20. The Mindset Trap
With all the emphasis on changing one’s mind, it may be better to focus on changing one’s actions
Once upon a time, I was an engineer. I had the degree, I had the job, I had the capacity to operate as a consultant. But I struggled with the work, wondering whether I really was an engineer.
At some point, the job was taken from me, the clients disappeared, and I found myself looking at my qualifications as worthless. They told me it was imposter’s syndrome. Just keep at it, you’ll see — they said — that you really are an engineer. But that encouragement only went so far. After all — what if, at the end of the day, I really was not an engineer?
You may be familiar with the concept of a fixed vs a growth mindset. A fixed mindset considers that one’s capacity, skills, and talents are stagnant, that you “are” or “are not,” and generally defines their opportunities by whether or not it fits within their sense of self. A growth mindset considers the opposite to be true — essentially, where there’s a will, there’s a way, and challenges are opportunities to increase one’s capacity and skills. There’s no blanket statement for any individual — you can have growth mindset in some aspects of your life and fixed mindset in others. There are many discussions and self-help mantras around becoming more of a “growth mindset” person. Yet I’ve come to believe that it may be more advantageous to adjust your responses to a mindset than the mindset itself.
For example: the generalized counter argument to self-hatred is self-care. Accept yourself, take care of yourself, love yourself, and you’ll be able to make it through that situation. But self-hatred usually has reasons for rearing its ugly head. Trying to tell yourself to ignore those reasons or to change your perspective on those reasons feels a lot like gaslighting yourself. “What you perceive to be true, isn’t actually valid. Just change your mind — have a daisy!”
But the danger of a mindset isn’t actually the mindset itself as much as the response it provokes. Behaviors born from self-hatred are most often times dangerous to oneself. Depending on your personality, self-hatre may freeze you, take away your joy, depreciate your value, and make you susceptible to manipulation, depression, and loss of motivation. But what if, rather than forcing yourself to change your mind, you train yourself to change your actions? What if we were able to decouple mindset from responses, and allow our actions to change our minds?
For a situation like mine where the pressure is high, the deadlines are short, and my own propensity for anxiety is nearly automatic, this change in approach has been critical for me. My mind and emotions are incredibly sensitive and responsive to my situation, which is constantly fluctuating. I don’t have the luxury to change my mindset; quite frankly I’m too stubborn to respond positively to that approach. I may be emotional, but I’m also logical — you can’t convince me through mere rhetoric that the facts I see do not lead to the results I feel. But by allowing myself to break away from the standard responses to something like anxiety and self-hatred, I find that the arguments my brain attaches to are slowly disappearing. Because I can keep walking while I’m anxious, I can keep up a conversation while I’m upset, I can post an update while I’m terrified, I’ve found that, slowly but surely, my mindset is changing.
Seth Godin calls this “doing it scared.” For me, it’s laying the foundation I need to face the impossible, one terrified step at a time.
