Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

As parents, teachers, and coaches, we are entrusted with people’s lives. They are our responsibility and our legacy. We now know that the growth mindset has a key role to play in helping us fulfill our mission and in helping them fulfill their potential.

Grow Your Mindset

• Every word and action from parent to child sends a message. Tomorrow, listen to what you say to your kids and tune in to the messages you’re sending. Are they messages that say: You have permanent traits and I’m judging them? Or are they messages that say You’re a developing person and I’m interested in your development?

• How do you use praise? Remember that praising children’s intelligence or talent, tempting as it is, sends a fixed-mindset message. It makes their confidence and motivation more fragile. Instead, try to focus on the processes they used—their strategies, effort, or choices. Practice working the process praise into your interactions with your children.

• Watch and listen to yourself carefully when your child messes up. Remember that constructive criticism is feedback that helps the child understand how to fix something. It’s not feedback that labels or simply excuses the child. At the end of each day, write down the constructive criticism (and the process praise) you’ve given your kids.

• Parents often set goals their children can work toward. Remember that having innate talent is not a goal. Expanding skills and knowledge is. Pay careful attention to the goals you set for your children.

• If you’re a teacher, reaise?er that lowering standards doesn’t raise students’ self-esteem. But neither does raising standards without giving students ways of reaching them. The growth mindset gives you a way to set high standards and have students reach them. Try presenting topics in a growth framework and giving students process feedback. I think you’ll like what happens.

• Do you think of your slower students as kids who will never be able to learn well? Do they think of themselves as permanently dumb? Instead, try to figure out what they don’t understand and what learning strategies they don’t have. Remember that great teachers believe in the growth of talent and intellect, and are fascinated by the process of learning.

• Are you a fixed-mindset coach? Do you think first and foremost about your record and your reputation? Are you intolerant of mistakes? Do you try to motivate your players though judgment? That may be what’s holding up your athletes.

Try on the growth mindset. Instead of asking for mistake-free games, ask for full commitment and full effort. Instead of judging the players, give them the respect and the coaching they need to develop.

• As parents, teachers, and coaches, our mission is developing people’s potential. Let’s use all the lessons of the growth mindset—and whatever else we can—to do this.

Chapter 8

CHANGING MINDSETS

The growth mindset is based on the belief in change, and the most gratifying part of my work is watching people change. Nothing is better than seeing people find their way to things they value. This chapter is about kids and adults who found their way to using their abilities. And about how all of us can do that.

THE NATURE OF CHANGE

I was in the middle of first grade when my family moved. Suddenly I was in a new school. Everything was unfamiliar—the teacher, the students, and the work. The work was what terrified me. The new class was way ahead of my old one, or at least it seemed that way to me. They were writing letters I hadn’t learned to write yet. And there was a way to do everything that everyone seemed to know except me. So when the teacher said, “Class, put your name on your paper in the right place,” I had no idea what she meant.

So I cried. Each day things came up that I didn’t know how to do. Each time, I felt lost and overwhelmed. Why didn’t I just say to the teacher, “Mrs. Kahn, I haven’t learned this yet. Could you show me how?”

Another time when I was little, my parents gave me money to go to the movies with an adult and a group of kids. As I rounded the corner to the meeting place, I looked down the block and saw them all leaving. But instead of running after them and yelling, “Wait for me!” I stood frozen, clutching the coins in my hand and watching them recede into the distance.

Why didn’t I try to stop them or catch up with them? Why did I accept defeat before I had tried some simple tactics? I know that in my dreams I had often performed magical or superhuman feats in the face of danger. I even have a picture of myself in my self-made Superman cape. Why, in real life, couldn’t I do an ordinary thing liask for help or call out for people to wait?