Have you ever wondered HOW you wonder? In other words, have you paid attention to the way your mind processes information?
What impact do you think this has on your motivation, achievement levels and how you relate to others?
Carol Dweck is a Stanford psychologist and author of Mindset, a book about her research in the area of achievement and success. She discovered there are two types of mindsets, or established set of attitudes, from which people engage with the world and with themselves.
In a fixed mindset, people believe their talents or intelligence are fixed. They focus on measuring their capabilities in order to predict their potential. In a growth mindset, people believe that their talents and intelligence can be developed through persistence and dedication. They focus on learning and resilience in order to achieve.
You can listen to Carol Dweck share details in a TEDx talk about the amazing results schoolchildren had when they were taught to have a growth mindset. The teaching involved praising them for the process of learning rather than the outcome as well as redefining the meaning of effort and difficulty to build resilience.
So which category do you fit in? Fixed or growth mindset? How can you shift from fixed to a growth? Try listening and accepting both “mindset voices” in your head, but following through on growth mindset actions:
- Learn to hear your fixed mindset voice when you encounter a challenge. It’s the one that says this is too hard or impossible for you.
- Recognize you have a choice of how to interpret challenges.
- Talk back to your fixed mindset voice with your growth mindset voice. It’s the one that encourages learning rather than criticizes performance.
- Take the growth mindset action.
Our established attitudes are an unconscious bias about what we are capable of. Why not put the odds in our favor? If underprivileged schoolchildren can improve their grades with a growth mindset, then what can we achieve?
Jo-Aynne
Fab Friday: 5 Minute action item – Today is our day to appreciate what went wrong as well as what went right this week on the road to achieving more that means more. Take a few minutes to write about the process of learning from your wins and your losses. This is taking action from a growth mindset.
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