When you are better at something, it’s easier to do. By gaining skills, you’re turning up the volume on ability. How you increase your skills depends on the behavior. It could mean doing online research, asking a friend for tips, or taking a class. And you can increase your skills by doing the behavior over and over.
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It’s also important to realize that even if people have a fixed mindset, they’re 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 I’ve learned from my research is that in the growth mindset, you don’t always need confidence.
What I mean is that even when you think you’re not good at something, you can still plunge into it wholeheartedly and stick to it. Actually, sometimes you plunge into something because you’re not good at it. This is a wonderful feature of the growth mindset. You don’t have to think you’re already great at something to want to do it and to enjoy doing it.
What I’ve found in my research and years of experience is that your answer will involve at least one of five factors. I call them the Ability Factors. Here’s how they break down.
- Do you have enough time to do the behavior?
- Do you have enough money to do the behavior?
- Are you physically capable of doing the behavior?
- Does the behavior require a lot of creative or mental energy?
- Does the behavior fit into your current routine or does it require you to make adjustments?
When you rehearse in Tiny Habits, you are both training muscle memory and rewiring your brain to remember. And you can drill and wire in a habit quickly if you have an effective celebration.
The feeling of success is a powerful catalyst for change. Your confidence grows when you celebrate not only because you are now a habit-creating machine but also because you are getting better and better at being nice to yourself. You start looking for opportunities to celebrate yourself instead of berating yourself.