Your mindset determines your experience of the world and impacts throughout all areas of life. It affects your motivation and productivity and will invade all key life areas from relationships to finance.
It is an essential building block to growing self-esteem and self-worth and will be the difference to succeeding at something or not. It affects our daily self-dialogue, that internal voice and plays a critical role in how you cope with life's challenges and setbacks and reinforces our most intimate beliefs, attitudes and feelings about ourselves.
When a child is brought up with an 'I Can - I Am' attitude life's challenges are just that, challenges, that they can discover how to work through and overcome. Their resilience grows as does their self-esteem and confidence. They believe in themselves and their abilities, that they have a place in this world, that they deserve to be here and that it is o.k to shine.
Their positive growth mindset shows in what they choose to do and be.
When a child is brought up within an 'I Can't - I Fail' environment when they haven't been allowed to make decisions for themselves, been constantly criticised for getting it wrong or not been given the space to have a go at life with an 'everything is a learning' attitude, they will find life's challenges too much. Their resilience suffers as does their self-esteem and confidence. They lack belief in themselves and their abilities and it shows in what they choose to do or don't do.
The brain adapts to the environment that it has and will respond perfectly to it. Some brains grow in a loving, conscious, happy environment and so it will be shaped to respond to that.
Other's will be living with violence, the constant risk of being attacked either verbally or physically or both and it will adapt to that.
In the latter a combination of freeze, fight or fly will be the preferred mode of protection. A child may withdraw and play it small to scared to put themselves out there, some may be in fight mode or on the defence. Whichever it is, the brain is working in direct response to their upbringing, what they have been told to believe about themselves and the world around and is working perfectly to protect themselves at all times. Both of these mindsets will be re-enforced over time through experience and will determine how they live their life.
A mindset is developed by the projections, judgements and assumptions of significant others and reinforced through experience...
What you put in you get out!
Children will only ever live up to our expectations of them and so it's up to us to help create a positive growth mindset by being aware of;
By becoming aware and consciously deciding on how we respond to children we can then create the space to start establishing a new way of speaking and being.
Keep your eyes peeled for the next blog about language and how we can structure our sentences to have a positive impact on the children in our care.
If you can't wait for that then you can use the code PositiveParenting1 at checkout to grab the Mindset Matters online course - Now only £37 until Midnight Sunday 26th April.