GROWTH vs. FIXED MINDSETS

Your mindset effects how successful you’ll be in life as it determines your over all ability and capacity to learn. Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist and researcher, decided to explore the idea of mindsets and coined Fixed and Growth as the two differences.

“For decades, I’ve been studying why some people succeed while people, who are equally talented, do not. And over the years, I’ve discovered that people’s mindsets play a crucial role in this process.”
– Carol Dweck

GROWTH:

People with a growth mindset believe that we are all born with a certain level of skill and intelligence, and that through practice and determination we can elevate those levels. Simply by just signing up for a course shows the growth mindset as you still believe in the ability to learn and improve. Having the motivation to do so already sets you apart from a fixed mindset. People with this mentality almost in a sense have a craving for learning and see failure as just that, opportunity to learn. The idea of this almost snowballs because as the person sees themselves learning from failure and retaining more information, they set aside more time to focus on this. Coding bootcamp for instance is a great example for people with growth mindsets. You’re constantly debugging your failed code only to learn the proper way/syntax. Seeing the same errors you almost automatically know what the issue is right away. I see examples of growth mindsets on a daily basis at Flatiron Access Labs during lectures with students in my cohort:

• Asking if there is a different way/or asking if their idea of a solution would work.
• Trying to “give it a shot” when the instructor asks for someone to help solve an issue when they aren’t 100% on their own answer.
• asking a question that they might find “stupid” when asking.

It’s easy to practice growth mindset by simply reading and learning something new everyday (crossword puzzles is a favorite of mine), with all this in mind and maintaining the idea that your brain is a muscle.

FIXED:

This specific mindset hinders and can often limit your success as you almost in a way set a limit for yourself. Unlike growth mindset, fixed is based on the idea that you are born with a certain level of intelligence and skill that you can not change. The cards your dealt kind of mentality. The fear of looking dumb is the source of motivation in this mindset. They care more about validation of personality traits and want to appear intelligent, if they are not viewed that way they feel as though they cannot redeem themselves. There’s a strong belief when in this mindset that talent will be the source of your success and not effort. While growth mindsets would rather hear that “they try hard”, fixed would rather hear “you’re so smart”. This can lead to situations where if someone within this mindset is wrong or fails, rather than understand why, they’ll exert effort into proving they’re right. Nothing wrong with this, as it can also fall into the same category as sticking to your word, but there’s a fine line there. Often fixed mentality would take things too personally which can cause tension in a work environment. In fact, fixed mentality would reduce productivity as people in this mindset would not be able to receive any feedback. They would take it too personally and often respond with a you don’t know what you’re talking about or I’m not good at this, I should just quit attitude and run with it. It would also deter someone from taking on tasks that are too challenging in fear they couldn’t complete it. This mindset steers the person away from anything that would make them fail, as failure will make them feel inadequate. These are reasons why they’ll only stick to what they’re good at. If they continuously fail they fall into a failure mentality.

With all these qualities in mind, it’s not to say we are one mindset or the other. We can often fall from one into the other on any given day or in any given scenario. The trick now is to determine which mindset we have in any given situation, figure out why we slipped into it, and rethink our perspective. This ultimately will allow us to put a more positive spin on our view and allow us to grow professionally and as an individual.