• Differentiate between growth and fixed mindsets
• Understand the impact of praise and mindsets on performance

How Mindset Influences Performance

Imagine that you are a parent and your child has just brought home a report card from 4th grade that is really good. You look it over and feel proud of your son or daughter. With a wide grin on your face, you turn to your child and say:

“I’m so proud of you! This report card is great! You __________”

• are so smart!
• must have worked so hard!
• have some jelly on your nose!

We hope you didn’t choose the jelly statement. Between the other two options, which one would you be more likely to blurt out?

It turns out that your choice could matter.

Carol Dweck, who is now a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, has been studying factors that promote or interfere with achievement since the 1970s. Over this time, and especially since the mid-1990s, she came to realize that our ways of dealing with the world, and particularly our behaviors in trying to achieve our own goals, are influenced by what she calls “self-theories”: beliefs we have about our own abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and potential. These self-theories affect decisions we make about what is possible, sensible, or reasonable to do in order to achieve our goals.

Before we discuss Carol Dweck’s work, please answer a few questions about your own beliefs. Try to answer based on your real ways of thinking. The questions are a bit repetitive, but answer each one without regard to your previous answers.

Take the  8-question Mindset Quiz here or take the 8-question Mindset Quiz here

Dr. Dweck and her colleagues have used questions like the ones you just answered to sort people into groups based on their beliefs about intelligence (and other abilities and skills). She has found that people tend to adopt one of two general sets of beliefs about intelligence. People with a fixed mindset tend to think of intelligence as an “entity”—something that is part of a person’s essential self. According to people with this belief, intelligence does not change much regardless of what we do or what we experience. Other people have a growth mindset, and they tend to think of intelligence as being “incremental”—a quality that can change for better or worse depending on what we do and on the experiences we have. Some people are strongly committed to one or the other end of the fixed vs. growth mindset scale, while others fall in-between to varying degrees.