Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset
Hello and welcome to another exciting topic as we dive deeper into the different types of mindsets.
You’ve heard me mention ‘growth mindset’ a few times and today I’m going to make sense of what a fixed mindset is and what a growth mindset it. And of course how we can move from one to the other.
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And as with most topics I cover on this blog,they are all interlinked. Your mindset is closely linked to your beliefs. And tools such as language and Stoic philosophy are already helping you move towards that growth mindset.
And that’s why I’m writing this blog and also have a whole coaching course dedicated to the subject. all of these tools and concepts are powerful on their own. And when you link them all together and use them in conjuction of one another. That’s where the real magic happens. And we get the multiplier effect. It’s like compound interest in your brain.
You can view your mindset as a muscle or any other skill. It needs training and it needs maintenance. And there’s always a next level. I’ve discussed a variety of tools, concepts and theories in this blog and hopefully you have started to train them, put them together and integrate them into your daily life and daily thinking.
What’s crazy is that this is transferable into anything you do, and you probably already naturally did a lot of these skills in various parts of your life unconsciously. But in other parts struggled and it could seem like you were a completely different person.
This is completely normal. We often we see people that have a solid mindset in one part of their life. Maybe they are very successful professionally. They have a good job and solid career. They smash through all the things I’ve mentioned naturally in this area of their life. They see obstacles as opportunities and overcome them. They use positive empowering language. They have strong beliefs that push them forward rather than holding them back. And they set solid goals and focus on the actions they can take to achieve them.
Then in a separate area of their life, they are a mess. They have the complete opposite mindset. They could be very unhealthy and make terrible choices in both food and exercise. They just aren’t in control of it and can’t seem to get in shape. Or they are defeated by cigarettes. Or maybe even they excel in one area professionally, but then when faced in another area, maybe moving from one job to the next, they just can’t find the same level of success and start to move towards that fixed mindset and start to fail.
What are the Qualities of Success?
We’re told they are based on hard work, focus and persistence but research shows that these are all bi-products of something much larger.
A Growth Mindset!
You can see the difference in people that keep a consistent mindset in everything they do. They are the people that are just good at everything. They seamlessly move from one area to another. Maybe they are a successful athlete, then they move over and become a successful businessman and then move over and are even good at a variety of other sports.
It’s not because they’ve got a multitude of talents. They’ve got one talent. And it’s a solid mindset and they transfer it into anything they do.
Let’s look at both mindsets in more details.
Since the dawn of time, people have thought differently, acted differently and fare differently from each other. And we’ve been asking the age old question of why people differed. Why are some people smarter or more moral? And is there something that makes them permanently different?
Experts lined up on both sides, some claiming a strong physical basis for the differences making them unavoidaable and unalterable. This included things like genes and the size and shape of the skull. Others pointed to strong differences in people’s backgrounds, experiences, training or ways of learning. A big champion of this view was Alfred Binet, the inventor of the IQ test. He designed the test to identify children who were not profiting from the Paris public school system so that new educational programmes could be designed to better serve them. He believed that education and practice could bring about fundamental changes in intelligence.
Today, most experts agree that it’s not either — or. Scientists are learning that people have more capacity for lifelong learning and brain development than they ever thought. Whilst each person does have a unique genetic endowment it is clear that experience, training and personal effort take them the rest of the way. In other words. It’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.
And this is backed up by 30 years of research from people such as Dr Carol Dweck.
Her research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.
So what’s a fixed mindset? This is believing that your qualities are carved in stone. Hence fixed mindset. This creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character — well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characterisitcs.
Many of us are trained in this mindset from an early age. Those teachers at school that sit you in test score order and blame your failures or success on a fixed measure of intelligence.
This mindset leads to one consuming goal of proving yourself. In the classroom, in your career and in your relationships. Every situation calls for a confirmation of your intelligence, personality or character. Every situation is evaluated: “Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected. Will I feel like a winner or a loser?”
And on the flip side there’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others. Although people may differ in every which way — in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments — everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
Do these people believe that anyone can be anything and that anyone with proper motivation or education can become Einstein or Beethoven? No, but they believe that a person’s true potential is unknown and unknowable; that it’s impossible to foresee what can be accomplished with years of passion, toil or training.
So you can see how this growth mindset belief that cherished qualities can be developed creates a passion for learning. Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better? Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends and partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow?
The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even when it’s not going well is the hallmark of the growth mindset. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.
Let me tell you about Josh Waitzkin. He’s the subject of both the book and later film called ‘In search of Bobby Fisher.’
He started life out as a child chess prodigy and went on to win the U.S. Junior Chess championship in 1993 and 1994.
Noone else has won the number of tournaments that he has won.
To prove that he’s not a genius prodigy and that skills can be learnt through the correct application of mindset, he went on to at the age of 21 to try a new challenge.
Martial Arts.
He became a martial arts push hands champion and then a champion coach and then he moved over to Brazilian Jui Jitsu where he earnt a black belt under Marcelo Garcia, a five time world champion and considered the best pound for pound grappler in the world.
Josh says that the best thing that ever happened to him was losing his first ever chess championship. That taught him to get over the psychological traps and get into the right mindset. And key traps that he avoided was believing he was special and smarter than other people.
What Josh has that sets him apart, and the purpose of what I’d like you to get out of this blog is to embrace that growth mindset, in all areas of our lives. As discussed, you’ll already possess it in some, and it’s that ability to permanently live in that growth mindset that will really push you to the next level.
Now let’s just look at a bit of science as to how this works.
There are physiological manifestations to mindset that appear in brain scans. It shows that people with a fixed mindset, the brain becomes most active when receiving information about how the person performed. Such as a greater score.
But for people with a growth mindset, the one you will adopt, the brain becomes most active when receiving information about what they could do better next time.
So this means, that those with a fixed mindset, worry about how they will be judged. An external factor. Remember this from the blog on the tricotomy of control and Stoicism?
Those with a growth mindset focus the most on learning.
There are other consequences of mindset. People with a fixed mindset see effort as a bad thing, something that only people with low capabilities need while those with a growth mindset see effort as what makes us smart, as the way to grow. And when they hit a setback or failure, people with a fixed mindset tend to conclude that this is due to them not being naturally capable, so to protect their ego.
Whereas people with a growth mindset understand that setbacks are part of growth. So when they hit a roadblock they find a way around it like Josh Waitzkin did when he lost in chess, or in martial arts. This again goes back to what I speak about in the Stoicism blog post on overcoming obstacles.
Research clearly shows these effects of mindset. In one study that Dr Dweck who also created the image above, they had children do a set of puzzles.
And then they praise the kids and to some of the kids they said, “Wow, that’s a really good score, you must be smart”
Now that’s fixed mindset praise because it portrays intelligence or abilities as a fixed quality.
And to other kids they said, “Wow, that’s a really good score, you must have tried really hard.” That’s growth mindset praise, because it focuses on the process. Again, this goes back to focusing on what you can control. The effort and training that you put in, and not the end result. The tennis example was the one we used in the blog post on Stoicism.
Then they ask the kids, okay, what kind of puzzle would you like to do next: an easy one, or a hard one?
The majority of the kids who received the fixed mindset praise chose to do the easy puzzle. While the great majority of those who received the growth mindset praise chose to challenge themselves.
Then no matter what response the kind gave, the researchers gave a hard puzzle to all of the kids because they’re interested in seeing what confronting difficulty would do to their performance.
Then what’s very interesting is when the kids later went back to the set of easier problems that they started with the kids who received the fixed mindset praise, did significantly worse than they had originally. Well, those who received the growth praise by surprise did better.
And to top it off, at the very end, kids were asked to report their scores. And the kids who received the fixed mindset praise lied about their scores over three times more often than those who received the growth mindset praise, they did not have another way to cope with their failure.
So what does this mean for you. This study nicely tops up everything I’ve covered in this blog so far. It shows a combination of beliefs, language, clear goals setting and Stoic principles at play.
Let’s continue working on these and a strong powerful growth mindset will become the norm.
Hope you enjoyed this week’s blog post and see you in the next one.
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This article was written by Stuart Munnich. If you’d like to know more or receive notifications for future articles, please head over to the Agoge Project Website or subscribe to updates right here!
