How do today’s arts leaders cultivate the positive mindset in order to lead through challenging times?
That’s the question that we are now exploring in my 21st Century Arts Leadership class at the Yale School of Music. In my last post, I shared my model for what today’s arts leaders need for personal leadership-the ability to lead yourself before you lead others:
- Positive mindset: The belief in yourself and optimism about the future
- Authentic Leadership: A self-reflection on who you are at your core: your values, passions and strengths.
- Purpose-driven leadership: Knowing your purpose and how you put your talents and experience to work to make the world a better place
- Connection: Once you connect with your purpose, you connect with others who share the same mission and set goals on how you can leverage your collective talents and experience in service of your meaningful goal.
The start of personal leadership, then, is cultivating a positive mindset. To do so, we draw on three researched-backed theories from positive psychology:
- Flow
- The Growth Mindset
- The SPIRE well-being framework.
So let’s take a closer look at these three elements and how they contribute to the positive mindset of leadership.
- Flow
Flow is a psychological state of optimal performance. It is the brainchild of positive psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi as described in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Flow is the total immersion in a complex activity of creation that you are intrinsically motivated to pursue where your skill level meets the challenge at hand and time goes by to the point that you do not even notice.
Flow gives rise to feelings of happiness and confidence. In fact, Csikszentmihalyi elaborates on the connection between Flow and Happiness in his TED Talk entitled Flow: The Secret to Happiness.
Flow is at the heart of positive leadership because you tap into your highest level of optimal performance:
- Flow connects you to your passions. When we engage in something that we are passionate about, you are experiencing life to the fullest.
- Flow connects you to your purpose, as flow experiences are deeply meaningful and fulfilling.
- Flow makes you feel great. When you experience positive emotions, those good feelings help you to be more creative, more collaborative and more effective. It helps you to take risks and expand your capacity for courage.
- Flow is inherently pleasurable so you enjoy the process.
- Flow is a growth experience because the more you engage in Flow, the more you challenge yourself and become better at what you do.
- Flow keeps you grounded and in the moment. You experience mindfulness, which is an important part of happiness. Flow helps to build happiness because the process is what matters. The end result of success is a by-product.
- When you engage in Flow, you are tapping into the best part of yourself. You experience greater self-esteem and feel more confident.
- Flow often connects us to other people, which is another aspect of happiness.
In class, we tapped into the experience of Flow through a short meditation. We then captured the experience by having my students share the words that described what they were like in Flow:
Love, resonance, composed, connected, compassion, peace, calm, content, whole, magnetic, confident.
We then turned these words into a Flow Affirmation, starting with the words, “I am ______”, and filling in the blanks with our flow words.
My students report that using their flow words is inspiring them not only in leadership but also in their daily lives. That’s the power of flow!
To discover and tap into your flow, please watch my TEDx Talk “Cracking the Code on Creativity: The Secret to Full-Blast Living.”
- The Growth Mindset
The second aspect of the positive mindset is the growth mindset, an essential element for success. The growth mindset comes to us from Dr. Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
The growth mindset is the belief that your talent and intelligence are the starting points of success and that true success comes from taking risks, learning from mistakes, working hard with smart strategies, and resiliently picking yourself up after your setbacks. In other words, you believe that you can grow and change with experience.
This is in contrast to the fixed mindset, which is grounded in the belief that you are born with a certain amount of unchangeable talent and intelligence. As a result, you rely on talent to get ahead, you are afraid to make mistakes, you avoid taking risks, and you perceive the need to do everything perfectly or else you are a failure.
Dr. Dweck’s research confirms that those with the growth mindset are more resilient, more collaborative and ultimately more successful than people with a fixed mindset.
Developing a growth mindset approach is a 4-step process.
1. Embrace both the fixed and growth mindsets:
We all have fixed mindset thoughts. Those rooted in a growth mindset attitude persist!
2. Understand your fixed mindset:
What triggers your fixed mindset? What does your fixed mindset say to you?
3. Develop strategies to answer back to the fixed mindset:
Here is where you actively develop ways to overcome fixed mindset thoughts and cultivate a growth mindset approach.
4. Make a plan and take growth mindset actions:
It’s not enough to know the theories. You must commit to taking action!
Dr. Dweck has explained the importance of a growth mindset for leadership:
It is not simply asking people to work hard. Instead, it is about helping people to develop their abilities to engage in a process that leads to more positive and creative outcomes, using smart strategies, mentorship, and collaboration.
My students are tracking their growth mindsets by logging their daily risks and mistakes, highlighting their successes, and capturing their learning. This process documents their progress and encourages them to continue exploring, experimenting, learning and growing!
- SPIRE
SPIRE is a multi-dimensional model of well-being, developed by psychologist Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar and his collaborators. It is based on five elements:
S: spiritual well-being
P: physical well-being
I: intellectual well-being
R: relational well-being
E: emotional well-being
In class, we explored how SPIRE connects to positive leadership:
Spiritual Well-being:
We experience spiritual wellbeing when we feel a sense of purpose. I define purpose as how you apply your talents and passions to making the world a better place. For leaders, knowing their purpose provides a deep sense of fulfillment and meaning and helps them to create a vision of what they want the world to look like.
My students are exploring how engaging in the arts fuels their sense of purpose by writing their Life Purpose Statements. I will delve more deeply into Life Purpose in a future post!
Physical Well-being:
Leaders need to maintain their physical and mental health in order to lead from a place of positivity. Our attitudes and perceptions can affect our physical health thanks to the mind-body connection. A great example is how we perceive stress. While many people think of stress as harmful, research shows that stress, when properly managed, is actually good for us since it energizes your mind and body to meet a challenge. Moreover, when you see stress in this light, you become more resilient.
It is how we perceive stress that matters. To learn more, watch Kelly McGonigal’s TED talk on how stress is your friend!
Our students found it helpful to reframe stress in this way since it motivates and gives you confidence to take on more challenges.
Intellectual Well-being:
Intellectual well-being means being curious and open to new experiences. The Growth Mindset is at the heart of intellectual well-being because it taps into curiosity as part of the search for smart strategies and new ways to do things.
Relational Well-being:
Relational well-being involves nurturing strong relationships with others. My students are keenly aware that successful leadership depends on nurturing positive relationships in order to inspire others and work closely together to accomplish great things. They also appreciated learning that the research from the 8-decade Harvard Study of Adult Development shows that having quality relationships with others is the single biggest predictor of happiness.
Emotional Well-being
Emotional wellbeing means that you give yourself permission to be human and experience all of your emotions. Then, you look for ways to bring about more pleasurable emotions. As documented by psychologist Barbara Frederickson, when you experience positive emotions, you are more creative, more collaborative, and more productive. No wonder leaders who experience greater emotional well-being find that they are more effective at work!
The research confirms that one way to experience greater emotional well-being in a professional setting is by expressing gratitude. My students did an exercise in class where they told another student what they appreciated about that person. I even had one student tell me how much he appreciated our class. Everyone, myself included, walked out of class that day feeling very positive!
In short, SPIRE is a powerful leadership tool that is inspiring our students to feel more positive about their lives and their leadership.
Next time, we will take a look at action steps that my students are taking to bring Flow, the Growth Mindset and SPIRE into their lives.