Dr. Tchiki Davis provides 15 tips to help embrace a growth mindset.
The hand you are dealt is just the starting point for development. —Carol Dweck
Why Growth Mindset Matters
Only 10 years ago, I stood behind an old brown cash register at a local retail store, sliding customers’ purchases across a crisscross red scanner for $7.25 an hour (minimum wage at the time). If you had told me then that ten years later I’d have a Ph.D. from Berkeley, write a blog for Psychology Today, or be the author of a book on how to generate happiness in the technology age, I would have thought you were absolutely bonkers! I had no connections, no money, no information on how to get me from where I was then to where I am now. But I did have one thing…I had a growth mindset.
What Is Growth Mindset?
A growth mindset is simply the belief that our basic abilities can be developed and improved through dedication and hard work. It’s not so much that this belief is some kind of magic. It’s just that without a growth mindset, we don’t exert the required effort, and so we remain perpetually stuck.
But with a growth mindset, we can break through the stuck-ness and achieve the results we desire, whether that be at work, in our relationships, or in other aspects of our lives (take this well-being quiz to get a sense for the areas of your life that might need work).
Do You Have a Growth Mindset?
Do you believe that you were born and raised with a fixed set of skills and abilities—such as your IQ—that you had from birth and will stay with you your entire life? Or do you believe that your ideas and beliefs are ever-evolving, that you can learn new skills if you work at it, and that your wisdom and intelligence grows with each new experience? If you said “yes” to the first question, you have what is referred to as a “fixed mindset.” If you said “yes” to the second question, you probably have what Stanford professor Carol Dweck calls a “growth mindset.”
