In the face of developing our business as we are heading towards the new year – or as it already is in full speed – our team is faced with quite a fundamental question. What does growth mean to us? And how can we grow this year?
That’s obvious, isn’t it. We talk about it all the time! Our name is growth. It is our job to help people, teams and organizations to grow. However, it is these fundamental beliefs about growth – what it is and how it takes place – that will essentially define how we work as individuals and as a team, how we work with our clients, and how we communicate to the world.
“How do you define growth?”
According to the Cambridge Dictionary growth means ”an increase in the size or the importance of something”. Forgetting about size for a moment, it is the importance that we give to something that defines its growth. Thus, we get to another fundamental question: what is important to us right now? And what do we want to be even more important to us next?
“What is important to you right now?”
Funny enough, what is important to us and what our year will be dedicated to is growth itself. Actually, to be more precise, we want to grow our growth mindset this year. We want to grow and we want to learn to grow. This means that we want to achieve great things this year – we want to grow our size and our importance – but at the same time, and even more importantly, we want to learn through that process of growing itself. (This might ring a bell for those of you who are familiar with the approach of end goals versus process goals.)
“How do you want to grow?”
And this is where the growth mindset comes in. Cultivating a growth mindset means that we constantly remind ourselves that our abilities and traits are not written in stone, that instead of proving ourselves and our abilities to others (and to ourselves) we give importance to effort, application and experience. Instead of being fixed on delivering a perfect training we make sure that we have done all in our capabilities to prepare and create a great experience for our participants, and we keep asking ourselves “What can we learn from this to make it better next time?”. Instead of being obsessed about delivering the perfect coaching session to a client we ask ourselves questions like “How can I deliver more value to my client?”.
“How can you keep growing?”
Great things can happen as a result of cultivating a growth mindset. As Carol Dweck writes in her book on mindset: “It’s ironic: the top is where the fixed-mindset people hunger to be, but it’s where many growth-mindset people arrive as a by-product of their enthusiasm for what they do.”
Cultivating a growth mindset is all about walking the talk. Thus, through this text we want to introduce our coming concept of GrowthLab, a place where we test and learn new concepts and ideas together with our network – together with you.