Mindset

by Carol S. Dweck

Winning was everything and learning did not enter the picture.

Jason’s internal monologue used to be: Win. Win. You have to win. Prove yourself. Everything depends on it. Now it’s: Observe. Learn. Improve. Become a better athlete.

The more that you challenge your mind to learn, the more your brain cells grow.

Simply learning about the growth mindset can sometimes mobilize people for meeting challenges and persevering.

When people hold on to a fixed mindset, it’s often for a reason. At some point in their lives it served a good purpose for them. It told them who they were or who they wanted to be (a smart, talented child) and it told them how to be that (perform well). In this way, it provided a formula for self-esteem and a path to love and respect from others.

when young children feel insecure about being accepted by their parents, they experience great anxiety. They feel lost and alone in a complicated world. Since they’re only a few years old, they can’t simply reject their parents and say, “I think I’ll go it alone.” They have to find a way to feel safe and to win their parents over.

Mindset change asks people to give this up. As you can imagine, it’s not easy to just let go of something that has felt like your “self” for many years and that has given you your route to self-esteem. And it’s especially not easy to replace it with a mindset that tells you to embrace all the things that have felt threatening: challenge, struggle, criticism, setbacks.

Every day people plan to do difficult things, but they don’t do them. They think, “I’ll do it tomorrow,” and they swear to themselves that they’ll follow through the next day.

What is it? Now make a concrete plan. When will you follow through on your plan? Where will you do it? How will you do it? Think about it in vivid detail.

These concrete plans—plans you can visualize—about when, where, and how you are going to do something lead to really high levels of follow-through, which, of course, ups the chances of success.

the idea is not only to make a growth-mindset plan, but also to visualize, in a concrete way, how ...

In the end, many people with the fixed mindset understand that their cloak of specialness was really a suit of armor they built to feel safe, strong, and worthy. While it may have protected them early on, later it constricted their growth, sent them into self-defeating battles, and cut them off from satisfying, mutual relationships.

“What did you learn today?” “What mistake did you make that taught you something?” “What did you try hard at today?”

When people with a fixed mindset fail their test—in chemistry, dieting, smoking, or anger—they beat themselves up.

willpower is not just a thing you have or don’t have. Willpower needs help. I’ll come back to this point.

You feel righteous about your anger for a while, but then you realize you’ve gone too far. You suddenly recall all the ways that your spouse is a supportive partner and feel intensely guilty. Then you talk yourself back into the idea that you, too, are a good person, who’s just slipped up—lost it—temporarily. “I’ve really learned my lesson,” you think. “I’ll never do this again.”

They realize that to succeed, they’ll need to learn and practice strategies that work for them.

They understand that to diet, they need to plan. They may need to keep desserts out of the house. Or think in advance about what to order in restaurants. Or schedule a once-a-week splurge. Or consider exercising more.

They know that setbacks will happen. So instead of beating themselves up, they ask: “What can I learn from this? What will I do next time when I’m in this situation?” It’s a learning process—not a battle between the bad you and the good you.

First, think about why you got so worked up. You may have felt devalued and disrespected when your spouse shirked the tasks or broke your rules—as though they were saying to you, “You’re not important. Your needs are trivial. I can’t be bothered.”

First, spouses can’t read your mind, so when an anger-provoking situation arises, you have to matter-of-factly tell them how it makes you feel.

When you feel yourself losing it, you can learn to leave the room and write down your ugliest thoughts, followed by what is probably really happening (“She doesn’t understand this is important to me,” “He doesn’t know what to do when I start to blow”). When you feel calm enough, you can return to the situation.

When people drop the good–bad, strong–weak thinking that grows out of the fixed mindset, they’re better able to learn useful strategies that help with self-control.

It’s a reminder that you’re an unfinished human being and a clue to how to do it better next time.

Whether people change their mindset in order to further their career, heal from a loss, help their children thrive, lose weight, or control their anger, change needs to be maintained.

This is why mindset change is not about picking up a few tricks. In fact, if someone stays inside a fixed mindset and uses the growth strategies, it can backfire.

Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It’s about seeing things in a new way.

Their commitment is to growth, and growth takes plenty of time, effort, and mutual support to achieve and maintain.

Everyone wants to seem enlightened, in the know.

The first step is to embrace your fixed mindset.

It’s not a shameful admission. It’s more like, welcome to the human race.

The second step is to become aware of your fixed-mindset triggers.

It could be when you’re thinking about taking on a big, new challenge.

It could be when you’re struggling with something and you keep hitting dead ends.

How about when you feel like you’ve failed decisively? Lost your job. Lost a cherished relationship. Messed up in a very big way.

What about when you encounter someone who’s a lot better than you in the very area you pride yourself on?

What about our fixed mindset toward others? If we’re educators, what happens after a high-stakes test? Do we judge who’s smart and who isn’t? If we’re managers, what happens during and after a big project? Do we judge our employees’ talent? If we’re parents, do we pressure our kids to prove they’re smarter than others and make them feel judged based on their grades and test scores?

When I asked people to tell me when their fixed-mindset persona usually shows up, here’s what they said: “When I’m under pressure, my fixed-mindset persona appears. He fills my head with noise and keeps me from paying attention to the work I have to do. Then I feel like I can’t accomplish anything. Feelings of anxiety and sadness also attract him. He attempts to weaken me when I’m already feeling down. He makes comments like ‘You don’t have the ability to grasp difficult concepts. You have reached your limit.’ ” (By the way, this was a woman who thought of her fixed-mindset persona as a male.)

“Whenever I demonstrate my laziness through procrastination, whenever I have a disagreement with someone, whenever I’m too shy to talk to anyone at a party, my fixed mindset persona shows up. . . . He tells me, ‘Your FAILURE doesn’t define you.’ Of course, he yells the word ‘failure,’ and whispers the rest.”

“Whenever I fail to live up to the image that she—my fixed-mindset persona—concocted for me, she makes me feel stressed, defensive, and unmotivated. She doesn’t allow me to take risks that may affect our reputation as a successful person. She doesn’t let me speak out for fear of being wrong. She forc...

“When we have a work deadline and my team is under the gun, my fixed-mindset persona sits in judgment. Instead of empowering my team, I become a harping perfectionist—no one is doing it right, no one is working fast enough. Where are all those breakthrough ideas? We’ll never make it. As a result, I often just take over and do a lot of the work myself. Needless to say, it doesn’t do wonder...

She rejects failure instead of embracing it, and makes me worry that if anyone ever sees me fail they will deem me a failure.”

“Anything that triggers self-doubt triggers my fixed mindset, which triggers more self-doubt.

Whispers of ‘What if you can never repeat that success?’ trail behind every successful outcome.

Take a moment to think carefully about your own fixed-mindset persona. Will you name it after someone in your life? A character from a book or a movie? Will you give it your middle name—it’s part of you but not the main part of you? Or perhaps you might give it a name you don’t like, to remind you that that’s not the person you want to be.

You’re in touch with your triggers and you’re excruciatingly aware of your fixed-mindset persona and what it does to you. It has a name. What happens now? Educate it. Take it on the journey with you.

“Look, I know this may not work out, but I’d really like to take a stab at it. Can I count on you to bear with me?”

Remember that your fixed-mindset persona was born to protect you and keep you safe.

Understanding that everyone has a fixed-mindset persona can give us more compassion for people. It allows us to understand their struggles.

Every one of us has a journey to take.