The Importance Of Mindset
Here at VersaMe, we are on a mission to empower every child to fulfill their potential. And we believe that their potential is unlimited — every child, given the right tools for success, can succeed at the highest level.
But throughout childhood, there are often more visible stumbling blocks than helping hands on the path toward academic and social success. Often, these stumbling blocks can be hidden in the form of a compliment: telling Suzie that she’s “so smart!” after she earned an A on her math quiz, or Johnny that he’s “the best baseball player out there!” after he chased down a pop fly.
When we give praise, we express our pride in our children and encourage them to be proud of themselves. But when our praise is fixed, like it is in the aforementioned examples, we run the risk of assigning fixed traits to people who are always changing.
According to Dr. Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist who opened the debate between fixed and growth mindsets, how we express our pride and encouragement makes a huge difference in how kids perceive their own abilities. A fixed mindset, writes author Sumitha Bahandarkar, “is one where we believe that our core personality, character, talent, abilities and intelligence are fixed.” In other words, telling Suzie that she’s “so smart” for earning an A on her math test ties her identity to her math performance.
Yes, Suzie probably feels proud when she earns a good math grade, but when she inevitably makes a mistake, she will likely react by shutting down and making excuses. As Bahandarkar writes, “since success/failure are so tightly tied to a sense of identity, people with the fixed mindset tend to develop an irrational fear of failure and tend to take less risks.”
However, this doesn’t mean that we should never praise our kids our let them know how proud we are of them! On the other side of the debate is this idea of a growth mindset. With a growth mindset, we don’t define people with static labels, like “smart” or “best.” Instead, it champions the value of hard work and resilience, a willingness to fail and find the value in that failure.
To follow up on the previous examples, you could tell Suzie that you’re proud of how hard she worked to master the material, or ask Johnny to tell you how it felt to make the catch. With a growth mindset, a person’s success and failure are not directly tied to his or her identity — thus, writes Bahandarkar, “people with the growth mindset tend to wear their success with humility and handle failures gracefully.”
As parents, teachers, and caregivers, we can teach our kids to adopt a growth mindset by encouraging and rewarding effort and exploration. This means that to lead by example, we, too, need to have a growth mindset for ourselves — something that can be challenging especially when we’re used to listening to fixed praise and criticism. Fortunately, Dr. Dweck offers four steps to help us adopt a growth mindset.
- Listen for your fixed mindset “voice.”
- Acknowledge that you have a choice between a fixed and growth mindset.
- Talk back to your fixed voice with your growth voice.
- Choose the growth mindset path.
While I’m nowhere close to parenthood yet, I’ll be working on strengthening my own growth mindset. Big thanks to Dr. Carol Dweck for the research and Sumitha Bhandarkar, the founder of A Fine Parent, for the great synthesis!
This piece was originally posted at VersaMe.com. VersaMe created the Starling the world’s first wearable engagement tracker that helps encourage and reinforce positive parenting behaviors.
