people. And now you’re one of them. You lose all sense of worth. Your partner, who knew you
intimately, doesn’t want you anymore.
For months, you don’t feel like going on, convinced that even your children would be
better off without you. It takes you a while to get to the point where you feel at all useful or
competent. Or hopeful. Now comes the hard part because, even though you now feel a little
better about yourself, you’re still in the fixed mindset. You’re embarking on a lifetime of
judging. With everything good that happens, your internal voice says, Maybe I’m okay after all.
But with everything bad that happens, the voice says, My spouse was right. Every new person
you meet is judged too—as a potential betrayer.
How could you rethink your marriage, yourself, and your life from a growth-mindset
perspective? Why were you afraid to listen to your spouse? What could you have done? What
should you do now?
The Growth-Mindset Step. First, it’s not that the marriage, which you used to think of as
inherently good, suddenly turned out to have been all bad or always bad. It was an evolving thing
that had stopped developing for lack of nourishment. You need to think about how both you and
your spouse contributed to this, and especially about why you weren’t able to hear the request for
greater closeness and sharing.
As you probe, you realize that, in your fixed mindset, you saw your partner’s request as a
criticism of you that you didn’t want to hear. You also realize that at some level, you were afraid
you weren’t capable of the intimacy your partner was requesting. So instead of exploring these
issues with your spouse, you turned a deaf ear, hoping they would go away.
When a relationship goes sour, these are the issues we all need to explore in depth, not to
judge ourselves for what went wrong, but to overcome our fears and learn the communication
skills we’ll need to build and maintain better relationships in the future. Ultimately, a growth
mindset allows people to carry forth not judgments and bitterness, but new understanding and
new skills.
Is someone in your life trying to tell you something you’re refusing to hear? Step into the
growth mindset and listen again.
CHANGING YOUR CHILD’S MINDSET
Many of our children, our most precious resource, are stuck in a fixed mindset. You can
give them a personal Brainology workshop. Let’s look at some ways to do this.
The Precocious Fixed Mindsetter
Most kids who adopt a fixed mindset don’t become truly passionate believers until later
in childhood. But some kids take to it much earlier.
The Dilemma. Imagine your young son comes home from school one day and says to
you, “Some kids are smart and some kids are dumb. They have a worse brain.” You’re appalled.
“Who told you that?” you ask him, gearing up to complain to the school. “I figured it out
myself,” he says proudly. He saw that some children could read and write their letters and add a
lot of numbers, and others couldn’t. He drew his conclusion. And he held fast to it.
Your son is precocious in all aspects of the fixed mindset, and soon the mindset is in full
flower. He develops a distaste for effort—he wants his smart brain to churn things out quickly
for him. And it often does.
When he takes to chess very quickly, your spouse, thinking to inspire him, rents the
movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, a film about a young chess champion. What your son learns
from the film is that you could lose and not be a champion anymore. So he retires. “I’m a chess
champion,” he announces to one and all. A champion who won’t play.
wang
(Wang)
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