Understanding Growth Mindset

G is for growth mindset. A growth mindset, as conceived by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and colleagues, is the belief that a person's capacities and talents can be improved over time. People with a growth mindset are open to the effort, even if it takes time.

In contrast a fixed mindset is the limiting belief that the capacity to learn and improve cannot be meaningfully developed.

Proponents of the theory contend that adopting a growth mindset and rejecting a fixed mindset can help people be more open to success.

Now I am an educator. I always foster a growth mindset in my students and challenge a fixed mindset.

Yet till 2 years back I never saw myself as a person able, keen or competent in playing cricket.

I never saw it as a thing I can do.

In my mind I had the fixed idea about cricket as primarily being a men’s sport. Maybe because it was not a part of PE coursework back at school, badminton and table tennis was. For these and a zillion other assumed or presumed reasons let’s just say cricket was just not my thing.

My husband on the other hand always played cricket and encouraged me and our daughter to start learning it. My daughter then proposed that I should learn with her.

Just when I was about to say, “me?” “No thanks, cannot do it, won’t be good at it, it is hard..” Came the teacher voice from within, “have a go” and another voice “keep an open mind”. As you can see in the photos, I did go for it, I did learn (still am) and loved it!!

In me, resided the aspects of both, a fixed and a growth mindset. A growth mindset for new ideas, yet a fixed mindset for those ideas that I did not work deeply yet, the weeds of ideas that make us stuck and locked in our minds.

We humans are complex. When we learn a new idea, such as the idea of growth mindset, we are great at using it as a lens to see our present choices and analyse the world’s proceedings. But on deeper reflection, comes the self- awareness to see aspects of our personalities, our identities where we may have employed a fixed mindset early on in our lives and never revisited them to see where we are with these ideas today.

So one of the conditions for learning in life is to go within and see which all windows of our personalities are looking out at the world with the blurry glass of a fixed mindset. Is there a potential to develop self-awareness, a sense of brave introspection to shine that blurry glass of fixed mindset to see a different world outside, clearer, brighter and full of growth?