How to change your mindset and get better at the things you care about

Hard work is not a foreign concept for many SME owners, but there’s nothing worse than devoting time and energy into performing at a high level but getting nowhere.

So when Eduardo Briceño, co-founder of mindset training company Mindset Works was confronted with this very situation, he decided to make a change.

Addressing an audience at a TED Talk in Manhattan at the end of 2016, Briceño shared some insights into what business owners can do to get better at what they care about.

“What I’ve learned is that the most effective people and teams in any domain do something we can all emulate. They go through life deliberately alternating between two zones: the learning zone and the performance zone,” Briceño said.

“The learning zone is when our goal is to improve. Then we do activities designed for improvement, concentrating on what we haven’t mastered yet.”

“Our performance zone [is where] our goal is to do something as best as we can, to execute. Then we concentrate on what we have already mastered and we try to minimise mistakes.”

Briceño says striking a balance between these two “zones” can lead to higher performance in what you do now and into the future. While the performance zone “maximises our immediate performance”, the learning zone “maximises our growth and our future performance”.

Watch Briceño’s TED Talk below.

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