Leadership Mindsets Matter!

“Mindset is everything. Your success begins and ends with mindset. In between its grit that carries you through.” LeAura Alderson

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In my work with career, business, and organisational change accelerators, I have worked with leaders who are looking for mindsets that will give them an edge and enable them to power up their leadership.?

In my new book, Accelerate You! The power pivots, mindsets, and steps to power up your leadership, I share the importance of mindsets and the need for flexible thinking and resilient skills that accelerate you forward toward your goals and dreams.?

When your mindsets are aligned with your role in life or in the workplace, your mindsets match your will better match your workplace culture, you will feel inspired, productive, and satisfied.?

When you are feeling unsatisfied or uninspired, you need to power up your mindset and/or make a change in your life, career, or workplace.

Your mindsets can be measured, helping you adjust your mindsets or your situation so that you will feel happier and more authentic.?

Knowing the 5 mindsets that can help you power up your career and your leadership will enable you to become a ‘change artist’ and to make better decisions to manage your life, career, and business.

dsets and how mindsets affect our sense of satisfaction and productivity as well as how a mismatch in our mindsets and our work culture can become demoralizing and lead to a sense of personal powerlessness.? Always curious, I embarked on a research study about how female leaders design and manage their careers and found three archetypes that explain how women make career decisions and what kind of support that they need as they create their careers in challenging times.? This research led to the framework I call Accelerate You!? Mindsets matter to your success. Do you know your mindsets?? Are your mindsets holding you back from achieving what you want?

What are mindsets?

Mindsets are your established patterns of thoughts or a set of preferred attitudes or motivations. These mindsets frame your thinking and how you make sense or meaning of the world around you.

Mindsets are a collection of beliefs or thoughts that drive your attitudes, habits, behaviors, and outcomes. Your mindsets influence how you think, feel, and react in any given situation.

Mindsets are beliefs about yourself and the world that relate to how you feel about yourself and your self-worth.? Your mindset goes to the heart of your personal power, including your sense of agency and your sense of authority, as well as your attitudes, accomplishments, and abilities.

While you have your default mindsets, you can change your mindsets, and this can impact your success or failure.

Examples of mindsets are your beliefs, values, determination, hope, humility, gratitude, patience, feeling of purpose, and sense of connection to your personal power. Mindsets relate to how you approach problems and set goals, how you communicate, and how you take on or share responsibility with others.

Mindsets drive collaboration, creativity, and innovation. Mindsets even determine your relationship to change and how you can lead and manage change collaborating with others.

Researchers have found that different mindsets are required for different situations, such as creating something new, starting up a business, or scaling a business. A research team I led found that women draw on different mindsets to orienteer the different pivots in their careers and businesses.

As humans, we are bombarded with information every second of the day and we have developed the ability to sift through the information using our internal sensory circuits (for example, sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste) to bring information to the nervous system throughout the body and the brain where information, memories, and emotions are stored.

You access and retrieve this information in different parts of your brain and body through an intricate superhighway of neural pathways. Humans use mental cues, filters, or shortcuts to make decisions consciously and unconsciously using these systems of neural pathways.

Researchers refer to these mental shortcuts as meta programs. Think of these meta programs as your unique software that operates your internal systems. Meta programs are cognitive and behavioral attitudes, motivations, styles, or patterns that influence your decisions, behaviors, or interactions with the world.

According to research conducted by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, PhD, your mindset can determine your relationship with achievement and success. She found that there are two types of mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that your abilities are fixed and unchangeable and that you either have the talent, capability, or intelligence to succeed or you don’t.

If you have a fixed mindset, you aren’t motivated by challenge. On the contrary, you are highly resistant to change, experimentation, learning new skills or concepts, and reaching your potential. If you have a fixed mindset, it could be impacting your ability to reach your goals.

Alternatively, if you have a growth mindset, you believe that you can cultivate talent, capability, and intelligence through effort and persistence, and you use challenge and experimentation to learn and grow.?

Mindsets affect your wellbeing and your resilience. If you had a growth mindset as a child, you grew up curious, enjoying challenges and discovering new things. As you grew into adulthood, your growth mindset helped you to persevere with life’s setbacks. In contrast, children and adults with fixed mindsets are less resilient, give up more easily, and tend to seek validation to prove their worth to others and to themselves.

You can develop a growth mindset and change your relationship with success. Holly Ransom, in her book The Leading Edge, describes leadership as a state of mind and encourages leaders to adopt five core mindsets: anchor to purpose, frame your choices, own your narrative, build your bounce, or choose your attitude, and stay hungry for feedback. She talks about mindsets, methods, and mastery of leadership, and encourages us to first lead ourselves by choosing our mindsets.?

How can you measure and change your mindsets?

When you learn how to identify your thinking patterns, you can make changes in your mindsets to make better decisions and achieve more results faster, bringing you the consistency you are seeking in achieving your goals and finding fulfillment, happiness, and success.

Start by developing self-awareness, which is the ability to see yourself clearly and understand who you are, how others see you, and how you fit into the world. Self-awareness gives you power. Knowing your strengths and mindsets enables you to see yourself clearly, which enhances your confidence, courage, and creativity. Your strengths and mindsets come from exploring your relationship with yourself and with others.

With practice, coaching, and tools, you can become aware of your internal thoughts, beliefs, emotions, motivations, mindsets, and reactions, as well as your awareness of how other people view you and your strengths, motivations, behaviors, and reactions. With this internal and external self-awareness, you can also understand situations, activities, interactions, jobs, and work cultures that make you feel empowered or discouraged.

Tasha Eurich, PhD, in a Harvard Business Review article titled “What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It)”, describes four self-awareness archetypes that illuminate how well you know yourself and how well you understand how others see you. Eurich suggests that leaders must develop both internal and external awareness. Why would you want to do this? Eurich’s research found that having high internal and external awareness makes leaders more effective, promotable, and productive – leading to more profitable companies.

You can develop awareness of how others perceive you by working with supportive, trustworthy friends, family members, colleagues, coaches, and mentors. Seek feedback regularly from a variety of sources.

Surround yourself with supportive allies.? The people around you impact your behaviors, thought patterns, and how you view yourself. Choose people who will support you, inspire you, and enable you to achieve your goals as you master new capabilities and evolve.

Focus on leveraging your strengths in areas where you are highly motivated to succeed. Work with a mentor or a coach who can help you identify self-awareness and understand your strengths and how to reach your goals.?

Another great way to develop self-awareness is to take one of the many mindset assessments available. Mindsets have been studied and can be measured. Leadership and business management researchers have looked at the dimensions of our mindsets for decades and, as a result, define mindsets as attitudes or motivations that underpin your intentional and unintentional patterns of thinking and acting.

Many of the women I work with have lost their connection to their strengths and know very little about their mindsets and, more importantly, how mindsets can make them successful.

There’s a variety of online assessments that will enable you to learn more about yourself and build self-awareness about your mindsets. These online assessments offer a point-in-time snapshot that will illuminate what makes you tick. When you know yourself better, you have clarity and are more confident. When you know your mindsets and what motivates you, you can make better choices.

You can select workplaces with cultures that make you happier and more productive. To accelerate yourself toward your goals, use tools that enable you to mark and measure your mindsets and dimensions of your personal power.?

Fingerprint for Success (F4S) is one of the assessment tools I use when coaching leaders because it features a simple and intuitive online user interface containing a vast range of tools for individuals, teams, and organizations. This tool that has recently been re-branded as Marlee enables you to develop yourself, your team, and the culture in your business. Know your mindsets.?

Track your mindsets over time. Choose to power up your leadership and your results by making choices aligned to your mindsets and your goals. When you know your mindsets, you can change your strategies for communication, decision making, and collaboration based on different situations, objectives, and the people involved.

Learn what motivates you to initiate and seize opportunities, take risks, make decisions, and solve problems. Learn your attitudes toward power and how you prefer to lead and be led. Tools like this build your self-awareness and help you build your container to hold your personal power.

Take the free Accelerate You! Fingerprint for Success assessment and review your results and awaken to your strengths.

This survey will provide insight and clarity on your mindsets and what is important to you. Knowing your strengths, motivations, and blind spots can help you increase your happiness and wellbeing, find meaning and purpose, boost your performance, and increase your capability to communicate and collaborate effectively.

Developing this deep self-awareness will assist you to leverage your strengths, power up your leadership, and accomplish goals. These tools can also help you connect to your personal power and manage your stress, energy, vitality, and health. ?

Mindsets and organizational culture

Michelle Duval, a researcher, pioneer in professional coaching, and founder of Fingerprint for Success, has been working with thousands of companies around the world to develop leaders, high-performing teams, and organizational cultures that support creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurial success. In her work, she began to see patterns emerging about the attitudes and motivations of successful start-up founders, business owners and leaders, and compared them to leaders who had failed. As a result, she has been able to identify the mindsets that enable success in different contexts.?

By mapping the current culture or collective mindsets of the individuals in organizations, teams can self-identify areas in the organization and its culture that are aligned with their personal values and goals for the future. If organizations are seeking to better support enterprising leaders and innovation, the tools for measuring culture enable them to identify strategies for organizational development and investment.??

Individuals can use the F4S tool to better understand how to select organizations with cultures that inspire productivity, engagement, and a sense of belonging, enabling them to actively manage their careers.

The mindsets revealed through the F4S assessment also underpin the framework of Accelerate You! ?

Disrupting ourselves to level up our life, career, or to create a new startup, for example, can feel like riding a roller coaster and it helps to have a map to guide you through untraveled terrain.? You can empower yourself by understanding that your decision-making pattern can be based on how much risk or change you want to take on at different stages in your life or career.?? It is helpful to know that your decision-making style can change over time.

It is essential for you identify anything that is clouding your judgement or impacting your choices.? For example, take the time to understand your emotions, beliefs, and influences and weigh those factors that may be a barrier to you taking on opportunities or seeing opportunities clearly. During this transformational process we are in a constant state of growing and changing. Some of the changes have positive outcomes for us, some negative. Some changes keep us looking toward the future, others bring apprehension and stall our momentum.

In Accelerate You! The power pivots, mindsets, and steps to power up your leadership, you learn about the five mindsets required to be a change agent in your life, career, or business. These mindsets are clarity, confidence, courage, creativity, and the ability to embrace and embody change. ?Accelerate You! is packed with researched-based strategies, tips, and hacks that will help you create your own playbook to power up your leadership and achieve your goals in life, career, and business.

Jeri Childers, PhD, is the founder of Accelerating You! which provides coaching, leadership, and business development services for leaders, entrepreneurs, and business builders who want a coach or business catalyst to commercialize their ideas, enabling them to startup, scaleup, and lead high impact change.? For top-level career and leadership growth resources, training, and coaching, visit JeriChilders.com.? ?Check out Jeri’s book Accelerate You! ?

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