Over a year ago I wrote a piece entitled Having a Growth Mindset in which I defined the term “growth mindset” and provided links to Carol Dweck’s book and research on the topic. If you are a longtime Three Action Thursday (3AT) reader and/or you just know me personally pretty well, you know that personal growth is important to me and is laced throughout much of 3AT’s content. So this week I want to share with you 3AT’s Growth Mindset Audit. It is a quick way to determine where you are in your personal/professional growth journey. **Action: Take the audit and determine your score. Think about where you are in…

I was born in 1980, and my formative years occurred primarily in the 1990s. The (sometimes) poetic lyrics of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. comprised the soundtrack of my middle school and high school years. The United States was transfixed and concerned about NWA’s F*** the Police, then the Los Angeles race riots, and ongoing gang violence remained in the news for nearly a decade. Meanwhile, my middle class, Caucasian self was completely clueless to the true struggles occurring in the inner city outside of the rap lyrics filling my ears. I recently picked up a book called “Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion” by Gregory…

I have struggled with self-limiting thoughts and behaviors. I tend to focus on where I’ve come from, where I went to school, etc. as my identity. As I read more, though, I am starting to realize that past events should not impact my future decisions as much as they do. One’s mind never stops humming in the background. It’s constantly churning out thoughts and interpreting the input it receives from our senses. The very first step towards greater self-knowledge is being able to listen to that background “noise”: to realize how often it is talking and determine how it is affecting our decisions in life. I am just finishing up…

I ran across the following story this past week and I wanted to share it with you. Charles Plumb was a U.S. Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent six years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience. One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”…