Yaffa Maritz is the Clinical Director of Mindful Parents Community. To read more of Yaffa’s articles click here.
According to Carol Dweck, a world renowned professor in Stanford and the author of the widely received book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success – How we can learn to fulfill our potential, the answer is yes!
Are you surprised? I was too at first, but after reading her book and gaining more understanding as to how our minds work, failure started to seem less scary to me.
Professor Dweck’s life long research has been focused on how we learn and how we become successful and happy. What she found was that for a long time we, in the US and the rest of the modern world, held the wrong assumptions about our children. We thought that by praising their actions, intelligence, abilities, and talents we would help increase their self esteem and therefore their success and happiness. (Generation Y is a causality of this “self esteem” movement of the 80s).
What Carol has discovered in her extensive research is that just the opposite happens. These children tend to be more fragile, invest in looking smart at all cost, hide their mistakes, and are discouraged by their failures to the point that they only took on tasks that they believe they can succeed in. These children became less engaged, less curious, and less happy about themselves.
She labeled this phenomena:” Fixed mind set”.
On the other side of the spectrum there are the children with the “Growth mind set”.
“Children in growth mind set don’t just seek challenge, they thrive on it,” Carol said. Their parents were not praising their children’s intelligence but rather encouraging their efforts, their willingness to take on difficult tasks and stay with it in spite of the difficulties.
The end results were less emphasized than the learning process that was involved. Those children therefore, became more resilient, more engaged in the learning process, have longer attention spans, and overall felt better about themselves.
The good news for us as a society and for our Community of Mindful Parents in particular, is that Mindset is only “fixed” for as long as we allow it to be. Therefore change and growth can happen at any point.
With self-awareness and insight, we can examine ourselves and wonder what we hold in higher value: The IQ or the learning process?
Do we tend to tell our children, “You are so smart, this was so easy for you, good for you!” Or do we say, “This was too easy for you, let us find some tasks that will be more challenging, so you can learn from them.”
The amazing thing is that if we tend to do the latter, not only does the child end up feeling better about them-self, but knowing what we know about brain plasticity, their intelligence will get a real boost too!
I have to end this piece with an email I got from my daughter with whom I shared Carol’s book.
“I really like that idea about failing and learning, because when I’m doing this work for Social Capital I have to work with this statistics program that is a little bit over my head. I find myself failing a lot at firstand then figuring our how to do it and feeling really accomplished. The fact that I feel I can overcome those obstacles gives me a lot more confidence then just being able to do it on the first try. It makes me realize that having a challenge is fun.”
Professor Carol Dweck spoke at Seattle main Library in November.
For more reading: Book:”Mindset” By Carol Dweck
http://link.post.hbsp.harvard.edu/r/7W0A/VGT6E/TUVJB4/73T5H/4W3D8/9A/h
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