The What’s My Mindset Activity is a visual, self-reflection tool. It gives you a structured way to name, examine, question, and reshape your mindset in your own words. Ready to be applied in workshops, projects, and coaching sessions worldwide, it turns what is sometimes treated as a vague concept into a clear, actionable one.
We sometimes talk about mindset as a single or binary idea, such as having a “growth mindset“ or an “agile mindset.” However, over a century of mindset research and practice reveals it is so much more. Emerging, field-wide research is supporting a new generation of approaches.
At its heart, a mindset is a “set” of many qualities. The big four of these qualities are beliefs, values, paradigms, and worldviews. The open umbrella metaphor acts as a unifying metaphor: it visually holds this “set” of qualities together, and helps you explore how its dimensions combine to create the overall mindset you embody.
The activity can help you, or the people you teach, coach, or lead:
- Understand mindset as a set of qualities, beyond single or binary types.
- Discern between beliefs, values, paradigms, and worldviews.
- Describe your own mindset in your own words.
- Reflect on how your mindset may want to change.
The activity takes between 15–60 minutes. It can be done individually, such as to help address a challenge you’re facing, or navigate a change you’d like to make. Collectively, it could be used as part of your next team meeting or the kick-off for a new project. Doing this activity could be the difference between going into a situation with mindset awareness and going in blind. It can help you embrace a more flexible mindset and open up to new ways of seeing, thinking, and acting.
Let’s talk
Want help bringing this activity to your team or project? Ash Buchanan spent a decade exploring how the collective knowledge of the mindset sciences can be applied in real-world settings. He offers trainings, learning partnerships, and project support, to help you turn insights into action.
