Fixed mindset or growth mindset – it’s your choice. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe you are who you are, and you cannot change. This creates problems when you are challenged because anything that appears to be more than you can handle is bound to make you feel hopeless and overwhelmed. People with a growth mindset believe they can improve with effort. They outperform those with a fixed mindset, even when they have a lower IQ, because they embrace challenges, treating them as opportunities to learn something new. People with a high degree of emotional intelligence most often have a growth mindset.

Common sense suggests that having ability, like being smart, inspires confidence that gets results. It does, but only when the going is easy. The deciding factor is how you handle setbacks and challenges. Success comes down to how you deal with failure. Failure is information – we incorrectly label it as failure, but it’s more like “This didn’t work, and I’m a problem solver, so I’ll try something else.”
-Credit to Dr. Travis Bradberry

Einstein was a strong advocate for the value of failure. He believed that failure was an essential part of the learning process, and that success (and growth) was often achieved only after many failed attempts. Remember some of Albert Einstein’s famous quotes regarding failure:
“Failure is success in progress”
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
“Before any great breakthrough, there is failure.”
“Failing isn’t bad when you learn what not to do.”

Thomas Edison claimed that opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like hard work. His growth mindset and unstoppable curiosity led him to experiment and invent, to the point that he held 1,093 U.S. patents.

In the end, there are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe they can make things happen and those who believe things happen to them. People who feel they control events in their lives (more than the events control them) do better on nearly every important measure of performance. The feeling of control is an important component of a growth mindset.

What makes people with a growth mindset special – whether they work on the shop floor or in the c-suite – is that they don’t get overwhelmed when the going gets tough. They may feel intense stress and anxiety when hard times strike, but they use this anxiety differently. Because they believe they can control the outcome of their lives, their anxiety fuels passion instead of pity, drive in lieu of despair, and tenacity over trepidation – refusing to wave the white flag.

With concerted efforts, you can develop and harness a growth mindset, which will increase your emotional intelligence exponentially. As your growth mindset increases, so will your emotionally intelligent thoughts and behavior. Life is uncertain – the outcome of your future has not been decided, but your mindset is up to you.

“When you’re in a growth mindset, what that means is that you choose to see struggle and challenge as an opportunity for growth and learning development.”
-Chris Bertram

“The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.”
-Carol Dweck

Or as Carol Dweck went on to say, “Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset. They tend to achieve more than those with a more fixed mindset (those who believe their talents are innate gifts).”