By Zach Clement
Having fulfilling relationships is essential to living a fulfilling life. If you’re like most people, a growth mindset could help you to have more—and better—relationships.
What traits make someone most likely to succeed in sports, school, work, and relationships? Carol Dweck spent years trying to answer this question. She found that people who weren’t successful frequently had what she called a fixed mindset, and people who were successful had a growth mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe that their performance on tasks is due to fixed, permanent traits that they are powerless to change, but people with a growth mindset see success as a result of hard work. What would it look like to have a growth attitude towards relationships? Keep reading to find out.
Applaud yourself for trying, even if you don’t succeed
Imagine you’re a college student and you’re feeling alone in the first week of your new class. You try to start up a conversation with a person sitting by you, but after a few seconds, you don’t know how to keep the conversation going, so you both end up looking at your phones until class starts. It’s tempting to think that you simply don’t “have what it takes” to make new friends in your classes. With these beliefs (a fixed mindset) you’ll stop trying to make friends because it’s pointless anyway if you don’t “have what it takes.” However, with a growth mindset, you know that your efforts matter much more than immediate results, and that you can become better at making friends over time. With this mindset, you keep starting up conversations with people until eventually you become skilled at it (or you just meet people who are more friendly) and eventually, you have many friends in your class.
Believe in the capacity of others (and yourself) to change
Let’s say you’ve made a couple of friends in your class, but to be honest, you’re not too happy with your relationships with them. One of them cancelled plans to see a movie last weekend because they wanted to study for the midterm (boring) and another one never texts you back. If you had a fixed mindset, you would be tempted to give up on your relationships with them. You would believe that there was something permanently wrong with them (or with you) and that you would never have a positive relationship with them. On the other hand, if you had a growth mindset, you would believe that people can and will do better if they put in effort. You would communicate your needs to your friends, and you would think about whether you could change anything about yourself to make your relationships better.
People with growth mindsets effectively overcome setbacks and problems in relationships. Because they believe that both people in the relationship can change, they communicate about problems instead of assuming that their relationship is broken or that their friend or partner is irredeemably flawed. They are persistent when they encounter difficulty, and they are determined to grow their own relationship skills to do better in the future. If you make an effort to involve a growth mindset in your relationships, they will be longer-lasting and more rewarding.
How can I develop a growth mindset?
Fortunately, it’s very possible to develop a growth mindset. With time and effort, you can literally change the organization and behavior of the neurons in your brain to make certain thought patterns more or less frequent. Persistent practice at thinking positively about stressful situations and failure (see our module for more information) can help you to change your brain so that it’s easier for you to think in a growth mindset and less automatic for you to think in a fixed mindset. As you learn to view your relationships with a growth mindset, you will be able to live a more rewarding, meaningful life.