Manufacturing Your Mindset

MANUFACTURING YOUR MINDSET

Life over the past 12 months has been rather surreal. The world changed almost overnight, with freedoms and many of life’s pleasures being seemingly ‘taken away’ in a scenario much more akin to a movie than real life.

While the focus has predominantly been on people’s physical health, more recently the conversation has moved to focus much more on mental health and wellbeing. With Lockdown 3 hitting the UK, people seem to be increasingly – and understandably – struggling to adhere to the old British adage of ‘keeping a stiff upper lip’.

With the overwhelming amount of coverage on traditional and social media, it’s no wonder that many of us feel like there is no escape.

Here at White Label, we understand that we can’t eradicate COVID-19 overnight, but we do think that we can help people to create a positive mindset wherever possible. As ever, we greatly care about our employee’s mindsets and how they are coping. Read on to find out more about the recent steps we’ve taken.

#MakingPeopleBetter

The White Label campaign of #MakingPeopleBetter isn’t just a marketing ploy but is a real and long-lasting commitment to provide our employees and clients with useful and implementable information that can be used in both their professional and personal lives.

Our areas of speciality are within the Manufacturing and Engineering industries and predominantly focused on the Design Engineering, Quality Engineering and Technical Sales markets and our hope is that our positivity will spread to all these sectors.

The team’s recent effort in this regard was to hold some internal personal and professional training with coaching expert Kathy Brooke. The session focused on mindset hacks, NLP skills, business and communications skills and wellbeing for employees – all the things you need to manufacture a positive mindset.

It turns out that we’re not the only ones who are prioritising this at the moment. A recent poll of more than 500 HR decision-makers by industry body Group Risk Development (GRiD) found that ‘six in 10 (63%) employers have increased support to staff across one or more areas of mental, financial, physical and social wellbeing as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, with mental health considered the top priority.’

It appears that employers are also taking on more accountability for the mental health of their staff, with the poll finding that half of firms (48%) feel more responsible for employee mental wellbeing now than before the onset of the pandemic.

Here at White Label, we think that this can only be a good thing!
At the end of the day, you can’t keep being told to just ‘be positive’. A lot of the time, ‘being positive’ takes real work, real investment and real skill.

Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset

In our training with Kathy, we learnt a great deal about the benefits of a Growth Mindset as opposed to a fixed one.

According to Stanford researcher and growth mindset specialist, Carol Dweck, “a growth mindset enables us to engage with challenges rather than freeze out of fear”. People, and companies, who are able to overcome this ‘primary response’ will often be able to achieve higher levels of adaptability, learning agility, resilience and engagement.

Kathy taught our teams that a Fixed Mindset is when someone:

•  Feels like a failure if something doesn’t go right
• Believes talent is fixed
• Doesn’t like challenges
•  Thinks potential is predetermined
• Takes feedback and criticism personally
• Gives up easily
• Believes there is one fixed way of doing things

Whereas a Growth Mindset is someone who:

• Loves a challenge and problem solving
• Believes talent is developed and harnessed
• Learns through feedback
• Explores the opportunities failure brings
• Asks for help
•  Is inspired by others

There are certain things you can do to set yourself up for success, such as:

• Setting daily targets/tasks
• Allowing for change over time
• Allowing for stress
• Staying accountable
• Communicating Being realistic

If you are able to develop a Growth Mindset, then you will be able to relish challenges instead of fearing them and will see failure as an opportunity to learn rather than a disaster to be ran from.

When embraced properly, a Growth Mindset will allow you to identify new ways of overcoming problems as you will explore new resources and be more creative in order to reach your goal. It seems realistic to imagine that if a whole company can manufacture this way of thinking then their potential will be huge.

How to embrace a Growth Mindset

At the end of the day, having a Growth Mindset is not something we are magically born with, but something that we need to work on every day. By making small and regular changes we believe that our employees and clients across the manufacturing industry will be able to achieve this enviable state of being.

A Mindset is not changed overnight. Here at White Label, we intend to celebrate the highs and lows of getting there, while continuing to communicate with everyone in our network about the process and journey we all need to take.

As Mark Zuckerberg shrewdly said: “The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that’s changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.“

In these uncertain times, we believe there has never been a truer word said. How will you join us in this risky business of manufacturing a new mindset?