Mindset is the ultimate driver!

Mindsets are linked to being the drivers that drive our actions and inactions. Mindsets are mental images of ourselves. Hence, maintaining a positive and dynamic mindset that is growth-induced is highly critical. Having a fixed or negative mindset is detrimental to one's success rate in all spheres of life.

Our culture, environment, and the people around us all had a significant impact on the formation of our mindsets as we grew up. We were raised to understand that if you are a child and you are a slow learner, the rest of the world labels you as a dead brain. The next thing you get are alternatives to you leaving school and going to learn a trade or become a farmer, among other options.

Even in the classroom, not all teachers are aware that we have fast and slow learners. Again, a student who already believes that he has a dead brain that can never improve will surely have a mental picture of him or herself being a failure, which will not take much time to become a reality. So what then is a "positive and static mindset"? How do we know when we see them?

A positive mindset is a mindset that is not static but rather dynamic and willing to learn, unlearn, relearn, and continue learning.

To have a positive growth mindset entails:

Embracing challenges as they emerge instead of avoiding them or looking for excuses, which are mostly attributed to a fixed or static mindset.

The positive and growth-oriented mind set knows that consistent effort is needed in order to achieve mastery of a task. On the other hand, a static mindset will simply see such a task as difficult without trying persistently to unravel it.

A growth-oriented mindset learns from feedback while the static mindset does not. In the same vein, a positive mindset allows others' successes and failures to teach and guide them, while a static mindset just overlooks such failures or success stories or gets intimidated by them.

A positive mindset uses the word "yet" to affirm. For example, when asked, "Can you type using MS Word? They tend to affirm, "Yes, I can type with Google Doc, but I'm not yet a fast typist. That word, yet, shows the possibility for further learning and improvement. This is likely not to be so with a person with a static mindset who may, out of fear and lack of self-confidence, say outright No to the question.

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Feel free to share any of your experiences that characterised you as exhibiting a positive or static mindset.