How to Build a Growth Mindset as a Budding Entrepreneur

Is your mindset tuned for growth?

The best entrepreneurs are the ones who can constantly learn and improve, pivoting to suit the needs of their customers and the demands of a changing marketplace.

But not all business leaders are automatically that agile.

To survive in an unpredictable environment, it’s important to cultivate a mental state that’s conducive to your success. It’s something referred to by Carol Dweck as a “growth mindset.”

Here’s what you need to know about nurturing the growth mindset of an entrepreneur.

What is a Growth Mindset?

When people talk about the things required to start a business, they often mention things like investment capital, a great idea, and a target audience. While all those ingredients are crucial to your business, there’s one that’s often overlooked: your mindset.

Your mindset is how you interpret and respond to the things that you encounter as an entrepreneur.

For entrepreneurs, there are two primary types of mindset: growth and fixed.

For example, say you started your SaaS accounting company and discovered that following an expensive round of marketing, you’re still not reaching enough customers:

●      A fixed mindset entrepreneur would assume that they were destined for failure from day one. They’d say that the market was too cluttered for them to “break in” or that they just weren’t launching at the right time.

●      A growth mindset entrepreneur would look at the potential reasons why their solution isn’t thriving. Are they targeting the right audience? Should they be trying a different marketing strategy? How clear is their unique selling proposition?

Fixed mindsets impose limitations by suggesting that our ability to succeed in life is static. In other words, you’re born with a certain level of luck, intelligence, or creativity, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

A growth mindset believes that with work and time, you can grow.

How to Nurture Your Entrepreneurial Growth Mindset

As an entrepreneur, a growth mindset is extremely valuable.

It means that instead of giving up and cutting your losses when you hit your first hurdle, you’ll take every opportunity to learn and improve. That makes for a very adaptable, flexible business leader.

Cultivating and empowering your growth mindset isn’t always easy, though.

Using these strategies will help you to build a growth mindset:

1. Acknowledge weakness. Confidence is great. You should be able to believe in the things that you’re good at. However, that doesn’t mean being ignorant of the things you need to work on.

●      Look for signs that you may not be as great at certain things as you think.

●      If you can acknowledge where your weaknesses are, you can find ways to improve, learn, and evolve. For instance, if you know you’re great at producing products, but you’re not good at marketing, can you learn the basics with an online course and some online articles?

1. Embrace the challenge. Nothing worth having is easy to get. With a growth mindset, you don’t see challenges as monsters in your path, impossible to defeat. Instead, those challenges are opportunities for you to learn, explore new ideas, and put your skills to the test.

●      With a growth mindset, you relish the chance to step out of your comfort zone and overcome new tests.

●      Common fears about hard work or failure don’t stop you from pushing forward.

1. Accept failure. We all wish we were good at everything, but that’s not how the world works. As you learn to accept challenges as opportunities, you must also learn to accept failure.

●      Not all your risks will pan out the way you want them to. But that doesn’t mean that your business is doomed to fail!

●      Consider J.K Rowling. If she had stopped reaching out to publishers after her first, fifth, or twelfth rejection, we’d never have gotten one of the world’s most popular book series.

●      Learn from each failure, adapt, and try again.

1. Avoid seeking approval. This is a difficult lesson to learn – but a crucial one. You don’t need everyone to agree with what you’re doing.

●      Instead, focus on your own goals, your ability to grow, and the things you’re striving for.

●      Work on improving for yourself – not for anyone else – but be willing to accept and use criticism if it’s valuable to you. Outsider input can offer a unique perspective when you’re working on your growth mindset.

Go Forth and Grow

Entrepreneurs with a growth mindset spend less of their time worrying about results and more time focusing on the process.

It doesn’t matter if you hit a few roadblocks on the road to success if you take every stumble as an opportunity to learn.

For those still holding onto a fixed mindset, the switch to the growth way of life can be tough. However, if you can embrace the idea that there’s always room to improve, you’ll learn an important truth: It’s only you who can determine what you’re capable of.