What is a Mindset? What’s Yours?

Written by Max | Edited by Rory Hart

Last updated on Sep 04, 2023

Sections of this topic

The focus of the Library is on resources for personal, professional, and organizational development. At the core of these is personal development. Without personal development, it’s difficult to sustain professional and organizational development.

Sections on This Topic Include

What is a Mindset?
Examples of Various Mindsets
Breakthrough: Fixed Versus Growth Mindset
Test – What is Your Mindset?

Learn More in the Library’s Blogs Related to Personal Development

In addition to the articles on this current page, also see the following blogs that have posts related to Personal Development. Scan down the blog’s page to see various posts. Also, see the section “Recent Blog Posts” in the sidebar of the blog or click on “Next” near the bottom of a post in the blog. The blog also links to numerous free related resources.

What is a Mindset?

“… a mindset is a set of assumptions, methods, or notations held by one or more people or groups of people. A mindset can also be seen as an incident of a person’s worldview or philosophy of life.” — Wikipedia

Mindset (Wikipedia, broad overview of mindsets)

An example of a mindset is abundance versus scarcity. Someone with a mindset of abundance naturally believes there are enough resources for everyone in the world and also that there are resources that will never run out because they replenish themselves, for example, love between people. Someone with a scarcity mindset naturally believes that there are limited amounts of everything and so, as some people benefit, others lose.

Examples of Various Mindsets

Breakthrough: Fixed Versus Growth Mindset

This mindset was discovered by Carol Dweck in her ground-breaking research about traits of achieving and successful people. She found they had a different mindset: a fixed versus growth mindset. While there are numerous examples of different mindsets, the fixed versus growth mindset has been a particular breakthrough for people living in today’s rapidly changing and highly complex world.

A person with a fixed mindset believes people have fixed traits, similar to a scarcity mindset. A person with a growth mindset believes that traits can be changed and developed by working on them — the traits are abundant. A fixed mindset sees the world in an “either/or” perspective, while a growth mindset sees “both/and”. A fixed mindset sees mistakes as failures, while a growth mindset sees them as opportunities for learning. The following articles further explain this comparison.

Test – What is Your Mindset?

Do you think you are a fixed or a growth mindset? Take this test and see.

Test Your Mindset?

Now that you’ve got some impression of your mindset, what do you want to do about it?

Also, consider

For the Category of Personal Development:

To round out your knowledge of this Library topic, you may want to review some related topics, available from the link below. Each of the related topics includes free, online resources.

Also, scan the Recommended Books listed below. They have been selected for their relevance and highly practical nature.

Max

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