The One Thing

Often, I see agents build a great business plan, but many need support in implementing it. It can be discouraging to set goals that you don’t accomplish. When you don’t accomplish your ambitious goals, you may tend to take them down a notch and set your goals more realistically the next time. This has the effect of lowering the bar over time, until you are not challenging yourself! And suddenly, business planning becomes a dreaded and demotivating task.

What is the one change you can make to avoid the trap of setting goals that you don’t accomplish? What change makes all others possible? It is our mindset. The place where all growth starts is in our mind. So, let’s check in with our brain and see if it’s working correctly to power our dreams into reality.

Let’s explore mindset from a scientific point of view. We know that it’s critical to have a positive attitude, but there is so much more. To the extent that we can visualize ourselves actually living in our future desired state, the more our brain works to bring our vision about.

What the mind believes it can achieve!

Modern psychology confirms that certain belief systems can predict our success. The research of Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck, looks into the power of our beliefs and show that we can change simple beliefs to have a profound effect on our results.

In her book Mindset-The New Psychology of Success, Dweck identified 2 opposite mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. In a fixed mindset, we assume that our character, intelligence and ability are static – that we can’t change in a meaningful way. We also believe that we must prove ourselves against equally fixed standards, such as getting an A on a test – or meeting certain production goals. With a fixed mindset, we’re constantly looking for approval & validation. And if we fail at something it means that we don’t possess the intelligence or ability to accomplish certain tasks – we believe that we are just not good at a certain thing!

The growth mindset thrives on the challenge to become successful and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligent or incapable, but as a jumping off place – an opportunity for growth and stretching our abilities.

Twenty years of research shows that the view that you adopt for yourself profoundly affect the way you live your life – whether you become the person you want to be or achieve the things that are most important to you.

So, when you’re setting your goals, check your mindset, identify points where you can grow and set about growing and visualizing yourself having accomplished your goal. That’s a growth mindset.