This episode is part of the Happiness Reset at Work campaign, where Klaudia introduces you to 5 drivers that contribute to building more satisfaction in our careers so that you can reconnect and re-energise with your work in 2025. 

The 5th and final driver of happiness at work is Mastery.

This episode focuses on practical strategies to cultivate mastery at work by embracing a growth mindset.

Klaudia discusses the importance of viewing challenges and setbacks as opportunities for learning and improvement, contrasting this with a fixed mindset that limits potential.

She offers three actionable ideas for learning in the flow of work.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Happiness Reset at four campaign, part of the Happiness Challenge Podcast. I'm your host Klaudia, and this campaign is all about five drivers that contribute to building more satisfaction in our careers.

Follow me on LinkedIn and subscribe to my Substack newsletter for topic summaries and free tickets to my February webinar about the happiness at work.

Also, Remember to visit happinesschallenge.co.uk courses to learn more about my new online program to help you to create an action plan for more fulfillment and impact at work. And in this short episode, I share some practical hacks to create more mastery at work.

As a reminder, mastery is all about engaging in work that aligns with your strengths while simultaneously seeking out opportunities for learning and growth.

If you would like to understand more about mastery, listen to episode 145 and I really don't believe that this is almost it's almost the end of our campaign.

So let's now get practical of how can we create more mastery of work by learning more often now, there are different factors that impact whether we are keen to learn at work and grow new skills or we tend to stay in our comfort zone. And one of the most crucial factors is about mindset.

So based on extensive research on intelligence and achievement, Professor Carol Dweck distinguished two types of mindset. We have a fixed mindset, Know it All and growth mindset Learn it All.

And in the fixed fixed mindset, Know it All, we believe that our skills cannot be changed. So we spend quite lots of time and energy on proving to people that we are right.

We are the expert rather than getting feedback and learning from our errors. And we are gripped by the tyranny of now. Whatever we now know is what limits us. Opposite to that, we have a growth mindset Learn it all.

And when we have that mindset, we invest our time and efforts into stretching our abilities and viewing often our small failures at work as opportunities to learn and improve our career prospects.

And in this mindset we believe that our skills are not fixed, they can be improved with effort and solutions are out there, we just haven't found them yet. And Carol Dweck calls this approach the power of yet. We just don't know things yet.

We just haven't found the solution yet because we know we are on a learning curve and adopting a growth mindset help us to create more mastery at work and achieve more happiness at work. It will help us apply the current strengths to new settings and also it can help us to develop new skills.

So how can we apply the growth mindset at work? Here are my three ideas for you to try. Number one is Learning from feedback.

I feel personally that we often shy away from receiving feedback in case, let's be honest, we hear something we don't like. But asking for feedback? Yes, it takes courage. But from a growth perspective, mindset feedback is data for our development.

Aim to ask at least once a month for a feedback. It could be on your current work. It could be about what other skills you could learn. It could be about specific strengths that other people see.

It doesn't really matter, but what's very much important is that we getting into a routine of asking for feedback. Second idea for action is set specific learning goals. Often our learning at work is missed because we don't make it specific enough.

I really think it's about the idea that things are vague and we just don't know where to start. And then hey, there is always something else to do.

And vague learning goals such as communication skills, leadership are just such a big concept that we don't even know where to start. Leadership, where do we start?

And growth mindset recognizes that we can always build on existing skills and we can always have specific learning goals that can help us to do so.

For example, improving communication skills can be transformed into learning goal of when presenting, aim not to use as a pause between sentences or I want to learn three methods of how to tell a story when presenting data. Or speak to three experts on negotiation and try their advice in the next board meeting. You can see very specific, very realistic learning goals.

Make sure that we take our mastery at work to the next level because we exactly know what we want to learn and we can easily implement that. And the final idea for action is introduce the concept of microlearning.

Since we are short on time, learning doesn't have to be about adding additional pressure. It doesn't only have to be about qualification or courses. It can be about consistency of learning in short 10 minutes bursts of time.

So this could really look like reading one article on a current issue in your sector or having a quick few minutes reflection of what you have learned last week or asking a mentor or a trusted colleague for advice on a specific issue. And those micro moments of learning truly adapt across the week, ensuring that you are learning consistently and you creating more mastery.

So really, your three ideas for action are to create more mastery at work and to adopt the growth mindset by asking for regular feedback, setting those specific learning goals and introducing micro learning for you into your schedule.

Now the final tip for me that I always feel it's very valuable is to write down what you are learning, what progress you are making, what strengths are you enhancing? And writing down things is really important, but especially in this context, it creates your career capital or a career portfolio.

And this is always very useful to have at hand when applying for new opportunities, pitching your ideas to the business, negotiating a pay rise. It's very difficult to recall across the year, what have I learned, what things have changed.

Having things written down already, writing them regularly when you are learning in the flow. It's so powerful and so helpful. So thank you for listening to the Happiness Reset campaign at work.

I hope to see you at the next and final episode again. I just don't believe that we're arriving at the end of the campaign.

In the next and final episode, I'll be Talking to Aoife O'Brien from Happier at Work podcast about strengths at work. As always, I'll be truly grateful if you could subscribe to my podcast and newsletter so you don't miss out on any future content.

Thank you again for listening and I dare you to be happy. Bye.