A LEADING-EDGE MINDSET CHANGES EVERYTHING

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At key times across each busy year, we each need to re-evaluate and then purposefully elevate our energy and mindset—by sharpening focus and drive despite the neuroscience revelations that most people are unwittingly and unconsciously lowering theirs.

The gift in this is that it gives you a fresh chance to break away from the norm as you gauge where you really are today in your perspective, vision, and actions, versus where you want to be in all the key areas of your life and work.

Devote some brief but deep reflective time to honestly assess how you approach the challenges and opportunities of life and work. There are three possible mindsets that deeply affect those things.

 A “Fixed Mindset,” which is a mental vantage point or lens that limits you to polishing the past, resisting change, and clutching routines, and where possibility and achievement are immediately and automatically resisted or blocked.
Typical phrases used by those with a Fixed Mindset include “That’s just the way I am” and “That’s not how we do it [or have always done it] here…”
 A “Growth Mindset,” which is where you are instinctively curious and open to growth and change, especially incremental changes. The problem—according to Stanford scientist Carol Dweck, who pioneered this research—is that a surprising majority of the people who self-rate as having a growth mindset, don’t—in reality, they are fixed in their past-based attitudes, reactions, and approaches to life and work. (Dweck calls this a “False Growth Mindset”).
If you truly believe you have a growth mindset, list the specific array of improvements over the past days and weeks in your life and work that measurably confirm it.
 A “Leading-Edge Mindset” is exemplified by the disciplined daring and experiences of the highest tier of performers. It’s a mindset where you continually question yesterday’s assumptions, habits, attitudes, and routines, asking “What is truly possible?” and refusing to accept the norm or industry-best practices as “as good as it gets.” You seek out insights, discoveries, and data that enable you to learn, test, and tailor ever more of the right improvements and breakthroughs as you drive toward the outer edges of what is possible, even when others believe it’s “impossible.”

The reason a mindset is so powerful is that it is the lens through which you see yourself and the world around you, and a Leading-Edge Mindset becomes the instinctive way you learn to override your hard-wired brain’s clutching of comfort and routine and the past, and instead you elevate your ongoing vantage point and learn to embrace being constructively discontented and productively uncomfortable as you contrast what is common or normal versus what may be—and almost always is—possible.
More and more of today’s record-setting leaders, professionals, and teams are studying and adopting a Leading-Edge Mindset, and they strive day after day to keep making it more effective and successful in outcomes created, not just in effort expended or time spent.

You can choose your mindset. So be sure you and everyone on your team commits to live and lead from the leading edge. All day, every day. Doing that changes how you and they sense and seize more of the right opportunities. It ignites initiative and helps everyone provide more of the right encouragement, touch points, and nudges to those around them.
It becomes second nature—and creates a more open mind and discovery-oriented attitude about the things that matter most.