What’s your mindset?
Climb that hill!
Is your mindset fixed, telling you that what’s so is so and unlikely to change?
Or is it attuned to growth, leading you to look for ways to do things differently, make things better, try again?
The growth-vs.-fixed dichotomy is at the heart of Prof. Carol Dweck’s book Mindset, which I reviewed here last year, and which I recommend to anyone. Many years of painstaking research by Dweck revealed that a growth mindset was the common denominator for many high performers across diverse fields of endeavor.
My guess is that the state of the economy has driven a lot of people into fixed-mindset-land. But I’m sure that we would all benefit from a society-wide conversion to the growth mindset.
- What are you doing to prevent the fixed mindset from taking hold?
- What can you do to promote a growth mindset for yourself, your team, your entire organization?
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Photo by Rudi Riet, used under a CC-Share Alike license.
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Tim, this connects well with another bit I came across this morning, a post about cultivating curiosity as a way to avoid conflict. In one study, people who viewed an antagonistic speaker were tasked with coming up with either a comment on the topic, or an open question, (or perhaps a naive question, eh?):
“What scientists found was that compared with people preparing comments, people armed with a single question viewed the message on the video as more intelligent and reasonable, viewed the speaker as more open-minded, and most promising, were more interested in meeting and getting to know the speaker in the future.”
Conflict isn’t just interpersonal, of course. It could be status quo vs. the industry changing under our feet. Our own preferences vs. those of the customer base. What we want to believe vs. what’s true. Who we are vs. who we want to be. The take-away, as I see it, is that people with an active Critic Reflex (cough*me*cough) would do well to keep the questioning as simple and removed. Strong opinions, weakly held. Etc.
Very interesting take, Mark — and as it happens, I already had that same post about curiosity open in my browser before I read your comment.
I *love* the connection you make back to naive questions. When we’re willing to ask “How does this work?” or “What do our customers need?” we can often short-circuit (at least some of) the finger-pointing and get on with the business of finding things out and making things better.
Which is a heck of a lot better than barraging one another with our talking points.