Tuesday's Blog- January 10

"A few modern philosophers... assert that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased We must practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgement and literally to become more intelligent than we were before."

Given I have just started the book, Mindset- the new psychology of success by, Carol S. Dweck, PH.D, she starts the book off by saying she suddenly become obsessed with understanding how people cope with failures. She decided to bring children in one at a time to a room in their school, made them comfortable, and then gave them a series of puzzles to solve. First ones were easy, then they got hard. One ten-year-old boy pulled up his chair and said, "I love a challenge!" Another student, sweating, saying "You know, I was hoping this would be informative!". Dweck always thought either people coped with failure or did not cope with failure. She said these children were her role models. That they knew something she didn't and she was determined to figure it out. The children knew that human qualities, such as intellectual skills, could be cultivated through effort. They were getting smarter. Not only were they discouraged by failure, they did even think they were failing. They thought they were learning. (This is where I felt a connection to myself) Dweck thought someone was either smart of not smart. It was that simple. I got my quote from one of Alfred Binet's major books, Modern Ideas About Children, in which he summarized his work into one quote of children with learning difficulties. Binet recognized that it is not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest. Dweck said for twenty years, her research has shown that the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life. It can determine whether you become the person you want to be and whether you accomplish the things you value. Some people are trained in this mindset from an early age. Did you know that Darwin and Tolstoy were considered ordinary children? That Ben Hogan, one of the greatest golfers of all time, was completely uncoordinated and graceless as a child? That photographer Cindy Sherman, who has been on the list of the most important artist of the twentieth century, failed her first photography course? The passion for putting yourself outside of your comfort zone and sticking to it, even if it is not going well is the growth mindset. This mindset allows people to thrive during some of the most challenging times in their lives.

I thought something cool that the author shared with us, was growing our mindset.

Which mindset do you have? Answer the questions about intelligence. Read each statement and decide whether you mostly agree with it or disagree with it.

1. Your intelligence is something very basic about you that you can't change very much.
2. You can learn new things, but you can't really change how intelligent you are,
3. No matter how much intelligence you have, you can always change it quite a bit.
4. You can always substantially change how intelligent you are.

Questions 1 and 2 are the fixed-mindset questions. Questions 3 and 4 reflect the growth mindset. You can be a mixture, but most people learn towards one or the other.

You also have beliefs about other abilities. You could substitute "artistic talent", "sports ability", or "business skill" for "intelligence." Try it out.

1. You are a certain kind of person, and there is not much that can be done to really change that.
2. No matter what kind of person you are, you can always change substantially.
3. You can do things differently, but the important parts of who you are can't really be changed.
4. You can always change basic things about the kind of person you are.

Here, Questions 1 and 3 are fixed-mindset question and questions 2 and 4 reflect the growth mindset. Which did you agree with more? Did it differ from your intelligence mindset? It can. Your "intelligence mindset" comes into play when situations involve mental ability. Your "personality mindset" comes into play in situations that involve your personal qualities- for examples how dependable, cooperative, caring, or socially skilled you are. The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you'll be judged; the growth mindset makes you concerned with improving.

This connected to me because I am fortunate enough that I was taught at a young age that it is okay to fail. That you learn from failure and that failure is not the end. You learn from your mistakes and you grow from them. I've failed before in sports, in school, in my everyday life. It may bother me at first, but dwelling on the past does not help my future. I learned from it and I helped it develop who I am today. For example- there are some people on my cheerleading team who have the mindset that failure is the end. When they fail at something they are done with what they are doing. They don't take it into mind and then learn from it. And that is where I step in. My coach considers me a role model- given I am able to motivate others that failure is okay. That everyone fails at some point in their lives. That when you fail, you acknowledge where you went wrong, learn the right way, and then continuing to learn to better yourself at the specific spot.