A mindset is your belief and underlying opinions, they serve as a foundation for how you view or engage the world. A mindset is a very powerful thing that can shape your realities, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors in important and impactful ways. This can be a bad thing that creates blind spots, fuel based thinking and can become hard to change if left unchecked. This mostly remains outside of your consciousness, and it takes effort and intention to learn about and become face-to-face of how mindsets show up in productive and unproductive ways. Without thinking about the actions that you are doing will negatively impact your mind and create bad habits. Our mindset drives anything you do in life and affects the lens you see the world through. It helps you notice and interpret situations through conformation bias. It causes you to notice information that supports your beliefs, and may fail to notice that contradicts beliefs. Conformation bias makes you only remember evidence that supports your life in any way, sometimes rational or irrational. Any information that contradicts your strong beliefs, you simply won’t remember it. If there are any information that contradicts your beliefs, you will usually say it’s an exception to the rule so your beliefs and the way you see the world through your own lens.
Students or employees who understand that the brain gets smarter and smarter, this is called a growth mindset, allows you to retain more knowledge. They can see that failure is a good thing and how you can use it to go forward. Students who have a fixed mindset will focus on judgment and not the actual process of learning. This means they might project that they are smart or hiding that their not. This means that they tend to avoid situations in which they could fail or may have to work hard. Growth mindset allows you to learn from mistakes and not hide from them, hiding only makes life and your situation worse. If you don’t speak up and change something, you will head down the wrong path. Your mentality can change by allowing yourself to see what you want/need to see, rather than what your brain is allowing. When you only focus on what you haven’t been able to do you are focusing on the wrong things. All you will see while learning are your mistakes, and you need to be intentional on how to see the things that you did right.
Mindset can affect performance in anything that you do and the reason being is still self-doubt or not dealing with negative energy in a healthy way or not at all. You will reinforce a negative narrative in your brain and focus on what you don’t have or done. The more that you convince yourself that you are doing worse and worse the worse you are actually going to perform. A growth mindset will allow you to take motivation from failure and use it for the next activity. Building momentum through small tasks or activities is a great way to improve your mindset, and will continue into more momentum which can carry to more activities getting done. Getting in the flow will continue to strengthen your growth mindset and transform you to perform better and not overthink decisions that should come naturally to you. For example a mentally sound strong Tiger Woods is going to have an easier time playing golf with a crowd rather than an average person because his mind is so tough that distractions are brushed off of his shoulder. An average person may be distracted by the outside noises or movement from the crowd which will affect a golf shot and most likely result in a miss. That is the difference in mindset when it comes to performance because some people are able to block out the noise and some people are more vulnerable to the noise. This can dramatically affect how someone operates because they are allowing things that shouldn’t be in, in. Build a mental barrier for outside distractions to better your performance in any activity you do.
If your mindset is already affecting your learning and your performance then you most likely are struggling to succeed as well. Performance is a part of succeeding and to succeed in anything, it requires you to perform somewhat well too. The main mindset for having success would be the growth mindset because you are taking on challenges instead of staying static and in one spot for the rest of your life, you need to be constantly learning and failing in order to be successful. Those who are static can evolve their minds to take on challenges daily and continue to learn and progress through it. Being someone you never thought you could be is a result of cultivating a growth mindset. Success also isn’t measured monetarily it is a judge of character, intellect, and your relationships with others is how you will be more successful. Having a fixed mindset can be difficult to change, and you should always allow for help when you need it, whether it be just talking to someone about it or having them help you or aid each other if you do it together. Changing your mindset will automatically help set you up for success because you know that it is okay to fail and learn from it. Learning something new every time you do something is considered successful in my book. Whatever success means to you, allow the growth mindset to aid you in finding your version of successful.
The reason why mindset is so crucial is that it affects what our reality is, and when your reality is looking through a gloomy lens every day you won’t have the energy or motivation to try anymore. Trying is all that you need to do, and it won’t matter if you fail because it will give you the tools to not fail the next time you do it. This is growth mentally and physically. The whole goal of the growth mindset is to grow physically and mentally to be better prepared for life in general. This is important because if all members of a community are growing and doing their best everyone will prosper. A mindset is a way of life and shouldn’t be turned on and off when you want it or need it; it should always be there, leading you to the next best, well thought decision to positively impact your life.