How To Embrace A Growth Mindset As An Entrepreneur

When people talk about the things required to start a business, they often mention things like a great idea, a target audience and investment capital. While all those ingredients are crucial to your business, there’s one that’s often overlooked: your mindset.

The most successful entrepreneurs are the ones that can constantly learn and improve, pivoting to suit the needs of their customers and the demands of an ever changing marketplace.

But not all business leaders are automatically that agile. Is your mindset tuned for growth?

To survive in an unpredictable environment, it’s important to cultivate a mental state that’s conducive to your success. It’s something referred to by Carol Dweck as a “growth mindset.”

What is a Growth Mindset?

Your mindset is how you interpret and respond to the things that you encounter in life and ultimately as an entrepreneur.

There here are two primary types of mindset: growth and fixed.

For example, say you started your online ecommerce store and discovered that following an expensive round of marketing, you’re still not reaching enough customers resulting in few sales:

A fixed mindset entrepreneur would assume that they were destined for failure. That they had chosen the wrong niche and that the market was too over saturated for them to stand-out, attract customers or that they just weren’t launching at the right time.

On the other hand, an entrepreneur would look at the potential reasons why their efforts isn’t thriving. Are they targeting the right audience? Should they be trying a different marketing strategy? How clear is their USP (unique selling proposition)?

Fixed mindsets impose limitations by suggesting that our ability to succeed in life is static. In other words, you’re born with a certain level of luck, intelligence, or creativity, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

A growth mindset believes that with work and time, you can grow.

How to Nurture your Entrepreneurial Growth Mindset

As an entrepreneur, a growth mindset is extremely valuable and one that you must be willing to adopt and cultivate if you want to succeed.

It means that instead of giving up and cutting your losses when you hit your first or second hurdle, you’ll take every opportunity to stay the course and to learn and improve. That makes for a very adaptable, flexible business leader.

Although cultivating and empowering your growth mindset isn’t always easy, try using these strategies below to help you to begin building a growth mindset:

1 - Acknowledge your weaknesses. Having a healthy dose of self-confidence and belief in your abilities is vital for achieving the goals we set in life. However, that doesn’t mean being ignorant of the skillsets you need to work on or learn.

Become aware of and be honest in the areas you may be lacking. If you can acknowledge where your weaknesses lies, you can find ways to improve, learn, and evolve. For instance, if you know you’re great at producing products, but you’re not good at marketing, be open to learning the basics by spending some time watching free programs on marketing tips on Youtube, reading books on marketing or investing in an online course.

2 - Choose to embrace challenges. Nothing worth having comes easily and we're often tested every step of the way. With a growth mindset, you don’t see challenges as insurmountable and allow them to stop you. Instead, you determine to embrace the challenges you encounter as opportunities to learn, grow, explore new ideas, and put your skills to the test.

With a growth mindset, you relish the chance to step out of your comfort zone and overcome new challenges. Neither do you allow the all too common fears about hard work or failure to stop your progress and forward movement.

3 - Accept failure. As you learn to accept challenges as opportunities, you must also learn to accept failure as opportunity for growth. Accept that not all of your risks will pan out the way you want them to. But that doesn’t mean that your business is doomed to fail!

Consider J.K Rowling. If she had stopped reaching out to publishers after her first, fifth, or twelfth rejection, we’d never have gotten one of the world’s most popular book series.

Learn from each failure, adapt, and try again.

4 - Avoid seeking approval. This is may at first be a difficult lesson to learn, but it is a crucial one. You don’t need everyone to agree with what you’re doing.

Instead, focus on improving yourself - for yourself and not for anyone else. Set and concentrate on your goals, your ability to grow, and the things you’re striving to achieve. And be open to accept and use feedback, if it’s valuable to you. Often positive input if it comes from those we trust and who has our best interest at heart can offer a unique perspective when you’re starting out as an entrepreneur.

As it is in life, as an entrepreneur you are bound to hit a few roadblocks on your journey, but by committing to adopting a growth mindset you will be more able to turn every into a challenge and as an opportunity to learn. You will also spend less time worrying about results and more time enjoying the journey and focusing on the process.

By|womenwhoslay @womenwhoslay