The Science of Growth Mindset
“Through developing a growth mindset, the meaning of effort and difficulty were transformed.”
— Carol Dweck
Growth mindset, coined by psychologist and researcher Carol Dweck, is a learning approach that helps you acquire skills faster and optimize performance. Whether you’re a student under 25 or deep into your career, developing a growth mindset can help you endure challenges, achieve better results, and enjoy the learning process more.
So, how can you apply a growth mindset to your life? Read on to learn how, as well as the scientific basis of growth mindset and science-based tools to help you accelerate your development. Yes— for adults too!
Introduction
Carol Dweck noticed through her research that there are vast differences in the way students show up and perform in the classroom. Some perform extremely well, despite facing failures, while others fail chronically and experience a lot of pain in the process.
“Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting A’s?” Dweck fears, “And are they carrying this need for constant validation into their lives as adults, which leads them to being unable to get through the day without a reward?”
Many of us have experienced this firsthand — whether as parents, educators, or young people ourselves. We’ve all known someone who spirals into crushing feelings of inadequacy under the crippling weight of even the smallest failure. This is what Dweck refers to as The Tyranny of Now — failing to achieve their goal now equates to “being a failure.”
The Power of Yet
By contrast to The Tyranny Of Now, there’s profound power in “yet.” Failing to achieve something today simply means “not yet.” How does it feel to say that about one of your recent failures? Try it on for size.
What Growth Mindset Is
The crux of growth mindset is:
When you focus on and reinforce the actions that you put into challenging yourself toward a goal, you ultimately perform better.
Perhaps counterintuitively, if you focus on labelling yourself and identifying with the results of your performance, it can be destructive for your results.
When we identify with our results, we see ourselves as failures when we don’t live up to our expectations. Building this habit can be extremely detrimental to our learning outcomes as kids, and later on as adults. Research has shown that kids without a growth mindset fall apart when presented with a challenge. Further, they look for counterproductive ways to soothe themselves, like identifying a peer who performed worse than they did to inflate their sense of worth. When experiencing failure and identifying with it, it discourages them from being challenged ever again.
What happens next? A negative feedback loop of failure and pain, that they carry with them into adulthood if not reversed.
Research has also shown that classes who are performing abysmally as a whole, when put into a growth mindset classroom, shoot up to the top of their district in as little as one school year.
Why is this?
When we’re presented with a challenge that’s just a little too hard for us, we will err, and maybe fail. While we endure the effort and difficulty of maneuvering through that challenge is when our neurons are making connections.
It is during effort and difficulty that we’re getting SMARTER.
So, a growth mindset makes you extremely proficient at enduring effort and difficulty, to get to what’s on the other side: growth.
Dr. Maya Shankar identified as violinist since she was a very small child. When introducing herself to others, she’d say, “Hi, I’m a violinist. And my name’s Maya.” Perhaps it’s no surprise that when she suffered a violin career-ending injury, her identity was shattered. After some soul-searching, she wound up pursuing a cognitive science career, which appears quite different from a musical career on the surface.
But Dr. Shankar reflects on the importance of identifying with the “why,” rather than the “what.” She discovered that the meaning of the violin to her was to connect with people through her music. That’s where her heart really is, and that’s why she fell in love with cognitive science too— because she’s able to connect with others through it.
Dr. Shankar was forced to learn what all of us need to learn in order to live up to our highest potential (and enjoy the process!).
How to Develop a Growth Mindset at Any Age
(or instill one in your colleagues, team, or kids)
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. This is the mindset that allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.
— Carol Dweck
Make errors and fail. This is when neural plasticity is happening, and it’s when we’re learning. It’s a myth that we need to get into “flow” as an “optimal learning state” — on the contrary, flow is an expression of what we already know how to do. In order to learn something new or acquire a new skill, one must hit the point of frustration, and go just a little bit further.
Turn up the volume on the verbs, and turn down the volume on the labels. That is, when talking to yourself, your child, or a friend about their performance, focus on the actions taken in the pursuit of the goal. It doesn’t matter if they succeeded or failed, the debrief should include genuinely positive feelings about the process and/or effort that went into the attempt.
Don’t over-index yourself in a learning bout. Learn in relatively short, consistent repetitions. It depends on what you’re practicing and if you’re over or under 25, but any bouts of learning and focus should be capped at 90 minutes maximum. You may only practice a new skill for 10 minutes. But come back again soon.
Bonus strategies for adults:
Develop a “stress is enhancing” mindset to go along with your growth mindset. This mindset is founded on the research demonstrating that the belief that stress is good for your health makes you perform and feel better. The inverse is true too: Knowing that stress is bad for your health and performance makes you perform and feel worse. Here’s the kicker: Both of these claims are scientifically true, but the differentiator is regarding the duration of that stress. Acute stress is good for us, chronic stress is bad for us.
Use positive restraints. A clear exception to the rule of using short learning bouts as an adult is when there is high contingency. In other words, does your life depend on you developing a certain skill or learning something new (literally or metaphorically)? If, for example, you had to hunt your own food in order to eat and feed your family, you would be immersed in this challenge and acquire the skill of hunting significantly faster than you would if doing it for any other reason.
Use self-hypnosis as a swiss army knife tool. Self-hypnosis is the secret weapon of top performers all around the world today, and even throughout history. Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods each used hypnosis to reach the top of their game. Salvador Dalí engaged in micro hypnosis to fuel his creativity, and Thomas Edison used self-hypnosis to maintain the growth mindset necessary to patent over 2,000 inventions worldwide. Notable actors, musicians and CEOs you’ve heard of use hypnosis to achieve their goals.
Using Science-Backed Self-Hypnosis to Accelerate Growth Mindset
You can use self-hypnosis for anything you want to achieve, from sports, to acting, to music, to public speaking, to interpersonal goals like better relationships.
The Reveri toolkit to enhance growth mindset and accelerate learning:
Self-hypnosis is highly flexible. This toolkit is based on common ways of using Reveri, but you can use the tools however they make the greatest impact for you.
Conquer Performance Anxiety: Use this prior to any kind of performance or presentation that’s giving you the jitters (new exercise coming to Reveri in October 2023!).
Enhance Focus: Use this when you are stuck on a problem.
Relieve Stress: Use this to disconnect from the symptoms of stress and focus on the actions you can take right now.
Review my Workout: Use this exercise immediately following a working or learning session, where you think about the work just completed as your workout.
Float On, Unwind From Work: Use either of these sessions to stop ruminating on the problem. Remember: short learning bouts → break → come back again.
Improve Sleep: Use this if you are ever struggling to sleep, particularly if a thought or worry is keeping you awake. You need your sleep so you can come back to the problem tomorrow!
Control Any Habit: If you have a deeply ingrained habit of getting down on yourself when you fail to achieve something, do this session regularly. Focus on turning down the volume of the labels while turning up the volume of the verbs.
Remember, you can develop a growth mindset to help you optimize your performance in every area of life.
As Carol Dweck wrote:
“Why waste time proving over and over how great you are, when you could be getting better?”
Develop a growth mindset at any stage of life. Download Reveri today.