Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

How could you rethink your marriage, yourself, and your life from a growth-mindset perspective? Why were you afraid to listen to your spouse? What could you have done? What should you do now?

The Growth-Mindset Step. First, it’s not that the marriage, which you used to think of as inherently good, suddenly turned out to have been all bad or always bad. It was an evolving thing that had stopped developing for lack of nourishment. You need to think about how both you and your spouse contributed to this, and especially about why you weren’t able to hear the request for greater closeness and sharing.

As you probe, you realize that, in your fixed mindset, you saw your partner’s request as a criticism of you that you didn’t want to hear. You also realize that at some level, you were afraid you weren’t capable of the intimacy your partner was requesting. So instead of exploring these issues with your spouse, you turned a deaf ear, hoping they would go away.

When a relationship goes sour, these are the issues we all need to explore in depth, not to judge ourselves for what went wrong, but to overcome our fears and learn the communication skills we’ll need to build and maintain better relationships in the future. Ultimately, a growth mindset allows people to carry forth not judgments and bitterness, but new understanding and new skills.

Is someone in your life trying to tell you something you’re refusing to hear? Step into the growth mindset and listen again.

CHANGING YOUR CHILD’S MINDSET

Many of our children, our most precious resource, are stuck in a fixed mindset. You can give them a personal Brainology workshop. Let’s look at some ways to do this.

The Precocious Fixed Mindsetter

Most kids who adopt a fixed mindset don’t become truly passionate believers until later in childhood. But some kids take to it much earlier.

The Dilemma. Imagine your young son comes home from school one day and says to you, “Some kids are smart and some kids are dumb. They have a worse brain.” You’re appalled. “Who told you that?” you ask him, gearing up to complain to the school. “I figured it out myself,” he says proudly. He saw that some children could read and write their letters and add a lot of numbers, and others couldn’t. He drew his conclusion. And he held fast to it.

Your son is precocious in all aspects of the fixed mindset, and soon the mindset is in full flower. He develops a distaste for effort—he wants his smart brain to churn things out quickly for him. And it often does.

When he takes to chess very quickly, your spouse, thinking to inspire him, rents the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, a film about a young chess champion. What your son learns from the film is that you could lose and not be a champion anymore. So he retires. “I’m a chess champion,” he announces to one and all. A champion who won’t play.

Because he now understands what losing means, he takes further steps to avoid it. He starts cheating at Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders, and other games.

He talks often about all the things he can do and other children can’t. When you and your spouse tell him that other children aren’t dumb, they just haven’t practiced as much as he has, he refuses to believe it. He watches things carefully at school and then comes home and reports, “Even when the teacher shows us something new, I can do it better than them. I don’t have to practice.”

This boy is invested in his brain—not in making it grow but in singing its praises. You’ve already told him that it’s about practice and learning, not smart and dumb, but he doesn’t buy it. What else can you do? What are other ways you can get the message across?

The Growth-Mindset Step. You decide that, rather than trying to talk him out of the fixed mindset, you have to live the growth mindset. At the dinner table each evening, you and your partner structure the discussion around the growth mindset, asking each child (and each other): “What did you learn today?” “What mistake did you make that taught you something?” “What did you try hard at today?” You go around the table with each question, excitedly discussing your own and one another’s effort, strategies, setbacks, and learning.

You talk about skills you have today that you didn’t have yesterday because of the ctice you put in. You dramatize mistakes you made that held the key to the solution, telling it like a mystery story. You describe with relish things you’re struggling with and making progress on. Soon the children can’t wait each night to tell their stories. “Oh my goodness,” you say with wonder, “you certainly did get smarter today!”