One of the most basic beliefs we carry about ourselves, has to do with how we view and inhabit what we consider to be our personality. Out of these two mindsets, which we manifest from a very early age, springs a great deal of our behavior, our relationship with success and failure in both professional and personal contexts, and ultimately our capacity for happiness.
Believing that your qualities are carved in stone the fixed mindset creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. People with the fixed mindset see risk and effort as potential giveaways of their inadequacies, revealing that they come up short in some way.
This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. At the heart of what makes the “growth mindset” so winsome, is that it creates a passion for learning rather than a hunger for approval. 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.
As you begin to understand the fixed and growth mindsets, you will see exactly how one thing leads to another—how a belief that your qualities are carved in stone leads to a host of thoughts and actions, and how a belief that your qualities can be cultivated leads to a host of different thoughts and actions, taking you down an entirely different road.
The typical response is to compare the two mindsets and say, the growth mindset is better. This is my mindset and I believe would be the mindset of most educators in the 21st century. Today’s educators are constantly having to learn, grow, and stretch themselves to teach and prepare students for the future. But there is a key distinction that is true for all of us: you can have a growth mindset in some areas and a fixed mindset in others. For example, you might be very growth-oriented in your career and believe in your ability to develop and improve at work. Meanwhile, you might display a fixed mindset with regards to your core beliefs. The point is that it’s very easy for anyone to have a fixed mindset in a given area even if they display a growth mindset on others.
