0:00 because that's what will encourage us and our loved ones our friends our family to adopt that growth mindset who are you and where are you going what do you want together we'll find the ideal path on the way to wow show with your host kevin bennel in episode 8 of season 2 i talked about angela duckworth's work on building grit that is passion and perseverance
0:38 in pursuit of a long-term goal measured over years two of the ways we build grit are through a work ethic and through having a growth mindset and probably the person who's most in tune with how we develop a growth mindset is professor carol dweck i'm going to read you just a short biography of professor dweck so since 2004 she's been the lewis and virginia eaton professor of psychology at stanford university
1:13 she also has helped professorships at the university of illinois harvard and columbia that's it's pretty gold plated in a career spanning almost 50 years she has investigated how we view ourselves and then use those conceptions to guide our lives her seminal book is called mindset the new psychology for success it was first published in 2006 and it stands as the seminal work on how we develop a growth mindset
1:51 and in fact from the time i finished that book until today i have a page from the book that i xeroxed and put on my bathroom mirror that i look at every single morning so we're going to take a look at a video in which professor dweck talks about how you develop a growth mindset why it's important but first i'm gonna mix myself up a cocktail for my earliest drinking days one of my favorite cocktails was the simple gin and tonic it's very flavorful it's light it's easy to make it's another type of high ball
2:27 just a for a spirits and a mixer so for for this segment i'm gonna i'm gonna mix one up i don't know if this is the correct way to do it honestly but i don't think it really matters i start out i just put a little ice in the glass it's nice to have it cold i'm going to use my favorite gin this is a citadel this is citadel this is actually from france i know jyn is typically thought of as being from england but this this is such a nice it has a nice citrusy flavor to it i'm making it kind of light i'm just going to use an ounce of um of gin pour it over the ice
3:04 and and then you know there's all kinds of tonic waters you can use each one's a little bit different schweppes is a great one classic classic tonic water [Music] and top it off with that and then i like to have a nice little uh lime wedge in mine and the best way to make a lime wedge by the way i've learned not too long ago is to take a slice of lime and then cut it in half so so you have a nice the nice kind of fleshy part of the line squeeze that in a little bit drop it in and there you have a gin and tonic
3:41 let's go watch professor dweck so as i mentioned in the intro we're going to take a look at a short video by carol dweck and in the video she's going to talk about this idea of mindset and actually dig pretty deeply into it so let's start off watching a segment while she talks about the two kinds of mindsets i learned in high school in chicago where students had to pass 84 units to graduate
4:17 and if they didn't pass they got the grade not yet i thought isn't that wonderful because if you fail you're nowhere but if you get the grade not yet you're on a learning curve not yet gave them a path into the future and not yet also helped me understand a critical experience early in my career to figure out how kids coped with challenge i gave ten-year-olds some problems that were a little too difficult for them
4:54 some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way they said things like i love a challenge or i was hoping this would be informative they understood that their abilities could grow through their hard work they had what i call a growth mindset but other children for them it was tragic catastrophic from their more fixed mindset perspective their core
5:30 intelligence had been tested and devastated instead of the power of yet they were gripped by the tyranny of now so what did they do next in one study after a failure on a test they said they'd cheat next time instead of study more in another study they found someone who did worse than they did so they could feel better so this is where we want to start out
6:05 this idea of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset that's really the core of professor dweck's work so with a fixed mindset when we're faced with a challenge it's devastating we can't meet it if we can't it's devastating if we can't meet it so with a fixed mindset if we're faced with a challenge and we can't meet it it's devastating and everything seems to flow from there
6:40 we can't see beyond the present we we don't see that we have choice in the future and so we're stuck right where we are as opposed to with a growth mindset so with this not yet attitude what that means is if we keep working on it if we try again so then we can conquer the kinds of things that were tr that are challenging us maybe not the first time out maybe not even the fifth or the sixth time out but the tenth time
7:16 out or the eleventh time out as long as we keep at it we can keep growing that's that's really the central theme to everything we're going to be talking about in this segment all right so let's uh let's actually continue on from here let's look at how that looks in the brain motionless colleagues measured from the brain as kids encountered errors processing the error shows up in red if you look at the fixed mindset brain on the left nothing is happening but if you look at the growth mindset brain on the right it's
7:53 on fire with yet they're processing the error deeply learning from it and correcting correcting it so if you saw those you saw those tim images the sort of green image of the fixed mindset and the red image of the growth mindset you know we've been we've been schooled our entire lives to think you know red bad red stop but from our brain standpoint we want our minds on fire to have that drive to keep learning and growing right so so we we need to almost retrain
8:31 ourselves when we hit that point that we can't overcome the obstacle we shouldn't see it as red we should see obstacles as as as the go ahead right and then we'll we'll we'll make our brains on fire and able to conquer whatever whatever the challenge is all right so we're going to skip ahead now a little bit how can we build that bridge to yet first we can praise wisely our research shows that when we praise kids for the process they engage in
9:06 their hard work their strategies their focus their perseverance they learn that challenge seeking they learn that resilience praising talent praising intelligence makes them vulnerable so think think about it if we say to some a child or even we say to ourselves oh you're so talented that means well we're naturally able to deal with the vicissitudes of life we're naturally able to overcome problems it's just
9:41 something inherent in us but it doesn't give us the ability to get over new challenges and and strive forward for ever more growth right so for both our children and even ourselves we need to praise not just effort right i'm not suggesting you know giving gold stars just for showing up but we need to praise repeated efforts to overcome and conquer a new task a new idea a new chore
10:18 right that's we want to praise that in our children and in ourselves as well because that's what will encourage us and our loved ones our friends our family to adopt that growth mindset we also can change students mindsets directly in one study we taught students that every time they pushed out of their comfort zone to learn something really really hard and they stuck to it the neurons in their brain could form new stronger connections
10:56 and over time they could become smarter those who learn this lesson showed a sharp increase in their grades those who did not showed a decrease we have done this with thousands of students now across the country with similar results especially for struggling students so this is i think the most crucial thing that professor direct dweck is going to
11:31 talk about and that is how do we move from having a fixed mindset to having a growth mindset right so the process of of of of a growth mindset is encounter an obstacle learn from it try again repeat until that process is habituated we just do it naturally right now why that process works is what professor dweck was just talking about now so when we repeatedly
12:08 engage in this growth mindset behavior it creates new neuron connections in our brain okay and by the way although she's talking in the context of children i've read in other sources the same thing happens for adults as well so it's not as if you know when we get older somehow our neurons no longer connect and maybe they're more stubborn but but we can still build new neuron connections even in our older even as we get older and in fact the
12:45 studies i've read show that one of the ways that people can stave off some of the negative impacts of aging is to keep engaging in new activities things they haven't done before hobbies or even work that keep our minds active and stimulated so we'll continue to make those new connections learning learning a foreign language is is something that's often cited right so we can um as we build those new neuron connections we're further ingraining in us the
13:22 desire to pursue that that growth mindset okay all right so let's let's uh let's move on to the next segment now and they did it because learning a growth mindset transformed the meaning of effort and difficulty it used to mean they were dumb and now it means they had a chance to get smarter difficulty just meant not yet right so think about in the past you tried something maybe even tried it
13:59 again and and you just couldn't get you said i'm i'm just dumb so i have a very close friend who who although being one of the smartest people i know is is convinced she can't do math she says i just can't do math right and and the belief that we can't do something becomes self-reinforcing than saying this is challenging i can't do it yet i need more practice
14:36 or maybe i need some coaching or i need some some help getting over this hurdle that i seem to keep hitting the mindset is one of i just can't do this thing i'm i'm i'm i'm dumb i'm stupid i'm all the self-criticisms criticisms that we make or even worse when we put those criticisms on somebody else our our child our our spouse our friends oh man you're just dumb you're never going to be able to do that how many times have we said that i'm really thinking about what impact that has on the individual
15:12 and i'll i'll tell you when i first read uh professor dweck's work some of it seemed kind of polyamish to me and and as much as i liked the movie pollyanna to be frank i don't like that that kind of attitude it it it comes off i don't know kind of makes me get the willies but it actually works and and that's the thing it's just not worthwhile to call ourselves dumb or stupid it serves no purpose to label
15:48 our loved ones especially our loved ones as being you know permanent essentially permanently deficient in some area we're much better off encouraging them to try again and again and again and again and and if we love them we'll encourage them you know an infinite number of times as they try and overcome those hurdles in pursuit of that growth mindset and think of what a growth mindset in the people around you means for you it means you've got people who are supporting you
16:23 in finding your way to wow and finding what you want out of life that's that's why a growth mindset in the end is so important okay so let's look at uh one one more segment here last year i got a letter from a 13 year old boy he said dear professor dweck i read your book already i like the fact that it was based on sound scientific research that's why i decided to test out your
16:59 growth mindset principles in three areas of my life as a result i'm earning higher grades i have a better relationship with my parents i have a better relationship with the other kids at school i realize i've wasted most of my life let's not waste any more lives i it's a perfect sum up a
17:34 13 year old was able to figure this out put it to work in his life and see how much better his life was not just academically but his his interpersonal relationships improved as well we can all do this the process is simple try and if we don't succeed that first time learn our lessons from it and try again and if we don't succeed that time what's the new lesson and try again and just be determined to do that over and over
18:10 and over again let's not waste the rest of our lives mired in a fixed mindset let's all adopt this really simple process of obtaining a growth mindset if i could have you take away one concept from ever watching the way to wow show it would be the importance of developing a growth mindset try something if it doesn't work learn a lesson and try again we see it
18:47 happening we see it happening all the time in the military it really happens anywhere where people are doing new things creating new technology making new entertainment most things don't work the first time if we let them crush us we'll never find our way to wow courage at all times my friends marie you're still my belle
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