Growth starts with having the right attitude and the right mindset. In this video, I will share with you how you can nurture a growth mindset in your business 

What is a growth mindset?  

A growth mindset is a belief that we can develop our talents, abilities, and skills through dedication and hard work. 

How do we develop a growth mindset? 

As its name suggests, a growth mindset is a mindset of growth. It involves believing that we can grow, that we have control over our growth and development, and that if we work towards it, we can improve ourselves and be better.  

Remember the key words: belief, control, and development 

Where do we start? 

Experts believe that nurturing a growth mindset involves different sets of strategies. Here are three strategies you can start employing today to help you develop a growth mindset. 

• Learn vicariously. 

Learning vicariously or learning via proxy means learning from the mistakes of others. Mistakes are teachable moments—use this as an opportunity to learn something new or to improve current processes. It would be a waste of resources if the lessons do not get shared to others.  

For example, if someone in your team makes a mistake, take this as an opportunity for everyone in the team to learn. Replace blame with curiosity and try to find out what caused the mistake and how this can be avoided in the future.  

What’s another way to learn vicariously? Read! In one of my previous video, I discuss how reading is a daily habit of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. They do this to stay relevant and even become better business leaders in this ever changing world.  

• Consider struggle as part of the process. 

Every expert started from the bottom. Struggling to master things is part of the process. Expect to struggle if you wish to grow. 

Take Michael Jordan for example. His career as a basketball superstar is best known for what did NOT happen in the beginning—he did not make it to his high school basketball varsity team. Instead, the coaches thought he was too small that they put him in junior varsity. 

This stung him so badly that he used this struggle as an opportunity to keep practising every day in school until he made varsity. He went his way to basketball stardom from there. 

Many times the fear of struggle is what causes us from trying new things. If we start accepting that we are all made to struggle and that this is part of the growth process, this will help calm our fear of trying new things, a key aspect of building a growth mindset. 

Don’t avoid struggle. Learn to embrace it. Try to control struggle by placing it in a context that you can control. If you want to learn how to do this, please reach out to me so that we can chat. 

• Regard failure in a different light. 

Failure is necessary for success. Failure is an effective teacher.  

Failure is the time to apply extra effort to significantly improve your results. It’s OK to fail—and the best thing that you can do after failing is to understand what you can learn from it. And for a very successful entrepreneur like Jeff Bezos, founder, CEO and President of Amazon, failure is key to his billion dollar success. He famously said, “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com.” 

The ability to learn from failures and past mistakes is a critical skill set that business owners need to master, as I discuss in a previous video. 

It is often said that growth happens outside of your comfort zone. And in this discomfort zone, there is a struggle. There is a failure. And that’s OK. It’s easy to aspire to become the world’s most successful entrepreneur, like Jeff Bezos—or even to aspire to succeed like Michael Jordan did as an athlete. But they didn’t start from the top. They worked from the bottom. Jeff Bezos started Amazon inside his garage, and Michael Jordan started in junior varsity. They both struggled, made a lot of mistakes along the way—but the most important thing that they did was to learn from their struggles and their mistakes, and used those lessons they learned to grow and become better. And that’s exactly what having a growth mindset means—embracing struggle and failure as part of the growth process.  

Do you struggle to come to terms with certain struggles or even failures in your business? Do you avoid growth and development opportunities because you are too busy or that you have too much to handle? If you can identify with those questions, please send me an email and let’s have a chat. 

If you are interested to know more about what a business has to go through when facing exponential growth, you can download the first chapter of the book, ”$20K to $20 Million in 2 Years” absolutely free here. The chapter talks about the differences between a good and a great business and puts out questions that make you consider how you can turn your business from good to great.