Embracing A Growth Mindset To Elevate Your Results

“So what should we say when children complete a task — say, math problems — quickly and perfectly? Should we deny them the praise they have earned? Yes. When this happens, I say, “Whoops. I guess that was too easy. I apologise for wasting your time. Let’s do something you can really learn from!”

― Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

The idea of the ‘growth’ VS ‘fixed’ mindset is a concept coined by Dr. Dweck, to describe the underlying beliefs people have about learning and intelligence.

Carol Dweck studies human motivation and has derived this powerful concept to identify the reasons behind individual success, failure and achieving outcomes that provide us with a sense of fulfilment.

For the purpose of this article, I will look to identify the two comparative mindsets, their typical characteristics and how we can endeavour to lean into a growth mindset to facilitate outcomes within the training and nutrition space.

The Fixed Mindset

To put it simply, a fixed mindset is just that.

A fixed perception about capabilities and qualities of an individual, paired with the belief that these are unmalleable.

Adopting a fixed mindset is characterised by avoiding challenges, giving up easily, seeing effort as fruitless, ignoring feedback and feeling threatened by the success of others. These stagnant beliefs result in an inability to learn and change, is a barrier to potential being met and hinders the likelihood of achievement and success.

The Growth Mindset

A growth mindset begins with an individual’s beliefs about their ability to harness success through strategy, dedication and hard work.
When we favour a growth mindset, we are more likely to embrace challenges, persist in the face of obstacles, view effort as the path to mastery, learn from criticism and find lessons and inspiration from the success of others.

As a result, achieving a greater sense of free will and reaching higher levels of achievement.

It is common to shift between the two, within different compartments of life and it is important to highlight that sitting within either of these spaces is fluid, and at no point are you pigeonholed into a specific category, forever.

In fact, an openness to change and shift our beliefs has a powerful impact on all aspects of life. Rather than being fixated on proving your worth and protecting your ego, a focus on learning, ownership and growth leads to inevitable success.

For example let’s take client A, with the goal of losing 5kg, who continues to self sabotage their diet.

With a fixed mindset, the common beliefs follow:

‘This is too hard’
‘My coach expects too much of me’
‘This diet is too hard to stick to, can we try X instead’

Often jumping around from diet to diet, coach to coach, the inability to look inward, foster habits in alignment with the goal and focus on perfecting the process at hand is the limitation between person A and the results they desperately want to achieve.

Client B, with a growth mindset views the process as a challenge to learn from, turns to their coach for education and strategies to overcome the daily obstacles they face and channels their energy into ‘how I can’ opposed to ‘why I can’t.’

With the fluid nature of this concept, creating mindset shifts is an ever evolving process.

Below, I will outline 5 useful strategies that aid in embracing a growth mindset and improving the success of your outcomes.

Value the process over the end result.

Being process driven is non negotiable when it comes to developing a growth mindset.

This requires stepping away from instant gratification of praise and results, and leans into finding value and joy in learning new things and committing to consistent effort over a prolonged period of time, without reward being the driving factor.

Reward actions, not traits.

Without action, change is non existent.

Rewarding action encourages us to strive toward adhering to habits that support our longer term goal, opposed to focusing on the personal characteristics we ‘need’ to accomplish the task.

An example of this includes a reward system for adherence to a daily habit tracker. This encourages the actions to be repeated and increases the likelihood of the behaviour being developed into a long term habit.
This creates an effective feedback system that often creates an upward spiral leading to behavioural change.

Emphasise growth over speed.

Developing a growth mindset comes with the understanding that change does not happen overnight. Once again, stepping away from receiving instant reward for action, and emphasising milestones of achievement over the rate of success.

Learning fast does not always mean you are achieving the desired outcome, and often time needs to be left for error and opportunity to preserve in the face of challenges. An individual with the growth mindset doesn’t get frustrated over the timely nature of learning new concepts, remaining committed to growth, over immediate results.

Provide regular opportunities for reflection.

It is human nature to make errors and mistakes. The ability to reflect on experiences, information and think critically about what we are learning and doing provides us with an opportunity to change and grow.
Adopting a growth mindset includes being receptive to feedback and constructive criticism, without feeling personally attacked or disheartened. This might look like evaluating what worked well, and what didn’t work well throughout your week and adjusting the action steps for the following week accordingly.

Make a new goal for every goal accomplished.

Continuous growth means setting high standards for yourself and what you want to achieve. Settling is comfortable, and comfortable is stagnant.

Learning to step outside your comfort zone and allowing yourself to feel challenged, even scared in the pursuit of a new goal encourages growth and expansion and detaches us from the limiting fixed beliefs that create barriers to change.