If You Want to Change Something, Start With Your Mindset

When I was eight, I started to play professional table tennis. Although sports was my first priority, I liked studying and I was doing well in school, despite all the missed classes during competition tournaments. But when I moved to high school, the game changed and the bar was raised.

It was during my ninth grade when I realised I was not going to make a living from playing table tennis. So, at the end of the ninth grade, I switched gears and put school first. I transferred to another high school, where I enrolled to the French language and literature class. That entire first year during my tenth grade, I felt like the poor countryside cousin who lands in the big city. I had a lot to catch up on most subjects. But as we were specialising in humanities, we had less math and science classes in our weekly schedule. Our teachers also assumed that we were not very interested in math and science, since we chose to study humanities, so they were less demanding of us. Until we had Mr. Stancu as economics teacher, in the eleventh grade.

My economics teacher was not only demanding, but he also thought girls were less capable than boys. With a few exceptions, he was talking down on girls, intimidating them and making them feel like they were naturally less gifted than boys. I still remember this one time when he asked me to come to the blackboard to solve a problem. I was so nervous that I could not remember any of the formulas I had memorized. Then he asked me, “Teodora, what do you want to study after high school?” I told him I didn’t know yet, but foreign languages could be an option. “Good, that’s a good choice for you. Become a French teacher and don’t ever get into something that has to do with numbers”. My teacher’s validation was clear. I was a 16-year-old girl, bad at numbers and I was destined to become a French teacher.

What Mr. Stancu didn’t know, was that I actually liked economics. I also liked chemistry and physics, although I had never been very good at math. I was also shy and got easily intimidated by tough teachers. I felt inferior to my classmates, because of all the knowledge gaps I still had. So, I knew I had to study hard to catch up and I was constantly feeling the need to prove myself, seeking external validation. But what I actually needed most was encouragement. Instead, a respected teacher was pinpointing how bad I was at something. So my 16-year-old brain got stuck on that negative label and started to believe I was actually bad at numbers and in fact not very good at anything else. Years later, while working in marketing and therefore, working with numbers every day, I still had moments when my self-confidence sank in front of a challenging task and I could hear my teacher’s voice, “What are you trying to do here? You should be teaching French”.

Fixed Mindsets

When teachers, parents and managers have a fixed mindset, they judge others for either being talented at something, or not. She is either made for it, or she should pursue other activities where she has more talent for. End of story. But as Carol Dweck proved with her growth mindset theory, talent is not an indication of achievement because intelligence is not given, it’s something you can develop.

The main role of teachers, parents and managers is precisely to develop others and teach them what they cannot do yet.

In a fixed mindset, we identify ourselves and we judge others around us, based on a set of dual reference points. You’re good at numbers or you’re not. You’re competent or incompetent. When teachers or parents have this sort of mindset, they basically put children into categories and label them, with the risk that these children will start identifying themselves with those labels.

The bad news is that we all have a fixed mindset sometimes. The good news is that we can learn to notice our thoughts and change how we behave and act.

Growth Mindsets

It is true that intelligence matters to a certain extent, and there are jobs we cannot do if we don’t meet the minimum IQ requirements. But once we met the minimum requirement, IQ alone will not predict success. Continuous learning, improvement and focusing on the right objectives and tasks, is something that matters more in the equation of achievement. Together with persistence, self-motivation, learning from failures, habits and focus.

When Carol Dweck started to shape her theory of the two mindsets, fixed versus growth, it all started from a simple observation of school children. There were children who always wanted to prove their abilities, look smart and talented and seeked validation. And others who could just let go and learn, stretching and developing themselves.

People with a growth mindset thrive when they challenge themselves, when they learn something new or even reach the impossible, like Christopher Reeve did, by regaining control of his movements after being paralysed from a horse-riding accident. The fixed mindset people on the other hand, are thriving when they feel better than the others, when they feel special and smart.

Using Labels and the Danger of Stereotyping

One of the beliefs that come with a fixed mindset is that if I am more talented and smarter than you, I am a superior human being. My success is your failure. If I want to feel good about myself, I need to put you down. Needless to say, that such thoughts create more feelings of anxiety, fear of failure and aversion to experimentation and risk taking. If I have to work too hard, that means everyone will know I am not smart enough.

The problem becomes even bigger when someone else puts this kind of labels on us and we start identifying with that label. Like I identified with the person who was not good at numbers, and it took me many years to understand and accept that it was just a perception, and it did not define my potential. Surely, my ambition has never been to become chief financial officer or expert accountant. But understanding the basics of financial management and working with sales reports on a daily basis, was a skill I developed like any other skill. I didn’t need to be a math wizard and go to international math competitions, to be able to develop rational thinking and problem-solving skills.

What negative labels and stereotypes can do to the way we perceive our own abilities, is that we start to internalise them and identify with that person.

In time, this develops into a phenomenon called stereotype threat or internalised bias. Stereotype threat occurs when someone is afraid to behave in a certain way, out of fear that she would confirm the negative stereotype someone else has about her or her group.

In a experiment done by Claude Steele, a social psychology professor at Stanford University, African American students were asked one additional question before their SAT exam. The questions was: “What is your race?”. By simply answering this one additional question before starting their test, this group of students scored lower than their peers. Being reminded of being black, seemed to internalise negative performance bias.

But negative labels are not the only dangerous labels. Too many positive labels and praise, are dangerous too. When people with a fixed mindset are used to receive praise on a regular basis and want to always prove they are better than the others, they also become more afraid to lose that label. This leads to an increased fear of trying challenging tasks, taking risks or dive into unknown situations. When we hold onto our champion label too hard, we risk stagnating, and we stop developing.

When Effort Beats Talent

Potential and talent are definitely important factors in our development, and they can give us a head start in life, especially when we grow up in supportive families and our environment is favourable. But potential itself is not an indication of success. As Angela Duckworth put it, talent plus effort equals skill, and skill plus effort equals achievement. So, where talents counts once, effort counts twice in order to achieve what we want. Thorough learning that help us long term, can only be achieved through effort and difficult tasks. Fast and easy learning is not going to last for too long. The concept of desirable difficulties proves that having obstacles that make learning more challenging, slower and more frustrating, actually pays off on the long term.

?In a fixed mindset, we learn to achieve short term goals, like getting a good grade. In the growth mindset, we learn to develop new skills and achieve long term results. It’s unfortunate that some teachers don’t see things this way and they discourage effort, for the sake of short term wins.

Looking back at my personal development, I know that having a growth mindset helped me and pushed me forward, one small step at a time. Did I always have a growth mindset? Of course not. There were and still are moments when I feel less confident, and my inner critic is trying to put me back where I belong. But then I remember that courage is not the lack of fear, but acting in spite of it. Nobody wants to fail, but failure is sometimes inevitable when we want to grow. Long term progress and development can only be achieved with small but consistent steps forward. And at the end of the day, there is one big question: what did I learn today?

More Helpful Resources:

?Read

Mindset. How You Can Fulfil Your Potential, by Carol S. Dweck [BOOK]

Fixed vs. Growth. The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives, by Maria Popova, on brainpickings.org [BLOG POST]

Watch

The Power of Believing That You Can Improve, TED Talk by Carol S. Dweck [VIDEO]

Listen To

Scott Belsky about The Messy Middle on Design Matters, with Debbie Millman [PODCAST]

There's a Gap Between Perception and Reality and It Comes to Learning, Shankar Vedantam, on Hidden Brain [PODCAST]

This article is an abridged version of "If You Want to Change Something, Start With Your Mindset", originally published on my personal blog on June 17, 2021. If you want to receive more inspiration and insights directly in your inbox, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

Copyright ? 2022 by?Teodora Takacs. All Rights Reserved