Mindset Matters: Change Your Mindset, Change Your Life

Contemporary science is increasingly proving that our individual expectations, prior conditioning and beliefs about an intervention can trigger a healing response within the body, labelled the “placebo effect”. Our article, “Mindset matters: the powerful placebo effect”, showed that how we think and what we experience are unquestionably related.

These scientific revelations powerfully demonstrate the enormous capacity of our mindsets – in this case the positive expectation about health and triggering healing processes in the body. However, the extraordinary power of our mindsets is not simply confined to medical walls; it permeates all facets of our life, including our professional successes and careers, relationships, sports, financial security, and even our longevity. While we may not actively pay much attention to our mindsets, they are central to enhancing our well-being and achieving our life goals.

What is a “mindset” anyway?

A mindset is the lens through which an individual views the world - it’s our own personal representation of the world by which we create our particular mental map or model of the world (Bandler, 2008). Essentially, we interpret and internally represent the world by filtering communications according to our values and beliefs, sense of self and capabilities, knowledge, understanding, history, memories, and so on. It is through this filter that we experience the world, perceive the world, and see the choices available to us within the world in which we live (Bandler, 2008). With many talented scholars now tackling this phenomenon, there is much research illustrating that our mindsets directly influence our reality.

The mechanisms of the mindset

The famous Stanford Professor, Carol Dwek, demonstrated through her series of influential research projects the capacity of our mindsets in shaping our ability to learn and our levels of success. Dweck showed that while some people see intelligence as fixed, others see it as a quality that can be developed. She demonstrated that these two different mindsets, a fixed or a growth mindset, lead to different behaviours and results (Dweck, 2017).

In a study she conducted with Dr Lisa Blackwell, which surveyed hundreds of seventh grade school children, Dweck deduced the mindset of each student and then tracked them for two years. Results showed that students with a growth mindset, those who thought they could change their own intelligence, increased their grades over time. Conversely, those with a fixed mindset did not. The difference between these two groups was simply a different perspective on intelligence which they each believed to be a fact or truth about themselves (Dweck & Blackwell, 2017).

Many other studies show similar effects of mindsets in other areas, including our capacity for managing people, problem solving, playing sports and sustaining healthy relationships. Professor Becca Levy of Yale University conducted a study on how our mindsets about ageing affect the way we age. Her research found that older people with more positive self-perceptions of ageing lived 7.5 years longer than those who perceived ageing less positively.  

This was established even after factors such as age, gender,  socioeconomic  status,  loneliness,  and  functional  health  were taken into consideration. This suggests that if we can shift our mindsets about ageing, from viewing ageing as an unavoidable process of deterioration to being a process of development and attaining wisdom, it not only extends longevity, but it also enriches how we grow old (Levy at al., 2002).

You can change your mindset

In another study with Claudia Mueller, Dweck explored the outcomes of how different types of praise affected students who were required to complete a problem-solving game. The students were told they got 80% of the problem correct, but some were praised for their natural intelligence (fixed mindset) and others were praised for how hard they worked (growth mindset).

Those who were praised for their intelligence tended to choose future tasks that were easier, reported enjoying the task less, were less likely to persist on tasks and performed worse overall. Children who had been praised for their effort chose tasks that would help them learn new things, enjoyed and persisted with the tasks, asked for feedback on their performance and achieved greater results. (Dweck & Mueller, 1998).

This research shows that if we can shift our mindsets about our intelligence and talent as something that is fixed to something that is changeable over time, it can considerably alter our academic and professional success.

The plethora of research on this subject not only demonstrates the mechanisms of our mindsets in affecting our performance and shaping our reality, but it also shows that we can change our mindsets. Understanding this concept is crucial because most of us have a fixed mindset about something in our lives. For instance, it is common for people to hold mindsets such as they are not “athletic”, or in relationships that all the “good ones are taken”, or when it comes to finances that they are “not good with money”. When we realise that we have the ability to change our mental processes and our internal maps of the world - to change our mindset - we can significantly shift and improve our experience of life.

Self-awareness is the key

Once we accept that our mindsets are malleable, how do we then shift our mindset to create a more beneficial state of mind? The key to shifting your mindset begins by building self-awareness, which is the process of discovering your past and current self. With the right tools, awareness gives you the means of reviewing your beliefs, deciding which are useful and worth maintaining, and which would benefit your life from being changed. It is only through doing the work to uncover your particular map or model of how you internally represent the world, that you can then begin to bring about and see the changes or transformation that you want.

REFERENCES

Bandler R. (2008), Richard Bandler’s guide to trance-formation, Health Communications Inc., United States, pp 20-21; 101

Dweck C. (2017). Mindset: Changing the way you think to fulfil your potential. Little, Brown Book Group, Great Britain.

Dweck C. et al. (2007).  Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement Across an Adolescent Transition:  A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention. Child Development, Vol. 78, No. 1, pp. 246-263.

Levy BR, et al. (2002). Longevity increased by positive self-perceptions of ageing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Aug; Vol. 83, No. 2, pp. 261-70.

Dweck C. & Mueller C. (1998). Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Jul; Vol. 75, No. 1, pp.33-52.