You know those people. The ones who always find the downer comment. “Oh, you were promoted? Ugh, you probably have to work longer hours.”

I am someone who looks for the silver lining in every situation and tries to reframe the way I see the situation or the behavior. In certain periods of my life, I’ve had to work really hard to make this my modus operandi. But, ultimately as a way of being, it brings me much more peace. Because we know that we think, we say, what we say, we become.

This way of thinking also applies to the way I view myself and my abilities and my children’s abilities. It’s easy to get stuck in the fixed mindset – perhaps from a place of fear of trying something new, or from the old idea that we are born with a particular set of innate skills, which cannot change. “I am a natural …” fill in the blanks.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it does not leave space for evolution, for growth and change. And according to Angela Duckworth in her new book Grit, if said repeatedly, creates a negative way of thinking about oneself which doesn’t allow for evolution. And perhaps, more crucially for women, Lisa Damour, in her recent City Club talk, here in Cleveland, promoting her new book Untangled (about the stages that teenage girls go through on their path to adulthood) noted that girls tend to have more of a fixed mindset than boys.

So, how to create shift, welcome struggle and ultimately channel growth?

What we really need is to cultivate the growth mindset. A way of viewing our world and our achievements and shifts in our lives in a positive way. If we don’t stretch ourselves, we can’t grow. If we don’t challenge ourselves, we can’t learn how to fail, fall and rise again. If we don’t constantly work on our own evolution, we can’t see how far we can go and how much we can achieve. This is something I believe in so deeply that I recently had “fall seven, rise eight” tattooed on my hip!

Fall 7, Rise 8

3 TIPS FOR CULTIVATING GROWTH MINDSET:
1) Acknowledge and praise the process, not the person
2) Remember and teach that the brain and your abilities/intelligence is NOT fixed: practice will re-wire your brain
3) Make mistakes: Fail. Celebrate them & crucially, LEARN from them

“The reality is that most people have an inner fixed-mindset pessimist in them right alongside their inner growth-mindset optimist. Recognizing this is important because it’s easy to make the mistake of changing what we say without changing our body language, facial expressions, and behavior.” Angela Duckworth, Grit (2016).

Copyright Tamsin Astor, Yoga Brained LLC, 2016.

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