Working on mindset: what you do when it gets hard matters most

To develop a growth mindset in practice, the place to focus is your behaviour: trying a different approach when the first one doesn't work, asking for feedback, and treating a setback as information. PiViva's Working on Mindset uses five behavioural statements to give you a score out of 25. Carol Dweck, who first described the growth mindset, later warned against what she called a "false growth mindset", where people say they believe in growth and carry on behaving exactly as before.

Why does knowing about growth mindset change so little?

The growth mindset has become one of the best-known ideas in modern psychology. It appears on posters in school corridors and on slides in leadership programmes, and plenty of people will happily tell you that effort matters and that failure is just a chance to learn.

Then something goes wrong at work, or a new skill proves harder than expected, and they respond exactly as they always have, by avoiding it, blaming themselves or simply giving up. You might recognise the pattern in yourself: the course you signed up for with real enthusiasm and stopped attending after week three, or the new piece of software at work that you've found clever ways to avoid using ever since.

If that sounds familiar, there's no need to be hard on yourself. Knowing about an idea and living by it are two very different things, and the encouraging news is that the living part can be practised.

What is a "false growth mindset"?

Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist behind the growth mindset, noticed this pattern herself. In 2015 she wrote about what she called a "false growth mindset", where people declare that they have one and praise effort for its own sake, without changing anything about how they behave when they struggle.

Her point was that effort needs direction. Trying new strategies, seeking help from others and learning from setbacks are what actually make the difference, and simply trying harder at the same thing rarely does.

Research supports this practical focus. In 2019, a large study led by David Yeager found that a short mindset intervention helped lower-achieving students most where the environment around them supported new behaviour, which suggests that belief works best when it's backed up by what we do and by the people around us.

How does Working on Mindset work in PiViva?

This tool is the companion to Fixed vs Growth Mindset. That test tells you which way you lean, and this one looks at what you actually do about it.

There are five statements, each rated from one to five, giving you a score out of 25. They're all about practice: how you respond when something is hard, whether you ask for feedback or tend to avoid it, what you do after a failure, and how you approach the things you haven't yet mastered.

If your score comes out low, please don't read it as a judgement on you as a person: it's simply a picture of a few habits, and habits can be changed. You'll have some specific things to practise, which is far easier to work with than trying to change an attitude in the abstract. Take it again in a few months, and you'll probably find this score moves faster than your mindset score, since behaviour tends to change first and belief follows along behind it.

What if your score stays low?

Then pick the lowest statement and turn it into a small, regular habit. If you tend to avoid feedback, for example, you might decide to ask one person a month a single question, such as "What's one thing I could do better?", and attach that habit to something you already do using Building Habits.

If setbacks tend to knock you sideways, the Self-Compassion Break is worth trying. Research by Juliana Breines and Serena Chen in 2012 found that self-compassion after a failure increased people's motivation to improve, which is exactly what helps when you're trying to keep going.

Every small change counts here. Each time you try a new approach, or ask for feedback when you'd normally keep your head down, you're building the kind of mindset that genuinely makes a difference, and that's something anyone can do, starting this week.