A fixed mindset will stifle your growth

Have you ever been with someone who always tells you that ‘this is how I am?’

What a limiting mindset that accepts things as they are and never considers how they can be.

It is a mindset that accepts and resigns itself to status quo. We see it everywhere.

In the workplace you try to tell someone they can do better than they are doing but in their head they think they are doing their best.

The truth is that best is relative. If the barrier for what you consider as your best is static then you are not going to make much out of your life. Potential is not static. Potential is variable and it should keep increasing throughout a person’s life.

The fixed potential belief system is what happens when a person or people have been exposed to limitations all their lives and when they get to a point where they justify their limitations, cannot understand why other people are not subject to their limitations.

BLAMING EVERYONE

This is the stage when people wonder why others can prosper in the same economy in which they are struggling.

They then take it out on the prosperous and call them names and ultimately this leads to the kind of thing we are seeing in South Africa today.

It is the external expression of people with fixed mindset thinking. Like someone said, it is the place where an illiterate person feels the doctor from another country is the one responsible for his not getting a job.

Fixed mindsets always look outside and never inside. I subscribe to the philosophy that says the statement that all birds are blue is nullified if I can find just one bird that is not blue. I do not need a critical mass of birds that are not blue. I need just one.

Similarly, the notion that you cannot do well because of something outside of you is just not acceptable. Victims always look for scapegoats and the language of victims is complaining.

They look for people that they can blame. They blame everyone around them. They blame the system, the weather, the government, their boss, God. They blame every single person but the very one to who the blame belongs — themselves.

Your internal strength will determine the effect of external events on your life. Some people go through hell and high water but rand come out smelling like a rose while others never make it out. The difference is in the internal fortitude.

You need to take responsibility. As long as you blame others for where you are you will never get to where you can be.

Blaming others is shifting the power base of your life to others.

LEARNING ATTITUDE

I come from the school of thought that says even if you treated me badly; it was because I allowed it either through ignorance, stupidity or both. What I take responsibility for I exercise control over.

Next you must have the right attitude. Big problems don’t just happen. A crisis is the end result of small problems that were not well managed.

The right learning attitude with small problems is the training ground big problems.

The right attitude can make a paradise out of a hellish situation while the wrong attitude can make hell out of paradise. Now this is great news because no one but you has the control over your attitude.

The right attitude says it may appear difficult but I will build my capacity for the task. The wrong attitude says it is difficult and there’s nothing I can do about it and don’t try to change me. That’s how I am.’ It’s a fixed potential mindset.

Your mind is the most elastic thing you possess. You can stretch it beyond human comprehension.

A fixed potential mindset is therefore a tragedy because it wastes the most creative and potent resource on the face of the earth – the human mind.