“Nothing is impossible. The word itself says ‘I’m possible!” -- Audrey Hepburn, actress and humanitarian
My grandson was born just six weeks ago. Such a love! As I watch my daughter capably handling the uncertainties of caring for a newborn, I see a mindset like Audrey Hepburn’s in action. While being a new mother isn’t always easy, she’s determined, keeps figuring it out with intelligence, warmth, and humor.
This can-do attitude started with my parents who showed that with perseverance, anything is possible— investing time and energy wherever we lived, even though we moved every year or two. Only as an adult did I realize that not everyone thought like my parents and…that I couldn’t always think that way! Sometimes my courage failed, and I gave up before I really tried.
Today, even with my years of intense training and practice, I regularly get trapped in less productive mindsets. When I hold onto fixed, often unexamined beliefs about myself and the world, they interfere with accomplishing and expressing what really matters to me.
I see the leaders and teams I work with do the same. Frustrated by their results, they don’t understand what holds them back. As they struggle to understand how their inner frameworks direct the way they behave, and how the way they behave produces their results, they begin to see that the place to start is in shifting their mindsets.
When the world has changed, and life asks something more from us, it’s time to update mindsets whose usefulness has expired and consciously strengthen mindsets that support our active participation in the emerging future.
Our mindsets set up how we view the world. I find that it needs updating more often these days to respond constructively and with as much grace as possible to the unpredictability we all face. Between the pandemic, political choices, accelerating climate change, and social unrest, my head aches. I am braced against the next difficulty, poised for rage as my neighbors host parties without masks or social distancing. And yet, at the same time, tending my garden fills my spirit. My heart warms to bursting holding my beautiful grandson. It’s demanding to hold it all at the same time, to stay at the edge of creating new coherence and possibility.
This pandemic has given us the space and time to see that we need a reset. For instance, we are waking up to the often unintentional and unconscious bias in the way we talk and the actions we take. The tragic death of Breonna Taylor woke us up to the way Black women are rarely thought of in our outrage over police shootings and seldom included in the lists of dead.
New actions are called for to respond to what lives in our hearts. On August 6th, a group of powerful women issued a clarion call to the news media for anti-sexist and anti-racist reporting. The memo, entitled, “We Have Her Back,” calls out how women have been subject to stereotypes and tropes about qualifications, leadership, looks, relationships, and experience. By publishing this before Joe Biden selected his running mate, they named the entrenched mindsets that hold women, and ultimately all of us, back.
This is an inflection point for change. When operating from old mindsets, our political, technical, and cultural systems are misaligned with what is actually happening in the world. Globally, we can see that even with the rate of species extinction and the acceleration of climate change, out-of-date convictions drive resistance to alternative technologies; new businesses are still designed with a reliance on fossil fuels. Every day in the news we can see those who refuse to admit there is a problem as they reinforce entrenched attitudes. And, every day we can be inspired by all those who are willing to question long-held beliefs, design alternative technologies, and work for systemic change.
We face an incredible opportunity to decide where we want to focus our time and attention and how we want to show up in this new world. I convened a recent panel on Mindsets for Change where we discuss conscious leadership designing meaningful action toward a vital world.
What exactly are mindsets?
At the personal level, mindsets are conclusions we reach early in life that end up stored deep in our subconscious as belief systems. Some of these conclusions uplift and motivate, like I can do it, I love to learn, or things go right for me. Some of these conclusions make life harder, more of an uphill climb: I’m not smart enough, life is tough, I’m a failure.
Mindsets shape the pattern of our thinking, influence what we see or ignore, and over time turn into well-anchored ways of making sense of the world. As an established set of attitudes and beliefs, our mindsets shape how we behave and influence our results in everything from intelligence to creativity to athleticism to relationships to performance at work. Even when a belief stops us from growing, we think “That’s just the way it is,” or “This is just who I am,” or “This is just who we are.”
Our mindset is invisible to us but holds us in its thrall. Simple or complex, from childhood or cultural, mindsets shape our future. Here’s one example of a mindset and the path to change in the story of one executive, who I’ll call Gloria. Although excited at the challenge of a new promotion, Gloria worried that she would again experience what held her back in her previous position. In our first sessions I could see that she spent a lot of time thinking about what would go wrong. When something did, she amplified it, made it bigger, ran it through her mind again and again. Her glass-half-empty mindset meant she struggled against a constant stream of disappointments. As we worked together, she began to see how out-of-date views governed her behavior and predicted her results.
Gloria assumed that we can’t help the way we think. She thought that we absorb beliefs from what happens to us and that they aren’t changeable. Instead, she began to take responsibility for the conclusion she reached, based on her interpretation of the events and circumstances of her life. With a big ‘aha’ she realized that her twin sister reached a different conclusion – “If things aren’t working, I’m going to do something about it.” Once she understood how mindsets shape our lives, Gloria could make sense of why her path was so different from her sister’s and began to design a different future for herself.
Mindsets are like an operating system in a computer: if we don’t update, the system starts to break down. For instance, the old mentality that everyone needs to be in the office to get work done made it tough for some leaders to adjust to the current necessity for their teams to work from home. Proactive mindsets that look for innovations reduce cycles of poverty and violence, while an embedded attitude of fear triggers helplessness because “that’s just the way it is.”
The good news is that we can change our mindset at any age. Research in domains like learning, emotions, stress, intelligence and health demonstrate that we form convictions early to deal with complex and conflicting information. As Gloria found, it takes a potent willingness, even courage, to look for the background ways of thinking that create the patterns of our lives, teams or organizations, and even more courage to transform them, to recognize that they are no longer relevant.
In her wonderfully insightful book Talk Matters, Mary Gelinas reminds us that “The past becomes the future through our current beliefs and behaviors.” Mary then asks, “Do we really want more of the same?” She goes on to remind us that investigating beliefs about ourselves isn’t an easy thing to do and suggests that, “as you do this self-examination, tread lightly, with a warm-hearted curiosity and acceptance of what seems true in this moment.”
There are many invisible mindsets that shape our lives. The simplest way to discover whether or not they are serving us is by looking at our results. Do the results in our life and work match our deepest commitments? No? Consider an update. Yes? Appreciate, reinforce and amplify the mindset that got us there and use it to shape our communications and our choices.
That’s what Alexander Ocasio-Cortez did when she recently delivered a lesson in decency on the house floor. Responding to derogatory comments by Ted Yoho, Ocasio-Cortez defended herself, as she defended principle and countless women, all without resorting to bland argument or aggressive demeaning ugliness.
Different leadership mindsets create different results. Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said in a video message last April, “We can turn the crisis of this pandemic into an opportunity to rebuild our economies differently.” Working together with Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, and Christine Lagarde head of the European Central Bank, they engaged the leaders of every country in the EU to put together a 750 billion euro fund for Europe. The heart of their vision is to use the Covid19 crisis to innovate and improve the environment for everyone. Embracing the opportunity for a significantly new approach, they solicited and secured widespread buy-in to ensure that change has a better chance to succeed.
In challenging times, the results of a leaders’ mindset are magnified. As we’ve seen in today’s politics, a “we are all in this together” way of looking at the world lands on different strategies and policies than a fearful outlook. The weight of our fear or our capacity to love, the quality of our thinking and our performance at work all follow from the belief systems we have internalized about ourselves and the world.
How we show up in the world has real consequences for our earth and our future. Between the pandemic, accelerating climate change, and social justice issues – we know we can’t go back to an old normal. The new normal asks for not only new skills, but also new convictions that alter how we actively participate in rethinking and rebuilding our civilization. Let’s work together to evolve, claim, and hold onto mindsets that reimagine what’s possible as we create a new future.
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Photo from Unsplash - Constant Loubier @constant_lb