Do you ever feel deflated when you aren’t good at a new skill or hobby at first, and it can feel like a sign that you don’t have what it takes? Perhaps, like most people, when you take up a new skill you might feel daunted by how much there is to learn. Well, we’ve all been there. Turns out that cultivating a ‘growth mindset’ (as opposed to a ‘fixed mindset’) can help us persevere during the ups and downs of skill development, and enjoy ourselves more along the way.

Since Carole Dweck coined the term ‘growth mindset’ in the late-1990s. Her book Mindset, first published in 2006, has sold over ** copies and is hugely influential in education and psychology.

Fixed and Growth Mindset: What’s the Difference?

Imagine this: you start off a new skill like playing tennis, and you take a look around you: everyone else seems to know what they’re doing, they’re playing all these great shots, and wait is that a 12-year-old with a serve like a cannon? All the while you’re doing some goofy under-arm serve and barely getting your shots over the net. Jeez. It seems like everyone’s so much better at it than you are.

This leads to a cascade of thoughts and feelings, many of which would be consistent with the ‘fixed mindset’ thinking:

• You feel like success in the activity is dependent on talent rather than practice. It feels like abilities are ‘fixed’ rather than changeable
• Unless you’re good at an activity straight away (i.e. because you’re naturally good at it) it will be hard or impossible to get good at it
• Problems in an activity are taken personally, as an indication of a lack of natural talent or are defective in some way. Others must be more talented than you if they are better at the activity than you are
• Practice feels like it may not be worth it: perhaps you think it would take too long if you’re not talented enough in the first place

Belief in a ‘fixed mindset’ might have an ego-boosting effect if a person happens to get good at something straight away (since they would believe that this reflects a natural talent on their part). However, even if this is the case, someone with a fixed mindset may eventually be tempted to ‘coast’ if they believe it’s talent that matters rather than practice. Also, what about if they eventually suffered a setback and it started to look like others were more talented than them? The fixed mindset approach tends to really show problems when things don’t work out: the person feels deflated since they believe that success is unattainable considering they lack the basic talent required.

So then, what are the characteristics of the ‘growth mindset’?

• Although people vary in their initial capability, the main predictor of long term success is practice/experience
• Most people find an activity hard to begin with, so it doesn’t mean much about you as a person
• If you aren’t good at something *yet*, all you need is more practice and opportunity to gain experience
• There’s a scale from beginner to intermediate to expert, and by default you have to start at beginner: even experts started at beginner too
• Skill development is about time, practice, & gradual improvement

But What About Natural Talent?

Of course, it’s fair to say that natural talents and characteristics do have some effect: NBA basketball players are frequently very tall, for example. However, even a very tall person can’t succeed right away with no practice or skill development. Similarly Mozart was a musical prodigy, but he didn’t just impress a few friends by being pretty good for a while and then give it up: even after his head-start he had to work on it consistently in order to truly excel at what he was doing. If he had just enjoyed being good at making music for a year or two and then stopped doing it, he would never have fully developed his natural talent into something truly great.

To further understand the role of sustained practice in skill development, it’s also important to acknowledge that there are also plenty of people who have mastered something despite being just ‘ok’ at it when they first took it up, or having some setbacks along the way. Even if you get off to a slower start than some others, you can still succeed if you keep at it. Henry Ford famously went bankrupt several times before starting the Ford motor company, for example. So it’s probably true that skill is partially defined by in-born talent, but then the rest is due to practice. And in any case, unless you can figure out how to be born again with different attributes and talents, it makes sense that practice is the only bit you can work on anyway.

The above points make sense when drawn as a graph: if you were to look at the skill development of someone with natural talent you’d see that they will progress very quickly at the start, perhaps faster than others who don’t have the same level of talent. However, even someone highly talented will reach a point where their initial fast progress will start to level off. If they keep working at it then they could become truly excellent at what they do, but if they don’t keep practising then they won’t reach their full potential. In fact eventually they will slowly start to lose skills over time. Take the example of someone else who doesn’t quite have that same level of natural talent: they won’t progress as quickly in the first instance. But, if they stick at it, they will probably find that eventually they’ll exceed the skill level of the person who initially progressed quickly but then stopped practising. So, the overall point is: practice trumps talent in the end.

How to Develop a Growth Mindset

There are numerous benefits to a growth mindset, including:

• Less stress, and the ability to approach situations calmly
• Higher resilience, meaning a healthier response to setbacks. Less likely to quit when things don’t work out
• Enhanced self-acceptance, and a more realistic approach to skill development
• Happy to learn as you go rather than being good at things right away. Increased emphasis on practice and developing consistent habits
• Better able to receive feedback, without taking it too personally, since a lack of current ability just means you have more to learn
• Tackling new challenges head on: people with a growth mindset tend to relish challenges and learning opportunities. They don’t worry that any difficulties they face will be a sign of personal defectiveness
• Self-reliance and self-efficacy. Growth mindset puts you in the driving seat: it’s ok if you don’t want to do an activity any more because you don’t like it, but you’ll realise that you can always continue to improve if you continue showing up.

It’s important to recognise that growth mindset and fixed mindset are not chalk and cheese: there’s a continuum. It’s ok if you sometimes get caught up in a fixed mindset: it’s normal to sometimes feel deflated when something’s hard for example, or if you hit a roadblock. However, you can perhaps ‘catch yourself’ feeling that way, and bring yourself back to thinking with a growth mindset. Then you can focus again on what you need to do to improve: maybe find a mentor or learn a new strategy, for example.

Here are some ways of thinking that will help you stay on track with developing a growth mindset, which I have summarised in the handy mnemonic GROWS:

• G = Gradual. Getting good at stuff takes time, and it’s about taking small steps. The old saying goes “It’s a marathon not a sprint”. Focus on whether you are progressing overall, not whether every single time is great. Find ways to notice your progress and celebrate the small wins. Notice that the other players at the tennis club actually have a range of abilities: don’t just compare yourself to the top 5% of players if you’ve just started recently.
• R = Regular. Consistency is the key if you want to get good at something. Knowledge and proficiency fade gradually over time, especially in the early stages. Find a regular time to practice the skill. If you take a break then it’s not ‘all over’ though: just get back onto it without judgement or stress (assuming it’s still something that still has a purpose for you in your life).
• O = Oops. Mistakes are normal. If it’s a sport then you’ll lose sometimes, you’ll miss an important shot, you’ll have a bad practice. Don’t take it personally as a sign that you can’t do it, just take it as a chance to learn and improve. And definitely don’t take it as a sign of your overall worth as a person: being harsh on yourself will just make you more stressed, so just continue to show up and try your best.
• W = Why. Remember why you’re doing this thing in the first place. Find a reason that isn’t outcome-focused and that is about your values, enjoyment, sense of meaning, health, or connecting with others. Perhaps you’re playing violin to have fun or be part of an orchestra, or you’re surfing to get into the ocean more. Pro basketballers tend to love playing basketball (which is lucky since they have to do it every day), good bloggers want to help others learn, etc: find a reason for what you’re doing and it’ll keep you on track.
• S = Share. Find a group of people to learn with and learn from. This makes it fun, but also means you’ve got people to bounce ideas off. Find a mentor who’s ahead of you, and take their advice (not because they’re smarter than you but because they’ve done it more and they know more). Mentor others once you get good: partly because someone helped you, but also because it helps you learn things while teaching.

Summary and Other Ideas

A growth mindset is all about the idea that we learn and improve because we keep practising something, rather than (only) because we have a talent at it to begin with. It helps us persevere when there are obstacles because we don’t take setbacks personally (instead we simply take it as a sign that we have more to learn), and we can also be realistic and gradual in our approach to skill development. People with a growth mindset tend to be more resilient to the ups and downs, and it also helps to find ways to enjoy and find meaning in an activity in itself rather than because it leads to a specific outcome (such as winning, passing a music exam, benching a particular amount etc).

Having a growth mindset is especially powerful when combined with other approaches such as self-compassion. Self-compassion is the approach of being kind to ourselves, and recognising that everyone has strengths as well as flaws (i.e. this is a normal part of being human). Self-compassion can also help people set challenging but realistic goals, and to overcome setbacks more easily. You can read more about this [here].

Lastly, there are many other facets to developing resilience, and establishing consistent habits. You may want to check out some of my posts on emotion regulation, mindfulness, and also ways to manage your diary to establish consistent habits.

As always, please feel free to share your own tips, strategies, and opinions in the comments: and let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to read about in this area. Thanks for reading!