The Growth Mindset

a new series

I failed at my new quarantine goal for the week… but I can still grow from it.

Growing up, when I failed to do something, I always felt overwhelmed with frustration. “I failed” started to take form as an identity of “I am a failure.” To me, making a mistake slowly etched into my identity until I gave into the notion that my identity was wrapped up in my actions.

It took years to restructure this narrative. In fact, I’m still in the middle of that process, which was highly evidenced by this past work week. Now, I preface what I am about to say with the fact that I am very grateful my job is secure, that being the Co-Founder of a new start-up has its challenges, but nowhere near the challenges of those around me. With that being said, here’s what I’ve learned this past week about myself and a little something called the growth mindset.

Last week I shared about how important it is to take care of your physical and mental wellness during this season. While attending school online and trying to manage expectations of what the next few months will look like, it’s important to create a space to be healthy. One of the recommendations I mentioned was about not trying to implement every habit you’ve ever dreamed of right away. If you are anything like me, I can end up doing a lot of “dreaming” about my habits instead of acting on them. But I decided that it was important to use my time wisely and implement one healthy habit at a time over these next few weeks of quarantine.

Last week, I decided to work out everyday. I checked it off my list fairly easily and felt a sense of pride by my small accomplishment. This past week however, I ventured on a far more difficult task for myself: waking up at 7:30am. Again, I know that I am blessed to be able to choose when I start my work day, but nonetheless, it is difficult for me to do anything in the morning. Oftentimes, you will find me working until late in the evening before I voluntarily wake up early. But I didn’t want to lose sunlight and I figured that this was a good time to build the healthier habit of waking up early and getting a jumpstart on productivity.

Day 1 went well. I woke up on Sunday morning at 7:30am, worked out, made a healthy breakfast, got ready, and made it to our online church right on time. Day 2 was a completely different story. I ended up waking up at 9:30am after going to bed at around 1:30am the night before. I honestly was discouraged by this and tried to get up at 7:30am the rest of the week, but inevitably failed for one reason or another.

This is when I had an important realization about our habits and our mindset. While reading “Mindset” by Carol S. Dweck, I discovered that my reaction to this failure was reflective of the “fixed mindset.” She shares that the fixed mindset expects talent and ability to appear on their own without learning or failure. My response completely reflected this “fixed mindset” that incapacitates the ability to grow. For me, my actions showed that if I couldn’t do it easily after 1 day, then maybe I wouldn’t be able to do it at all. However, the growth mindset is one that recognizes failure as an opportunity to learn and readjust. A growth mindset response to my mess of a morning routine would assess why it was difficult to wake up and adjust from there. And so, this week, that is what I am going to do. Instead of wallowing in my failure, as it is so easy for me to do, I am going to learn from it.

This mindset doesn’t only apply to habits. It applies to the classroom when you’ve gotten a D again, even though you’ve studied more this time. It applies to your friendships. Choose to learn from the inappropriate comment you made instead of defending yourself blindly. It applies to yourself. Choose to see the areas you have flaws and don’t shy away from them. Learning is a process — you won’t be perfect at it overnight. But, you can learn from your actions and grow from your experiences. Failure is an opportunity to grow from mistakes, not ignore them.

This lesson is one that I realized I truly believe for my students. I know that my students can learn and grow and be supported until they find success. What I realized through this, however, was that I need to be cognisant in applying this thought process to myself. This mindset was actually introduced to me by a good friend of mine, Emily Woo. In next week’s blog she shares her particularly insightful experience with the growth mindset.

We are excited about this new series and we hope that you will apply what is written to your everyday life (even in quarantine).