Training Area: Growth – Achieve Anything You Want

Are you mathematically gifted? Do you find it easy to learn languages? Would you describe yourself as athletic?

In many cases, we view our abilities as static or unchangeable and therefore often answer these questions negatively. As a consequence, statements like "I'm super bad at languages" or "I'm totally unathletic" often become sentences that define our abilities.

But is that justified? Are you actually bad at languages, or do you just think you're bad at them?

The way we think about ourselves influences us in everyday life and is therefore of great importance to each of us. Our self-image affects motivation, perseverance, and resilience, and thus also the likelihood of experiencing flow in daily life.

In the Growth area, you learn to develop a healthy self-image that increases your inner drive and persistence so you can get into flow better!

Your Self-Image Is Decisive

The Growth area encompasses various abilities that are important for getting into flow. A prerequisite for developing growth abilities is believing you can acquire and develop skills.

Psychologist Carol S. Dweck calls this a growth mindset. People with a growth mindset are convinced that abilities, intelligence, and talents can be developed through effort and learning.

Unfortunately, many of us also have parts of a fixed mindset: With this, abilities seem rather innate and hardly changeable. Is it even worth investing energy and time in something we supposedly can't change anyway?

People with a fixed mindset tend to avoid challenges, while people with a growth mindset are convinced they'll improve their abilities by taking them on.

Which mindset we have determines our goal-setting, motivation, perseverance, and also our flow experience. A central aspect of growth training is therefore internalizing a growth mindset.

Focus on the Process

This means the focus isn't only on the end result, mistakes, or failures. With a growth mindset, isn't the learning experience much more decisive?

Of course it's important to have a clear goal in mind. But here, it's not exclusively the big goal in the foreground, but also the "process" – the path to the goal.

Is only the exam grade interesting, or can you perhaps notice that you gained important insights while studying? And does only your first-place finish at a competition count, or do you recognize new abilities you developed during training?

With this perspective, every learning experience becomes a success, regardless of whether the end result was achieved or not. And you stay motivated because even small progress becomes visible.

After a setback, with a growth mindset and process orientation, you're much more likely to look for additional ways to reach your goal and learn from your failures, since you're convinced you can continue to develop.

As Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology, noted: Success requires persistence – the ability not to give up in the face of failure.

Finding Intrinsic Motivation

When you train your growth mindset, you simultaneously learn another skill highly relevant for flow: finding exactly the right challenging tasks that are optimally matched to your abilities.

For flow, exactly the right challenge and a certain stress level are crucial. If you stay trapped in a routine without new challenges for too long, it can quickly lead to understimulation and boredom – two absolute flow blockers.

To give meaning to our actions, we need something that motivates and drives us – a so-called intrinsic motivation. This is about pure interest and enjoyment of an activity, not external factors like recognition or money.

When you're intrinsically motivated, the activity itself becomes your purpose, brings you joy, and keeps spurring you to grow beyond yourself.

How Can I Achieve This?

You can acquire a growth mindset that enables more motivation, persistence, and flow! The growth exercises from your flow training support you in this:

Mental Coaching

The term mental coaching describes a series of various psychological interventions and strategies to increase mental strengths, well-being, and motivation.

Through self-observation and reflection exercises, you work on your growth mindset and become clear about what actually drives and intrinsically motivates you. Additionally, your frustration tolerance and mental endurance are increased through cognitive reappraisals and perspective shifts.

Visualizations

Visualization is about actively replacing negative ideas with positive ones. The brain doesn't distinguish between reality and its own imagination when processing received stimuli – and you can use exactly that for yourself.

Through visualizations, states you aspire to are painted in exact detail in your mind. This makes you clearer about your goals and motivation on one hand, and on the other hand aligns your brain toward your own goals.

Many competitive athletes use this method to perfect certain movement sequences and their technique. Studies show that their performance significantly improves as a result.

Train Your Growth Mindset

The more regularly you train, the more lasting the effects! Seek out new challenges now, find your inner drive, and start your personalized flow training!