Change leaders focus on making a shift in how they view Personal and Organizational Development. They start focusing on “GROWTH" rather than “GOALS" to start the transformation process.
“Goals help you to do better while Growth helps you to become better."
Growth leaders tend to be Successful people: They
Have great attitudes
Have strong relationships
Understand everything rises and falls on leadership
Understand how to develop others
Growth leaders tend to focus on learning six things and start implementing them in their lives and organizations. They are:
Embracing Change
Becoming a student of life
Ensuring that love for learning is greater than fear of failure
Connecting and developing relationships with other Growth-oriented leaders
Believing in ourselves and our abilities
Developing humility
Embracing Change
One of the interesting observations about human nature is that everyone wants to grow and improve and resist change at the same time. As this is impossible hence we need to be open and start embracing change.
You need to start by shifting your fixed mindset to a growth mindset if you want to be an outstanding leader, manager, or a better business owner.
When you have a fixed mindset, your accomplishments are limited and keeps you from reaching your full potential, whereas a growth mindset fuels you to a higher level of achievement. Remember, creating and living with a growth mindset is a long, slow process but a highly rewarding one.
A growth mindset:
Proactively accepts challenges
Persists when faced with obstacles and setbacks
Always learns from constructive feedback
Learns from others’ experiences and best practices
Believes that intelligence can be developed
CANI – Continuous and Never-Ending Improvement
Become a student of life
Growth only happens when you have an attitude of the student and associated learnable spirit. It means you are hungry to learn every day and at every opportunity. You have a passion for observing everything with a curious mind and passion for understanding and learning.
Growth leaders swiftly adopt the “Review, Reflect, Learn, and Change" practices for your long-term growth and success. They take the time every day to review all the activities of the day, reflect on them to identify best practices and lessons learned. They then learn to incorporate these into their daily lives and change for outstanding growth and success.
Ensuring that love for learning is greater than fear of failure.
Wins and failures are part of life. For few, the failures make you so risk-averse such that you don’t want to try new things and test new opportunities for growth and success. If this continues, then you will slowly settle for a fixed mindset and can never grow nor reach your full potential. Don’t allow failure to be a bully in your life. It will if you allow it. This is where a mind-shift is very critical. You need to review your belief system and assumptions when you are facing a fear of failure and reinforce that your love for learning should be way greater than your fear of failure.
Remember, failure isn’t a failure if you can learn something from it and move on. Another powerful way to overcome the fear of failure is taking massive action. Massive action always reduces fear and increases courage.
Connecting and developing relationships with other Growth-oriented leaders
The saying goes that you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with. It is a great time to look around you and reflect on how many growth leaders you are associated with. It is the right time to become a proactive leader and start identifying people that you need to start associating with and the changes in the mindset that you need to make.
Identify and start creating your mastermind with people who have these five characteristics:
People who are ahead of me
Join circles or groups where the atmosphere is affirming
Circles where others are learning and growing
People who are predominantly focused on change
Groups where growth is modeled and expected.
Identify and start changing my beliefs and assumptions:
I am continually being challenged
I am very focused on forward-thinking
I am continually pushing myself to be out of my comfort zone
Failure is not my enemy, and it is my stepping stone to sucess
I wake with positive expectations looking forward to opportunities for learning and growth
Believing in ourselves and our abilities
One of the biggest “AHA" moments in my life has been when I realized that “I must see value in myself to add value in myself." It was a turning point in my life. Once I started noticing the value in myself, I started investing in myself. Once I started investing in myself, I started to grow and become a growth leader. Appropriately my career and my businesses started growing and adding value to myself and others. It is very critical to see your self-worth. If you see your self-worth at 2 out of 10, then your investment will be at level two. If you see your self-worth at 8 out of 10, then your investment will be level 8. It is very critical because your growth return will never exceed your growth investment.
Benjamin Franklin said, “Empty the coins of your purse into your mind, and your mind will fill your purse with coins." It is a great way to think about investment.
Developing humility
“Humility is being honest about your weaknesses" The essence of humility is unafraid to admit when we are wrong. Interestingly the more we learn and grow, the more we become aware of what we don’t know. Leaders who possess humility are confident yet feel no need to draw attention to themselves. They are comfortable with themselves yet acknowledge that they need to improve. They have self-awareness. They gratefully received criticism and are always striving to learn and grow.
Are you willing to be criticized for the sake of improvement? Are you willing to admit your wrong in deference to your desire to change and grow? Are you willing to drop bad habits, change wrong priorities, and embrace new ways of thinking? You must be willing to admit where you are wrong so that you can discover what is right. Anyone can make a choice, but it requires humility
Growth leaders swiftly adopt the “Review, Reflect, Learn, and Change" practices for long-term growth and success. They take the time every day to review all the activities of the day, reflect on them to identify best practices and learn lessons. They then learn to incorporate these into their daily lives and change for outstanding growth and success.