Hi I’m KJ Walton founder of Growth Mindset by KJ Walton.

I am passionate about our Mindsets and the implications that the Mindset we approach life with, which can vary dramatically throughout the day, can have on us and our lives. I’m so passionate about this and spreading the message and encouraging the practice of trying to live in a way that has Growth Mindset values at its heart that I have written three books about it and the forth is in production and I hope it won’t be long until I can tell you more about that and show you the finished book!

I’ve been working with Mindset principles for the last nine years and started my journey in schools as a teacher, surrounding children with messages and behaviours that all go to creating a culture where consideration of our Mindsets is forefront of everything that’s done day to day in the classroom. I then considered this culture within a school and more recently from a parental perspective now having my own daughter who is three. It is so important that the Mindset children develop in relation to learning is established early in their learning life because it will help them to self-regulate and provide them the tools to motivate themselves, even in times of struggle, of which there will be many, as learning is messy.

I have always considered that a very large proportion of getting children into exhibiting more Growth Mindset behaviours and being more able to spot when they are being Fixed Mindset is about the level of parental understanding about Mindset that parents possess. Inadvertently, parents could easily transmit messages that put children into a Fixed Mindset and if this is done repeatedly, this could have a very adverse effect on how children come to regard themselves as learners and subsequently behave.

Along my journey over the years, I have come to realise that there are many subtleties to the Mindset theory in practice and often, when people say they understand it, their actions often contradict this.

There are so many facets that weave into each other and my journey has been about finding creative ways to unpick what the Mindset theory is all about and how to interpret that into effective practice in real life.  It hugely impacts on daily life and by unpicking what Mindset theory is all about, we can learn to notice moments in our life where our Mindset can heavily influence how we choose to respond to learning situations. Once you understand the different facets you will start to see how they play out in our lives constantly and really affect how we live our lives – when we are in a Fixed Mindset, much less is achieved than when we find ourselves in the Growth Mindset which makes so much more possible. This impacts on our mental well-being and therefore applying Mindset principles to our everyday life and the way we live is going to be hugely beneficial to our mental health.

Where my target has largely been children, I am now looking to expand this understanding out to parents and other adults, particularly those supporting children but actually we all need to understand how our Mindsets work and spot triggers that push us into a Fixed Mindset because being in a Fixed Mindset can be debilitating and stunts achievement in certain areas. The likelihood is that if you easily fell into a Fixed Mindset as a child, you have kept hold of the habits into adulthood and that is when your life can have been severely impacted. That is why getting children to be aware of the Mindsets they fall into is the first step to managing it and the subsequent actions they may take as they get older. My own life has changed dramatically in response to my awareness of my own Mindset. Having understanding of what the two different Mindsets are allows me to recognise when I am being more fixed and therefore I can choose to react in a different way because I know being fixed does not help me to get better and make progress. Information is power!

The videos that you will see on this channel are my exploration of what it means to be Fixed and Growth Mindset and how an understanding of words and behaviours go to impact whether we fall into a Growth or Fixed Mindset in significant ways and those are words and behaviours that can be used by those around you. The material is intended to be informative and go some way to exploring how the Mindset theory translates into our real lives – and it really does. Small behaviours can have huge impacts, especially if repeated over and over but hopefully that is what you will come to see.