With all the action, information, and activity that happens in our everyday lives, it’s easy to believe that nobody truly has control over their own lives. Change is “forced” upon us and we’ve got no say in the matter.
The mindset we discuss in this chapter is one of agency: you’re not a powerless bystander in your own life. Everything in your life is under your control; you just have to believe it first to put it in action. Outside events and external factors have only minor influence at best. Your mindset can overcome all of them. You author your own mission for change — nobody and nothing besides yourself have the right to disrupt it.
As hard as it is for us to believe that in times of distress, it’s an empowering truth that can see us to our greatest heights. To get yourself into a mindset shaped for controlling your own destiny, there are a few theoretical models that can help you focus on what kinds of thinking you might need to change.
- Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
This leads to a whole lot of roadblocks in the process itself because what’s the purpose in trying if you don’t think it’s in you? The fixed mindset is quick to avoid challenges and even give up before a problem can be solved. It doesn’t value effort; it views excessive work as “trying too hard” for little to no payoff. A single criticism can derail an entire project because the fixed mindset has already determined that what they currently have is all they’re going to get.
The growth mindset is fundamentally different because it assumes change and growth are possible. Whatever you are right now is just a starting place from which to grow, improve, and develop. Challenges and obstacles aren’t avoided; they’re dealt with and learned from.
Constructive criticism is welcome feedback digested in the spirit of helpfulness. The growth mindset is always evolving, always learning how to make things better, and always considering how to improve.
The growth mindset is what you’ll find in people with higher levels of success. If a roadblock looms, the fixed mindset feels that if it’s there, it can’t be overcome, whereas the growth mindset feels that effort and time can overcome almost anything. Clearly, it’s not beneficial to constantly give up in life.
The differences between fixed and growth mindsets are manifest in several ways, from a particular kind of action to variances in speech and messaging:
- Fixed mindset: Wants to appear smart or capable
- Growth mindset: Wants to learn and improve
- Fixed mindset: Says “I don’t have the right set of talents” or “I’m not naturally gifted”
- Growth mindset: Says “I can learn to develop more talents” or “If I learn this new skill, my capacity will increase”
- Fixed mindset: Gives up when problems or barriers arise
- Growth mindset: Powers through roadblocks
- Fixed mindset:Disregards feedback or construes criticism as negative
- Growth mindset: Welcomes constructive criticism
- Fixed mindset: Says “I did the best I could”
- Growth mindset: Says “It’s okay if I didn’t get it all right in one shot—with gradual work and practice, I’ll get better”
- Fixed mindset: Resists leaving the comfort zone
- Growth mindset: Pursues new challenges
By adopting the growth mindset, you’re exerting control and power over the circ*mstances in your life.The growth mindset really doesn’t leave a lot of room for excuses — after all, the primary objective is to learn more rather than manufacture more; there’s no need for excuses.
In essence, the development of the false growth mindset boils down to the educators praising the students’ efforts rather than their process. The growth mindset focuses on the deliberate execution and gradual understanding of concepts. Someone with a genuine growth mindset gets more specific about their praise. Rather than applauding the person, they compliment their process. Instead of exalting who their students are, they commend what they do.
For example, a fixed mindset would say, “Gosh, you’re really smart at math!” A growth mindset, on the other hand, would say, “I like how you worked on this problem by trying different approaches and how thoroughly you tried to solve the equation with these notes. You put a lot of work into this.” A false growth mindset would simply say, “Great job for trying! Keep trying!”
Personal relationships and friendships also benefit from the growth mindset. A fixed mindset is always looking for the perfect partner, someone who checks off every trait on their list and will live with them happily ever after. But if they discover flaws in the other person — or themselves — they feel they’re just part of who they are and they won’t be able to change, whereas a growth mindset knows that all relationships take work and honest, active engagement with others.
Finally, be aware that it’s almost impossible to be in growth mindset 100% of the time—you will, occasionally, find yourself rooted in a fixed mindset where you feel you’ve hit a wall or a ceiling. It happens. When it does, you might beat yourself up a little about it because that’s what a fixed mindset does: it judges according to a final result or lack thereof. But spin off that critical voice by examining what you might have missed, diagnosing it, taking it into consideration, and trying again.
- Adjust Your Locus of Control
A locus of control refers to where people feel control in their life resides — internally or externally. If you feel your life is controlled by outside influences that no amount of effort from you can change, you have an external locus of control. The external locus view decreases the amount of control you have down to almost zero. This is a mindset that is highly detrimental to the pursuit of success, happiness, and maximizing your potential.
External locus people focus on things that happened in the past. They focus on situations in which they really do not have a say. They focus on the lives of other people. They hope people will magically change or that situations will stop happening to them. They simply hope, wish, and pray that things will be different. This is someone who sits quietly in their room in the hopes that their comfort zone will suddenly burst or increase.
The time you invest worrying about things you have no voice or control over is wasted. You let the fiction that you are not in control of your life get the best of you. You throw yourself a pity party.
Let’s compare that to someone with an internal locus of control. By contrast, a person with an internal locus of control believes that outcomes and successes are directly tied to their level of effort and work. And of course, if they fail, it’s because they did not try hard enough. If the missing element is effort and action, then that’s what will increase ten-fold.
What’s the difference in mindset between the two? Internal locus people don’t accept a lack of success and are active to remedy it. External locus people passively accept whatever comes their way because they don’t feel they can change it.
- Self-Efficacy vs. Helplessness
Self-efficacy is a nearly universal element in almost any success story. By nurturing belief and confidence in your abilities, you can start a chain reaction that funnels down through your efforts, understanding, and accomplishments. The more resolute one is that they can do something, the more likely the chances that they actually will. And the more they accomplish with this mindset, the more control and agency they have over their own fortune. If you assume, even brashly, that you can tackle a task, you’ll try and succeed or try, fail, learn, and then succeed in the end again.
The opposite of self-efficacy is helplessness, in which an individual perceives that they have no control over a given situation—and therefore no control over their own fate. Helplessness promotes a fatalistic outlook, which in turn makes one less willing to put energy into anything. They’ve already decided their goal is out of reach, so why put any effort into it? You might as well just curl up into a ball on the ground.
Mastery experiences, or “just doing it.” You’ve done it before, so you can do it again. With every successful completion of a task, project, or goal, we add and accumulate more self-efficacy and confidence in our abilities. It takes tenacity to power through the process and conquer the snags, but that’s exactly the concrete evidence we need to feel good and reassure ourselves.
Vicarious experiences. As the name implies, these kinds of experiences come from observing those around us, especially people we’ve set up as role models for the kinds of accomplishments we want to make. By seeing others attain favorable outcomes from their efforts, we become encouraged that we can replicate their success ourselves.
Verbal persuasion. People who we consider authority or mentor figures—parents, coaches, teachers, tutors, supervisors—play a huge part in developing self-belief, encouragement, and faith in our success. Their support and guidance make us more likely to stick with a given task and transcend obstacles.
Emotional and physiological states. How you’re feeling — your overall mental state and how you feel at that particular moment — will naturally affect your level of self-efficacy, especially if you’re feeling negatively.
Negative emotions — the feeling of failure after not being able to finish a book, discouragement at your weight training progress — affect your mindset. But don’t underestimate the power of positive emotions on your sense of self-efficacy: the relief of a completed research paper or the satisfaction of a fantastic co*cktail with one of those little umbrellas in it.
So the mindsets of self-efficacy and helplessness are both conditions that are learnable and lead to polar opposite results. Self-efficacy increases one’s motivation to work with confidence, take on new challenges, and navigate confidently through trials or negative situations that come up in life.
Takeaways:
It’s easy to feel like you aren’t in control of your life. After all, we literally aren’t in control of anyone’s actions but our own. But if you carry that mindset through your life, you end up becoming prey to everyone else’s whims but yours. You make yourself powerless because you believe it eventually.
The first way this tends to happen is through adopting a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is where you feel that your abilities and possibilities are fixed and limited, whereas a growth mindset accurately states that you are limited only by your efforts and actions. The latter is far more associated with success.
The second way we tend to feel powerless is through unwittingly having an external locus of control. This is when you feel that your life is fully determined by things external to you — other people, circ*mstances, and luck. This stands in contrast to an internal locus of control, where you feel that you have the power to impact your life in whatever way you wish — within reason. Again, the latter is far more associated with success because it pushes you toward achievement.
The third and final way we might feel that we lack agency in our own lives is through adopting a helpless mindset versus a self-efficacious mindset. The former is a learned behavior that nothing will change even if you act, so therefore, you stop acting. The latter is a far better learned mindset of belief in one’s own abilities. This belief can be grown through personal experiences, affirmations from others, vicarious experiences, and emotional and physiological states.
By: Peter Hollins' The Art of Intentional Thinking: Master Your Mindset. Control Your Thoughts. Transform Your Mental Patterns to Achieve Your Goals.
