Many people dismiss mindset, they don’t realize that a positive mindset is critical in achieving success in pursuing goals and dreams.
Enabling you to look at all the positives in a given situation and it helps you visualize your goals.
Do you have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset?
Below is a self-test taken from Carol S Dweck book “Mindset the New Psychology of Success”.
So take a look at the following statements and then decide whether you mostly agree or disagree…
- Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change very much.
- You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.
- No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
- You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.
Did you answer yes to either questions 1 or 2? Because if you did then this indicates a fixed-mindset, whereas questions 2 and 3 indicate a growth-mindset.
What does this actually mean?
If you have a growth-mindset, you view effort as an essential ingredient to success, you don’t shy away from effort you embrace it, you find inspiration from the success of others and you learn for your own development.
A growth-mindset leads you into an upward spiral on continued development meaning you will achieve a higher rate of success.
The good news is that if you have a fixed mindset, this can be changed, the fact you’re now aware of this as already started the change.
This is known as “Neuroplasticity”.
And simply opening your mind to what is possible and shifting your perspective of what is possible gives you a new choice.
The human brain learns from repeated practise, which in turn strengthens and creates the connections between the neurons in your brain.
This applies to whatever you are learning, be it artistic, musical, athletic or mathematical.
And the saying “I think therefore I am”, is actually true!
If you think you’re bad at something you will be bad at it, and if you think you’re good at something you will be good at it.
Your thoughts combined with your emotions create strong neuron links in the brain. The more those thoughts and emotions are repeated the stronger the connections in your brain.
What can we learn from this?
That we must be more aware of how our thoughts can have a direct impact on our own brain.
It takes repetition combined with emotion to make a change to our thinking, and because we are the sum total of what we both believe and think about ourselves.
