Sport Psych Parenting: Growth Mindset

Are you accidentally teaching your kids to fear failure? Well, hopefully not. I'm sure you're well intentioned, but I got an important message for you in this video. And your children's mindset starts early, and it can start with you. A big piece of anybody's mindset comes down to the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. And maybe you've heard these terms before, but a fixed mindset is the belief that your abilities are innate and unchangeable, whereas a growth mindset is the belief that your abilities can develop over time through effort and embracing challenges.

And this is important to know because every word to action can send a message. In other words, it tells your children how to think about themselves. It can be a fixed mindset message that says, you have permanent traits and I'm judging them, or it can be a growth mindset message that says, hey, you're a developing person and I am committed to your development. This growth mindset approach tells those kids that, hey, I'll love you unconditionally. Whereas a fixed mindset can come across as I love you only if you succeed.

These mindsets can be learned in these little moments, so it's important to know what they sound like. A fixed mindset mess might sound like, wow, you learned that so quickly. You're so smart. Or look at that drawing. You might be the next Picasso. While that's well intentioned, you want to encourage your kids. That could be internalized. As if I don't learn something quickly, I'm not smart, or I shouldn't try drawing anything hard or they're gonna figure out I'm not Picasso. A lot of this stuff I got from, I mean, my training, but specifically with parenting, I got it from this book, highly recommend.

It's called Mindset by Carol Dweck. She's the one that pioneered the research in this topic of growth mindset. And there's a specific chapter titled Parents, teachers, and coaches. Where do mindsets come from? So my goal is to try to give you some principles from this great book. The number one principle that can help you apply growth mindset to your children is to praise effort, not talent. In other words, focus on the process rather than the outcome. Yes, children love to be praised, but it only lasts a short time.

And once they face a challenge or a failure and they don't receive that praise, their motivation and their confidence can fall. So does this mean that you have to fight the urge to praise them when they do something great? Absolutely not. Just be more specific and deliberate. With the praise that you provide them is the key. So try to focus on the process over the outcome. If they did well on a test rather than, hey, you got a great score, hey, your study habits really showed up with how you practice leading up to the test.

You may have not done so well in this performance, but your persistence I really appreciated and valued label the strategy that they use rather than the outcome. Because we can't control the outcome, we can control the input and the strategies to the situation all goes to what I call enabling these winning streaks. So if a child does well at something and you only label the outcome as being the main thing that you praise, they don't know what to do with that. Whereas if you are specific with the strategy or the process that led to the outcome, they can focus on that process.

They can focus on that strategy and sustain it over time, which enables those winning streaks long term. So whether they succeeded, did well, or they failed or didn't do well, focus on the process. And kids also learn this from how you talk about others. So if you say, oh, she's a natural genius or he's always been a good athlete, that might go back to that fixed mindset of oh, these abilities, they're innate, they're natural. Either I have them or I don't. And if I don't, I can't develop them. So it's important to specifically hone in your praise on the effort, the strategies, the persistence, the values, all the things that led to the outcome.

This will help teach children to love challenges, seek them out, they enjoy the effort, they seek new strategies, and they're a constant learner throughout life. It'll also help them respond proactively to mistakes. In other words, they learn from them rather than seeing them as a setback or an indicator that they don't have the innate ability to do something. One of my big takeaways from this overall growth mindset principle is that as a parent, it's natural to want to give your children confidence and work ethic and all these values and intangible qualities that you might want in them.

But unfortunately, you can't just give them that directly. You have to give them opportunities to develop those skills and abilities. You have to allow them to develop self reliant confidence, self reliant work ethic. And it all starts with praising the effort over the outcome. And lastly, what I will say is, because kids learn from their natural environment so much, they learn from what you say about others. They also learn from how you talk about yourself or how you respond to different situations.

So apply this concept of a growth mindset to yourself as a parent too. You're going to make mistakes. Nobody is perfect. So try to learn from your mistakes, recognize what you can do to get better, and grow from your experience and focus more on that process rather than the outcome. At the end of the day, focus on the input rather than the output, and I could go much more in depth. But if you're curious about this, if you resonate with this topic, I'd encourage you again, read this book. It's about 270 pages or so, and like I said, you can just go to that that one chapter that talks about parenting, coaching and teaching.

And there's a lot of great nuggets of wisdom in their side. Highly recommend.