Skill Set vs. Mindset – Which Will Help You Achieve the Life You Love?
From day one, we focused on learning new skills – learning to walk, read, or ride a bike. Academically, we were encouraged to acquire new skills and we dedicated ourselves to building our resume by attending school, getting a degree, and signing up for continuing education. Obviously, a well-rounded skill set is important but what about your mindset? In skill set vs. mindset is there a clear winner when you’re trying to design the life you love?
Mindset is about how you think – how you react to failure, how you motivate yourself, how you view others. Mindset is the lens you use to look at the world. Nothing is more critical to your success as a leader, and perhaps you’ve noticed that a successful mindset isn’t taught in most classrooms.
Mindset is the foundation of effective leadership training, making it relevant to the full dimension of the human experience: mind, body, emotion, and spirit. You cannot separate your professional self from yourself as a whole person. This explains why integrating new professional skills only occurs when one fully engages and aligns those skills with the right mindset.
How Does Settling the Skill Set vs. Mindset Debate Benefit You?
The fact that mindset holds more weight than skill set is very good news! How so? We never want to minimize the importance of skills — technological, managerial, and social skills — all have tremendous value. However, they can become somewhat of a commodity. Skilled work is often outsourced to other countries and what you learn today in technology can be obsolete in a few short years. But no one can outsource your mindset to someone else and it’s never obsolete!
Have you noticed that the most influential leader is often the one who cares the most about the organization’s or project’s success? They’re the ones with a positive, strategic, goal-oriented mindset and when they run into an obstacle they find a way around or over it. That’s exactly what will help you design the life you love! As George Bernard Shaw wisely noted,
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
“Dream Big, Start Small” Here’s the one thing you can do today.
Embarking on the journey to embodied leadership starts with understanding your mindset. You have big dreams, but every big leap starts with small, conscious steps. This exercise will help you reflect on how you respond to challenges, successes, and opportunities.
Step 1: Self-Examination without Judgment. The goal is to make this your new practice — before diving into any action, take a moment to assess where you stand mentally and emotionally.
Review the following questions so you’re prepared for each of these challenges:
Getting Feedback: Do I defend myself or use it to improve?
Small step: Next time you receive feedback, pause. Instead of responding immediately, reflect on one thing you could learn from it, even if it feels uncomfortable.
Making Goals: Do I stay motivated or lose steam before accomplishing it?
Small step: Break your next goal into micro-goals. Celebrate progress, no matter how small, to maintain momentum.
Seeing a Colleague’s Success: Do I feel resentful or inspired by them?
Small step: Instead of comparing, ask them for advice or inspiration. What can you learn from their journey?
Handling Failure: Am I discouraged or motivated to try harder next time?
Small step: Reframe failure as feedback. Write down one lesson you can take from a recent setback and how it can improve your future efforts.
Discovering Weaknesses: Do I hide them or work to overcome them?
Small step: Choose one area for growth. Instead of avoiding it, set a small, achievable goal to develop that skill.
Do I seek the tried and true, instead of experiences that will stretch me?
Small step: Say “yes” to one new experience that feels outside your comfort zone this week.
Step 2: Small Wins Add Up. Embodied leadership isn’t about changing everything at once. It’s about shifting your mindset one step at a time. Each time you act on one of these reflections, you are building the internal strength and awareness needed for larger change. Let the small shifts lead you to the bigger transformation you’re dreaming of.
Step 3: Reflect on Your Progress. After a week of focusing on these small actions, ask yourself:
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- What did I learn about my mindset?
- How did I handle challenges differently?
- What surprised me about my growth?
Remember, every small step forward brings you closer to the life and impact you desire.
When you see room for growth, don’t be discouraged! Just as you can learn new skills, you can develop a more successful mindset. Your current mindset, whether it’s a product of your genes. or environment . or both, is just the starting point for development. Determine what’s holding you back from fully designing the life you love.
And remember, your leadership qualities are things you have control over because you can cultivate them over time. As Benjamin Barber said,
“I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures. I divide the world into the learners and nonlearners.”
Are you a learner? What is it that you’d most like to learn right now? What flashed through your mind, before you started filtering it with judgments like, “That’s not practical” or “I can’t afford that” or “I’m too busy to educate myself on something new”?
And if you’d like to lay an amazing foundation for an empowered mindset take a look at my Embodied Leadership Training. It’s an opportunity to simultaneously enhance your skills and mindset as you continue to design the life you love!
graduate confetti photo by Logan Isbell