BUILD A GROWTH MINDSET
When you think of what you do in your life, how do you think of yourself?
If you think thoughts such as, “I’m intelligent,” or “I’m talented,” or “I’m a failure,” you’re thinking of yourself in terms of traits. Traits are fixed qualities that do not change much, if at all.
There is a big problem with thinking of yourself – or other people – in terms of traits; it makes it very difficult to learn, grow, and change.
In research done by Carol Dweck and others, they found that kids who thought of themselves in terms of traits would give up easily, and had a hard time bouncing back from adversity or defeat.
If you’re told how smart you are, how talented you are, how gifted you are, and such traits are the main focus of praise for you, then what happens when you fail a test?
You shouldn’t fail a test; in fact you should never do anything but great on a test. After all, you’re brilliant and talented; a real natural at these things!
When a child is evaluated in terms of such positive traits, there isn’t much room for improvement.
You either do well and live up to your evaluation, or if you fail, that failure undermines the positive evaluation of your traits.
How can you be brilliant and do poorly? There must’ve been a mistake in the positive evaluation.
When there is failure, there isn’t much room for improvement, either.
Failing is not a verb to a trait-oriented person. Failure is something that you are.
A child with a trait-oriented mindset who has a setback or failure does not experience it as a failure of action, he experiences it as a failure of character – an overwhelming defeat at a fundamental level.
A trait-oriented mindset is a helpless mindset. But there is an alternative…




Mount Athos, Greece. The Monastic Community of Mount Athos has been independent from the rest of the world for over a thousand years. In all that time, no woman has been allowed to enter. 20 Eastern Orthodox Christian monasteries, home to some 2,000 monks, are scattered along the Athos peninsula at the apex of the Aegean Sea. The most dramatic of them is Simonopetra built in the 1200s on a huge granite rock hanging on a cliff 1,000 feet above the sea.





[Durk and I had many a conversation about a nutritional formula that he and Sandy were very proud of creating. There is a mechanism in your body responsible for so many aging maladies, and their formula either stopped it or slowed it way down. They called their formula AGEless for good reason. I’m so grateful to Greg and Michelle making it available.—JW] 