How do you feel when you hear these words?
- “Tomorrow, the class is taking a test.”
- “Let’s head to my office for your performance review.”
- “Our assessment results are in, we’re all meeting after lunch to review our performance.”
Most feel butterflies. Others, terror. Our early schooling experiences, and the way we responded to these experiences, created a deep performance anxiety. Most people suffer from it at one level or another.
But according to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, there’s a mindset that dramatically reduces this fear of evaluation, called the growth mindset. It stands opposite the default way of thinking, the fixed mindset.
Let’s look first at the fixed mindset. “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone,” Dweck writes, “creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you only have a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character – well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.”1
For those with a fixed mindset, the test score is forever. It doesn’t measure progress at one point in time. It measures intelligence for all times. It measures fixed intelligence. It reveals deficiencies that can’t be cured. It condemns. It shames. The reason people don’t like tests and assessments is because their inner motto is, “Look smart, don’t look dumb.” For those with a fixed mindset, evaluation is a threat.
The alternative mindset is the growth mindset, which is based on the belief that our basic qualities are cultivated and developed through effort. “There’s another mindset in which these traits are not simply a hand you’re dealt and have to live with, always trying to convince yourself and others that you have a royal flush when you’re secretly worried it’s a pair of tens,” writes Dweck. “In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development.” For those with a growth mindset, testing creates excitement. It tells them where they are so they can make progress.
Fortunately, mindset can be changed. We can learn a growth mindset. We can realize that most great accomplishment comes from effort, not pure talent. Success is never perfect or immediate, so let’s abandon that false idea, and commit ourselves to measure and develop ourselves over time.
1Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, (New York: Ballantine Books, 2006), p. 6.