Smarter this you think: growth vs fixed mindsets
(Hoping this is an appropriate place to put this thread; I'm new at this.)
My therapist was discussing two different mindsets: growth mindset, and fixed mindset. The idea was that someone with a growth mindset would actually be more successful in school, jobs, life, etc. and be happier in general/more willing to take chances and to (ultimately) get farther.
In very basic terms, things break down like this:
• growth mindset: every step progresses your learning experiences
• fixed mindset: every step is either success or failure
Someone with a fixed mindset might be more afraid to take on new challenges, because they're afraid that they will fail, and people will realize that they are incompetent. For someone with a fixed mindset, life is simply a series of tests to prove or disprove your inherent abilities.
Someone with a growth mindset, however, realizes that failure is simply a learning experience, and the mistakes in the past don't preclude you from being excellent in the future. Being willing to make mistakes means being able to make progress. (As a children's cartoon has recently reminded me, "Sucking at something is the first step to being really good at it.")
Not everything in life is a test, but you can learn from anything in life. People who embrace this do better; forgive yourself if you have made errors in the past, understand that you will make them in the future, and realize that as a human being, you are a work in progress.
Here's to learning.
Nice! Thanks for sharing. That's definitely something to think about.
My take is that we all humans are born with the trial and error kind of thinking, a fixed mindset, but then with the right kind of support and development track you learn that things are way more complex and it's better to give yourself the chance to approach failure as part of your progress too, the one thing really important in both cases is that you keep trying and help yourself be happy.
@cristiana33
yes! It sounds like you are familiar with these concepts (or have spent time contemplating/observing similar things for yourself)?
Supposedly, one of the reasons that children often seem to pick up link which is faster is not an inherent property that makes them particularly better, (though there is some truth to the fact that certain developmental stages are more predisposed for linguistic development) but rather that they are less afraid of making mistakes, and therefore more willing to muddle through, and end up learning vocabulary and structure as they go along.
I was scared of not doing something as well as my theoretical potential capabilities allowed, so I would put things off, due to a stupid sort of self-one-upsmanship/obsession with perfection. What ended up happening was I was afraid to try and do something and discover that I wasn't as good as I thought I was, or something like that, and so I ended up doing nothing at all.
It's much easier to complete a goal that involves working on something in general rather than always being better than before buy some predetermined increment. People need to remember that they don't always progress linearly, and certainly not exponentially, but rather that by virtue of working on something, they can hope to improve, just simply not always right away.
