Mindset and Self-Confidence
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Last week, I wrote an article about the negative impact a lack of self-confidence can have on one’s professional life. This week, I take a look at one of the major causes of lack of self-confidence.
You might have heard about the work of Carol Dweck, the renowned professor of Psychology at Stanford, and in particular her research on the way each of us views the development of our own capacities. According to Dweck, everyone adopts one of two “mindsets” when thinking about his or her own abilities:
a “fixed’ mindset; or
a “growth” mindset.
If you have a fixed mindset, it means that you believe talent is inborn: either you have it or you don’t. Every challenge is an opportunity to either prove to yourself and those around you that you have a certain ability or that you do not. As a result, each test of abilities carries a high emotional burden and pressure that can be too much to handle. If you have ever seen a tennis player either “choke” or fly into a fit of rage on the court, a fixed mindset could be an underlying factor.
A growth mindset, on the other hand, presupposes that all skills are learned and developed with time and effort. The more challenging a task is, the more pleasure one derives from it: it is an opportunity not only to test the limits of one’s capacities, but also to figure out what must be done to expand them even more. Easily-completed tasks elicit boredom rather than satisfaction: after all, what’s the point of wasting your time doing something easy when you could instead focus your time and energy on something more difficult that will actually help you improve yourself?
According to Dweck:
We adopt one of these two mindsets with respect to each one of our capacities — there is no third way humans think about talent.
Everyone adopts different mindsets in different circumstances — nobody adopts the same mindset about all of his or her abilities.
For example, I was lucky to have a growth mindset when I started downhill skiing. Ask anyone who knew me as a kid and they will confirm it: I was a terrible skier. But for some reason, I kept up with it for years, dutifully picking myself up after every fall, refusing to let my frustrations get the better of me, embracing the challenge and building up more and more confidence as time wore on. Gradually, I improved to the point where my skiing abilities became a great source of pride for me.
However, when it came to playing the saxophone, I had a decidedly fixed mindset. I was good enough to get into audition-only ensembles and keep up with most of my peers. But I hated practicing; hearing my own mistakes was painful and frustrating. My abilities stagnated, and my saxophone has been dormant in my parents’ basement for nearly 30 years.
Dweck’s theory therefore shows how mindset can impact self-confidence:
With a fixed mindset comes a tendency to label every challenge a make-or-break opportunity to prove one’s worth; setbacks cause self-confidence to plunge.
With a growth mindset, however, rather than getting distracted by excessive worry following a setback, one focuses instead on what one can learn from failure.
This is why Dweck’s observation that we adopt growth and fixed mindsets about various talents is important: it means that a growth mindset can be cultivated. That, in turn, gives you the keys to increased self-confidence. By using Dweck’s theory to analyse the way we react to challenges, we can train ourselves to adopt the growth mindset more often — like developing a muscle.
With practice, challenges become less frequently the occasion for an unnecessary spike in stress and more often the opportunity to gain satisfaction from the effort necessary to overcome them.
If you are curious how you might leverage coaching to reduce stress and improve performance at work, drop me a line here. And if you would like to know more about me — there’s more to me than just skiing and not playing the saxophone — take a look here.