How to Develop a Growth Mindset
Public Domain Image of Kate Winslet
Your mindset is the critical requisite for any kind of growth. Science-backed research reveals that you can improve your life with the power of positive thinking.
Several studies have produced fascinating insights about the power of thought, particularly around Neuroplasticity — a relatively new branch within neurological medicine that studies the mind’s ability to rewire itself. This field of science supports the work, and subsequent bestselling book, of a popular Stanford University psychologist, Carol Dweck, who coined the term growth mindset.
A mindset is a self-perception or “self-theory” that people hold about themselves. Believing that you are either “intelligent” or “unintelligent” is a simple example of a mindset … People may be aware or unaware of their mindsets but they have a profound effect on learning achievement, skill acquisition, personal relationships, professional success, and many other dimensions of life. — Carol Dweck
Countless research has shown that negative thinking releases stress-producing hormones that can be destructive to the brain's normal functioning, having a significant and lasting effect on our physical and emotional well-being. On the contrary, positive mental states — such as through mindfulness — seem to change the brain for the better.
Positivity can lead to less stress and anxiety, increased memory, and a stronger sense of self. In short, there are thoughts that interfere with your ability to be efficient and effective, just like there are thoughts that amplify your ability to be proficient and productive. You can maximize the former and minimize the latter by rewiring your mind.
Mindfulness should no longer be considered a “nice-to-have” for executives. It’s a “must-have”: a way to keep our brains healthy, to support self-regulation and effective decision-making capabilities, and to protect ourselves from toxic stress. It can be integrated into one’s religious or spiritual life, or practiced as a form of secular mental training. When we take a seat, take a breath, and commit to being mindful, particularly when we gather with others who are doing the same, we have the potential to be changed. —Harvard Business Review
In order to manage your mindset for the better, you need to be aware of what you are thinking and how these thoughts influence your attitude and habits. Here is a simple 5-step process to consider:
Monitor your thoughts
Measure your mood
Map mood to habits
Make changes accordingly
Take inspired action
Monitor Your Thoughts
The first step in shifting your way of thinking is to assess how you think under certain circumstances. Taking inventory of your thoughts will help you understand how you tend to frame situations. Do you have a propensity for pessimistic or optimistic framing? Put simply, are you a glass half full or half empty type of person?
To answer this, schedule a few minutes throughout each day (for the next week) to stop and unpack what you are thinking right then and there. Then jot it down in a daily journal. At the end of a week you’ll have a comprehensive log of feedback that will help you determine whether your thoughts skew negative or positive, and under what context.
Framing is one way the brain finds patterns in chaos (its primary survival function) and creates meaning out of meaninglessness … There’s always a point of view, and it biases the view by emphasizing or including certain aspects of the situation or experience while omitting or devaluing others. —Psychology Today
Measure Your Mood
Consider how your specific thoughts are linked to certain emotions. According to the book "Thinking Fast and Slow" written by Nobel prize winning author Daniel Kahneman, there are two systems of thought:
intuitive thinking — fast and automatic biases governed subconsciously by the emotions (for instance, having a gut reaction to some event).
rational thinking — slow and deliberate evaluations and logical conclusions managed by our conscious mind.
Most of the time intuitive thinking is used to judge, decide, and act because it is swifter and less taxing on the brain. Intuitive thought is faster and often useful, but not without biases that may cloud how you perceive certain situations. That’s because the subconscious relies on memories of past experiences to provoke emotions, and those memories aren’t always relevant to the situation at hand. You can measure your intuition, and subsequently exert more mastery over your mood, by doing the following:
having a list of emotions readily available so you are able to better articulate how you feel in any given moment
reading through your thought journal and considering how certain thoughts, and the way you frame them, make you feel
being in tune with your subconscious mind so you can detect and manage thoughts and emotions that bubble up automatically
Map Mood to Habits
Now fixate on the emotions that tend to be more prominent than others — and determine how they influence your actions, habits, and behaviors, for the better or worse. This is an important next step of the growth mindset process because your emotional state directly impacts your health. As you work through your thought journal and tag thoughts to emotions, tally up any that seem perpetually negative. Then try to recall whether these unfavorable emotions provoke bad habits.
Some emotions — despite being negative — are harmless because you are able to contain them. It’s those that cause an adverse impact on different areas of your life that you’ll want to target and adjust. That’s because some bad habits not only stop you from thriving (e.g. developing and succeeding in life) but maybe even surviving (e.g. causing stress and strain on the mind and body).
In a 2007 study that followed more than 6,000 men and women aged 25 to 74 for 20 years, for example, [researchers] found that emotional vitality — a sense of enthusiasm, of hopefulness, of engagement in life, and the ability to face life’s stresses with emotional balance — appears to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease. The protective effect was distinct and measurable, even when taking into account such wholesome behaviors as not smoking and regular exercise. — Harvard Health
Make Changes Accordingly
Once you are able to isolate the thoughts and emotions that make you feel the worst and that to poor decisions and behaviors, you’ll be more motivated to make the necessary changes. There are many different methods you could use to experiment with better thinking, but one that seems particularly promising is called third-person self-talk.
We all have an internal monologue that we engage in from time to time; an inner voice that guides our moment-to-moment reflections. Although people frequently engage in such “self-talk”, recent findings indicate that the language they use to refer to the self when they engage in this process influences self-control. Specifically, using one’s own name to refer to the self during introspection, rather than the first-person pronoun “I”, increases peoples’ ability to control their thoughts, feelings, and behavior under stress. — Scientific Reports
To break it down, once you’ve determined specific thoughts and emotions that are damaging, when they arise you can start to manage them by speaking to yourself as if you were talking to another person (for example, using your name or “you”). For example, imagine being a runner and the first 5-10 minutes of your daily runs always being the most painful. Your body may resist in the form of stomach cramps, labored breathing, and thoughts urging you to stop.
The only way to persist through this starting phase is to talk to yourself: slow down, control your breath, and go at your own pace. You may tell yourself that the first few minutes are always the most difficult, but it’ll get easier, the discomfort is nothing new but you’ll hit your stride shortly. And a few minutes into the run those negative thoughts do subside and you hit your stride — and typically have a great workout.
It is important to note that self-talk without action is only half the battle. If you are lying in bed in the morning you need self-talk plus discipline to actually get up, put on your running gear, and make it out the door. Self-talk without action is nothing but a set of lies you tell yourself — and your mind knows the difference. Some research has even shown that merely repeating positive self-statements can backfire and make you feel worse, especially if you already struggle with low self-esteem.
If what you tell yourself is incongruent with your current mindset, be sure that your self-talk is reasonable and use action to make it more believable. In combination, self-talk and action trains your brain to accept these new ideas as truth. This is one of the most profound findings gaining more and more support in the field of Neuroplasticity.
Take Inspired Action
The key insight from these findings is this: if your mind is in the gutter, your life will follow. This is why it is of utmost importance that you train your brain with uplifting thoughts and orient your thoughts towards your desires. However, this doesn’t mean there isn't a time or place for negative emotions. Both positive and negative thoughts are natural because this is a yin-yang world where positive and negative phenomenon co-exist and balance each other.
A growth mindset is not about thinking more positive than negative thoughts or eliminating negative thoughts altogether. It is about being the mastermind of your thoughts so you can fine-tune and align your mentality with your goals. It's acknowledging the good and bad then setting an intention to persist despite the circumstances.
You can’t just wink an eye and think a good thought and expect miraculous outcomes, you have to build a repertoire of tactics that cultivate discipline and enable you to build good habits. This will empower you to become savvy at recognizing where you are, envisioning where you want to be and creating a strategy to bridge the gap.
