Assuming that you haven’t been living under a rock the last 15 years, you’ve probably seen the concept of mindset popping up all over the internet. Growth mindset, abundance mindset, #mindset, fixed mindset, winner’s mindset, positive mindset, fear mindset….the list of identified mindsets goes on and on.
It turns out that there is not much agreement on that… So I went back to the source of our modern craze, Carol Dweck and her 2006 book (creatively titled Mindset). According to her, mindset is “…the view you adopt of yourself (in relation to the outside world)”. More concretely, mindset is a way for the brain to collect your existing beliefs and create a “default setting”. These default settings influence our decisions, even if we are not aware of it.
Maybe your heart races when the topic of money comes up. Maybe you just can’t seem to reach that next level at work. Maybe you learn new skills quickly, even in the face of adversity. Maybe you bounce back quickly after a personal set-back and anguish endlessly over professional ones. This is all mindset at work—it shapes your baseline reaction to events, and through that subtly (or sometimes not so subtly) influences your outcomes and opportunities. For example, if you believe that great leaders are “born that way” but on the other hand you want to improve at leadership…well, it’s not going to be easy to improve, and your future opportunities to move forward in leadership are likely to be impaired.
In my view, since we can hold a variety of beliefs, it makes sense that we can have a range of mindsets. Your beliefs in key areas of your life (e.g. health, finances, relationships, leadership, spirituality/religion, health, etc…) are likely to vary—sometimes drastically! The more these beliefs differ, the more variability in mindsets you may experience. In general, though, since the brain likes consistency, you are likely to have only one prevailing mindset per key area of your life.
Although it’s tempting to label different mindsets as “good” or “bad”, they are simply the brain doing the best it can to make sense of what you believe and translate that into consistent action. The key question, is does your mindset help you get what you want? If not, you can definitely adapt and evolve mindset—and I will dedicate space in later posts to go into details. For now, I challenge you to take the first step: build awareness. Try to notice your default settings in various areas of your life. What patterns do you notice, and how do they help (or hinder) you getting what you want?
