The best bet for any young writer venturing into the world of writing is to have a positive growth mindset which improves your outlook toward your writing journey.
Your goal plan and what becomes of the success of your writing career as a budding creative is parallel to the kind of growth mindset you have developed at the start of your creative journey.
This begs the question, what kind of growth mindset have you cultivated as a new writer? What kind of expectations have you projected for yourself?
Certain unrealistic expectations you project for yourself as a new writer will greatly affect your mindset toward building a successful writing career.
Refining these unrealistic expectations to mirror actual achievable results, in reality, is a great step towards building a positive growth mindset that will serve you long-term, keep your productivity levels at their peak, and fuel your motivation to stay on track.
What Is A Positive Growth Mindset?
A positive growth mindset is characterized by flexibility of perspective. It is a type of mindset held by people who believe they can adapt to change and shifts their focus to things that are necessary to achieve their goals.
People with a positive growth mindset view their diverse character traits as strengths rather than weaknesses and work hard to embrace their struggles with personal development, which creates room for knowledge expansion.
As a new writer, it is crucial to cultivate a positive growth mindset because it sets your writing journey apart, allows you to embrace new challenges, drives your zeal and focus, and encourages you to keep trying.
A lovely positive growth mindset quote from Thomas Watson says, “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.”
Despite the many failures you’ll encounter as a new writer, developing a positive growth mindset will help you harness that failure and transform it into a career success story.
How To Cultivate A Positive Growth Mindset As A New Writer
Your mind is the powerhouse of your creativity, and the type of mindset you have as a budding creative will greatly affect the success of your writing career.
Before diving into ways to cultivate a positive growth mindset, it is important to understand that changing from any other kind of mindset you may currently have as a new writer will require some effort.
It’ll take discipline, mindfulness, and consistent efforts to outgrow your present mindset and evolve into a positive growth mindset that’s free of inhibitions.
Here are seven ways to cultivate a positive growth mindset as a new writer.
Focus on your action steps, not the results
As a new writer, it is easy to feel pressured to jump right in and chase your goals, but after a short while, the strength to pursue that goal begins to wane.
The best line of approach to this is to focus more on your crafted action steps than on your endgame.
Keep an eye on the prize, but focus on taking it one step at a time
Understand that failure is a part of the process
Not even renowned and bestselling authors escaped this phase, so why shy away from it. As with any other endeavor, failure is a massive part of the process, and your writing journey is no different.
“Success is most often achieved by those who don’t know that failure is inevitable.” – Coco Chanel
Understanding that failure is a part of the process of building a successful writing career as a new writer will help you stay better prepared for when it hits and not take you unawares.
Celebrate your small wins
As with failures, you’ll also have times of triumph.
Celebrating your small wins without comparison to how many failures produced the result is a great way to cultivate a positive growth mindset as a writer.
Reward your progress
For every successful completion of an action step, it is important to reward yourself as a writer.
How big or little the reward should be doesn’t matter, what’s important is that you’ve acknowledged the progress you’ve made and that fuels your drive to achieve more success.
Accept challenges as a learning curve
Maintaining a positive growth mindset means your thinking progression isn’t linear or static.
This helps you accept new challenges as a part of your learning curve as a writer rather than perceiving it as a threat to the success of your writing career.
Know your purpose
You should be able to answer the basic question about your passion for writing, and understand what drives your need to achieve your goals.
Knowing your purpose for venturing into writing is a great motivation to stay on track and embrace all the challenges that come with it.
Ensuring that your drive for pursuing a career in writing is more internal than it is external will help you cultivate a positive growth mindset that’s free of inhibitions.
Revamp your perception
Every mindful creative understands the power of perception and the magic it creates. Perception is the reason why storytelling never gets old because it can make and break a soul.
Visualizing the success of your writing career begins in your mind. If you cannot imagine your goals as a writer, then there’s a 70% chance they may not come to fruition.
Effects Of Cultivating A Positive Growth Mindset And How It Affects The Success Of Your Writing Career
Pursuing a career in writing can be tough; still, when it comes to achieving success with your writing, it boils down to the type of growth mindset you have.
Inherently, there will always be challenges associated with achieving your goal, but it is your mindset toward these challenges and how you perceive them that affects your reactions and solutions to the,
Jack Sparrow said, “The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem.”
Cultivating a positive growth mindset as a new writer is ultimately the best kind of mindset that will set your writing journey apart and propels the success of your writing career because it is unhindered by the perception of failure and challenges as a shameful roadblocks.
Here are 5 effects of cultivating a positive growth mindset and how it affects the success of your writing career
Builds Self-Confidence
The driving force behind pursuing your writing career is you. The person pushing for the success of your writing career is you.
So, ultimately without a crippling personal conviction that your goals are worth fighting for, they will remain but mere figments of an imaginative mind.
Cultivating a positive growth mindset builds your self-confidence as a person first, then as a writer who understands that every journey to success is different.
The minute you begin to perceive the challenges you encounter in your writing journey as a learning curve, your self-confidence increases considerably and builds the momentum for success in your writing career.
Builds A Resilient Personality
Slow and steady wins in the race are important moral lessons for cultivating a positive growth mindset.
To build a resilient personality as a new writer, you have to embrace the notion that no two writing journeys are the same. How progressive another writer’s journey is, has nothing to do with yours.
How many times you’ve failed in comparison to how many times you’ve achieved success should have no room in your thoughts or it could be catastrophic and negatively impact your pursuit of success in your writing career.
I hope this quote by J.K Rowling clarifies a few misgivings you might have.
“Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time. It is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing.” – J.K. Rowling
Resilience is very important to the success of your writing career as a budding creative and cultivating a positive growth mindset is key to building a resilient personality.
Refines Perception To Change
Planning and goal setting is always susceptible to change because the world evolves and things change.
Having a fixed growth mindset on how to achieve success with your writing career is morally damaging because you are inflexible to change.
However, cultivating a positive growth mindset will help you forego the lapses in your plan and realign your goals to match current trends that will help you achieve success in your writing career.
Refining your perception to change is an important advantage of cultivating a positive growth mindset, and helps you tailor your expectations to match your current reality.
Increases Productivity
When your mindset is not tamed by the fear of failure, or caged by the fixed perceptions of negative and positive outcomes, you become more productive in the pursuit of success in your writing career.
Untaming the wild side of your imaginative creativity will help you find diversity in your pursuits at every challenging step. No longer will you have to feel ashamed of your failure but embrace it as a part of the process.
Your productivity levels will greatly improve as a young writer who visualizes failure as a podium for growth. This projects a positive outlook and keeps you right on track for achieving success with your writing career.
Increases Motivation and Encourages Consistency
One of the earliest drivers of any goal plan is motivation. It may not be the key ingredient to achieving that goal plan but it is the sauce that spices up 50% of the process and gets you out of bed in the morning.
Consistency also plays a key role in achieving your goals alongside motivation but the trigger that activates these powerful feelings in you is your mindset.
When you approach the pursuit of success with your writing career from the standpoint of a person with a fixed or negative mindset, you are easily discouraged by tumultuous circumstances in your journey.
However, when you approach it from the flexible standpoint of a person with a positive growth mindset, these challenges will add more color to your process, spark your creativity, increase your problem-solving skills, and fuel your desire to keep moving.
Endnotes
Cultivating a positive growth mindset is important to your personal development as a new writer.
With so much to learn and even more challenges to tackle, there is a need to embrace the flexibilities that come with having a positive growth mindset.
Change is scary and takes time to adjust, but the achievable results of cultivating this type of mindset are far better than dwelling on things that aren’t sustainable.
Roy T. Bennett said it better. “Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.”