Am I too old to self-improve?

Self-improvement and personal development are possible at any age

One day I almost bet with a person who was taking for granted that our forty-something friend was not able to change his attitude, just because of the age (“if he hadn’t changed it before, he will not be able to do it now”). At that time, I was close to my forties as well and couldn’t have accepted that belief as a truth – never before in my life I had felt more ready for a self-development! If my friend was not improving himself in some areas, it was because he didn’t want to, I thought. 

Driven by a curiosity and an intrinsic need to be rigorous with facts I moved from a common sense-based approach to a scientific one and started looking for the resourses that could confirm - or deny - my hypothesis. That’s how I found an insightful article on the Harvard Business Review webpage in which Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman explain the self-improvement in relation to the age. The title of the article is How Age and Gender Affect Self-Improvement.

The authors start the article mentioning the concept of Growth and Fix Mindset, described by Carol Dweck, and then develop the idea of proving and improving mindset. Proving is about trying to prove something, e.g. somebody can tell me that I am bad at cooking and I do my best to show them that’s not truth. I will invite them every night for a dinner and try to prove - using my existing cooking skills - they’re not right. If I had an improving mindset I would admit “yes, I’m bad at cooking, let me understand better my weaknesses and I will work on how to improve my cooking skills”. The first reaction reveals a defensive approach to corrective feedback, and it could be an obstacle to self-development, the second one is an opposite – openness to feedback means I can be more effective at identifying my true development areas and then at changing them. The reaction to corrective feedback can tell us then how much people are ready for a self-improvement and building new skills based on it.

In the article we read about 3 elements that have an impact on our reactions to feedback: age, gender and self-confidence. Based on the combination of these factors people activate a proving or an improving mindset and are less or more open to self-improvement.

Based on the search, the older we get, the more we are open to self-improvement. This sounds quite counterintuitive for those who believe in the opposite: the older you are, the more difficult it is to change because you have some rigid constructs in your mind, you behave in a consolidated way and it would require a huge effort to change your beliefs and habits.

And how does the self-confidence relate to a self-improvement? The higher my self-confidence, the closer I get to the improving orientation. But the gender factor plays an important role here. There are differences between women and men when it comes to the development of their self-confidence. Men and women achieve the maximum of their self-confidence at different age:

• For men it is before 40 and after 50, then their self-confidence starts to decrease around 60;
• Women start with a lower self-confidence than men. It begins to increase at about 20 and only at 40 they become more confident than men. Then it never stops to increase. 

On the one hand this could make sense and would explain why many women have this feeling of being ready for a big change around their forties. I’m talking here about what I’m hearing around from the women I meet or get in touch with. Maybe the “the life starts after forty” with which my older friends wished me a happy birthday makes really sense? On the other hand, saying that only older women can self-improve conflicts with what we often observe: schools and universities are full of females who are more successful at studies and perform better in exams than males. We know as well about ambitious young women who grow fast and get to the top of the company ladders faster than many of their male colleagues. These achievements must require self-improvement. Are they the exceptions from the rule or is there another explanation of this phenomenon?

The authors mention a “prove-it-again” bias originally described by Joan C. Williams, that can be a clue. Following that thought it may be that in case of many women, self-improvement arises from the need to prove that they are competent, have required skills or can perform certain jobs. It is less about listening to feedback and activating an improvement mindset, it is more about having to defend ourselves - it is not enough to prove a certain competence only once, you have to do it again and again and again. Women start with a lower self-confidence and follow the proving orientation because they are kind of directed into it by their early age experience and by the society requirements. This is a trend of course, not every experience brings to this situation.

Applying a common sense all of this may look like nothing revealing – it is understandable that people get more confidence as they age because they get more experience, know more things, get more skills. The connection between the self-confidence level and the openness to feedback and self-improvement is not so trivial, however. The tricky thing is to understand the right level of the self-confidence: neither too low, nor too high.

The positive aspect of the search conclusions is that it is possible to shift the mindset from a proving to an improving oreintation and self-improve at any age. No one is saying it’s easy or that it just happens because we get older, but it can be a great stimulus for people convinced to be too old to self-develop. No excuses, it’s never too late!

#selfimprovement #development #mindset #change #age #hbr #gender #coaching

References:

Zenger, J & Folkman, J (2016) How Age and Gender Affect Self-Improvement. Available from: https://hbr.org/2016/01/how-age-and-gender-affect-self-improvement [Accessed 5th January 2021]