Fixed and Growth Mindsets

Welcome to (un)leaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through a leadership perspective. In this episode, host Barbara Iverson talks about growth and fixed mindsets based on the work of Carol Dweck. Understanding her fixed mindset and shifting to a growth mindset has been life-changing for Barbara, and she's full of stories and examples of both mindsets.

Barbara tells stories from her life and looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. Every week she offers a challenge or task for listeners, to prompt reflection or growth. This podcast is the perfect listen for someone who feels like they don't quite fit to the typical leadership profile. 

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Transcript

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Who are these children? Hello and welcome to the podcast Unleaderly, the show where we look at the world through a leadership perspective. I'm your host, Barbara Iverson, and today we are going to talk about mindsets, specifically fixed and growth mindsets. This is based on the work of Carol Dweck. She's written about it in her book Mindsets, and you can find a lot of her content online. But essentially, she's an American researcher who did a lot of work with children and discovered through that work that there are definitely two different ways that people can tend to see the world. It's not all black and white, but she was able to, she created these fixed and growth mindset categories. And we're going to talk about those today and how they affect leadership and some examples from my own life and other things that I've observed. So why this topic? I really enjoy starting leadership development work by talking about this. Why? Well, because first of all, it gives us a common vocabulary in terms of having words that mean we understand what they mean in these contexts. And then we can also find ourselves in these mindsets. I think as we go through this today, you'll find that you can recognize things about yourself, ways that you talk to yourself, ways that you know your brain works, and recognizing it can be the first step to making changes. It can give us insights into ourselves. Why do we do what we do? Why do we think the way we do? And it'll also give us insights into the people we work with and the people on our teams. When I did this once at a company with, I had done this with a bunch of different cohorts for leadership development. And then I did it with one group. And literally this man turned to me and said, Why are we talking about this today? This, what does this have to do with leadership? I think he really wanted me to just lay out like, here's the top five ways to be a better leader. Which, no, that's not my style. I'm more interested in giving you things to think about and seeing where we go from there. If you are new to this podcast, that's what you can expect from me. But I think this, the insight into how our teams function and how we function within them, using these mindsets, we there's a bunch of tools at our disposal, but let's think about this as a tool. Let's think about this as a tool that we can use to know ourselves better and to know other people better, to be able to identify patterns of behavior and thought that then we might be able to work to change. So again, the content that I'm using is from the work of Carol Dweck. I read her book, Mindsets, a few years ago. I'd never heard of her before, and then I had a colleague who wanted to incorporate it into the work we were doing about interpersonal skills. And I remember reading this book. Now I had learned kind of the basics from my colleague and was able to do some workshops about it. But then I took the time to read the book, and I literally thought that it was like this book was mapping out my childhood for me. Through this lens, I kept going, oh my goodness, oh my gosh. That's that's why I that's me. This is me. And not in the best way. I'll get to that. But it was so meaningful. I have since recommended it to countless friends and have used the material over and over again in my work. And one thing I do find is it's great because this common vocabulary that it provides is priceless. It gives name to a mentality that otherwise I don't really think is quite easy to name. Like you don't need to say that someone's just being a jerk and obstinate because that's usually not what's happening. There's something else going on. Whether it's a cultural difference, that'll be another podcast. Or it's a mindset, stuckiness, that's not a word, being stuck in a mindset. When I worked at a university and we did all these workshops about fixed and growth mindsets, it was really funny that a professor came to me one time and he said, you know, it's really wild that we've done so much work about mindsets at this place that like the worst insult you can give someone is that they have a fixed mindset. Which I thought was really fantastic because I was like, that's great. They have this common vocabulary. It doesn't mean that we should be all down on people with fixed mindsets because as we're gonna learn, we all fall into those mindsets. Nobody is all one or the other. We all meander in between them. But it's it's been very helpful for me and it's been also helpful for friends. I have a friend who often, when we talk about her colleagues, she'll say, Yeah, that's a fixed mindset on her call her colleagues' part, or she'll talk about herself and say, I know that this is a fixed mindset on my part. All right, so I'm going to walk through what each mindset is and give examples from my own life. And I want you to think about how you might have seen these patterns in your own self, your own way of thinking, your behaviors as a child, as an adult, whatever. This is not time-bound. And then we're gonna talk about some of the thought patterns that are typical for each one, either things that you say or things that you think. And this is really helpful, I think, for identifying which mindset you're in. And then at the end, we're gonna talk about how to switch your mindset from fixed to growth. So, a fixed mindset, I'm gonna start with that. Basically, and you're gonna hear, these are not, this is not rocket science. These are descriptive mindsets. So the fixed mindset is thinking that says that our abilities and our intelligence are set at birth, and we cannot do a lot to change them. So, one way that you see this is that someone who has a fixed mindset will think of themselves, rank themselves among the other people in the room to sort of figure out: am I the most intelligent? Am I the least intelligent? Where am I on this spectrum? And they will fight, I mean, not really fight, but they will take action to make sure that they appear at that level, right? So if they've ranked themselves high in their minds in the room, they will avoid challenges, they will maybe be combative with people. If someone is questioning their decisions, if someone is questioning a choice that they made or a direction that they're leading the team, or even influencing the team, they will really want to protect that sort of status because to them that's value, to them that's meaningful, their value, their meaning, their value comes from this place that's established, and it is mostly in their minds. In their heads, everybody is just at one place and they're not gonna move. You can maybe learn a new skill, but you can't become more than you are. And I I hope that you can already start to see how this is a little bit of a trap. So for me, when I was a when I was a child, I was in the accelerated class schedule all through grade school. I was in the advanced reading class for the class above me with a classmate. And I was always told how smart I was. I was told I was quick, I was told I was smart, everything came very easily. I was a very, very good student. And then junior high and high school hit where I was then having to take classes, specifically science and math, that did not come easily to me. Those classes were much more difficult. I did not get it right away, and I became frustrated very, very fast. And the reason was because I thought of myself as smart. I thought of myself as someone who on ideas and concepts came too quickly. I'd never had to work for good grades before. I'd never had to apply myself or learn how to study. I didn't learn how to really study until I was in university, but that's a different story. I started avoiding those classes. I mean, I I didn't fail. I got pretty low grades for a few math and science courses, even though I took them because I was one of the smart kids in my class. I was supposed to take those classes. I didn't do very well. I had no idea what I was doing. Somehow I eked by passing. I don't know how. But even in university, when I had to decide on a major for study, I took a major that did not require me to take any math classes. I took science classes and I really enjoyed them. But I didn't take anything where I had to do math. That's how avoidant I was. Same can be said for myself. I learned how to peel play the piano at a young age. And people always said, Oh, you play the piano so well, you pick it up so easily, blah, blah, blah. Well, I never really learned how to read music because I could find the notes on the piano on the keyboard, on the piano itself, and then I could figure out how to play, but I couldn't really look at a piece of music and recognize from what my eyes saw where my fingers were supposed to go. Kind of, but not really. I remember my last recital because I wasn't going to be taking lessons anymore. I was stopping, I was around 13 years old, and the piece that I was gonna play was Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin, because I was really into ragtime music, which is complicated on the piano. It's a lot of chords, a lot of all over the place. And I was able to play this piece. I don't know how I was, but I was. I was able to play this piece, and my teacher had had me trying to practice it by like starting in the middle, but I really could not start in the middle. I could really only start at the beginning because then my fingers knew where to go, and I could use the music to kind of know where I was supposed to be, but I couldn't read it to recognize if I had a problem and got stuck, I could only start at the beginning again because the music on the page wasn't gonna be able to help me. So I had that last recital where I was supposed to play this complicated piece, and I started freaking myself out that I was gonna make a mistake somewhere in the middle. I wasn't gonna be able to pick up where I was, I was gonna have to start over again, and I would be embarrassed. And I gave myself such a stomachache. I was supposed to play last, I think. I gave myself such a stomachache that I told my mom, I can't. I can't play, I'm sick, I need to go home. And I was only partly faking because I had given myself such a stomachache. So that's a fixed mindset, though. And it's it's not really focusing on the process, it's trying to get the gold star and not put in a lot of effort, believing that, well, this is something I'm just not good at. I'm just not good at math and science. So I'm just gonna avoid it. Okay. A growth mindset, what Carol Dwack found in her research was that there were children who were both okay with failing and they really enjoyed the process of being challenged. Like if they were given puzzles that they couldn't get right away, they relished the process of figuring it out. And I asked myself, who are these children? Because that was not me. I was not the one who was excited about learning and being in that process. This growth mindset is about embracing a process that you haven't mastered something yet. But isn't it fun to be challenged? Isn't it fun to be in the learning process? They may or may not want the gold star, but they're definitely all about the process of learning, the process of being challenged. And that's the fun part, which to me, I don't relate to this because I just want the gold star. So I don't always have a growth mindset. I think one of the exceptions for me is pottery. I've talked about that I am a potter who throws on a wheel, and I've got a studio at home. I learned before COVID. And pottery is one of those things that you have to learn by doing. You cannot just be told what to do. You have to learn how the clay needs to feel in your hands, and you have to learn how to shape it and mold it and move it, and when there's too much water and when there's too little and what's going wrong and all the things. And pottery is one of those few places for me where even when a piece is wobbling, it's cratering, the walls are falling down, it's a mess. For me, it's still fun. I still really enjoy it. I'm not worried about whether or not I'm great at it. I mean, part of part of pottery is you know you can't really get excited about a piece until after it's dry, after it's been fired once, after it's been glazed, after it's been fired the second time, and you take it out of that kiln after the second firing. Maybe you have to have a third, but usually two is enough. And then you can actually get excited about the piece because there's so many places that things can go wrong. Either it's the potter's fault or it's just, hmm, things didn't go well this time. So you have to kind of look at each piece not as a masterpiece when it's wet on the wheel. It doesn't become a masterpiece until far further down in the process. And this was something that I actually didn't understand right at the beginning. Every piece I made, I thought it was a masterpiece. What I should have been doing is taking my wire and slicing through half of it to pull the other half away and take a look at what the walls look like. Because that's the most important thing that you really have to learn in pottery, how to get equal walls, not too thin, not too thick. And this is something you you don't know unless you slice it in half with your wire to take a look. There's no other way to know. You can kind of tell by feel if you pick it up and you think, ooh, this is heavy. Okay, so those the bottoms probably too thick and the walls are probably too thick. And then, you know, you can use it as a doorstop. It's funny, one of the reasons I know I have a growth mindset about pottery is I was back in the studio where I learned pottery in Spain the year after I first learned how to do it. And I was having a really rough day on the wheel. Sometimes just nothing works. Sometimes everything works. Ugh, to just live in that space. But you don't. It's not that's not life. So I was having a rough day on the wheel. The wife of the master that I learned from was there in the studio that day. And she speaks English, so we had could have better conversations than the master and I could. And she could see that I was frustrated and having a really hard time. And she said, Maybe you should just go back to painting. And I I sort of looked at her and I thought, no, no, I'm not gonna do that. I I love this. This is fun to me, and I don't mind that I'm having a rough day because I know I'm gonna have a better day another day. Like another day, this is all gonna be fine, and it's gonna be it's still fun today, even though it's frustrating. But this is isn't the end of things. Like one bad day doesn't mean I'm just gonna throw it all away. When I was younger, or had it been something that I might not have loved as much, I might have gone along with what she said. Entirely possible. But I can see that my my mindset has changed. I don't think that way anymore. Or at least on this topic, I don't think that way, and I do have a growth mindset, which I have to say I'm quite proud of. So pottery is one of the places that I have a bit of a growth mindset, and I think it's partly just because I enjoy it so much, which is also part of the point. There's a book out there, It's Great to Suck at Something. And basically, sorry, I can't remember who wrote it, but sorry to her because you don't really have to read it. All you need is the title. But her premise is great. It's great to suck at something. If you love something, I love pottery. She loves surfing. If you love it, it doesn't really matter if you're great at it. If you ever are recognized as a famous pottery artist or a world-class surfer in her case, it doesn't matter. If you enjoy it, that's what matters. If you have so much joy from the process of doing it, that is fantastic. It doesn't matter what it ever looks like. It doesn't matter if anybody else ever loves it. If you do, that's fantastic. And once you can embrace that sucking at something, you can take even more joy from it because you're not trying to reach that gold star. You're not trying to just whiz past the process. You're actually enjoying the process. This is the thing. In a in a growth mindset, the process is the thing. And that is hard for me, but it's something that I'm learning to do better all the time. So, some other examples that I've seen. One was also at the university where I was a team coach for a project team. And there was a product manager on that team who had made some decisions about the software approach they were going to take. And what made sense to him at the beginning, he started to see the signs that it maybe wasn't the best way to go. But he really was afraid he was gonna look kind of like an amateur, maybe like an idiot. And so he just wanted to press forward, hoping that things were gonna get better. And guess what? They didn't. And when he finally was able to recognize it, and he used the words like, I realize I've been in a fixed mindset, and he said, Okay, we're gonna switch. And they had to redo tons of stuff, but actually making the change was so much better. Everybody said, I'm so glad you recognize that because now we are full speed ahead because we're actually doing the right thing right now. Fantastic. I knew of a house contractor who was not someone who really enjoyed asking questions. He felt, I don't know, he he seemed to feel embarrassed because he saw himself as a contractor with a ton of experience. He came into things saying he knew how to do everything. But the truth was he didn't. And in when he came up against a problem, instead of talking it over with the house owner, who actually had a lot of ideas and was very open to discussion when there was a problem, the contractor never contacted the owner because he was afraid to. And what ended up happening was there were so many weird mistakes in this house that they were not like life or death, this absolutely has to change. But if the owner had known what was going on, if the contractor had been honest and upfront and admitted that they weren't quite sure about everything, it would have made a huge difference. I think the other side of this is well illustrated from a glass artist I saw on the Netflix show Blown Away. And he said the most profound thing that I felt was such a great example of a growth mindset. He said, You know, this process is really difficult, and there's so many things that you can only learn by making mistakes and then going forward and fixing them. He said, I want to get as many mistakes out of the out of the way as soon as possible because then I'm actually learning and then I'm Can actually get to like the doing stage. And I thought that was amazing because how many times do we actually think to ourselves, these mistakes are necessary to get me to the place where this is going to start to go smoothly? You just have to go through the mistakes. You have to go through the problem times in order to get to the good stuff. But how often do we want to just get to the good stuff immediately, thinking that somehow we're not going to make the mistakes? When I start to put myself in the role of the observer and think about this a little bit more logically, I start to think, wow, in so many ways, a fixed mindset is so unhelpful. It just doesn't get you through this process in a meaningful, profitable, enjoyable way. It gets you so stuck. Last example, in my 30s, I worked on a team for a nonprofit, and a new person joined the team, and she was much younger than me. And for some reason, I really had it in my head that I could learn nothing from her. Like there wasn't anything she would be able to tell me that I didn't already know. And it was really just simply because she was younger than me. Which I think about that now, and I think, oh my goodness, that's so weird. Fortunately for me, I had a friend who I raised this in a conversation with her. I was like, ugh, I just really don't like this new team member. She's so young, and I I don't know. I don't, I just don't think I have anything to learn from her. And my friend looked at me and said, You're gonna have to get over that. And truly, I did need to get over it because I could learn from her. The thing is, we don't all start at the same place. Learning is not linear. Everybody doesn't start with one and go from one to ten million in their lifetimes, and and we can all measure like where I am, and oh, that person's 10 behind me. Well, I know more than they do about everything that we could know. No, it doesn't work like that. We start with Apple, and then we go to L. And then we go to 10, and then we go to drum. Right? I mean, that obviously doesn't make any sense, but my point is that we nothing's linear and it moves all around, and the the scales are different, and we learn different things than different people do. And what it comes down to is we can always learn from anyone. We can learn from anyone. If someone is in our lives, we can learn from them and we can take advantage of the fact that they are in our lives and say, What do you know that I don't know yet? How can I learn from you? Okay, so statements that tend to characterize these mindsets. For a fixed mindset, if you are saying to yourself, I am too old, I am too dumb, I am too inexperienced, I am too fill in the blank to learn this or change, that is a fixed mindset. If you find yourself thinking, I am not getting this, let's just go on to something else, that is a fixed mindset. If you hear yourself saying or thinking, I don't have anything to learn from fill in the blank, that is also a fixed mindset. This also applies to organizations in the sense that if you are in an organization where the people keep saying anytime someone wants to make a change, oh, but this is how we've always done it. Oh, but this is what we know works, oh, but this is whatever. That is also a fixed mindset. It's the organization, obviously, it doesn't have its own mindset, but there is a culture within that organization that says, don't make waves, don't make changes, don't make it uncomfortable, don't make it painful, don't make it feel any kind of way that isn't just let's just go on as we always have. That's a fixed mindset in a company culture. The growth mindset says, I don't know how to do this yet, but I will. The growth mindset says, I'm here for the process, even when it's hard. And the growth mindset says, I can learn something from anyone. So people always ask, all right, so if that's a fixed mindset and this is a growth mindset, and you probably want to be in a growth mindset, people have asked me the question numerous times when I've done this. Can you think of a time when you should be in a fixed mindset? And to be honest, I mean, you need to just figure that out for yourself. In my opinion, not really. I fixed mindset to me is is seldom helpful. Like protecting yourself and being careful, yes, of course, but that's not what this is. You can you can ask me the question, I'm not sure I could answer it for you. But I think it's worth it's worth reflecting on. Is there ever a time when you should be in or stay in a fixed mindset? I don't know. That you'll have to decide for yourself. But what is golden to me is that when you want to change, if you recognize that you're in a fixed mindset, that recognition alone is pretty much all you need to be able to move into a growth mindset. Don't ask me how that works. It's not, it's kind of magic. That the recognition, oh, I am in a fixed mindset right now. That alone can shift you, can pivot your brain over to say, all right, what is a what is a growth mindset say? How do I stay in this? How do I stay present? How do I embrace the process? How do I just not give up because this hasn't come easily to me? Because things that are worth doing are often worth doing, whether they're easy or hard. That's the beauty of it. It's not a long process to scrabble your way from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. It's not. In my experience, it truly is the recognition that that's where you are. And boom, now if you want to be, you can be in a growth mindset. Incredible. Amazing how simple it is. So getting back to the guy who is so confused and asking me, why are we why are we talking about this in a leadership development? This is your challenge for today. I want you to think about what does this have to do with leadership? Is that what I want you to think about today? Okay, this is funny. So I I thought this could be the challenge. And to be honest, I think that's I think that's kind of dumb because to me, this is so obvious. It's so obvious why you would talk about mindsets for leadership development. That is not the challenge for today. Let's let's not even entertain that. Of course this is relevant. Of course this matters. To understand when we're getting stuck and we're not leading very well anymore, of course that's relevant to being a leader. Of course that's relevant to managing teams. I think a better challenge is actually to think back, to reflect back on your own childhood. As I was telling stories of myself in a fixed mindset in particular, what were you thinking? What was that taking you back to? When had you gotten sort of trapped in a fixed mindset as a child? I do want to add here, because I didn't earlier, that those teachers and family members and whoever was telling me that I was smart as a kid, they were not intentionally harming me. That was not at all what they were trying to do. They were trying to encourage me. They were trying to just speak the truth that they were seeing. They didn't know that that was feeding into a fixed mindset in me. Had they known, I don't think they would have said it. Again, they were doing their best, they were working with what they had. And separating kids by like, you're smart, you're dumb, you're super dumb, uh, was normal. This is not something that many people try to harm their children or their students or whoever is in their care. And it doesn't mean that you shouldn't encourage people, but you can, you can alter how you talk to people. Like, hey, the child creates something for you. Hey, oh, I really like this. Tell me about it. Tell me about the process. Was it always easy? Was it hard? What did you do when it was hard? To actually get them to talk about the process and not just praise what we think is, you know, easy, what comes easily. Or, you know, if a colleague is in the process, this is not just about children. If a colleague is struggling in a process, you can recognize I see you're in this process, I see it's hard. How can I support you? But I want you to know, I think this is worth it. Like stay in it. This process is worth it. There are ways that we can shift how we talk to people and not just praise the finished work and give out the gold stars, but we can actually focus on the process and praise the process and enjoy the process. So there you go. I think I'd also like you to consider is there something that you suck at that you really enjoy? Is there anything that you suck at? Like, I I mean, I don't suck at pottery. Some days I do, but generally speaking, I don't. So I'm also thinking about this myself. Like, is there anything in my life that I'm really not that good at, but I do because I love? And I don't think you have to, but I think it's an interesting question. Thank you for joining me today. I hope this has been fun, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. As always, big thanks to Lilia Keys for our intro and outro music.