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Change Your Mindset and Grow

When psychologist Carol Dweck was studying how children respond to new challenges, she noticed something interesting. Some hung back or gave up easily while others appeared to enjoy the experience, persisting even after repeated failures. She and her research colleagues came up with a model to explain the differences they were observing: fixed and growth mindsets.

Dweck's mindset model has proved to be a valuable tool for understanding adult behavior, too. You can use it in your own life to learn, stretch your abilities, and grow for greater success.

What is a fixed mindset?

A fixed mindset is the belief that your intelligence, abilities, and other qualities are set, or have limits that can't be overcome, even with effort. A fixed mindset can be reinforced in school or through life experiences when someone tells you that you're either good at or not good at something. That might be math, writing, singing, sports, social relationships, or anything else.

When you have a fixed mindset and are faced with a new task, you have a tendency to either prove that you can do it well—demonstrating your ability—or avoid it—to hide a possible weakness. When you try and fail, you're not likely to persist. Your inner voice tells you that this is one of those things you're just not good at and are unlikely to master no matter how hard you try. With a fixed mindset, it's more comfortable to give up in the face of failure than to keep trying.

With a fixed mindset, your goal is to show off your natural strengths and hide your natural deficiencies. That can limit you and keep you from trying new things, learning, and growing. It can be a real obstacle when you're faced with a significant change.

What is a growth mindset?

A growth mindset is the belief that you can hone your intelligence, abilities, and other qualities with practice, training, and help from others. With a growth mindset, you understand that people have different talents and strengths, but that these are just the starting point and can be built on and improved. They are the floor rather than the ceiling.

When you have a growth mindset, you welcome new challenges as opportunities to learn and grow. Trying and failing is not discouraging enough to stop you. Rather, each attempt is a learning experience, informing your next effort. When you can't overcome a problem, you don't hide your failure. Instead, you examine what went wrong and try again with a different approach. You might ask for help and guidance from someone with more experience or expertise.

With a growth mindset, you're less concerned with what others might think of your failed attempts than with what you can learn from those failures as you try again.

Everyone moves between fixed and growth mindsets.

A key to benefiting from the concept of fixed and growth mindsets is to understand that people are not all one or the other. As Dweck explained in a 2016 interview in The Atlantic, "...nobody has a growth mindset in everything all the time."¹

You might have a growth mindset when engaged in some activities, but a fixed mindset in others. You might have a growth mindset when you're calm and well rested, and a fixed mindset when you're tense or exhausted. Think how you might behave under extreme time pressure compared to when you're working with more time. Think, too, about how you might approach different activities, such as public speaking, playing a musical instrument, solving a business problem using higher levels of math, or looking at the programming code behind a website. In some activities and at some times, your curiosity and drive to learn might have the upper hand—a growth mindset. In other situations, your fixed mindset might take charge.

How Adopting a Growth Mindset Can Help You Succeed

Adopting a growth mindset in more areas of your life—whether it's work, relationships, creative endeavors, or anything else—can lead you to new knowledge and new skills while deepening your understanding of who you are and all you can be. Recognizing the situations and triggers that tend to push you into a fixed mindset can help you be more self-aware and better able to consciously change for the better.

The more you approach life with a growth mindset, the better you'll be at overcoming obstacles, navigating change, and seizing new opportunities. In short, cultivating a growth mindset can help you thrive in all aspects of your life, especially when faced with new challenges.

Charles Kettering, one of the most successful inventors of all time (his 186 patents include the electric starter for cars, an incubator for premature infants, and ways to harness solar energy), wrote this: "Every great improvement has come after repeated failures. Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. One fails forward toward success."²

Ways to Get Into a Growth Mindset

Accepting that you operate in both fixed and growth mindsets is the first step in using this concept to your advantage. The next is to notice when you shift between the two mindsets. Even if you are a person who is naturally curious, open to new experiences, and driven to learn, you're bound to face situations or have times when you feel insecure and defensive. Those might include criticism, conflict, or failed efforts. These are the triggers that push you into a fixed mindset. Pay attention to your fixed-mindset triggers. When you catch yourself giving up too easily or trying too hard to show off known abilities, make a conscious effort to get yourself into a growth mindset—experimenting, taking risks, and learning from your attempts and failures.

Moving to a growth mindset is a journey that takes time and requires self-examination. Here are some ways to help yourself along that path:

• When faced with an obstacle or a setback, pause and consider the opportunities it might present.
• When you try something and it doesn't work out as expected, examine what went wrong. Adjust your approach and try again.
• When you find yourself focusing narrowly on the negatives of a situation, expand your view to look at other possibilities. Is this a roadblock, or just new information that gives you a clearer picture of reality? How might you respond creatively to make progress?
• When fear of failure keeps you from trying something new, consider how you might benefit from learning a new skill. Think, too, about the worst outcome, should you try and fail. It's usually not such a big deal, even if it takes a few failed attempts to make progress.
• If everything you do comes easily, you're probably avoiding important challenges and opportunities. Seek out assignments and activities that stretch you and make you a bit uncomfortable.
• Commit yourself to lifelong learning. Learning doesn't stop when you leave school. Cultivate your curiosity, too. Learning can be fun.
• If you're stuck, ask for help. It's not an admission of failure. It's a sign that you're committed to succeeding.
• Be tenacious. The important successes in life take hard work. They often require that you overcome obstacles and make many failed attempts, sometimes a great many, before you succeed.

For More Information

Mindset: The new psychology of success (By C.S. Dweck, 2006, 2016), Random House.

"What Having a 'Growth Mindset' Actually Means," Harvard Business Review (By C.S. Dweck, January 13, 2016). https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actually-means

"How Praise Became a Consolation Prize," The Atlantic (Interview with Carol Dweck. By C. Gross-Loh, December 16, 2016).
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/12/how-praise-became-a-consolation-prize/510845

References

1. Gross-Loh, C. (2016, December 16). How praise became a consolation prize. The Atlantic. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://www.theatlantic.com
2. Kettering, C. (1944, February). Education begins at home. In DeWitt & Lila Acheson (Eds.), Wallace (Author), Reader's Digest.