American psychologist Carol Dweck coined and popularized the expression ‘growth mindset’ to describe an especially productive and effective approach to problem-solving.
Her research was primarily conducted in schools and in the context of learning, and is therefore of special interest to us as educators in the often intimidating world of tech.
In this article, we will introduce you to the concept of a growth mindset – and its antithesis, a fixed mindset – and discuss ways that you can develop and cultivate such an approach for yourself.
What Is A Growth Mindset?
A growth mindset is particular a way of understanding or perceiving our abilities, our talents, and our potential. It sees these things as changeable by means of action. In this frame of mind, your ability to resolve problems (or to do anything else) will grow the more problems you face, and the more you dedicate yourself to them.
The opposite of this is a fixed mindset, in which you see your qualities as essentially ‘gifts’ that you have or have not been given. Thus, your ‘intelligence’ is what it is: if you are confronted with a problem, you will either be able to solve it without effort, or else it will simply be beyond your reach, and there is nothing you can do about that.
A growth mindset naturally leads to a love of learning and greater achievements, in the short and long term both, while a fixed mindset tends to get stuck in either admiration of its own qualities, or self-deprecation for their absence.
What A Growth Mindset Is NOT – Common Fallacies
In these times when self-help practices have become more popular than ever, the idea of a growth mindset has also seen its meaning diluted as an effect of its own popularity. So, before embarking on how to develop it, let’s point out some of the most common mistakes people make when thinking about this concept.
- Growth mindset just means staying positive. Nope. It means something more specific, which has to do with the relationship between our qualities and our activities. It’s not simply a synonym for being optimistic, and it doesn’t carry rose-tinted rhetorical messages like ‘you can achieve anything you want as long as you believe in yourself’. Believing you can push your limits back is not the same as fantasising that there are no limits at all.
- Growth and fixed mindsets are mutually exclusive. Not correct. The two may be opposite mindsets, but as is often the case in psychology, they exist simultaneously in all of us. We typically approach some things on growth terms, and some other on fixed terms. We can change this to a very great extent, but nobody ever reaches a 100% growth mindset or fully and permanently gets rid of a fixed mindset.
- Growth mindset is all about effort. Again, not quite. Someone who keeps doing the same thing even though it always yields the same results may be putting in a lot of effort, but they are not growing. Effort has to be productive in some way – not in the sense that it must always be successful, but that even when it fails, it must lead to some form of learning or progress.
How To Develop A Growth Mindset
All right, now that we know what a growth mindset is (and isn’t), let’s look at a few tips that can help us develop it in ourselves! And first of all…
- Identify the patterns of your fixed mindset.
The first step to develop a growth mindset is to become aware of when you’re sliding into its opposite – the fixed mindset. This doesn’t always take the form of conscious thoughts. If there are certain problems, and especially certain types of problems, that make you want to walk away, to throw your hands up, that immediately engender a sense of frustration, that’s your fixed mindset acting up. Learn to recognize these feelings, and learn to welcome problems that engender them. That’s exactly where growth will come from.
- Reframe failure as learning
Some people define ‘failure’ as what happens when you try something and don’t get the desired or expected outcome. Yet it is only by ‘failing’ in this way that you learn how to succeed. If you want to learn how to design a website, the only way to do that is to try multiple times, get bombarded with error messages when you first try writing code, and fix those error messages until your code actually works. Start thinking of failure not as the times when you try and don’t succeed, but as the times when you do not try something. See things this way, and as long as you try, you can literally never fail!
- Add the word ‘yet’ whenever you evaluate your abilities
As we said earlier, we all have limits, and it would be childish to pretend we do not. Suppose that you want to automate one of your work tasks with the programming language Python. Can you do this? If you do not have the skills, you may think the answer is no. But the correct answer is not yet. Any time that you assess what you can and cannot do, accept your limits, but add ‘yet’ at the end of your sentence. Understand the things you cannot do as things that you can learn to do.
- Celebrate not giving up
Rewarding yourself is key to keeping motivation up. But rather than telling yourself ‘I am so smart!’ when you finally crack a problem, start congratulating yourself for not having given up. That’s what should be activating your reward circuits. This way, when you next find yourself frustrated by a problem, instead of thinking ‘I’m clearly not clever enough for this’, you will more likely push yourself to keep going. By the way – you should be celebrating others in the same way as well! Congratulate your peers on their persistence, on their flexibility, on their willingness to try new things and solutions – not on how ‘good’ or how ‘talented’ they are.
- Welcome the roadblocks
Somebody may enjoy what they’re doing, until they come to a roadblock, and then the experience stops being enjoyable. Think differently: welcome the roadblocks. If there are none in your path, it means you are not learning. Instead, be grateful whenever you come across a roadblock. See it as an opportunity to overcome something you could not do before (or you could not yet do before), and an opportunity to add something to your arsenal of skills and your archive of knowledge. Embrace the times when you come across a problem that seems insurmountable, and don’t feel bad if you can’t get past it on your first try. Remember – you only fail by not trying.
Go Forth And Be Kind To Yourself
This ends our list of tips on how to develop a growth mindset. We hope that it was useful to you, but remember – a growth mindset is not a light switch that you flick on and off. It is something that you must develop, slowly and gradually, and it is something that can never be achieved in a definitive, ‘growth-at-100%’ state.
Ironically, developing a growth mindset requires a growth mindset! This means that even as you try to get there, you will stumble, you will make mistakes, you will come short. When you do, don’t berate yourself, and do not give up. The path to getting better is hard and never straight, and this isn’t true only for what you do, but also for how you think.