Followup to: Why Your Mindset is So Important
Want to have more fun in life? Enjoy learning? Have better relationships? Improve your business? A growth mindset is associated with all of these benefits plus more. This simple attitude impacts your success, health, happiness, careers, and relationships.
Your mindset is the view you adopt of yourself—whether your abilities and characteristics can change (the growth mindset), or whether they are set in stone (the fixed mindset).
The benefits of having a growth mindset over a fixed mindset are vast. Here are just a few benefits of the growth mindset that I extracted from Carol Dweck’s book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
1. Enjoy Life, Even When You’re Not Good At It
“This is a wonderful feature of the growth mindset. You don’t have to think you’re already great at something to want to do it and to enjoy doing it.” – Dweck ((Dweck (2006), p. 53.))
Since your focus is on doing and learning cool stuff, while not caring about success or achievements, it is much easier to enjoy doing whatever it is you’re doing. Never painted in your life? Who cares! Drink a bottle of wine with some friends, pick up a paint set at a nearby dollar store, and give it a try. The fixed mindset would make you shun from doing this, knowing that your painting will ‘suck’ and be ’embarrassing’. The growth mindset says “who cares?” and lets you enjoy yourself.
“The growth mindset does allow people to love what they’re doing – and continue to love it in the face of difficulties. … The growth mindset allows people to value what they’re doing regardless of the outcome.” – Dweck ((Dweck (2006), p. 48.))
2. Improve Your Self-Insight and Self-Esteem
Many studies show that people are terrible at estimating their abilities. ((“Research from numerous corners of psychological inquiry suggests that self-assessments of skill and character are often flawed in substantive and systematic ways.” Dunning et al. (2004); Krugger & Dunning (1999); Dunning et al. (2003).)) But, as additional work performed by Dweck (and others) has shown: ((Ehrlinger (2008), Ehrlinger & Dweck (2007).))
“[It] was those with the fixed mindset who accounted for almost all the innaccuracy. The people with the growth mindset were amazingly accurate.” – Dweck ((Dweck (2006), p. 11.))
This result is also reflected in Extraordinary Minds by Howard Gardner (1997), who concluded that exceptional individuals are especially talented at identifying their own strength and weaknesses. As Dweck points out, this overlaps with the growth mindset.
3. Improve Your Relationships
Those with a fixed mindset want an ideal mate to put them on a pedestal, make them feel perfect, and worship them. A fixed mindset can cause partners to think they should be able to read each other’s mind, or that the two of them should never disagree on anything (which is very unlikely).
Those with a growth mindset, however, want an ideal mate to see their faults and help them to work on them, challenge them to become a better person, and encourage them to learn new things. This makes for a *much* healthier and happier relationships. [click here to keep reading…]
