Mini Ep. 59: Growth Mindset

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in Jiu-Jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in Jiu-Jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access. And if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to BJJ Mental Models.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent Jiu-Jitsu approach. And in this mini episode, I want to continue our foray into pop science mental models, talking about where they're useful and where their limitations are. This week, I'm going to talk about the growth mindset as popularized by the Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. In her 2006 book, Mindset, Carol argued that your mindset can be either fixed, which means you believe you have attributes that cannot be changed, or it can be a growth mindset in which you believe that you can overcome your limitations and get better and achieve greater performance. Carol argues that a fixed mindset leads to stagnating growth because you believe that your attributes are part of your circumstances and you can't get better, whereas someone with a growth mindset should be able to improve more because they don't see their current standing as a limitation. They see it as just where they are today and look at it as something that could be overcome with enough effort and practice. As you can imagine, Carol's work was very popular. The idea of a growth mindset with which we can overcome any challenge is tremendously popular and something that we want to hear. So after Carol published her 2006 book on the topic, a lot of people ran wild with it. And you've probably heard of Carol's research because it gets cited and discussed so often. However, something that happens sometimes when you've got a good idea, if it develops a life of its own, people can wind up taking that idea beyond the original scope of what was intended. And it's arguable that many of the people promoting Carol's work have made it more generalized than it should have been. So there's been some pushback on Carol's mindset research in which people argue that it's not a universal thing necessarily. There may be times when a growth mindset can really help, but there might also be times when it isn't going to do that much for you. I'm not here to argue the merits of Carol's research, but what I will say is, like with any mental model, understand that many of them have limitations. We talked a few weeks ago about how the map is not the territory. That's a powerful mental model for understanding the limits of frameworks like this. So whenever you hear an idea coming out of pop science, like growth mindset, you should understand that it probably has limitations as well. Sometimes people take these ideas and they run with them and they assume that they will always apply and always get results in every situation. That can lead to disappointment when you find some of the exceptions. And so in the case of Carol Dweck, it's been an interesting journey where her ideas got very popular, maybe too popular and were too broadly applied, and then there was pushback because her ideas were so broadly applied. Sometimes that criticism was leveled against her, and I'm not even sure that she was directly responsible for the overpromotion of those ideas. So, we'll save all of that for later and we'll just talk about the merits of a growth and a fixed mindset right now when it comes to Jiu-Jitsu. In Jiu-Jitsu, generally speaking, you should probably have a growth mindset where possible. Most of the things that we look at as limitations, they can be overcome in Jiu-Jitsu, particularly things relating to the mental game. It's true that there are some natural attributes you may have that are challenging to overcome, but many of the attributes that we have can be improved upon, and it's always healthy to think of your attributes as something that can be grown, something that can be improved over time. As soon as you start believing that your attributes are fixed, you've started coming up with excuses for your suboptimal performance. So that's one of the real challenges with having a fixed mindset is you're giving yourself excuses for not achieving the level of performance that you might have desired. Now, there are some things that are more or less fixed. Your height, for example, is somewhat out of your control, but other attributes can be evolved upon. It is true that certain physical attributes are just distributed unfairly. Some people have more natural athletic inclinations than others. And to act like you can overcome this entirely with a growth mindset, that's being disingenuous. Some people just have genetics that lend themselves better to Jiu-Jitsu than other people might. However, all of us can get better by applying a growth mindset. And you'll never really know exactly where your ceiling is until you try. And that's why a growth mindset is so important. So although there may be limitations to where a growth mindset can actually help you out, as a best practice, I think it's important to think about things through the lens of a growth mindset. So try not to think of yourself as I'm too small, or I'm not strong enough, or I'm not good at this area of the Jiu-Jitsu technical game. Think instead about where you could be and how you could get there. That's ultimately what the growth mindset teaches us is to think of ourselves less as a grouping of fixed attributes, and more as being along the road on a particular journey. And just because we're somewhere today, that doesn't mean we're still going to be in that place tomorrow. We can get better over time. On the flip side, though, I also encourage people to be compassionate with others and don't ever assume that just because someone is failing to succeed, that that must mean that they've got a fixed mindset. One problem with the growth mindset approach is that it can be used to dismiss legitimate concerns from others because you can always just claim that they don't have a growth mindset and that's why they're not getting results. The reality is, there are real-world considerations that can make it difficult for people to achieve the goals that they want to. And we should never hide behind a pop psychology concept like growth mindsets to dismiss people's very legitimate concerns about unfairness or why other people might have advantages that you just don't have. So all of that is to say that the growth mindset, thinking of yourself as being someone who can improve, this is generally a good idea, but like with many of these other pop science concepts, it does have its limitations and it's important to not get so caught up in the concept of a growth mindset that you assume it will solve all of your problems and you dismiss the very legitimate problems that other people might be having because you accuse them of having a fixed mindset. I hope this was helpful. This is a powerful concept, but it also has limitations. And you can learn more about this one and other concepts along these lines at BJJ Mental Models.com. All of our full-length episodes are released once a week and they're intended to be long-form breakdowns of important aspects of the sport of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We also have mini episodes like these if you want quick hits that just break down a single concept. All of that is completely free, plus our amazing newsletter, 13,000 subscribers. I recommend getting all of this stuff at BJJ Mental Models.com. I'll put a link to all of it in the show notes. And as always, if you haven't done so yet, please do consider joining our ever-growing army of BJJ Mental Models premium subscribers. This is where we can really help improve not just your technical Jiu-Jitsu, but your entire Jiu-Jitsu career. We go well beyond just teaching technique and that's one of the things that makes BJJ Mental Models premium so special. You can get a week of that free at BJJ Mental Models.com. I'll put links to all of this in the show notes, but as always, my sincere thanks for hanging out and listening to me talk about this stuff. I do appreciate it. I hope it's been valuable and we'll speak again soon.