Warrior Mindset: How you Defeat Learned Demons
How much control do we really have over our reality? How much can our mentality really affect the way we conduct ourselves when attempting to reach our peaks? When you try out something new, such as a new sport, do you embrace the opportunity to try something new or are you afraid of the possibility of failure? Do you welcome challenge and the unknown or do you shy away from it and only attempt things you know you will do well at? Can you even change the way you think about these possibilities if you try? The above are the fundamental differences between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset, the concepts being explored in the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. She claims that learning to have a growth mindset is not only entirely possible but that it is necessary in order to reach the highest peak that you want to achieve. I agree with her on this point and I think that a growth mindset is absolutely necessary to reach your peak, and that the fundamental reason people fall into having a fixed mindset is because of one’s natural inclination to rely on their natural ability rather than hard work and strong effort.
Having natural ability is what brings in a lot of people into hobbies and sports at a young age, if you try something and you are just good at it, you will want to continue doing that thing because doing well at it makes you feel very good about yourself. It increases your self esteem and you can brag and show off your natural skills to your peers. I think that the natural inclination of gifted and talented people is to adopt a fixed mindset, and this is a really big shame, because so many people’s hopes and dreams are crushed by having a fixed mindset later on in their careers. We should teach people to focus on the things they’re naturally good at, and at the same time, teach them to constantly improve. We should teach people to avoid falling into the trap of sticking with your natural ability without also focusing on embracing challenge and embrace failure, and how we should be learning from mistakes and failures, not being so afraid of them we quit early before we even know our maximum potential. So why is it that so many people fall into a fixed mindset when they start off so strong?
In Carol Dweck’s book, she has a specific section on sports and athletics and how each mindset can have an effect on your performance in your sporting career. Dweck starts off the chapter with an example of someone with natural talent who lacks a growth mindset, or as she calls it in this chapter, “the mindset of a champion.” She states, “Billy Beane was a natural. Everyone agreed he was the next Babe Ruth..As he moved up in baseball from the minor leagues to the majors, things got worse and worse. Each at-bat became a nightmare, another opportunity for humiliation, and with every botched at-bat, he went to pieces….Did Beane try to fix his problems in constructive ways? No, of course not, because this is a story of the fixed mindset.” She starts out this section with a main focus, the struggle of the athlete who struggles later on because of their fixed mindset. They ride off of their natural ability and view what they can do as static, and when they start to experience challenge or setbacks when they reach the peak of their ability, they don’t know how to improve because they’ve never had to work hard to do well. This brings up the question, is a fixed mindset something you choose to be in or is it simply the mindset adopted by naturally gifted people after a certain point? There are loads upon loads of gifted students and athletes burning out once things get more challenging because they now have to work after not having to do so for so long. Dweck expands on this idea further in the next paragraph, stating “because in the fixed mindset, you don’t take control of your abilities and your motivation. You look for your talent to carry you through, and when it doesn’t, well then, what else could you have done? You are not a work in progress, you’re a finished product.” This is where the importance of having a growth mindset comes in the most, once you have reached your perceived natural peak you should be harnessing the growth mindset to surpass those limits, you should be striving to get better and embrace mistakes so you can learn from them, you should be diving head on into challenge to better your skill and harden your resolve to improve.
Dweck also goes over this topic, and argues that a primary reason for this “gifted burn out phenomenon” is the way that we are taught by our parents. She claims that if our parents praise us on our natural ability and not our efforts, we can be inadvertently taught to think in a fixed mindset. She writes, “In fact, more than 80 percent of parents told us it was necessary to praise children’s ability so as to foster their confidence and achievement.” She then continues into the next paragraph, “We thought about how people with the fixed mindset already focus too much on their ability: ‘Is it high enough?’ ‘Will it look good?’ Wouldn’t praising people’s ability focus them on it even more? Wouldn’t it be telling them that that’s what we value and, even worse, that we can read their deep, underlying ability from their performance? Isn’t that teaching them the fixed mindset?” Her claims here support the idea that fixed mindset is taught young, and that people who rely on their natural ability do so because they are only praised on their natural talent. Dweck continues this research in a nonverbal IQ test, given to hundreds of students. After the test, some students were praised on their ability, being told things such as “Wow, you got [say] eight right. That’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised on their efforts, and were told things such as “Wow, you got [say] eight right. That’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.” Both groups had about the same performance on each test, but the real differences happened after the praise occurred. Dweck writes, “But right after the praise, they began to differ. As we feared, the ability praise pushed students right into the fixed mindset, and they showed all the signs of it, too: When we gave them a choice, they rejected a challenging new task that they could learn from. They didn’t want to do anything that could expose their flaws and call into question their talent…In contrast, when students were praised for effort, 90 percent of them wanted the challenging new task that they could learn from…The effort kids simply thought the difficulty meant ‘Apply more effort.’ They didn’t see it as a failure, and they didn’t think it reflected on their intellect.” The students praised on ability fall into the trap of the fixed mindset because they are taught to rely on natural ability only, and because of this they avoid challenges and mistakes, because any sign of difficulty is seen as not worth the effort because it did not come naturally to them.
My experience in competitive swimming reflects the importance of having a growth mindset pretty heavily as I switched from having a very strong fixed mindset to a growth mindset later on in my swimming career. Before I joined my first competitive high school swim team I swam in my elementary school team and for recreation. I was pretty good at swimming naturally and didn’t try very hard in order to do well. I was achieving my personal goals without very much effort and wasn’t facing any challenge because it was very relaxed and non competitive. I was praised on my ability by my parents and peers and I began to slip into a heavy fixed mindset. I wasn’t comparing myself to other people because we were focusing on the personal goal aspect of swimming, it was much less competitive than a high school team, there were no cuts and people didn’t train super hard outside of practice. Problems started forming when I joined my high school team however. The difficulty increased by a huge margin, practice time increased to almost 2 hours a day, swim meets became mandatory every weekend and took up almost the entire day, people could get cut from the team, grades started mattering more so I didn’t have as much time to actually get heavy training in. My natural ability was simply not enough to keep ahead any more, and it was torture for my fixed mind. I was constantly comparing myself to my teammates and stopped focusing on personal goals. I was still getting better but it wasn’t at the same pace as before, and my teammates were also getting a lot better as many people couldn’t take the pressure, and quit in the first few months. We started with around 40 people on the team at the beginning of the season and at the end of the year ended with less than half remaining. Freshman year of swimming was probably the most difficult thing I’ve had to do in my life so far. The time investment and mental discipline you have to go through is very intense when you are so used to a more laid back team. Even though it was a massive challenge for me, I got through the year in one piece, and in between my freshman and sophomore year, I had to decide if I wanted to continue swimming. I had to decide to either keep my fixed mindset and possibly quit or I had to evolve and get better. I decided to train harder and better and to embrace my mistakes. I stopped comparing myself to my teammates and focused on more personal goals, and I started training my technique more. I focused on how I could make myself better, because in order to make my team better I had to make myself better. After my sophomore year I stopped viewing challenge as bad and started having more fun being on the team. I enjoyed smashing my records and scoring better in meets, and I actually started having a lot more fun being on the team. I stopped being stressed about looking bad or not being “good enough” to be on the team, I strived to make myself good enough to be on the team. I viewed myself an asset to the team and that’s all thanks to adopting a growth mindset, and I didn’t even know what a growth mindset was at the time.
I definitely agree with Dweck on the benefits of a fixed mindset, and due to my own experience, I think that everyone should adopt a growth mindset too. Viewing challenge as something to overcome and beat rather than something to avoid and be afraid of is one of the best things you can do to improve your life. Getting away from the destructive mindsets we learn and fall into when young are absolutely necessary in order to fully reach your goals. Change, no matter how uncomfortable, is necessary for us to grow, if we stay in the same mindset we were taught when we were kids we stay thinking like kids. Being afraid of struggle is something that too many people are doing nowadays, and it’s majorly important to stay on top of your personal game because the world is only getting more and more competitive. Your ability must be combined with the effort and drive to improve, and you should face all challenges that come your way in order to overcome them.
