The one thing I learned at school that changed my life forever.

Sister Dominic was her name. She was the only nun in our primary school. I was lucky enough to have her teach me for three years in a row between the ages of 10 and 12. I only recently realised what a huge impact she has had on my life, and I wish I could have told her that whilst she was still alive.

Before Sister Dominic, school was a bore. To liven things up I treated it like a social club. I had been to most of the girls’ houses “for tea” and spent most of my time chatting to their Mums whom I called by their first names. Yes, I was one of those annoying precocious kids.

Here's the surprising bit. Irony of ironies, it was this nun who taught me one of my most valuable lessons in life - that there’s nothing God given about intelligence or talent. You can think, read and write yourself smarter.

She delighted in setting us crazy challenges like reading a poem once and then reciting it from memory. However after a few months practising our “powers of concentration” in class every day, a lot of us found we could memorise something by reading it once.

Sister Dominic believed in giving us problems that were slightly too difficult to solve. (No internet to help remember). When we threw our hands up in despair, saying “We can’t do it sister”, she would always reply, “No, you just can’t do it yet.”

Little did I know then that she was sharing a divine revelation of sorts with me and my classmates . Because unbeknownst to her, she was teaching us to develop what’s called “a growth mindset” - something that would only be codified and shared with the world decades later.

In the book “Mindset. The New Psychology of Success”, renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck synthesised years of her research into a simple but groundbreaking idea – the power of mindset to change you life.

She differentiates between those with a growth mindset (who believe their abilities can be developed) and those with a fixed mindset (who believe their abilities are cast in stone). You might be thinking that these two mindsets relate to two different types of people, the optimistic and pessimistic kind. But the truth is that everybody is a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets.

When we believe that we have the power to improve by dint of our own efforts, we’re in a growth mindset. When we are faring less well than our peers, when we face criticism challenges or setbacks, we can become insecure or defensive, leaving us in a fixed mindset. We’ve all been there and it sucks.

Cultivating a growth mindset improves every aspect of your life, personally and professionally. If like me, you work in the communications industry, you won’t be surprised to learn that in a poll of 143 creativity researchers, the number one ingredient in creative achievement is having a growth mindset.

I was watching a biopic recently about Diana Nyad who set out at 60 to achieve her life-long dream of swimming from Cuba to Florida across 110 miles of shark and Lion’s mane jellyfish-infested open ocean. A week later I read about Betty Brussel, a 99-year old swimmer who broke three world records on the same day.

These women clearly had a growth mindset, which got me wondering what happens to our growth mindset over time and whether there are any gender differences. I came across a really interesting longitudinal study on that very topic.

Hermundur Sigmundsson, a professor at the Department of Psychology in the Norwegian University of Science and Technology has measured the growth mindset of 1,548 people aged 13 to 77.

Turns out Carol Dweck sent him a mail thanking him for his contribution to her work. What he found was that whilst our passion for achievement and belief in our ability to get better declines with age, this is more than compensated for by the fact that our level of grit increases.

His explanation was that the more experience we have of equating effort to reward, the more grit we develop. It becomes self-perpetuating.

“By the time we’re older we realise that we need to persevere in order to succeed, rather than jumping from one thing to another. This experience-based grit increases our passion to achieve”.

Another fascinating finding from Sigmundsson’s study is that the growth mindset increases more in women than in men from middle age onwards. He suggested to me that it was most likely due to the extra roles women tend to take on by choice or out of obligation around this stage of life:

“They become mothers or carers to others on top of working and doing a disproportionate amount of housekeeping duties. This stretches them to the limit”.

A new report from ActionAid Ireland and the National Women's Council, launched ahead of the referendum on March 8th, said that in Ireland women do twice as much unpaid care and housework as men.

I’m not convinced that a yes or no vote is going to change this sad state of affairs. What I do know is that Carol Dweck’s growth mindset is the closest thing I’ve found to a formula for successful living. The questions she asks are the ones we should all be asking ourselves more:

“Why hide deficiencies instead of overcoming them? Why look for friends or partners who will just shore up your self-esteem instead of ones who will also challenge you to grow? And why seek out the tried and true instead of experiences that will stretch you? The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset”.

All easier said than done, obviously. There is only so much growth any of us - even mature females - can hack… yet!

#growthmindset #lifelessons #learning #education

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