written by JOSH GESSNER | The Learning Engine

Today at a Glance:

• Growth Mindset

• How praise is undermining your performance

• The power of the word ‘yet’

• Stress… is actually good?

I used really struggle with the fear of failure.

It affected my performance on the field and affected my mental state off the field.

I still struggle with it today - but my perspective drastically changed when I picked up a book called ‘Mindset’ by Carol Dweck.

This book introduced me to ‘Growth Mindset’.

From Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps - the greatest athletes have adapted Growth Mindset.

And so can you.

^{What is Growth Mindset?}

Growth mindset is when you believe that your abilities can be improved through dedication, effort, and learning.

The opposite is a fixed mindset, where you believe that your abilities are fixed.

Why does this matter?

The athletes with a fixed mindset shy away from failure.

Athletes with a growth mindset view failure as a necessary ingredient to improvement.

Failure leads to learning, which leads to improvement.

When we shy away from failure, we are leaving a lot of room for improvement on the table.

You’re probably thinking:

This all sounds nice, but is hard to implement.

I agree.

But I found 3 actionable ways you can implement this today:

^{1) Praise effort, not performance}

Has anyone told you: “You’re so talented” or ““you’re a great athlete” ?

They most likely had good intentions, but multiple studies conducted by Dr. Carol Dweck have found that they are actually undermining your performance when they praise you in this matter.

When you give someone performance based praise such as:

“You are so talented”

their performance decreases.

In contrast if you give effort based praise such as:

“You work really hard”

This has been shown to increase their performance.

why?

The reason is in the way people respond to failure.

The people who are given performance based praise tend to shy away from failure to uphold that self-identity as a talented person:

Because talented people shouldn’t fail.

On the other hand, people with an effort based identity tend to uphold that identity by persisting and tackling challenges.

Super interesting.

Action: Start to identify yourself and praise yourself as a hard worker, instead of someone who is talented.

^{2) Power of ‘Yet’:}

The word "yet" is the key to a growth mindset:

"I'm not good enough" becomes "I'm not good enough...yet."

"I don't know how to do it" becomes "I don't know how to do it...yet."

"I'm not capable of that" becomes "I'm not capable of that...yet."

Not gonna lie, when I first read this, it sounded like some woo woo optimistic BS.

But as I think more about it:

The opposite, where you don’t believe you can improve - gets you nowhere.

Action: Start to identify areas where you are limiting yourself, and attach ‘yet’ to the end of that sentence.

Just try. See what happens.

^{3) Stress-is-enhancing mindset:}

So this growth mindset stuff sounds great and all but… at the end of day, failing is stressful, and it sucks.

The last part to the growth mindset is embracing the stress-is-enhacing mindset.

The stress-is-enhancing mindset is when we discover that stress is actually beneficial.

It mobilizes our resources to increase strength,power and focus, to help us perform at our best.

Multiple studies conducted by Dr. David Yager showed that just the knowledge of how stress can help us increases our performance - Only if we believe it.

If we view stress as a negative, we panic and performance decreases.

If we view it as something that helps us, performance actually does increase.

Jesus.

The power of the placebo.

Action: Research the ways stress actually benefits us, and believe it.

Growth Mindset will take years to fully adapt. I’m going through that process right now. But slowly cultivating this mindset might drastically change your career for the better.

That’s it for today, Thanks so much for reading!