Hello and welcome to the Saint Alphonsus Wellcast.
My name is Candice Zappia and I'm joined today with Kim Kleveland, our nurse practitioner. And Deborah Masner, our RN. Happy to be here.
Thanks for joining us.
So today we're going to be talking about growth mindset and Kim has done a lot of research on this topic and so she is going to share with us a little bit about growth mindset and how we can, I guess, develop it.
So how about we get started with Kim.
What is growth mindset?
Well, I think the best part about a growth mindset is it can be used in any area of your
life.
It's a simple switch you can make, simple in concept, maybe less in practice, but it can
be used in your personal life, your professional life, health, fitness, parenting, friendships,
literally anywhere in your life that you feel like you need a little extra boost.
It's one of those great tools that can be contagious too if you start developing it in
your own life and you can demonstrate this for others.
It's something they can pick up on or maybe they can apply it in their own life and it's
something that we could all use a little bit more of.
So what it is is basically a belief that your skills and your work can improve over time.
Nothing is set in stone.
It's the belief that nothing is completely inherent for you.
You can develop new skills and maybe you have a propensity for something, but you always
have the ability to accomplish new things.
It's the belief that intelligence and the ability to do something can be developed.
And what this does for you is allows for you to find positivity in areas of criticism,
curiosity to ask questions, and allows you to seek out questions and take risks in your
life.
What do you think, Deb?
Does that kind of summarize it?
That sounds very much like growth and learning rather than fixed.
We always compare it to a fixed.
Yeah, so tell us what's the opposite side of growth.
Yeah, so sometimes just learning about a topic, it can be helpful to know what the opposite
is so that you know sort of the contrast.
The fixed mindset is the opposite.
It's the belief that the failure, any failure you have is a limit of your abilities and
you're either good at it or you're not maybe sticking to what you know.
Your potential is predetermined, those kinds of things.
Basically that you can't develop new skills or abilities over time that you're kind of
stuck with what you have and have to work with what you have.
That sounds like the thinking of like you're born that way or you have a natural talent
or you're gifted.
And so you see that.
That used to be the way we described a lot of people in sports or in music or in just
a lot of different things.
Yeah.
And I love to think about with this, if you think about any kind of challenge or setback,
you can't make it through a morning.
I feel like without a setback, at least not in my household, there's always setbacks.
And when you're in this growth mindset, it's that ability to look at life happening for
you, not to you and giving you challenges that you have the ability to overcome and
be creative in terms of finding a solution.
Whereas when you're in a fixed mindset, which I will admit I was in this morning, it's
something where you kind of feel like, well, this is the day.
This is what I'm left with.
I don't have a lot of tools or skills to kind of accomplish what I want to accomplish for
the day.
You kind of can feel like you're giving up when you're faced with any of those challenges
and maybe not believing in your ability to propel yourself forward.
Yeah.
I can definitely say that I had a fixed mindset when it came to math.
And I just continually told myself, I'm not good at this.
I can't get this concept.
And then I was forced with having to get this math class to graduate, right?
That I didn't know that I had to complete but did.
And I came at it with a different approach, but I also had a teacher, someone to guide
me that showed me a different approach and what I was capable of.
And then I started to build on that.
I'm like, oh, I did accomplish this and that helped to help my self-esteem.
And then it kind of opened up a world to me of like possibility because I moved out of
that fixed mindset of I can't do this and I'm not good at it too.
I can learn this.
I just have to learn it in a way that I can, you know, grasp.
And it's really changed my concept.
And I think it's great to have that.
Now I'm not afraid of it anymore.
What I love about what you just said too is how you mentioned that you had a fixed mindset
about math.
So I think it's important to note that you can, it's not all or nothing.
You can have a fixed mindset in certain areas of your life and maybe more of a growth mindset
comes more naturally to you in other areas.
And what I think is great about it is when you can identify in your own world places that
you've been able to utilize a growth mindset and really be able to capitalize on some of
your setbacks or challenges and propel yourself forward, you can apply those same skills and
that same knowledge about what you have inside of you and what skills you can draw upon for
areas where maybe you have more of a fixed mindset.
So it's a nice idea that you can kind of apply things.
And then certainly, you know, you develop self-efficacy and you develop self-esteem and confidence
in your ability and it can snowball into other areas of your life too.
Absolutely.
So moving forward, let's look at, give us some examples of a growth mindset.
I mean, that was kind of like one, I guess, right there.
But are there any other examples of how we can kind of change our mindset and keep moving
forward?
Yeah.
So I think, you know, right now we're at the workplace.
So maybe we could use a work-related example.
So say you're interested in a new job and you believed that pretty much you are who
you are, you don't have a lot of room to grow, maybe you feel threatened when others criticize
the work you're doing or aren't doing, or you don't feel confident in your ability to
try new things.
So if you were in this state of mind, you might hear yourself saying things like, I just
can't or I've never done it before.
It's really outside of my skill set or I don't even know how to learn what I need to know
for this position.
What if I don't succeed?
They didn't like my first take at this.
I'm never going to get it right.
Or I don't want to ask questions.
What if they think I'm stupid?
You know, there's all these different ways that you may hear yourself talking to yourself
about what you're doing that may represent you being in a fixed mindset.
But if we take that same situation and you see a new job that you're interested in and
you know it's a little different than anything else you've done, but you know that because
skills can be learned and you have problem solving skills, that growth mindset, you
might be able to offer something to that position.
You're not 100% sure if you're a fit, but you think that every situation has a lesson
to be learned and you want to at least try.
That would be more of a growth mindset.
Deb, how do you think you could take any of those statements and sort of switch them
around to kind of reframe for yourself into a growth mindset, like, instead of thinking
I just can't or I've never done it before, so I'm not going to try?
Yeah, I think using different words like it's figure outable or I'm capable or I can do
hard things or you know just kind of switching your language and also just being aware of
what you're saying to yourself.
I think a lot of people don't realize they're negative self-talk and so just recognizing
like I can figure these things out.
I can do this.
You know, it just kind of helps move us forward too.
Like you said, not being afraid of failure and just looking at failure differently.
It's really not failure, it's just learning.
That's how we learn and that's how we grow.
Yeah, I think that's so important.
In terms of what you said about people being aware of what they're saying to themselves,
do you have any good tips or tricks for people as like a reminder or how to keep themselves
having tabs on what they are saying to themselves so they can keep that awareness?
Well I think just listening to something like this is going to make you more aware of what
you're saying to yourself.
So just educating yourself and then in the moment like really pausing and taking a moment
like say you get a new assignment or you have to figure out something at work or there's
some problem to be solved like taking a moment to just check in with yourself and you can
even pause and then just say to yourself like I'm having the thought that or I'm noticing
that and that can kind of help remove yourself from just being in the drama of oh I'm not
getting this, I must be so stupid, I'm never going to get this, I'm a failure.
You know when you can remove yourself and just say like well I noticed that I'm having
the thought that I'm never going to get this or I'm having the thought that I'm a failure.
That kind of removes you enough from the emotion of the situation that then you can take a
moment and just kind of ask yourself like well is that true, what else is true and what
else is true is I can figure this out, I can you know I can pull in other resources, I
can then you start focusing on the solution instead of the problem.
Yeah, I really like that, I want to take it one step further.
I think that what that triggered for me in my mind is how sometimes when I'm in a fixed
mindset or even just having a lot of negative self-talk, sometimes I don't want to get out
of the self-talk secretly I think somewhere deep inside of me if I remove myself from
it and say like or more objective about it like this is what's happening to me, this
is the thought I'm having, I'm like almost not ready to give it up sometimes.
I don't know if that's something you ever hear from people but it's kind of it's not
always comfortable to kind of flip the script on yourself.
Well especially so our brain you know we have all these neural pathways and we're just used
to following a familiar pathway so anytime we go off that path, it doesn't matter which
direction we're going our brain's like whoa where are you going that's not the way we
go brings in the fear response, brings you back to your negative talk or the usual one
because that's what you're used to.
So that's probably why you're like feel safer to be over in this little negative cave that
I've always been in than going out and thinking differently.
Yeah definitely and then circling back to Kandy's math situation where she had that
one area I feel like there are definitely two or three areas in my life I can identify
that I do a pretty darn good job with this growth mindset and kind of viewing my challenges
as opportunities and then there's a couple of areas where there's room for improvement.
But then also circling back everything is figure out of all and because I know I have
this ability in certain areas of my life I can certainly draw upon those resources inside
and out in order to take it to those other two areas.
And growth of course means that you have to do some type of action right and so sometimes
we don't want to have that mindset because it's easier to just not do it or pass it
on to somebody else but there's an opportunity when we're thinking okay let's take away these
negative self-talks it requires you to then do something that might be a little hard or
out of your comfort zone or whatever but then you build skills and then you can you know
progress but it requires work.
It definitely does and so when I think about two people who maybe are a little more primed
for some of this work you know just by way of time that we've been on this earth when
we are not exactly as young as these people I'm going to talk about now with this study
it's a little bit harder to rewire some of those pathways but they have done some interesting
research on high schoolers who are a little bit younger than me.
They have my brain is still very plastic and able to be molded and I can rewire those pathways
but when you're a little younger you maybe you have a little more you have less time
to develop those bad habits or some of that negative self-talk but they've done some studies
on this type of mindset when working with teen groups and they found that there was
more success in improving grades of high schoolers when they had participated in some level of
this mindset shift work at school.
So they did some curriculum regarding growth mindset did a lot of like peer counseling
and education about what setbacks look like for them how to overcome setbacks how this
is part of the learning process and they were able to take kids and implement this and found
that they had greater camaraderie, greater teamwork and later had greater success in
business when they had received this kind of coaching as high schoolers and the kids
that they used in this particular study I'm referencing were kids who are kind of on the
verge of failing out of school so they were able to kind of recover and then overall had
a better mindset going forward into the rest of their life and were equipped with tools
and skills that made them successful in other areas of their life as well.
So when we look at that they've also studied this mindset in the business sense looking
at teams using a growth mindset and getting some sort of coaching on this as well and
similar results have happened and I think it just shows there's some really powerful
reasons both inside for yourself but that as you're working as part of a team aimed
toward accomplishing a specific goal or making an impact in the community I think there's
definitely room for all of us to adopt this kind of mindset going forward.
So Deb I'm going to put you on the spot one more time.
How can we incorporate this in our daily life?
What would that look like for anybody?
That's a tough question.
Well I think it's being naturally curious.
I think acting like a scientist can be very very effective so you know when you think
about scientists and they do an experiment and it fails quote unquote fails it's not
a failure when you're a scientist it's like oh my hypothesis was proven wrong like oh
what's happening here or maybe they didn't add this chemical or that or what not like
they're just constantly observing and learning from it and so when we can just use that natural
curiosity and act like a scientist then we're able to kind of examine what's going on day
to day and even just like interactions with other people you know sometimes maybe you
have a conversation with a colleague and it doesn't go the way you thought it should
so instead of kind of getting hurt and like oh they don't like me or whatever you can
be curious and be like hmm I wonder why Kim said what she said today you know maybe she's
having a rough day or you know she mentioned her kids were sick last night or she didn't
get any sleep so you're just becoming curious so I think those are some ways that you can
practice growth mindset during the day.
Yeah I love that I think that's really really great I love that idea of just being naturally
curious and looking at ourselves and thinking about what we're thinking and how that applies
so that's really great.
Okay so in closing one last exercise I want to encourage everybody to do is to think about
an aspect of your life that you would love to improve and then think about some of the
thoughts that you have that may represent a growth mindset or a fixed mindset in regard
to that particular area of your life and then of course we can remember that we may have
parts of ourselves that exist in both of these mindsets and none of us are all or nothing
and that is perfectly okay and figure out a goal.
Love it.
Well thank you girls I think that was great.
Yeah thanks I think I hope it was helpful for everybody I think this is something we all
can work on none of us are perfect with this but it's really fun to dive into some of these
topics and think about how we can apply them.
Absolutely well that concludes this episode and we hope that you'll join us again on our
next topic but until then be well.
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