Growth Mindset

“Growth mindset is the belief that your current level of ability is just a starting point that your potential is based on your level of effort and practice. With this lens a person will usually see failure and challenges as an opportunity to learn. They will see failure as where they are currently at not who they are.”

Watching the spring classics or the Tour de France shows us the peak of high performance. The best athletes in the world execute near flawless performances under extreme pressure. It's easy to look at these athletes as being superhuman. These performances are years and in some cases decades in the making.

What all these athletes have in common is resilience, willingness to learn and courage to step into challenges. Some would describe this collection of traits as Grit. In many other ways these athletes differ, from height, weight, physiology, starting age and wealth. What these repeat performers most likely have in common is a shared belief in themselves.

Mindset is defined by the research, as a set of beliefs or attitudes that significantly influences how individuals approach learning, challenges, and personal development.

Carlo Dweck is an American psychologist and researcher who helped popularise two main mindsets, fixed and growth.

Growth mindset is the belief that your current level of ability is just a starting point that your potential is based on your level of effort and practice. With this lens a person will usually see failure and challenges as an opportunity to learn. They will see failure as where they are currently at not who they are.

A person with a fixed mindset tends to think that current level of ability is a product of innate talent. This encourages a person to see potential failure as uncovering, proving or disproving what is already known about their talent. This mindset discourages stepping far outside their comfort zone, where there could be potential growth.

The vast majority of the research shows that growth mindset creates superior learners, with higher resilience and higher tolerance to stress.

Carol Dweck said it best when she explained "In this mindset, the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts."

Adopting a growth mindset is helpful for any person at any stage of life. We remain highly adaptive even late into adulthood. As we age we do lose what comes more naturally to younger people but we can combat this by being more intentional with our effort.

Even as an adult we have incredible neuro and physical plasticity. Sport is the perfect low stakes environment to challenge ourselves. Understanding that we are antifragile, meaning we grow our capacity to handle stress when we are stressed physically and mentally.

That being said we need to be careful not to delude ourselves that hard work alone is standing in our way of reaching world class performance and that things like genetics play no role. Having a growth mindset is about cultivating the attitude that you can improve in anything you work at.

If you are intrigued to learn more I recommend the book Mindset by Carol Dweck.