WHAT IS A GROWTH MINDSET?
Growth mindset is open-minded thinking. It helps us generate solutions that bounce us back after challenges. It’s available to all who take time to practice it. Anyone can do it. When we choose growth mindset approaches, we choose an art and science of creative reactions. We learn to recognize emotional cues, diffuse disappointments, and access a healthier, more agile brain. We reinforce an ability to deal with common frustrations and filter out irrelevant reactions.
Call it a boost for our brain. To practice growth mindset reactions is to allow ourselves to make mistakes. When slip-ups happen, we can avoid judging ourselves and instead create opportunities to grow and change. Sounds simple and obvious, right? Well, it’s really all about doing it more, so we can do it easier.
As we practice living a growth mindset, we’ll discover ways to reshape restrictive beliefs as we become aware of flexible growth mindsets. The exercises will give us tools to boost social skills and tackle problems with confidence. With daily practice, we’ll gradually begin to set goals that lay stronger foundations upon which to build lifelong dreams.
WHAT’S A FIXED MINDSET?
Fixed mindsets believe capabilities are hardwired traits. Our fixed mindset leads us to believe our friends may be natural athletes or leaders, yet we are born without soccer skills, or leadership acumen. We feel we’re born with certain inabilities and stuck with these. No wonder we give up rather than try new approaches or take risks. We likely look at friends who do well and conclude we can’t learn a skill because it’s too late. A fixed mindset holds us back whenever we believe things about ourselves such as “I’m not organized”; “I’ll never be good at sports”; “Science is too hard”; “I can’t create”; “I’m always late”; “I can’t make friends”; “I’ll never be able to _________.” Fill in the blank. These inner fears keep us sticking to what we know.
Sure, no risk seems reasonable when our potential seems stuck. We feel powerless. A fixed mindset inhibits our potential for growth and robs us of joy. Have you experienced this or observed others with fixed beliefs? It doesn’t have to be this way.
Rather than fall into the trap of a fixed mindset where failure seems final, we can become aware that effort and hard work inevitably ends in thriving and flourishing. We inevitably reshape our limiting mindset to believe instead that, “Hard work and practice over time helps us immensely in learning, in sports and in endless mental and emotional skills.”
WHAT’S A GRACE MINDSET AND HOW DOES IT COMPARE?
Rather than hard work and practice over time, we access, awaken and then act on or ‘live” grace filled strategies and experiences as we bask in the FLOW of God’s agape love!
We grow aware of emotional life and cues. We awaken to psychological blockages to living grace and mercy. Joy is our evidence. We recognize grace barriers that leave us stressed, emotionally fragile, stingy, fearful, and in a storage hold rather than a flowing state.
Without grace experiences we persist in a place of scarcity, where we tend to protect, defend, or hide what little we feel we have or are. We judge others for strengths they lack, and fail to lean into mercy that accepts our missteps and motivates us to access and awaken agape’s inner love.
Within a grace mindset we neither protect nor guard our vibrant inner source, vitality, or healthy emotions. We trust that life is given freely, and accept that our creator smiles over us with love on good days and bad,
We have little invested in living stingy, petty, blaming, angry, playing the victim, or in any way feeling offended. We learn to let go of barriers to grace before fixed mindset miseries take hold of us.
Daily we desire alignment with our Infinite Source of grace with its unconditional flow in and through our DNA. Yes, even on days when suffering seems more imminent than celebrating, we remain an open conduit for love streams that God keeps abundant, flowing and alive in us.
Grace begins when we yield to trust in God’s amazing love, and when we’re abiding in agape’s place of abundance of love for us and for all the world around us. How will we access and awaken such a vital love flow again today? Perhaps we start with a reminder that this energizing and light-filled agape love comes to us without condition, and likely we sense love’s warmth more by remembering it’s our agape gift for eternity.
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Book clubs have recently emerged to discuss these differences and support one another in lived experiences that benefit all!
Why choose to live a grace mindset?
Rachel Harding shared her mother’s choice to live a grace-filled vision:
“There is no scarcity. There is no shortage. No lack of love,
of compassion, of joy in the world. There is enough.
There is more than enough.
Only fear and greed make us think otherwise.
No one need starve. There is enough land and enough food.
No one need die of thirst. There is enough water. No one
need live without mercy. There is no end to grace. And we
are all instruments of grace. The more we give it, the more
we share it, the more we use it, the more God makes. There
is no scarcity of love. There is plenty. And always more.
This is the universe my mother lived in.”
Rachel E. Harding in, “Daughter’s Précis,” foreword to Remnants, by Rosemarie Freeney Harding, [ix].
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