Developing a Growth Mindset is Vital to Living Switched-on

Developing a growth mindset is knowing that you can choose to improve your intelligence and abilities. Research shows that the inherent understanding of intelligence can have a significant impact on your progress and accomplishments in life.

When developing a growth mindset, you don’t believe that anybody’s current situation is everlasting. This understanding particularly applies to how we deal with failures.  When you come to see faults as proof of having an inept personality, this limiting and prejudicial fixed mindset will become a natural constraint to your growth.

In 2007, the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck demonstrated the effect of the growth and fixed mindsets in a two-year study where she observed hundreds of high school students who were participating in a challenging math program.

People with a Growth Mindset Respond Positively to Failures

At the outset of the study, Dweck determined which students had a fixed mindset and which had a growth mindset. After a few months, it became apparent that the students with a growth mindset were outperforming their peers with a fixed mindset. The performance discrepancy between the two groups continued to widen as the years went on.

In analyzing what exactly had caused this discrepancy, Dweck found that those with a growth mindset managed to recover from failures. More accurately, she noticed that because the growth-minded students didn’t regard their intelligence level as fixed, they did not perceive failure as a threat. Instead, they were aware they could learn from failure and use the experience to improve. As a result, they were far more inclined to take on challenging mathematical problems and learn from them.

If you Currently Have a Fixed Mindset, Switch to Growth!

The students with a fixed mindset, in comparison, were afraid that a faulty solution to a math problem would only reconfirm the preconceived notion that they were mediocre students unlikely to ever get better at math. This belief made the fixed-minded students reluctant even to try.

The good news is, developing a growth mindset is open to anyone. Here are some articles to stimulate your thoughts.