What if we lead with our hopes instead of our fears?

Learning is not an insta-grow experience.

Time is essential. Struggle – working at the edges of ability – is critical.  Patience is required as is a growth mindset. It might take a while to see evidence of growth. What if we practice, struggle, share, and seek feedback?

During this time of learning from home, how are we intentionally developing and leveraging growth mindset? How do we coach ourselves and our learners using Carol Dweck’s first steps to changing your mindset?

Step1. Learn to hear your fixed mindset “voice.”

Step 2. Recognize that you have a choice.

Step 3. Talk back to it with a growth mindset voice.

Step 4. Take the growth mindset action.

In  The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, Shawn Achor writes:

Move the fulcrum so that all the advantage goes to a negative mindset, and we never rise off the ground. Move the fulcrum to a positive mindset, and the lever’s power is magnified— ready to move everything up. (Achor, 65 pag.)

In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carole Dweck writes:

“And if abilities can be expanded – if change and growth are possible – then there are still many paths to success.” (Dweck, 39 pag.)

In The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born : It’s Grown, Here’s How, Daniel Coyle writes:

“Why does slowing down work so well? The myelin model offers two reasons.  First, going slow allows you to attend more closely to errors, creating a higher degree of precision with each firing – and when it comes to growing myelin, precision is everything.  As football coach Tom Martinez likes to say ‘It’s not how fast you can do it. It’s how slowly you can do it correctly.’ Second, going slow helps the practitioner to develop something even more important: a working perception of the skill’s internal blueprint – the shape and rhythm of the interlocking skill circuits.”  (p. 85)

Finally, from Carol Dweck’s TED Talk:

Praising the process that kids engage in: their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient.

Slow down. Listen. Listen to your fear and worry. Learn to hear your fixed mindset “voice.” Recognize that the future is not fixed. There is more time to grow, to struggle, to reflect, to question, and to learn. Talk back to your inner worry. You are learning alongside the children in your care. Name your hopes. Take action in hope. There are many paths to success. Move the fulcum to the positive mindset to magnify hope and learning.

Growth over time…patience required.

What if we lead with our hopes instead of our fears?

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Achor, Shawn. The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work. New York: Broadway, 2010. Print.

Coyle, Daniel. The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born : It’s Grown, Here’s How. New York: Bantam, 2009. 217.  Print.

Dweck, Carol S. Mindset: the New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006. 39. Print.