Hey you,
Welcome back to the Screenspire blog.
Today’s post is part 2 of a 7-part blog series where we’ll discuss seven mindset shifts we must make in order to experience digital wellness. When we talk about digital wellness, we often focus on the external changes we can make to improve our relationships with media (e.g, reducing our screentime, using grayscale on our phones). But we rarely consider how our mindsets — our attitudes, beliefs, and thought patterns — influence our experiences with digital media, and how these experiences prevent us from practicing digital wellness.
Across seven posts, we will explore how seven mindsets impact the way in which we approach life and digital media.
Today’s post covers the fixed mindset.
The Fixed Mindset, Simplified
“I’ll never be in a good relationship because my personality is trash.”
“I’m going to fail this Advanced Functions test because I’m not a math person, so there’s no point in studying.”
“Some people just have always known what they want to do in life. I’m not one of those people.”
A fixed mindset is the belief that our intelligence, abilities, skills, and talents cannot be changed with effort or hard work. Individuals who carry a fixed mindset believe — to some degree — that the traits that we have “naturally” or “easily” developed cannot be improved by effort overtime, and that there is a fixed limit beyond which we cannot improve our traits. They also believe that we are stuck with the traits and circumstances we currently have; that there are clearly defined, mutually-exclusive groups of “successful” and “unsuccessful” people; and that all individuals who were ever “successful” were born into unchangeable traits or circumstances that destined them for success. [Harvard – Growth]
At this point, you’re probably thinking “Hey, wait a minute… privilege plays a role in influencing our life outcomes, and that includes how we develop skills and how we experience traditional markers of success.” And you’re right. Privilege makes it easier for some individuals to travel towards their desired outcomes without facing as many obstacles as someone who does not hold their privilege. It’s important to acknowledge this.
However, possessing a fixed mindset is very different from acknowledging privilege. A fixed mindset believes that all individuals lack the ability to learn and grow. Acknowledging privilege means understanding that we can all learn and grow, but it may be more seamless for some individuals to experience and access this learning and growth.
Privilege: “The unearned and mostly unacknowledged societal advantage that a restricted group of people has over another group” (Dictionary.com, n.d.)
Maybe after reading this far, you’ve realized that you have some fixed mindset tendencies. That’s alright. Most of us have carried a fixed mindset approach at some point or another; it’s just so easy to do. It’s difficult to be completely untouched by this way of thinking. This is because early on in life, many of us inhabited environments and social groups in which fixed mindsets were explicitly or implicitly reinforced by individuals and opportunities we cared about.
Maybe we grew up receiving praise that centered our traits (“You’re so smart.”) rather than our efforts (“You worked really hard to solve that problem! I’m so proud of you!”), which made us feel like if we didn’t perform well, we would lose this praise. This kind of praise (which emphasizes a child’s abilities instead of the process they took to achieve a certain result) is called outcome praise or person praise (Kamins and Dweck, 1999). Praise that emphasizes a child’s hard work and efforts is called process praise (Kamins and Dweck, 1999). Research finds that children who receive process praise during early development (like when they are 14 to 38 months old) are more likely to believe that their efforts can grow and change when they are 7 and 8 years old (Gunderson et al., 2013)!
Maybe we spent a lot of time in environments like school, where we were categorized and treated differently based on our achievements…where we received outcome praise. To emphasize this point, I looked up the number of hours the average child has spent in school by grade 12. It varies across provinces / states, grade levels, and individual schools, but according to research from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (which handles the monetary policy in the USA), the average child spends 6.3 hours at school per day (Hall and Nielsen, 2020). In Ontario, Canada (where I live), there are around 195 school days in the average school year (Government of Ontario, n.d.). I did the math and found out that a child who has perfect attendance from grade 1 to grade 12 will spend approximately 14,747 hours at school. During this time — if the child’s elementary and high schools are anything like the ones I attended — think about all of the outcome praise or criticism that a child will experience from the people in their environments, and how this may impact their mindsets!
And this isn’t just about school. We receive praise that emphasizes our achievements in many environments and social contexts growing up. This includes our friend groups, sports teams, and family environments.
Fixed Mindsets in the Digital Age
It’s easy for us to think in ways that reflect a fixed mindset when we’re spending a lot of time with digital media, and looking at others’ lives from afar. This is because entertainment media content (e.g, social media, films, television series) offers countless opportunities for us to view the positive moments in others’ lives without seeing the struggle, skill development, growth, and low starting points that led there. When we repeatedly see people doing amazing things without seeing their starting points and progress, we may begin to believe that these individuals were just blessed with a destiny that led to success. Even those of us who know better can fall into this trap.
And it’s not your fault. Social media was designed to create these exact insecurities and feelings of anxiety so that we would spend more time ruminating on them, fixating content that appeals to our insecurities, and spending more time on the platform in an effort to boost our self-esteem with likes. But I’ll save that for another post.
How Carrying a Fixed Mindset Prevents us from Thriving in the Digital Age
Overtime, living with a fixed mindset can make us feel so insecure about ourselves, and hopeless about our abilities to grow, that we disengage from opportunities to develop skills that matter to us. We become hopeless, and start to believe that effort and hard work are futile.
A fixed mindset can also cause us to resent the lives, bodies, and experiences we were born into because we believe that they’ve given us an unfair disadvantage that prevents us from experiencing any growth or improvement towards our goals.
We may also begin to resent individuals who we consider to be successful, because we feel that they had unfair advantages that caused them to excel while we failed.
What to do instead
Growth Mindset: The belief that an individual’s skills, abilities, and traits can grow and improve with effort.
In order to thrive in the digital age, we must adopt a growth mindset. A growth mindset endorses the belief that our intelligence, abilities, skills, and talents can be improved with effort.
When we have a growth mindset, we can look at depictions of individuals in social media and entertainment media and understand that no matter who we’re viewing, some effort and growth went into their journey. Life will open up to us. We’ll start to identify small, unconventional strategies and resources we can use to grow towards our own goals. We may even begin to reframe some of the personal traits and experiences we thought were weaknesses, and see how they uniquely position us to learn and grow.
In our hyper-social digital environments, adopting a growth mindset reminds us that we are capable of learning and growing if we exert effort. It reminds us of the power we have to shape our lives, and enriches our ability to appreciate our unique journeys and carry gratitude and joy towards others’ wins.
Here are some practical, research-informed ways to begin cultivating a growth mindset today:
Change your language: Instead of using words like “always” or “never,” which communicate absolutes and permanency, use words like “yet,” “one day,” and “frequently.” I believe that the words we speak shape our experiences of the world, and that the words we use most often determine the things in life that are most salient to us. If we want to cultivate attitudes that value growth and hard work, we must reflect this valuation in the way we speak.
Reflect on your progress: when we track our growth and life experiences through journaling, speaking to others about your experiences, or just engaging in inward self-reflection, we remind ourselves that we are growing at all times. This activates within us a genuine appreciation for the fact that our small, effortful habits can lead to great outcomes. While it is possible to move through life without documenting our growth — like I did for most of my life — this may make it easier for us to believe that “we were just lucky” or that our outcomes came from some unchanging quality we have, rather than being at least the partial product of effort.
Spend more time in environments that celebrate efforts rather than outcome: Find environments in which growth (rather than, or in addition to, results) is valued and celebrated. Seek out communities and activities that are process-focused instead of product-focused. The truth is that even if we succeed at something or achieve an outcome that is widely praised by others, we only spend a short amount of time at the summit. We spend more time climbing the mountain to get to our goal, so finding a community of encouraging, balanced people to climb with will create the most fulfilling experience.
The growth mindset is a phenomenon I’m deeply passionate about. I love the idea that we can shift our life outcomes by shifting our perspectives on things. To me, this is a very democratic and accessible way of understanding wellness and success.
Hopefully after reading this post, you now realize that cultivating a growth mindset is about more than just reshaping our thoughts; it’s about changing our environments as well. Since media is an ever-present part of our lives, what do you think the media industry could do to help us (users, gamers, viewers) cultivate growth mindsets?
Let me know in the comments!