Why Cultivate a Growth Mindset to Grow Your Business

Having a growth mindset can help you flourish in virtually all aspects of your life, including business. Here's how you can leverage a growth mindset to achieve your goals and drive business growth.

Key Takeaways:

• Your mindset can help or hinder your goals.
• Having a growth mindset can help founders achieve business growth.
• Growth-minded people believe skills, abilities, and knowledge can be developed or acquired.
• The big difference between fixed and growth mindsets is what people believe about change.
• A growth mindset helps founders bounce back from failure, making them more successful. 
• Developing a growth mindset is an ongoing practice, not a destination. 

You started your business to grow it, but is your belief system helping or hindering those goals? The role of mindset in entrepreneurship cannot be understated. The truth is that understanding just one important psychological concept can open your mind to new possibilities like business expansion. 

Founders tend to be an optimistic bunch, and Duke University studies show that U.S. CEOs have higher levels of optimism than the general population. This allows them to see situations differently and take more risks, which leads to more rewards. 

It’s not unrelenting optimism that’s driving their expansion, though. It’s a “growth mindset,” and here’s what you need to know about it.

Understanding the growth mindset concept

A growth mindset is the belief that skills, abilities, and knowledge can be changed, acquired, nurtured, and developed. The term was coined by psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck after decades of research on motivation and success. 

One of the most intriguing aspects of Dr. Dweck’s research is that developing a growth mindset takes more than just rewarding results. Business is typically a results-oriented field, but Dr. Dweck has found that acknowledging the learning process – and appreciating the efforts involved – to be vital in developing a growth mindset. This suggests that mindset is a way of being, rather than an achievement.

The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed one. Those with a fixed mindset believe that skills or talents are innate and immutable. The variance in these mental approaches is key in determining whether a person or organization will experience success. Here’s what to know:

• The difference between the mindsets comes down to what a person believes about change.
• Those with a growth mindset believe things can be changed, including circumstances, intelligence, and skill sets.
• Those with a fixed mindset do not believe in the capacity for change. 

High school basketball coach Tim Notke sums it up well, saying “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.” Someone with a growth mindset who is willing to put in the time to develop their talents can achieve success and even beat out the naturally talented. Meanwhile, those who believe a situation is “as good as it gets” won’t put in the time or effort to grow because they believe they’ve peaked.

If you want to find out if you’re looking at something with a growth mindset or a fixed one, ask yourself these questions: Do I believe this can change? What kind of things would I be doing differently in my life and business today if I believed change was possible?

Why failure is a great thing

Being a founder means learning to face rejection, and having a growth mindset will keep you going and growing. Studies show that one in four entrepreneurs fail before succeeding, for example, and that it takes the average entrepreneur three years before their business can support them financially. Your belief that this can change – that you can and will push through this early phase – is what will keep you from allowing a temporary flop to be a final failure.

There are plenty of famous examples of a growth mindset keeping people who have ultimately changed the world going in the early years: 

• Oprah Winfrey was told she was “unfit for TV.” 
• Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling was on welfare and rejected multiple times. 
• In 1993, Beyonce lost Star Search. 
• Walt Disney was told that a mouse would “never work.” 

These people failed spectacularly, then went on to make massive impacts in their industries and change lives. This all happened because their growth mindset allowed them to learn how to fail. 

Here’s how founders with a growth mindset should view failure:

• Be open to failure, because it means you’re doing something.
• Failure is feedback, so use it as data and learn from it.
• That’s right, failure is a learning opportunity.
• It’s also a chance to course correct.

So, fail, and fail often, and then fail again. Don’t attach emotions to your failures, though. Remember, it’s just data to learn and grow from in the future. 

How to build a growth mindset

Developing a growth mindset is a journey, not a destination. It takes time to retrain your brain to focus on positive outcomes. With that said, here are some ways that founders can nurture a growth mindset: 

• Remember that failure isn’t final (unless you quit).
• Be a life-long learner and an expert in your field.
• Hold yourself to a high level of accountability.
• Do the work and put in your time.
• Acknowledge efforts and processes, not just results.
• Acknowledge all results, including the undesirable ones.
• Understand your purpose is service, and ask how you can better be of service to others.
• Question your belief systems regularly to find the ones that best serve your goals.

Putting the above into practice allows founders to nurture their mindset, which in turn yields payouts in your business. A growth mindset will open untold doors for both you and your business.

Contact MetaGrowth Ventures for help growing your business

At MetaGrowth Ventures, we know how to help you hit your growth goals. We have decades of experience helping founders like you streamline their teams’ efforts and achieve their goals. We do by helping you hire expert sales professionals, training them to your standards, and tracking their progress for you – all so you can focus on being the best leader you can be.

If you’re ready to have an amazing team of top-performing sales professionals do your selling for you, contact us today.