What is a Growth Mindset - Perfectionism Isn't Necessary
Mar 06, 2024
Have you ever wished you could go back in time with what you know now so that you could better impact your life at a certain place where you maybe said, oh, I'm not going to do this anymore, or you told a toxic person to get away, or you took a different action so that today you'd have different results? These are things I think we all think about, and it's pretty normal because we're wondering if there's a way that we could have done things better.
It's Not About Being Perfect!
But today, I want to talk about learning and what it takes to learn forward. We're always going to have things that we're not experts at, and that's alright. It's not about being perfect! It's about growing and having a growth mindset. Having a growth mindset allows you to see what is possible.
What Does This Make Possible?
There's this wonderful man who just recently went home to get his reward, and his name is Dan Miller. He is somebody that I didn't interact with very much on a personal basis, but I was kind of on the periphery of what he was doing. I did speak to him at one point in time, and he was very gracious and inspiring. His life left such a legacy for so many people. Dan was somebody who did what is called the 48 Days Community. He was 48 Days Eagles Community where people would rise up to their potential by learning who God made them to be and going after those gifts in the marketplace. One of the things that stuck with me from Dan's teachings were that when something happens, no matter what it is, you can ask, what does this make possible? So, I've adopted that as something that I regularly do in my life.
When things don't typically go as planned, it's a great time that you can say, what does this make possible? So if something's frustrating, what does this make possible? If something's overwhelming, what does this make possible? If something is happy, what does this make possible? It can be used at any point, but when you think about where you are in the present moment and ask, what does this make possible? It's really a powerful question. So that's thanks to Dan Miller, and I'm sure that he's having a great time in heaven.
A Life Lived Well
Dan had a life well lived. That's one of the things that is a big goal in my life. I want to have a life well lived. When everything is said and done, I want my family, my friends, my community to be able to have peace that I lived my life well. I lived my life on purpose. I lived my life for God and that there was nothing left undone. That every purpose that I was entrusted with was completed and completed well. That doesn't mean perfect, that doesn't mean I'm going to get it perfect, and that doesn't mean I don't have a lot to learn. It means that I will have fallen forward as I've learned and grown, and with this growth mindset of what does this make possible, I used it! I expanded the good things. I expanded the opportunities. I expanded the opportunities to make a difference in someone else's life. I expanded my horizons to see more and more of what God has for us and what is truly possible because He has things greater for us than we could ever ask or imagine.
Take the Next Step Forward
So, no matter where you are stuck right now in your personal life, I want to just inspire you. Breathing hope in there, breathing the breath of God's holy spirit and fresh new life, wisdom, and growth. Just say, wherever you are right now, what does this make possible? Does it make it possible for you to take the next step forward because you're in a place where everything is crappy, and you just really need to come up for air. Great. It's a great place to start. It feels crappy. It's not something that's pleasant. It's not something you probably want to go through, but at least you can take a foot forward into fresh air and start where you are today.
What does it make possible? Where can you go from this present moment forward? And if things are great, wonderful! What's in your hands right now that you can continue to sow good things into so that more wonderful crops are reaped, and the benefits are there. It's so important to realize how much power we have in what we do next.
Community Membership-Focus on Progress, Not Perfection
So, I'm going to change this direction a little bit from the growth mindset to the part of the, oh, things didn't go so well. I'm not so perfect at things part of the equation, the human equation. So lately I have been working on the community membership for listeners of this podcast which is to build community and to teach further mental health skills which are more in depth and more personal coaching than I can do on the podcast. I know people have been longing for this. I had a founders sign up special in January and February that basically went through the end of February where people who wanted to join the community as a founding member could sign up while we worked out some of the initial details and could kind of figure out what this looks like and put some systems into place. So, we did a low founding member launch, basically low rate, where it was free to come in for several weeks. If you joined in on that, I hope you enjoyed it. If you didn't join in on it, I'm sorry you missed it, but we are going to be offering the community again. It's just right now I want to give you information on where we stand, and that is that we had approximately 50 people sign up for the free membership, and probably about 10 -20% of those people were active in it, and I know that's okay. Life happens and sometimes we just can't do everything all at once. So, if you signed up and you didn't really get as much out of it as you wanted to when you signed up, that's okay. There will be opportunities going forward for you to get involved again. No shame, blame, guilt, nothing like that; I'm just glad that you signed up, because sometimes just thinking about doing something gives us a step forward.
Sometimes we have to think about it first. Forward- Sorry, man, I'm getting all tied around my tongue. This is a perfect example of how we don't always do things perfectly. And that's okay. Look, I'm not going to go back and edit that because it's not going to change anything. I don't need this to be perfect. I want what's coming through to you, the information that's coming through to you, to be helpful to you. So, it is helpful when you see there are people who are moving forward in spite of messing up and that it is helpful that in spite of getting things perfect, which we cannot do in of our own strength and certainly not consistently in and of our own strength, that we can at least take a step. Like saying, well, let me try something out or let me sign up for this. Maybe the next time, if you signed up for it and you didn't really dig into the materials or join for the live meetups, maybe next time you'll go a little bit further, and that's okay.
We need to have grace with ourselves because it's like those first baby steps. We take one step and then we gain our balance. And sometimes we topple, and sometimes we stand back up again and we take a few more steps, and before we know it, we're walking and then running and then playing hide and seek and jumping rope and doing all kinds of good things and going on trips to different places because we put 1 foot in front of the other.
When we join this membership community, as these founding members did, whether they turned into paid founding members, which is what we just did this past week when we transferred the people who came in for free to paid founding members if they wanted to join the membership and really get serious about the community and making change and getting the coaching and reaching their goals. So, now the membership is temporarily closed because I want to do well by what we have right now. We have paid members that have signed up that I am going to pour myself into making sure that they have a great experience in the membership community before we open it up again. Because this was our kind of test group, this was our starting place. This was my first steps in offering the community. So, we're going to hit pause.
If you're interested in joining in the future, you can still go over to the website today and you can sign up as someone who wants to be on the waiting list to get information when the doors open again. That'll probably be sometime in April, but I want to make sure that I pour into this over the next month, really give the new members who, the founding members who are there all that I can and making sure that the systems are up and running for those of you who join in future cohorts. So please go over to mentalhealthforchristianwomen.com and let me know if you're interested in being alerted when the doors open again, and we'll be sure to do that.
Now to go back to this not doing things perfectly, here's what I learned as I started a new membership, which is a big deal. I learned that sometimes the tech doesn't go right. I learned that sometimes I forget to link to the appropriate button in the web page, and I learned that sometimes I put a wrong date on something like when I put Sunday, March 2nd, when it Sunday was March 3rd. I had to make decisions such as, is this worth going back and correcting it or should I just move forward because I didn't want to confuse people? At the same time, if we're already on Sunday, March 3rd, there's no point in going back to Saturday and rewriting an email that already went out that said Sunday, March 2nd. Right. It's just getting more confusing.
Which way do we go? Do we start here and clean up the mess? Or do we just say, okay, it's over, and move forward? And here's the truth of it. I don't know that there is one answer for all of the time. I think sometimes when we're in the chaos of life and we're doing life, it gets messy. Not because we're doing anything wrong, but just because we're human. There are multiple pieces. So, as I was trying to put this membership community together, there were the pieces of the emails to the people who had signed up. There were the pieces of the follow-up for how they should sign up. There was the transition into being paid members. There was making sure that each person was scheduled for their bonus session of individual strategy and where they wanted to go in the community and in their personal goals. There was coordinating with my community relations assistant, my pal, Mackenzie, who was helping me with these details. There was making sure the content was up. There was a whole lot of stuff that was going in there.
If I had focused on, oh, you messed up a date, or oh, you didn't get the link right, or, oh, this was worded incorrectly or you forgot to edit this, I would have been stuck, feeling paralyzed, where nothing much would have gotten accomplished. Instead, I just had to plow in knowing it would not be perfect and being okay with correcting as I went if it was necessary to improve upon it.
That's just this template that I want to give you today that you can have grace with yourself, and you can decide in that moment, is this something that I need to do, a total clearing out and a revamp of? Is this something I can just dust myself off where I am and move forward? But the growth mindset is that you say, I will take the next step, even if the next step is taking a season to rest, even if the next step is just raising my hand and saying, hey, can someone help me? Even the next step is just, well, I could correct this, or I could just move forward. And how will I do that? What's the next step to what this makes possible for me? There are many ways to handle every time that you hit a crossroads. And sometimes you might hit several crossroads in any given day, but don't get overwhelmed by that. Look at it for what it is: It's a learning experience.
There is no failure. We don't have failure stamped on us or like they used to do, the big L on the forehead. No, you're not a loser. You're not a failure. You're a person, and this happens in life. One of the key mindsets that we need to be able to reframe and regroup is to be able to say, hey, this is not a deal breaker. It doesn't count me out. It doesn't mean that I'm not going to continue to move forward towards my goals. It means I'm human. So what do I do with where I am now? And that's okay.
Extras!
So, now that leads me to two things. First, I want to tell you that if you want a 15-minute free consult with me to just gain clarity on where you are now and what might be helpful for where you want to go in the future. You can hop on my calendar link. So you can go to mentalhealthforchristianwomen.com and you can connect with Michelle. There's a tab there to do that, and then you can sign up for a 15-minute free consult call. If you want to be on the waiting list for the membership community, you can go to mentalhealthforchristianwomen.com and sign up to be on the waiting list to get priority notification for when the doors open up again for the membership community.
If you want to listen in tomorrow, I'm doing a Bonus Episode. This is for Crystal, a member of the initial founding group. She had a question on boundaries, and I told her I would answer that on the podcast. So, I'm actually going to do a bonus podcast tomorrow answering Crystal's question on boundaries. So, I hope you'll listen into that bonus this week. It's about how to have boundaries with people who don't mean harm. So oftentimes we think about having boundaries with people who have ill intent, but her question was how to effectively do that when people don't mean you harm, when you know that they're not trying to cause you pain, what do we do with that? So, I'm going to answer that tomorrow in an Ask Michelle. Check out the episode here: Bonus Episode: How to Set Boundaries with Well-Meaning People.
All right, guys, I hope that this was helpful. So the takeaway for today is what do you want to do with where you are now? That is the only moment you have and you get to determine what does this make possible? What does this make possible? And I hope that you will go forward today giving yourself some grace and just taking the next step. No matter where you are, what you've done, what you've gotten correct, what you've gotten incorrect, it doesn't matter. The next steps with the Lord. He's got your back. Just follow him one step at a time. Go take on the day.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Cras sed sapien quam. Sed dapibus est id enim facilisis, at posuere turpis adipiscing. Quisque sit amet dui dui.
Stay connected with news and updates!
Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our team.
Don't worry, your information will not be shared.
We hate SPAM. We will never sell your information, for any reason.
