Adapted from the work of Carol Dwek and Andrew Huberman
“When you’re given a positive label, you’re afraid of losing it,
and when you’re hit with a negative label,
you’re afraid of deserving it.”
Carol Dweck
When I was 42 years old I initiated a lifelong dream. To play the piano.
It was exciting and scary.
Would I be good enough, how quickly could I learn, would my lack of ability depress me?
I was locked into a Fixed Mindset. (FM) Success or Failure…”Applause or Tomatoes?” To quote Fritz Perlz.
About a year into the process and making reasonable progress, I arrived at my weekly lesson. My piano teacher had a friend and colleague visiting. He introduced me and his friend asked how I was doing with the lessons and my piano teacher said, “Pretty good but with the usual adult ‘fear thing’.”
He was of course referring to the panic and shaking fingers that I experienced when I started each lesson with the recital of what I’d been learning during the week.
This panic, inculcated by my parents and a pernicious 17th century school system, is a reflection of FM.
Our school system teaches us reading, writing and arithmetic and then, our primary learning is that they are teaching us to be frightened.
Having a FM is a disease.
A FM is believing and acting as if you have to succeed, be brilliant and talented. FM says that mistakes are a sign of failure, of bad character, of poor application and a faulty personality.
FM says that the goal, the outcome, the award and the rating you receive, is everything.
Failure is a disaster.
FM says that you need to focus on success and run desperately from failure. It says you need to be a good person and a kind person never a bad person or a cruel person. It says “I have to be perfect!” FM is binary.
FM is either-or.
FM is all-or-nothing.
Vincent Van Gough was a total ‘failure’ in his lifetime and one of the greatest artistic successes in history, after he died.
Which is the truth?
Neither.
Because life isn’t all about the outcome!
I’m not saying the outcome doesn’t have significance but learning to reduce its significance is transforming.
If you only focus on the outcome of your efforts you will live much of the time driven by fear, perfectionistic and goal focused, which when you achieve it, will perhaps leave you momentarily delighted, manic or excited and then ultimately deflated and looking for the next ‘hit’.
I had a client who spent seven years getting his PhD in the pharmaceutical arena and he walked into my office one day saying: “I’ve done it, I’m Dr X” and I said, “How does it feel?” and he said, “Wonderful, but why am I so deflated?”
He was deflated because all he was looking for was the end result: ‘Dr X’, the status, the kudos, the glory, instead of spending the seven years finding the value in the striving and joy and struggle of the creation.
Growth Mindset, (GM) is really an expression of how to focus on the journey not the destination.
Which means, this moment, the now, is where your energy needs to be.
It’s actually another way of accessing mindfulness, being in the present moment and for me it is a more effective way of accessing mindfulness than the traditional Buddhist practices.
GM is another way of discovering the Power of Now!
The alternative is the disempowerment of what’s next?
Where will I get my next reward?
My next piece of approval?
I met a guy who said that the meaning of life is, “What am I going to do next?”
Michael Phelps, the greatest athlete in modern Olympic history with 23 gold medals to his name, came out to the world a few years ago stating that after every Olympic Games he was so depressed he wanted to kill himself.
Driving success, the goal, to the exclusion of embracing the joy and power and fulfilment and the dopamine enhancing striving, of the journey, will kill your Spirit and no one can live without their Spirit, at least not happily.
The need for a mindfulness practice is essentially saying that we, most of the time, are in our heads, in the past or the future. When we are engaged in one task, our minds and bodies are straining into the next moment, trying to get it done, to get to the future. GM is to immerse oneself in the present.
Andrew Huberman, professor of Neuro-Biology and Ophthalmology at Stanford Medical School has researched how dopamine is produced in the body.
As you resist and struggle in the moment, your dopamine, which is a measure of energized motivation, drops. The more you do it, the more it keeps dropping and then your baseline of dopamine in the system keeps dropping.
Then you get your ‘hit’ at the end and you have a momentary high, but there’s too little dopamine in the system to maintain it and you crash. You also crash because you are relying on the end point to get happiness and we don’t spend much time at the end.
Huberman suggests that you learn to enjoy the struggle and reward yourself at stages along the way. This raises dopamine in the moment and doing it often enough also raises your baseline of dopamine! He also suggests that you don’t celebrate success too much, “Maybe every 2nd or 10th time!”
Begin to let go of external rewards and reward yourself!!!
If your success leaves you miserable, it might mean that it is driven by a FM. I say might because there may be a multitude of other issues, traumas and losses which contribute to your misery, most importantly including using external success to avoid dealing with your vulnerabilities.
Dweck describes an extraordinary experiment where two groups of kids were given a task to do and were scored on it. One group was told they were brilliant and the other group was told that they worked really hard. They then had to send the results to other kids at another school.
40% of the kids in the ‘brilliant’ group lied about their results. The ‘worked hard’ group didn’t lie.
Dweck says:
“What’s so alarming is that we took ordinary children and made them into liars, simply by telling them they were smart.”
What I also love is that parents so often say to their children, “Haven’t I told you not to lie,” having no idea of how they have indirectly taught their kids precisely why they should lie, to perpetuate an image FM and protect that image.
In another experiment she worked with a group of kids who just loved drawing. She split them into 2. The one group just continued to draw for the love of it and the other group received gold stars for good drawing.
The second group gave up!!!
Why because the were no longer doing GM. Drawing for the love of it. They were now hooked into FM. Drawing for praise, which of course evoked the opposite: “I didn’t get a gold star, or Mary has more gold stars than me!”
Most of our culture is structured around winning, achieving, being number one!
I said that FM is a disease in our culture and it is. It is natural for parents to tell their children that they are brilliant, smart, beautiful and talented, but it is destructive to their self-esteem and it raises their levels of anxiety. They may achieve success but the cost is overwhelming.
- I have a friend, Mark Casey. He has been a partner at Deloitte for decades. I was visiting him many years ago, it was after work and he hadn’t come home yet and I was chatting to his wife. He walked into the house, “Hi Honey I’m home,” he said and she replied, “How was your day?” and he replied, walking into the room, without a hint of self-righteousness, “I was awesome,” pumping the air with his fist!!!
I asked him what made him say that. He replied, “We had a meeting with one of the big banks. The meeting went badly, but I kept my cool and I know where we are going.” The italicized words are GM.
How many people do you know who can do what Casey did!?
A FM would have said, “Crap meeting, what a mess. Bunch of idiots, I need a drink.”
Can you arrive home after work today and tell your family how
you were “awesome” when the
achievement wasn’t
external.
Research shows that public speaking is considered by most people to be more scary than death. I think the research is somewhat questionable but nevertheless it does reflect that people have immense anxiety about public speaking.
When you learn to write at school they either say to you, “Wow you’re so clever and so good at writing” or, “That’s useless or it looks like a mess.”
The receiver of both options is hooked into a FM.
The one who is successful lives in fear of failure and the one who is deemed a failure gets depressed or is motivated to become a success, but a miserable one!
A GM way of working with this is to say to the first kid, “Wow, you really worked hard to make sure that you did that well and you kept trying even though you wanted to give up.”
To the second kid you could say, “I can see you are struggling let me help you to keep working at it so you can overcome your difficulties and push through them.” You are teaching them to thrive on challenge.”
I created a concept out of the work of Dr John Demartini called The Law of Conservation of Stress and Pain.
Think of your life between birth and six years old and what stressed you – Bedtime and not being able to eat enough sweets and get enough presents.
Between six and 12 years old – teachers and tests and bullies and being chained to a desk having to learn subjects you had no interest in.
Between 12 and 18 years old – sexuality and romance and rejection and achievement and what to do with my life?
Between 18 and 24 years old – establishing responsibility, university degree or a career, paying rent.
You can go on doing this up to the age of 90.
This law is based on the first law of thermodynamics which says, “Energy cannot be created or destroyed it simply changes form.” Ice if heated becomes water if it continues to be heated it becomes steam, it doesn’t disappear, it just changes form.
So stress and pain are always changing form.
They never disappear.
A FM is trying to achieve a state of permanent completion and happiness, saying that when you achieve some particular goal you will be happy and that all pain will be gone.
This is a lie.
They lied to us – not intentionally – but simply because their parents lied to them and the parents parent’s lied to them, going all the way back to being cave people!!!
A GM says, “Embrace the struggle, the learning, the growth, as it is happening and stop focusing only on the goal.”
I italicize the word ‘embrace’ because the way you struggle is critical.
A great gift from my dear mother was how she taught me not to run from challenge and threat and stress and pain, but unfortunately she taught me to do this with a clenched heart and a tight fist. I like to refer to this as a tight and constricted energetic signature.
Our energetic signature reflects the energy inside our system and in our behaviour. When someone simply shakes your hand, the energy might be aggressive, meek, tentative, invasive, questioning…This simple act communicates a great deal about who we are and the quality of your connection with others.
Dweck’s work has taught me to relax into the struggle, to learn to enjoy it!!! It’s about changing the energetic signature with which I connect to the world.
It’s not easy, it takes time, but just notice how it changes how you feel about your life.
There are so many motivational speakers and there is so much literature out there these days on achieving your goals, but this is misleading because goals alone, are not the answer.
Doing the Work.
Most people interested in personal growth, love to read about it and not really do the work.
Theories can be fun, but pretty useless if you want to grow.
My preamble to doing the work is very important.
For some people the wounding and the criticism created by FM will make it very difficult for them to simply implement these strategies on a conscious level. The trauma from the past may be overwhelming and in such cases I would recommend deeper emotional work first.
In addition, some people have learned to live with a nervous system that is very hyper-aroused. This work is more difficult for them.
Here are some of Dweck’s Suggestions around developing a GM.
For kids:
- Don’t focus on how clever or beautiful or talented your kid is. Get them to focus on effort and learning and growing and standing up after falling down and praising them for that rather than the result.
- Ask them what they learned today and discuss strategies for overcoming setbacks and growing.
- If a kid says he did better than someone else say, “Great, but what did you learn?”
- If your child says he’s a champ! Say to him, “Champs are the ones who don’t give up.”
- Teach your kids to love learning and to reward themselves as they struggle and strive and to look at information in new ways, rather than just working hard for the result.
- There are many other suggestions in her book…
For Adults:
- Become aware of your triggers that push you into FM. Failure, stress, criticism, anxiety about performance are all potential triggers. Name the FM to get control of it.
- You then learn new GM ways to move away from the old FM strategies.
- So when you berate yourself for failure or making a mistake you can begin to switch to, what did I learn, how can I grow, from this, how can I develop myself?
Mark’s suggestions:
- Human beings are almost entirely defined by grasping toward pleasure and resisting pain. GM uses Cultivating Wisdom to begin to transcend this.
- It takes insight and wisdom to notice how, particularly under pressure, we run the same story. A desperate need to achieve, or please or become a victim or the pressures of life. To learn to slow down and relax your nervous system is one of the keys to moving out of a FM and into GM. (I use self-hypnosis, heart rate variability breathing and meditation to help my clients with this).
- This enables moving into the resonance, the connectedness of the present moment.
Challenges and threats were not a part of life to be embraced, they were something to be survived and got through as quickly as possible. Zorba the Greek is famous for the following phrase.
He’s talking to his boss who is stressed out, in FM.
Zorba says to the superior, “Boss, life is trouble, only in death is there no trouble. I take off my belt and I look for trouble.”
I struggled for years to implement this and GM help me. I don’t ‘take off my belt and look for trouble’, but rather soften and relax and see how much I can enjoy the challenge and the empowerment that comes from embracing threat with relaxation, tenacity and internal power.
- Brian Hiner an ex US navy SEAL. One of his books is entitled GUTS Greatness Under Tremendous Stres is worth reading. There is much GM in his work.
- He has a beautiful way of defining gratitude. Instead of saying, “I have to present to the CEO” which is resentful and resistant. You say, “I get to present to the CEO.”
This is GM in buckets.
Instead of, “I resent getting up in the cold to exercise, you say to yourself, “I get to get up in the cold to exercise.” It’s an invitation into gratitude that is really powerful. Very different from the parental, “Be grateful!”
Don’t expect this to work if your stress is overwhelming.
I have a client, a man who was desperately abused by his father, who took his son to see a ‘low cost housing’ area to “Teach him gratitude”. This is abuse. The son was well behaved “For a week!”
And while he was being well behaved, what damage was he experiencing emotionally!?
- If f
GM is often intense courage, tenacity, problem solving. It’s the Mastery Position of moving toward threat, not contracting against it.
It’s an attitude. It’s in the mind, in the body and in the Spirit.
- Developing a GM takes a lot of work because the conditioning of FM is endemic to our culture and it runs extremely deep.
- A final reminder – the striving and learning and growing of GM needs to be slow and soft and loose, not fast and hard and tight.
I long for the day when teachers no longer say to kids learning to write, “Well done, you’re so clever” or “That looks terrible you’re capable of doing much better,” and instead say:
“Can you feel the magic of writing and the energy you’re putting into keeping going, to struggle, even though it’s difficult?”
