How have you grown?
Learning is something that I am passionate about. I love to learn about how stuff works, why things happen, causes and effects, and many other things, but one of my biggest areas I love to learn about is myself.
I believe learning about oneself facilitates improvement and growth. It helps me prevent errors by learning from past experiences. It helps me better manage situations that I once handled poorly (usually due to lack of experience or knowledge). It helps me broaden my horizons to see other influencers that once I was unaware of. Most importantly, however, I believe my learning mindset allows me to objectively review my own actions, situations, behaviours, experiences etc and be able to critically assess my performance in relation to the past.
In my opinion, there are a few key factors that support a learning mindset:
Desire to learn
I believe that to learn, one has to be open to opportunity, have a desire to understand, to ask why, to become an even better version of oneself, and to believe that you CAN learn.
Belief
When attempting to learn or do anything new, do you start out with a belief that you can learn/ do it? I think that in order to be successful, I have to believe that a slight possibility that I can be successful. This is vital.
As I mentioned in my Bio, I am famous for my “how hard can it be?”. This has got me into some interesting situations over the years, and probably worried my parents sick. In general, however, my belief in my “how hard can it be?” has led me to learn many new things. I truly believe that without this belief, I would never have even tried.
Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.
~ Henry Ford
You’ve probably heard / read this quote before. For me it is a powerful statement; reminding me that with a can-do attitude, there is a much greater possibility of achieving one’s goals.
Openness
Being open to new ideas, different perspectives, different experiences. Everyone has something to offer and contribute and not respecting this and being open to new ideas or different ways of thinking/doing something could be detrimental to the greater good. This isn’t about blindly accepting ideas as being correct, but it is about being open enough to accept that there is a possibility of the idea being possible, and then objectively assessing the idea.
Ego
Ego – whilst we all think we are important and we may like to think that everything is about ourselves….it really isn’t. Many situations get clouded by people thinking it is about them, a reflection of them, and therefore they are unable to differentiate between the situation and the person, e.g. I do therefore I am.
Being able to put your ego aside (which can be very hard at times – or at least I find it so) will help to open up a world of possibility. It helps me take the focus away from myself, and allows me to focus on the broader concepts that are possible. I find this particularly hard when something hasn’t gone to plan, or where I feel I might get blamed for something (or where I blame myself for something).
Perspective
People generally refer to me as optimistic – I do my best to see positivity, opportunity, or the good in everything – even when things just don’t seem to be going to plan.
By seeing failure as opportunity to learn, it helps me bounce back from it quicker than if I wallow in my failure and despair of not achieving something that I wanted to achieve. However, by simply trying and failing, I have learnt something – it might not be the intended outcome – but it’s more than what I knew when I started.
I think about how children learn to walk. How many times they try and fail. How many bumps, bruises, tears are shed in that learning process….but each time they learn something more…and they attempt again and again with dogged determination until they eventually get strong enough and establish the balance needed to stand and then take their first steps. Innocent dogged determination, it really is quite remarkable!
Just think if that a child had a perspective of…”well I tried, and I couldn’t do it….so I’m not going to attempt to do that again” – I mean where would that have got the human race?
So next time things go awry, just have a think about what you have learned in the process. In my opinion, failure brings far more learning than success, if you allow yourself to experience failure in a positive light.
It’s all in the perspective!
Opinion
Being open to learn means that you have to be open to constructive challenge and willing to change your opinion.
I generally form my opinions based on logic and evidence. This means that I am willing to change on something if new evidence becomes available to support an opinion change, or my logic was flawed. It’s something that comes quite naturally to me (even though I am ridiculously stubborn), but for other people I know that this is a hard thing to do.
Aside from forming my opinions on reason and logic, I also don’t create a link between my opinion and me. What I mean by that is some people may unknowingly create an association which says my opinion is right, therefore I am right. Imagine then if or when that opinion is challenged….essentially one’s sense of self is also being challenged – my opinion is wrong, therefore I am wrong.
Based on the latter I hope you can see why some people will “fight” hard to prove that they are right. It is much deeper than the actual facts, and far deeper than the opinion itself.
Acceptance
Key to learning and growth is being able to look back on experiences in a positive light, and be kind to yourself when maybe things didn’t go as well as they could. Being accepting and/ or forgiving also helps us move on and learn – dragging the past in to the future can cloud our judgement and impact future decisions and actions.
Hindsight also plays a massive role here. It is easy to forget the reality of a past situation as it was at the time. It’s so easy to look back on a situation with more experience, knowledge, and skills; casting blame, shame etc. onto oneself or others. SO….what do I do? Two things, namely:
- I remind myself that in those past situations, even if I did make an error, it certainly wasn’t intentional. I am human and, unfortunately I will make mistakes.
- At the time, I didn’t have the benefit of the additional experience, knowledge, skills and resources, so be kind to myself, and accept the actions I took, or the decisions I made.
I have found that this is one of the hardest parts about being willing to grow. Acceptance and forgiveness is hard. It can be painful, and for some people it can seem near impossible.
From my experiences, I felt relieved to stop blaming myself (or others) for past events. Once I had come to terms with this new perspective, I felt less anxious going in to new situations where risk of success. I also was able to make rationale decisions rather than making decisions which were, partly or wholly, influenced by negativity from past experiences.
So, how does your mindset facilitate your learning ability and your growth? I hope you are able to look on experiences, both past and present, and see how they have helped form your learning and your successes to date. I also hope that you start, or continue, to challenge yourself to learn more, to believe you can achieve, and believe you can be your best self through growth.
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