Fixed mindset versus Growth mindset

One thing my colleagues and I talk a lot about in our work is a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset.  It’s vital in the work we do in supporting the wellness of fire and emergency services workers.  We all have our battles, but when your role immerses you in trauma and stress it’s doubly necessary to build a bigger frame for recovery.  

Growth mindset principles work in all our lives.  Most lives involve trauma and stress.  Growth mindset principles are therefore vitalising in the quest for hope-filled recovery.  

But a growth mindset delivers 
a life of blessing in any context.

The simplest premise is this:

An empowered life is a life 
motivated to look within and learn. 

It is a GROWTH mindset. 

But a life that externalises everything—
blaming others, resisting ownership and agency— 
loses the only power available to them. 

A life capable of learning 
and turning from wrongdoing 
is a powerful life for itself 
and for the others 
who love and care for that life.

Ultimately, the happiest life 
is a life that considers others’ lives.

Selfish lives are confined to unhappiness.  Kicking against the goads of life isn’t enough.  They keep doing it.  And their misery is always extended to those who love and care for them.  Misery for one is misery for all.  

Such a fixed mindset won’t allow the person even the awareness to SEE let alone the insight to motivate the action implicit in a growth mindset.  The fixed mindset is a prison for those blind to life.

LIFE – ADVENTURE OR NOTHING

Helen Keller famously said, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.  Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”

We are better off waking to the challenges 
the day ahead presents rather than bingeing Netflix.

Those with a growth mindset don’t resent or spurn the challenges—they see them and take them on.  Those with a fixed mindset either cannot see the challenges to be faced or they lazily avoid them or fearfully refuse to take them on. 

The only difference between both perceptions is perception itself—honestly, heaven or hell.  Seriously, for simply a shift in core attitude YOU and I CHOOSE whether we will live a life of heaven or hell.

Those with a fixed mindset will see that a growth mindset requires continuous ‘work’, and it does.  But that’s all it requires—a work ethic.  Those with a growth mindset look at those with a fixed mindset and say to themselves, “This isn’t hard, all I choose to do is face reality and work the challenges, all in the knowledge that every challenge is designed to be overcome.”

To those with a fixed mindset, challenges are a lamentable and despicable part of life that make life out as a painful, terrible existence, at times not worth living.  But those of the growth mindset have joy in ALL their work—they’ve transcended all fear of work.  

When work is a joy, rest is bliss.
Life for the worker is all upside.

CHANGING WHAT CAN BE CHANGED, ACCEPTING WHAT CAN’T

The only challenge that is insurmountable for those with a growth mindset is the existence of people with the fixed mindset who refuse to grow.  

Those with a growth mindset are daunted by many things without being resigned to despair, but those fixed in a fixed mindset are beyond them.

The only resolution for such situations where horses are led to water but refuse to drink is the common acceptance that we all reap what we sow.  Justice flows down as we all end up accounting for our overall behaviour in the final analysis.

Nobody gets away with reprehensible behaviour.
But a good life lived delivers an eternal legacy.

The growth mindset delivers to the person enrolled 
in its wisdom a peace that is personal and communal.

Everyone benefits when a life is turned toward learning, 
for those who continue to turn and learn are a blessing.

Why would we not want to be a blessing in our life?
The power to bless lives and be blessed because of it.