How my 6 year old taught me about Growth Mindset
The pace of change, the uncertainty of outcome, the complexity of decision making and the ambiguity of facts are making it harder for leaders to make an impact.
One of the best ways to face these interesting times with confidence is to take on a growth mindset. What is a growth mindset? Let me illustrate with a story.
About 12 years ago, my family and I went on vacation to a lake. One beautiful morning, the lake was placid. Completely still and calm. You could see the reflection of the sky and trees perfectly in the water.
My 4-year old picked up a pebble and threw it in the water and he was immediately in awe. That rock that he threw in made ripples that seemed to go on forever. My 2 boys and I must have spent 2 hours at the lake that day throwing pebbles and trying to make bigger and bigger ripples. It was a glorious day. A memorable day.
Two years later, our family was driving to the Oregon Coast for vacation. We had booked a place on Cannon Beach. The whole drive up, my sons couldn’t stop talking about throwing stones into the water. They remembered that wonderful day we had had together and could not wait to recreate it. So, the next morning, we headed to the beach. It was a beautiful day but the water was volatile. There was a wind and the waves were crashing.
My boys had been collecting rocks for days. But what happens when you throw rocks into rough waters? That is right, nothing. My younger son looked at me for direction. I didn't know what to say while I tried to think of a back-up plan so that the day could be salvaged.
Then he looked at me again, with a glimmer in his eye. Something had clearly changed in his brain. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking, but I recognized by his facial expression that he was looking to me for permission for something. With a slight nod, I gave it to him. With that cue, he ripped off his shirt, backed up about 10 feet and ran into the crashing waves. Of course he was knocked down right away, but that didn't stop him. He did it again and again and, within 20 minutes, he had figured out how to ride the waves.
He was demonstrating a growth mindset. He had created a plan, based on his past experience, and was ready to execute. He was going to throw his stones and create ripples. He was going to make his impact. But there is a difference between the ocean and a lake. The weather also created different conditions in the water. He could have given up and decided instead to build sand castles or fly a kite. Those would have been good options. Instead, he re-assessed and found another way to make an impact in the water. In the process, he learned a new skill, riding waves, which he continues to enjoy to this day.
Caroline Dweck, a Stanford professor, psychologist and author of the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, studied why some children fold in the face of obstacles, or choose the easy path, while other children rise to challenge and actively seek more complex tasks. In her book, she describes a continuum between fixed mindset and growth mindset that defines how we look at our talents and abilities. A fixed mindset suggests that our abilities and our intelligence are unchangeable, whereas a growth mindset suggests that our abilities and intelligence can increase infinitely with practice, redefined strategies and coaching.
What are some of the other differences between a fixed and a growth mindset?
In a fixed mindset, failure is viewed as permanent and the risk of failure should be avoided at all costs. In a growth mindset, one sees failure as an opportunity to learn and perhaps even re-invent.
A person with a fixed mindset is likely to view criticism as a personal attack, while those with a growth mindset will see it as an opportunity to shift their perspective.
With a fixed mindset, the emphasis is on achieving a measurable end outcome with a focus on appearing to be a top performer. With a growth mindset, while the outcome matters, the emphasis is on the process to achieve the outcome and the trial and error learning that occurs along the way.
With a fixed mindset, one is not likely to take creative risks. But with a growth mindset, creative risks are a way to innovate and improve.
Basically, your mindset will affect everything from how you innovate to how you seek and accept feedback to whether or not you persist to accomplish difficult tasks.
Our natural leaning falls between the two ends of the continuum and is established over the course of our childhood and adolescence. It can be a result of the cues we get from our parents and teachers from academic and athletic successes or missteps. Even subtle cues can make a big impact.
Imagine a child comes home with a less-than-satisfactory mark on a math test. One parent might have experienced something similar as a child and, through love and empathy, say something like, “You know I wasn’t very good at math either when I was a kid. Not everyone has to be good at math.” Now that child might interpret this as a suggestion that they are genetically predisposed to be not good at math. That belief could influence their lack of desire and effort to get better at math. A fixed mindset.
Alternatively, another parent might be disappointed that the child did not do well on the math test and might, out of sincere care for the child’s best interests, lecture the child on the importance of getting good marks on math tests if they want to get into a good university. That child might start forming an overweighted view on the importance of the grade instead of the process of learning the underlying fundamentals.
Whatever the cues in the formative years, a growth mindset is available to everyone, regardless of age or education level achieved. If you enjoy great storytelling, I encourage you to check out the episode Marie-Claude of the podcast Heavyweight. It's a wonderful story of how a woman, at the age of 50, overcomes her fixed mindset. It's also a lovely story of lifelong friendship.
Why is a growth mindset so critical, particularly in today’s business environment? Decades ago, after the end of the Cold War, students at the U.S. Army War College came up with the term VUCA, which stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, to describe the decision-making context that military strategists were operating in.
In the last few years, the term has been applied to the changes happening in industry and government. Volatility refers to the pace of change; uncertainty refers to the unpredictability of outcomes; complexity refers to the numerous variables and the complicated relationships between those variables; and ambiguity refers to the difficulty in making sense of all facts we are presented with in our daily lives
The unpredictability of events happening outside of our organizations can be negative or positive. But VUCA is a context which makes it difficult for leaders to make decisions.
Just think for a second about the number of forces affecting our roles today. Supply chains have been changing constantly for at least the past 30 years and the pace has not slowed down. We have the implications of Artificial Intelligence on our capabilities to serve customers but also on our jobs. Sales and marketing leaders are under pressure of changing customer preferences and increasing unanticipated competition. We have more generations in the workplace today than ever. Social media helps us get our message out, but it also presents a risk that our message will be taken out of our hands. Shifting societal norms around diversity and inclusion are calling for new levels of empathy and emotional intelligence. This is just to name a few of the forces… to say nothing of how we personally have to deal with the implications on our children and of an uncertain future of work, aging parents and juggling family life.
I believe the only way to thrive with all of this is to intentionally develop a growth mindset and deliberately apply it to convert this unpredictability in our day-to-day challenges into positive outcomes.
In trying to embrace a growth mindset, it’s important to recognize some of the natural human tendencies that are triggers to a fixed mindset.
Our belief that what made us successful in the past is what will make us successful in the future.
This belief can get in our way. Success looks different for each of us. Whether we realize it or not, there have been a set of rules that each of us has developed over time about what leads to success. Some of those rules are from our education, some are from previous bosses and colleagues and some are from our previous work experience. These rules guide our decision-making. As human beings, we are, by nature, pattern recognizers. Our brains are wired to store learned patterns and call them up, as needed, when we come across situations which seem like circumstances we have seen before. It’s like a wired shortcut and it's usually a good thing. However, in this age of disruption, we can’t always rely on past experiences to guide our future decisions.
I am not pushing you to abandon your belief in your past drivers of your success. I am just suggesting you don’t cling to them without considering other insights and sources of information drawn from others’ experiences.
Our desire to look competent and capable and not show any vulnerability can get in the way of our growth.
Starting in school and continuing in our job interviews and our management positions, we generally don’t like to appear as though we don’t know what we’re doing or that we don’t know the answers most of the time. Even when we have a doubt, we rarely reveal it. And, sometimes when we do, we feel judged. Therefore most of us have a tendency to appear more confident than we are. All of that limits our ability to grow.
Our feelings about failure. The word “failure” itself usually sets off strong emotions. Most of us are predisposed to not take risks out of fear of failure. Part of this comes, of course, from not wanting to cause harm to the organization that we are responsible to, but part of it likely comes from our fear of being judged. As we work, the key is to engineer small experiments that permit us to fail fast and with less consequence. The fear of failure limits our growth.
Related to failure, is our fear of rejection and our difficulty in accepting criticism. We are biologically and psychologically predisposed to protect ourselves from rejection and criticism. The limbic system of our brain and, at its centre, the amygdala, our emotion centre, are designed for our survival. This system exists to run our fight or flight response. While it has helped the human race to survive, the amygdala works against us when it comes to the growth mindset.
For most of us, when we hear criticism, even when delivered politely, we go into protection mode. This results in the release of increased hormones into our bloodstream, which causes heightened emotion. That heightened emotion makes it difficult to process the feedback constructively. That protection takes different forms for different people. For some of us, we might become defensive and explain out loud the reasons why the criticism is wrong. For others, we might listen and receive criticism so as not to create a conflict but dismiss it afterwards. Some will take the criticism but will get caught up in unproductively beating themselves up about it.
The key is to detach emotionally from the feedback and objectively reflect on whether any part of the criticism is true. Of course, this is much easier said than done, but it is critical to the growth mindset. The good news is the brain has a wonderful quality called neuroplasticity, which makes it possible, at any age, to re-wire these emotional reactions if we consciously stop seeing constructive feedback as negative.
When I was interviewing for one of my past jobs, the CEO was driving me to the airport after my final interview and he said. “Part of me believes you can knock this job out of the park but, as I look at your resume, I do not get the sense that you have experienced the level of complexity that exists in this role. That is something to think about.
On the surface, I was calm and cool and said something like, “I have to take your word on that given your experience.” On the inside, I was saying something like “C’mon, I have worked in management consulting, turned around struggling teams, launched a new business in an established industry… whatever you say.” Not a very growth mindset, right?
Well, I got the job and I realized on my first day what he meant. Working in the non-profit sector, with a dozen different stakeholder groups, dependence on volunteers and donor funding, and the security concerns of having staff in challenging parts of the world were just a few of the things that my past experiences had not prepared me for. I had a lot to learn and I felt like I was drinking out of a firehouse for at least 9 months… but I grew.
Personal technology has brought us a lot in terms of productivity improvement but it can hold us back from a growth mindset. I have found that technology allows me to work from anywhere and offers much flexibility. This also comes with a responsibility of knowing when enough is enough and turning it off. That is a challenge most of us face. When and how to turn it off, to truly unplug. There has been a lot of discussion about the negative impacts of this on our personal relationships. While these impacts can be true, I am going to guess that most of us have figured out ways of being present with our families. After several years of painful reminders and arguments, we have found a way to balance connectivity with family time.
But there is another impact. And I bet most of us have put solving this one on the backburner. It is that personal technology takes away from the time we spend with ourselves in self-reflection. How many of us look at our phones just before we go to bed? How many of us check our phones in the morning before we are even fully awake?
That lack of self reflection limits the time we have to think about the events of our day. To think about the interactions that we had and what we learned from them. To think about the decisions we made and reflect on whether we considered all the facts and feelings at our disposable. To process how others reacted to the things we did or said. To think about what we might want to do differently tomorrow.
Self reflection can take many forms. For some, it looks like a daily practice of meditation or a regular habit of journaling. For others, it looks like a ritual exercise routine like a run, hike or cycle through the woods. Some people find a way to combine the two. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, it's about taking at least 20 minutes each day and thinking about how it’s going, how it's really going.
So what to do to live a growth mindset every day? Here are two ideas for you.
First, recognize that taking a fixed or growth mindset is a choice, not a foregone conclusion. It requires a conscious effort for most of us.
You can choose to:
Take on more challenging goals and difficult problems.
Be conscious about embracing constructive criticism, no matter how difficult it might be.
Ask for help, when faced with an obstacle, instead of giving up.
Find inspiration in a colleague’s success. Try and learn what they did right.
Learn from failure instead of being embarrassed by it.
If it all sounds uncomfortable, you are right. It is. Success in a VUCA world will come to those that are able to be comfortable in the uncomfortable.
Second, you will need to cultivate your ability to reflect on your own performance in real-time, if possible.
When I was a kid, the Bobby Orr hockey card was coveted. He was a legend. What you may not know is that he was a master of real-time reflection.
Bobby Orr was said to have an incredible ability to be able to be in the game, on the ice, in the middle of the action, while at the same time being able to jump in and out of the stands. This ability meant he could monitor his performance and change his behaviour in real-time as things shifted.
Believe it or not, this ability is available to all of us. When we are delivering a presentation, and we notice the audience disengaging, or checking their phones, we have the ability to reflect on what we are delivering and change our approach.
When my son jumped into the crashing waves, over and over again, he kept changing his speed, his stance, his angle in an effort to get the perfect ride. He was constantly reflecting and adjusting.
When we are in the middle of a conversation, perhaps receiving criticism, we know when we are getting uncomfortable. We might even say a few defensive words. When we hear ourselves say those words, we have the ability to pause and reset our approach in the conversation.
It’s also important to establish even a short, daily practice of reflection. Ideally, at the end of the business day and ideally in the form of handwritten notes, because handwriting helps the brain process. The types of questions to ask yourself are:
What did I learn today?
What would I do differently if I had the chance?
What was I doing when I felt the most energized? Why did that energize me?
What was I doing when I felt drained? Why did that drain me?
This simple act of daily reflection is part of being fully aware of who you are and what you have to learn from the people and experiences you come across in your day.
Many companies are investing time and resources to develop processes to inculcate a culture of growth mindset. Microsoft, for example, is completely redefining its approach to development and, in the process, bringing forward previously unidentified candidates for leadership roles. By implementing hackathons, supporting high-risk projects and redefining the talent identification process, Microsoft is pushing up-and-comers out of their comfort zones and exposing them to higher chances for failure. Failures from which they can grow and innovate.
What are other ways that you try to maintain a growth mindset? What have been your experiences with VUCA? Comment below or send me an email at shakeel@oceanbluestrategic.com.
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