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January 12 - January 28, 2023
After staring at these results for a while, I began reminiscing about my own experience of classroom teaching. I remembered the many afternoons I’d gone home exasperated and exhausted. I remembered battling catastrophic self-talk about my own capabilities—Oh god, I really am an idiot!—and those of my young charges—She got it wrong again? She’ll never learn this! And I remembered the mornings I’d gotten up and decided, after all, that there was one more tactic worth trying: Maybe if I bring in a Hershey bar and cut it into pieces, they’ll get the idea of fractions. Maybe if I have everyone
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When you keep searching for ways to change your situation for the better, you stand a chance of finding them.
“Whether you think you can, or think you can’t—you’re right.”
Carol Dweck
What Carol found is that the children in the success only program gave up just as easily after encountering very difficult problems as they had before training. In sharp contrast, children in the attribution retraining program tried harder after encountering difficulty. It seems as though they’d learned to interpret failure as a cue to try harder rather than as confirmation that they lacked the ability to succeed.
if Carol asks you questions about them, you have a ready answer. But like the thoughts you work on when you go to a cognitive behavioral therapist, you may not be aware of them until you’re asked.
If you found yourself nodding affirmatively to the first two statements but shaking your head in disagreement with the last two, then Carol would say you have more of a fixed mindset. If you had the opposite reaction, then Carol would say you tend toward a growth mindset.
no road is without bumps.
Mindsets have been shown to make a difference in all the same life domains as optimism. For instance, if you have a growth mindset, you’re more likely to do well in school, enjoy better emotional and physical health, and have stronger, more positive social relationships with other people.
Consider, for example, what people said to you when, as a child, you did something really well. Were you praised for your talent? Or were you praised for your effort? Either way, chances are you use the same language today when evaluating victories and defeats.
Mike Feinberg
Dave Levin,
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
Daeun Park,
Jennifer Chatman
By contrast, in growth-mindset cultures, employees were 47 percent more likely to say their colleagues were trustworthy, 49 percent more likely to say their company fosters innovation, and 65 percent more likely to say their company supports risk taking.
The reality is that most people have an inner fixed-mindset pessimist in them right alongside their inner growth-mindset optimist. Recognizing this is important because it’s easy to make the mistake of changing what we say without changing our body language, facial expressions, and behavior.
Bill McNabb
“Because I’d come so damn close to quitting and yet hung in there, and because things eventually did work out, I learned a lesson I’d never forget. The lesson was that, when you have setbacks and failures, you can’t overreact to them. You need to step back, analyze them, and learn from them. But you also need to stay optimistic.”
How did that lesson help Bill later in life? “There have been times in my career where I felt discouraged. I’d watch someone else get promoted before me. I’d want things to go a certain way, and they’d go the opposite. At those points, I’d say to myself, ‘Just keep working hard and learning, and it will all work out.’ ”
Outward Bound—so
What’s more, these benefits tend to increase, rather than diminish, in the six months following participation in the program.
“I worry a lot about kids in poverty,” Steve said. “They’re getting a lot of helplessness experiences. They’re not getting enough mastery experiences. They’re not learning: ‘I can do this. I can succeed in that.’ My speculation is that those earlier experiences can have really enduring effects. You need to learn that there’s a contingency between your actions and what happens to you: ‘If I do something, then something will happen.’ ”
Milton Hershey
Carol also explains that the brain is remarkably adaptive. Like a muscle that gets stronger with use, the brain changes itself when you struggle to master a new challenge.
My next suggestion is to practice optimistic self-talk. The link between cognitive behavioral therapy and learned helplessness led to the development of “resilience training.” In essence, this interactive curriculum is a preventative dose of cognitive behavioral therapy. In one study, children who completed this training showed lower levels of pessimism and developed fewer symptoms of depression over the next two years. In a similar study, pessimistic college students demonstrated less anxiety over the subsequent two years and less depression over three years.
The point is that you can, in fact, modify your self-talk, and you can learn to not let it interfere with you moving toward your goals. With practice and guidance, you can change the way you think, feel, and, most important, act when the going gets rough.
Rhonda Hughes.
“I had this mentor who knew, even before I did, that I was going to be a mathematician. It all started when I’d done very poorly on one of his tests, and I went to his office and cried. All of a sudden, he jumped up out of his chair and, without a word, ran out of the room. When, finally, he came back he said, ‘Young lady, you should go to graduate school in mathematics. But you’re taking all of the wrong courses.’ And he had all of the courses I should have been taking mapped out, and the personal promises of other faculty that they’d help.”
EDGE Program
“People assume you have to have some special talent to do mathematics,” Sylvia has said. “They think you’re either born with it, or you’re not. But Rhonda and I keep saying, ‘You actually develop the ability to do mathematics. Don’t give up!’ ”
“There have been so many times in my career when I wanted to pack it in, when I wanted to give up and do something easier,” Rhonda told me. “But there was always someone who, in one way or another, told me to keep going. I think everyone needs somebody like that. Don’t you?”
“Race your strengths and train your weaknesses.”
The word parenting derives from Latin and means “to bring forth.” You’re acting in a parentlike way if you’re asking for guidance on how to best bring forth interest, practice, purpose, and hope in the people you care for.
John Watson,
The lesson that persistence eventually delivers rewards was one on which Steve relied in the four years he sat on the bench with the San Francisco 49ers. Rather than request a trade, Steve apprenticed himself to Joe Montana, the starting quarterback who captained the team to four Super Bowl victories. “If I was ever going to find out just how good I could get, I needed to stay in San Francisco and learn, even if it was brutally hard to do. . . . I many times thought about quitting. . . . I heard boos during my sleepless nights, but I feared calling my dad. I knew what he’d say: ‘Endure to the
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Francesca Martinez
But unlike most of her peers, she needs to do breathing and voice exercises before each show.
“I don’t take credit for my hard work and passion,” she told me. “I think these qualities came from my family, which was very loving and very stable. Their overwhelming support and positivity are why there is no limit to my ambition.”
Children carry within them the seeds of their own future. Their own interests will emerge if we trust them.”
“So much of sticking with things is believing you can do it. That belief comes from self-worth. And that comes from how others have made us feel in our lives.”
“To finish things, you have to put the work in.
If you’ve got something to say, go ahead and say it and finish it.”
Benjamin Bloom
They appreciate that children need love, limits, and latitude to reach their full potential. Their authority is based on knowledge and wisdom, rather than power.
Larry Steinberg
Regardless of gender, ethnicity, social class, or parents’ marital status, teens with warm, respectful, and demanding parents earned higher grades in school, were more self-reliant, suffered from less anxiety and depression, and were less likely to engage in delinquent behavior. The same pattern replicates in nearly every nation that’s been studied and at every stage of child development.
Nancy Darling,
Further, “most of the parents found it natural to encourage their children to participate in their favored activities.” Indeed, one of Bloom’s summary conclusions was that “parents’ own interests somehow get communicated to the child. . . . We found over and over again that the parents of the pianists would send their child to the tennis lessons but they would take their child to the piano lessons. And we found just the opposite for the tennis homes.”
If you want to bring forth grit in your child, first ask how much passion and perseverance you have for your own life goals.
