How to Develop a Growth Mindset: Start from a State of Abundance

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My work as a performance coach explores the power of mindset. I teach people how to shift their perspectives to get what they want out of life with more ease and flow.

In my last post, What is the Most Likely Consequence of Setting Unrealistic Goals?, I discussed the importance of creating an environment that is aligned with success. Your mindset establishes the environment of your reality. By aligning your mindset with success, growth, and expansion, that environment becomes your reality.

Most people go through life believing that we are controlled by reality, but the truth is we control our reality. Yes, we are products of our environment, but, at the same time, our mindset determines the reality we experience.

What is mindset?

Mindset is your perspective. It is created by all your experiences—what you believe, what you’ve been taught, where you live, and endless other factors that establish your identity. Whether you realize it or not, you are always working from a mindset. Ever present, your mindset is your operating system.

You have the power to decide what you believe. By changing your beliefs and shifting your perspective, you can change the reality you experience. One important step to changing your perspective is moving beyond beliefs that are limiting your potential.

You are the creator of your reality. The only thing that limits your potential is you. And the fastest way to remove limitations is by evaluating your beliefs about yourself and consciously shifting your mindset.

What is a fixed mindset?

In coaching, I teach the 7 Levels of Mindset Alignment. The lowest levels of mindset alignment are living in reaction to the past—and being limited by the past.

When you are limited by the past, your mindset is determined by things that have already happened and you are in a fixed mindset. In a fixed mindset, what is possible is determined by what you have already experienced. The truth is anything is possible in the next moment regardless of what has happened in the past.

We all have baggage, and someone may have told you that the way to move beyond your past is to simply let it go. I have discovered that the way to stop being limited by the past is not to ignore it or push it away but to face it.

When we are in reaction to the past, we relive past experiences and let them define our current reality. Let’s say you want to aim for a big target, maybe you want to close ten times the number of deals you closed last year. When you think of this goal, a time when you failed in the past comes to mind, and you relive the emotions you felt during that failure. Feelings like self-doubt arise, and you perpetuate the belief that you will fail because you have failed in the past. If you simply try to let those emotions go, or even worse just push them back down, they will continue to come up and continue to affect your mindset around your big target.

Imagine you are a hot air balloon. You want to rise higher, but you are anchored to the ground by sandbags. Emotions, beliefs, and experiences from the past are your sandbags. You must establish a new perspective and change any beliefs that are limiting growth and expansion to remove those anchors.

If you want to hit that next level of success, but you are allowing past failures to your limit your potential, you are in a fixed mindset. You can remove those sandbags by changing your beliefs about yourself and how life works and stop being limited by the past, 

I work with clients to help them face and integrate past beliefs, emotions, and experiences. By integrating instead of ignoring, my coaching methodology guides people from being limited by the past (one of the lowest levels of mindset alignment) to the highest level of alignment—active creation.  

When you are limited by the past, your mindset is fixed. You are a hot air balloon anchored to the ground.

What is a growth mindset?

At Jason Drees Coaching, we avoid viewing what life brings us as positive or negative. Life is what it is. If you have failed in the past, life needed to teach you something. Life was stretching you and preparing you for future growth and expansion. When we are stuck in negative emotions from our past, we ignore the fact that one particular failure does not define us. And, most likely, that failure was an important part of our unique path to success.

By accepting ourselves, failures and all, we can begin to work with life and start to change our beliefs about ourselves. When we hit a wall, life is telling us there is something about ourselves we need to accept or integrate. Hitting a wall can seem negative, but it is simply an indicator. Life is trying to get our attention. Life is saying, “Look over here, I am preparing you for amazing growth and expansion.” We must first find out what limits us to move beyond a limitation. We have to hit the wall before we can move past it.

Put failure in proper perspective. Hitting a wall is life bringing you a message. You may not understand the message at the time. Often, only in retrospect can we see how life was bringing us exactly what we needed at that precise moment, even if it was failure.

What we learn from falling short is the invaluable knowledge we will need to execute on future opportunities. Face the past, learn from it, and integrate the lessons life is bringing you. Decide to work with life and you will begin to operate in a growth mindset.

In a fixed mindset, failure is negative, and success is positive. In a growth mindset, we accept everything that life brings us and utilize it for growth and expansion. The goal is not to avoid failure but to make a conscious decision to face and accept ourselves and what life brings us.

As a coach, I share my discovery of how life really works and help clients expand their understanding of what and who they are. Together, we explore what they currently hold to be true and how that may be limiting their potential. Throughout this process, the goal is to move into active creation—the highest level of mindset alignment.

We have the power to choose what we believe. To move beyond the past, we should acknowledge the emotions that come up and consciously choose to believe they have nothing to do with what is possible in the future.

Scarcity mindset vs. abundance mindset

If you have been grinding but can’t seem to push past a certain level of success, you may have a limited or fixed financial mindset. My beliefs about money and my relationship with money kept me in a limited financial mindset for many years.

Exploring and unpacking your financial mindset or money mindset is a process that I cannot guide you through via a blog post. But one thing you can do right now is to check if you are in a scarcity mindset or an abundance mindset, and start to consciously change your beliefs around what is available to you and what you deserve.

As discussed in my last post, when we set goals, we want to start from a place of success, which aligns us with success. When we seek growth and expansion, especially financial growth, it is important to start from a place of abundance.

Checking your financial mindset can be as simple as watching the way you think about and discuss money. If you walk around saying and believing, “I don’t have enough money. I am working hard and no matter what I do I can’t close those big deals,” you are asking the universe to continue to deliver that reality. You are starting in a state of lacking or scarcity.

If you switch your approach and begin to say and believe things like, “I have all that I need. I am grateful for the abundance in my life, and I believe life will bring me opportunities to grow my bank account,” you are deciding to live in that reality. You are starting in a state of abundance.

This does not mean you don’t have to put in the work. You still have to take action and close deals to increase your net worth. But by starting from a place of abundance as opposed to a place of scarcity, you are better aligned with your goal of making more money. You are creating a reality that is a match to your target. The life you experience is a result of your internal alignment.

Final thoughts

Operating in a fixed mindset allows the past to limit your future and keeps you in misalignment. Moving into a growth mindset and living in active creation aligns you with growth and expansion.

The way you view the world, whether as a place of scarcity or a place of abundance, determines your reality.

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.