How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset

When we are just taught that stress can be enhancing, and then we are placed into a stressful environment... the total amount of blood that the heart can pump with each beat is actually increased—peripheral blood flow increases, and our ability to maintain cognition, to think clearly under conditions of stress, increases.

If you tell a kid that they're smart or talented, and that's the reason why they perform well, when they encounter challenges, they are likely to go with the least amount of challenge so that they can continue to receive that praise or feedback. Whereas, if you receive praise and feedback for your strong effort, then later, you tend to pick environments, problem sets, etc. that allow you to exert the very effort that got you the praise in the first place.

The specific feedback we get, meaning whether or not we get feedback that is attached to our identity... sends us down a very different path of performance in the short and long run as compared to whether or not we receive feedback that's based on effort.

For those of you that perhaps have heard stress reduces testosterone levels, stress reduces estrogen levels, etc.—that's true. It is also true, by the way, that when you are informed about how stress can be enhancing of performance, it becomes anabolic.

At the end of the day, at the end of the year, and at the end of our life, really, the only thing that you really truly can control is where you place your attention and where you place your effort.

When people have a growth mindset, and they are presented with the information that they got something wrong, rather than just feel it as a somatic response or an emotional response, they tend to appraise it; they tend to direct their attentional resources toward trying to understand what the error was and why they got that error.

If people are given even just a short tutorial about some of the negative consequences of stress on learning and performance and their physiology and their health, they experience a lot of negative consequences of stress when they're put into a stressful circumstance. Conversely, if people are taught about the performance-enhancing aspects of stress, then those people will experience performance-enhancement when they are confronted with stress...

There are a lot of data now to support the fact that one of the key ways to analyze our errors is to get help. And this is one of the things that really differentiates the high-performers from the low-performers over time.

There's this additional mindset, which has to do with our mindset around stress and frustration itself, that can allow us to access growth mindset far more easily. And this mindset around stress actually has a name; it's called the stress-is-enhancing mindset.

Dr. Crum defines a mindset as a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information.

These are questions that you could ask yourself right now ... You could ask yourself, for instance, what have I been told I'm really good at? You should also ask yourself, what have I been told I'm really poor at, that I'm just not good at? What have I told myself I'm really good at, and what have I told myself I'm really bad at?

Telling someone that they're smart or talented can increase the probability that that person is going to misrepresent their performance in the future.