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Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
I can maintain a mindset of every one of these things is a learning opportunity. It is incredible how you start to see 📍 opportunities that you would've never seen before. Most people with a fixed mindset, they just believe that the world is happening to them and that they are victims of their setbacks, rather than those setbacks being lessons that can become blessings for them down the road. Hey everyone. Thanks for joining me for another episode.
I really appreciate you taking the time. If you're getting value from this content, please like, share, subscribe, send this to somebody who you think might enjoy it. It really helps me with my mission to reach and help as many people as possible. And then head on over to brian force.com and sign up for our newsletter.
I spend a lot of time really creating a lot of actionable guidance that you can implement in your business right now, and I really think you'd get a lot out of it. That's enough for the PSAs. Thank you again from being here. Let's get back to the 📍 show.
If you're running your own business, you're an entrepreneur of some sort, or you just have massive ambition.
You've probably heard and talked about mindset a whole lot in your lifetime, and I don't think we can talk enough about it because mindset isn't something that you just develop and then you're done. That would actually be the definition of a fixed mindset. It would be something that you think that you could just fix and then it would be that way forever.
But your mindset is an evolution. It's a constant journey because the variables around you in your world are always going to be changing, there's always gonna be new challenges.
If you think that you're gonna get to a place where your mindset is just perfect because you've figured it out, well, then you probably need to raise your standards a little bit. Because as you continue to evolve, as your business continues to evolve, as your life continues to evolve, there are going to be new chapters, new challenges, new things that test your mindset.
And so I think it's important every once in a while to come back to the fundamentals of mindset as a professional, as a human being in general, and really focus on the things that we can do to continue to evolve our growth mindsets. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna talk about creating a bulletproof mindset that will serve you for years to come.
Now, first, what we really need to do to set the stage for the strategies that we're gonna be discussing is to talk about what a growth mindset is.
A growth mindset in contrast to a fixed mindset. Those are really the two types of mindsets, fixed and growth. And I will just level with you, most people in the world have a fixed mindset.
A fixed mindset is the one that believes that abilities are static. People are a certain way. The world is a certain way, and my job is to operate inside of the framework of my existing capacity. The world is what it is. I am who I am. I can do what I can do. I can't do what I can't do,
and I'm going to try to create a life that serves my desires within that framework. I'm not gonna get over my skis. I'm not gonna dream too big. I'm gonna go to work every day, make it through, and I'm gonna work with what I've got in the world that I've got to work within. Yeah, that's what a fixed mindset is.
That probably encompasses about 90% of human beings on earth. And I don't mean that to be derogatory, just look around you. And that's kind of true for most people. And then there's a growth mindset. A growth mindset is the complete opposite.
The growth mindset doesn't accept that the world around you just is the way that it is. That asks questions about the way the world can be. The growth mindset doesn't just say, I am who I am. The growth mindset says I am this version of myself and here's what I'm doing to become.
The next version, the version I strive to become. The growth mindset says I have these capacities now, and with hard work and consistency and effort and resilience, I can refine those capacities and develop new capacities. The growth mindset says I am here at this particular place and time as this version of me, but going forward, I will be a new
and continually evolving version every single day. A growth mindset doesn't say that my failures are a reflection. A fixed mindset says that my failures are simply a reflection of my capacity. There are just some things that I'm good at and some things that I'm not good at, and I'm gonna operate within that framework and I'm not gonna get outside of those parameters.
Whereas a growth mindset says that every single time I fail. I get better every single time that I fail. My capacity increases. I can develop whatever skills I want. I can develop whatever opportunities I want or that I choose to. It's just the function of my effort into the process. How much effort am I going to put into it for how long?
How consistently will I be, and with how much resilience? It's a simple formula for a growth minded person to get to where they're trying to go because they see themselves as constantly evolving.
So that's a massive difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A growth mindset doesn't mean you're not going to struggle. Having a growth mindset doesn't mean you're not gonna face massive setbacks. It doesn't even mean that. Sometimes you might face catastrophic setbacks in your life, in your journey, in your business.
But it's how you frame those setbacks and those experiences that really makes the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset. A fixed mindset, sees every single one of their setbacks as reassurance that they are correct about who they are and how the world is.
Every setback for someone with a fixed mindset, just further ingrains them in their way of thinking. I knew I shouldn't have gotten out of my comfort zone because this is what happens. I'm just gonna stay here, be this person, and accept the things that I cannot change within the framework of a world that I can't change.
A growth-minded person sees things the exact opposite way. Massive failures to a growth-minded person are valuable lessons for them to learn and move forward in a new direction. Their tests of one's resilience and their character and their tolerance for suffering. A growth-minded person welcomes setbacks because they're opportunities to move forward.
A growth-minded person realizes that no one's gonna read your biography if there isn't some adversity in it. And so a growth-minded person welcomes those challenges. And while they're difficult, just because you have a growth mindset doesn't mean you're free from suffering while they're difficult.
A growth minded person finds value in challenges, finds value in setbacks, and believes that they have the ability to get better and to evolve and to use all of the pain of everything they've been through to become a version of themselves that accomplishes what they want to, that's getting to where they want to go.
That's the difference between fixed and growth mindsets. But as you can see. In me describing what a growth mindset is. It's something that constantly needs maintenance. It needs to be maintained because having a growth mindset isn't something that just happens once.
A growth mindset is a muscle that you have to exercise daily, just like any other muscle in your body. Imagine a fixed mindset is just a fixed physical body. It never works out. It sits on the couch all day. It eats whatever it wants, and whatever shape it's in is literally just a function of how it's being used and how it's being fed.
And so a fixed body type probably isn't gonna be in that good of a shape. It's just gonna be in whatever organic shape life tells it to be in with no real habits to improve it. It's just like what a default body looks like with no concentration on making it grow or evolve or get into good shape
now somebody who's in shape, that body needs to be maintained every day. It needs to be fed the right food constantly. It needs to be exercised, and it needs to be kept up with and maintained. If you are in good shape, it's not because you did something once. It's because you do something every single day, and so your mindset is no different.
Just because you have a growth mindset now doesn't mean you could just stop working on it and it'll be that way forever. Because the world around you continues to evolve and your mind has to continue to maintain. Because the world around you continues to evolve and you have to maintain your mindset with it.
So with that, let's talk about strategies. From maintaining that bulletproof growth mindset through all the ups and downs and cycles and trials and tribulations of everything that we go through in this world, especially as business people and entrepreneurs, what are the key strategies that we can focus on every single day to maintain that growth mindset?
The first thing to do on a daily basis to maintain your growth mindset is to get in the habit of asking yourself valuable questions around what you are learning every single day. And I really do mean every day because it's gonna.
Force you to think deeply at least once a day around how you're growing. Because if you are learning, then you are growing. If you are learning, you are going to have more opportunity. If you are learning, your capacity is expanding. You're gonna recognize opportunities that you didn't see before and you're going to appreciate the world for all the things that you can contribute to it and vice versa. And also asking yourself what you are learning on a regular basis helps you to reframe what you would consider failures, the things that aren't working,
the things that are not going well at any given time, the things that kind of suck right now, the things that you feel like are falling apart. When you get in the habit of asking yourself regularly, what am I learning through this? Then it forces you to reframe those quote unquote failures as learning opportunities.
This is an exercise. It's not something that will happen organically right away, and that's why it's super important to get in the habit of asking yourself what you're learning every single. Day I do a really simple mechanism for this. I use what's called the Day one app. It's a online journal. I have it across my different devices and I have two different templates inside of my day. One app. I have a gratitude template where I talk about what I'm grateful for every single day. And I have a daily learning questions template, which really just asks me a couple of questions each day around what I have learned in different areas of my life.
And there are days like a lazy Sunday, where I will feel like I've learned a whole lot, but I will force myself to go and answer those questions, even if it's like I just learned today that I really love, you know, watching Netflix on the couch sometimes for a couple of hours and getting away from the stress and hectic nature of my daily life usually.
It's not a super insightful thing to learn, but what it does is it forces me to get in that habit of writing something every single day. So on the days where things are really tough, on the days where we took a big loss on the days where something really went wrong, on the days when things feel like they're really falling apart, I sit down and force myself to answer the question, what am I learning through this?
Because I can maintain a mindset of every one of these things is a learning opportunity. It is incredible how you start to see opportunities that you would've never seen before. Most people with a fixed mindset, they just believe that the world is happening to them and that they are victims of their setbacks, rather than those setbacks being lessons that can become blessings for them down the road.
So step number one. Is to get yourself a journal or some sort of mechanism where you are asking yourself, what am I learning every single day? And do it even on the days where it doesn't really feel like a lot happen, where it really doesn't feel like you learned a lot.
If you do that, then I swear you are going to start to see challenges as lessons. And not only that, you'll actually start to become grateful for them. It, it doesn't happen right away, just like exercising, just like eating healthy. It takes habits and it takes time for those things to really make a massive difference.
But the buildup over time, the difference that it makes in your life is absolutely fundamentally incredible. So make sure that you get in the habit. Of asking yourself what you're learning every single day.
And the second strategy to building that bulletproof mindset is to not stop growing.
And what I mean by that is to always have a goal that challenges you to grow in some way that you can focus on every single day. We have massive goals in our businesses and in our lives, and we do all kinds of goal setting throughout the year. And a lot of those goals, they take time. They take a lot of time and it can be difficult to see progress every single day.
And so if you have massive business goals, that's fantastic. You should, in order to maintain your growth mindset. One of the strategies that I really like to employ is have. Personal goals that I'm working towards every single day that I can see tangible progress towards every single day to continue to show me that I'm growing, that I am maintaining my level of discipline and resilience.
I can create a feedback loop where I have a personal goal that if I do this every day, I start to see momentum. A lot of us have this with our health and fitness like I do as well. Some of us have a reading goal, we wanna read a certain amount, or some of us take on other sorts of challenges.
I like to build new skills. Right now, I've talked about this a lot on the show. I'm trying to become conversationally fluent in Spanish. I desperately want to be able to speak with my Mexican family. And speaking in Spanish is really important to me. And as an adult, as a 37-year-old man, it's been a challenge to learn a new language, especially with the limited amount of time that I have to really immerse myself into study.
But that personal goal keeps me moving forward every day. I know whether or not I'm better at speaking Spanish than I was yesterday.
I want to speak Spanish with my family, and I take lessons, and then I do homework and I practice. It's something that I have committed to, but it gives me something that I can. Always strive to get better at whether you do this with your body and your fitness, whether you do this with your mind and your intellect, whatever it is, it's so valuable to have some sort of goal that you're looking to achieve and then just keep stacking them on top of one another when you achieve one.
Put a new one in place and you'll have this endless, beautiful journey of your evolution. You'll learn new languages, you'll read a lot of books. You'll have a certain body type and maintain a certain level of health and fitness. Or maybe it's a travel goal. Maybe you want to make enough money in your business that you can go and travel certain places and learn about their cultures, and that's a journey that you want to be on.
Well have those goals and be working towards them every single day, but something that you can get instant feedback on. Is really preferable, something that you can see every single day, whether you're getting closer to your goal or further away from your goal, is really, really, really important.
That's why I love my goal of, becoming fluent in Spanish because I can see every day if I'm getting closer or further away. So if you only have business goals right now and you don't have really a personal goal that you're striving for, put one in place.
Think deeply about it and make it something where you can get instant feedback every single day.
the number three strategy to maintaining a growth mindset is to continuously be expanding your comfort zone. Now notice I, I take language very seriously the way that I say things because I think it's really important to say things in a way that are conceptually accurate.
I don't ever talk about stepping outside of your comfort zone. I talk about expanding your comfort zone, because if I can step outside my comfort zone, I could just as quickly step back in my comfort zone. I can go and do something, and I could say, that made me uncomfortable.
That means I don't want to do that anymore, and then I could step back inside my comfort zone. I talk about expanding your comfort zone, and the reason that I talk about expanding your comfort zone is one. I like to get that language down, but two, I think that expanding your comfort zone is a continuous process, whereas stepping outside of your comfort zone is something that can happen once.
So for example, let's say that one of the things that I want to do in my evolution to maintain my growth mindset is, I really wanna focus on my body and I wanna learn yoga, and I wanna become very good at it. I have a goal for things that I'd like to achieve, you know, in my yoga. Journey.
Which by the way, that's awesome because it involves really great core strength, flexibility elements of meditation. Like you should be doing yoga regularly. But if I've never done yoga before and it's something that I've always wanted to do, but it's not currently within my comfort zone, well, I can tell myself to go step outside my comfort zone, and that means that I'm gonna commit to going to yoga next week.
And my first session of yoga is gonna be really difficult. I've never done it before. My balance is probably terrible. I'm not that flexible. Everything hurts. They keep telling me to breathe through it, and I can't. I've just never breathed that way before. It's not a great experience.
It's something that I really want to do, but the first time that I stepped outside my comfort zone and did it, I had a bad experience. Now, if I have a fixed mindset, stepping out of my comfort zone like that. And not experiencing something positive is all I need to step right back inside my comfort zone and say that yoga's not for me.
I tried yoga, I tried meditation, I tried all these things. They're not for me. I. I don't have the ability to do yoga the way that some people do. That's what stepping outside of your comfort zone looks like to me. The reason I say expand your comfort zone is because you have to step outside your comfort zone more than once.
You have to do it consistently to actually expand your comfort zone.
It is like training your body or anything else, training your mind. You have to do it more than once, and I don't like the idea of stepping outside of your comfort zone because that insinuates that you can just step right back in. So if I'm somebody with a growth mindset and I talk about expanding my comfort zone, rather than saying that I'm going to go to yoga next week, what I say is that I'm going to make the commitment and sign up for a yoga membership for the next year.
I'm going to make the commitment that I acknowledge that yoga is going to be difficult in the beginning, but it's something that I'm personally committed to and that's important to me, and I am going to resist the temptation to step right back inside my comfort zone, and I am going to make that commitment now, and I'm gonna be there for a year.
That is the level of discipline that I'm going to show, and I'm gonna commit to expanding my comfort zone. And who do you think after a year is going to have a better experience with their yoga journey? Somebody who says they'll go to yoga one time and see how they like it,
even though they really wanted to be a part of who they are, and then they had that first negative experience and they had to build their confidence up all over again to go do it. Or somebody who goes acknowledging that it's gonna be hard and that's why they've made the commitment to doing it for a year before they make any judgment around whether or not they want to continue.
That second person is expanding their comfort zone deliberately, not stepping outside of their comfort zone. That's one of the reasons that I've made the commitment that I have to learning my Spanish is because I had been on and off with my Spanish practice for like years, and I had been really plateauing.
I had very much like the fundamentals down, but I'm not conversationally fluent. It was driving me crazy that my skills were so limited, and so I committed to a year of lessons and I paid all upfront. Now I have Monday, Wednesday, Friday, lessons and homework in between. And those are things that I never would've done before, but I'm so comfortable with them now because I've been doing it for a few months.
I really like the cadence. I can see myself getting better and I put myself in a position where there's accountability. I deliberately expanded my comfort zone by partnering with a teacher who's gonna hold me accountable to my commitment. Rather than just saying like, I'm gonna do one-off lessons here or there, I'm gonna keep using the apps, or whatever it is.
There's no commitment there. When I sign up for yoga for a year, I'm way more committed to going, if I just say I'm gonna go to yoga class with no accountability around it, I'm stepping outside of my comfort zone momentarily and allowing myself to step right back in. That's not what you want. You want to expand your comfort zone.
So whatever it is that you are thinking about doing, the thing that you want to take on, whatever it is. If you're looking to maintain that growth mindset, then don't dabble in it. Commit to it. What is the thing that you want to commit to? And by the way, it doesn't necessarily need to be just a personal thing for you.
It might be something in your relationship, right? You might need to make a commitment to your significant other that you are going to have date night with them. Every single Thursday for one year straight come hell or high water. And I promise you as a busy business person, a busy entrepreneur, a busy human being in general, there are going to be Thursdays that very much challenge you.
Because life is going on, things are busy, the sky is falling down, it feels like sometimes, and you are going to have to expand your comfort zone and say no to things so that you can maintain that Thursday date night. So it could be something as simple as that, but commit to it for an extended period of time.
Don't just say, I'm gonna step outside my comfort zone and try it. That's the big difference.
And the number four strategy to maintaining your growth mindset is to celebrate your milestones along the way. There's nothing wrong with cheering yourself on. There's nothing wrong with celebrating victories along the way.
Now there's a fine line between going overboard and patting yourself on the back for every little thing that you do, and actually celebrating milestones that are meaningful along the way that energize you to keep moving forward. I'll use the Spanish example one more time. There are 11 levels of fluency in my Spanish program, and every single time I make it to the next level, I celebrate a little.
It's really important to have those milestones along the way. If it is your health and fitness, it could be a milestone there, a certain amount of body fat that you've hit or some sort of physical feat that you're trying to accomplish, some sort of race or challenge that you're doing.
Give yourself milestones along the way, and that's again, why it's so important to have these more personalized goals to help you maintain your growth mindset. Because business goals can be big. They can be far off, and you might not get that feedback loop on a really regular interval.
And when you have solid personal goals, things that you're working towards every single day, that feedback loop tends to get condensed, and you have victories more often. You can see progress more clearly. You're really growing in real time, and so it's important to celebrate that. Celebrate the expansion of your comfort zone, celebrate your resilience, celebrate the way you look at your challenges, and you learn the lessons and you move forward.
It's really important to. Give yourself that revitalization to remind yourself that you are on a journey and you're moving forward and you're growing.
And last but certainly not least, in fact, it might be the most important strategy to implement, to maintain your growth mindset is to surround yourself with other people that are like-minded.
If you wanna maintain a growth mindset. Put yourself in a position where you are constantly surrounded by other people with a growth mindset, and you'll be able to spot them in an instant. You have a ten second conversation with someone with a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset, and you're able to pick them out, no problem whatsoever.
And so that's important. Whatever line of work you're in, whatever business you're in, whatever you are into and interested in, I'm sure there's a community of people around it, and you wanna make sure that you surround yourself with people from that community that are the growth minded ones.
Take a hard look at the people that you're constantly surrounded by. Audit the conversations that you're having with them. Audit the things that you're feeding your mind by listening to the people that you are closest with or that you see on the most regular basis.
And then you may need to make some important decisions around how you spend your time and with who you spend your time. You are absolutely positively the sum of the mindsets of the people that you surround yourself with. I think that's a really key distinction to make. We talk about how like you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, like that is very much true.
Specifically from a mindset perspective. You are going to have a similar mindset to the five people that you spend the most time with, because energy is infectious. If you absorb negative fixed mindset, energy on a regular basis, it's going to seep through, and that's going to be what your mindset becomes.
If you are constantly surrounded by people with positive energy that believe that life is happening for them and that their challenges are opportunities to learn and that they are capable of growth, they have goals, they have feedback loops, they're on a journey, and they're inspiring you to do the same, you would be amazed at how much easier it is to maintain a growth mindset.
When you are surrounded by fixed mindset individuals that believe that life is happening to them, that their abilities are finite and that life just is what it is, it's gonna be hard to break out of that cycle. So think deeply around your close contacts. Think deeply around the people that you spend the most time with, and decide whether or not you need to make a change.
Because if the closest five people to you in your world had nothing but growth mindsets. I guarantee you, you would adopt one as well, purely organically, purely by proximity, and so give yourself that boost. Give yourself that headstart by surrounding yourself with the right community.
That's really the number one strategy for maintaining a growth mindset, is to put yourself around others who do the same.
And so there we have it. Those are the key strategies to maintaining a bulletproof growth mindset.
Number one is to start to reframe your quote unquote, failures as opportunities for growth.
Number two is to commit to expanding your comfort zone. Not stepping outside of your comfort zone, but expanding your comfort zone.
Number three is great feedback loop. Seek feedback from the people around you because that's gonna show whether you're progressing, regressing, but one or the other. It's gonna show you that you have more that you can do and it's gonna get you inspired.
Number four is to celebrate your milestones. Have wins along the way, and don't be afraid to celebrate them and celebrate them with number five, the growth-minded people in your world. Surround yourself with people that have the mindset that you want to have and it'll get that much easier. That is how you develop a cadence that helps you maintain a growth mindset through all seasons and environments in your life. It's not always easy to have a growth mindset. Sometimes it really feels like the world is caving in on you, like you're taking loss after loss after loss.
A growth mindset is something to be maintained. It's not something that you build one time. It's something you work on every single day, and these five strategies will help 📍 you to maintain that growth mindset. I would love to hear how these strategies are working for you.
Please drop a comment, send me an email. Let me know what you've learned from implementing these strategies in your world. I truly appreciate you listening to another episode, and I'll look forward to talking soon.