In my quest to build my Growth Mindset business, I have been thinking carefully about the values that are important to my brand.

This has come as part of the process of thinking about my vision and resulting mission (statement).

This is an interesting exercise to go through and it really helps to establish why you exist and what you are trying to do. You think this is easy to say but in practice, writing it down in a clear and concise way is challenging but extremely helpful. This is where I am at so far:

Vision:

To enable children to be supported in developing resilience and self-regulation skills for learning that will support their ability to thrive in education and beyond.

Mission:

To support the significant adults in children's lives to create environments every day where children love the challenge of learning by bringing the science of learning to life in delightful and interesting ways.

I have been on my crispy frazzled edge with this process, if I am honest, largely because I was finding it difficult to pin down my audience. As my teaching and parental experience suggests, my foremost focus is children and that's where the impact should lie. However, in order to influence children's learning mindsets you must first reach adults and get them to consider their own learning mindsets as this is the foundation of any influence on children. There is a lot of science to reveal and that is where the adults understanding is crucial. What we say and do has a huge influence on how our children come to regard themselves as learners; it is this that subsequently affects their learning behaviour.

This is most certainly the case when it comes to learning mindsets because value systems, on which the Growth Mindset theory relies, are where beliefs are formed; beliefs drive our mindsets. Moreover, there are more than one type of adult that would be of influence on children. Therefore, it is not as easy to suggest that it is parents and carers that are the audience. The term 'significant adults' is what I have used for this reason. This could encompass teachers, coaches and other adult influencers.

My audience is therefore layered and multi-faceted - well that makes life easy!! Ultimately, it is the children that lie at the end of this process. What I like about all this is that adults get to do some work on their own Mindsets in order to develop healthy learning Mindsets in their children - two for the price of one! What you discover along the way is truly fascinating and largely goes against the ways that most us have been brought up in the past, much of which is hugely damaging to the beliefs we start to carve out of ourselves as learners. We then perpetuate this as parents ourselves - the cycle needs to break. We need to fix our own learning insecurities (such as the development of perfectionism) and stop encouraging them in our children.