Tag: growth mindset

Facing your fears – incrementally vs all at once

The way I see it, there are two ways to successfully face your fears. You can gradually/incrementally introduce yourself to your fears (taking baby steps – learning more about it first, then being around it, then facing it in an unimportant situation, then facing it more regularly) OR you can dive right in and surround yourself with them. The best approach depends on how devastating the outcome could be and what your mindset is.

If there are irreversible repercussions to you failing, then you should take the gradual approach. Read about what you are going to face, talk with other people who have conquered that fear, listen to books/podcasts/YouTube videos, etc. Then just go and be around whatever you have to face. You don’t need to face it yet, but the nearer you are, the more acclimated you’ll get. Start by going once per week then increase the frequency. As you become more familiar with the event, your fear levels will likely go down.

If the stakes are low if you fail/mess up, it’s probably best to just jump right in and learn on the fly. Learning is often done best by experiencing. Then you can still read, listen, talk with others, and watch others to learn more, but now you’ll have a better understanding of what they’re going through (because you’ve already been through a similar situation). You will speed up your learning curve by doing. Just make sure you have a growth mindset going into the event. You may not be good at whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish/conquer yet, but with enough practice you can/will get better.

Protecting your time

Be intentional with your time. Protect it…not just from others asking you to do things, but also from yourself. It’s easy to binge watch a show. Be careful so that the 30 minute show doesn’t become a two hour watch session. It’s easy to consume social media. If you keep a social media account, make sure that you’re not mindlessly surfing through their carefully crafted content specifically targeted at delivering the most compelling stories to keep you on their website.

How can you be intentional with your time where you’re doing something to improve your knowledge AND what would make you feel better (long term)? Instead of consuming shallow, surface level content (including tv shows, social media posts, and even many magazine articles), try reading something with more depth.

Start small. Try reading 10 pages per day (from a book). Over the course of the year, this will equate to 3,650 pages per year. If an average book is 250 pages, you will have read between 14-15 books for the year! If you do this for ten years, you will have read 140-150 books.

So many people quit reading or only occasionally read after graduating high school or college. Be different. Set yourself apart from the collective average. Use your time intentionally. And then use your newly acquired knowledge to further yourself in your career or change your life for the better.

The fear of making mistakes

“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.” – Elbert Hubbard

When I was younger, I feared making mistakes because I thought it would make me look dumb. I never asked questions in school and figured I would just look up the solution afterwards (even though I rarely did). But what that did was put me further behind. Instead of asking a question, one that may have been on other people’s minds as well, I chose to not understand something. Talk about dumb? That’s a dumb decision!

As I grew older, my fear of asking questions has disappeared, but I still battle the fear of not making mistakes. It’s something that I may always have trouble with, but as long as I remain aware of it and try to fight against it, I will keep improving.

By the way, if you understand what I’m talking about, don’t feel bad. This is very common, especially if you have always been told that you’re good at something. For example, while I don’t know if he has ever come out and said it, I think even LeBron James experiences this too. With his mixture of attributes (height) and skill set (jumping ability, coordination, etc), I think he would have been a great candidate to win the slam dunk contest. There’s no guarantee he’d win, but he was capable of performing dunks that not many other players could imagine. But, to all NBA fans’ chagrin, he never participated in a dunk contest. Instead, he did “participate” in the Skills Challenge. I put the word participate in quotes there because if you go back and look at the Skills Challenge he was in, he looked like he was in half speed – like he wasn’t even trying. Once again, I feel fear is the culprit here. If he tried his best and lost, or if looked like he was trying his best, what would that say about his greatness? In my opinion, nothing. He would still be one of the greatest to ever play. But I think the fixed mindset of him always needing to be the perceived best got to him and his fear of making mistakes/failing led to his half-hearted performance.

That being said, everyone experiences fear. You can run away for a little while, but ultimately, you need to face your fears. Why not get it over with and face them now?

Mindset

Work on having a growth mindset, where you’re open to the possibility of changing and growing your abilities. Just because you can’t do something right now doesn’t mean that you’ll never be able to do it. The only way that you know for sure that you won’t be able to do something is if you stop trying to improve yourself. The same can be said if you are already good at something. If you have a fixed mindset, you may think that you don’t have to try because you’ll always be good at that thing. But if you stop working at something because you feel your abilities are “fixed,” you will soon be surpassed by those who are working harder than you.

So how do you work on having a growth mindset? Understand that everyone has to start somewhere. Some people will naturally have more ability than others, but no matter where you start, you can always improve if you’re willing to make an effort. Realize that if you want to improve, you’re going to have to push the boundaries of your comfort and, as a result, you’ll fail often. Don’t be afraid of failure. Embrace it and use it as a stepping stone towards your eventual success. It can only truly be considered a failure if you quit afterwards. Otherwise it’s just more experience for you to learn from.

Where is the knowledge?

“Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?” – T.S. Elliot

We are so inundated with information, most of which is irrelevant, that we lose the part that is actually important – the applicable knowledge.

Don’t confuse the two. Start/continue to listen to audiobooks and podcasts, to read articles and books, and to try to learn as much as possible, but make sure you occasionally take a step back and figure out if you’re just consuming noise (information), or if what you’re letting in will help you. Then apply what you’ve learned. The best teacher is experience. You can read as much as you want, but you need to actually start “doing” to gain a complete knowledge of a subject.