Do you feel inadequate and incompetent at your workplace? Here is how you can bolster your achievements by following some tips to succeed with a growth mindset at work. Let’s begin!
Hello dear friend, or rather ‘friend from work’!
If you are reading this, you most likely understand the importance of a growth mindset at work. Well, being an employee myself, I can empathize with the long list of struggles you are going through. I was in a similar situation and unfortunately felt like an outcast. Too bad, huh!
In fact, it gets worse when you are trying so hard to stand out yet do not find the motivation to do so. The dreams of a high salary, heightened respect and dignity, and support from your coworkers aren’t fulfilled and you feel like a failure. You end up confused, and dejected yet hold on to that faint light of hope!
It’s essential to recognize your weak spots and work on improving them.
But, here’s the challenge!
You may misunderstand your pitfalls and try to work on the ones that don’t necessarily improve your position at work.
That’s why, to help your tackle this situation, we will focus on how and where you need to invest and draw out the best outcomes for your long-term success! So, without further ado, let’s dive in.
Why Employees Can’t Foster a Growth Mindset?
If you have been wondering about this yourself, you aren’t alone!
This issue lingers with almost every employee bearing the brunt of an increasingly competitive and stressful lifestyle. Often, the reason is the lack of proper work culture and appropriate guidance which discourages them to perform any better than their peers.
At other times, they try to grab certain opportunities coming along their way, only to realize that they were walking to a dead end!
That said, here are 5 reasons why employees can’t foster a growth mindset.
1. Lack of Quality Experiences in the Past
No, we are not just talking about work experiences! We are talking about life experiences, dear!
You haven’t always been an employee now, have you? As kids or teenagers, we are always quite optimistic about learning and growing. When we are appreciated for our talents for succeeding in something, we feel immense happiness and gratification. Unfortunately, this makes us complacent and our skills take a back seat. We don’t work enough to build them to excel in life.
If you had such experiences, it can be challenging to foster a growth mindset. Your negligence towards developing new skills has trapped you in a comfort zone, keeping you in a sophisticated position in your workplace. And you can’t let this happen if you want to build a growth mindset at work.
Related: 7 Common Myths About Self-Improvement
2. Feelings of Incompetency and Inadequacy
If you have been to therapy or watched a life coach giving a compelling speech on TV, you may have heard them emphasizing fears and insecurities in our lives. Now, it’s perfectly normal to feel this way, after all, we are humans, right?
However, if not handled responsibly, these fears and insecurities translate to feelings of incompetency and inadequacy, especially at work. Under such situations, any growth opportunity provided to us seems threatening as we fear that it will expose us. This negative and irrational mindset discourages us to have a growth mindset.
In fact, this fear can be very crippling and make us resign within ourselves until we become the master of our thoughts. Such is the peril of an employee that he fails to see any good in himself, let alone have a positive outlook at work!
3. Enforcing Restrictive Rules That Curb Personal Growth
Both personal and professional growth go hand in hand. Each skill learnt and mastered in a nick of time contributes to a growth mindset at work. If only you weren’t rule-bound by your firm!
Rules aren’t for fools!
However, they do become the culprits of brain drain if enforced beyond a limit. Some employees may find unique ways to benefit their firm, yet they may not be supported for their ideas as they can run the risk of violating the rules.
Now, what good are these ‘rules’ if they can’t allow the employees to be problem solvers? Over time, this becomes a major deterrent with the employees avoiding suggesting ideas to their seniors and minding their own business.
Related: How to Ace Life with an Exploratory Personality
4. Too Focused on Instant Gratification
It’s never advisable to be too hasty when reaping the results of your efforts. You may have put all your energy, dedication, and resources to get the best possible outcome. But if you can’t wait for the result, it just becomes painfully disappointing.
Where I come from, we have a saying
“Do your deeds and stop worrying about the outcomes. If you do good, you reap good…”
Without a growth mindset, it is difficult to foster perseverance and patience at work. While instant gratification may work for short-term goals, they are ineffective when it comes to making long-term ones a reality.
5. Trapped in a Learner’s Block
Well, it is actually a lack of will to learn. Learner’s block is when the concerned employee(s) fail to upskill themselves and risk becoming a liability to the firm. In such cases, the employees don’t feel the need to learn new things or test the depth of the waters.
Now, we did talk about being trapped in a comfort zone in the first point. However, experiencing this ‘block’ is another human tendency where we install barriers in our minds. These barriers are similar to lockdowns enforced by a local administration that do not permit over-the-top solutions. Ultimately, the employee remains in the perpetual abyss of complacency and redundancy.
Well, this was quite mentally overwhelming, isn’t it? Ironically, the reason behind a lack of growth mindset is the human condition itself.
So, how can we fight it?
Well, you can’t fight the human condition but you can curb your tendencies by assessing its impacts on your work and finding common ground. That is what we will see in the tips to succeed with growth mindset at work. Buckle up, dear!
What are the Tips to Succeed With Growth Mindset at Work?
If we had the superpower to turn our growth mindset into a sapling and implant it in our heads, things would have been so much easier, right? No need to work on our abilities, or gain new skills to thrive in a workplace.
I don’t know about you but I surely thought about this all the time. Sadly, I was living a lie just like the rest of my lazy peers. But if you have had enough of your helplessness and want to take charge of your life, this is where your growth begins dear!
Even the perfect guy in your office was a loser someday. Take this as an inspiration to start reshaping your life. If you are unsure how to do it, then here are some simple yet effective tips to succeed with a growth mindset at work.
1. Change Your Society at Work
If you aren’t self-employed and don’t work alone, this tip totally applies to you. You may have heard a million times that your society shapes your talents, desires, and interests. Well, the same applies to your workplace too.
When you want to succeed with a growth mindset at work, you have to pay attention to the kind of society around you.
“Are your friends supportive?”
“Do they want to grow and learn too?”
“Can each of you contribute to each other’s success in the long run?”
In fact, being a part of a team or group with diverse thinking patterns can bolster your growth exponentially. With so many ideas addressing different perspectives, you can learn to be a spontaneous thinker and a creative problem solver at work.
“How cool is that, huh?”
And being around such growth-oriented people also improves teamwork and collaboration. Without a doubt, it is a win-win situation for all. To sum up, a supportive atmosphere is one of the best tips to succeed with a growth mindset.
2. Change Your Perspective from “will not” to “why not”
May sound cheesy but works every time!
Our perspective towards work influences our career growth. If you want to succeed with a growth mindset at work, you have to change the way you see things, especially the challenges. A subtle change in your language or expression can make a big difference!
For example, rather than saying “will not or cannot”, say “why not or can’t not”. Making these slight changes goes a long way towards breaking the fictional barriers built by a fixed mindset. Individuals who frequently engage in such healthy talks benefit from it and grow out of their comfort zone.
If you find this insignificant or hard to believe, there have been studies carried out on people, proving that a slightly optimistic and balanced perspective becomes the foundation of our growth mindset.
Besides, you are already at a low point, right? The only way now is up! Take it as a base for your efforts and keep growing and inspiring!
3. Start Appreciating Others’ Success and Feel Inspired
I am guilty of this actually…
If I got a dollar for every time I was envious of others’ success, I would be a millionaire by now. That’s how insecure I was at work! But something aggravated this tendency over time.
Wonder what it was?
People around me doing the same instead of correcting me.
In other words, there are many ways to be envious of others’ success but very few to be appreciative of them.
In fact, when you see your coworkers being appreciated for their efforts, try to reflect on why you are feeling jealous of their success. What exactly is triggering inside or making you uncomfortable? Reflect on it and find the root cause. Once you do, you will never feel jealous. Learning to appreciate others’ success takes both time and courage.
Additionally, psychologists often emphasize a communication style known as ‘active constructive responding‘. According to this, the individual learns to interact or engage with people around him in a positive and uplifting manner which, in turn, instils positivity in the individual’s mind itself.
4. Be the Master of Your Own Destiny
Have you come across people who call successful individuals gifted or god-gifted? When seeing an insanely successful personality on TV, our friends and relatives would most likely term them as someone innately talented.
However, I couldn’t help but notice how easily people were dismissive of their efforts, challenges, and pitfalls. They didn’t care to know how successful people had to acquire everything all by themselves as no one supported them. They rewrote their fate and made a significant change in their lives.
Similarly, we tend to believe that a growth mindset is innate with some having a higher drive while others have less of it.
We couldn’t be more wrong on this!
Each individual brings something to the table but we prioritize certain traits and dismiss others. This is where we have to make a change. A person looking out to make a unique place for himself not only develops a vision but also influences people with his dedication towards making it a reality. This trait is instrumental to success and becomes an inseparable part of his growth mindset.
5. Take Valuable Lessons From Your Failures
Not a unique but nevertheless an important tip!
You may be doing an extremely good job at work and still find yourself facing setbacks or failures. Being an employee it’s imperative to come across some miserable times where you may lose your mental peace and make the same mistakes again and again. You can’t control your situation, but you can change your reaction to it!
According to popular research with a sizeable sample size of candidates, it was revealed that those who viewed intelligence as a flexible trait showed positive signs of fostering a growth mindset. In other words, they were open to experiencing challenging situations and learning from them. Unlike other people, they didn’t term intelligence as ‘fixed’ or ‘constant’.
Hence, it’s important for employees to realize that failures don’t represent their incompetence, rather they serve as an opportunity for them to build their legacy and aim for the best position in life.
Set Yourself Apart from the Competition!
Your work is akin to your life, ‘unpredictable’! On some days you’ll feel fortunate to be a part of it while on others you’ll be desperate to leave everything behind. Experiencing such highs and lows can be overwhelming. But not when you consider the positive aspects!
Success at work relies on your ability to deal with your challenges. It’s actually in your most vulnerable moments that you have to push yourself and see things from a different perspective. A growth mindset emerges from the shards of a fixed mindset. So break the mental barriers and learn to succeed with a growth mindset at work. Who knows, maybe you find yourself tapping into your true potential!
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