How important is mindset?
The longer I’ve been in business the more highly I rank mindset when it comes to predicting success and happiness.
In researching for this episode, I found time and time again that personal happiness and success are not a result of where we come from, or what we know—instead, it’s a result of how we think.
What’s really cool is you can actually shape your own mindset so if you’re thinking you don’t have a great growth mindset right now, you’re absolutely in the right place.
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What Does it Mean to Have a Growth Mindset?
One of the best ways to know if you are headed in the direction of growth is through your mindset. But what is a growth mindset and how do you know if you have one?
Growth mindset is a way of viewing the world around you, specifically the way of viewing challenges, setbacks, and failures.
Five Signs You Have a Growth Mindset
As you take a look at your own character traits and mindset to evaluate if you’re on the path to growth, here are five signs to look for to determine if you have a growth mindset.
1. You make space to slow down and evaluate.
The very first thing you must consider is if you make space to slow down and evaluate. The reason why we have to do this is to become more self aware and identify what is happening in our businesses and in our own heads.
Allowing space to press pause on the normal day-to-day in your business and evaluate may sound like the very last thing you have time for right now but I always remember the quote “An hour of planning can save you 10 hours of doing.” and it shifts things fo rme.
If you can slow down for an hour, you can save a ton about of time in the long run.
For me, this means taking time to do an annual planning weekend for my business goals each year. You can grab my free guide, The Strategic Business Planning Guide, which will help you look at your business and questions you should answer in planning.
2. You ask for help and are open to feedback.
This is your reminder that you do not have to do it all. Especially as a working mom, I need this reminder. One of my favorite quotes is:
Your job is not to do it all. It’s to make sure it all gets done.” – Patrick Lencioni.
For me this looks like paying for help in my business especially if that help allows me to buy back my own time. I pay for childcare. I pay for cleaning person to come to my house. Sometimes, I pay for childcare not just to work but to have personal time and pour back into myself.
In addition to asking for help, you should be open to feedback.
If you work alone, this can be really tricky! A great way to know if you are truly open to feedback is if your team or your family feels they can honestly share things that are working/not working with you.
Are you allowing opportunities to your clients to provide feedback? A great time to do this is just as you wrap up your client work or deliver the final gallery/items to your clients.
I have to make a little note here and say that if the feedback is coming from anonymous comments or people being haters online, you can go ahead and ignore that! I’m talking about the valuable feedback of your actual customers, clients, and peers in life and business.
3. You identify your shortcomings to grow from those things and not to shame yourself.
“I should be posting more”
“I should raise my rates”
“I should be working on this thing in my business”
Notice how the word SHOULD is in there a lot? That often means you’re being hard on yourself and maybe even shaming yourself.
As soon as I catch this in myself I re-state the sentence without the word should.
This reframes your thoughts putting you in the driver’s seat.
4. Make time for yourself and your business.
I’m reading a book right now called More Than A Mom, and it talks about how the more we prioritize ourselves as moms the more our families thrive as a result of that.
Rest. Eat. Sleep. Movement. The basics are so important here.
But even when something sounds basic you can still easily find yourself hunched over your computer editing, on your 3rd caffeinated beverage of the day, and forgetting to eat real meals with protein.
The second half of this is making time for your own business. What I mean here is that you are protecting time each week to work on projects and content that moves your business forward, not just deliver on client work. As creatives, our clients keep us busy with projects and the days are filled with emails, creation, admin, and none of this is bad but it’s not the kind of work I’m talking about here.
I like to set aside dedicated pockets of time where I know I will be able to work on MY projects, not client projects. Maybe it’s a content calendar for myself. Maybe it’s a website revamp. Or maybe time to take a course or learn more about an area of business.
5. You see failure as a crucial part of growth.
Who is excited to fail? Not me.
Failure sounds bad, but the reframe I want to share for you here is that failure is just a sign of trying.
This is a crucial part of your growth.
Sara Blakely (founder of SPANX) shared in an interview that her dad would ask her and her brother each week “How have you failed this week?” and would be disappointed if they couldn’t think of something they tried and failed at.
He was showing them that failure is simply a part of learning, growing, and taking action.
Fail fast and fail often.
My personal challenge to you is to identify one of these growth mindsets that you heard and felt like that is an area you need to work on.
Write it down! Write it in the first person. “I ask for help” or “I see failure as growth” as a reminder for you.
Mentioned in This Episode:
The Strategic Business Planning Guide
Connect with Joy:
Instagram: instagram.com/joyymichelle
Youtube: youtube.com/channel/UC-Ou6jRKxcjMrVMxWxLO_fQ
Facebook: facebook.com/joymichellephotography
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