Can We Learn and Grow or Are We All Stuck?

What we strive for and what we can achieve is more than uncertain. Potential can be nurtured and disrupted alike by a million impulses every day. Often we bury goals that can’t be achieved instantly with a sense of “I’m not good at that” or “I have other talents”.

There are a few concepts out there that help to raise motivation trying to leverage the full potential of us. Today we are looking into the works by Carol Dweck and her book Mindset. The book has a strong emphasis on differentiating people of two types: people with a fixed mindset and those with a growth mindset.

One of the primary points in this book advises the reader that our mindset controls if we believe we can learn and change or not. While we are all human, we are yet all unique individuals. Possibly we are more than just two categories but diving deeper into this subject we begin to understand this differentiation.

The fixed mindset lives with the fact that there are natural talents that you receive as a gift when you’re born and that they are unable to acquire skills beyond those natural talents. The growth mindset believes that they can learn, grow, change and achieve everything if they try hard enough to learn and improve.

Does that matter on the job?

Traditional HR and recruiters further support the stance of the fixed mindset. They are on the hunt for people with a particular set of skills and experiences, hire them and let them do their job until they become redundant or retire.
A modern approach to this would be to leverage growth mindsets in HR and leadership to enable them to learn and grow into a larger role in their company. May it be within their current team or outside of what they used to do. The potential is unlocked by believing it’s possible to grow.

Often a person with a fixed mindset would rather work on their defined scope of work and seek for approval rather than being on the lookout for more solutions or improvements to what’s already there. On the other hand, a person with a growth mindset pursues development of themselves, their team, their services, their products and some even seek to develop their line managers and directors.

Because it matters to them

Why would they have an interest in that? Because they genuinely care about it and want to grow and improve not only themselves but the whole company and everything around them. This is the type of person you need to retain and keep happy at all cost. They are what keeps the shop together. They are the secret cheerleaders, the hidden consultants, and the stealth marketers.

If you are able to retain those, your next task should be to work on turning the people with a fixed mindset into people with a growth mindset. This is not only for the sake of enriching their career but holistically this can make a difference in the people’s lives. Remember it, if you work hard on something, keep training, stay diligent and not give up, mostly your goals can be achieved.