Growth can also mean a process of aging, but what does personal growth mean? When you add the word ‘personal’ in it, it directs to your development of characteristics and personality as a human being. For having personal growth, the key is to learn how to develop a growth mindset. So how do we define a growth mindset? People who believe to advance their talents through hard work, good strategies have a growth mindset characteristic. They tend to achieve more than those people who have a fixed mindset characteristic. People who have a fixed mindset believe they are born with a certain level of ability and are unable to improve their level of abilities over time. If you see your talents and attributes as inherently unchangeable, you have a fixed mindset and are likely to approach the world with negativity and trepidation.
Let’s not play the blame game towards people who have a fixed mindset. We have from birth been taught to fear. We’ve been taught to stay within our boundaries and be safe from harm. But have you realized the limitation we face with that ideology? A cat who sits on a hot stove never sits on a hot stove again, but it never sits on a cold stove either. A person with a growth mindset characteristic learns to overcome those situations and tackle them in the right way. So let’s discuss what does it mean to have a growth mindset.
Now that we have an idea of what a growth mindset is, let’s dig a little deeper into developing a growth mindset. Here are the 5 rules you should always keep in mind to create growth in your life
1. Find your Purpose and Goal
Part of developing a growth mindset is shattering the negative perceptions you have and looking into personal growth examples such as:
- Gaining confidence
- Making fear your friend
- Stop procrastinating
- Become a master of conflict resolution
- Let go of the past.
Once you have dissolved the past and are determined to create a better future you will be able to know what your purpose in life is and create goals accordingly.
Write your goals and aspirations down on paper like it is the blueprint of what you want to become and start working towards it with sheer determination.
2. Take on Challenges
Growth is all about doing things out of your comfort zone. If you are within your comfort zone it automatically means you’re within your fixed mindset and have no space for personal growth and development. Therefore, taking up the right and correct challenges for your goals will help you gain each and every milestone to your goal.
The greatest mistake of not being able to take challenges will be fearing you will make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. There never has been anyone who was born in this world who hasn’t made a mistake. This doesn’t mean you keep making mistakes and do nothing about it. It means you take challenges and maybe fail, but improve your strategies to become better. This is the difference between a person with a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. It is the will to take bigger challenges and advance.
3. Strive with Balance
There are a lot of people who start with finding their purposes and goals and take up challenges, but there are very few who strive with the process. Once you have started your pathworking for your purpose, you have entered the zone of endeavoring the course.
People face a lot of hardships that look impossible and many give up, lose their balance of mind and patience. It does obviously gets stressful as many complications might arise, but it is best to stay mindful. There are a few ways you can stay mindful, such as mediation, walking or even stretching allows you to stay focused in the present moment. Meditation and yoga exercises help you a lot. Mental and physical activities are another piece of the growth mindset formula.
If you are feeling low and about to give up, watch growth mindset videos or listen to podcasts of successful people who talk about their struggle before they reached their success. Make sure they are relatable to your line of struggle. It will definitely help you in your areas of personal growth and how you should deal with certain situations if you are facing any.
4. Make Things Easy for Yourself
Growth doesn’t always mean hard work and struggle. There is always a simpler way of doing things. Try making things work automatically so that you have to take the full load on yourself. Human beings have evolved and grown throughout the years because they have made things easier for themselves. You can see so many things that are easily accessible to you, but was that the same case when we were hunter-gatherers? From making tools out of rocks and stone we have learned to make things easy for us to the click of a button. Therefore, there is always room to make things easier for you to work.
Personal growth definition is to become a better version of yourself and what is a better version of yourself where you have everything you have dreamed of easily accessible in front of you.
5. Keep Updating your Core Value
Maybe you have reached a certain goal in life. Is this where things end? People who reach their goal early in life face these problems, such as the astronauts who landed on the moon for the first time were in their 30s. They had worked their whole lives in making their dream of landing on the moon come true. Now after the mission was complete they had no purpose and nothing more to work for and started to get depressed in their life afterward.
Another example we can take is after you’ve reached a certain milestone in life, it is highly likely for that to become your core value and over time it becomes a fixed mindset. What if huge entrepreneurs stop updating their work? What if Facebook always stayed the same way it was, from its launch date in 2004? Many other competing businesses would have overtaken them within a couple of years. It is the way they kept updating their website to create more value for their users, made them able to stay on the top of thousands of competing business entrepreneurs that challenged them through almost all these years.
To thrive in your career in today’s changing environment, you must develop a growth mindset. Most important of all, you will achieve clarity in your career direction only if you are able to focus on and maintain a career success with a mindset that keeps blossoming. What better way to do it than learning the foundation of personal growth?