Growth Mindset Archives

3 Key Reminders About Having a Growth Mindset

Growth Mindset, Teamwork & Team building

At Headstrong, we believe your mindset is the difference maker. Your mindset can either hurt or help your performance.

A fixed mindset focuses on how good you are right now instead of your potential. A fixed mindset takes feedback personally and gets defensive. A fixed mindset avoids working on your weakest skills and does not believe that improvement is possible. A growth mindset focuses on measuring improvement and learns from a tough loss. A growth mindset accepts feedback and views criticism as constructive. A growth mindset targets your weakest skills in training and truly believes improvement is the reward of a hard work ethic.

Having belief in your ability to improve with practice is essential to succeeding throughout your career. It is critical you trust in the potential of your ability to improve and your teammates ability to get better during the course of a season. Here’s 4 key reminders about having a growth mindset.

[Read more…]

Interview with Beth Launiere on Preparing for NCAA Playoffs and Avoiding Player Burnout

Growth Mindset, Interview, Self-care

2019 was a landmark year for Beth Launiere. Not only did it mark her 30th season as the Head Volleyball Coach at the University of Utah, but Launiere was named the Pac-12 Coach of the Year and led her team to the program’s fourth Sweet 16 performance. The team’s match up against BYU in the second round of the NCAA playoffs has gone down in Ute volleyball history.

In the 2019 NCAA tournament your team beat BYU 3-0 at BYU. How did you prepare your team for that big match-up?

There were a number of factors. We had very high goals for the season and expectations for ourselves. We were ready for the NCAA tournament. We finished 3rd in the PAC-12. We were ready to make a nice run (in the playoffs) and we felt really confident. We really thought that we had a shot at hosting, and found out that we were going to BYU for the 3rd time in 4 years. I couldn’t have been more proud of my team for the way they handled that. I had very strong leadership. Right from the start they were like, it’s a bummer but it doesn’t matter. I’ve been doing this long enough now to know that if you start getting too worried about where you’re sent and what your seed might be, then you’re probably starting from behind right off the bat. So we just had a really great mindset going into the tournament right away. We took the mentality of wherever, whoever and whatever it takes.

[Read more…]

Planting Seeds

Growth Mindset

Our ancestors were deeply attuned to the seasons of the earth. They new when to plant seeds to harvest life sustaining vegetables and grains because they lived off the food they harvested from the seeds they planted.

For something to grow, a seed has to be planted in the dirt, underground, out of sight. The seed needs to be watered, but not over watered. It needs sunlight, but not too much sunlight. To harvest food from seeds, it takes patience and trust. You can care for it, fertilize it and protect it but you can’t speed up the process. The seed is going to grow at the natural rhythm of the earth. Our great ancestors understood this. They lived by this pace, this rhythm of the earth.

[Read more…]