Transcript
[00:00:01]
You're listening to the Her Leadership Coach podcast for the quietly determined career woman who's looking to step up into her first or next level leadership role. If you're looking to make a bigger, more positive difference in your organization, you've come to the right place. Well, hello. Welcome in. It's Rochelle.
[00:00:22]
Thanks for joining me for this week's episode of Her Leadership Coach, where we're talking all about mindsets. Now, every Monday morning in the Women's Leadership Facebook group, I give a prompt for the members to ask them to let me know, what mindset are you choosing to kick the week off with? And I love seeing the intentions that are set by our members, some really great mindset intentions every week. But what on earth is a mindset? When I asked that question in the Woman Leadership Facebook group, kristen said, for her mindset is how her head will let her process what's coming.
[00:01:03]
She also mentioned, and I quote, this week, I have made sure that the brain weasels are well fed and that they should let me do the whole week with positivity and achievement focus. I just love the brain weasel phrase, what a great picture for what's going on in our heads. Tracey shared that for her, mindset is how she thinks about the world and herself. And I see mindset as, I guess, the attitude that I bring to situations and to the unexpected things that happen during the day. So underneath our mindset is the stories that I'm telling myself, the beliefs I have about the world and the way it works.
[00:01:49]
And at the bottom of all that is really my thoughts and my feelings, my emotions. Mindsets affect almost every part of our lives. I think some of them serve us well, some not so much. So let me give you an example. Let's say a friend and I have a milestone birthday coming up, one that might just end in a zero.
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Yeah, I'm turning 50 in six weeks, six weeks today, if you are listening to this when it's released. And I'm excited about reaching that milestone, and I'm also excited about the next ten years, the next decade. There's so many possibilities for me. It's kind of this unwritten book that's waiting for me to fill it. How is this chapter of my life going to turn out?
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Imagine. My friend, however, is feeling pretty depressed about the whole thing and feeling just old. She's anxious about what she's going to do on the day itself, and she's really not feeling all that positive about the next decade. It's all downhill from here. As she says, it's the same milestone, but the mindset towards it is completely different.
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And there could be an infinite number of things behind the forming of each of our mindsets. It could be how birthdays were treated in our houses growing up. It could be how our parents or even our grandparents approached aging. My grandparents used to tell me, well, into their eighty s that they were just approaching middle age. I don't think it was until my grandfather turned 90 that he admitted that maybe he was getting a hold.
[00:03:40]
It could be the amount of social media that we're consuming and how much we've absorbed. The idea that youth is the be all and end all. And boy, can that message be pervasive everywhere in the world. Unless, of course, you've chosen to follow people who celebrate those later years. None of those things actually affect your milestone birthday or your coming decade.
[00:04:07]
I mean, none of them are physically stopping you from doing anything right except through the power of your mindset. They just might be. Because if my mindset is that age is simply a number, and my mindset is that my best years are yet to come, which it is, there's a higher chance I'm going to enjoy my actual birthday than if I think my best years are behind me and all I've got to look forward to is a body that will fall apart. It's not just about enjoying it because of my thoughts, though. It's that those thoughts lead me to different actions.
[00:04:49]
So I might plan a big happy birthday or I might plan an intimate family dinner with champagne because I want to share my joy. My friend might decide to do absolutely nothing, hide away, or maybe reluctantly throw a party, but then they put minimal effort into it because what's to celebrate, right? There's a lot of research that's been done on the power of the mind. For example, you might have heard about the placebo effect. So it's where someone believes they're going to be cured by taking a particular medication, and they often are.
[00:05:30]
For example, about 60% of patients with a gastric ulcer can actually be cured with a simple starch pill. In other words, it's the belief, the mindset that a pill was going to cure them that cured them. Okay, so mindsets can make a difference to our experience of life, our actions, our behaviors, and also our end outcomes. But we can't just make past things not have happened, can we? We can't just go back 30 years and make our grandparents tell us different stories or forget that the whole of Western societies celebrates youth.
[00:06:14]
And unfortunately, no one has given us a pill that makes us believe our next decade is going to be our best yet. Although how cool would that be if you're an inventor. Yeah, give him that one. How much money would you make with that placebo? But the good news is that this doesn't have to be a barrier to us being able to change or what I like to call shift our mindsets from one that, say, limits us to one that empowers us.
[00:06:45]
The power comes when you choose what that mindset is going to be, as opposed to being buffeted by the winds of what happens to you during the day in fact, even that sentence contains a mindset, a belief, a story, a thought. Did you pick up on it? I'll come back to that at the end of the podcast. But what do you think how much control do you think we have to choose our mindsets on any given day? Well, your answer to that question will probably depend on whether you have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset.
[00:07:28]
A growth mindset is probably the most wellknown, at this stage at least, it's the one I hear the most about at work. I hear about it quite often now. So growth mindset is the idea that you can grow, that your intelligence, your capabilities, your talents can be improved by effort and by your own actions. So really this is the mindset that needs to be shifted so that all of the other mindsets can be shifted. Can we call it like a meta mindset?
[00:08:03]
Like the mindset to shift all mindsets? Having a growth mindset means you're more likely to seek out challenges because you believe they will help you grow. It means you're more likely to see failure as something to be learned from as opposed to something to avoid. The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset. And these terms are coined by a professor called Carol dwick.
[00:08:32]
And you can look her up and read more about these because they are definitely worth learning about. A fixed mindset is where you believe that you are born with a certain level of intelligence or ability and there's nothing you can do to improve it. It's there or it's not there. There's no point challenging yourself. And failure means for you that you've found your limit and you better stop trying because it's embarrassing.
[00:08:58]
And if you have that belief that fixed mindset, if that's the way you see the world, then why would you bother trying to learn new things, including new mindsets? So if right now we have a fixed mindset, how can we start shifting it to a growth mindset so that we can also work on all of our other mindsets? I think one thing to note is it's not normally a case of having one or the other. So you can have a growth mindset in some contexts and affects one in another. I've noticed this lately, where for the most part, I do know I can grow and learn and I am pretty good at throwing myself into challenges.
[00:09:45]
But I had a mindset that I couldn't run, that I just wasn't a runner. So if I have that mindset, how might I start shifting it? Well, a simple way, and one that I started using was to add a yes to the end of that sentence. So I started with, well, I'm not a runner yet. And that one word immediately shifts the brain into believing that perhaps, just maybe, it's possible I will be in the future.
[00:10:22]
And when I allow for that possibility, then I might start to learn about maybe some good shoes to buy or some ways that I can start running that won't kill me. I might look for others that once thought they weren't runners, and they are now to be inspired. And over time, I realized, because this was in the past, that it's entirely possible that I could be a runner. I got to the point where I was able to run for 23 minutes without stopping from believing that I wasn't a runner. I was pretty impressed with myself.
[00:11:02]
Another helpful shift, besides adding yes to the end of a sentence that will help you go to a gross mindset, is a shift in the way you see failure. So instead of internalizing failure, which we so often do, instead of saying, oh, I didn't complete that run, so I'm such a failure, you shift that to I didn't complete that run, I just need to keep working on it.
[00:11:32]
And I want you to stop and think here, because some of you are probably thinking, yes, this is stuff I've heard before. I know the yet. I know failure is all about learning and yet have a think. What are you holding yourself back from right now because you're scared of failing? Be honest with yourself.
[00:11:55]
Or maybe there's a story you've told yourself about something that you just aren't made for. Those are still examples of a fixed mindset in a specific context. So, yes, we can know this stuff intellectually and still forget to apply it. I'm still forgetting to apply it now in several areas of my life, and some of those have come to mind, just as I've written this episode. So I want you to hear this again with a beginner's mindset deal.
[00:12:28]
Add the yet shift the way you see failure to any context where that needs to be done right now. All right. There's a lot of other names out there for mindsets that have come out of different research and different literature. There's the scarcity versus abundant mindset that I talked about in the last week's episode. And if you missed that, definitely go back and have a listen.
[00:12:52]
There's an open or closed. There is positive or negative. There is the beginner's mindset that I just mentioned. There is a digital mindset, which I've talked all about at work for quite a while now. There's an entrepreneurial mindset, which is exceptional.
[00:13:08]
There's inward or outward promotion or prevention, and I'm sure there is many more. But a mindset doesn't have to have a label. It can just be an intention. How am I going to view the world today? What attitude am I going to bring to different situations today?
[00:13:27]
So I'd love you to have a think about which mindset or view of the world you think might be the most important for you to work on right now. I think the thing is to remember that mindsets can be changed, providing you're open to change them. No one else can make you change them, although other people can influence your beliefs and help you see the stories you're telling yourself that you might not recognize as stories. So often we see these stories as truths, as the way the world is. So it can help to have other people influence your mindset.
[00:14:06]
It also means you can't make someone else change their mindset, as much as we would love to. You can influence, but they need to be open to it in the first place.
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Changing your own mindset can often take time. It can take consistent effort. It takes exposing yourself to new ideas and new ways of looking at the world over and over again. And we do a lot of this work in the Accelerate Your Leadership Academy. But changing your mindset can also be immediate.
[00:14:39]
It can be flicking the switch from one way of looking at the world to a completely new understanding. Either way, it starts with making the choice to do so. And that is why I ask every Monday morning in the Facebook group, what mindset are you choosing to bring to this week? Because when we consciously dia, which is decide in advance what we're bringing to the world, there's a much higher chance we can respond to our circumstances rather than react. And that's it for this week.
[00:15:15]
Thank you for joining me. If you want to continue the conversation about mindsets, why not join us in the Women and Leadership Facebook group? You'll find the link in the show notes. I am in there every day and absolutely happy to help you with shaping some of the mindset that you might like to bring to the world. If you got value out of this episode, I would love it if you could share it with others.
[00:15:37]
And of course, if you've been listening to podcasts for any amount of time, you'll know that writing the show and leaving a review helps others to find the show and I really would appreciate it. Until next week, continue to lead the way her way.
