Dr. Dweck’s research showed how a person’s mindset builds the platform for either a fixed or a growth mindset. A student with a fixed mindset will be more conscious about looking smart all the time and will avoid challenging work. However, a student with a growth mindset will pursue interesting and challenging tasks in order to learn more.
Further into the research, she found that people’s beliefs about their own intelligence had a significant impact on their motivation, effort and approach to challenges. Those who believed they could overcome challenges were more likely to focus on them and persist despite setbacks.
This model of the fixed versus growth mindset shows how cognitive, affective and behavioural features are linked to one’s beliefs about the flexibility of one’s intelligence. Different mindsets lead to different patterns of behaviour.
As Dweck argues, a fixed mindset is what stops many of us from trying to improve in certain areas where we think we’ve hit our ceiling. In truth, of course, we’re all capable of reaching new heights. It’s just a matter of shifting from a “fixed mindset” to a “growth mindset”.
There are several tools that one can use to make the transition to a growth mindset — reframing “I can’t do this” as “I can’t do this yet”, valuing effort and process over the appearance of being clever, and treating mistakes as information rather than verdicts.
Parts of the original article are reproduced here for representational purposes only, and ThinkTac acknowledges the copyright of the original owners. Source material drawn from Mindset Works (mindsetworks.com) and Lifehack (lifehack.org).