Let's Talk About Growth Mindset

(When I think of "growth mindset," I think of our powerful brain. Found on Google Images)

What is college all about? Learning? Friends? Future? To achieve any of these or anything else in college, though, one must do something first: grow. To grow in college is to learn about yourself, your friends, and your future. Watching Carol Dweck's Ted Talks about the growth mindset and how much power it holds reminded me of how important it is to keep progressing forward, even when it's the hard thing to do.

I know it's hard to remember, but we are at school first and foremost for school. My parents engrained this into my brain, with all of the cliche threats of taking my car away or sending me to community college if I had anything lower than a B on my transcript. This pressure from my parents that was supposed to motivate me often times did the exact opposite; causing me to put an immense amount of stress and strain on myself for seemingly no reason. This mindset hindered my learning and actually ended up preventing me from reaching my full potential. I trapped myself in this idea of perfection and put unrealistic expectations on myself that I wasn't doing any growing; I had fixed my way into this mindset that I would never reach my goals. It took me a while to learn how to balance out the noise of this "need" to be perfect and the love from my parents behind the message. Once I did though, my whole perspective on school changed. I found myself eager to go to class to learn, not to maintain a certain grade. I did my homework because I wanted to expand on what I did in the classroom, not because I was scared I would forget everything if I didn't immediately practice. This fear was no replaced with excitement, and I wanted to grow more and more everyday.

Another big part of college is friends, which truly can make or break your whole experience. For me, I am a huge people person, so the people in my life are always intentional. However, sometimes this love for people reared its ugly head and turned into people pleasing, which lead to some friendships that kept me from feeling like my best self. As a woman, it's easy to get caught up in comparison, image, and what everyone else is doing; and none of these things help with any sort of growth. The people I was surrounding myself with were encouraging me in ways that weren't building me up but instead were tearing me down. I started engaging in negative competition that trapped me with the idea that I would never be good enough or that I would always be playing catch up. With a change of scenery though, I stopped viewing the world and other people as competitors and instead used them to help me see the beauty all around. I found people that wanted the best for me and saw the potential in me that I wasn't aware of yet, and helped me grow into that rather than keep me from it. These people weren't intimidated by what I could be; instead they wanted me to embrace those possibilities. I started growing into the person I had always wanted to be, all because my friends helped me change the thoughts of "never" to thoughts of "when."

In my introduction blog post, I explained the importance of my five year plan and how I worked my way to that. My future is something I don't take lightly, and I am all about growing into the best version of yourself. Watching Carol Dweck's Ted Talk about the growth mindset helped encourage me to continue pushing the boundaries and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I was reminded to never put myself in a box, limiting my possibilities. Growth is what gets us places, and change is hardly ever bad. Everything happens for a reason, and growing with every change is what takes you forward.