Inspiring Confidence, Fostering Success, and Empowering the Future
Have you ever wondered…How entrepreneurs thrive through failure and rejection? How they recognize opportunities & take initiative? How they innovate in the face of challenges? Or how they stay optimistic when the outcome is negative & uncertain?
With an entrepreneurial resilient mindset.
Now, you can learn the tools to build this mindset.
Join us for an upcoming workshop where you will be introduced to our Girl Gonna Launch mindset curriculum teaches failure resilience, shame resilience, and growth mindset.
Our mindset helps girls explore who or what they want to be now and in the world. And it can help girls become successful entrepreneurs, innovators, and changemakers, making the world a better place wherever they go.
Unfortunately, you cannot wave a magic wand or tell someone to get the right mindset and assume it will just come through divine intervention.
It needs to be taught.
The good news: Girl Gonna Launch has proven it can be taught.
Developed over years of research and practice, our mindset curriculum combines research, theory, real-life entrepreneurial stories, and experiential classroom exercises, ensuring students learn both the theory and the practice. It is built upon the research and literature of Drs. Martin Seligman, Carol Dweck, Brene Brown, Karen Reivich, and Adam Grant.
We developed and taught the mindset curriculum in the classroom, and now we are bringing it out of the ivory tower and into the world to help tween and teen girls succeed in school and in life.
In middle school, girls stand on the precipice of self-discovery and development.
And according to extensive research, confidence drops for girls as they enter puberty; the exact age we meet our students. Teaching middle school girls the entrepreneurship mindset can build their confidence and spark the confidence that they can achieve anything they set their minds to.
When I was leading the college entrepreneurship and innovation program, we tracked resiliency starting when students entered as first years in our intro class and then reassessed students at our capstone class when they’re juniors or seniors.
Students enrolled in our intro class where they took a baseline assessment of their resilience via a 72-question survey. Then, we reassessed the students via the same survey in our capstone class.
As part of this self-assessment, we asked students to report on the following dimensions:
Emotional Regulation
Impulse Control
Optimism
Causal Analysis
Empathy
Self-efficacy
Reaching Out
Growth Mindset
Professional Skills
Fearless Asking
Entrepreneurial Endurance
We used the trailblazing work of Karen Reivich to develop this assessment.
Let's explore why this matters…
Growth Mindset: The Key to Building Girls’ Confidence
Middle school is a critical time for self-esteem development (or loss!) It's a period when girls may start to encounter stereotypes and societal expectations that can falsely limit their potential and hide it away. Teaching a growth mindset can break these barriers. A growth mindset encourages the view that effort and perseverance are the pathways to success. By instilling the belief that abilities, like entrepreneurship and innovation, can be developed through effort, girls are more likely to challenge stereotypes and pursue subjects and careers traditionally considered male-dominated.
But according to the creator of the growth mindset, Carol Dweck, you need the right teacher for the growth mindset to take hold and be effective. You need a teach who has a growth a mindset and fosters it in the classroom.
In a growth mindset, mistakes and failures are not viewed as a referendum on you, but as opportunities for growth. Middle school girls are often hesitant to take risks for fear of failing or looking foolish in front of their peers. However, with a growth mindset, they can reframe setbacks as part of the learning process. They do this by using our failure reframe matrix. This attitude encourages resilience and a willingness to step outside of their comfort zone.
Shame: The Gremlin Keeping You Small
The link between failure and innovation is inescapable and research shows that learning from previous failures is positively correlated with entrepreneurial success. But we cannot overlook shame’s role here. Because shame is a secret killer of innovation.
Shames makes us afraid to be seen. Shame tethers what we create to our identity. It keeps us small and afraid of sharing our creation or idea with the world out of fear for how it (and thus, we) will be judged. But we are more than our innovative idea or our pitch or our product. We are not defined by what we create. If we conflate our identity with what we create, we will feel a tsunami of shame if/when someone rejects it
When we make a mistake or do something wrong, shame tells us that there is something wrong with us or we are a bad, stupid, (fill in the blank) person.
We have found that students are so wrapped up in shame they cannot even see it. Our shame resilience readings, discussions, and activities have an impact on our students who have experienced shame but lacked the tools or language to properly articulate and address it. Allowing them an outlet to discuss and process shame both in the classroom and through reflective essays appears to be cathartic, especially as it relates to social media.
And this resilience liberates them to put their ideas out into the world.
The Other ”F” Word: How Entrepreneurs Turn Failure from Regret to Resource
The path to success is often paved with setbacks, challenges, and failures. Entrepreneurs must be prepared to weather storms, adapt to changing markets, and bounce forward by learning from failures. Resilience is the ability to keep moving forward in the face of adversity, to find creative solutions to problems, and to persevere when others might give up. It's this unwavering determination that can turn obstacles into opportunities and setbacks into successes.
Failure resilience is the capacity to embrace failure as a learning experience, rather than a referendum on you. Successful entrepreneurs view each setback as an opportunity to gather insights, adjust strategies, and evolve. They understand that failure is not the end but a crucial step on the path to success.
Thomas Edison exemplified this failure-resilient mindset when he famously said: "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Why These Qualities Are Crucial for Success
The entrepreneurial landscape is rife with uncertainty, risk, and unpredictability. That’s why having the right mindset matters.
As the rate of change continues to accelerate in the 21st century, the mindset curriculum helps students learn to cope with ambiguity, uncertainty, and risk. Studying entrepreneurship and innovation is not just about starting a business, it is about having the ability to analyze, adapt, innovate, create value, see opportunities, make change happen, and advocate for yourself and your ideas.
Students who develop a shame resilient, failure resilient, and growth mindset are more likely to:
Innovate: The fear of shame can drive creative thinking and the pursuit of unique solutions.
Adapt: Resilience enables entrepreneurs to pivot and adjust to changing circumstances, staying relevant in a dynamic marketplace.
Gain Perspective: Failure resilience ensures that mistakes and setbacks become stepping stones, not stumbling blocks.
Embrace Discomfort: We are wired to avoid discomfort and yet so much of the good stuff happens outside our comfort zone in what’s known as our learning or stretch zone; discomfort it a sign you are learning, ease it not
Persist: Students learn to believe in themselves and their ideas and push forward in the face of adversity and strong headwinds
Advocate: Students learn to have agency, to fearlessly ask for help, and to begin building a network of support
We know that entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. Success often hinges on the ability to transform problems into opportunities, adversity into motivation, resilience into strength, and failures into valuable lessons. These qualities are not just essential for surviving as an entrepreneur, but for building a life worth living and a business worth leading.
In our workshops, we teach students how to think like innovators, changemakers, and entrepreneurs, building the necessary foundation to not only build a business, but also to make real change happen in the real world.
Girl Gonna Launch Workshops’ Empowers Middle School Girls
As Carol Dwesk and others have made clear, the learning environment truly matters. Our workshops provide a supportive learning environment that embraces discomfort and ambiguity, reframes failures and setbacks, rewards effort over perfection, and empowers girls to dream BIG.
This quote by Michell Clark sums it up:
“Be the person who still tries.
After failure, after frustration, after disappointment, after exhaustion, after heartache, be the person who musters up the courage to believe that a new attempt can manifest a new outcome. Be the person who still tries.”
See it. Be it.
We share positive stories of successful female entrepreneurs, both within and outside the classroom, so that girls can see what is possible. We like to call this See it. Be it.
When middle school girls are taught to nurture this resilient mindset, the effects ripple through their lives and communities. They are more likely to:
Excel Academically: A growth mindset can improve their grades and overall academic performance.
Pursue STEM Fields: Encouraged by the belief that they can excel in traditionally male-dominated fields, more girls can see many paths for themselves, including STEM careers.
Set Ambitious Goals: With a growth mindset, they are more likely to set ambitious personal and career goals and take the necessary steps to achieve them.
Succeed in College and in Life: Students how to take initiative and see a project through to completion.
Advocate for Themselves and What They Believe In: Our mindsets teach girls self-efficacy, better self-awareness, and a willingness to examine and question the status quo.
Detect Opportunities: Having a positive and curious attitude means they look at world with a design thinking mindset seeing problems as opportunities for design.
This is the scaffolding for their future success.
We want girls to believe in themselves and their potential and to develop the confidence needed to thrive in the world. By teaching the mindset curriculum, we are not only shaping better students but also nurturing the confident, resilient, and empowered leaders of tomorrow. It's a change that benefits not just the individual but the entire community and society as a whole.
Sources:
Kay, K. (2018). The confidence code for girls: Taking risks, messing up, and becoming your amazingly imperfect, totally powerful self. HarperCollinsPublishers.
MacBride, Elizabeth. “Repeat Entrepreneurs Are More Successful: Are entrepreneurs born or made? New research by Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Kathryn Shaw adds to the evidence on the "made" side of the column”. Inc Magazine, 13 October 2014