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Growth Mindset
When New Year's Resolutions Start to Challenge Us
...and finding the right mindset to fight back.
Posted January 10, 2020
January 10. That’s Quitters' Day 2020. On this day, many people will lose enthusiasm for the goal they just set, according to Strava, a top social networking app for runners and cyclists. The company relied on more than 31 million fitness records from its global users. It designed an algorithm that identified the date most athletes' activity drops well below regular levels—and that's the second Friday in January.
At certain points in our life, we may take stock of where we are and where we want to be. Maybe we just hit a milestone birthday or switched career paths. Maybe with the turn of a new year, we set a resolution to change something about ourselves—about half of Americans do. At moments like these, we set new goals, and our interest in maintaining them starts out strong. Indeed, Google Trends finds that the worldwide search interest in the term "New Year's Resolution" increased fivefold from the last week of 2019 to the first week of 2020.
But interest in setting a goal is not enough to meet it, and in fact, the challenges to holding on to a newly formed commitment grow quickly. We might find that this pressure to recreate ourselves in the new year manifests in setting a goal that is impossibly difficult to achieve. It can show up as expectations of personal progress that are not realistic. When we stop to assess whether our investment has paid off in any noticeable way, whether our efforts towards accomplishing a goal are tangible, the answer may be no.
But stumbling early on is not necessarily the only reason we give up on a newly formed goal within a few weeks of forming it. Our mindset is another one.
Carol Dweck is a psychologist at Stanford University who studies motivation and achievement. She has found that the mindset people adopt as they are working towards their goals is predictive of who is more likely to succeed and who is more likely to fail. What mindset is the problem? She finds that a fixed mindset can set us back and hurt us in the long run. People who adopt a fixed mindset believe that personal characteristics are unchangeable, that people are born with a set amount of ability or capacity. Individuals with a fixed mindset believe that winning is the goal and failure defines who they are overall. People with this mindset believe they must prove themselves with every opportunity.
On the other hand, according to Dweck, people who hold a growth mindset are better off. Those with a growth mindset consider new experiences and challenges as opportunities to improve and learn. They focus on the process instead of the outcome. They believe that valuable skills can be learned through effort and investment.
A large-scale study of all 10th-grade public school students in Chile (n > 160,000) conducted by lead researcher Susana Claro found that adolescents who believed that intelligence can be developed performed at higher levels on standardized tests of language and math abilities. While this relationship between mindset and performance held true across the socioeconomic strata, the team found that students from lower-income families who held a growth mindset seemed to be buffered against the deleterious effects of poverty on achievement.
A growth mindset may improve not only objective performance but our prospects for the future as well. In one such study, researchers trained an NCAA Division I athletes to adopt a growth mindset. Compared to a control group, these athletes were, on average, less stressed, handled their own feelings of disappointment better, and had more energy to throw into the game. Another study trained college rowers to use a growth mindset. They showed heightened self-efficacy, or a belief in their own ability to achieve, which is a key component of success.
Of course, growth mindset interventions are not equally effective among all people. Indeed, they tend to be more effective among those who likely face more obstacles. For example, in a highly powered (n = 6,320), pre-registered study led by David Yeager, lower-achieving adolescents benefited more from a growth mindset intervention when they attended schools that had minimal compared to ample resources to prevent academic failure.
A growth mindset is more than just a way to shave off a few seconds from the timer or nail another three-pointer. Bethany Hamilton is a professional surfer who experienced a horrific accident that changed the course of her life forever. She always showed great promise, winning first place in competitions when she was only 8 years old. In 2003, at the age of 13, she went out for a surf at Tunnels Beach in Kauai with her best friend, Alana Blanchard, and Alana’s family. It was a beautiful morning and a seemingly perfect time to catch some waves. Bethany was laying on her board, with her left arm in the water, when a 14-foot tiger shark swam up and bit her.
Her friends paddled her back to shore. Alana’s father stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet he created from a surfboard strap. They rushed to the hospital and discovered that Bethany lost 60 percent of the blood in her body. Most of her left arm was gone. But four weeks after the attack, Bethany was back on her board surfing again. Within the year, Bethany won first place in the Australian National Scholastic Surfing Association Competition.
To surf again, she had to learn to paddle out over the waves differently; find balance with her new body. To most people, this would have been a career-ender, and it could have ended Bethany’s career shortly after it began. But that didn't happen—in part because Bethany holds a growth mindset. As said by Bethany herself, “whatever your situation might be, set your mind to whatever you want to do and put a good attitude in it, and I believe you can succeed.”
So when it comes to creating a healthy and grounded life, how do we adopt a growth mindset? Dweck advises against fixating on perfection but instead coaches people to adopt the mantra, “becoming is better than being.” What does this mean? Don’t hold Olympic-level expectations of ourselves if we’re just starting out.
Instead, track improvement over time. If your goal is to meditate daily, start off trying for once a weekend and once during the week. Hold focus for as long as it is comfortable and scale up to longer bouts with each passing week. Acknowledge effort. Celebrate when, for a few weeks consecutively, enlightenment came every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Over time the stamina and strength will come.
If a month or two has passed since the turn of a new year or reckoning day has arrived in some other way and it feels like progress has come to a halt, remember that it is not too late to start working toward those goals once again. The journey toward a happier and healthier self is one that takes patience and persistence.
