Your Mindset – 6 tips to better habits

Your Mindset – 6 tips to better habits

How you choose to react in a given situation, says a lot about you as a golfer, but also as an human being. Here are 6 tips for better mental habits, and the theory behind. 

The Mindset Theory is based upon behavioral psychology, and deals with why people choose as they do in given situations.

Research has shown that people can have two different mindsets. The Growth and the Fixed.

The Fixed Mindset

People with the fixed mindset, believe the talent and skills are a constant size, which can’ot be change. You have a certain amount of talent and abilities, which one has to live with forever. Athletes with this mindset often have a great need to show themselves as better than others, and therefore they never reach their full potential because they constantly need to “protect” their status as being better than the others.

The Growth Mindset

People with an open mindset; believe that talent and skills are a changing size that can be developed throughout life, through hard work and training. These people believe that behind every performance there is a major work ethic.

Most of the world’s greatest athletes, Michael Jordan, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Tiger Woods, Mia Hamm, Pete Sampras, have or have had the growth-mindset. None of these athletes have come easy to their performance; they have worked hard, and achieved what they have throughout focused training, and constant analysis of their performance and weaknesses.

Advantages of the Growth mindset

Research has shown that a growth mindset creates a healthy approach to learning and training. People with this mindset are much more susceptible to feedback and they have a much greater ability to deal with adversity. And last but not least – the growth mindset reaches a much higher performance level in the long term.

The mindset is incredibly important, both on the golf course, but also in life as general. If you want to see which set of thoughts you walk around with, check out which beliefs you have in the table below.

Do you want to live with a growth-mindset?

The mindset theory is not just a theory; it’s an approach to life. If you have the desire and the courage to live with the growth mindset, then I’m sure you can. It requires hard work and determination, but we can all do it!

6 tips to live with a growth-mindset

1. Use words that I will, I can, that sounds exciting, well done, great job, well fought, and so on.
2. Appreciate the effort – the work – and not the result.
3. Chose the difficult option – that’s were you can learn the most.
4. When you are facing a difficulties and setbacks, think of it as an opportunity for you to learn and improve.
5. When people give you criticism and feedback – thank them; they have just helped you to identify areas for improvement.
6. Doing great is not when you can do something with no mistakes, and finish quickly. Doing great is when you really work hard to do a task and when you keep trying even though you are struggling to find a solution.