Growth Mindset

‘When I first heard this term I was in school and thought it was stupid. Headteachers talking about a growth mindset and all I could do was giggle.

Now look at me preaching to others how to have a growth mindset.’

Ironically this is proving a growth mindset, learning from something I once discarded.

In essence, I thought I was too smart to take advice from a teacher, whose life I did not want to live. Dismissing it as a cringe useless concept because, well most of what they said was. But just because something is rubbish, doesn’t mean everything is.

We must recognise all knowledge is valuable as it gives you perspective. A new opportunity to learn, to grow and to improve. It does not matter who it comes from, because you can learn something from everyone and you can benefit from everyone.

Growth mindset simply means you are always looking to be better.

• To progress consistently

• To continue learning

Switching your mindset to look at challenges as opportunities for growth and learning is essential to becoming Perpetual.

Potential is merely a hypothesis, a what if, an opportunity.

Where I’ve heard the word potential most commonly is young footballers.

Potential is an estimation of the future based on the present, past and the line of growth drawn between your past and present. But not every graph has to be linear.

You see the thing about estimations, they can easily be proved wrong as it can be proved right.

The beauty of potential is that it literally isn’t real.

And when something’s not real, it means you get to decide how it plays out, how far you reach, and who you become.

So what does this have to do with a growth mindset? Well if your potential isn’t set in stone then your mindset chooses what your potential is. A person with a growth mindset will reach the greatest of heights, whereas someone who doesn’t, well they won’t.

“Potential is only the expression of a possibility. Something that can be assessed accurately ONLY in retrospect. In other words, you’ll never know how good you might’ve become unless you try”.

Mike Mentzer

In psychology there is something called the Pygmalion effect, which states you will rise or fall according to the expectations around you.

That the belief in your inner circle, whether that be you, friends or family will highly influence you.

Charles Oliveira, former UFC lightweight champion had a tough start to his career. He suffered subsequent losses which caused him to hit rock bottom. The losses had him labelled a quitter and a loser. People close to him used to tell his father “ See we knew he couldn’t compete with the good ones “.

All of this drilled one thing into his subconscious, that he was a loser. He had now adopted and fallen to this expectation.

Then by a miracle, he switched gyms, with new training partners and coaches. At this new gym he was surrounded by people who actually believe in him and want him to succeed. Despite the whole world thinking of him as a quitter, his new teammates believed he could become champion. They set his belief as a champion.

This positive reinforcement overruled Oliveira’s self doubt for long enough that he was able to begin winning. He rose to the expectations around him. He then won 8 fights in a row, dominantly, and truly believed in himself. He flipped his direction of potential and became world champion.

So what does this have to do with growth mindset? Well Charles didn’t let his past define him. He failed but he grew. He embraced the challenge, the struggle and kept learning until he flipped his coin the right way.

Your own potential for growth depends on how much you believe in it. The higher you set you’re potential, the better you will become. And the the higher you believe your potential, the higher it can be.

If you set your potential low you will work comfortably and never reach the heights of true success.

If you can accept that you can learn something from everyone, even beginners, you will experience a much better outcome in life.

A perfect example of this is Conor McGregor’s rise to success. Young Conor was wise and had the epitome of a growth mindset. He took value from everything, learned from everyone and he seemed untouchable for a number of fights.

Then with the wins came the pride and ego. Rightfully so, he won every fight convincingly, looking like every aspect of his art was perfected.

However, the saying ‘Pride is the Devil’ holds significance here.

He took pride in being the best, and began to stop learning. He wasn’t as hungry to perfect his style like he once was, his growth mindset wasn’t the primary driving force. As a result the losses came.

The point is, if you don’t have a growth mindset you have pride and ego, which prevent more growth from occurring because you believe you have nothing left to learn. Progress stops and usually declines.

Being open minded is part of a growth mindset.

If you want to grow from every situation you have to be prepared to loosen up your cemented beliefs. What do I mean by this?

Well humans are creatures of comfort, which means when we develop a belief, we have an incredible skill to be bias where we can. I saw a video where a man read out a quote to two women. I don’t remember the quote off the top of my head but they were on board with whoever had said this. The man then revealed to them that it was an Andrew Tate quote and well lets just say their expressions changed. They now dismissed the quote as toxic, cringe etc etc.

The point is, that they couldn’t take something they themselves perceived as positive coming from someone they hated, because their beliefs were too concrete and couldn’t drop the pride to be open minded.

In this situation they could have learnt something about themselves, gotten better, but they chose not to. Sometimes you have to suck it up, drop the pride, and just listen and accept based on the information. If you are actually serious about learning, growing and just bettering yourself in general you have to understand that you’re not going to get to pick and choose where you get your information from. Being open minded is a very conscious change you have to make. You need to purposefully go into conversations with the intention of learning something no matter who it is. In fact if you want to take it a step further, do it with people you dislike, or with people who on paper, are less knowledgeable or skillful in a specific context. It feels very foreign to do so, because yes some people do talk nonsense. Chances are you’re not going to learn from them, but be open minded to the fact that you could.

By just thinking that way, you open so many more doors, for so many more opportunities.

Again it seems to be attached to human nature if we were wrong about something there’s not a chance we would admit it.

It’s again one of those things where we have too much pride in our own opinions, ethics and morals. If we do something, think something, or believe something, it’s pretty concreted instantly. This again ties into being open minded, because we should be open minded to the fact that were not perfect beings and we get things wrong. The thing is, the quicker you can accept you are wrong, the quicker you can learn the right thing, the quicker you can grow and the more potential you have to improve. A growth mindset is all about learning, and if you’re too stubborn to admit you’re wrong, or you don’t want to admit it, the reality is you’re not going to improve as much as you can.

I’ve touched on this briefly but it’s too important to skim over.

The bigger the hurdle, the bigger the jump, the harder the challenge is, the more growth required to overcome it.

If every time you were faced with a challenge, you saw it as some sign for you to stop or to give up, then well you’re not going to get anywhere.

Life is boring without challenge. You may not realise it but when you’re not working towards something, it can easily become very dull.

Growth requires a stimulus, in plants that’s sunlight and water, in humans, we need to be provided a problem. So instead of seeing challenge as a setback, see it as an opportunity to develop your skills.

Failure will happen. Sooner or later it will happen. Whether it’s big, small or whatever, you have to understand it is coming, it’s a part of life.

It can happen once, twice or a hundred times but I want you to understand something, to reframe your mindset. It’s not a failure unless it causes you to quit. It’s not a failure if you learn from it, if you bounce back stronger. You have to place tension on yourself to grow, just like a muscle.

Sometimes to take 2 steps forward you have to take 1 back.

The setback can reset you completely, but understand it’s not a failure, just a re route.

What separates people is how they deal with it. Failure should be seen as an opportunity. An opportunity to learn, bounce back, change your ways. But the common perception of failure is a loss.

Quitting is the only reason that anything ends. Quitting after failing.

On the other hand, success is delusional perseverance as after 1000 failures one more try may work.

See failure as one step closer to your golden formula. If you can come back from the biggest failure that no one is prepared to restart at, you cannot lose.

It’s tough, and very, very demoralising. But the bigger the setback the bigger the comeback. To get something you’ve never had, you have to do something you’ve never done, and if that involves taking a huge loss, to finally see that huge win, what’s the problem.

Understand that success starts with learning then execution and sometimes during your execution you get another chance to learn.

The easiest thing to do is give up. Take the stable and comfortable route and never experience the highs of your hard work.

Find the reason you failed, fix it, and never make the mistake again. Let your wall be broken so that you can see where you need to get stronger. The only way to stop failing, is fail enough times that you make sure it doesn’t happen again.