What Is A Growth Mindset?
‘Mindset’ is used to describe how someone thinks about their abilities and talent. There are two kinds of mindset: a growth mindset and a fixed mindset.
After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but ground breaking idea: the power of mindset. In her brilliant book, ‘Mindset: The New Psychology of Success“, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavour can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.
How to encourage a growth mindset
There are a number of ways to encourage a growth mindset, including:
- Giving effective feedback
- Explaining that people are not just born good at things, they have to work hard.
Giving Effective Feedback
This video shows your how giving effective feedback can dramatically improve a growth mindset and the results of a task when the person doing the task is given ample opportunities to improve and is given feedback in a non-judgemental way… even if they are in the first grade!
Trying hard and not achieving the success you want can feel devastating, but should you be judged for the effort you put in or the results you get? The idea of someone being a ‘natural’ at a chosen activity is common; can we really compete with someone who is a ‘natural’? Yes, we can! Natural talent counts for nothing without effort.
Wilma Rudolf overcame polio and other illnesses as a child to become an Olympic athlete. Was she born to win three gold medals?
Lionel Messi is regarded as the greatest footballer on the planet, and a ‘natural’ at the game. But did success really come naturally to him?
Effort is just as important as achievement. So, the real mistake would be not to try.
The best organisations want their people to be creative, show effort and want you to learn. They recognise that mistakes will be just as likely as success, and your efforts will be praised alongside your achievements.
If you make the effort, then achievement will follow. It could be in one month…or one year. If you believe in your ideas, then we will too. Be confident in your ability, don’t let a setback affect you and when you achieve, be ready to do it again.
There are those people who like to say: ‘This is what I could have been..’. And other people who say: ‘I gave my all to be what I am today!’
Be proud of your achievements…and value the efforts you made!
A comfort zone is where we feel safe, relaxed, sheltered from the outside. Certain situations may mean you have to step out of this comfort zone.
Where do you start? Taking the first step is often the hardest. The thought of doing something that makes us feel uncomfortable can put doubt in our mind. To combat this doubt, make realistic goals, make your first target something simple but necessary, so you can take your first steps. It may be tempting to remain in your comfort zone but trying new things will help your confidence.
Stay motivated, look for new challenges and think about how you can achieve your goals. You might make mistakes or be uncertain, but you can always ask for help. If things don’t go to plan when you step outside your comfort zone, reflect on what you can do differently; be confident enough to change your approach.
Stepping out of your comfort zone will help your mind grow. The more you try, the more you’ll learn. And as your confidence grows, so will your comfort zone.
Too old to learn?
The development of a growth mindset can happen at any age!
Neuroplasticity has shown that the brain can and does adapt throughout our lives: it’s adaptable and plastic.
Habits are our established way of thinking, doing and feeling. Every time we think a certain thing, practice a particular task or feel a specific emotion, we strength that habit and the habit becomes more engrained and easier.
Neuroplasticity
We all have the ability to think about something differently, learn a new task, or choose a different emotion. In doing so, we start to develop a new habit and the more we do this the stronger that habit becomes. The habit becomes second nature and the old habits begin to die off. This is neuroplasticity. With repeated and directed attention towards you desired habit, you can rewire your brain!
Do you ever find it difficult to try something new, especially if you believe you aren’t sporty, clever or talented enough to do it well? You’re not alone!
Take our first-time skier here, its his first time on the slopes and he’s really nervous. That nursery run suddenly looks like a very steep slope.
Everyone else looks like a natural and he is worried he is going to make a fool of himself. It’s easy to assume that successful people were born with talent, but is that really the truth?
In fact, our role models put in a lot effort and work in order to become successful. They’ve learnt that in order to improve, they need to fail, take risks and learn from their mistakes. Think how many hours of practice a champion skier needs before they become a champion.
We need to learn from our mistakes rather than letting them get us down or blaming them on others. And recognise that failure just means that we aren’t successful yet, and if we keep practicing, we can create these skills and habits.
By challenging the belief that people are born brainy or talented, we can start to develop the confidence to learn new things. By trying new things we can even start to physically change the way our brains’ work. Scientific research shows that our brains do change through our lifetime and are not fixed from birth. This is a concept known as neuroplasticity, and is our brains ability to create new neuropathway connections as we try new things, helping us to embed new skills and habits.
This is great news for our skier; by practicing hard and learning from his mistakes he is now flying down those nursery slopes. Next step, the black run!
How To Develop A Growth Mindset
People naturally move between learning and performing.
If you spend too much time in the performance zone your mindset will become fixed. In order to develop your habit of a growth mindset, you should start by consciously spending more time in the learning zone.
Here are some examples of behaviours seen in either the performing or the learning zones.
| Behaviour | Learning Zone | Performance Zone |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Improve | Do as best we can |
| Activities for | Improve | Execution |
| Concentrate on | Hasn’t mastered yet | Has mastered |
| Mistakes can be | Expected | Minimised |
The Learning Zone
Low stakes situations
How can we spend more time in the learning zone. The more time we spend in the learning zone, the more we will improve.
- You must believe and understand that you will improve#
- You must want to improve
- You must have an idea about how to improve
- You must be in a low stakes situation, i.e. a situation where mistakes won’t have catastrophic consequences.
We spend a lot of time in the performance zone because our environments are often, unnecessarily, high stakes.
We create social risks by the learnt behaviour that mistakes are bad or that other will think less of you. We are taught that mistakes are undesirable when people always expect perfect answers or flawless execution and discourage the wrong answer or taking risks.
But, consider:
- A tight rope walker – does not practice new tricks without a net underneath them
- An athlete – does not try a new move during the Olympics.
We can encourage growth mindsets by having conversation and identifying what we want to get better at and how and when we want to perform and minimise mistakes.
As individuals we can:
- Create low stakes islands in an otherwise high stakes ocean, i.e. spaces where mistakes have very limited consequences. This could be through exchange of ideas with mentors or setting aside time to learn.
- Execute and perform as we are expected to, but then reflect on what we could do better next time and observe and emulate experts (observation, reflection and adjustments).
- Lead by example and lower the stakes for others. Ask questions, solicit feedback and share mistakes so that others feel safe to do the same. Be clear about when you are seeking to learn and seeking to perform.
Setting challenges
Setting yourself challenges and goals is an important part of driving yourself to achieve. The Brownlee Brothers know a thing or two about striving to achieve their goal.
Jonny Brownlee is a British triathlete from Leeds. He is an Olympic bronze and silver medallist and also a World Champion.
Alistair Brownlee is Jonny’s older brother. He started doing triathlons when he was eight years old, has been to three Olympic games, and won two gold medals. He’s been World Champion twice and European champion a few times as well.
Hear are a few quotes from the brothers about setting challenges:
Challenges
Alistair: Really, as a professional athlete, you are setting yourself a challenge almost every day, and it’s what your whole life is about. I think possibly the toughest challenge I’ve ever set myself was in 2012, I actually tore my Acylase, in January, with the Olympics and the home Olympic games coming up eight months later in August in London. It was a massive challenge to overcome that and train and be fit enough for it.
Jonny: The biggest challenge I overcame was when I got my stress fracture in my femur in 2015, I went from being an athlete in great shape to not being able to train for four months. The first thing I did to overcome that challenge was actually to speak to Alistair; the first thing he said was to go away and live a normal life for a few weeks. I came back from that a stronger athlete, to medal in the Olympics in 2016.
Alistair: If the challenge is big enough and the goal is set high enough, you probably shouldn’t have that much confidence in being able to achieve it, you should just believe that you can achieve it, break it down and take confidence from succeeding in very small sections on the way to getting there.
People who inspired me
Jonny: I think role models are very very important, and Alistair has been a massive role model for me; he’s the most driven person I’ve ever met. So, as young athlete, to have someone who has told me if I was going to do something, I had to do something properly, 100%. And also a big one, on my start line, it’s my responsibility. Alistair is an athlete who is always with me on my start line and has taken responsibility for all of his training and all of his performances. I was quite an underconfident kid so I wasn’t sure I could achieve these things but having Alistair come home with his Great Britain kit for the first time was a massive eye opener for me; having Alistair go to the Olympics in Beijing in 2008 made me believe I could do that as well.
Alistair: In my training programme, lots of people around me have a big impact on what I do every day, in events and moving up a level. That might be Jonny, in a swimming pool, pushing me on. It might be the coach being motivational or telling me things that I’m not doing properly. Or it might be someone on the side of the road shouting some encouragement.
Jonny: School teachers, who would take me out running every single lunch time and genuinely love the sport that we did, and I’ve taken some important lessons from them. Most of the training that we do, we genuinely love, and I don’t believe that I’m the most talented athlete out there, but I’m the athlete who trained the hardest and I like for people to think that I got everything out of myself and was the best athlete that I possibly could be.
Dealing with negativity
Alistair: Almost every morning, I go to the pool thinking that I can’t possibly do this session but I will be able to do it later in the morning, and I think diving in a swimming pool when you’re cold and tired after training hard the day before, a set on the board seems impossible to do, but ten minutes later you’re warmed up and bit more confident and you’re ready to do it, then an hour later it’s done.
Jonny: As an athlete, you are receiving feedback at every single training session but the most difficult piece of feedback that I’ve received is been this year, I’ve had a couple of years where things haven’t gone too well and I’ve spoken to the head coach of British Triathlon and he’s told me to change my training slightly. And as an athlete whose done the same training for 10 years that’s hard to hear and an athlete who loves the routine, again that’s hard to hear but I’ve had to look at the bigger picture and realise that as you get older things change and listen to that advice and learn from it and I’ve made a few changes now and I’ve actually started to improve as an athlete again, which has been very, very important to me.
Alistair: When it’s a few months before a big competition and I’m running round the track, I know I can’t quite run fast enough yet; it can be frustrating, but I know two or three months of hard training, improving a second every week maybe, I can get there and get closer to that goal of being able to run at that pace that I need to be able to win the most important and biggest races in the sport.
How do you cultivate a Growth Mindset in your work and everyday performance? Leave a comment.
Yours optimally,
Scott
Read more… Active vs Passive Mindset: It’s All Your Fault
Do the Things You Don’t Want to Do
Look For A Teachable Moment: Lessons From Roman Emperors, Stoic Philosophers and Leaders
Practice Radical Open-Mindedness
Source: Virtual College