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Research by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues shows that vowing, even intense vowing, is often useless. The next day comes and the next day goes. What works is making a vivid, concrete plan: “Tomorrow during my break, I’ll get a cup of tea, close the door to my office, and call the graduate school.”
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.
Ultimately, a growth mindset allows people to carry forth not judgments and bitterness, but new understanding and new skills.
You decide that, rather than trying to talk him out of the fixed mindset, you have to live the growth mindset.
You talk about skills you have today that you didn’t have yesterday because of the practice you put in. You dramatize mistakes you made that held the key to the solution, telling it like a mystery story. You describe with relish things you’re struggling with and making progress on. Soon the children can’t wait each night to tell their stories. “Oh my goodness,” you say with wonder, “you certainly did get smarter today!”
She is to study her school materials to learn from them, not to cram everything possible into her head. The counselor refers her to a tutor who teaches her how to study for understanding. The tutor also discusses the material with her in a way that makes it interesting and enjoyable. Studying
Slowly, you learn to separate your needs and desires from hers. You may have needed a daughter who was number one in everything, but your daughter needed something else: acceptance from her parents and freedom to grow.
If you can’t hear what your child is trying to tell you—in words or actions—then you don’t know where your child is. Enter the growth mindset and listen harder.
When people with a fixed mindset fail their test—in chemistry, dieting, smoking, or anger—they beat themselves up. They’re incompetent, weak, or bad people.
It’s like the growth-mindset chemistry students. They used better study techniques, carefully planned their study time, and kept up their motivation. In other words, they used every strategy possible to make sure they succeeded.
Every lapse doesn’t spell doom. It’s like anything else in the growth mindset. It’s a reminder that you’re an unfinished human being and a clue to how to do it better next time.
Maybe that’s why Alcoholics Anonymous tells people they will always be alcoholics—so they won’t become complacent and stop doing what they need to do to stay sober. It’s a way of saying, “You’ll always be vulnerable.”
Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It’s about seeing things in a new way. When people—couples, coaches and athletes, managers and workers, parents and children, teachers and students—change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework.
It’s more like, welcome to the human race. But even though we have to accept that some fixed mindset dwells within, we do not have to accept how often it shows up and how much havoc it can wreak when it does.
Now give your fixed-mindset persona a name. You heard me correctly.
When you hit a setback, the chances are excellent it’s going to show up again. Don’t suppress it or ban it. Just let it do its thing. Let it do its song and dance, and when it settles down a bit, talk to it about how you plan to learn from the setback and go forward: “Yes, yes, it’s possible that I’m not so good at this (yet), but I think I have an idea of what to do next. Let’s just try it.”
Remember that your fixed-mindset persona was born to protect you and keep you safe. But it has developed some very limiting ways of doing that. So educate it in the new growth mindset ways that it can support you: in taking on challenges and sticking to them, bouncing back from failure, and helping and supporting others to grow.
How often do we threaten, punish, or write off these people rather than helping them work it through or helping them find the conditions under which they can thrive?
Every one of us has a journey to take. • It starts by accepting that we all have both mindsets. • Then we learn to recognize what triggers our fixed mindset. Failures? Criticism? Deadlines? Disagreements? • And we come to understand what happens to us when our fixed-mindset “persona” is triggered. Who is this persona? What’s its name? What does it make us think, feel, and do? How does it affect those around us? • Importantly, we can gradually learn to remain in a growth-mindset place despite the triggers, as we educate our persona and invite it to join us on our growth-mindset journey. •
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Remember, as Alex Rodriguez, the baseball player, wisely said: “You either go one way or the other.” You might as well be the one deciding the direction.
