Mindset _ The New Psychology of Success - Carol S. Dweck [110]
In the end, many people with the fixed mindset understand that their cloak of specialness was really a suit of armor they built to feel safe, strong, and worthy. While it may have protected them early on, later it constricted their growth, sent them into self-defeating battles, and cut them off from satisfying, mutual relationships.
Denial: My Life Is Perfect
People in a fixed mindset often run away from their problems. If their life is flawed, then they’re flawed. It’s easier to make believe everything’s all right. Try this dilemma.
THE DILEMMA. You seem to have everything. You have a fulfilling career, a loving marriage, wonderful children, and devoted friends. But one of those things isn’t true. Unbeknownst to you, your marriage is ending. It’s not that there haven’t been signs, but you chose to misinterpret them. You were fulfilling your idea of the “man’s role” or the “woman’s role,” and couldn’t hear your partner’s desire for more communication and more sharing of your lives. By the time you wake up and take notice, it’s too late. Your spouse has disengaged emotionally from the relationship.
THE FIXED-MINDSET REACTION. You’ve always felt sorry for divorced people, abandoned people. And now you’re one of them. You lose all sense of worth. Your partner, who knew you intimately, doesn’t want you anymore.
For months, you don’t feel like going on, convinced that even your children would be better off without you. It takes you a while to get to the point where you feel at all useful or competent. Or hopeful. Now comes the hard part because, even though you now feel a little better about yourself, you’re still in the fixed mindset. You’re embarking on a lifetime of judging. With everything good that happens, your internal voice says, Maybe I’m okay after all. But with everything bad that happens, the voice says, My spouse was right. Every new person you meet is judged too—as a potential betrayer.
How could you rethink your marriage, yourself, and your life from a growth-mindset perspective? Why were you afraid to listen to your spouse? What could you have done? What should you do now?
THE GROWTH-MINDSET STEP. First, it’s not that the marriage, which you used to think of as inherently good, suddenly turned out to have been all bad or always bad. It was an evolving thing that had stopped developing for lack of nourishment. You need to think about how both you and your spouse contributed to this, and especially about why you weren’t able to hear the request for greater closeness and sharing.
As you probe, you realize that, in your fixed mindset, you saw your partner’s request as a criticism of you that you didn’t want to hear. You also realize that at some level, you were afraid you weren’t capable of the intimacy your partner was requesting. So instead of exploring these issues with your spouse, you turned a deaf ear, hoping they would go away.
When a relationship goes sour, these are the issues we all need to explore in depth, not to judge ourselves for what went wrong, but to overcome our fears and learn the communication skills we’ll need to build and maintain better relationships in the future. Ultimately, a growth mindset allows people to carry forth not judgments and bitterness, but new understanding and new skills.
Is someone in your life trying to tell you something you’re refusing to hear? Step into the growth mindset and listen again.
CHANGING YOUR CHILD’S MINDSET
Many of our children, our most precious resource, are stuck in a fixed mindset. You can give them a personal Brainology workshop. Let’s look at some ways to do this.
The Precocious Fixed Mindsetter
Most kids who adopt a fixed mindset don’t become truly passionate believers until later in childhood. But some kids take to it much earlier.
THE DILEMMA. Imagine your young son comes home from school one day and says to you, “Some kids are smart and some kids are dumb. They have a worse brain.” You’re appalled. “Who told you that?