A growth mindset means not settling for less than achieving your potential. This statement assumes that you believe in your own potential and that opportunities exist for you. Without these basic beliefs, you are likely to stay feeling stuck or frustrated in your career, regardless of other factors or excuses.
Thankfully, your mindset is one of the few things in life that you have the ability to choose or change, just like your attitude, you have the power to decide how to show up or respond to situations and other people’s behaviour that is outside of your control. Do you believe that your knowledge and skills can be developed through reading, learning and hard work? By adopting an Employable Mindset, you can unlock your potential, overcome challenges, and create opportunities for career advancement.
Consider the following strategies for developing a career growth mindset, investing in appropriate education, clarifying your professional identity, and developing a thick skin, also known as resilience.
Investing in Yourself through Appropriate Education
Warren Buffet said that, "The more you learn, the more you'll earn." Education is a key foundation for both personal and professional growth. However, there has been a massive shift in the education landscape over the past few decades. Education no longer necessarily means going the traditional route of attending university or college after school to get an undergraduate degree. By investing in the appropriate education for your chosen path, you can acquire the knowledge, skills, and qualifications necessary to get ahead. This can be by pursuing a degree through online learning later in life, attending workshops or short courses to gain bridging skills to the next career step, or obtaining relevant professional or technical certifications, continuous learning is a game changer.
Clarifying Your Professional Identity
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Inc., once said, "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.” Basically, he was saying that the work you do, should be something that matters to you in some way. Tim Denning takes it even further and writes about finding an Obsession. To develop a career growth mindset, clarifying your professional identity by understanding your strengths, interests, and values is pivotal. This will enable you to make informed career choices and pursue opportunities that align with your long-term goals. When you care about what you do, you will be more likely to invest time and effort into continuous learning and growth, in order to differentiate yourself and showcase your unique value, which in turn will lead to opening up those elusive opportunities.
Developing a Thick Skin
Resilience is an essential part of a career growth mindset. Are you able to pick yourself up after a setback and keep trying, adapt to uncomfortable changes, and persevere in the face of personal or workplace challenges? The ability to frame failures and obstacles as opportunities for growth and learning, rather than roadblocks or career-enders, is pure mindset work! Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, once said, "We need to accept that we won't always make the right decisions, that we'll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it's part of success." Embracing failure as part of the growth process can help to develop resilience.
If any of these ideas resonate with you, and you would like to find out more about developing the career growth mindset to secure the job offers that you want, check out the Career Accelerator, where you can learn how to implement strategies like these to develop your own Employable Mindset.