Does Your Mindset Get in Your Way?

Source: AI-Assisted

The growth mindset sees mistakes and failures as opportunities for learning, and criticism as constructive feedback, not personal attacks. People with a growth mindset embrace imperfection and feel it’s fine to be flawed and altogether average. For them, engaging in the process is more important than the outcome. For them, being knee-deep in an undertaking is the whole point. They do not have to rush or be the first to finish. Instead, they take their time and are okay with their slow but steady progress.

My father was a good example of someone with a healthy growth mindset. In his youth, he discovered he was good at studying and test-taking. When various wealthy families in the neighborhood heard about this, they ordered him to take exams for their sons. Dad agreed to do this to avoid a broken nose and being beaten up. At the root of Dad’s success: Curiosity. He taught himself to do many things. He learned, through reading, how to ride a horse, shoot a gun, play the harmonica, and swim. Meanwhile, Dad kept attending school, which annoyed his father, who said, “Books are a lofty waste of time and money.” His father did not like the idea of higher education; therefore, Dad had to forge his own plan.

He told his father that he would be escorting a few students to a university some three weeks away on foot when he was really escorting himself and not coming back. He walked for weeks in a pair of borrowed shoes. To rest his weary feet, he would stop along the side of the road to brew some tea and eat some bread. To earn money for the tea and bread, he hung a handmade sign that read: Accounting and Letter Writing While You Rest. Every few days, he sat on a rock with a calligrapher’s brush, ink, paper, and an abacus and had no shortage of patrons. Dad had a lot of gumption, conviction, and burning desires that could not be thwarted. The obstacles were many, including the Japanese War and his unsupportive family. When he finally arrived at the university, he was told that the school had closed because of the bombing, but if he walked three weeks west, there was a school that was still running. And so he kept walking.

A person can quickly go from a growth to a fixed mindset just by feeling insecure or defensive when others are critical, or when a challenge feels insurmountable. A fixed mindset can close a person to feedback, cooperation, or owning up to mistakes. In effect, growth can get stifled when we feel vulnerable or shut off. This may also lead to the fear of making mistakes. We will not try new things and will want to avoid failure and criticism. This is the nature of closed-mindedness and fixed thinking.

Attitude and positive thinking certainly help, and the words we use make a difference in how we view learning, growing, and thinking. If we cling to defeatist words (Why do I even try? I cannot win), we will not likely push through the obstacles in life. It’s not a way to learn from lessons that can be instructive and can help us move toward our goals and objectives.

Are You Fired Up?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we were all as passionate about our endeavors? My dad had the conviction to plug on—walking for weeks and weeks in a borrowed pair of shoes made from hemp. Imagine what we could accomplish with this sort of zeal and enthusiasm.

How do you get fired up and stay fired up? They say you should do what you love, but that was not the case for Dad. He had planned to get an engineering degree at the first university. Instead, he earned a degree in animal science, the equivalent of veterinary studies, at the second university. It almost didn’t matter what he studied, as long as it was useful, something that would help others, something to help him grow. While Dad had to sweat for his pursuits, he was also a fluid thinker, ready to pivot whenever a situation required. He may have had multiple obstacles in his way, but he also found alternative paths to reach his end goal—of course, that goal kept changing. This kind of fleet-footedness gives hope a chance.

The late psychologist Rick Snyder studied hope, the pursuit of goals, and a diversified perspective and found that a nimble sensibility can help bypass closed doors and see the open ones nearby.

Most people are stuck in the way they think. Yet it doesn’t start that way. Little children happily engage in unrestricted thinking. Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of many books, including The Scientist in the Crib, has studied the innate cognitive abilities of children. In one study, she showed adults and children a toy that played music, and everyone was taught how to turn it on by using a set of blocks. The next part of the study entailed turning on the toy with a different set of blocks. The adults mindlessly stuck to their earlier directions, while the children readily discarded prior methods to try new ways to make the toy work.

If we believe our abilities are fixed and go nowhere, they are immutable. If we believe we are capable of moving ahead, then we may just move ahead. Our dedication, curiosity, hard work, and positive outlook may lead us to success. A person with a growth mindset:

• Puts in the effort to master endeavors

• Learns and grows from their mistakes

• Sees challenges and setbacks as opportunities

• Believes that feedback is good

• Learns and takes inspiration from others