Growing Together— Changing our Mindset
Image description: Photo of a plant sprouting on a light orange background with the words “I’m still growing” in the background
By Peter Simon
The theme for November is about reflection. In this post, you may notice as I talk about my journey of learning how to grow, I ask a lot of questions. I find these to help me be reflective and notice who I am and how I react in the world around me. I hope that they are able to make you reflect a little too as I talk about adopting a growth mindset.
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From the time we are born and then throughout childhood, we’re encouraged to learn. Encouraged to make mistakes and try again. There often seems to be a collective understanding of the people and world around a child to encourage failure as a way of learning. Repeatedly, kids will try again without so much as a bat of an eye.
There comes a time though after childhood, somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, that we begin to look at mistakes and failure a bit differently. When we begin to see them less as learning points and more as how good or bad we are at something.
Maybe we just forget to keep encouraging others and ourselves.
Can you recall the first time in your life that you began to see your mistakes through a different lens? Was it one singular moment or rather a culmination of little moments?
Was there someone telling you your mistakes were wrong or was it yourself?
For me, making mistakes is heavily tied to my struggles with perfectionism. I didn’t realize the full extent until I was talking with my parents a couple months ago. They told me one time at school conferences, one of my teachers brought up that when I got .5 wrong on a test, I came up to him crying and trying to get back that half point.
Reflecting back, I wonder if I reacted so strongly because it was for my German class and I have always had a strong desire to be fluent and live there. So, when I wasn’t perfect, I think I felt a fear grow inside me that I may never be good enough to live out that dream.
When it feels like making a mistake automatically deems you as incapable, it can then make receiving any sort of feedback in the future all the more difficult. Maybe this turns into us doing everything we can to avoid those situations or brushing off feedback like it means nothing. In doing so, we can become more fixed in our ways and possibly create unhelpful habits or routines in our life for when we receive feedback. I certainly did.
Carol Dweck, who helped inform my thinking for this post and for which I will provide a link to her talk at the end of this post, has a TEDx Talk about the power of yet and how that can help us with adopting a growth mindset. This mindset is when we see our abilities as changeable-- our focus is more on the process instead of the end product. We believe we are able to learn from mistakes and then we do just that. At the other end is a fixed mindset, in which we see our abilities as what we were born with and rather unchangeable. We see our mistakes as impossibilities.
How may our daily life be impacted by trying to maintain a fixed mindset so that we feel safe and can avoid those impossibilities?
When I reflect on this question for myself, I realized I maintained this mindset by creating a bubble around me. I became lonelier and lonelier because I was isolating myself from family and friends. Isolating myself from occupations or hobbies that made my life feel meaningful. And I also felt myself becoming angrier at the world that I could not be this perfect person I seemingly longed to be.
When we make a mistake, what is the voice like in our head? Is it critical or is it kind?
Below is a video that I made for school, a TEDx Talk spoof of sorts, explaining the importance of having a growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset while receiving feedback. While I am speaking to first year students, the message still feels relevant and important to share with you all. And even with myself.
It’s funny, after I made this video, I felt so invigorated and promised myself to always have a growth mindset-- to stop with my perfectionist ways. I started my first Level II Fieldwork for school soon after, where students are hands on and practicing being an OT-- ultimately putting themselves out there 100% for 12 weeks. I started off so strong and with so much humility. Those first weeks, I was so good at growing. I was taking feedback and figuring out what I needed from it in order to grow at every opportunity that arose.
Then for a couple weeks after, I began to feel lost and really sad. I could feel myself becoming fixed in my ways again, with it exacerbated after receiving some feedback on a session I had frozen up in. Afterwards, I felt like a flickering light, never quite sure when I would be on or when I would be off. It was hard to constantly open myself up to feedback and be vulnerable. For a moment, I was back to being that boy crying over getting .5 off on a test.
I am not sure what happened that let me move away from my fixed mindset. After a couple weeks, I felt a sudden urge randomly to take care of my mental health. So, maybe it was time, maybe it was me listening to my gut, maybe it was opening up about it to my partner, or maybe it was me starting daily meditations.
At its core, I see it as a moment of growth. I learned that I have created a very strong habit to be fixed in my mindset as a way to protect myself. I learned that my fixed mindset does not actually protect me. So, maybe that was me trying to adopt a growth mindset all along, it just took a bit longer in that moment to do so.
One thing that really resonated with me during that first fieldwork was whenever our kids faced challenges, we would teach them to say, “this is really hard but I am trying.” I hope that is a phrase you can carry with you into your day today and the next ones whenever you make mistakes or receive feedback.
We are trying and that is a powerful thing to remember.
Here is the video that is from Carol Dweck that was referenced above:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X0mgOOSpLU
