All this Talk of Mindsets: But What IS an Entrepreneurial Mindset?

I have written a 3-part blog series on mindsets. The first focuses on perhaps the most widely known and understood mindsets, including the growth, positive, abundance, and challenge mindsets. A second blog is dedicated to the mindful mindset. This third blog explores the lesser known (at least to me) entrepreneurial mindset.  The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) defines the entrepreneurial mindset as:

A set of skills that enable people to identify and make the most of opportunities, overcome and learn from setbacks, and succeed in a variety of settings.

While widely related to characteristics, attitudes, behaviors, and skills crucial to other mindsets and applicable to many of life’s circumstances, this list of assets is critical of an individual with entrepreneurial strengths. Research shows that an entrepreneurial mindset is valued by employers, boosts educational attainment and performance, and is crucial for creating new businesses. This list includes:

If you are familiar with 21st Century Skills and/or Socioemotional Learning, you will recognize many commonalities between the three skill lists. This is because they come from the same research base regarding what individuals need to be successful in educational/college, career, and life settings. They are what employers are seeking in their new hires and what schools and training programs of all sorts (including the military) look for in their recruits and extend further teachings to with their students/participants.

You’ll notice that these are distinct from the knowledge base broadly taught in most secondary schools. Subject matter, while important to a certain extent, is being left behind for more competency-based learning models as we move forward into a more progressive, applied skills, technology-driven world. Schools in the United States have been slow on the uptake of these future-facing types of learning experiences, and this is part and partial to why our students have been falling further behind the world’s leading/most educated countries for several decades now.

Won’t you join me in supporting our youth and our country at large?

How can we scaffold our young ones to

  • think for themselves and develop self-reliance,
  • communicate face to face and collaborate with others,
  • take risks and grow their flexibility, and ultimately,
  • recognize the opportunity to create their dream future?

If you would like help in navigating this challenge, reach out to me today! Together, we can learn and practice healthy parenting skills, brainstorm how best to bolster our loved ones, guide them in doing this hard work, improve our communication skills with a generation that is getting harder and harder to reach, and model what it looks like to be a happy, successful, and fulfilled adult during a time when this is so frightening for so many.

For further exploration on ways to support our younger generations, read my blogs:

Making the Most of a Mindful Mindset

Ram Mahalingam, Director of the Barger Leadership Institute at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, developed a mindful mindset framework drawing from Buddhism, critical intersectionality theory, and social justice perspective. The mindful mindset encompasses seven features including compassion, sympathetic joy, critical intersectional awareness, negative capability, cultural humility, wonder, and generosity.

Compassion
Our capacity to understand the suffering of others and act upon it.

Sympathetic joy 
Our capacity to rejoice with the happiness of others. 

Critical intersectional awareness 
Social categories intersect with each other in complex ways which offer possibilities for identifying similarities and coalition forming across seemingly different categories.

Negative capability 
Our ability to reside in a situation with an open mind and to experience the sensations, feelings and emotions even when they are uncomfortable. 

Cultural humility 
A lifelong learning process of self-reflection and self-critique whereby the individual not only learns about another’s culture, but one starts with an examination of her/his own beliefs and cultural identities.

Wonder
A key ingredient in the revitalization of our life goals and aspirations; to experience the miracle of seeing something miraculous in the familiar. 

Generosity 
Our ability to help while keeping the self-worth of the recipient of our kindness intact.

(https://lsa.umich.edu/bli/about-us/mindful-mindset.html)

While health and life coach Lisa D. Murray considers mindfulness and mindset to be opposite sides of the same coin, described in the following definition:

Whereas mindfulness is a passive practice that allows us to pause and observe (our habitual thoughts) with curiosity, mindset is the active practice of identifying depleting thought patterns and replacing them with positive thoughts that are more supportive and compassionate of ourselves.

Still, the Mindful Mindset Wellness Center in Naperville, Illinois, distinguishes the two this way:

Mindful– Conscious or aware of/paying full attention to something; focusing one’s awareness on the present moment, especially as part of a therapeutic or meditative technique.

Mindset– The driving force in the quest for success and achievement; a mindset that combines discipline, strength, confidence, and ambition is a powerful mindset.

Although there are varying views on the ways the terms mindful, mindset, and mindful mindset are related, I attest that a mindful mindset is the quest for success achieved by conscious awareness of the present moment.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is thought to have the largest influence on bringing mindfulness from the Eastern World to the West. Kabat-Zinn is known for developing the popular Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program which later inspired Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, used to treat Major Depressive Disorder. Further, in 2016 a study of the Positive Mindfulness Program, synthesizing mindfulness training and positive psychology, proved that positive psychology and mindfulness can be combined in research settings for the purpose of increasing the wellbeing of participants. Today yoga, meditation, and other mindfulness practices are prevalent throughout the world both within specific practice fields and for general use.

Why, you may ask, do I focus on the mindful mindset as the subject for an entire blog post? Mindsets have always been a passion of mine. I believe in thinking optimistically, in knowing that I am capable of learning and growing through effort, in perceiving all the possibilities before limiting my chances, and most recently, living more in and for the present.

As a child and adolescent, I dreamt of my future, of what could be, and of who I may become. As a young adult, I reminisced about my childhood and what had passed, and was seemingly gone forever. Now, as a middle-aged adult, I appreciate who, where, and how I am in the present. My what is me. My when is now. My why is because I’m here. I am grateful for all I have. Of my joy, compassion, and generosity toward others. Of my boundless wonder, humility, and awareness for all the beauty that surrounds me. And of my ability to reside in a situation with an open mind and experience sensations, feelings, and emotions even when they are uncomfortable. This last one has come by piecemeal. It’s difficult to sit in ambiguity without it making me anxious. But this is in fact, an essential component of mindfulness and has helped me to bolster, strengthen, and expand my mindset even more. I don’t have all the answers and I am good with that. It actually invigorates me!

Won’t you join me on my journey?

Brainstorm some ways you’d like to be more mindful. Jot them down, create a storyboard, and share them with a loved one. Ask yourself some difficult questions.

What can you do today, tomorrow, every day this week to increase your mindful practices?

It may be as simple as savoring the food you eat, acknowledging those in your company, soaking up the weather, or dozing off for a sound night’s sleep.

Or it may be more complex. A painful reflection, difficult realization, or spiritual revelation.

It’s completely up to you. Just live in the moment for some number of minutes starting today and extending throughout the week. Remember to give yourself grace. This is a learning process. Adapting one’s mindset comes in time.

Take your first step and let me know how it goes!

Mindset: It’s Not Just In Your Mind !

According to The Berkeley Well-Being Institute, mindset is:

the set of attitudes or beliefs that we hold.

Sounds simple enough! Mindset is crucially important however because our attitudes and beliefs affect everything we feel, think, do, and experience. Moreover, our mindset influences our perceptions and how we navigate our world. Although everyone has one general mindset, each individual’s mindset is made up of many smaller mindsets. Some help us improve our wellbeing and succeed in the world while others hurt our ability to do so. Developing healthy mindsets can greatly help us reach our goals, achieve success, and ultimately, find happiness.

Six of the most studied mindset types are listed below. Each can be experienced on a continuum. I therefore list them paired- on the left is the more helpful approach and the right, the less healthy rendering. It is important to understand that all these mindsets are changeable. That means they can be learned, adapted, and grown.

 

  1. Growth-Fixed
  2. Positive-Negative
  3. Challenge-Threat
  4. Abundance-Scarcity
  5. ​Mindful-Mindless
  6. Entrepreneurial-Worker Bee

Growth and positive mindsets are heavily researched and consequently frequently written about. I perceive the challenge and abundance mindsets to be closely related. The mindful mindset refers to one’s awareness and perception of the world. While some may see the entrepreneurial mindset in the same category as the challenge and abundance mindsets, I have chosen to address it separately, as it combines its own set of traits related to productivity. For these reasons, I will focus this blog on the first four listed mindsets and write separate blogs pertaining to the latter two.

Starting with perhaps the best known, the growth mindset was popularized by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, whose research into motivation and mindset was started in the 1970s, but widely popularized in the early 2000s with the 2006 publication of her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Full of great examples for how to instill a sense of lifelong learning, healthy risk/challenge seeking, growth from life’s hardest mistakes, and confidence-building techniques, Dweck advises,

If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.

The foundation for the research behind the growth mindset is based on brain science and more specifically, neuroplasticity. Defined by Psychology Today,

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s capacity to continue growing and evolving in response to life experiences. Plasticity is the capacity to be shaped, molded, or altered; neuroplasticity, then, is the ability for the brain to adapt or change over time, by creating new neurons and building new networks

…uncovering endless possibilities! Our amazing brains are capable of shifting functions to its different regions, allowing us to change dysfunctional patterns and other unhealthy ways of thinking and behaving into profitable methods.

The flip side of the growth mindset is the fixed mindset. Those who subscribe to having a fixed mindset believe that the intelligence and abilities we’re born with are those that we have forever- that our brain stops growing after childhood, such that the mindsets, memories, skills, abilities, and intellect we have at the time of early adulthood, remain fixed for the remainder of our lifespan. Individuals who have a fixed mindset believe that they are only capable of so much and should therefore only expect a certain amount from themselves. I feel this to be a very limiting and demoralizing perspective.

A positive mindset was defined by Kendra Cherry at Very Well Mind in 2017 as:

Approaching life’s challenges with a positive outlook. It does not necessarily mean avoiding or ignoring the bad things; instead, it involves making the most of the potentially bad situations, trying to see the best in other people, and viewing yourself and your abilities in a positive light.

I love that Cherry includes the idea that a positive mindset does not mean ignoring negativity. Many people write off the theories of positivity, happiness, and the like as unrealistic or idealistic because life has its ups and downs. Of course it does, and I would be utterly misguided if I said otherwise. However, I appreciate the idea that we can (and should) have a flexible mindset, one which allows us to turn a bad attitude on its head and make something good of it. Whenever possible, I prefer to focus on the bright side, expect positive results, and approach challenges with a positive outlook.

The opposite end of the spectrum for the positive mindset would be a negative mindset. Rather than being able to see the glass half full, one with a negative bias would tend to see the same glass half empty. Positive psychology has studied something called the negativity bias, our tendency not only to register negative stimuli more readily than positive but also to dwell on these negative events, causing us to respond more strongly to negative than to positive or neutral stimuli. This is an unfortunate tendency of humans. However, it does not have to be our downfall because after all, our brains are malleable, and we can learn to challenge such negative practices.

According to Blascovich et al. (2004), the challenge mindset pertains to

How we evaluate the demands of the situation and our resources for coping with these demands. Resources may include skills, knowledge, abilities, dispositions (like positive self-esteem), and external support. Demands may include danger, uncertainty, and required effort. Most of these resources and demands are attitudes, perceptions, and other cognitions—things that we have the power to change.

Therefore, those of us who surround ourselves with new challenges daily are likely to be individuals who like to try new things or take risks. We enter new surroundings with a sense of wonder, intrigue, and courage. We are up for anything and are not likely to see the unknown as a threat. Instead of being fearful, we are brave!

Clearly then, the other side of the continuum is that of the threat mindset. Surely, you’ve heard people speculate about others who are not inclined to take risks/challenge themselves, as being afraid/threatened. What are they afraid of? Of failure of course. But what is failure? It’s the threat/fear that one may not be successful. This sounds familiar. Clearly, we can circle back to the previous discussion of the growth/fixed mindset continuum.

The abundance mindset is one of wholeness. You’ve heard the adage, less is more, well not with the abundance mindset. Here, more is more. For people with an abundance mindset, life is made up of win-win scenarios often inspired by the success of others. We are appreciative for what we have and make gratitude a part of our daily lives. Likewise, we surround ourselves with others who see the glass half full and recognize our possibilities. As a consequence, we are constantly thriving for growth. This should sound familiar (again, think growth/fixed mindset)!

The scarcity mindset, initially coined in Stephen Covey’s best-selling book published in 1989The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, refers to people seeing life as a finite pie; if one person takes a big piece, that leaves less for everyone else. Whereas individuals with an abundance mindset believe there is enough in the world for everyone, if we only expect a certain amount of/from ourselves, how can we possibly fulfill our full potential? Again, this seems a very bleak outcome.

But how do we get there…to a growth/positive/challenge/abundance mindset… if this is not our natural tendency, you may ask? Actively adopting a sense of optimism, acceptance, resilience, gratitude, mindfulness, and integrity will help you develop and maintain a healthy and productive mindset. These traits are not only characteristics of a flourishing mindset, but they are also likely products of one!

To learn more about these topics, read the following blogs:

To see a full library of topics I’ve written about, go to:

If you’ve read your fill and would prefer to wait to read what’s to come, watch for blogs on the mindful and entrepreneurial mindsets!