CHASE Your Dreams Podcast

Growth Mindset Vs. Fixed Mindset

• Families Together, Inc.

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If fear of failure is  holding you back, this episode is for you! We'll examine the advantages of adopting a growth mindset in order to achieve new heights, and how to avoid the pitfalls of staying stuck in a fixed mindset. 

Much of this episode is based on the work of Carol Dweck, Ph.D. and her book "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" released in 2006. 

Thanks for listening! 

Speaker 1:

You are now listening to the Chase your Dreams podcast where we talk about how to become whole and balanced people so that we feel empowered to chase our dream life. Thanks for tuning in, yo. Welcome back Brad here with another episode of the Chase your Dreams podcast, and I'm going to give you a little bit of a personal background on this particular episode. I got to tell you growing up I was never a big reader. I would read some stuff I mean probably half of the Harry Potter series books here and there for book reports, all that but I was never on the level that my siblings and parents were. In fact, this made me feel like kind of an outcast in the family, honestly, because everyone was always reading besides me.

Speaker 1:

Then one day a few years ago, I was in a meeting at a previous job while I was working for this huge company, and they brought in one of their bigwigs at the end of the year to tell us all about how the year went. Everybody was talking this guy up. They were saying he's so inspiring and everything he touches turns to gold. It was this really, really huge reputation to live up to, and in the meeting someone asked him about book recommendations and he said something that changed my life forever. He said I never read books growing up. And then one day I decided to read 10 pages a day. And if you read 10 pages a day, that's 300 pages a month, which equals about one book per month or 12 books per year. 12 books per year that was an absolutely absurd idea in my mind, except for the fact that 10 pages a day actually seemed pretty doable.

Speaker 1:

Now, as fate would have it, this meeting landed right before Christmas, which meant that New Year's Eve was coming up, and that was a time when I like to try to set annual goals. So this became my new goal I'm going to read 10 pages per day. And that was a time when I liked to try to set annual goals. So this became my new goal I'm going to read 10 pages per day. And do you know what happened? For the first time ever, I was able to get through books. Now, with anything new, it's going to feel clunky for a while and, you know, I would feel kind of maybe bored with the first few pages, or I would totally immerse myself in a book and I'd want to read beyond the 10-page mark. I had to be quite disciplined in order to stick to 10 pages a day. But I did hold fast to this and at the end of the year I had read 15 books people 15, which I can guarantee you is 15 more than the year before. And you should have seen the look on my family's faces when, all of a sudden, I was the one making the book recommendations. And I'm so grateful to have been in that meeting, because quiet time now, reading a book, is one of my favorite parts of the day and I've learned just a ton of new information with this new habit.

Speaker 1:

So why am I bringing this up? It's because a few months ago I had the itch to find a new book and I was digging around in the dollar bins, like I like to do, and one book jumped out at me. It had these big blue letters on the front and it said mindset the new psychology of success. And if you know me, you know that I love mindset stuff. I'm big on mindset, and who doesn't like success? So I started thumbing through it and, as far as I could tell, it was pretty good. Well, as it turns out, it was very good, so good that I'm sitting here now recording my thoughts and wanting to share them with you.

Speaker 1:

So what was this book about? It was written by Carol Dweck, a PhD from Stanford, and the book was written in 2006. Now, if you're a youth in our program listening to this, my guess is you weren't even born yet in 2006. But what I want to tell you is that, from what I can remember, in 2006, not very many people were talking about mindset kind of stuff. I think as a society we've been slowly coming around to this more in the last decade or so, but 20 years ago there wasn't a ton of information out there about mental health and about how actively choosing your mindset can greatly influence your quality of life.

Speaker 1:

So in this book, carol Dweck coins the term growth mindset. This is the whole point of the book. The entire book is illustrating the differences between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. So we're going to break these down. It's very important to me personally and I really want to share this with you because adopting a growth mindset has been a big shift for me lately. So, going into this book, if you asked me what a growth mindset is, I think I would have said something like oh you know, it's always having an abundant state of mind and everything just feels cheery and awesome all the time. Now, there may be some truth there, but that's not the whole story. In fact, adopting a growth mindset, according to the decades of research by Carol and her team, is going to mean things like accepting failure, falling in love with challenges, getting rid of this notion of perfectionism and encouraging yourself and others based on the amount of effort that you're putting into something, not the actual outcome of that thing. All right, that's a big one.

Speaker 1:

So one study that was cited in the book illustrates the difference between a growth mindset and a fixed mindset in a very interesting way. What Carol's team did was put a group of students into two separate groups. They gave the students the same test, and in one group, they praised the students based on their intelligence. So after the test, they said wow, you're so awesome, you're so smart, you did so well, you're so smart, you're so intelligent. And now, in the other group, they praised the students based on their effort. So instead of saying you're so smart, they said wow, you did so well, you must have worked really hard. Notice the difference there You're smart versus you worked really hard. And what they found was that telling students that they're smart actually encourages what Carroll calls the fixed mindset. And when someone has a fixed mindset, they have now attached their worth and their identity to the thing that they've been rewarded on, whereas someone in the growth mindset loves to take on new challenges and loves to learn from them, because they're just rewarded and praised based on how hard they tried. Now what they found next was the most interesting part when they increased the difficulty on the next test.

Speaker 1:

Students with the fixed mindset remember the ones who have been praised on their intelligence. They refused to take the harder questions on their intelligence. They refuse to take the harder questions, and that makes sense, because if you're thinking I'm smart and that's my value, I'm not going to subject myself to these challenges because that could potentially expose me as someone who's not smart at all. But if I associate my value with trying hard, then I'm willing to take on new challenges and thus achieving new levels of success. And that's what they found in the students with growth mindset. If you're rewarded on effort and your mindset is such that you just love to learn and grow, you're going to be way more apt to taking on new challenges. When you take on new challenges, you learn more and you get further. So that's why this is so valuable.

Speaker 1:

We're trying to take on new challenges in a place of not being afraid to make mistakes. And we see this every day People that are very attached to the fixed mindset very afraid of making mistakes. If you're afraid of making mistakes, you don't try those new things, you don't learn to grow and then you're kind of consumed by protecting this level of perfection. That really isn't human at all, and I think this concept in this book really resonated with me personally, because this is something I can certainly identify as a challenge in my own life. I'll admit I grew up placing a lot of emphasis on things like getting good grades and doing well in sports and winning at those sports. You know I hated to lose and I associated my personal worth with the achievements, not on my openness to failure or making mistakes, which is ultimately what would have pushed me further. But I adopted a fixed mindset at that time. So the million dollar question how do I adopt a growth mindset First? I want you to consider this In the fixed mindset world, success and quality of life is about proving yourself to others that you're smart and talented.

Speaker 1:

Are there areas in your life where you're more concerned with proving yourself than you are with the progress. Are there areas in life when failure makes you feel like you're not talented, you're not smart or you're not worthy, and is this failure enough to make you want to give up and stop trying at that thing? If those resonated with you, if you found yourself saying yes to some of them, very good chance that you're living with a fixed mindset and didn't even know it. I certainly was, and one example that showed up in my own life was with my singing voice. So I've been a musician for a long time and I love playing guitar and I love playing piano, but, for whatever reason, I never really felt like that gifted of a singer, and so I was always very shy and anxious about singing for people, because if I don't sing well, maybe that means I'm a bad singer, and if I'm a bad singer, maybe I shouldn't be playing music at all. You see, this is a very fixed mindset. This creates an immense amount of pressure on myself. It makes music all about proving myself instead of just loving the craft of music and happily sharing it with others, even if I do make mistakes, because God knows the mistakes will happen.

Speaker 1:

Growth mindset is all about pushing yourself, learning, improving. If I push myself to sing for people, I may connect with someone that I would have not otherwise. If I learn from those mistakes when I'm singing, I can then turn around and improve my singing with more practice and information that I got from the failures. So, again, this is a positive thing. I need to reward and praise myself for giving effort, not associate my worth with whether or not my singing or my music is perfect in someone else's point of view. So do you see how adopting a growth mindset can be a huge advantage in life? Do you see how integrating this mindset with your positive self-talk can be a huge leap forward?

Speaker 1:

In a growth mindset, where you can change, like all humans do, success is about your effort, which helps you get smarter and increase your abilities. So my challenge to you today is to try something new. It can be anything, but it has to be something you've never done. So maybe it's a craft drawing, playing an instrument, meditating, gardening, playing a new game, learning to juggle raising chickens anything as long as it's new. Playing a new game, learning to juggle raising chickens anything as long as it's new. And in this new endeavor, make a promise to yourself to go into it with a growth mindset. So when you incur challenges or experience failure because anything new is going to present challenges and failure I want you to write down daily the ways in which you're growing through effort, notice, through this experience, if you're tempted to beat yourself up about a failure, if you're wanting to give up because it feels so hard, and if giving up feels like a reflection of your own intelligence or your own worth or your own talent, write these down too and, as a challenge, reframe that, like we do with our positive self-talk.

Speaker 1:

So if you feel like you're not worthy because you're failing at this new thing, reframe that and praise yourself based on the effort that you're giving. It's all about adopting that growth mindset. I can't wait to hear about how this goes for you. Tune in next time for the Chase your Dreams podcast. You.