[jkhdigital]

When I first read about Dweck’s work on mindset, I thought I had finally found the perfect description of my struggles in childhood. I was like a textbook case of fixed mindset.

But after a while I realized that the abstraction of “mindset” isn’t actually much help in changing your behavior. It’s more like mindset is a label you apply to a set of behaviors after the fact rather than some principle that drives the behavior in the first place. In other words, if you want to have a “growth mindset” then you behave in a way that people with such a mindset behave. That is obviously completely useless advice—so what you’re really digging for is what drives the behavior that Dweck calls fixed mindset.

For me, those behaviors are driven by fear. I suspect that I have a heightened physiological fear response compared to the average person, and fixed mindset behavior is just how I coped with that as a child. There’s really only a handful of ways to deal with that, the most effective of which is basically exposure therapy: engage in low-stakes activities that make you afraid, as often as possible. Frequently taking up new hobbies with a social element is a pretty easy way to accomplish this.