The Missing Ingredient to Skills Growth: Belief Setting
Developers need better Psychology, too. Here's how.
Most developers struggle with learning new skills. They think this has to do with not having the right tools or education in front of them.
But in today’s world, with more free and paid education options than ever, this is showing itself not to be true. If you really wanted to learn a new skill, you’d have a dozen ways to make it happen.
Something else is getting in the way.
Based on my hundreds of meetings with junior to principle engineers, I have found that often having crappy beliefs, and one’s inability to change that, is what stops most developers from making the changes to build great skills.
These crappy beliefs are what holds people back from getting better salaries, faster career advancement and even great positions. They know what they need to learn but can’t follow through with the learning.
Today we’re going to talk about what we can do with that.
Most developers believe that they don’t really have to care about mindset. That it’s good for losing weight or ‘self-help’ people, but doesn’t have a lot of relevance to hard technical careers like software development.
But this just isn’t true for a number of reasons:
Your beliefs affect everything about your life, from the way you feel when you get up in the morning to how you deal with bad news. If your strategy for learning news skills in a new domain keep failing, it’s almost always due to a limiting belief somewhere under the hood, whether you’re failing to lose weight or failing to improve your career.
Most people want to make a dramatic change to their life. If you’re a developer, this often means that you want a new job, bigger salary or even starting a company. But each of these changes requires a new set of skills, sometimes skills that are in conflict with the person you are today. Being a principle engineer is a different ball game than a junior engineer. If you don’t have an effective way to swap your beliefs, you’re going to experience a lot of pain in your transition, and maybe even self-sabotage.
Mindset shift is so foundational that it’s often the easiest place to start your skills growth. If you started a diet with the belief “I need to have dessert every night”, you’d be much better replacing that belief than spending potentially dozens of hours fighting your ‘urge’ to eat sweets. Making the transition to better beliefs for your technical career is just as important.
If you want replace your crappy beliefs with stronger beliefs to aide your skills growth, here’s what you’re going to do:
Identify one area you want to get better in and examine your beliefs in that area. Let’s say you are a great Javascript developer but want to get better at marketing yourself. The easiest way to start marketing is to just start posting your stuff consistently on Twitter or LinkedIn. It is that easy, but what’s stopping you? General it’s a negative belief that people aren’t interested in your work or that others will hate what you build. Or maybe you’re not good at writing. These are the beliefs that are stopping you from doing the things to actually GET better at marketing. Identifying what that belief is, in plain english, is the first step.
Flip the script on your belief by finding an empowering belief to replace it. If you believe “no one wants to see my CLI code”, you can create a new belief that says “showing my code will help others build better”. The goal is to not find a belief you already believe, but to find a belief that will be useful to you. The best beliefs are ones that successful people you want to be like would believe in. In plain english, find one belief you wish to have in your life.
Start to question your old belief. This may be painful, because you may have a very strongly held belief that will take some time to undermine. Ask yourself critical questions of your old belief, like asking “Is it true that no one really wants to see my code?”. The truth is that people do want to see your code (I do!), so it’s not really true. You may also ask questions like “What am I losing financially by holding onto this belief?”. So long as you’re undermining the support for this belief (logically and emotionally), you’ll start to open the door to a new belief. Keep asking yourself questions to make your beliefs critical.
Finally, start to ask yourself questions to re-enforce the new belief you have. You want to ask leading questions that will naturally lead you to start drawing connections. One question I like is “What would I gain from this financially if I believed this?”, or “How has this been true in the past?”. You’re forcing your brain to come up with ideas on why this belief is not only a good idea, but actually true! Do this enough, and you’ve started creating pathways to your new belief.
Once you’ve done this with the right belief, you’ll start to find that learning the skills to become better at skills you might have been previously resistant to become easier. This is because you’ve destroyed the natural resistance your engineering skills have put up against your skills.
If you need a boost to your career, you’re in the right place! I help technical professionals increase their salaries, build their entrepreneurial opportunities and craft a career worth having. To get more great insights into what it takes to make the most out of your career, sign up here!