Mindsets

The power of understanding your mind.

I completed Dr. Carol Dweck’s book Mindset last week.  It is one of the best books I’ve read this year.  The information and explanations in it really helped me to understand some of the baffling and frustrating ways that people, and I, approach life’s challenges.

I have to credit social media and my broader network for pointing this work out to me.  I listen to many podcasts and I heard her interviewed about the book on several over the last couple years.

This is one of the powerful things about social media. We have these individuals who curate that vast ocean of available information for us.  We have the opportunity to cultivate relationships, albeit one–way and anonymous, with those people whose curation skills align with our needs.

It’s like having an outer ring to your circle of influence that you can leverage to find insights that you might not otherwise have found.  The key is to get these insights filtered so that you don’t get drowned in information.

Dr. Dweck speaks about two different mindsets; growth and fixed.  She gives great examples of how we learn to adopt one or the other in our approach.  She gives great examples of how they manifest.  Most importantly she explains how to unlearn or relearn your mindset through practice.

What is the basic difference between a fixed and a growth mindset?  A fixed mindset thinks that things are set the way they are and can’t be changed.  A growth mindset believes that things can always be improved or changed.

The glaring example for me was thinking that people are born with a certain amount of some attribute and that really can’t be changed.  When you think in this fixed way it severely limits what you can and will do with your life.

From the introduction of the book, here’s an exercise.  Would you agree or disagree with the following statements?

Agree or Disagree?

• Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can’t change very much.

Agree or Disagree?

• You can learn new things, but you can’t really change how intelligent you are.

Agree or Disagree?

• No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.

Agree or Disagree?

• You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.

If you agree with the first two statements, that you are born with a certain intelligence and it can’t be changed much, that is a fixed mindset.  If you agree with the second two statements, that is a growth mindset.

It’s worth noting that a fixed mindset isn’t just about intelligence.  You can change the word “intelligence” with “athletic ability” or “math skills” or “Empathy” or “relationship skills” or any other area of your life.

You can have degrees of fixed or growth across the different areas of your life.  You may think intelligence is fixed but athletic ability can be developed.  You can look for those trigger thoughts across everything you do.

The reason I loved Dr. Dweck’s work is that I saw myself and my thought patterns immediately and was surprised at how fixed I was! This was an epiphany for me right out of the gate.  Those statements about being born smart clearly defined a fixed mindset I had around this.

Why do you care about fixed versus growth mindsets?  Because your mindset colors the way you interact with the world.

First, if you have a fixed mindset you think there isn’t enough to go around.  This causes you to defend what you have above all else.  You will be jealous when others succeed because this means there is less for you.

Second, if you believe that you are naturally endowed with certain capabilities you run away from situations that may threaten this view of yourself.  If you have defined yourself as naturally athletic and find yourself in a position where you are struggling you will give up when it gets hard.  The inner logic is “If I’m naturally good at this, it should be easy.  This is hard so I’m not going to do it.”

This causes all sorts of simply awful and self-destructive behavior.  Instead of rising to a challenge and learning something new and getting that much better, you will make excuses and run from challenges.  You will cheat.  You will take credit for other people’s work.  You will try to drag down others who are having success.  You will try to find the easy path.  All of that just because of the way your mindset has developed.

When setbacks and challenges happen to fixed mindset people they take it personally.  Getting passed over for that job doesn’t mean they should understand why they were passed over and use that knowledge to work on it and get better for next time…no…getting passed over is a direct assault on their core personal image.  It means that that there were obviously politics involved and they got screwed over, or worse it means that they are a bad person and they should just give up trying.

How do you get a fixed mindset?  You get it from a well-meaning environment.  When you get praised for being good or smart as your brain is developing you learn to value the ‘smartness’ above the effort.  The result above the process.  This makes you less able to grow and learn.

When I was growing up the prevailing popular parenting method for the baby boomers was praise.  My sister will laugh when she hears this.  “Russell kids are the smartest kids.”

To enhance a growth mindset you instead praise the process.  “I’m proud of how hard you worked on this.  You really took that challenge as a learning experience.”

Enough on the fixed side.  What about growth?

A growth mindset leans into the challenge.  A growth mindset says “I may not be able to do it well now, but that can change!”

I’ll give a personal example. If you had asked me when I was a kid whether I was athletic I would have said “Clearly NO!” This is one of the reasons qualifying for Boston changed me so much – it blew up my fixed mindset around my athleticism and I began to think “If I can do this, then what other assumptions have I been making in my life that are wrong?”

You can see it in many of the transformational stories that we hear here – people use endurance sports to break their fixed frame and they blossom in other areas.

Dr. Dweck goes on to describe how a fixed vs growth mindset impacts your attitude about sports, business and schoolwork.  In her research they are able to create mindsets simply by having the test subjects read fixed or growth statements before the test. Simple as that.

If you tell people before a test that ability is fixed, they will shy away from challenges.  If you tell them anything is possible they will work harder and longer at the problems without worrying about success or failure.

How do you get out of your fixed mindset and get into a growth mindset?

First you have to notice where you have a fixed mindset.  Where in your life are you shying away from challenges because ‘you don’t want to look bad’? Where are you jealous that someone else has done better than you?  Where is your worldview ‘fixed’?

Listen for that fixed mindset self-talk.  When you notice it insert growth mindset talk.

One of the biggest red flags is when something gets hard.  Maybe you can’t win at a game, or you can’t get to a goal and it makes you feel incompetent or stupid.  You want to quit.  Because in a fixed mindset it’s better to not play than it is to play and lose.   At least if you don’t play you can’t be stupid and your sense of self is maintained.  In a fixed mindset the logic is ‘if I’m so good it shouldn’t be hard’.

Listen for that signal when things get hard and you’re afraid of screwing up.  That’s the fixed thinking.  Instead, acknowledge that this is going to be hard, but there is no success or failure or being stupid.  Approach the challenge with only the goal of learning and getting better.  In order to learn it’s going to require hard work.

Lean in when you get those signals and commit to the hard work necessary.  This is important because it’s not just hard at the beginning it stays hard and you will ‘fail forward’ as you learn.

There’s not much chance of me doing Dr. Dweck’s body of work any justice in a short post.  Either get the book or find one of the many places where she has been interviewed and give it a listen.

I think you’ll find it worthwhile.