A person’s mindset can dictate every aspect of their future. A lot of the times a person may not be aware of what they are really thinking and how it affects their environment. Many individuals have had moments in their lives where they don’t understand why they feel a certain way, but have those individuals ever wondered why? What I have truly believed has been my biggest moment of growth is when I realized I have control over my emotions. In other words, I changed my mindset.
The biggest lie, in my opinion, is that you can never change. Individuals cannot control what thoughts they have and how they feel, but I believe that they have control over how they interpret those emotions and can create their own feelings that they find suitable. Rather than being in a jail of one’s own thoughts that usually lead to negative outcomes, I believe an individual can manipulate their thoughts in a way to free themselves from emotions they don’t enjoy. “Fake it until you make it” is something I believe can be successfully applied to this concept. An individual who chooses to take control of their emotions can begin to create an improved life where things that were negative before will no longer bother them.
It is not impossible or wrong to trick your mind, and it opens doors to personal growth that no one else can open for you. In addition to the environment that they were raised in, a person’s personal identity is made up of a combination of values that they have chosen to be important in their life. Those values include those that an individual made a conscious decision to be important to them, along with values that have been embedded quietly into their mind. One usually can explain why they value being in a relationship, but can’t explain why they aren’t happy with the one their in. What this leads to are confused and negative emotions.
The road to a new beginning starts with oneself. The first step is realizing that by digging deeper into why one is feeling a certain way, they can start to examine how they can change their situation. Individuals must be self-motivated enough to see what they can do with their own mind to change other aspects of their life. I’ve come to realize that to be successful as an adult you have to be able to adapt to change. Change occurs all the time from a micro-scale to a major life event.
As one goes through their daily ritual they may get bored and venture into a new hobby or career, leading to necessary changes in their personal life to make their new lifestyle change work. Other changes come without warning or require a more significant lifestyle change than the usual, such as a death of a close one or relocating to a new city. Regardless of the scale of the event, each and every person has had a significant moment that brought along a roller coaster of emotions, a search for answers, and a realization that change is either happening or needed. Knowing that change is inevitable, I believe life is easy when one is mentally prepared for the events that occur in their life. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that one must be flexible when facing changes.
Things that change one way can always change back — which is why I believe Dweck is also telling his readers that we must be flexible and not set ourselves to one permanent way of thinking. The goal of Dweck’s thesis is to educate his readers in realizing that each individual has control of their emotions and how they choose to see the world. Failure is subjective only to one’s own interpretation. One individual may enjoy playing a game of baseball regardless of the outcome while another individual may see not even see losing as an option. The difference between these two individuals is that when losing, the first individual will have still had a good time while the second individual may beat him or herself over the game when it is over.
This doesn’t mean that the first individual is wrong for being upset. Dweck states “you don’t have to have one mindset or the other to be upset, who wouldn’t be?”. The failure isn’t as important as the events that follow. The future shouldn’t be dictated by an event that is now a part of the past. There is no positive outcome from “labeling” and “throwing up their hands”, but there can be a brighter future from “confronting the challenges and keep working at them” (pg 9).
I believe that competition is healthy, but for the individual who can only win and never lose, how will they deal with life when they are inevitably dealt situations that cannot be won?
Dweck states “failure has been transformed from an action (I failed) to an identity (I am failure)”. Failure is inevitable throughout life. Without failure, I don’t believe that a person can truly grow. Throughout the process of failing at something, an individual is able to learn from mistakes that were made and focus on improving themselves.
Failure allows an individual to go through a series of emotions and self-reflection that bring opportunities to change their mindset. On top of reflecting on things that they could do differently the next time around, failing can humble a person, bring light to flaws that were ignored or never noticed, and build tolerance to the emotions of failing should they ever go through this experience again. It’s not easy, Dweck mentions “even in the growth mindset, failure can be a painful experience”. We always hear of successful individuals and that their success was based off of failure. I believe that the mindset these individuals adopt is truly important in order to be successful throughout all aspects of life.
I also believe that individuals who aren’t in this mindset usually need to experience significant failures of their own in order to be able to adopt this mindset. It’s healthy to be competitive, but if an individual’s mindset is not to be positive after a failure then I believe the whole experience is lost. There are definitely significant failures that can be hard to overcome. There are also failures that may never make it past the grieving phase. Whatever the case may be, an individual must do what they need to do to deal with their failure and figure out a way to move on from it.
Dwelling on a failure longer than one should means the whole experience of the event was lost, which is an outcome of having a fixed mindset. A person who loves basketball may forget why they enjoy playing the sport in the first place if they take a loss too hard. A writer may never write again if they aren’t being published. The list goes on. The one thing that stands true is that every person goes through this experience and those with a mindset that they can recover better and stronger will be the ones who move on to be successful. Dweck tells a story of Jim Marshall who ran the football the wrong way on national television.
His recovery from this major mistake was “If you make a mistake, you got to make it right. I realized I had a choice. I could sit in my misery or do something about it.” Later in the game he “played some of his best football and contributed to his team’s victory”. Things that go wrong don’t have to be that way forever. Dweck is telling the readers that when the mind is damaged it can be repaired and made stronger, similar to how the body repairs the muscles after lifting weights.
A few years ago I had to make the biggest change in my life, moving away from home to start a new job. It was a scary experience and looking back, I wasn’t truly prepared for it. I knew I had to do it and expected things to work out (without ever really putting thought into what was to come in the future). The months to come were some of the hardest in my life. I went through emotions I hadn’t felt before with being homesick, lonely, and constantly wishing I could have my old life back.
Looking back on it now, it was one of the best experiences to ever happen in my life. I was put into a situation where I was forced to be out of comfort zone, and the only thing that was able to get me through it was changing my mindset. By realizing that every other person in the world goes through this experience too, I didn’t feel alone. By focusing on making new friends instead of constantly bothering my friends back home, I was beginning to make a new life for myself in my new home. But overall, by having conversations with myself and telling myself that everything will be okay, I gave myself a more positive outlook on the challenges that were going to present itself.
As Dweck writes about John McEnroe, she states how John never blames himself for anything. “One time he had a headache, one time he fell victim to expectations, undertrained, overtrained”. John was not taking ownership and instead was making excuses. For myself, I could have easily made excuses to explain my feelings. I could have said I’m bad at making friends, this new job isn’t what I expected it to be, the city I live in is nothing compared to my hometown.
All of those excuses would have prevented me from accessing the full potential of my growth mindset. Looking back now, that year of my life was a challenge that allowed me to grow and exercise my growth mindset. Dweck mentions “Focus on that thing (failure). Feel all the emotions that go with it. Now put it in a growth-mindset perspective”.
I believe that I unintentionally changed my mindset at the time, and chose to have my brain be in a growth-mindset instead a fixed one. I took my emotions and channeled it into a new beginning rather than holding on to what I was comfortable with in my life up until that point. I changed my mindset, which I think Dweck’s message is intended to do. I believe that it is easy to ignore things and hope they don’t bother us later. A lot of the time we do it without realizing it.
Knowing that, I believe this is the biggest mistake we can make in our lives. Rather than letting ourselves tackle an experience that can help us grow and become better, we tend to hope it goes away due to the negative outcomes that may come from it. Leaving a relationship, moving to a new city, or starting a new job can all be things that are scary and may not work out, but taking risks in life are what allows us to become better versions of ourselves. My favorite passage from Dweck’s book is from the last sentence of the first chapter “The message is: You can change your mindset”. I believe as long as you tell yourself you can do something, you would be able to do it. It takes telling the mind that it can change, it can adapt, and that it can do anything it inspires itself to.
