October Book of the Month: Growth Mindset

We've been busy doing research in areas of positive psychology, motivation, and other related fields to better explain the outcomes of our tween/teen and adult programs. We realized that the books we have been reading and TED talks we have been watching might also be beneficial to those of you that are educators, parents, program evaluators, and grant writers. So we are kicking off a regular feature on our blog - a featured book or TED talk.

The first in our series is Growth Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck (2006), a researcher in the fields of personality, social and developmental psychology at Stanford University. In this book, she asserts that when approaching challenge, our mindset plays a critical role in the outcome. She explains that a person with a fixed mindset believes that performance is based on one's natural abilities and therefore they see no reason for putting effort into improving. When challenged a person with a fixed mindset will give up, retreat to own comfort zone, and blame others for performance. On the other hand, someone with a growth mindset wants to learn at all costs and believes that the harder she works, the better she will be. Growth mindset focuses effort on improving, capitalizes on mistakes as part of the learning process, and confronts deficiencies head-on. As a result, someone with a growth mindset faces challenges with enjoyment, confidence, and improved performance.

We can probably all identify tweens/teens and colleagues that fit into both of these. Where do you fall? The good news is that it's not too late - people can shift mindset. In the book, Dweck draws on examples from sports, business, and education and provides suggestions for helping to make this shift. More current research on resilience and grit reference the work of Dweck.

As many of you that have attended our conference workshops or staff trainings know, Flow Circus teaches juggling and skill toys. But for us, it's not about training future circus stars. Reading through Dweck's work helped us to identify one of the less tangible outcomes of our programs. By recognizing that the process of learning to juggle takes effort, struggle and persistence, emphasizing that all players learn at different paces, and encouraging players to look for new strategies to solve problems, our programs support the development of a growth mindset. An essential step that we build into the process of learning to juggle is letting the balls drop. Dropping isn't failing, instead it provides critical information about the next steps to take in mastering new tricks. When a player says, "I can't do it," we encourage her to add the word "yet" at the end of the sentence. "I can't do it, yet" means that with time, instruction, and effort, it can be done. It's a subtle difference, but that one word can help to shift the player to developing a growth mindset and a can-do attitude for future endeavors.