In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented.
– Carol Dweck
Our mindset is the biggest building block for our personality. We go through life, making decisions based on what we have learned, and the outcome of our decisions help us establish a set of rules and ethics that we plan on following throughout. As soon as we stop applying our knowledge practically, we stop growing ethically. And sometimes we miss the point of ethics and how important they are. Our mindset and our ethics govern our life.
Carol Dweck is a well-known psychologist known for her book Mindset. She explains Growth Mindset as developing skills and talents through persistent effort along being receptive to lessons and feedback. While acquiring a growth mindset, it is important for students to believe that they can improve through hard work and by trying new learning methods. Dweck says that the mindset plays a crucial role in self-motivation.
Dweck writes in her book that as teachers, you can improve the level and frequency of your children’s achievements if you focus more on improving through hard work and new learning methods.
Principles To Live By For Fearless Learning
Every now in then, it wouldn’t hurt if we try to educate ourselves on how we can be more efficient and set in our way. Therefore, listed below are some growth mindset principles for fearless learning:
- You need to learn how to acknowledge and embrace imperfections. One thing that is very common in today’s day and time is that we all work via trial and error. And with trial and error, we are bound to make mistakes. While doing so, we can make an error with judgement, or analysis, or the smallest of things. And we have to understand that it happens all the time and all we can do is learn from our mistakes and move forward with the lesson.
- The challenges that we face are opportunities in disguise. This is one of the strongest growth mindset principles there is and it makes perfect sense. It is very important to give ourselves a break and try to overcome the challenges without feeling like they are trying to eat us up. We need to understand that challenges build us, not break us.
- While you’re at it, why don’t mix it up and take up different learning tactics? We all need changes every once in a while. There comes a moment in every student’s life when they want to take their nose out of the books and pursue studies differently. Have you heard of memory palaces? A memory palace is a very interesting way to sharpen your memory. Take it up a notch and take a break out of the old grind.
- We all go through a phase where all we see are the things that we haven’t achieved. Our friends remind us of these things, our parents, our neighbours, and of course, our friends. But it’s really important to stop seeking approval. Life is not a race and you don’t need to be a horse. What you do need is to work at your own pace and follow your own reality.
- Somewhere on Google, a very aesthetic picture reads It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. Hence, you need to value the process. We are all going somewhere, anyway. The end result is just a product of our actions and our whole process. As soon as we start respecting the process, the end result is in our hands.
- There are days when you don’t feel particularly efficient. And that’s ok. It is important to stress growth over speed. We often run behind the speed and forget about the quality of our work, and this compromises everything about our creative effort. And that’s not fair to our work. Hence, we need to learn how to work on our own terms; whether it is by having a dedicated workspace or by designing your own schedule.
- If you can’t tell what you’re doing wrong, you won’t be able to rectify your mistakes. As soon as you start reflecting on your own behaviour, it will get easier for you to accept your mistakes and work on them. Growth mindset principles provide a very wide window for debriefing learning.
- Joline Godfrey says, “All work and no play doesn’t just make Jill and Jack dull, it kills the potential of discovery, mastery, and openness to change and flexibility and it hinders innovation and invention.” Hence, it is important to It is crucial to develop a healthy relationship between the mind and the body. You can’t just work your mind and expect your body to follow. You have to nurture the relationship between learning and brain training. As Saga says
The brain is like a muscle that needs to be worked out, just like the body.
That’s all, folks!
In a Nutshell
The values and ethics that we take on should keep growing. If we don’t educate ourselves on things around us, then it’s going to get really difficult to survive in what most tales and fables call the big bad world. And our mindset places a huge role in that.
