Growth vs Fixed Mindset
Fixed Mindset:
Someone with a fixed mindset is very outcome focused. A fixed mindset assumes our intelligence, our athletic abilities and our creative abilities are set. You may have thoughts like ‘people are just good at sport or they aren’t’ or ‘i’m just not creative’. You may feel you shouldn’t do things unless you can do them well, and give up new things easily if you don’t pick them up. Failure to you means you are not talented … There is shame if you don’t do well. An obstacle means you should give up and stick to what you’re good at.
Growth Mindset:
A growth mindset says that success is seeing repeated failure as obstacles, not a brick wall. It’s realising you will be bad at something and the only way to get better is to keep going. It’s knowing failure is inevitable if you try – it doesn’t mean anything about you; except that you were willing to give something a go.
You may understand this rationally, there is a BIG difference between knowing this rationally, and knowing this emotionally, at your core.
So how do you know if you know this in your core?
You need to test it out.
For instance, take running. Let’s say you’ve never been sporty. Maybe you even have an identity build up around not being sporty and people know you as the person who hates exercise.
You might think about getting into running, but then you think ‘I won’t be any good at it… it’s not my thing’.
If you start running, you will be bad at it at first. You will feel tired after 15 seconds of running.
A fixed mindset will take this to mean you aren’t talented, it’s not your ‘thing’ and you should think about trying a different form of exercise. There may be shame and comparison to others.
A growth mindset will see you not being good at running to mean nothing personal about you other than you need to practice more. It involves sitting through the discomfort of being the worst at something initially, going running when you don’t want to and persisting when you don’t improve as quickly as you’d hope.
Because eventually, on the other side of that persistent, is success. You will get better. But that success will not be linear. This is how you learn to be resilient. You persist in the face of delayed gratification, you learn self-discipline, see learning in applying effort, and you have enough self-trust that with consistency, things will eventually improve.
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