Mindset: Critically Important in the People You Lead

I have been rereading the excellent book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D. This book is excellent on many different levels and for many different reasons. Its content is highly relevant and directly applicable to each and every person in the world, including every leader in the world! Yes, that includes both you and me!

 

The book also provides excellent content, concepts, and strategies that can be put to immediate use in mentoring and in the personal, professional, and organizational development and growth of the people you lead!

 

In future articles, I will feature some of the excellent and specific research, recommendations, and advice from this thought provoking book. Particularly content directly relating to leaders. Today, as an intriguing appetizer, I would like to share a few quotations from the first chapter, which is titled “The Mindsets:”

 

• “The message is: You can change your mindset.”
• “For twenty years, my research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value.”
• “There was wide agreement about the number one ingredient in creative achievement. And it was exactly the kind of perseverance and resilience produced by the growth mindset.”
• “Yet those people with the growth mindset were not labeling themselves and throwing up their hands. Even though they felt distressed, they were ready to take the risks, confront the challenges, and keep working at them.”
• “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. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.”
• “With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.”
• “Next time you’re tempted to surround yourself with worshipers, go to church. In the rest of your life, seek constructive criticism.”

 

 

I encourage you to read or reread Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. After decades of reflecting on what has worked best for me—what has had the most positive impact in my own life and career, I believe that one of my most impactful habits is rereading excellent books that I have read in the past. Without exception, it is always uplifting, refreshing, and intellectually stimulating. I always gain new insights that I missed in the past. And I gain impactful new insights relative to what is most relevant and important in my life now, as opposed to the past, when I first read the book.

 

I invite you to join me. If you’re serious and diligent about leadership excellence, there is no way that you cannot and will not significantly benefit by reading or rereading this excellent book.

 

 

Copyright © 2016 by Dan Nielsen – www.americashealthcareleaders.com