What mindsets help you flourish?

/ mkessenburg

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich

Change! If my mindsets aren’t helping me, I need to change them! That’s what I’m thinking as I read Susan Ashford’s penetrating question: “How well is this mindset serving you, given the changes you would like to make?” (The Power of Flexing, loc 2929) 

The change I want to make is to more consistently experience flourishing and to help others do the same. How about you? What change do you want to make? To what extent are your current mindsets helping you make that change?

Mindsets that help me more consistently experience flourishing and its 5 elements* include:

  1. Passionate Purpose: a Christ-centered, focused, trust/inspire mindset (not a worldly, scattered, command-and-control mindset).
  2. Resilient Well-Being: a wellness mindset (not a personal neglect mindset).
  3. Healthy Relationships: an outward mindset that demonstrates love to neighbors (not an inward mindset that sees others as obstacles).
  4. Transformative Learning: a growth mindset (not a fixed mindset).
  5. Helpful Resources: an agile, strategic, mission-centered mindset (not an inflexible, unstrategic, money-centered mindset) and an abundance mindset (not a scarcity mindset)..
*Please note: I find it helpful to use tools from my toolbox that are appropriate for those I’m working to help. Given this blog post focuses on international Christian schools, I based the 5 elements of flourishing on ACSI’s model.

Additionally, Carolyn Dewar, author of CEO Excellence, identifies 6 key mindsets for leaders:

  1. “Be Bold” (loc 243)
  2. “Treat the Soft Stuff as the Hard Stuff” (loc 1008)
  3. “Solve for the Team’s Psychology” (loc 1700)
  4. “Help the Board Help the Business” (loc 2364)
  5. “Start with ‘Why’” (loc 2943)
  6. “Do What Only You Can Do” (loc 3647)

I found Dewar’s 6 mindsets helpful! Why? Because pursuing flourishing and helping others to do the same involves… 

  1. Boldness—a reframing of Christian schools primarily as places where students, parents, staff, leaders, and board members flourish. 
  2. Prioritizing the soft stuff like people and culture (which is actually the hard stuff).
  3. Addressing team dynamics (think 5 dysfunctions of a team).
  4. Seeing the board as an ally.
  5. Talking with others about the “why” of flourishing.
  6. Focusing on what I can do—like ensuring my own well-being and effectiveness. 

Photo by Pixabay

What about you? What change do you want to make? To what extent are your current mindsets helping you make that change? What mindsets help you flourish? What mindsets don’t help you flourish? Which of Dewar’s 6 mindsets might help you?

Here are some related blog posts:

Here are some other things I’m learning from CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest:

  • “As we spoke to the most successful CEOs, we were struck by how they similarly reframed what winning meant for their companies. They didn’t just raise aspiration levels; they changed the definition of success” (loc 268).
  • “…what gets in the way of lining up resources behind the vision and strategy?” (loc 798)
  • “…change is rarely an intellectual problem, it’s an emotional one. The “soft stuff”—issues related to people and culture—account for the vast majority (72 percent) of the barriers to success” (loc 1014).
  • “…what role do the best CEOs play in making the desired culture change happen? They…reshape the work environment…make it personal…make it meaningful…measure what matters” (loc 1089).
  • “‘For things to change, first I must change.’ This way of thinking suggests that no matter how good I am (or think I am) at being a role model, I also have a responsibility to personally change, which is also what I’m asking all other employees to do” (loc 1143).

Get flourishing!

Michael

P.S. Bonus! Here’s a list of 10 quotations from things I’ve read or listened to that contain the word mindset:

  1. “Have a mindset of experimentation” (100 Things Successful Leaders Do, loc 1230).
  2. “It takes great skill to be a leader who is able to create and maintain a work environment where staff come to work each morning motivated and with a positive mindset” (100 Things Successful Leaders Do, loc 3082).
  3. “…great leaders…listen, seek to understand, admit their mistakes, and are open to feedback, because they realize that while they know a lot, they don’t know everything. They have a powerfully humble mindset and because of it, people want to work with and for them” (The Three Chairs: How Great Leaders Drive Communication, Performance, and Engagement, loc 405).
  4. “As a leader, your job is to seek out, notice, recognize, encourage, cultivate, and provide opportunities for people to use their talents in ways that will benefit to the max those your organization serves. The mindset of a mediocre leader is, “I need to constantly micromanage and motivate my people to get results.” The mindset of a great leader is, “My job is to release the talent and passion of our team toward our highest purposes.” The mediocre leader seeks to control; the great leader unleashes talent” (Talent Unleashed, loc 955).
  5. “People with a learning mindset tend to approach situations looking for the learning that they might contain—hence the term learning mindset. Here you’re trying to improve your skill over time and do better than you did in the past” (The Power of Flexing: How to Use Small Daily Experiments to Create Big Life-Changing Growth, loc 611).
  6. “Most of us have a growth mindset—until we don’t” (Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company, loc 952).
  7. “Those who tend to embrace a performance-prove mindset express more anxiety about being in performance situations and show less confidence. And even when that mindset helps their performance, the positive relationship tends to be fairly small. By contrast, those who tend to adopt a learning mindset report learning more as well as far less anxiety and significantly higher performance” (The Power of Flexing: How to Use Small Daily Experiments to Create Big Life-Changing Growth, loc 653).
  8. “Command & Control leaders often don’t see the greatness in others, let alone communicate or develop it. Consider the demoralizing impact this has on people, teams, and cultures. With such a mindset, a leader might maintain the status quo or even get some incremental improvement. But that leader will get coordination only between silos, at best, and will rarely achieve real collaboration and creative innovation. Apathy reigns, leading to subpar results and eventual burnout” (Trust and Inspire: How Truly Great Leaders Unleash Greatness in Others, loc 1328).
  9. “Our mindset in turn limits the kinds of questions we may ask and therefore the possibilities we can see” (Flourishing Together: A Christian Vision for Students, Educators, and Schools, loc 2592).
  10. “…what can we do to transform the way we transform organizations so that rather than being exhausting, it’s actually empowering and energizing? To do that, we need to focus on…putting people first… enable people with the capabilities and skills that they need to succeed during the transformation and beyond…. instill a culture of continuous learning…. shift from a fixed mindset (where your role was to show up as the smartest person in the room) to a growth mindset (where your role was to listen, to learn, and to bring out the best in people)” (5 Ways to Lead in an Era of Constant Change).