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Do you believe you’re incapable of growth? What’s the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset?
As you’ve gotten older, you’ve probably discovered certain abilities that you excel at and ones you struggle with. But this doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with what you have. A growth mindset helps you improve by embracing challenges and learning new things.
Let’s look at what a growth mindset is and four ways that developing a growth mindset can be a smooth process for you.
Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
According to Mindset by Carol S. Dweck, you typically live by either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset, which shapes how you learn, cope with setbacks, and relate to others.
When you have a fixed mindset, you believe your abilities are unchangeable. You were born with certain traits and a certain amount of intelligence and that’s that. Many people are trained in this mindset from an early age—for instance, by a teacher who believed your IQ determines everything: You’re either smart or you’re not, and you can learn or you can’t.
When you view your abilities as unchangeable, you feel you must constantly prove yourself. If people get only a set amount of intelligence and a certain character, you want to prove you have a lot, although you secretly worry you were shortchanged. You don’t want to look unintelligent or fail. You feel you’re being judged or rated in every situation and must measure up. Children inculcated with this mindset often fear losing their parents’ or teachers’ approval and love if they fail.
When you have a growth mindset, you believe the abilities you’re born with are a starting point you can build on with hard work, persistence, and the right learning strategies. You have a passion for learning, welcome mistakes as opportunities to learn, and seek challenges so you can stretch. You also have a greater ability to survive difficult times.
The author first encountered the growth mindset as a young researcher while studying how children coped with failure. She gave kids a series of puzzles to solve, progressing from easy to difficult ones. She was surprised to find that some children loved attempting the hard puzzles, relishing the challenge and opportunity to become smarter. Until then, the author had viewed intelligence and problem-solving as fixed abilities, but watching kids learn from failure changed her mind.
Believing in the ability to learn and grow doesn’t mean believing anyone can become an Einstein or believing anyone can do anything they aspire to if they apply enough effort. But the growth mindset recognizes that you can’t predict someone’s potential or how far their passion, work, and learning can take them.
How to Develop a Growth Mindset
It’s important to know that, even if you have a fixed mindset now, you can learn the growth mindset, which can transform many aspects of your life. Below we’ll look at four ways to develop a growth mindset, from admitting you have a fixed mindset to staying hopeful and optimistic.
1. Admit You Have a Fixed Mindset
Often, just learning about the two mindsets and how they affect you can prompt change. However, completely developing a growth mindset takes time. The fixed mindset hangs around, competing with the growth-oriented ways of thinking that you’re trying to adopt.
Your fixed mindset beliefs about being smart, ambitious, superior, and super-competent may be your source of self-esteem. This makes it difficult to give them up for more challenging ideas about developing yourself through effort, taking on challenges, making mistakes, and learning through constructive criticism.
You may temporarily feel that you’re losing your sense of who you are. But the growth mindset ultimately frees you from constantly judging yourself so you can be authentic and explore your full potential.
Developing a growth mindset is a journey. You don’t get there all at once—you have to take one step at a time. The first big step is recognizing that you have a fixed mindset, according to Mindset. Here are the steps to doing so:
1) Accept having a fixed mindset. Even when you’re on a path to growth, you have lingering fixed-mindset beliefs. Everyone has a mix of fixed and growth-oriented beliefs. You can accept this reality without accepting the negatives a fixed mindset causes.
2) Learn what prompts your fixed mindset. When is your fixed-mindset persona likely to materialize? It might be when you take on a challenge, when you face obstacles or fail at something, or when a friend or colleague achieves something you envy.
3) Name your fixed-mindset persona. This can help you identify when you’re acting with a fixed mindset and remind you that’s not who you want to be. Pay attention to what happens with this persona is triggered.
4) Confront your fixed mindset. When your fixed mindset materializes, have an imaginary conversation with it. For instance, if you’re about to take on a new challenge, your fixed-mindset way of thinking may prompt you to worry about failure and want to quit. However, you can be ready to counter these beliefs when they come up by reminding yourself that risk is inherent in growth and that failures are opportunities to learn.
2. Learn From Failure
Mindset drives how people define and cope with failure. For people with a fixed mindset, failure is an identity that they fear and try to avoid rather than something that happens. Failure is hard for growth-minded people, too, but they don’t let it define them.
This is the core of Matthew Syed’s argument about developing a growth mindset in Black Box Thinking: As an individual, you can improve only by learning from your failures. On the flip side, neglecting to learn from mistakes means that you can’t improve. For example, a dancer who takes every mistake as a chance to grow will get better, while a dancer who ignores or denies her errors will remain static.
This also applies on the institutional level: Organizations that learn from failures iron out systemic flaws and improve their performance. Organizations that ignore their mistakes will continue to make them, risking stagnation or worse.
From here, Syed argues that we need to spread failure-based learning throughout modern society. Progress—our ability to develop our knowledge, our societies, or our technology—is a hallmark of human civilization. We develop by learning from failure. But, so long as such major institutions neglect this opportunity, we won’t progress as smoothly.
View Failure as Beneficial
According to Syed, learning from your mistakes starts with changing how you think about failure. By reframing failure as positive and beneficial, you can overcome the fear of erring and start learning from mistakes.
Syed argues that having a fixed mindset correlates with fragile self-esteem. Because failure could reveal your inadequacies, you’ll avoid it for fear of looking foolish or incapable. Regarding failure, people with a fixed mindset are threatened by failure and do everything they can to avoid it because they see it as a reflection of their self-worth.
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