The Luxasia Way of Unleashing Your Full Potential (Mindfulness at Work) series: Adopt an Open Growth Mindset

What is an Open Growth Mindset

A growth mindset is about constant learning. Neuroscientific studies about brain plasticity would specify it as the strengthening and development of neural circuits in our brains with continued/repeated practice.

Individuals with a growth mindset believe that body and mind can be cultivated and nurtured when you embrace opportunities for learning in both successes and failures. This motivates them to persist and improve even when things do not go as planned. They are fueled by their love for learning and a sense of curiosity. They tend to remain humble because they acknowledge that they do not know everything, see growth in all experiences, and they also don’t take themselves too seriously (see Figure 1).

A Growth Mindset is the Antidote to Failure

The fear of failure is the biggest factor keeping anyone from taking risks or making the best of opportunities, because the tunnel vision caused by fear prohibits creativity and innovation. I would like to recommend the antidote – see things in a different perspective through the lens of a growth mindset.

You need not be afraid of failure because, with a growth mindset, you essentially don’t fail. What the world widely regards as failures, mistakes, setbacks, wrongs etc. is embraced as a part and parcel of one’s learning journey, whether in life or at work. In short, failures are always viewed as lessons. They don’t derail or discourage the individual, but rather, fuel your motivation to find faster, better, and more efficient solutions.

With this mindset, you will be able to find opportunities in every aspect of your work and life, because you are removing self-limiting beliefs. You will also lose the need to wallow in self-pity about things that don’t go well. A growth mindset helps you to focus on a key journey in life – to keep getting better and find solutions. 

Basically, you can sum up the growth mindset in one sentence - “I can’t do that… YET.”

I like the graphic below which I found on Mindset Works: 

Figure 1: Contrasting between fixed and growth mindsets, and how mindsets shape your responses and therefore, affect your outcomes in life. Photo Credit: www.mindsetworks.com 

Responding (and not reacting) with an open mind

An open mind calls us to acknowledge that there are unknowns in life that we cannot plan for, and that we need to respond appropriately to these unknowns. When met with an unexpected roadblock, respond to it, rather than react.

Relating to mindfulness, having an open growth mindset reminds us to accept and acknowledge that there is a challenge, pause and reflect what the best response is, and then take steps to overcome it. Reacting to the setback leaves you with automatic reactions that typically makes you feel sour and sorry, draining your energy.

Do not resist changes, avoid situations, and escape experiences that you cannot control – acknowledge them and deal with them. Ignoring them does not make them go away either. Remember to focus on doing your best and delivering results in any given situation

Overcoming Challenges

When faced with a big and seemingly insurmountable challenge, one effective way of overcoming it is to break down your course of action into discrete, smaller, and more achievable milestones. This counters the need to draw up an overly elaborate plan and worry about everything under the sun before even taking the first step (i.e. over-planning). Furthermore, you will find yourself progressively motivated as you move along, completing these smaller milestones that pushes you along the right path while keeping your focus on the end in mind.

With every new skill or new venture, also do allow yourself some time to develop, improve and refine your learning so that you keep becoming better at it. No one is a master on his/her first try (maybe except prodigies who are gifted since birth but that’s a different story). Start to feel “comfortable being uncomfortable.” What I mean by this is that you need to have faith in yourself and your team to find the right answer or solution as you work through step by step, even if it feels uncomfortable as you don’t have all the answers at the start.

Open Growth Mindset in application to Leadership

Throughout my career, across all the teams that I have led, I have always encouraged People to be innovative i.e. try out new ideas and new ways of doing things. Innovation is critical to Transformation, which is what I do for companies.

Underlying innovation is dependent on an open growth mindset. If a plan works and delivers results, great. If not, dust it off, recover fast, and distil learnings from the experience – what went right, what went wrong, and how to avoid pitfalls in the future. Fail fast or scale fast. Transformation happens when innovation happens. That said, while I am fully supportive of learning from failures, it is equally important that we learn well and do not make the same mistake twice.

For leaders, while we need to encourage innovation and people empowerment, we also need to manage its accompanying risks. By this, I mean that we need to develop safety nets to “catch” initiatives that are not going well early before they degenerate into something more severe. How? In short, build a culture of trust and open communication, so that everyone is not afraid to brainstorm solutions, give feedback, and escalate issues early for quick resolution.

As Leaders, we need to “walk the talk” and be a role model. We must have the courage and humility to receive feedback graciously, and be that role model for our teams – do remember while we have authority, we are not perfect, we do not know everything, and we are not always right. This syncs with everything that we have discussed about an open growth mindset. Your role-modelling will go a long way building trust and making your team to feel comfortable i.e. “safe enough” to communicate openly with one another and with you.

An open growth mindset builds trust, fosters open communication, encourages innovation, and enables transformation. And it begins with you, the leader.