How can you identify your mindset toward growth and success? Let’s explore 5 key factors that may indicate you are on the path to growth.

1. You care to learn about the pains, needs, and dreams of your customers in an effort to improve and develop your business.

Try listening to the pain points of your customers. This is a way to build upon the systems you already have in place in order to grow. Identifying these problems will allow you to offer relevant solutions to your customers. Operating this way means that you are doing so with a growth mindset. 

If you were operating with a fixed mindset, you would continue with the systems you have in place waiting for customers whose needs and wants align with the solutions you currently offer.

 2. You believe that slow and steady (longevity) wins the race.

As an entrepreneur, you understand that you cannot provide a solution to every customer problem overnight. You are diligently prepared to put in the effort and the time necessary to discover what you can offer your customers now. Continually offering solutions that are individualized and customer-focused is your strategy.

Keeping your growth and advancements at a steady pace, but in a way that is simple to understand, will put your customers at ease. Growing WITH your customer base keeps you relatable. You are eager and willing to develop new skills. This will allow you to offer new solutions at a pace that supports your ability for output.

Putting in the forethought to anticipate the future needs of your customer base, and advancing your own abilities, is a growth mindset. You understand this isn’t an instant process, and that is okay.

A fixed mindset would look more like casting a wide net of one-size-fits-all solutions to a multitude of customer pains. This is not necessarily the wrong way to approach business, but it will result in short-term success. Short-term goal setting limits your opportunity for growth. This will ultimately affect your success on numerous levels.

Humans possess a natural opposition to and fear of change. Learning new systems and technologies can seem threatening to many. Ensuring that your growth trajectory is operating at a pace that is sustainable for you, and comfortable for your consumer, is a great plan for growth. 

3. You work to promote and cultivate independence for leadership opportunities within your organization.

Working together in a collaborative environment is what most team leaders strive for.  A growth mindset will often present itself as innovative (maybe even too innovative) and experimental in the presence of a team. Grow this way anyway.

One of the challenges we can face as entrepreneurs is that our teams are composed of individual people with individual mindsets. Making allowances for differences in the input you receive from team members, as well as input from your customers, will put you on a path for growth in your business.

If your company culture allows for the implementation of systems derived from the teams that exist to use them, you will more than likely promote leadership opportunities in a way that is conducive to exponential growth. 

Involving your team in setting goals for your business is a great way to unify your organization, and make sure everyone has room to grow together. Allowing opportunities for your team to appoint leadership roles on various projects is another great way to make sure your team is aligned and working toward growth.

Related: Watch this video on individual goals, team goals, and the summation of goals as applied to business growth planning. WATCH NOW . We also cover the Summation of Goals in our virtual courses and business planning workshops. Click Here To Learn More

4. You analyze and keep your eye on your market today, tomorrow, and into the future.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a crystal ball, a true vision of how your plan for growth will serve your customers today, tomorrow, and ten years from now?

Would an ability to see the big picture from a 30,000 ft view help you execute the growth plan for your business? 

Possessing a growth mindset is understanding that your customer needs are likely to change. Preparing for the transformation of your customer pain points is essential. 

In planning for the growth of your business, you should make it a goal to analyze the trends of your market. The ability to foresee how future changes may impact your customer is growth. Growth is learning and changing. It is adaptability. 

As an entrepreneur, you should have a plan for how you would operate in various market situations. Plan for how you would handle one of the major historical shifts your market has experienced. Making opportunities that arise out of a changing market is a mindset focused on growth and success. 

5. You celebrate success by offering more opportunities for success.

You are a leader and an entrepreneur. It is likely that you arrived at this point because you wanted to offer a solution to a problem that exists and to use your knowledge and skills to affect change. 

Chances are that you did not establish your business without a clearly defined set of goals and objectives for yourself.

• How do you define the objectives you have as an entrepreneur?
• How do you define the objectives you have for your team?
• Are you proactively using the success and growth of your market to measure the potential for success within your business?
• Are you using the same to measure the potential for success within your team?

The answers to these questions serve to get your gears spinning. Having a number of goals that can be achieved by working together with your team is a growth mindset.

Team Goal Setting for Success

Determine the growth trajectory of your business, related to the goals of your team. Identify the current needs of your market, related to the goals of your team. Understand that forward-moving progress toward achieving these goals means working together. Inward-facing focus on your current systems and the teams that use these systems is a great pathway to successful growth.

 It is important to remember that successes can be celebrated while discovering new opportunities for success. 

A great way to invest in your future success is by promoting continued opportunities for your team to acquire knowledge and skills.

• Do you currently offer your team members coaching opportunities or continuing education credits in your field? 
• Are you open to hearing from your team members about the ways they feel they could improve? 
• Are you receptive to hearing about the ways your team thinks your business could improve? 

If you answered “yes” to these questions, then you possess a great attitude and mindset for success. 

Compare the value of your business to its marketplace, but not to your competitors. Doing so will emphasize your mindset for growth. 

Identify the things your business does well.

• What are your areas of expertise? 
• How does your business add value to your marketplace? 
• How does your marketplace, in turn, add value to your business? 

Continue to identify the ways your business adds value, so you will continue creating additional levels of value. 

Focus less on what you do better than the rest of the marketplace, and more on what you do to better the marketplace. This is visionary and lasting. It is the mindset of success.