Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck is a professor of Psychology at Stanford university, she has done vast work in researching and developing her theories on human psychology. From this research she has derived an ideology, this ideology states that there is 2 human mindsets, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. I had never heard of Carol Dweck before, nor did I ever formally know of Growth Mindset. I knew that certain people would face adversity and improve themselves in doing so, be it physically or mentally. When you exercise you put muscles under stress so that they grow back stronger and more resilient, so for me its interesting to see that the growth mindset theory claims this also works on a neurological level.


The concept of the growth mindset is fascinating. It states that when faced with challenges someone with a growth mindset will not only overcome that challenge, but will learn and grow from it. Mrs. Dweck also states that when people are pushed outside of their comfort zone the neurons in their brain strengthen and form stronger connections with each other, making that person smarter.

Its interesting just how common examples of growth mindset really are. I've experienced it personally myself. When I was younger I used to be on a football team, I was the fat one who could barely run for like 10 seconds, that drove me to lose weight, go to the gym, train cardio, eat better ect. and that improved me as a person both mentally and physically. There's been examples of this in my schoolwork as well, given the amount of times we've had to do 20 assignments in the space of a week. The effort has made me more apt at getting work done. There's still plenty of more assignments to do though, and i'm sure a growth mindset approach will help me and all the other students through the challenges ahead.

(An example of a growth mindset)

Source: tes.com