A Super Power for You Inner Healer: the Growth Mindset
Feeling like a failure sucks. Failures and perceived failures pile up in our heads and hearts and bring us down. They create stress, anxiety and lurking doubts that maybe we aren’t good enough. Failures fester deep in our psyche and usually morph into excuses, paralysis, and limiting decisions which make us feel small and incapable. Failures invite in the identity of being wounded, a victim, somehow not whole. Failure is a chaotic, disempowering energy.
We can all fail at things and make mistakes. But feeling like a failure is a whole vibe. It’s a parasitic mindset of janky energy and once it takes hold, it’s like a super spreader infecting your whole being.
Today, I share with you a superpower that can radically eradicate any influence that failure energy might have on you. This knowledge will free you, uplift and inspire you to access your inner resilience and wholeness. This is an energetic frequency of wholeness. What is this amazing power? The Growth Mindset.
Fine Print Label Warning
If you've never heard of the Growth Mindset before, don't worry; I’ve got you covered. Be warned though - as with all amazing things, once you know it - you can never unknow it. You are being given a Roadmap to Resilience so if you prefer the low vibin’ energy of feeling wounded, enjoy complaining and don’t care to take real responsibility for your life - stop reading now. You can stay ignorant and go about your life pretending, I mean acting, like you have no power to have “Better”.
If you’d like a life skill, a naturally high vibing energy for your brain, one that you can employ and even teach loved ones to use, so you can feel empowered and help yourself facilitate profound personal change - then let’s continue.
What a Growth Mindset?
First things first – Growth Mindset is a concept I learned when I was teacher. It’s from Carol Dweck and has the ability inherent in it to transform anyone who uses it, because that’s how energy healing works. It’s paired with a fixed mindset. Basically, a growth mindset has certain attributes that make it is easier to learn and grow, and try to new things. We’ll go in depth below, but the gist is that life is evolving and changing all the time - a growth mindset not only helps you remember that, but also helps you to continue growing and changing all the time. Even when it is scary. Even when it is hard.
And because if you know me, you know I love the Elements, mindset is the domain of the Element of Air. Like air, your thoughts can go anywhere and affect everything - to the low, dark and shadowy places of fear and to to the high frequency places of love, trust, and empowerment. There is practical magic here to be harnessed.
A fixed mindset, on the other hand, is pretty much what happens when you decide you already know something, so you justify, rationalize, criticize or dismiss something that is new or different because you “know” already - whatever it is, you think you “know” it. News flash - you more than likely do not “know” it. This mindset keeps you feeling safe but actually is a marker of playing small, and often results in fearful, stuck, rigid and obstinate approaches to change and new.
Why a Growth Mindset?
If you were raised anything like me then the overwhelming message was go to school, get a job, get a family and a mortgage. Work said job until you retire. The end. It was a fixed formula. My parents almost made it seem as though someone would knock on my door as soon as I graduated and offer me a job.
But reality has proven to be a lot more fluid than fixed, and creative problem solving skills, critical thinking if you will, are hardly focused on yet remain the maker or breaker of how to navigate a never-ending shifting landscape of variables and demands otherwise known as LIFE.
Also,
Are you living and breathing? Are you a being of energy and stardust here to experience being a human? Are you a soul first and and amazing being who deserves to experience everything life has to offer and especially all the things that whisper in your heart to be expressed and brought out into the world, because you love them and desire to share your love of these things with others so they can love them too, and then there would be more love and more magic in the world, and things just might feel a bit safe, a bit better and bit more wonderful?
This is why a Growth Mindset. More love in your life and the world. Better ability to pivot and shift and solve problems that aren’t even in existence yet. Because life is not a formula and you don’t know everything.
How a Growth Mindset
Now that we have all that settled, let’s get down to brass tax. A growth mindset not only teaches a person to have resilience in the face of challenges - something we could all use, especially when dealing with melt downs from kids, co-workers, friends, partners or even ourselves. Growth mindsets also have aspects that are essential for anyone who is seeking to expand, heal and play with magic. Or just get better at solving problems in life and not feeling overwhelmed when the world suddenly shifts on you. There are 5 basic components of a growth mindset.
1. A growth mindset states that intelligence can be learned and developed. This stops a lot of victim statements in their tracks. No more, “I’m not good at (fill in the blank) because my parents weren’t, or because I’m a girl, or short, or whatever - you can learn. Period. Your brain grows and changes throughout your whole life. A long time ago and for a long time, people believed your brain was your brain. But science is learning and growing also, and new information proves that the brain can grow new cells, rewire old pathways and basically, create news ways of thinking and being, a..k.a heal. If you don’t now something, you can learn it.
The fixed mindset says you are what you, and you’ll never change - so why bother? Boring. Life is too short for boring. GROW!
2. Growth Mindset invites you to embrace challenges. Life can be hard. We cannot always be shielded from crappy things happening and while this mindset perspective is not inviting you to go out looking for trouble, it is saying that if troubles comes a callin’ don’t turn away and hide. Show up. Grow. Get a plan together and execute it - even if you’ve never done that before. And if you have resistance, remember it’s your ego and jsut needs love and assurance, which a well-thought out plan can provide.
A fixed mindset will have you runnin’, blaming or complaining, or quitting cuz it’s just too hard. It’s a choice. Now if it’s an unhealthy situation you’ve gotten yourself into, like a toxic relationship, then it might be wise to cut cords and move on, but if it’s just hard and there is a lesson there for your to grow - growth mindset says, “roll up them sleeves, girl, it’s time to dig deep.”
3. Going hand in hand with the embracing challenges, growth mindset invites you to persist in the face of setbacks. Our brains are binary - yes/no, on/off, stay/go, etc. and rejection is no fun. When we hear a lot of “no” or we try some things for a bit and it doesn’t work out, then what was once a “yes” can get turned into a “no.” I had a business coach who told me that I had to get real stubborn about being an entrepreneur. She is right and this applies to more than just business. Get stubborn about being a success, about healing, about loving yourself more - about whatever it is that you care about.
Fixed mindsets will have us seeing failures and then saying stuff like, “I am a failure,” or “it wasn’t meant to be,” which turns failure into your identity. But you are not a failure. You might need some new skills, a new attitude, some help, but you are NOT a failure. You are capable of doing hard things.
Having said that., the easiest way to persist in the face of setbacks is to focus your time and energy on things you actually care a lot about. There’s a reason people say, “it’s not work, if you love it.” Whatever it is you are doing in your life, I hope you are learning to love yourself more - in which case it becomes impossible for YOU to be a failure, and this is a huge mindset to understand and have, so I will repeat it. You may have setbacks and failures, but you are not a failure.
4. A powerful mindset builds upon fundamental layers and so, building on the previous, a growth mindset invites you to see effort as a path to mastery. Fall down 10 times? Get back up 11. Hit a wall? Find a way around. Want to accomplish something that seems out of reach? Reverse-engineer (work backwards) listing all the steps from the final goal to the beginning, until you come to the easiest-most do-able step. Start there.
You most likely don’t remember this, but you fell on your butt repeatedly just to learn to hold your own weight, then to stand on your two feet, then to learn how to use them to propel you forward and keep you moving until you chose to stop on your own.
“You may have setbacks and failures, but YOU are not a failure. ”
It’s funny how we think this basic order of operations “should” change because we are older. Guess what? That’s fixed thinking. Why would you think you could skip the steps of learning something you’ve never done before? Because you are naturally good at something, does that mean you can bypass the fundamentals and not put your effort into mastering the basics so you have a solid foundation on which to layer your success?
5. This question brings us to a glorious cornerstones of growth mindset which is group of traits really - curiosity, learning, accepting criticism (constructive) and using that to be inspired in your efforts. In Tarot, the Zero card of the Major Arcana is the Fool. We are all the Fool. The beauty of the Fool lies in the wonder, the innocence, the trust, and the sense of adventure.
Sometimes we get good at stuff and then we tell ourselves that we know stuff. We know this person. This situation reminds of something from the past so we “expect” it to be a certain way in our heads. We pre-judge how someone will be, what someone will say, or what we think should be the outcome of a situation. And sometimes we are right, so this behaviour is enforced. So, our minds get fixed into the idea that we know stuff.
Yet, there is so much more to life, and people can heal, change and grow. We need to be able to update our expectations, or release them entirely in order to allow for the NEW, the novel, the lesson, the divine, the magical, the whatever else might take the place of our fixed perspective. This is LOVE in its essence - to make space for Better, for ourselves and for others.
In this space we are all free to grow, to change, to transform, heal - be whatever we desire to be. And being your true self is the greatest super power you possess.
Want to learn more about frequency and energy? Check out this FREE course:
If you’re feeling called to work on your Growth Mindset, check out the Courses and Resources Section.
