But change will come, and if you acknowledge this simple but indisputable fact of life, and understand that you must adjust to all change, then you will have a head start.” Arthur Ashe
Spring has hit central California. Soft blossoms now cover the once sharp-fingered trees that line the avenues of my town. Poppies blanket the high desert; along the highways, the forsythia and lupine are in full bloom.
A season of change is upon us.
Hungry for the sights and smells of new growth, my family and I recently visited a botanical garden nestled high in the hills above Berkley. We rambled slowly along paths etched into the steep hillsides, breathing in the scent of trillium and fern and fresh rainwater flowing along winter-dormant creek-beds.
The park itself is divided into regions, each region filled with curated flora from each of California’s major climates. I have learned there are many in this vast state.
My husband’s favorites are the redwood forests. Walking under those tall guardians of the garden always elicits feelings of awe, almost of reverence.
On this visit, they elicited something more.
“Look at that one,” I said to my husband and daughter.
I stood under one of the trees and pointed upward.
For perhaps 100 feet the trunk rose ramrod straight from the ground. Then, for no reason still in evidence, the trunk listed at a steep angle, perhaps 20 or 30 degrees, before pushing straight upward once more.
I’m no botanist, but it was reasonably clear what had happened. In the tree’s younger life, it had met with some sort of obstruction on the ground – perhaps a large boulder or a fallen tree trunk. It had to either move around it, changing its preferred course, or die because of it.
In the way of living things, it had changed its course.
It made me think of the next characteristic of resilience that I want to cover this year: adapting to change.
Some might say that trees are not good examples of this type of resilience – they would point to grasses that dance in the wind and say, “There’s resilience for you: the ability to bend in adversity and not break.”
And maybe they’re right. Maybe that is a natural kind of resilience.
But I believe there is a worthy lesson in a tree that cannot bend, whose natural inclination is instead to grow in a rigidly straight line, that adapts to change, anyway.
Learning this skill can also help us recover from stress-related mental disorders like depression and anxiety.
Two Mindsets
Over a decade ago, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck described two main types of mindsets in her book: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success:1
The “fixed” qualities in the “fixed” mindset are one’s intelligence, character, and creative ability. A “fixed” mindset assumes that these are static qualities over which we have little or no control.
‘So the goal of the “fixed” mindset is to protect the external borders of these qualities so that you or I may continue to believe that we are smart or skilled or whatever else it is we want to believe.
To ensure “success” – a pre-determined and equally “fixed” standard – you or I may only reach for goals inside those boundaries. This would ensure a 100% success rate.
Change is often too scary for the “fixed” mindset. Change might mean that our “success” rate would remain uncertain.
On the other hand, the “growth” mindset does not believe that intelligence and creativity are rigid qualities.
Rather, like the rings of a tree, they grow outward, depending on environment and life circumstances. Sometimes thick and sometimes thin, sometimes scorched by fire or ravaged by drought, the rings of growth build on each other and thereby strengthen the tree.
Perhaps we should call them wisdom and ability instead.
Sometimes the rings meet with an external force: a boulder or a fallen tree trunk. Even the mighty redwood, with its many arms stretched out above the earth, cannot reach down and lift such obstructions out of its way. Its rings must simply change course. This changes the trajectory of the tree, but not its growth.
The goal of the “growth” mindset is, to put it most simply, more growth.
“Success” means anything that accomplishes that goal, even if it involves embarrassing mistakes and unsightly failures. You or I are not so worried about safety here. Boundaries are a problem in this mindset because they may block important growth.
When you or I have this mindset, we do not fear change. Change is our friend.
Change is an instrument of future growth.
Dweck writes:
When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world — the world of fixed traits — success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other — the world of changing qualities — it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.
In one world, failure is about having a setback. Getting a bad grade. Losing a tournament. Getting fired. Getting rejected. It means you’re not smart or talented. In the other world, failure is about not growing. Not reaching for the things you value. It means you’re not fulfilling your potential.
In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.”1
We develop these mindsets early in life.
In her book, Dweck cites behavioral research to back her claims about these two opposing mindsets.
In one study, Dweck and colleagues gave four-year-old children an easy jigsaw puzzle to solve.2 After the preschoolers had successfully accomplished this task, the researchers gave them a choice: they could either re-work the easy puzzle, or they could try a more difficult one.
The children clearly responded in either one way or the other: some chose the safety of repeating their earlier success while others reached eagerly for a new challenge. They even explained their opposing mindsets to the researchers; the first expressing their belief that “smart kids never make mistakes,” and the second wondering why on earth they should do the same old puzzle over again when there was nothing new to be learned.
Where do these mindsets come from?
Were the preschoolers born thinking this way, or were they acting out the thoughts and behaviors they saw modelled in others?
Probably both. Our minds are usually shaped by both nature and nurture.
Our Mindset Determines Our Sense of “Success” and “Failure.”
In another study, Dweck and colleagues administered a fairly easy IQ test to a group of adolescents.3
Afterward, the researchers deliberately gave some of the students “ability”-based feedback such as, “Wow, you got _____ answers right. You must be really smart.”
They gave “effort”-based feedback to the others: “Wow, you got _____ answers right. You must have worked really hard.”
As the researchers suspected would happen, those given “ability”-based feedback were more likely to think about their test results in “fixed” terms: “I was smart enough to do well on that test.” Likewise, those given “effort”-type feedback were more likely to think in “growth” terms: “I worked hard enough to do well.”
But this was not the end of the experiment. Dweck and colleagues then gave the students a much harder IQ test. None of the students did as well on the second round, but of course test results were not the point.
What the researchers wanted to know was, how would the “fixed” vs. “growth” students handle their failure?
As they suspected, the “growth” students took it in stride. Since the test results were not reflective of some immutable standard of skill or smarts, there was no reason to get upset over them. The “growth” students did not interpret the test results as failure, but simply a gauge of further effort needed for next time.
As the researchers feared, the “fixed” students were dealt a more serious blow. Their test results seemed to burst their bubble of affirmed smarts and skills. The “fixed” students did not interpret the test results as an opportunity for further growth. Rather, the jig was up; the second test proved just how dumb they actually were.
The “growth” students had fun in both parts of the experiment and, importantly, worked hard to improve their performance as the test problems got harder. As you might have guessed, the “fixed” students stopped having fun when they started to “fail.” Their performance got worse as the test problems got harder.
Mindsets Re-visited
The danger with all good (and hugely popular) theories is, sometimes they get misapplied.
Carol Dweck herself has bemoaned the misapplication of her mindset theories, especially in the field of education.
So now that I’ve gone down the road of describing Dweck’s research in the school setting, I feel a responsibility to share some of Dweck’s further thoughts on the subject, written directly to educators.4
1. A Growth Mindset is not just about effort.
There’s a difference between believing that more effort is needed, vs. continuing to pour sheer effort into something. The reason is, our initial efforts may be wrong, misguided, or simply inefficient. So continuing to add more is just throwing good effort after bad.
Our efforts require careful thought and will likely need to change over time. The same principle is currently recognized in the business world: business leaders and entrepreneurs call it the ability to “pivot” approaches.
2. A Growth Mindset is not about blindly praising effort.
In Dweck’s own words:
Recently, someone asked what keeps me up at night. It’s the fear that the mindset concepts, which grew up to counter the failed self-esteem movement, will be used to perpetuate that movement. In other words, if you want to make students feel good, even if they’re not learning, just praise their effort! Want to hide learning gaps from them? Just tell them, “Everyone is smart!” The growth mindset was intended to help close achievement gaps, not hide them. It is about telling the truth about a student’s current achievement and then, together, doing something about it, helping him or her become smarter.”4
3. Mindsets are not to be used as reasons for poor learning.
Dweck again:
I also fear that the mindset work is sometimes used to justify why some students aren’t learning: ‘Oh, he has a fixed mindset.’… Must it always come back to finding a reason why some children just can’t learn, as opposed to finding a way to help them learn? Teachers who understand the growth mindset do everything in their power to unlock that learning.”
4. It’s dangerous to completely ban a “fixed” mindset.
We all are probably a combination of both, and recognizing both is the starting point of change.
If we ‘ban’ the fixed mindset, we will surely create false growth-mindsets. (By the way, I also fear that if we use mindset measures for accountability, we will create false growth mindsets on an unprecedented scale.) But if we watch carefully for our fixed-mindset triggers, we can begin the true journey to a growth mindset… Watch for a fixed-mindset reaction when you face challenges. Do you feel overly anxious, or does a voice in your head warn you away? Watch for it when you face a setback… Do you feel incompetent or defeated? Do you look for an excuse? Watch to see whether criticism brings out your fixed mindset. Do you become defensive, angry, or crushed instead of interested in learning from the feedback? Watch what happens when you see an educator who’s better than you at something you value. Do you feel envious and threatened, or do you feel eager to learn? Accept those thoughts and feelings and work with and through them.”
As a final note, I also include a graphic from Dweck’s paper to educators:
Conclusion & Action Steps
The main conclusion I draw from Dweck’s work is this.
We all have a primary mindset that we navigate by, either “fixed” or “growth.” That mindset is likely a product of both our biology and our environment.
But our mindset is malleable – it can be influenced by the feedback others give us and what we say to ourselves.
For those of us more on the “fixed” side, this is good news. It means that we can become more focused on growth, on adapting to the ever-present change in life.
In the next blog post, we will talk about some specific ways to do this.
1 Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books. 15-16.
2 Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books. 16-17.
3 Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Ballantine Books. 71-73.
4 Dweck, C. (2015). Carol Dweck revisits the growth mindset. Education Week, 35(5), 20-24.
Dr. Pamela Coburn-Litvak has published research articles on exercise and stress in Neuroscience and Neurobiology of Learning and Behavior. Her latest book, Leaving the Shadowland of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression, was published in 2020.
After receiving a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she served as both Assistant Professor of Physiology & Pharmacology and Special Assistant to the Vice President for Research Affairs at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California. She then joined the Biology department at Andrews University and developed courses in human physiology as well as the neurobiology of mental illness. She also founded Rock @ Science LLC, a company that specializes in health and science education and web development. She co-developed the brain and body physiology segment of the Stress: Beyond Coping seminar with its creator, Dr. William “Skip” MacCarty, DMin.
Dr. Coburn-Litvak currently lives in California with her husband. Their two daughters are mostly grown and attending school elsewhere.
When she’s not studying or teaching about stress, she enjoys stress-relieving activities like puttering around the garden, taking nature walks with her family, knitting, cooking, and reading.
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