Personal growth is not a fad, hobby, or item you purchase. It’s an essential part of being human.
Having a growth mindset means orienting your daily activities around long-term goals and building yourself through activities that challenge you.
Think of a growth mindset as an attitude of turning your difficulties into opportunities for triumph. Here’s what it looks like:
Growth Mindset Activity # 1: Listening to Your Feelings
Traumas we’ve endured can put us out of touch with ourselves.
They can break us off from being on our own side and turn us into someone who has to micromanage and repress our authentic feelings to be pleasing to others.
Growing from trauma is a long and delicate process, so applying a growth mindset involves certain steps:
- Gaining awareness of when we’re feeling overwhelmed emotionally and making a note of our trigger points.
- Allowing our feelings to occur and making a note of exactly how we feel.
- Attempting to understand the origins of these feelings and the possible events that could have embedded trauma in us.
- Nurturing your feelings with self-compassion. This means determining exactly what you need in difficult moments and treating yourself like you would a loved one.
Growing through traumatic experiences (whatever they may have looked like) means bridging the gap between you and the damaged self you feel divided from. It means healing the shame and guilt you might be feeling, so you can start living a more full life.
Growth Mindset Activity # 2: Building Skills
People with a growth mindset seek to grow through activities, meaning they find something that excites them and commit to improving over the long term.
They love seeing their long-term progress, as well as the fruits of their labor.
Pick something you’ve always wanted to try (or, better yet, something you’ve always felt you had no business trying but secretly wanted to) and start participating in it.
Dancing, writing poetry, learning to code, painting, rock climbing, martial arts — the growth from your chosen activity will come from failing, assessing your mistakes, and trying again. This is called the iterative process, and it’s how people improve at anything.
Tell this to yourself when you’re trying to get better at something:
“I can’t lose. I either win, or I learn.”
Looking at any skill like this, how could you not get better?
Growth Mindset Activity # 3: Your Body is Part of Your Growth Habits
Physical health is a beautiful foundation for mental health. People with a growth mindset pay attention to their bodies in their search for personal growth.
A wealth of evidence suggests that physical exercise aids in depression and anxiety, as does prioritizing adequate sleep.
And yes, a spot-on diet, cardiovascular endurance, or abundant physical strength do not directly solve your mental struggles.
These qualities do, however, show that…
- You regularly get a chance to forget your worries through intense physical exertion.
- You have improved cognitive well-being and will maintain your quality of life as you age.
- Your body has greater stores of energy so that you can better handle life’s challenges.
In short, physical exercise is to the mind as aspirin is to the body — a generic painkiller that generates feelings of well-being and facilitates excellent mental functioning.
In addition to diet and exercise, activities like cold showers and spending time in saunas also offer myriad health benefits.
Exposure to extreme conditions gives the mind an acute sense of presence, similar to mindfulness meditation. Connecting to the present (even when it’s difficult) aids in transcending personal troubles and putting life’s problems in perspective.
Growth Mindset Activity # 4: A Practice of Daily Reflection
Gratitude practices are popular recommendations for those trying to improve their well-being, and for good reason.
However, in addition to gratitude, it can be helpful to make reflecting on your life as a whole a regular practice in itself.
Every morning, for example, you can reflect on…
- What direction your life has been going in.
- How you’ve been feeling.
- What the people in your life need from you.
- How you could prioritize your own needs as well as your family’s.
- If you’ve been compassionate with yourself, or if you’ve been neglecting yourself.
- What needs to be done to get to your next goal in life?
- Your mortality (in a productive way that drives you to action and doing what is most authentic to you).
These moments of reflection do not need to be strict journaling sessions or mediation or a gratitude practice (but they certainly could be). They can be you becoming more conscious of your own life and your existence on Earth.
By examining your life in its entirety, you’re making sure that you stay on the path of self-growth.
Growth Mindset Activity # 5: Lifelong Learning
Learning is not limited to schools or universities. Life is a learning experience.
Individuals with a growth mindset commit to learning until the day they die. They are aware of each experience they have, and they work to extract wisdom from their experiences to better their own lives and those around them.
Here’s what growth-oriented learning looks like…
- Reading books for the sake of curiosity and not an obligation.
- Traveling to foreign countries and doing things that challenge your level of comfort.
- Listening to perspectives you need to become more familiar with.
- Identifying your blindspots and working to become more aware of them.
- Realizing that there is no end to wisdom and that the most vivid learning occurs through direct experience, not just explanation.
You should not take things at face value, and you should pass everything through your critical thinking filter. But at the same time, you need to remember that you are flawed, too, and that you could always be wrong.
The most growth comes from keeping an open mind.
A Growth Mindset For Life
Growth is a never-ending process, so we can always appreciate how far we’ve come and how much more we can gain.
Adopting a growth mindset will help you minimize regrets later in life and help you live a truly meaningful life. Life will never be perfect, but your mindset can always be oriented toward growth.
To review, here’s what growth-minded people do:
- Listen to their emotions and learn from their pasts.
- They commit to building and mastering their skill sets.
- They keep their bodies healthy so their minds may follow.
- They remain conscious of themselves and their lives.
- They never stop learning.
If nothing else, try to be a little better every day. Like compound interest, it will make a massive difference over time.
