Self awareness is key for effective leadership. Knowing who you are enables you to respond effectively under pressure. Great leaders are defined by how they react in tough situations. Your mindset shapes your world and how you respond to it. What’s more, it’s a skill that you can learn, but how do you implement mindset change? Here’s how to reset your leadership mindset.

You Can Reset Your Mindset

Your leadership mindset isn’t fixed. Mindset is a skill, like any other. Just like you go to the gym to train your body, with a little focus, you can rest your leadership mindset. With a few minor tweaks to your daily routine, a leadership reset is possible. A growth mindset will take your leadership from good to great.

Growth vs Fixed

Stanford Professor, Carol Dweck’s research has demonstrated the critical differences between a fixed and a growth mindset. Leadership mindset is a key differentiator in business, but why?

Fixed Mindset Leaders

Fixed mindset leaders see failure as all defining. Believing that failure reflects negatively on them, they avoid it, shutting down valuable learning opportunities. Their concern with looking good in the eyes of others prevents them from moving forwards. What’s more, it limits their performance, stunting their growth. These leaders react emotionally when they are under stress. Those emotions negatively affect their clarity of thinking, impeding effective decision making. The fixed mindset effect doesn’t stop with them. Their mindset will trickle down to the rest of their organisation. What comes next is a culture of blame, sacrifice syndrome, burnout and lack of innovation.

If something doesn’t come easily to them, they withdraw and admit defeat. Innovation ceases, new ideas stagnate for fear of failure, blame and looking stupid. They believe that potential is fixed and there’s nothing you can do to change that. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Growth Mindset Leaders

Growth mindset leaders recognise that failure presents an opportunity to learn, to develop and most importantly, grow. These leaders believe that their people can change and develop their abilities and talents. A growth mindset is a foundational skill for effective leadership. It embraces black box thinking along with a no blame culture. They recognise that success comes from examining mistakes in order to push through obstacles.

Your Brain Is Malleable

Dweck’s research has demonstrated that the human brain is malleable. That’s great news for your performance, along with your ability to manage stress. Embracing growth mindset strategies will increase your neuroplasticity. Each time we take a growth mindset approach, our brain changes, creating new neural networks, building resilience and sustainable performance.

Reset Your Leadership Mindset

Become your own coach to reset your leadership mindset by building these 8 behaviours into your day. Mindset starts with you. Whether you’re leading an organisation with thousands of employees or taking your first steps as a start up. Once you begin to cultivate a growth mindset, your organisational culture will follow.

• Consciously develop your awareness and recognise your fixed mindset bias
• Practice self awareness by using mindfulness to develop clearer thinking under pressure. It needn’t take up a huge chunk of time, check out our mindful leader hacks by following the link.
• Observe the situation without judgement. See if it’s possible to pause rather than jumping in with reactive decision making. Breaking knee jerk habitual thinking is possible with practice.
• Focus on the learning process. Gather as much information as you can. Analyse it, learn from it and use it next time.
• Remain flexible. Examine your thoughts and ideas without becoming attached to them. Keep an open mind to the opinions and ideas of others.
• Develop opportunities to learn and develop by setting yourself stretching goals
• Constantly challenge yourself to look for the learning information in failure
• Reflect on your performance

Great leaders leverage peak performance with a growth mindset culture. If you’d like to find out more about mindset, take a look at our free resources along with our Growth Mindset Toolkit

We work with thousands of individuals and Fortune 100 companies to develop growth mindset workplaces, high performing teams and individuals. We deliver growth mindset coaching and leadership training using evidence based strategies from positive psychology, neuroscience and performance psychology Get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.