5 Ways To Change Your Mindset

This month we’ve been talking a lot about growth mindset, and fixed mindset, and the various ways in which your life can be affected by each. In this post, we’re going to talk about material, concrete ways in which you can change your mindset.

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Understand What’s Possible

First, it’s important to understand that no one has a growth mindset all the time, about everything. We are all a mix of both mindsets. You can tend towards a growth mindset about many things, but still find yourself having a fixed mindset about others. So this article will focus on ways you can start observing yourself, your thoughts, and your reactions, and start to change the way you think about specific things or how you approach things in general.

There are no quick fixes. No matter how many times I sternly tell myself to “stop procrastinating!” it’s not as easy as just stopping. It’s the same thing with this. None of the ideas in this article will magically flip a switch and make you suddenly into a growth-minded person. Changing your mindset is a gradual process, over time, and you will have to work on it every day.

Fixed Mindset…We All Have It

Be sure to acknowledge and recognize that potential for fixed-mindedness within yourself. Even if you consider yourself a growth-minded person, I guarantee there are times and occasions where your fixed mindset comes out to play. Not only is this normal, it’s part of being a human being.

This article, as well as any other articles you find online or books you read can give you guidelines and ideas, but changing your mindset really is changing how you look at things. No amount of tips or pointers will solve this for you. There is no magic “cure” or solution. It’s a shift within your mind about how you choose to see yourself and the world around you, then constant effort to re-frame your thoughts and approaches to stay in that frame of mind.

…And It IS Possible to Change Your Mindset!

Research and studies have shown, over and over again, that it IS possible to change your mindset. Not only to change your mindset about a specific thing, but to change your mindset orientation in general. Even if your fixed mindset is telling you that “people are just born with a certain outlook”, try to suspend disbelief for a little while, stuff your fixed mindset in a box, and start thinking for a second about what it would mean if it were true. If you could figure out strategies and adopt practices that helped you change your mindset, what would that be like?

Answer: it would be. AWESOME.

If you’re still not sure, check out this article by MindsetWorks called Changing Mindsets. There’s several links to studies performed on students that not only shows the effect a negative mindset can have on students, but also how changing the mindset of students helped them perform better. Younger minds are more flexible, but that doesn’t mean that older minds like mine can’t do the same thing!

Now, let’s do this thing!

1. Understand Your Tendencies

The first thing is to understand your natural tendencies. Ask yourself questions like:

• Do I enjoy a challenge?
• Do I believe I can develop and improve my intelligence?
• Am I afraid of failure?
• Do I believe I can develop talent?
• Do I feel like mistakes mean I can’t learn something?
• Are mistakes something I take personally?

It’s important to really reflect on this. There’s no point doing it if you’re afraid of being honest. Having a fixed mindset doesn’t make you wrong. It just means it’s something to be aware of when it happens.

The point here is, you can’t change something you can’t identify. Be curious about yourself! Understand your position and thoughts on various areas of your life so you start to recognize areas where you might not be as growth-minded.

2. Understand How You Show Up

Once you know your tendencies, you will know where to focus. The next step is to understand what it looks like when you are in that fixed mindset. What do you typically say to yourself? When you’re getting in that fixed mindset, how does your mood change?

Both 1 and 2 in this list have to do with emotional- and self-awareness. This basically just means, checking in with yourself regularly, knowing what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it, and how those emotions and feelings make you interact with others, yourself, and the world around you. Having a deep understanding of what you do, what you say, or how you act when you’re going through certain situations or emotions will enable you to alter those default habits and reactions.

In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success [affiliate link], Carol Dweck talks about a concept that I am on the fence about, but may strike a chord with you. While I struggled with parts of this book, the section on creating personas in Chapter 8 was interesting. In this section, she talks about identifying your fixed mindset as a persona that shows up in your life, with its own goals and self-protection strategies. Personifying your fixed mindset may help you deal with it more easily because you can differentiate it from the “you” you want to become.

3. Define a Strategy

Going into this just resolving that you’re “going to change your mindset” without having a strategy will not work. You need to know “when x happens, I will do y”. You can and should come up with these strategies when you’re not in crisis mode, so that when x does happen, you already know what to do.

Let’s use my friend Jane as an example. Jane is afraid to make mistakes because when she does, her inner voice starts berating her mercilessly: “you’re so stupid. How could you think that would have worked? Now everyone thinks badly of you. You look incompetent.”

Because Jane knows this is how her mind reacts when certain things occur (such as making a mistake), she can build a strategy for the next time it happens. When her inner voice starts up, she can immediately stop it and replace or refute that negative self-talk with something positive that she knows to be true. For example, if her inner voice is telling her she’s stupid, she can respond with “I’m learning.” If it says “people think badly of you”, she can respond with “I am loved.”

A phrase I like to use myself is, “I am perfectly imperfect.” You’ve probably heard this phrase before. For me, what this means is that I’m not perfect, and I want to remind myself that I don’t have to be. We’re all works in progress. When our negative self-talk starts up, we can refute it or shut it down with something more positive.

Our next theme will be “self-compassion” and we will talk more about strategies to help you change the way you talk to yourself during that theme.

4. Develop New Interests

One of the core ideas of the growth mindset is that abilities and talents are not inborn and immutable; they are learnable and growable. Think about something that sounds interesting, but you haven’t tried yet. What’s holding you back? Not having enough time? An underlying fear that you might fail or not be good at it?

If you haven’t been focused on developing new interests because you thought that you didn’t have talent in it, you are not alone. Believing that you need talent in something, or worse, believing that having talent makes you superior to others, is a really common manifestation of the fixed mindset.

A Talent Tangent

A fixed mindset believes that firstly, people can’t get develop talent and should focus their time on things they are talented at. Secondly, that failure at something means you’re not talented. Thirdly, that some people are better than others because they are talented at something.

Think through the connections – in the fixed mindset, these beliefs look like this:

• If you don’t try something because you don’t believe you’re talented, you can’t fail at it (Win, right? Not exactly).
• If you believe you’re talented at something and you fail, then that may mean you’re not talented.
• And if you’re not talented, you’re not special.

These are the types of thoughts you need to let go of in order to change your mindset. Try replacing those thoughts with these:

• Talent is learned. Think of something like walking – no one is born able to walk. You learn it. No one is born able to drive; you learn it. Through practice, you get good at it. Some would argue that people like me still aren’t good at walking. While I can’t disagree, I tell myself that I’m still learning, and at least I’m at the point where I can stay upright. Most of the time.
• Failing means you are learning. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that the successful people failed, and then kept going.
• Being talented at something is not special, and doesn’t make you special. Talent means you can learn new skills more quickly perhaps, but there are plenty of talented people out there that do nothing with their talent. Having talent doesn’t make you any better or worse than someone else.

As a side note, this is not to say that there is no such thing as talent. Obviously people are born with natural affinities for various things. These affinities, or talents, will make some things more interesting for you than other things, or make you be more passionate about some things. Use those affinities to skyrocket your abilities! Put in the practice and use those talents to build your skills, and look for areas where you think you’re not talented, and give it a shot anyway!

5. Look Forward to Failure

Let’s be honest. No one loves failure. No one loves to feel like they are not great at something. It feels bad! It can be embarrassing and disempowering. However, the difference between someone that is successful at something and someone that is not, is that the successful person failed and learned from it. The unsuccessful person failed and gave up.

Don’t give up even if it gets hard or you think you’re no good at it. Look for ways to improve your technique, learn, observe. Fail, and fail often. Fail like a champ! This will do two things for your mindset:

1. Proof. If you approach your new interest with a plan of how you will develop your skills in it, then when you develop those skills you will prove to yourself that it’s possible. You will start to build a track record that shows you that you CAN learn new things.
2. Make your mind more flexible. When you learn new things, your brain creates new connections and actually gets smarter. Taking opportunities to pursue new interests will expand those pathways and open your mind up to new opportunities.

Kids learning to walk fall down all the time. Just like learning to walk, learning a new skill or trying something new means you will fail. If you can turn your thoughts from “I failed, therefore I am a failure” to “I failed, therefore there is something I need to fix”, you will be turning those failures into learning opportunities and using them as ways to improve.

Everyone fails. EVERYONE. When the voice in your head tells you that if you were meant to do it you would be able to do it perfectly, or that if it was meant to happen it wouldn’t be this hard, shut that sh*t down. It’s your mind trying to protect you – good intentions perhaps, but misguided.

Wrap Up

This post was so empowering to write. Growth mindset is something I struggle with every day, it seems like. While researching ways to change mindsets, I feel like I learned a lot about my own mind, and I got as much out of writing this as I hope you will get out of reading it! So I’d like to wrap up with an invitation to comment. I hope you are doing wonderfully and I hope to hear from you in comments below!

How did this resonate with you? Are there areas of changing your mindset that you find particularly challenging? Why? Are there additional strategies you’ve found helpful when changing your mindset? What are they? Share in comments!