How often do you decide to grow consciously and intentionally?

When we embark on any personal growth journey, most focus on improving our skills and knowledge. All our self-improvement resolutions are about doing new things or getting better at doing old things. We attend exercise classes and workshops, pursue degrees, and accumulate certifications to enhance our abilities. While these skills are valuable, we often overlook the power of mindset in our growth journey.

Our beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives that shape our thoughts and behaviors reflect our mindset. Working on them is often more challenging than getting that new certificate or finally running that half-marathon we always dreamed of doing.

Anyone can cultivate the right mindset if they practice the following habits every single day:

1. Compassion

2. Curiosity

3. Non-judgment

Compassion

When we feel someone else’s suffering and want to help, that’s compassion. In other words,

Compassion = I can truly imagine your pain, plus I want to help

We never grow in isolation. It is impossible.

Imagine the top three ways you want to grow. Then, for each way, imagine the top three reasons why. You will see that relationships dominate both lists.

Do you want to be a better parent? A more loving spouse? A more effective leader? Each of those describes relationships. Do you want to succeed in business? No way to do that without being an effective leader, an excellent networker, and a proficient persuader.

Do you want to be physically healthier? It’s a rare human whose list of “whys” for wanting to be healthier does not have a relationship in the top three.

Growth is impossible without relating to others and wanting to help them.

Business gurus teach that a successful business is built on truly knowing and relieving customers’ pain. That’s just another way of saying that compassion for customers is an essential attribute of successful businesses. And saying it even more succinctly — help people, make money.

Curiosity

Curiosity is the essential ingredient that helps people change their small corners of the world for the better. It is impossible to be a change agent without being curious about the world, nature, and people.

How does this work? Why does this person behave this way in this circumstance? Why did my intuition about someone or something turn out wrong? How can I improve my gut feeling? What will happen if I do it this way?

Imagine an exemplary leader, scientist, or businessman. Can we imagine them not constantly asking questions and experimenting with different ideas?

We don’t have to take it that far. Think of anyone we know as an excellent parent, spouse, or sibling. They are that way because they are curious about their children’s, spouses’, and siblings’ likes, dislikes, etc. They know these because they want to know, and they act on that knowledge to strengthen those relationships.

Non-judgment

We act with non-judgment when we look at another person’s actions from the same level and not from above. We don’t judge a person as being virtuous, evil, smart, stupid, motivated, or unmotivated without seeing the whole picture of that human being. It does not mean letting people evade accountability for their actions. It also does not mean ignoring habitual tendencies. For instance, when I want to meet a particularly disorganized friend, I plan where and when. However, I accept that he may not make it there on time or try to change something about the plan right at the last minute. I do not judge him as an unworthy friend because of this.

These three traits depend on each other. Judgment inhibits curiosity. The absence of curiosity prevents us from being compassionate. No matter how many workshops we attend and classes we take, unless we work on compassion, curiosity, and non-judgment every day, we don’t experience a change in mindset. And there’s no growth without it.