Power of Growth Mindset

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I am very excited to begin the third course of the ADL Program on the Growth mindset and look forward to the personal benefits of this pursuit.

I faced many learning challenges in early elementary, and as a result, I developed a fixed mindset about my intelligence and abilities. As I read chapters 1-4 of Carol Dweck’s Mindset book I could not help but wish that I was familiar with this concept back in my own grade school experience. The internal voice in my head matched all of the fixed mindset examples provided by Carol Dweck in her Mindset book and youtube video on The Power of Yet.

If only someone had instilled the power of yet in my learning, I could have saved myself years of low self-esteem and negative self-talk. Even as I did well in pursuing my undergraduate degree, I felt like a fraud who was just one step away from being the “dumb kid” again. I so readily accepted that identity as a result of early labels.

I wasted the first part of my life feeling slow, dumb, and below average. I surely was not going to be the first one raising my hand or offering to go to the board to complete a problem with excitement and enthusiasm, as described by Dr. Dweck when describing children equipped with a growth mindset.

Both Carol Dweck and Eduardo Briceno share knowledge and facts about our abilities to improve through repetition and practice. Grit and determination are the messages we need to share with our students and children and embrace that hard work obtains results.

I have started working process-related praise into how I tell my 19-year-old daughter that I am proud of her as she moves through early adulthood. I can see the fixed mindset in her and hope that as I understand more, I will be able to equip her with a growth mindset at her age instead of at mine. As Eduardo Briceno described praise through the mindset lens, I wished I learned what I’m learning now when she was just a little kid.

Taking the leap of faith to begin a graduate program was filled with self-doubt and an internal voice that worried I would embarrass myself. Hence my duplicitous excitement about the potentially painful process that may come from continuing to reshape my mindset.

I admit that I may have come to this program with a fixed mindset. I am done with the people-pleasing and approval-seeking ways of the past and instead move forward reprogramming myself to a growth mindset. The first two courses have already opened my mind to a different perspective on learning. Now I am trying to fully embrace a growth mindset so that I can work to instill that in others.