The other day one of my former grad students told me a story. But first some background.
In my field, when you submit a research paper for publication, that paper often represents years
of work. Some months later you receive your reviews: ten or so pages of
criticism—single-spaced. If the editor still thinks the paper has potential, you will be invited to
revise it and resubmit it provided you can address every criticism.
My student reminded me of the time she had sent her thesis research to the top journal in
our field. When the reviews came back, she was devastated. She had been judged—the work was
flawed and, by extension, so was she. Time passed, but she couldn’t bring herself to go near the
reviews again or work on the paper.
Then I told her to change her mindset. “Look,” I said, “it’s not about you. That’s their
job. Their job is to find every possible flaw. Your job is to learn from the critique and make your
paper even better.” Within hours she was revising her paper, which was warmly accepted. She
tells me: “I never felt judged again. Never. Every time I get that critique, I tell myself, ‘Oh, that’s
their job,’ and I get to work immediately on my job.”
But change is also hard.
When people hold on to a fixed mindset, it’s often for a reason. At some point in their
lives it served a good purpose for them. It told them who they were or who they wanted to be (a
smart, talented child) and it told them how to be that (perform well). In this way, it provided a
formula for self-esteem and a path to love and respect from others.
The idea that they are worthy and will be loved is crucial for children, and—if a child is
unsure about being valued or loved—the fixed mindset appears to offer a simple, straightforward
route to this.
Psychologists Karen Horney and Carl Rogers, working in the mid-1900s, both proposed
theories of children’s emotional development. They believed that when young children feel
insecure about being accepted by their parents, they experience great anxiety. They feel lost and
alone in a complicated world. Since they’re only a few years old, they can’t simply reject their
parents and say, “I think I’ll go it alone.” They have to find a way to feel safe and to win their
parents over.
Both Horney and Rogers proposed that children do this by creating or imagining other
“selves,” ones that their parents might like better. These new selves are what they think the
parents are looking for and what may win them the parents’ acceptance.
Often, these steps are good adjustments to the family situation at the time, bringing the
child some security and hope.
The problem is that this new self—this all-competent, strong, good self that they now try
to be—is likely to be a fixed-mindset self. Over time, the fixed traits may come to be the
person’s sense of who they are, and validating these traits may come to be the main source of
their self-esteem.
Mindset change asks people to give this up. As you can imagine, it’s not easy to just let
go of something that has felt like your “self” for many years and that has given you your route to
self-esteem. And it’s especially not easy to replace it with a mindset that tells you to embrace all
the things that have felt threatening: challenge, struggle, criticism, setbacks.
When I was exchanging my fixed mindset for a growth one, I was acutely aware of how
unsettled I felt. For example, I’ve told you how as a fixed mindsetter, I kept track each day of all
my successes. At the end of a good day, I could look at the results (the high numbers on my
intelligence “counter,” my personality “counter,” and so on) and feel good about myself. But as I
adopted a growth mindset and stopped keeping track, some nights I would still check my mental
wang
(Wang)
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