When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world - the world of fixed traits - success is about proving youâre smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other - the world of changing qualities - itâs about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.
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Believing that your qualities are carved in stone - the fixed mindset -creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character - well, then youâd better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldnât do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.
So children with the fixed mindset want to make sure they succeed. Smart people should always succeed. But for children with the growth mindset, success is about stretching themselves. Itâs about becoming smarter.
When we taught people the growth mindset, it changed the way they reacted to their depressed mood. The worse they felt, the more motivated they became and the more they confronted the problems that faced them.
In short, when people believe in fixed traits, they are always in danger of being measured by a failure. It can define them in a permanent way. Smart or talented as they may be, this mindset seems to rob them of their coping resources.
Itâs also important to realize that even if people have a fixed mindset, theyâre not always in that mindset. In fact, in many of our studies, we put people into a growth mindset. We tell them that an ability can be learned and that the task will give them a chance to do that. Or we have them read a scientific article that teaches them the growth mindset. The article describes people who did not have natural ability, but who developed exceptional skills. These experiences make our research participants into growth-minded thinkers, at least for the moment - and they act like growth-minded thinkers, too.
A remarkable thing Iâve learned from my research is that in the growth mindset, you donât always need confidence.
What I mean is that even when you think youâre not good at something, you can still plunge into it wholeheartedly and stick to it. Actually, sometimes you plunge into something because youâre not good at it. This is a wonderful feature of the growth mindset. You donât have to think youâre already great at something to want to do it and to enjoy doing it.