Why Growth Mindset is Important to Career Success
We’re often taught that to succeed, we need the processes in place – a plan, reducing expenses, saving more, creating a budget, investing and working like a dog to earn whatever we can.
And while that’s true, what fails to get mentioned is the mindset we need adopt to see our plans come to fruition.
Without a healthy money mindset to back us up, it’d be going around in circles like I did a few years ago.
“The kitchen sink was starting to smell unpleasant and I decided to tackle it. I removed the offending u-bend which caused water to drip from the open pipework. There was a small pool of water on the shelf under the sink where the washing liquid was kept. Using a cloth, I was able to mop up the spill which I squeezed back to the sink, but unfortunately the open pipe kept dripping and shelf remained wet.
I continued to mop the spill and squeeze the liquid back into the sink for probably about 5 mins. I was mopping and squeezing, mopping and squeezing, over and over and over.
It was at this point that my brain started functioning again, and I remember that the pipe continued to drip because I hadn’t replace the missing U-bend, do’h! I was going round in circles like a big fool.”
A positive money mindset must come first when planning for financial success.
How Can Growth Mindset Help You
A money mindset is made up of your beliefs and attitudes about money – good and bad, true and not so true. These will be either negative or positive opinions, depending on your past experiences and influences.
You can think of it as a scale; on one side sits the scarcity mindset, and on the other, an abundance mindset.
As the word suggests, a scarcity mindset would believe that money is hard to come by – it’s only for the rich, I’ll never earn enough money, I’m not good with money, money is the root of all evil, I can’t earn more money in my profession, money makes you selfish…
An abundance mindset on the other hand believes that:
There will always be money available when you need it.
You’re not comparing yourself to others.
Your money experience is separate to theirs, and you can both win.
Money is a tool to be used and you are confident in your ability to manage your money.
Quite often we sit somewhere in between, and this position is what determines how we experience money.
Your money mindset can be formed from a lot of different inputs – how your parents talked about money as you grew up, what your friends do, the values of people of influence in your life and your own experiences.
It’s not just based on the money itself either. It’s what you feel about people who have, or don’t have, money. For example, there’s a stereotypical belief that to be rich you have to be greedy or manipulative, or you’ve inherited your wealth so are just plain lucky.
All these different beliefs will guide you in your ability to use money and sabotage you when you’re stepping outside of those beliefs to keep you in line.
The things is, how many of these beliefs are actually true?
How Growth Mindset can Lead to Success
If you’re finding that you’re not achieving what you set out to financially, then limiting beliefs around money are in play.
And they’re sneaky. They hide in the background, secretly sabotaging your efforts while you try desperately to achieve whatever goal you’ve set yourself.
Without recognising these limiting beliefs and challenging their validity, you will continue trying to make changes without any significant improvements. This then ‘proves’ your beliefs, setting the cycle in motion again.
What To Do?
Your Current Beliefs
Discovering what you currently hold as true is the first step. If you don’t know what you think, you can’t do anything about it.
Create a list of every belief and thought you have about money – good and bad. For example, ‘rich people are greedy’ or ‘I’ll never earn more than £30K’.
Consider your thoughts on debt, spending, investing, saving, earning, rich people, poor people, budgeting… anything you can think of that gives you an opinion on money.
Next, decide where each of these beliefs comes from – are they yours from experience or did you acquire them from someone else’s say so? Are they a stereotype or have you witnessed them first hand.
Now decide if you really believe them – are they actually true, or are they an excuse, a perception or limitation that could be holding you back.
For example, if you wrote down ‘I’m not good with money’, that may be true. But it doesn’t have to be true forever and to continue using it would be an excuse for never having enough money. You could learn to be better with money.
And if you hold the belief ‘I’ll never earn more than £30K’, how does this serve you? If you didn’t hold this belief, could you earn more than £30K? The answer is yes, absolutely. You just haven’t earned it yet.
The point of this exercise is not to dwell on what has happened in the past, but to get you thinking about and aware of how you truly feel about money. Most people live in autopilot when it comes to finances, so seeing beliefs surface when you consider a money situation helps you make better choices.
Your New Beliefs
Write down your new beliefs. These can be true now, or what you’d like to be true for you. Reframing an old belief into a new, more helpful one is a great way to start this.
Be as creative as you like. These new beliefs are there for you to create the financial life you dream of, so don’t censor yourself or think small.
And make them work for you. For example, if you would like to be influential in your field, then make the old ‘rich people are greedy’ into ‘rich people are influential’.
Or if you want to give more to charity, then try ‘rich people are philanthropists’. Even simple wordplay like this can help you – you are charitable, rich people are charitable, therefore you are rich.
Read your beliefs every day until you believe them. If your limiting beliefs have the power to hold you back subconsciously, then these new empowering ones can propel you forward without your even knowing it. But you have to believe them.
What Else?
As well as working on your mindset list, you can change the way you think about money by working on a few other items too.
Set Goals
Setting realistic and exciting goals is a must – you need to have a destination. You might update the destination on the way, but have an end goal in mind to give yourself something to strive towards.
You can have several different goals with different time periods. For example, you might decide that long-term, you want to retire in 10 years. That’s a goal. Work backwards from that to see how you get there, setting SMART goals along the way.
Educate Yourself
If you’re just hoping that ‘I’m no good with money’ will magically transform when you change your mindset then you’ll be waiting a while. You need to inform yourself on good practices, and then do the work!
Read financial books, listen to podcasts, speak to people who are ‘making it’ already – the more you know about money, the less mystical and otherpeopley it will become (I might have made that word up).
Know Your Why
Understanding the deep, underlining reasons why you want to reach financial success helps you to continue to take action towards the goals that get you there, even when things don’t go to plan.
When finding your ‘why’, be like an annoying 5 year old who keeps asking ‘but why?’ every time you come up with a reason until you can go no further. It will hit you as true when you find it, so remind yourself of it whenever things get tough.
Practice Gratitude
Being grateful for what you already have sounds like an odd one to throw into creating a positive money mindset, after all, you’re wanting to be able to grow your finances and it can sound like settling.
But appreciating what you have is all a part of growth. When you can show gratitude for your current situation, and recognise the positive things that have come about by your steps so far, you’re moving away from the negativity of the scarcity mindset.
‘I’ll never be out of debt’ becomes ‘I’m grateful for the student loans and the opportunity to learn and create financial freedom for myself through my skills’.
‘I’ll never earn more from my job’ becomes ‘I’m grateful for my current income which keeps me afloat while I work towards my dream lifestyle’.
Find the positives, and the positives keep coming.
Forgive Past Mistakes
We’ve all made bad choices in our past. It’s when you cling to them as your identity that they become harmful.
Forgiving these past mistakes, learning from them and moving forward is the only way to reach your goals.
Don’t let them define your entire life; they’re in the past. Be grateful for the lesson, and then move on.
In Summary
The saying ‘I have to see it to believe it’ is backwards. In reality, you have to believe it to see it. Belief leads to emotions which leads to behaviour. Start with believing what’s possible, and see how your mind works to make it a reality.
Ian Genius
Owner - Ian Genius - The Ingenious Alternative to Selling
https://www.iangenius.co.uk
ian@iangenius.co.uk
07563141242