Entrepreneurial Mindset for Transformative Education with Stephen Carter

In a classic Biblical teaching, we are encouraged to look to the ants in order to learn wisdom. Based on the teaching of Jim Rohn, there are two key attributes that ants can teach us that directly contribute to our ongoing development of the entrepreneurial mindset. When we apply these teachings, wisdom supercharges our growth.

What do rocks have to do with goal setting? Everything, it turns out.  Going back to Stephen Covey's famous "put first things first" habit, rocks became synonymous with the big, important things in life that often get set aside for the less important "whirlwind" of the everyday. Gino Wickman in the book, Traction, explains how setting rocks, or quarterly goals, will directly relate to accomplishing yearly goals which will directly relate to accomplishing big, lofty ten year goals. The truth is in the system, and this system works for schools, businesses, and individuals. 

Let's work "on" instead of "in" our email. Some time management professionals will tell you to ignore email as much as possible or only look at it once a day. Often this results, however, in missing an important or urgent issue that needs to be addressed.

My preferred method harkens back to Stephen Covey. He shares the power of the Eisenhower Matrix (pictured below) in assuming control of one’s time. The matrix is a simple but powerful tool which, if correctly implemented, yields enormous benefit in helping us to prioritize.

Using four quadrants (urgent and important, not urgent and important, urgent and not important, not urgent and not important), the matrix allows us to filter incoming tasks and requests and ideas into the areas they belong. We are encouraged, by Covey, to “live” in the second quadrant—not urgent and important—as this is where our goals and dreams and ambitions are accomplished.

Ready to get fired up with some inspiration for you day? How about the story of a group of high school students who rallied behind a Wildly Important Goal to create a new business venture that fueled them with ownership and confidence? This is the stuff of the entrepreneurial mindset and this is what innovative education is all about. Let's Go!

Ready to supercharge your growth and development? Want to dive in to growth mindset, grit, redefining failure, and opportunity seeking? Subscribe to this podcast to get inspired and help radically transform yourself and the people in your life.

We all innately understand the value of becoming grittier but often we fall into the trap of assuming grit is an innate, fixed trait. Thanks to the growth mindset, however, we can dive into the way in which grit can be developed over time. A key technique for this is in goal setting. By setting goals in our own lives and by helping the students and children in our lives do the same, we become grittier as a by-product. Listen in to discover how.

We hear a lot these days about personal growth but if we don't have a plan for our growth, our growth will be undirected and haphazard. Having a plan means looking at all key aspects of our life--intellectual, relational, spiritual, physical, financial, and vocational--and setting key goals for our growth in those areas. This is about achieving balanced growth that is clearly directed toward our vision and it is as important for us as it is for the students in our classrooms.

So we have a mission, a vision, and core values for our organization (be it a business, church, or school). Before we congratulate ourselves, however, let's ask how deeply it has infiltrated each and everything we do. Does everyone know the mission, vision, and values? Does everyone live it out? When we have clarity around this and when we hold each other accountable to the mission, vision, and values, we set the level of its important--and it's incredibly important because it answers WHY. If we are going to help students determine their WHY, we need to make sure we are truly living ours.

Our students are bored--they are disengaged, listless, and disruptive in the classroom. And the issue is us as educators. Tough pill to swallow, I know, but if we help our students connect the WHY of education to the reality of practical training toward future success, we can create opportunities for them to engage in their learning and see the true value.

This episode explains the four primary attributes at work in the entrepreneurial mindset--growth mindset, grit, redefining failure, and opportunity seeking. When these are working together, we are ready for anything.