It’s estimated that it can often take over 100 applications before one receives a job offer. This underlines how arduous finding work can be. A recent study from EM Lyon Business School outlines how important our mindset is to be successful, especially as we often have unconscious assumptions that can undermine our efforts.
The concept of the fixed and growth mindsets was brought to the popular consciousness by Stanford’s Carol Dweck. Her work describes how those of us with a fixed mindset often believe that our abilities are static and inherent. In contrast, those of us with a growth mindset are more malleable, with our abilities able to be developed with effort. In these terms, success can either be something almost pre-ordained or it can be something that’s the result of hard work.
Impacting our search
Many people are unaware of their mindsets or how these beliefs shape their lives. Yet four decades of research show that simple beliefs about human potential—whether abilities are fixed or can grow—profoundly influence how people think, feel, and act, especially when facing challenges.
A fixed mindset often leads to defeatist thoughts, excessive worry, and giving up on goals too soon, while a growth mindset encourages persistence and resilience.
Most studies on this topic have focused on children and their struggles in educational settings. However, new research turns to working-age adults, examining how their mindsets influence their ability to navigate the challenges of job searching in real-world environments.
The researchers analyzed the situation for employees at an Australian industry skills council who lost their jobs after the agency was defunded. The researchers were especially keen to understand how each individual approached things like networking and negotiating.
What we can and can’t do
The analysis revealed that when we have a fixed mindset, we have a more rigid perspective on our ability at networking or interviewing. This can result in us blaming our failures on not being good enough or even the right kind of person for a job.
This can easily result in people becoming disheartened and discouraged by searching for a job and the various tasks that go into a successful job search. For instance, networking is something that so many of us struggle with, and our mindset going into such encounters can play a crucial role in whether we’re good at it or not (much less if we actually enjoy it or not). With so many jobs filled without being advertised, it’s easy to see how this can undermine our job search.
The study found that people with a fixed mindset would often assign labels to themselves in a way that reinforced any limitations they imagined they had.
An optimistic outlook
This isn’t the case among those with a more growth-oriented mindset. For them, challenges are generally tackled with a greater degree of optimism and adaptability. Central to their mindset was a willingness to learn from others. For instance, many participants said they regularly observed their managers to pick up on things like negotiating skills. The researchers found that they’d also use labels, but unlike their fixed-mindset peers, those labels would be more positive and emphasize their potential for growth.
Interestingly, those with a growth mindset were also generally better at reflecting on their experiences, and especially their negative ones. For instance, they might have had a bad interview but looked on it as an opportunity to learn rather than a reflection of themselves as people.
Indeed, so powerful is the right mindset that previous studies have shown that providing unemployed people with training to help them develop a growth mindset can be hugely important in terms of their success in finding a new job.
Unemployed adults given training in growth mindsets reacted much better to rejection than their peers who had more fixed mindsets. This resulted in them managing the stresses of unemployment more effectively and rejoining the workforce earlier than their peers.
Developing the right mindset
So how can you go about developing a more growth-oriented mindset? The first step is to actually think about how you typically approach challenges to see whether you might have a fixed mindset. You could reflect on areas that you’ve improved upon in the past to recognize the time and effort required to make those gains. This process could also involve analyzing those close to you to understand how they make positive changes.
Feedback is also crucial, so actively seek it from those around you to help you gain insights into your progress and identify other areas you could improve on.
You could also embrace the concept of “yet”. This frames weaknesses as something that you’re not good at “yet”, and therefore opens you up to areas for improvement. You could even challenge yourself to learn something new and build not only new skills but also the resilience that comes with learning new things.
This is crucial, as whenever we learn new things, we will inevitably make mistakes, and being able to respond kindly to those mistakes and practice self-compassion are going to be crucial.
It’s rare for anyone to be fully fixed (or growth) across every aspect of life, much less of the job search process, but if we can adopt a growth-oriented mindset, we’re more likely to approach all areas with an attitude of continuous improvement, which will help us to deal with the inevitable struggles involved in finding a new job.
