What's a mindset?
When I first came across the term mindset, it was back in the summer of 2020 near the beginning of the pandemic. Many friends described a COVID fog they felt. They shared their difficulty in participating in their regular activities.
When I read the New York Times article: “Feel Like You’re Going Out of Your Mind? Consider Your Mind-Set” — I wanted to dig deeper and discovered Dr. Carol Dweck. She coined the concept of mindset. The article is part of the New York Times' resiliency series. The author, Alina Tugend, described how no one likes to make mistakes, but how we manage them can make us more resilient.
There are two mindsets: fixed and growth. And yes, we each have a mix of both.
Fixed Mindset— doesn’t believe their abilities can change
Growth Mindset — does believe their capabilities are malleable
Thinking back to my own childhood and what mindset I grew up with, I texted the article to family members. I asked what they felt their mindsets were like growing up.
Turns out we all experienced a fixed mindset. The striving for “A”s in school. The following all the rules. We remembered failure hurt, and was embarrassing at times. Still is. But now, as adults, we all pretty much sensed we’d developed a growth mindset. Aware that our emotions drag us back into a fixed one.
Dr. Dweck is a professor of psychology at Stanford University. She's one of the foremost researchers on how we process our mistakes and failures. Dr. Dweck researches “growth mindset.” The concept of growing our brain's capacity to learn and solve problems.
In her TedTalk: The power of believing that you can improve, she describes two ways to think about a problem that is slightly too hard for you to solve. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet?
Dr. Dweck describes the “power of yet.”
Approaching problems with a growth mindset helps us learn from our mistakes and not define ourselves as failures. We can form new neurons with more robust connections, and over time, we can get smarter.
“Just the words "yet" or "not yet," give kids greater confidence, gives them a path into the future that creates greater persistence. And we can actually change students' mindsets.”
— Dr. Carol Dweck
Think back to school and the goal of getting “A”s versus focusing on learning the material. She’s done studies where kids are taught that every time they push the envelope of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, their neurons get stronger; they get smarter.
She also addresses mindset from an equality perspective. In groups of students who chronically underperform (kids in inner cities or on Native American reservations) when educators created a growth mindset classroom, improvements in their grades were significant.
“The Native kids outdid the Microsoft kids.”
— Dr. Carol Dweck
As adults, we can learn to understand the importance of encouraging a growth mindset. Seeing how our mindsets influence our parenting and our partnerships as Dr. Dweck’s talk at Google and her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success explains.
As parents, gone are the days of showering kids with praise. Instead finding ways to work through challenges will help kids practice resiliency. Taking a pause to plan versus shutting down and no longer trying.
With our adult relationships, we can learn to appreciate we are different people. Of course, we won’t agree or get along all the time. But with a growth mindset, we can discover how to encourage each other to reach our goals. Not our perceived version of what our partner's goals should be.
The strength and resiliency of a relationship depends on sincere effort over time. We are all individual people evolving, there is no “done.” The richness is in the trying. I'm still practicing after almost 42 years of marriage, ask my husband.
So how can you try to encourage a growth mindset? Dr. Dweck’s advice is to start by paying attention to our triggers.
when something triggers you back into a fixed mindset, be aware, don’t beat yourself up, and try to bring yourself back into a growth mindset by taking a different tack
when you’re not instantly good at something, don’t assume you can’t improve; focus on the process of tiny changes (think Atomic Habits)
when you hit a brick wall, try a different strategy, ask others, and don’t give up
What are your fixed mind triggers? And how can you embrace a growth mindset of “not yet?”
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