Changing The Trajectory Of Your Career With Mindset Development
At Tiles Collab we help women achieve their career goals by helping them develop their skills and mindsets. Skills development is a concept that’s easy to understand because it’s such a central part of the professional experience. We’ve all spent years in school, learning new skills so that we can get a job. Once we get it, we spend more years developing the skills that will get us promoted and paid. And inevitably, at some point in our careers, we experience situations where we are expected to give other people feedback and help so that they can develop their skills.
Mindset development is different. Even though the right mindset is a prerequisite for acquiring the skills we need, few people work on it intentionally. And even fewer recognize that this is often the thing holding them back. We get a lot of questions about mindset work. In this post, we’ll shed some light on what it is and how it’s done.
What is mindset development?
Since most mindset work happens when people are trying to affect a change in their lives, let’s look at a very simplified anatomy of a change process.
We identify a problem we need to overcome
We identify the actions we need to take to solve the problem
We implicitly evaluate each action through the lens of our core beliefs
Based on the evaluation, we either take the action or don’t
Mindset development focuses on step 3. It’s the process of making our core beliefs explicit, examining their impact on our behavior, and changing them where necessary so that we can develop a growth mindset.
According to Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, a growth mindset is a fundamental belief that abilities can be developed through learning and work, rather than something that certain people are just born with. As such, it is critical in any change process. Because in order to make something happen, you first have to believe that it’s possible.
Why does mindset development matter?
Our core beliefs can be incredibly empowering. But they can be equally limiting. In the context of career development, learning what you need to do - i.e. acquiring a new skill - is often the easy part. But actually doing it can be incredibly hard, even when the action itself seems to be simple enough. The reason that’s the case is that most of us have limiting beliefs that stop us from taking the actions that will improve our careers.
Take the example of a professional trying to get promoted to a senior management position in her company. She may know that her promotion hinges on her ability to convince the company’s CEO that she can be trusted to make the right strategic decisions for the company. The CEO probably told her as much. So she can easily deduce that she needs to learn a couple of strategy frameworks and improve her presentation skills. And she can find all the information she needs to learn those skills by buying a couple of books and watching a few hours of YouTube videos. But none of it will help as long as she has that little voice in her head telling her “No one wants to hear what you have to say”, “Everyone in the room is better at this than you are”, or even “You’ll just embarrass yourself”.
Breaking our limiting beliefs is often key to getting unstuck and achieving our career goals. The purpose of mindset work is to reshape our thinking and instill positive beliefs that will propel us forward, enable us to grow exponentially, and help us become who we want to be.
What causes limiting beliefs?
The causes for our limiting beliefs can be found in our past. We’ve all had formative experiences that either create or reinforce already existing beliefs.
Many women have been subjected to good girl programming from a very young age where we’ve been rewarded for being quiet, compliant, and deferential. Later in life, we learn to put others’ needs first, avoid asking for help, and that we have to stay busy and productive at all times. While it’s easy to see how this programming makes life easier for others around us, they rarely serve us. In a career context, they often lead to a number of behaviors that are directly harmful to our career prospects.
Our careers are another common source of limiting beliefs. We’ve all made mistakes and failed at things, or at least been made to feel like we have. These kinds of stressful experiences can sometimes mutate into something bigger and lead to limiting beliefs about our abilities.
What does mindset work look like?
In a coaching context, the goal of mindset work is to develop the beliefs that will help a client achieve their career goals. Together with the client, we examine their limiting beliefs and the situations that caused them to develop. Examining them helps the client strip these beliefs of their emotional power and their ability to influence behavior.
Then, we agree on a set of actions whose purpose is to create proof points for the new belief we’re instilling.
For example, if the limiting belief is that others aren’t interested in what the client has to say, we may identify meetings where they will intentionally take space and share opinions. We help the client prepare for the meetings and articulate what a successful outcome looks like. And we support them in framing and interpreting what actually happened in the meetings.
Each person is unique. We all have different limiting beliefs. Mindset improvements come quickly for some people while others need to overcome issues that are set more deeply. We repeat this process as many times as necessary for the client to start internalizing the proof points and reshaping their beliefs.
If you need help getting rid of beliefs that aren’t serving you and developing a growth mindset, book a free 30-minute call with us to explore how we can be of help.