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Mindset

What is a mindset?

Your mindset is a set of values, beliefs and behaviours that shape the way you live your life. Someone with a growth mindset will believe that they might not be able to do something right now, but with time and application they can learn something, be better than they are now and take pleasure in the process. A fixed mindset is believing you have a set of skills and not reaching outside of those boundaries to push into other things.

How can you nurture a growth mindset?

First let’s take a look at the why, let’s talk about our nervous system – it’s driven by our brain. Every organ in our body is governed by the nervous system from our digestion to our memory, our perception to our sleep.
The nervous system is a self-learning machine, the goal of the brain is to keep your body functioning (keep your heart beating, and your breathing rhythm) and then to learn things that are specific to the environment, but in this busy world your brain is constantly looking to conserve energy – it does this by defaulting to learned outcomes. If you don’t push outside of these ‘rules’ Its easy for these repetitions to become a ‘habit’. That’s not always a bad thing, these habits can be both positive and negative. A positive example would be switching a light on in a dark room – we can now see and go about what we need to do – therefore when a room is dark, we don’t even think about looking to find a light switch it’s an automatic response. The key is to establish which ‘habits’ are helpful to us, and which are not.

If we have had a previous negative experience the nervous system can drive us to avoidance behaviours, but just because we have those thoughts doesn’t mean we can’t challenge them. It’s not necessarily going to be the easiest option, and you will have to consciously push yourself in a different direction but in doing so you can start to show yourself that the outcome in certain situations wont ‘always’ be negative.

Have you ever heard the phrase ‘trust in the process’? Life isn’t always about the end result but these days we seem to be conditioned to only recognise the outcome. If we win, we celebrate, but we don’t necessarily celebrate the growth that we have achieved from the situation even if we lost. This is part of the understanding that win, lose or draw by rewarding ourselves for the effort rather than the result and embracing the challenge we can start to cultivate a growth mindset.

Why mindset matters

Your mindset plays a significant role in your wellbeing. A growth mindset can give you faith in yourself and especially in your ability to change, learn, and grow, it can help you overcome obstacles and to even feel happier and calmer. The truth is, we aren’t all hard wired firmly into one mindset or another rather a hybrid of both, but why not try, next time you feel like you can’t do something, challenge your thoughts, who knows where it will take you.