| So what is fixed vs growth mindset? You believe in innate talent vs you believe in practice and hardwork. Failure indicates that you don't have it vs curiosity around why it did not work this time. Criticism or feedback is taken personally vs Feedback is a way to learn. You are constantly looking at others to validate your talent vs You are measuring and developing your own yardsticks for growth. As per my understanding, you can have growth mindset in one sphere of your life and have fixed mindset in another. For e.g. a person I recently met, has fixed mindset around programming, but has a growth mindset on the subject of maths. What does all this result in? Our self-talk about the activity at hand will tell us what mindset we have. Do we tell ourselves:
"I am not good enough", "I will never be good at this".
Are we constantly looking at others to gauge what they perceive of us or our abilities? We then need to transform all these into 1. "I am not good at this right now, but if I work at it, I will". 2. "Everyone struggles. It's just not me. Everyone has spent time and effort to become good at it."
"Everyone finds learning a new thing hard and challenging" 3. What is stopping me from continuing right now? "Am i tired?", "Am I hungry?" or is it my regular pattern of avoiding pain of learning? Can I transform this towards curiosity? To move towards growth mindset we need to approach it with a sense of play. With a sense of curiosity towards what we are trying to learn or develop into. We also need to be aware of how are feelings are involved and what they are pushing us to do or avoid. |