Carol Dweck Archives - Farther to Go!

Even if you recognize the considerable benefits of developing a growth (or get better) mindset, you may not be sure what steps to take or what to focus your attention on to shift your mindset.

My recommendations are:

(1) Understand the differences between the growth and fixed mindsets. You can read this article, find information on the internet or from Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, or get a quick take from this infographic.

(2) Try to identify where in your life you operate primarily from a growth mindset and where you operate from a fixed mindset, so you can get a sense of the difference in perspective and outcome. You can use this handout for that.

(3) Incorporate the Guidelines for a Growth Mindset:

Develop your curiosity.

Curiosity keeps us engaged in exploring our inner and outer worlds. Curiosity causes us to ask questions, not necessarily to get answers, but to arrive at even bigger or deeper questions. It opens our minds and expands our perspective, which is what a growth mindset is all about.

Identify and pursue juicy desired outcomes.

If you want to expand your world, you need to choose worthy targets to aim for. The brain is an insatiable wanting machine, and dopamine is the wanting neurochemical. The bigger and juicier the desired outcomes you give your brain to pursue, the more dopamine it will release, and the more creative tension it will generate.

Run toward challenges instead of away from them.

Challenges can be expansive, too, if we are not afraid of them. Anything we haven’t done before or that requires effort or deliberate practice to accomplish takes us out of our comfort zone. But continually seeking out challenges ultimately expands our comfort zone, and trains our brain to assist us in mastering the unfamiliar.

Recognize that failure and success are equally transitory, but you only learn from failure.

Richard Saul Wurman is an architect and the founder of TED Talks. He said it better than I could: “I have failure every day. I know that I will not grow at all except by understanding my failures. Success tells you nothing; you learn nothing from success.”

Follow the path of the trickster.

Trickster is at home in liminal space, the space of possibility and uncertainty. In fact, trickster represents the opposite of a fixed mindset, avoiding staying in one place too long and preferring to be on the road, out and about, engaging with the world. Trickster keeps it light, but always has a juicy desired outcome to pursue. If he or she fails today, well there’s always tomorrow to try again.

Click here to print or download the guidelines.

learning to ride a bike - _MG_2933 — learning to ride a bike

A mindset is the set of ideas, beliefs, or attitudes with which you approach situations or through which you view them. Mindsets have something in common with habits since they tend to be habitual, which means somewhat unconscious.

You can have mindsets about yourself, another person, a group of people, a place, a time of year, a type of music, a political organization—actually just about anything. A mindset is not just an opinion. It is more complex than that.

And it can have surprisingly far-reaching effects.

Dueling Mindsets

Some mindsets have more profound effects on our lives than others. In her 2007 book Mindset, Carl Dweck describes two general mindsets—the fixed mindset and the growth mindset—that can lead to quite different experiences and outcomes.

In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They’re wrong.

In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment. Virtually all great people have had these qualities.

Dweck’s work on mindsets has been applied to the field of education, where children’s mindsets are often formed. Children praised for their talents and abilities (fixed mindset) tend to avoid taking on challenges they think are beyond their abilities. Children praised for their effort and persistence (growth mindset) tend to take on additional challenges in order to learn from them.

Be Good vs. Get Better

Following in Dweck’s footsteps, Heidi Grant Halvorson describes these two mindsets as Be Good and Get Better. People who have a Be Good mindset are focused on proving themselves, demonstrating their skills, and comparing themselves to others. If they think they aren’t already good at something, they tend to either not want to try to do it or to give up if they don’t experience quick success.

People who have a Get Better mindset are focused on improving, rather than proving, themselves; developing, rather than demonstrating, their skills; and comparing their current performance to their own past performance rather than to others’ performance. They aren’t afraid to try something new because even if they’re no good at it now, they can always get better.

The Be Good mindset may be good when it comes to performance, but it doesn’t have much else to recommend it. People with a Get Better mindset generally handle challenges better, get less upset when things go wrong, don’t give up as easily, are more comfortable with the new and the unknown, and get more interest and enjoyment out of what they do. People with a Get Better mindset use whatever happens to them—the good, the bad, and the ugly—as well as their own missteps and miscalculations, to help them get better.

This type of mindset isn’t a black-or-white kind of thing. You can have a Be Good mindset about some things and a Get Better mindset about others. It’s worth cultivating a Get Better mindset in as many areas as possible. But, as Halvorson says, it’s important to have a Get Better mindset about changing to a Get Better mindset.

Guidelines for a Growth Mindset