The DVLA, the unlikely pioneer of the business growth mindset…

Recent advances in the study of the brain have shown the brain to be far more elastic that we previously thought.

Research shows that every time you are pushed out of your comfort zone to learn something new, complicated, difficult and right at the edge of your learning capacity the neurons in your brain form stronger, new connections.

Over time you actually get smarter!

This ability to learn comes from having a growth mindset.

There are 2 types of mindset.

The fixed mindset people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They also believe that talent alone creates success, without effort.

They can often be heard saying things like ‘I cannot speak French it doesn’t come naturally to me, but you should hear Claire, she has a natural talent for it’

The growth mindset people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed and improved through effort and hard work. They have a love of learning and view failure as a necessary step on the path to greater achievement.

There is no doubt that we all have a little bit of both, we are human after all.

And you will be able to identify the people in your business that have more of one than the other.

BUT…

Can’t any skill be learned? We all learnt to drive after all…

The DVLA statistics prove that everyone has a growth mindset at some point.

The need to drive as an adult is so great that in 2015 the DVLA reported that 45.5 million people in the UK had a valid driving licence. Proving that most of the UK population in fact have a growth mindset.

They all learnt to drive, along the way there will have been mistakes, test failures and retakes, but the fact remains that all these people learnt a brand-new skill, something they had never done before from scratch…