Musings | Growth Mindset
“Love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning”
The last year has placed us all outside of our comfort zone. To some extent, we have all been knocked down. So where to from here? How are we going to get back up? To quote Carol Dweck (author of Mindset), we have the opportunity to “be gripped with the tyranny of now.” In other words, we can cultivate and embrace a growth mindset. A state of mind that allows us to stumble, to persevere, and not only welcome but learn from failure. A form of mind that accepts that we have not yet mastered our “new normal” but acknowledges that we will get there through consistent effort day by day. Or, we can allow our minds to stay fixed and be paralyzed by the now. This is a choice. Your mindset is simply a powerful belief that exists in your mind. We can all change our minds if we wish to.
The graphic on the right outlines the two mindsets available to us. A growth mindset is associated with a mind open to learning from setbacks and continually getting up and moving forward after falling down. In contrast, a fixed mindset is associated with avoiding challenges and giving up.
Adopting a growth mindset creates room for us to face our current challenges directly while creating space for self-compassion, learning, and growth in our lives. When we understand and accept that we just have not adapted to a situation or mastered a skill “yet,” we give ourselves permission to try repeatedly and in different ways. We can better be patient with ourselves and hear feedback and ideas from others and allow ourselves to explore different ways of doing things. As we move to adapt to life after Covid, adopting a growth mindset will help us stay mentally well and help us spring forward into our next reality.
Want to think about it differently? Try a video game mindset.
We can also think about this as a video game mindset (Adrian Ferrera via Cindra Kamphoff Mindset Summit): You get set up, you start the game, and you don’t know what’s going to happen. But you keep playing the game. You don’t know what everything does, but you learn as you go. You don’t know what happens at the end of the day. You don’t know what is going to happen, but you still need to play the game. You cannot get so far ahead that you focus on what will happen in the end. You also cannot be too focused on what happened in the past. You need to accept the obstacles that come in front of you and navigate them the best way you can.
Resources & Sources
Carol Dweck 10 minute Ted Talk