Why Charting Your Progress is Key as You Develop a Growth Mindset

Having a growth mindset enables you to evolve and develop over time. This mindset is useful in your life, career, work, or business so that you can continue to learn and grow.

This is the second in a series of 5 articles on How to Develop a Success Mindset. Here are the articles in the Series:

1. How to Embrace Change and Make it Work Towards Your Success
2. Why Charting Your Progress is Key as You Develop a Growth Mindset
3. 6 Tips to Help You Overcome the Fear of Making Mistakes

Why Charting Your Progress is Key as You Develop a Growth Mindset

1. It’s a Feedback Loop for Success

Charting your progress is one of the key ways of identifying if you’re growing or not. You do this by creating milestones and tracking them to identify when you reach them.

• Each milestone achieved is a testament that you’re growing.
• It proves that you can change over time, while at the same time showing that you’re making progress toward achieving your goals.
• It also serves as a kind of positive feedback loop that you can rely on to track your progress and growth.

This evidence of your growth in turn helps you keep pushing ahead and setting the next goal or milestone. This is a key source of motivation when you hit obstacles as you work on your goals.

2. It Provides Motivation During Tough Times

Sometimes all that keeps you moving forward is motivation from past success. But then how do you keep track in a way that provides motivation?

One of the most recommended ways to boost your motivation and growth is by keeping a success folder. Some people prefer to keep a physical success folder. You can also do this with a digital success folder.

The beauty of a digital folder is that you can access it from anywhere, unlike a physical one that you have to carry with you.

• Create the folder on your preferred digital device or online on Google Drive, DropBox, or any other online platform that you prefer.
• Save screenshots or files of completed projects in this folder. Include anything you consider an achievement.
• Additionally, save images from your social media posts, testimonials, recommendations, and even thank you or recognition emails.
• Keep updating this folder so that you have the most recent information.

This material and folder offer evidence of how far you’ve come. Go through it regularly and anytime you need motivation.

3. You’ll Set Better and More Effective Goals

The way you set your goals makes a big difference in your development and success. It’s also important in helping you strengthen your growth mindset when you identify what you’re doing right or wrong.

When talking of goals, ensure that your goals and milestones are SMART. SMART is an acronym for:

1. Specific: Identify exactly how you will know once the goal is achieved.
2. Measurable: Attach some numbers so you can easily measure the goal.
3. Actionable: Break each goal down into the steps needed to reach the goal. Each of these steps is a milestone to be achieved within a specific duration.
4. Realistic: The goal needs to be something you can achieve, with a little stretch out of your comfort zone.
5. Timely: Set a deadline for when you’ll achieve the goal. Also, do this for milestones.

Having clearly defined goals ensures that you’ll know for sure when you reach them. This makes it more effective to both reach your goals and chart your progress.

This blog has many resources on goal setting and achievement. You can access them using this link.

4. It Can Help You Reframe How You View Mistakes and Failure

A critical key to the growth mindset is reframing how you think about mistakes and failure. It’s easy to beat yourself up when you make a mistake or when you fail. However…

• Mistakes are not failures; they’re learning experiences.
• They don’t impede your growth unless you allow them to.
• They are a necessary part of growth just like successes are.

Additionally, failure is not always the end. In most cases, it’s just a bump in the process of working on your goals. While some failures mean the end of working on a goal, you will always reap important lessons from the work done and from the failure itself.

If you understand these factors, you can take action toward goals and more easily hit your milestones. You will also be able to recalibrate and change direction when a certain strategy is not working for you.

For example, on examining the failure of my first business, I realized that I had unknowingly helped my customers grow at the expense of growing my business. On further examination, I identified coaching as a career that I could move into. This led to a new path and a new business.

In the same way, when my business partners opted out of Biashara 360, I first thought I had made a mistake leaving my solopreneur business. But on reflection, I realized that Biashara 360 was my next level and that I could expand and grow it in a different way.

These 2 experiences have also made my business startup coaching program richer as I have real-life experiences to share with my students.

5. Charting Your Progress Is a Positive Habit

Successful people have made a habit of charting their progress. If you want to adopt the growth mindset, you have to make it an intentional part of your life. This means setting aside time for strategic planning and taking the time to learn new skills and techniques.

Schedule time on your calendar to:

• Set goals.
• Review results (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually).
• Remind yourself how far you’ve come by referring back to your digital success file.

Your goal tracking system should also evaluate the obstacles you’ve encountered and how you’ve handled these obstacles. You then recalibrate based on your results and create a new forward if need be.

This evaluation will also help you identify the habits you need to drop and new ones you need to learn.

Over to you…

Cultivating a growth mindset doesn’t come easy. It takes time, consistency, and a willingness to fail as you try new things and adopt new habits. The 5 reasons outlined in this article point out how keeping track of your progress helps deepen your growth and success mindset.

The path to success is never straight. Challenges come from different spheres of life and they can slow you down or stop your progress. Having a positive and empowered mindset will help you overcome these challenges and keep moving forward.

Do you want to learn more about charting your progress and growing?

Check out my program Break Free, Live Your Life which teaches you the A to Z of acquiring and sustaining a success mindset. You will learn how to get unstuck, get out of your comfort zone, and embrace change faster than before.

Click here to find out more about the Break Free coaching program so that you acquire the growth mindset that will help you achieve your personal, professional, or business goals without losing out on what matters most to you.

(Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels)

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