Credibility

What Do Mindsets and Habits Have To Do With Credibility?

Credibility-defining opportunities present themselves throughout each day. Sometimes we don't see them for what they are. These opportunities are often disguised as noise or time-wasters. How we respond to each one of these precious moments depends on how we think about them. In reality, it is our habits together with our mindsets that determine how we react. And, how we act and react impacts our credibility.

Habits

We tend to have habitual behaviors that we rely on each day. We form them with good intentions; some habits can help us to maintain quality of the work we produce, help us to be productive by maintaining focus on priorities or help us to meet deadlines. Others are established for personal convenience (many of us know someone who prefers being left alone until after a morning routine and cup of coffee is done).

And, these habits can, like most habits, become automatic -- so we do them without giving it a thought. Some typical examples include the following:

• We may ignore or dismiss situations that enter our line of sight as we work on a priority or to meet a deadline.
• We may react in anger or annoyance to an interruption when someone brings a matter to our attention.
• We may politely state we don't have time for it, and ask them to come back later.
• We may disregard it as unimportant and forget about it.

All of these time-saving (or self-oriented) responses can have unintended consequences: we can miss opportunities we may have otherwise seized. And, they can damage our credibility.

The Importance of Taking Stock

We can replace our habits, even long-standing ones, with new ones. It takes some work but our minds can enable us to pass these kinds of tests with enough effort and practice.

Fortunately, there is a practice we can make into a habit, that can help us differentiate between distractions and opportunities. It only takes seconds to take stock before responding.

Taking stock is the act of thinking about something to decide what to do next. Taking stock is a little bit like the self-regulation discipline associated with emotional intelligence. It's very quick, and yields options that align with our core purpose and values. We often gain credibility simply by doing it.

Mindsets

Mindsets have become widely recognized as having powerful impact on success and failure and the realization of human potential. What are mindsets?

Your mindset is a set of beliefs that shape how you make sense of the world and yourself. It influences how you think, feel, and behave in any given situation. -- Kendra Cherry, Verywell Mind

Research in both the Psychological and Neuro-Linguistic realms have identified two mindsets, the Growth Mindset and the Fixed Mindset, as being the context for many other smaller mindsets.

The differences between these two mindsets are numerous and vary from simple to complex in their scope and impact. Following are a few basic examples of how these mindsets differ:

Beliefs in The world of the Fixed Mindset:

• I already know all I need to know and I don't want to learn any more.
• I'm no good at math; I'll never be good at it.
• You're born with a certain amount of intelligence and it can't be changed.

Beliefs in The world of the Growth Mindset:

• I can learn and build my talents.
• You can learn new things and improve your intelligence.
• Mistakes and failing are part of learning.

We aren't exclusively one mindset or the other; We all have both mindsets. With effort over time, we can change our mindsets and adopt new ones. It's a continuum.

Two Ways Habits and Mindsets Can Impact Credibility

1. When we establish habits that become automatic, we can behave in ways that have unintended consequences or that don't fit our core purpose or values. We can also overlook opportunities to make a difference.
2. Beliefs about the capabilities, talents, and potential of yourself and other people can result in making judgments and flawed decisions, all rooted in wrong thinking based on mindset.

You Can Assess Your Mindset

Carol Dweck, a leader in mindset researcher and bestselling author, has created a self-assessment quiz you can use to identify your current mindset. You can access this quiz by using this link to a website co-founded by and featuring the work of Carol Dweck. Note, clicking will take you out of this site to mindsetworks.com.

LINK: https://blog.mindsetworks.com/what-s-my-mindset

What's Next?

In our first issue of Credibility, we jumped in with a definition and shared our perceptions, experience, thoughts and opinions about the source of credibility. We noted tools to help assess this as a set of behaviors, skills and attributes in ourselves (and others).

Here, in our second issue, we added perspectives on ways work habits and mindsets can impact our behavior and, subsequently, our credibility.

In issue three, we'll continue down the path to explore approaches to build credibility and what credibility looks like in the workplace. We'll identify strengths that can help us to build and sustain our credibility.

Now, we seek your feedback and input to plan our future issues of Credibility. So, we're asking this question: what other credibility-related topics, skills, or perspectives would you like to see?

We'll look forward to your comments, opinions and suggestions.

Copyright 2022 by Rosanna M. Nadeau

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