Grow Your Mindset

Recently, I’ve come across the work of Carol Dweck.  I’d never heard of her or her work, but I'm now reading her book.  What she has realized is that, as children, humans develop a mindset regarding their abilities to learn new things and, consequently, achieve what they want to in life.  This crosses the spectrum from the classroom to the workplace to art to technical skills, even to relationships and working on our inner selves: anything new to us that we had never done before. 

There are two mindsets: fixed and growth.  A fixed mindset is exactly what it sounds like: unmoving.  It believes that we are only a certain degree of intelligent or talented, and that determines how much we can do and how far we get in life.  If a skill comes easily to us, and we are praised for having that skill, we take it into our identities and it becomes who we are.  If we succeed in learning or solving a problem, we feel good about ourselves (we are endowed), and if we don’t, we feel bad about ourselves (we are flawed).  We take whether we learn or solve something right away or not very personally.  A growth mindset is exactly what it sounds like: fluid.  We thrive on challenges, and if a skill doesn’t come easily to us, and we are praised on our tenacity to try to learn that skill, we hold onto the effort that we put into it as our identities.  We have confidence that we can learn the new skillset, even if it doesn’t come right away, or it’s difficult.  We know for a fact that we can get smarter, better at something, through our own hard work and tenacity.  We don’t take anything personally. 

I’ve come to realize that I have had a fixed mindset all of my life.  Getting good grades came easily to me, as did making art, when I was a kid.  I was praised by adults for having these skills: “You’re so smart, you’re so talented, Gina!”  I didn’t feel special in other areas of my life, so I clung to this praise because it made me feel special.  I took this as my identity.  It was my memory that was my superpower, so my recall made it easy to take tests.  And I took to writing, so essays were also easy for me.  And I was very spatially-oriented (“You’re so fucking spatial/I wish I was spatial…”), so that made me good at drawing realistically.  Math and science…not so much.  I thought I was creative, but not logical.  I labored under that delusion for many, many years.  Math did not come easily to me, so I thought I wasn’t good at it, and that was that.  Even further, when I came across skills that were new in drawing and painting in my college classes (like abstract expressionism), I tried half-heartedly, to please the professors, but I gave up very easily.  I didn’t challenge myself.  I stayed well inside my comfort zone.  Even as an adult in my 40s, I feel that I can improve my painting skills, but I don’t leave myself time and space to work on them.  When things do not come easily to me, I get frustrated and stop the effort.  I get embarrassed that I don’t know it already.  I get angry.  I don’t like this new thing.  I resist.  I pout.  I feel like I’m being silently judged by people who do know how to do these things.  That they think I’m stupid, and oh, one of the worst things in the world is to be thought stupid, or to feel stupid, myself.  It’s unbearable.  I am fixed, rigid, unyielding, judgemental.  I don’t like it, but it’s what I have been.  Until now. 

Now that I see the differences between the two mindsets, and see what has been, I can see where I want to grow.  And I *do* want to grow.  I want to unhitch my identity from that stationary succeed/fail post and instead concern myself with moving forward (or in any direction, just moving and not standing still), using integrity and diligence (among others) as to how I identify myself.  I believe I have integrity, and a good work ethic.  That’s a pretty good start.  Realizing that not wanting to look like an idiot was behind my lack of effort (keeping me comfortably in my comfort zone), I now can channel effort into learning a new skill or solving a new problem, knowing full well that I am not an idiot just because I don’t know something.  I simply haven’t had exposure to it yet.  I know that I can do research or ask people who already know how to do it what their thoughts are, or to teach me some pointers.  I can take a class to learn how to paint, play an instrument, cook, learn algebra, or accounting.  I can read up on things.  I can learn by trial-and-error.  Just experimenting and seeing what works!  That is going to go miles for me to make my brain more plastic and less set-in-stone.  This is a *huge* transformation!!   And I know that I can keep the progress up as I move through the second half of my life, because as opposed to the first part of my life, this is a *choice* that I am making. 

I love that the key word is “yet”.  I don’t know how to do this *yet*.  I haven’t solved this problem *yet*.  I don’t have the answer *yet*.  But I *will*.  It’s remembering to have the confidence that I *can* figure it out, because I know in the past, I have figured things out, and I will again.  That is my new superpower: belief in myself as an action hero, as a doer, as an agent.  I don’t have to know everything about being a human being, and if I don’t know, it doesn’t make me less a human being.  I can always learn.