Growth Mindset: Memes!

(Meme is from the Growth Mindset blog)

As Professor Gibbs says, this saying is actually part of a larger quote that's worth reading (sourced from here):

The good life is lived best by those with gardens — a truth that was already a gnarled old vine in ancient Rome, but a sturdy one that still bears fruit. I don’t mean one must garden qua garden… I mean rather the moral equivalent of a garden — the virtual garden. I posit that life is better when you possess a sustaining practice that holds your desire, demands your attention, and requires effort; a plot of ground that gratifies the wish to labor and create — and, by so doing, to rule over an imagined world of your own.

It hasn't been an easy past week at all for me, and this weekend has been just as challenging. This quote reminded me that it's entirely up to me what I choose to focus on and where I put my time and energy--you really do have to "live in your own little world" sometimes in order to not let life get to you...remembering this isn't the easiest, though!

Week 13 Growth Mindset: The Power of Belief

(Josh Waitzkin, via Wikipedia)

For this week's growth mindset post, I watched this TEDxManhattan talk by Eduardo Briceno. In the talk, he recaps what we've already heard Carol Dweck say in her other videos towards the beginning of the semester, and elaborates on the effects of growth mindset--not only in children, but also in adults such as Josh Waitzkin, who has won many national chess championships and many national championship awards in Tai Chi Chuan. Waitzkin attributes his success to having developed a growth mindset after losing his first chess championship--he says that this loss proved to him that he wasn't a prodigy, or inherently more intelligent that anyone else, and inspired him to put more effort into improving.

I found Waitzkin's story pretty inspiring; being a martial artist who came late to my sport myself, I'm always interested in the stories of people who start various martial arts in their twenties and go on to become national champions. It's not just martial arts that growth mindset is useful for, of course, but their philosophies play really well together as a whole, I think--one of the goals of the World Taekwondo Federation is to instill a philosophy of constant improvement and integration of the mind, body, and spirit, for example--so it's interesting to think of growth mindset in that context....

Week 11 Growth Mindset: The Positive Side of Stress

(Stress, via Blue Diamond Gallery)

How Harnessing the Positive Side of Stress Can Change Student Mindsets

This article was really well-timed in my life, because this is one of the things I've been struggling with my entire college career. Sometimes stress can't get to me no matter how had it tries--I'm somewhere far, far above my troubles, and able to work with no problems, no setbacks, etc.--and sometimes I can't stop letting stress get to me. I can't do anything, then--it's like being paralyzed by fear.

So obviously I've been trying to figure out why this happens. I'd gotten it narrowed down to a few options--and then I read this article. And everything made more sense.

These were some of the thoughts I had on the three methods they describe for harnessing "the positive side of stress":

1) "Caring for others builds resiliency against stress": I agree with this statement 100%. When I was competing as a gymnast, the best way I found to take my mind off of the stress of the competition as pertained to me was to focus all of my attention on what the stress of the competition was doing to someone else. Making someone else feel better--either by encouraging them before they were up, or cheering for them during their routine, or giving them a hug when they didn't do as well as they wanted--or they did do as well as they wanted--always helped my own stress levels. When you lift someone else up, it lifts you up as well--and it's harder not to believe your own words of encouragement when you're encouraging someone who's in the same boat as you are, or a worse one.

2) "Purpose in life reduces stress": This is also golden. I forget this a lot, but it always helps to connect what you're doing--especially if that something is something you'd really rather not be doing--to the larger scheme of your life and where you're trying to get to, or what you're trying to accomplish. It's not always easy, and sometimes it takes a sizable dash of creativity and no small amount of suspension of disbelief, but it does help, in the long run. (The important thing about this is to see the task as another stepping stone towards greatness, and not an event your greatness hinges upon; that way you don't freak yourself out by convincing yourself this is the only chance you're ever going to get. Because that's not true.)

3) "Focus on how stress can help [you] grow": Aaaaaaand the last piece of this beautiful article wraps everything up nicely. Like I said, it helps if you look at stressful situations as another stepping stone in your life--but there's a reason why I said stepping stone, and not stair. Life is not a perpetual ascension into the sky of your goals. In a lot of cases, achieving goals--especially when they're big ones--is more like crossing a river using stepping stones, and trying to pick the best way across. Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards--but without that step you couldn't have gotten to where you needed to be. If you look at stress as just another step towards where you need to go, then it gets easier to cope when it feels like all you ever do is move backwards. In theory, anyway--in practice it's a bit harder...

Growth Mindset, AKA Self-Imposed Ruthlessness

I've started this post at least five times, and I still can't figure out how to talk about growth mindset, and what it means to me. How to accurately convey the role it holds in my life. How to succinctly explain how I came to the sudden, world-changing conclusion, when I was seventeen, that the most dangerous people are the ones that stretch their limits every day, because they realize that there is no ceiling to the things they can do. Because it isn't a short kind of thing. It's a long-winded, all-encompassing kind of thing. I would have to tell you my life story, and way more about myself than I'm comfortable sharing on the internet.

So I guess I'll just tell you it's important to me, and point you in the direction of some awesome stuff, with some explanations as to how I came to find it?

Thing #1: I used to be a competitive gymnast. For a long time, I thought I was a bad gymnast, because I didn't pick up skills as fast as the other girls, I didn't like competing, I was afraid of trying anything new--the list goes on and on. My coach planted the first seeds of my current understanding of "skill" within me when he gave me this book, which is now most tragically out of print. It's a brilliant, brilliant book. It banned the word "can't" from my vocabulary altogether. We had lots of sayings at my gym: "'can't' is a four-letter word", "the moment you think you can't, you can't", etc.--except my coach was the only one allowed to say them, because every time we gymnasts said the word "can't"--even jokingly--we were assigned fifty push-ups, on the principle that literally the only thing that could possibly stop us from doing a skill was our physical strength. You could always get stronger; you just had to work at it. Getting in the way of yourself wasn't an option; if you were afraid of something, that meant you were obligated to master it.

Yeah, it was a kind of ruthless thing to do to a bunch of preteen girls. But that was how my life was structured, and it affected everything: not just my gymnastics, but my schoolwork, and my relationships, and even how I learned to drive. It was still a structure that was imposed by somebody else, though, and when I was forced to quit gymnastics due to too many injuries (a condition brought on by the fact that I was no longer afraid to try new skills, sometimes with reckless abandon) I had to learn how to impose that mindset on myself. Which lead to...

Thing #2: Enter Maggie Stiefvater, my hero: her ability to do anything, plus her wonderful online presence, ensured that I was never at a loss for inspiration when it came to stretching my limits. I have no idea if she's even heard of Carol Dweck or not, but her philosophy of life is very, very similar to growth mindset: see her early butt-kicking posts on Blogger or the #dubiouslifeadvice tag on her Tumblr for proof. Warning: she sometimes curses. A lot.

(Shameless plug: she writes awesome books, too but I'm sure I've mentioned that before...)

So, onto my goals for the semester, now that we've established I'm really a Growth Mindset Junkie. Let's pick three?
1) I'm taking a lot of classes. Most of them are far above my current levels, and offered in formats I've never seen before. My goal? Work on my time management (due to necessity). Work on my ability to "roll with the changes", as our good friends in REO Speedwagon once put it. Get A's that reflect the effort I put in, and how well I achieved my goals.
2) I've got a job for the semester. I've never had this before. The idea of juggling school and work is terrifying, because I've never done it before. But like a good little ex-gymnast, I'm running straight towards the source of my fear. My goal? Learn to juggle priorities. This is a hurtful task, because I like to be good at everything, and inevitably some priorities tend to overshadow others.
3) There's a lot of writing in this course, and it's fiction writing. My goal? Write more than I ever have before. Explore new writing styles and concepts. And enjoy what I'm writing, because I suck at actually enjoying life during the semester.

And let's leave it on a high note, shall we?

(Proper explanation of bad villainy via Maggie Stiefvater. Copyright 2009)