SYBF Week 3: Build Your Growth Mindset
This week, we discuss, explore, and deepen our understanding of the Growth Mindset. You have already proven to yourself that you can try new things without taking them or yourself too seriously. These are the foundational underpinnings of the growth mindset.
Growth and Fixed Mindsets
Dr. Carol Dwek of Stanford University is credited with our current understanding of the growth mindset. According to Dr. Dwek, “Individuals who believe their talents can be developed (through hard work, good strategies, and input from others) have a growth mindset” (What Having a “Growth Mindset” Actually Means, Harvard Business Review, 2016).
As you can imagine, a fixed mindset is just the opposite. It believes that your intelligence, talents, and personality are fixed traits that cannot grow or develop.
Growth and fixed mindsets are not absolutes. A full spectrum of attitudes and behaviors exists between fixed and growth mindsets. These certainly differ between people; we can quickly think of people we know who believe they can grow and learn and those who don’t. They also differ within us for different skills. For example, an accountant might think they are better able to learn highly logic-based skills like numbers, formulas, and spreadsheets. The same accountant who believes they can learn things in the logical realm might think they cannot learn soccer because they haven’t had much experience playing team sports.
Now, for our weekly moment of science
Researchers have found that people who hold growth mindset beliefs are more likely to achieve their goals as they are not hindered by factors in their control: self-doubt and limiting beliefs. As you can imagine, people with a more fixed mindset find less “success” in meeting their goals as they see their talents, intelligence, and abilities as out of their control.
Growth mindset formula
It’s as easy as this:
Belief in your ability to grow + Commitment to do the work + Time = GROWTH
Without a belief in your ability to grow, commitment to taking steps toward your goals, and ample time to learn and grow, sustainable growth will not happen. At best, you get lucky. More likely, you’ll experience failure, frustration, and futility.
Imagine this: You are at work. During a social chitchat, a coworker tells you they signed up to run a marathon next weekend. Their training starts today, and they have not run in years. You are highly skeptical that they will be able to complete the race. Depending on their current running ability, a person is unlikely to run over 26 miles without training for weeks, months, or even a year.
Not every goal we set is a marathon, but all improvement requires the same formula. The amounts involved in each of the three requirements may be different, but none can be zero.
Growth mindset works for all ages
Everyone can grow their skills and minds regardless of age, and at the same time, we must recognize that this changes throughout our adult lives. The good news for us grown-up kids is that your brain does not stop developing in adulthood. It continues until the end of your life. It just works a bit differently. Let’s do a quick dive back into some brain science.
The young adult brain continues to develop executive function through approximately age 25. Executive function (covered in week 2) is responsible for the everyday skills we need to learn, grow, work, and live. We all know children and young adults have some executive function, but they cannot reach nearly the complexity of this skill as mature adults. Time and experience are required for this skill to develop fully.
In and around “middle age,” the adult brain slowly changes how it works and what it focuses on. We often think of the brain’s inevitable decline, but emerging research shows this is more like a new operating phase. For example, when our smartphone updates, the functionality changes can leave us feeling lost and confused. Eventually, we will get habituated to the new interface, and things will go more smoothly. This is much like how our brains mature. The maturing adult brain may lose trains of thoughts or particular words more easily, but it can also see greater themes and patterns in human behavior, existence, and the world around it.
The aging adult brain doesn’t so much care for all the repetitive small pieces of information anymore; it’s had plenty of that. The brain is now ready to think about more profound concepts and ideas over time to create meaning in the world. Indigenous cultures knew this intuitively. They didn’t need an MRI to tell them that their elders were to be revered because of the wisdom that the older brain is capable of.
Likewise, habits shape our brains over time. The brain believes more of what it believes, sees more of what it sees, and does more of what it does. If you spend an entire lifetime doing, believing, and seeing the same things, the brain will trust those things more and more. As we should expect, a ten-year practicing birdwatcher will more quickly spot a bird that may not even be visible to someone with one year of experience. This is because the neural pathways have had ten times the amount of practice in looking for all the subtle cues to find the bird that has evolutionarily camouflaged itself from predators, including humans, for thousands of years.
How we intervene with our own thinking matters
Now you know why we focused on reframing our self-talk in week one - how we think about, and talk to ourselves determines how we grow. Plain and simple. For a refresher on how our negative self-talk works and how we can shift it, revisit week 1 blog.
Environment matters!
This idea is often the one people have the hardest time with. This is because we often feel like we cannot impact the environment around us all that much. We have a rooted life where we currently live with a job, family, friends, and obligations. We can feel stuck as we don’t control certain things, like who we work with or who lives near us. We can accept that we can’t change everything and everyone around us to set us up for mental success, but we can identify those we can change and take action there. We can seek out more supportive and inspirational people in our free time and social lives that we will benefit from in the long run.
More Science!
Studies on the impacts of social circles have demonstrated that people who feel the most successful and report high gratification in their lives surround themselves with as many positive and encouraging people as possible. They also reduce the time they spend with those who project negativity.
Let’s look at one of my new favorite research studies. For over 40 years, Dr. Bob Rosenthal researched the social impacts on growth and development. In one study, he arbitrarily labeled one group of lab rats as “dumb” and one group as “smart.” He did not tell his research assistants this was arbitrary, as the research assistants were part of the study.
Can you guess the findings? The “smart” rats performed maze tests nearly two times better than the “dumb” rats, even though their mental capacity was not actually different.
How the rats performed on these tests was exclusively influenced by what the people who worked with them thought they were capable of. Rats don’t understand human words, but just like us, they can feel what people think of them, even if they can’t understand their words.
This study says it all: surround yourself with people who believe in you, and you will absorb that belief and believe in you, too!
Activity
This week, things are a bit different. A journal will come in very handy for our work this week. If you haven’t been journaling yet, that’s ok and now is a great time to start. Don’t overthink it. You can use that old, half-used notebook hanging around waiting for a purpose. Don’t put it off waiting for a new journal from Amazon or time to get to an office supply store. Start now; you can always move your learning and thinking to a fancy new journal later.
Your daily 5 minutes of practice will focus on building your personal growth plan. Don’t get hung up on perfection or doing things in order; just work on it a little each day throughout the week. Skip topics when you’re not feeling it; revisit topics you already addressed later in the week to develop them further. By the end of the week, be sure you have reflected at least a little on each section.
Create Your Growth Development Plan in 5 Parts
Reflect on learning
Make a list of things you have learned in your adult life (push yourself to get as many as possible).
Identify the things that you learned most recently. Write about how learning these things impacted you and your life.
Write down all the things you did to learn these new things. What strategies did you use, and what things did you practice? Also, think about what you did to overcome setbacks and obstacles.
Identify a skill to grow
List everything you would like to learn or start doing in your life. This list should include at least five things and can certainly be far more. These may be hobbies, skills, activities, sports, arts, or habits. IMPORTANT: Do not list what you will stop doing or not do.
Pick one thing from the list that you will commit to building your skills in for at least six months. This should be something that you are enthusiastic about and that you can practically undertake. For most of us, summiting Mount Everest is exciting and something we want to do, but it is not feasible, especially in six months. In this case, we might reframe our goal to hiking the tallest mountain in our state.
Create your timeline
Select a date in the future that is at least 6-months out where you will have achieved your goal. It might not be your final goal, but a major milestone along the way. Back to the Everest example, that might be your ultimate goal, but the first goal you set might be to hike that tall mountain in your state.
Vision how you will be using your new skill on that future date. Get very detailed, some questions to answer to help you find the details:
How often will you be using this skill?
Where will you use this skill?
Who will you be engaging with?
How will this fit into your life?
Who will help you be accountable to yourself and your goals?
Plan for setbacks
There will always be setbacks, no matter how strong your initial motivation and how good the plan is. We can’t account for everything that might get in our way along the path. But by accepting this will happen, we can plan for it now so we know how to get back on track when the time is right. Recommitting to a goal after a setback is a universal strategy of people who successfully meet their goals. Write about how you will recover from setbacks. A few questions below may help you:
Who are your cheerleaders always there for you and will boost you when you feel low?
What will you say to yourself as you pick yourself back up? (Mantras, affirmations, or inspirational sayings are great resources here)
What activities restore you when you are depleted?
What are small reset activities to re-engage and feel successful when you’ve gotten off track?
What underlying supports might you need to help you re-focus again?
Set milestones and rewards
Despite common belief, not all milestones have to be HUGE. Your end goal is your big milestone. Identify all the small ones along the way. In fact, the smaller they are, the better. An early milestone might be to do something for 5 minutes a day just 5 days that week (and now you “see behind the curtain” as to why this challenge is set up as it is). The next milestone might be to do 7 minutes a day for 5 days. And so on. A few pointers:
To establish a new pattern early, set milestones that can be achieved weekly for at least the first two months. After it’s set, your milestones can be stretched to longer periods between achievements.
Set small rewards for yourself when you meet your milestones. Ideally, the reward will match your goal, but it doesn’t have to. Treating yourself to your favorite dark chocolate bar is a perfectly acceptable reward (and also has health benefits, too, in moderation, of course).
Make a contingency plan. Just because you want to reach your goal in 6 months doesn’t mean that it’s actually going to happen when the “real world” starts to interfere. Allow for flexible planning that doesn’t rely on firm dates so you don’t feel like you’ve failed when making slower progress than you planned for.
This week feels big, and there was a lot to read. Don’t be deterred this activity is much easier than it sounds once you get started.
You can do this for 5 minutes daily, 5 days this week. You’ve already proved it by doing it!
Whatever happens from simply trying is just what is supposed to happen to build your brain a little stronger every day!
Now grab that journal and start writing your development plan!
