Grow With Your Mindset (1)

I am super excited because the topic for this Deep Dive is one of my personal favorites. This week I already posted something on LinkedIn that I wanted people to think about:

Our schooling system is very straightforward: If you perform well, it will show in your grades. If you perform badly, it will show too. This leads you to either become a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ student. Math is the perfect example: people tend to believe that they’re either good at it or not.

During my time as a student counselor, I had many conversations with students afraid of failing at math, which was part of their business studies. ‘I was not the best at math in school’, ‘What if I am unable to understand it at a university level’, ‘What if I’m just bad at math?’. My answer, however, was always: ‘If you understand the ‘why’ – the context in which you are using math – you will always make it.’
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At that time I hadn’t heard about Carol Dweck and her studies about the growth mindset, yet it turns out I was intuitively nudging them in the right direction. Here is what we need to understand as a society, for the sake of our children, students, as well as entrepreneurs, and especially you for yourself: You can learn anything. Bold statement? Calendar quote? Just give me the following paragraphs to prove it to you.

That being said, let’s dive into the Growth Mindset.

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STARTING POINT: DIFFERENT MINDSETS

Based on our genes, our personal experiences, and our environment including our parents, teachers, and friends we develop a certain set of beliefs on how we view the world. This can be called our mindset. This mindset is not only influencing how we perceive events that are happening to us. It turns out, that it also influences our active behavior and even the way our brain is handling new experiences and challenges. It influences our learning process.

But before we start to dive in, I would like to invite you to assess yourself by walking through this Three-Item-Scale. You can rate the following statements on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 6 (strongly agree). Take a moment, write the numbers down for each item, and try to honestly reflect:

You have a certain amount of intelligence, and you can’t really do much to change it.

Your intelligence is something about you that you can’t change very much.

You can learn new things, but you can't really change your basic intelligence.

Add the numbers. I will provide further input on this at the end of Deep Dive.

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FIXED VS. GROWTH MINDSET

The mindsets we are talking about, are called the fixed and the growth mindset. As you might imagine from the questions: They are related to your view on your intelligence.

People with a fixed mindset, also called entity theorists, believe that your intellectual abilities are resistant to change. Meaning that you are either good at something or not. Someone with a growth mindset on the other hand, or a so-called incremental theorist, believes the opposite: that you can learn from your failures and become better at the tasks at hand.

For me this one here really clicked: Entity theorists think that failure is a trait, and incremental theorists think it is part of your behavior. And we all know: Traits are fixed but behavior can be changed.

Interestingly, this single belief leads to very different goals within your whole learning journey:

Within the growth mindset, your goal for upcoming challenges is to learn from them. Whether you succeed or fail, your performance only matters in the sense, that you are simply gaining information for your further learning process.

However, If you have a fixed mindset, you are on a different mission. You want to validate your abilities. You compete against others to prove your rank of intelligence within that benchmark. Here, your performance matters because it seemingly displays your level of intelligence to you and your peers and competitors.

Let’s have a closer look at the brain and what happens to a person with a fixed mindset.

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YOUR BRAIN ON MISTAKES

What happens to a person experiencing failure believing they are ‘not good enough’?

If you watched Game of Thrones you might remember the scene with Cersei walking naked through the streets as a form of punishment, while others are throwing shit at her, screaming: SHAME, SHAME, SHAME.

While this scenario is of course exaggerated, shame is one of the possible feelings a person with a fixed mindset can encounter after failing. This can be critical when it comes to learning.

During and right after failure, your brain is priming itself to learn. It recognizes a bug: A discrepancy between what should be and what is. When this happens, your brain’s goal its goal is to get rid of this discrepancy. It does this by analyzing what went wrong and right, and understanding what kind of behavior or information, as a result, is valuable to save for the next time.

Now when you react with feelings of shame, focused on feeling bad for not being intelligent, what is your brain actually learning? Right. Probably to not do - whatever you just did - ever again.

What is the long-term result of this? You become scared of challenges, tend to choose easier ones to reduce the risk of failure and you are less likely to learn from your mistake at all. As a result, your performance on the task at hand is also less likely to improve.

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: You believe you are bad at something, so you stay bad at it. I guess we’ve all heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy at some point in our lives, and well – this is its explanation.

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LEARNING BECAUSE OF YOUR BELIEF

Now within the growth mindset, this looks different. First of all, you are more likely to choose bigger challenges and step out of your comfort zone more often. And secondly, your performance has a better chance to increase.

Since you are less focused on comparing yourself with others and validating your performance, you are better prepared to give your brain the actual information it is looking for – the answer to the question: What should we learn from this? Focusing more on this your brain reacts differently to mistakes:

The areas in the brain that are related to memory are more likely to be active.

Furthermore, you can see in the scan on the right that the overall activity increases (in microvolts).

Source: Tirri and Kujala (2016)

Use this moment to take this in: based ONLY on your beliefs about yourself, your brain reacts with different intensity when you are encountering failure. That means if you BELIEVE you can learn something, you are more likely to succeed.

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Let’s take a moment and look at the score you calculated for yourself at the beginning of this newsletter. The total number you could reach was 18 points. The closer your score is to 0, the more likely it is that you have a growth mindset. If it is closer to 18, don’t worry. You already started your journey towards a growth mindset today.

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THE JOURNEY

I can imagine that you are thinking: Yes this makes total sense, a growth mindset is what we all need. I am all for approaching challenges with a learning goal in mind, I want to have a growth mindset and because I believe I am open-minded therefore I have it now.

Well, sorry to be the bummer here but it is not that easy. Just because we understand the logic, we like the approach, and we believe it is good to have a growth mindset, we do not have one right away. It is a journey.

A PERSONAL REFLECTION

To be very honest with you: I am a huge fan when it comes to Carol Dweck’s and other researchers’ work on the growth mindset, I can literally nerd out on this topic for hours.

I also have already managed to say to myself in times of personal challenges: You can do this, you just need to put in the effort and walk the ‘learning walk’. However, there are still situations, where I am not fully believing it. I feel scared of what others might think, I feel scared of being ‘not good enough’ and I sometimes feel scared of failing.

Yet, I am committed to pushing myself into challenging situations, because I know this is the way to further grow my beliefs in the direction of a growth mindset.

THE FIRST STEP: CHECK ✅

Usually, I would end my Deep Dive today with a piece of more actionable advice on how to develop a growth mindset. The first step is to truly understand why it matters. To understand what happens in your brain, to understand there are differences in belief systems, and to understand that these differences influence your performance. And I hope you got closer to understanding this today.

However, since this is a huge topic and — in my opinion — a topic with a great impact, I don’t want to give you just one single piece of advice, I want to give you more. Therefore I decided to dedicate more time and effort to the ‘HOW’ and to create a ‘part two’ for next month. So stay tuned for next time, when we dive more into how we can develop a growth mindset. Until then, here’s Carol Dweck’s take on teaching a growth mindset, to keep you on your journey:

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Stay mindful,

Carina 🌻