Personal growth is essential for health, happiness, ambition and achievement. As a human being, you have amazing potential to continuously accept, and conquer, new challenges. There are few, if any, things which you cannot achieve, if you really want to achieve them. The key is that you want to achieve them enough to motivate you to take action. Many people hinder their own personal growth by refusing to take action. They come up with a myriad of excuses. If you do not want to be like them, you must develop a personal growth mindset. A personal growth mindset allows you to not only take on new challenges; you actively seek them out. While some ‘experts’ might tell you that this kind of thing requires intense mental training, it generally doesn’t. All you really require is an open mind, a desire to try new things, and awareness that you can improve your performance with commitment and effort.
Adopting a personal growth mindset
As a kid, I was nervous and shy about accepting new challenges. I was worried about others judging me if my performance was not exceptional. This was a self-limiting attitude. I was restricting my own personal growth with ridiculous expectations. Someone with a personal growth mindset knows that they are unlikely to be good at new things immediately. They know that as long as they enjoy it; they can work hard at it until they improve. Ironically, in order to know if you will enjoy something, you have to try it first.
A number of years back, I decided that I was going to adopt a personal growth mindset. I regularly seek out new challenges and try them out for a while. If I enjoy them, I stick with them. My decision whether to stick with it has nothing to do with my performance; that can be improved. It is all about whether I enjoy it or not. This year’s big challenge has been to start my own website and take my business online. When I started, in April, I knew nothing about websites, SEO or online marketing. In the past, I would have considered this and decided against taking on the challenge. However, with a personal growth mindset, I decided that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up. For the past 6 months, I have been researching, learning and experimenting and the results have surpassed anything I would have expected. I still only know a minute percentage of what there is to know but I am really enjoying the experience and I have identified a number of exciting new challenges for the next 6 months. Without a personal growth mindset, I would have missed out on this opportunity and the happiness that it has brought.
Tips for developing a personal growth mindset
The following tips will help you to adopt a personal growth mindset:
1. Stop justifying everything
You do not need to justify everything that you do. When you adopt a new behaviour or hobby, your friends and family will ask you why you have done it. Remember that you do not need to offer any justification other than ‘because I want to!’
2. Engage new people
Seek out and have conversations with people, and groups, whom you might not have spent time with previously. Approach these conversations with an open mind and you will learn new things and have your own views challenged. This will help to freshen up your life and stimulate your creativity and sense of adventure.
3. Allow yourself to dream
Every new adventure, or achievement, begins with a dream. Allow yourself to dream. Do not place limitations on these dreams. Your dreams are part of your creative self. If you embrace them, you will identify new opportunities for growth. When you identify these opportunities, try them out.
4. Understand that you will never do your best
No matter what you do, there will always be opportunity for improvement. There are always opportunities to learn from your experiences and use the feedback to improve. Therefore, you can never do your best but you can do the best that you can at any given moment, with the knowledge and skill you possess at that time. When you understand and accept this, you realise that the judgements of others are irrelevant. You can take comfort that you did the best you could at that time and resolve to learn from the experience so that you may do better next time.
5. Focus on the experience rather than the end result
There may be activities which you have avoided because you don’t feel that you would be any good at them. Ask yourself ‘Does it really matter if I am not very good at it?’ The answer is ‘No’. You don’t need to be good at it, if you enjoy it. You are not looking for a record deal, a museum exhibition or a professional sports contract. You are simply looking for fun. If you focus on the experience rather than the end result, you will have a lot more fun and you might, unwittingly, find something which you are actually good at.
6. Try one new thing everyday
If you commit to trying one new thing every day, you will have tried 365 new things in one year. The chances of finding something you like, enjoy or are good at are much higher. More importantly, you will quickly develop a personal growth mindset where you see challenges rather than problems, and you are unafraid to try new things.
Effective goal setting lies at the heart of a personal growth mindset. You can learn to set effective goals with the Ultimate Guide to Goal Setting.
A personal growth mindset allows you take on new challenges, seeing only opportunities for fun and learning. There may still be tough times but when you have the right mindset, you are more resilient. You accept that things will go wrong but you focus on identifying a solution, implementing it and moving on. You know that you might fail at a task but that doesn’t make you a failure. In fact, it affords you a valuable opportunity to learn and improve. With a personal growth mindset, you are happier, healthier and you have a zest for life. You become emotionally mature. Setbacks rarely faze you because you know that new opportunities lie just around the corner.