When you find yourself in a challenging situation, do you give up, or do you embrace the opportunity for further development? A growth mindset means greeting difficulties with the belief that you can handle the situation, learn from it, and become better. At Highland Hospital Behavioral Health in Charleston, West Virginia, we try to help our patients develop this outlook for their lives and their mental health journeys.
All About Perspective
We all experience things that are outside our skill set. Everyone struggles at some point or another to master something that is new to them. Having a growth mindset doesn’t mean you’re good at everything automatically. It just means that:
- You understand the struggle won’t last forever, and that if you keep practicing, it will get easier to do things that are currently difficult.
- You see challenges as opportunities to get better at something.
- You embrace constructive feedback from other people.
- You learn and grow from your mistakes.
- You celebrate efforts, not just successes.
- You’re not ashamed to be curious.
- You’re more focused on learning than on approval.
The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset. People who have a fixed mindset believe:
- No matter how hard or how long they work at something, their skills will not improve, and tasks will not get easier for them.
- Mistakes and failures are unacceptable.
- Mistakes are a direct indication of their own lack of value and worth.
- Talent determines your success, and you can’t change how much talent you have.
- Challenges should be avoided.
- Unfamiliar things are uncomfortable.
- If you don’t get it on the first try, you may as well give up.
- Other people don’t struggle with this the way that I do.
Helping Children to Develop a Growth Mindset
Parents, teachers, coaches, and other adults who spend time with young people have an opportunity to help them see their own potential for growth by:
- Encouraging and praising effort and hard work, not just achievement.
- Reminding children that the brain grows stronger with exercise, just like their muscles.
- Modeling persistence and positive self-talk through your own words and actions
- Normalizing mistakes as an important part of the learning process.
- Teaching children to say “yet” after any “I can’t” statement, like “I can’t do this math problem…yet.” “I can’t shoot a layup…yet.” “I can’t draw life-like pictures…yet.” “I can’t run a mile in six minutes…yet.” “I can’t recite this poem from memory…yet.”
- Promoting the idea that learning changes us and should happen throughout our lives.
- Sharing stories of other people who had to work to overcome challenges. For example, Simone Biles had to step back from gymnastics to manage her mental health; Stephen Hawking became a renowned physicist while living with ALS; Helen Keller became deaf and blind in childhood and then went on to advocate for people with disabilities, women, and workers; or Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, but continued to practice and get better, eventually becoming an NBA legend.
- Ask young people to share their own stories of how hard work helped them get better at something they initially found difficult.
- Teach children about setting SMART goals.
- Help children to develop habits that will move them closer to their goals.
- Let kids brainstorm with each other to come up with as many solutions as they can to a problem.
- Teach children about building up stamina and how starting small can gradually build up to something bigger.
- Allow do-overs when appropriate, so kids can apply what they learned from their first attempt to do better the second time.
- Encourage reflection on successes, struggles, and lessons.
Developing a Growth Mindset Later in Life
If you’re realizing in your golden years that you have been operating with a fixed mindset and you’d like to make the change to having a growth mindset, today is the perfect time to start making the transition:
- Remember that you have already overcome many difficult things in your life.
- Be proud that you have decades of experience and wisdom under your belt.
- Consider that there may be more ways to be, to do, and to get your needs met.
- Allow yourself to experience your feelings without judging yourself for them.
- Focus more on what you want and how to get there, rather than how things are in this moment.
It’s never too late or too early to develop a growth mindset. At Highland Hospital Behavioral Health, we work to instill in our patients a belief that things can and will get better. We give them a variety of tools they can utilize to strengthen their own mental health, as they work alongside their loved ones and professional supports to regain quality of life.
