Mindset Is Everything

**Adapted from my upcoming book: How To Feel Good

Mindset is everything. It has a massive impact on our motivation and behaviors, especially when it comes to growth. Depending on our ways of thinking we can either become more resilient and welcoming of challenges or we can become vulnerable and fragile, scared of failure and suffering damage to our ego. Here are three ways of thinking about mindset that have helped me and I am confident will help you.

Beginner’s Mind

Shoshin in Japanese (初心), beginner’s mind means having a lack of preconceptions and bias when learning a subject, even if you think you have an advanced level of knowledge at that particular subject. It’s a concept that comes from the Japanese school of Zen Buddhism, Soto Zen Buddhism, and translates literally from sho (​​初), meaning beginner, and shin, meaning mind (心). 

Assumed expertise often comes along with closed mindedness and stops us from considering new ideas or ways of thinking. That can cause us to stagnate greatly! Especially early on into learning or practicing a subject or skill when we’re most prone to overestimate our knowledge and abilities. We begin to associate our identities with that knowledge or identity and as I’ll talk about next, that association is antithetical to learning and growth.

Approach the world with a beginner’s mind and you’ll find there’s an infinite amount to learn. That there’s an infinite amount to explore. Approach the world with expertise and you’ll blind yourself to opportunities to grow. Keep that in mind (...a beginner’s mind, of course).

Growth Mindset

Growth mindset stands in opposition to a fixed mindset. It essentially means that you are capable of doing anything if only you try, if only you are willing to put in the effort to do so. A fixed mindset is one that correlates your ability with your identity. You hear it all the time, people say things like, “I’m bad at math”, or even “I’m good at math”. It’s said casually in this way, framing ‘bad at math’ as part of who they are. Here you might be asking, ‘Why does this matter?’ Well, I’m going to tell you. Maybe framing ourselves in this way, pinning us down to a set level of ability for any particular thing, might take something from us.

I want to highlight a particular study. Here’s a summary: three groups of fifth graders are assigned a series of tasks, one group was given praise for their intelligence, one group given praise for their effort, and one group wasn’t given any praise (messed up, I know). The last group was a control group so we’ll ignore them for now. The first group, the group given praise for their abilities and intelligence, what I would call ‘identity based compliments’, handled failure worse than the other groups. They gave up easier, they enjoyed the tasks less, and they were more prone to lie about their ability and skew the results more towards their ‘identity’ rather than their actual outcomes. This group had lower self esteem after failure. The other group, the ‘effort based compliments’ group, had the opposite effect. They had more task persistence, enjoyed the tasks more, and were more likely to to maintain higher self esteem and motivation even in the face of failure.

So you see, even conceptualizing yourself as ‘good at math’, can have a negative outcome. You begin to see it as something you don’t need to work towards, something you’re willing to lie about to maintain the illusion of, and something that stops bringing you enjoyment and even hurts your self esteem if it changes.

On the other hand, if you thought about it as ‘I’ve worked really hard at learning math for a long time’, then you know that hard work and persistence is rewarded, making you more likely to persist, not just with math but with other endeavors.

I choose math because I have an anecdote to go along with it. I have a close friend who I’ve known for decades. We were rowdy teenagers together. This particular friend used to get dogged on quite a bit for not being the brightest crayon in the box. That’s awful and rude, I know, but he never developed a fixed identity around his intelligence. In his 20s he would decide to go to school at a local community college for computer science which obviously involves some math. At the start of his academic career, I remember sitting in his room helping him with remedial math. I mean I’m talking basic algebra, maybe even pre-algebra type stuff. A couple years go by and he’s been consistently engaging with math, continually learning, in fact, he likes it more than the computer science stuff. He switches his major to pure math and gets a bachelor’s degree in Data Science. Okay, that’s impressive enough, but he doesn’t stop. He continues to go to school and as of now he has a PHD in Data Science, a pure math degree, and he works for the Jet Propulsion Lab at NASA making complex topological maps of our atmosphere using… math.

How did my friend who could barely correctly answer pre-algebra equations go to being a math wizard? He kept at it. He worked for it. He never doubted that it was something he was capable of doing. He didn’t say to himself, “I’m just bad at math”, or even, “I’m good at math”, he just. Kept. Going. That, my friends, is a growth mindset.

Here’s a few things you can do to help develop a growth mindset:

• Embrace challenges. Do the hard thing. Challenges are opportunities, without challenges, you can’t grow. When you encounter an obstacle, keep going. Persist through it and you’ll be rewarded. Remember that. Remember that if you stay in your comfort zone then sure, you might always be comfortable, but you won’t ever get anywhere. The same can be said of your couch. It’s comfortable, sure, but do you want to sit on your couch the rest of your life?

• Value effort and learning. Remember to give yourself effort based compliments. Praise yourself for effort, not identity. Find a way to reward yourself for the process, small victories are important, acknowledge them and what it took you to get to those small victories. Hint: it was effort.

• Cultivate a positive attitude. Positive self talk works wonders, why do you think every major league sports team employs a team of sports psychologists? Self talk matters. Believe in yourself, especially when it’s hard. You got this! Stay grateful and try to appreciate both the positive and negative aspects of your journey.

• Seek inspiration. Be curious and always on the lookout for new information and perspectives. They might help you on your own journey. Find others that have been on a similar path as you, study their failures and successes and learn from those. Better yet, find those people! Ask them to help you. A mentor is a cheat code for success.

Stress is Enhancing Mindset

Adaptation is a constant cycle of stress and recovery. Stress sends signals to our mind and our body to adapt, and as I said previously, recovery is when adaptation happens. Often we’re scared of stress, it feels like a threat. But what if we could view it differently? What if we could acknowledge that stress is one end of the adaptation spectrum, and without it, we will never develop resiliency? Then we might start to view stress as beneficial.

Now, don’t get me wrong, you must still recover. You must still rest. Rest is the other side of the equation. I’m fond of saying “train hard, recover harder”. Training is a type of acute stress, and a lot of us voluntarily submit ourselves to that stress because we know we’ll get an adaptive response. But if you trained indefinitely and never rested, you would never adapt, you'd begin to break down and end up overtraining or worse. So obviously stress without rest is not positive.

Give it a shot sometime. Try to change your mind about a hard thing you must do, a stress that you have. Start small. Maybe you’re feeling stressed about a phone call you need to make, or an email you need to write, how could you reframe it? Maybe making that phone call and having a hard conversation is going to help you have hard conversations in the future, maybe you’ll be less likely to leave it on the backburner and have it eat away at your subconscious, instead, making the phone call is going to make you more resilient in the face of difficult conversations and you’ll avoid them less, tackling problems faster and not letting them snowball into worse stressors.