Promoting a “growth mindset” is critical to success for both individuals and organizations.
If you believe that your skills are innate and cannot be developed or improved, your mindset can be described as “fixed”. As a rule, you tend to explain your failure due to your lack of aptitude or consider that a task, for example, is not suitable for you.
While acknowledging the existence of fitness, a healthier perspective involves recognizing that improving a person’s life often requires adapting, learning new skills, and staying flexible.
Carol Dweck, in the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, addresses the theme of the “constructive mindset”, demonstrating that a constructive mindset arises when you believe you can acquire different skills through continuous work, thus increasing your ability to cope new challenges and several setbacks, with success.
Self-awareness provides a reference for a constructive mindset
Effectively, you cannot develop your mindset without understanding and knowing it. After all, that’s why companies set key performance indicators. At the individual level, it involves self-awareness.
Personality type, explored using the Myers-Briggs Assessment Tool (MBTI), is one of the quickest and most powerful ways to gain self-awareness, helping you gain insight into yourself and your personality preferences. This process is carried out along four dimensions of personality:
- Introversion/Extroversion: Do we tend to focus our attention on the external world and activities (extroversion) or on the internal world of our thoughts and feelings (introversion)?
- Sensing / Intuition: Is our first instinct to trust the collected information (sensing) or through more abstract information, based on patterns and possibilities (intuition)?
- Thinking/Feeling: Does our natural inclination take into account our decisions around an objective logic (thinking) or does it consider our values and priorities (feeling)?
- Judging/Perceiving: Do we prefer to have things under control (judging) or do we prefer to keep our options open and remain spontaneous and flexible (perceiving)?
It is important to recognize that the natural preferences identified by personality type influence our behaviors but do not dictate them.
In fact, the more we are aware of what our natural inclinations may be in a given situation, the more we can change our behavior in order to improve and adapt it to the circumstances.
A case of growth: introversion / extroversion and the company brainstorm
Let’s consider an example that most employees in an organization should participate in: the team brainstorm.
How a person participates in a brainstorm is highly influenced by their preference for extroversion or introversion. Likewise, your growth in this area must also take into account your own personality preferences.
Those who prefer introversion like to think about things in order to understand them, keep their thoughts until they are (almost) perfect and, most of the time, like to stay in the background.
On the other hand, those who prefer extroversion tend to like to talk, prefer verbal over written communication, share their thoughts freely and find it easy to put themselves in the foreground.
If you are aware of your preferences, you can change your behavior to grow and develop in different directions.
By having a preference for expressing your feelings, you can train to pause them by verbalizing them, listening to others and asking questions, deepening the insights of other members of your team and building more satisfying relationships.
The type of personality that helps us chart a path to growth
In all cases, self-awareness about personality preferences facilitates a constructive mindset. If we can identify where we need to improve and grow, understanding the extent to which our natural personality preferences can be a drag, we can chart a more effective path to success and get to where we want to be faster.
