The developing world is experiencing a youth bulge, with the majority of this youthful population in sub-Saharan Africa. In Uganda, youth account for more than 70% of the population. It is vital to empower this population of youth to gain the demographic dividend. The effect of a positive mindset on empowerment outcomes has been demonstrated, and the concept of mindset has been part of Ugandan youth empowerment ediscourse in the last decade but without clearly operationalising it. Several contemporary theories on mindset exist in the field of psychology; they view the mind and, therefore, mindset as the interior processes of a single individual. At the root of these theories is the assumption that the human “mind” can be measured and explained through experimental psychology, which emphasises the use of natural science principles applied to humans, to the exclusion of cultural influences. I argue that these conceptualisations of mindset do not provide an appropriate approach to understanding mindsets in an African context like Uganda, whose socio-cultural fabric upholds the aspects of community and “Ubuntu”. I propose a conceptualisation of youth mindsets from a socio-cultural perspective based on Bakhtin’s dialogical view of the mind, which explains the mind as emerging from narratives within the socio-cultural context. In this paper, I describe the methods I used to carry out a narrative exploration of youth mindsets using both structural and dialogical narrative approaches, thus operationalising the term mindset in context.