The Myths/Folklore Blog

This week I decided to share some of My Growth Mindset tips with my sister, who recently became a freshman at the University of Tulsa. She’s always been somewhat of the same person as I am/was, where I would obsess over getting “perfect” grades, constantly putting myself under pressure to do well. It’s things like this idea of being perfect that truly can add some extreme stress to your life at college. So with my sister, I explained to her a main idea of a growth mindset is to accept failure, using it as a motivator/learning tool to move forward. People fail. That’s just part of life – things aren’t always easy. While we can definitely feel bad about our mistakes, we can’t let them consume our life. She took this advice really well (she’s more laid back than I was) and has been doing well in her classes, with probably a tad bit less worrying. Grades are important, but learning from your bad grades is even more important in my opinion. Image provided through Dreamstime

I've never heard of Carol Dweck or the idea of a growth mindset. However, the idea that focusing on the harder, more challenging aspects of your life is not one that is new to me. My mom, who is a middle-school teacher in OK, has definitely used this type of teaching with her class and with me. Her and my dad would focus on the effort that I put forth - if I wound up not doing so well on an assignment or a test, they would ask me, "Do you think you tried hard enough?". If I truly tried as hard as I could have, focusing on the harder aspects, they would be content with the score I got. Over time this developed further with the greater challenges that emerged with higher education. The effort that I put forward, the time that I put into a task, and how I did were all things that they considered when talking to me about certain subjects. While here at OU, I realized the type of person that I am. I, like most people, am more content when things are "easy". There i...