All people in the world have different views on how they see opportunities in life. Some believe they can do it, and others think they can’t.
Growth Mindset: “In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.” ( Dweck, 2015)
Fixed Mindset: “In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort.”
Over the past month and and a half we’ve been working on building our own growth mindset. Every week we made a reflection on some parts of our lives, experiences, and examples of growth and fixed mindset and put them all into a book. With the answers we got, we were able to build an understanding of what growth mindset was and how we can achieve it. It was fun to see how many people had a fixed mindset and then changed over the course of 6 weeks.
I learned that in order to succeed in life, you need to fail to experience and learn from your mistakes. After finishing this reflection, I realized that this has happened to me many times in the past and that I will continue doing it for the rest of my life. Failure is inevitable, so instead of worrying about failing do your best and see how you can improve for next time.
“No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person.”
– Chris Hardwick
Something else that I learned was that believing in what you’re doing will make it even better. It doesn’t really matter how you believe in what you’re doing as long as its positive. If you believe you can dunk a basketball, over time after lots of grit and effort you will dunk that basketball.
Something that has helped me in life is picturing yourself after you’ve accomplished your goal. As I was in the middle of the process of getting into PLP I sat down and pictured myself walking into the room with my iPad in my hands, and here I am now making this blog post!
Picturing specific details and just trying to be in that moment will not only help you believe in what you’re doing, it will propel you forward and make you mentally stronger.
At the end of this project, we then had to put these skills to test.
Our last task was to make a selfie and write an academic goal we can achieve by the neofascist the year using the skills we learned.
Finding the goal wasn’t that hard. Making it as specific as possible was the more difficult part. The hardest part for me was finding a picture of me that I liked!
After learning all these skills, I feel more confident on how I can achieve my goals and how I can put as much effort into a task without giving up. These skills that I learned have become super valuable and I hope others learn about this as well.