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Hi everybody. Welcome to the podcast. We're gonna talk today about one of the things that keeps people from creating, which is the fear of making mistakes or the fear of failure. The antidote to this is really the growth mindset. This is something which is really studied a lot by Carol Dweck and colleagues. What's the growth mindset? Growth mindset is when you believe that your skills and your abilities and even your intelligence can be developed with effort and learning and persistence. So somebody, somebody with a growth mindset feels like there's no such thing as failure. Only feedback. Mistakes help me grow. They're not signs of failure. Mistakes are how you learn. Someone with a growth mindset would say, even if I fail, I'll learn something valuable. Every expert was once a beginner. It's okay to learn as you go. The opposite of the growth mindset is what Carol Dweck calls the fixed mindset, which is where we have this extreme fear of making mistakes and being a failure because to the fixed mindset, a mistake is a sign that I'm not good at this, or even that I'm not good enough. Right. So it means something about my identity, something about my self-worth. So we feel like, when we have this fixed mindset, we feel like there's people that have talent at certain things and other people that don't. And there are people that are just naturally better. And I don't wanna try it because I might fail, and that would mean something about me. That would mean that I'm not good enough. So the growth mindset says, I made a mistake, but I can learn from it. The fixed mindset says I made a mistake, and that means that I'm a failure.

So people with a growth mindset, how does this serve them in the real world? Well, research shows that people with a growth mindset perform better academically. They're more resilient. They're more adaptive, have more coping mechanisms. They're more persistent in the face of challenges. They have better emotion regulation, and they're more focused on learning. Whereas people with a fixed mindset tend to avoid challenges, tend to give up easily. They're focused on their performance, not on their learning, and they tend to have more anxiety and depression.

But the good news is for those of us who tend to have to default toward this fixed mindset, which I would include myself in that number, the good news is that this mindset can be developed, it can be cultivated through repeated practice. It can actually create durable change in our brains when we will practice having a growth mindset, it can make it get to the point where it's actually automatic. Where we're not afraid of mistakes, where we just see them as feedback. It can change our default mental mode if we can practice. So the key is really how do you practice this growth mindset? If one of the biggest things keeping people from taking risks, from creating, from doing new things, from growing, is fear of failure, fear of making mistakes, it probably means that we have a fixed mindset because we think that making mistakes means something about our value. So how can we practice having a growth mindset? How can we go through this journey of training our brains to see things in a new way?

So I wanna talk to you about five different ways that I have practiced a growth mindset. This is an important day today because this episode today marks the first episode of season two of my podcast, and that means that I have done an entire year of weekly podcast episodes. I've published 52 episodes. This is number 53. And I'll just start by saying that the project of starting a podcast was something that was completely new to me and which I had a lot of fear about, because I really knew almost nothing about it. I didn't know how to record. I didn't know how to edit. I didn't know how to publish. I didn't know how to market. I didn't know how to make a website. You name it. I didn't know how to do it. I'm not a great public speaker. I'm not very good at speaking off the cuff. There's a lot of reasons for me to be really nervous about this endeavor. But as I explained in my introductory episode, I went through a journey myself where I was able to change from being a person who had anxiety as my default state toward a person who really felt in charge of my anxiety, and I wanted to share that with other people. So that motivated me to start trying to create this podcast in order to try and reach out and help people, even though it was something that I had no idea how to do. But there were five different ways that I worked on cultivating a growth mindset, which is not natural to me, that I wanted to share with you, because they might help you to figure out how to do the same with something that you're motivated to create or to do, or to risk in your life.

So the first thing that I did to cultivate a growth mindset was that before I began, I already sat down and expected that I was going to make mistakes and I worked on being okay with that ahead of time. And my mistakes, of course, are registered in the recordings that I have published since the beginning of last August. So they're all there for you to see. But I started the podcast knowing that since I have so little experience with this field and know so little about what I'm doing, it's gonna be full of mistakes. We've all heard that saying that pain is weakness, leaving the body. I modified that saying for myself to say that mistakes are weaknesses leaving my podcast. And so I consciously tried to see before I started that each mistake was information for my brain. It was information in the same way that falling down over and over helps you to learn how to ride a bike. There's just a certain amount of falling that you have to do before your mind and your body learn to balance and move in the context of bike riding. And so I consciously viewed mistakes that I was going to make as necessary stepping stones toward a better podcast performance in the future. And accepting that it would involve a lot of unfinished and imperfect stages along the way. So that's the first thing I did. To expect mistakes.

The second thing I did is related to expecting mistakes, and that was to be okay with half baked. I tend to be a perfectionist. I don't like to put things out there until I feel that they're perfect. But before I started, I already said to myself, it's going to be okay for this to be imperfect. And so my goal, instead of making perfect podcast episodes, was to have weekly podcast episodes. I was going to get them out every week and they might be half perfect by the time I had to launch them. There's a quote from the Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Galloway, which I printed out and had on my wall, and I'm gonna read it to you. It says, "when we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice it is small, but we do not criticize it as rootless and stemless. We treat it as a seed, giving it water and nourishment required as a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don't condemn it as immature and underdeveloped, nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change, yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is." And so I consciously decided to view my best efforts as perfect in the stage that I was in, and constantly reminded myself that I was like that rose that my potential was unfolding. And that it was okay for it not to be finished already, but to be in process still. So expect mistakes. Be okay with half baked.

The third thing that I did was to shrink my view. It was really difficult for me at the beginning to look out at this future of endless podcast episodes. How in the world was I going to come up with a new topic every week? How was I gonna keep up with the pace of recording and editing for every week? It takes a lot of time. It's a lot of work. I have a lot of other responsibilities. How was I gonna do this? It seemed impossible, but I decided instead to just focus on what was next. I'm just gonna do what's next, and I'm not gonna worry about what comes after that. I decided to trust that I would learn as I went, that things would get easier as I went. That what was hard and time consuming at first would become easier in the future. And so I just shrunk my view down to what the next step was and just worked on the next episode. I tried not to worry about the fact that I didn't have all the problems solved ahead of time. I could anticipate a lot of problems. I could see that there were a lot of them coming, and I knew that I didn't currently have the solution to all of those problems within my grasp, but I trusted that I would learn as I went, and I would figure out the solutions to those problems as I went.

The fourth thing that I did was to coach myself from the outside in. We had a whole episode about this a few months ago, which I'll link in the show notes, where we talked about how a really great emotion regulation strategy where we're, whether we're talking about anxiety or any other kind of negative emotion, is to coach yourself in the third person. To be able to step outside of your current difficulty and talk to yourself with words like you instead of I. So you use your name, you call yourself by name, and you talk to yourself with the word you. And we talked about studies that show that this can change the emotion intensity in your brain in as little as one second, if you can talk to yourself in the third person. Well, I did this a lot as I was going through this year. And I would have those moments of panic or depression or I just can't do this. I don't know how to make this work. I'm not good enough at this. I shouldn't be doing this. This is ridiculous. I would sit down and I would start to coach myself from the outside in. I'm just gonna read you a few of the things that I wrote down during this year in those moments of panic, and I would sit down and I would start to talk to myself and the third person, all of a sudden I would begin to be able to see things in a different way. So here's a little excerpt from my notebooks. " Adri, mistakes are not signs of failure. Mistakes are how you learn. Honest mistakes while trying your best are not failures. Don't let fear of your imperfection rule the day. It's okay to learn as you go. At least you are learning. The process of falling is part of the process. Expect failures and even welcome them as learning laboratories. A chance for your brain to get feedback on what not to do. All mistakes teach you how not to do it. The unknown is hard to navigate, but growth involves the unknown. The known doesn't cause growth or help you learn new things. This is part of the experience and it's hard, but you can't grow without it. Growth involves moving from weakness to strength, and that involves practice and failure. Don't give it a meaning that it doesn't deserve. Failure and mistakes are part of the process. See them as helpful, interesting information. You aren't condemned for not knowing it all. This is a journey and you'll pick up things that you need as you go. You are on your way even though it appears that you are not moving. You learn every day and that gets you closer to something. Allow yourself time to learn. It's okay." So can you see how my third party coach is able to get that panicked, anxious self that is so worried about making mistakes back into that view of not being worried about performance, but focusing on growth, focusing on learning and focusing on mistakes as a resource, not as a threat.

The fifth thing that I did was to harvest feedback that I got. Of course, I got feedback from family and friends that were listening and were giving me comments on different things that they thought were effective, things that were ineffective, things that I was doing well, things that I, they felt, felt that I could do better. My old self, my fixed mindset self would have reacted to this criticism and given it a meaning it would've seen criticism as meaning that I'm not good enough. But I worked on the growth mindset, seeing criticism as, "great, now I know what to do to improve." of course, every time I received any kind of feedback or criticism, I felt always an initial resistance. Always an initial, whoa, hang on, stop. But I started to recognize that our bodies and our brains don't like energy expenditure. And so I started to see that initial resistance that I had just as my body's effort to conserve energy. Anytime somebody asks me or tells me that I need to change something, my brain is going to initially put up a block because it doesn't like to spend energy. So I observed that initial reaction to not wanting to spend energy, and then I decided to take the next step, by believing that I could take what was useful from this person's comments and leave the rest. I realized it was okay for me to have a filter in place, that some of what people said was going to be useful and some of it wasn't. Sometimes when people give criticism, it's more about the person giving it than about you. It's more about the way that they're feeling, their personal preferences, but sometimes criticism really can help you to improve. So I put that filter up and tried to distinguish between what might be this particular person's issues versus what might reflect something that could really improve my podcast for people generally. So I got all kinds of comments about my tone, about my delivery, about my content, about it being too technical, about it not including enough stories, about not, it not being memorable enough, and these different comments, I decided to practice them. I decided to work on making my tone more natural, including more stories, trying to make the, outlines more memorable and more easy to follow. And I would work on it, and then I would talk to the person again, and I would say, " Hey, I've been working on what it is that you commented on. Can you tell me if you feel like I've improved?" so I really looked at that feedback as something worth harvesting, something worth mining, that there was some gold in there that might really help me improve. And I have to honestly say that following those people's critiques really did help my, episodes improve. I really did see the difference in listen ability in relatability in being able to connect with my listeners through the different things that people told me as I went along. And as I said, you can go back and listen to those, those early episodes and hear how I just sounded more nervous, more wooden, how everything was a lot more technical. Well, a lot of that improvement that came through the year came through harvesting the feedback that people gave me and practicing it and seeing it as something useful, another resource for me.

So those are the five ways that I consciously tried to practice this growth mindset. The first was to expect mistakes ahead of time. To be okay with half baked. Third was to shrink my view. Fourth was to coach myself from the outside in. And fifth was to harvest the feedback. There's some suggestions for you of how to practice the growth mindset. Some people have it naturally, some of us don't. But isn't it great that science teaches us that we can all cultivate it just by practicing it? So I hope that's helpful. Thanks for joining me on this podcast journey.

So now we're gonna have our kindness narrative, stay tuned. It really helps you in an almost effortless manner to reduce your default anxiety levels and your feeling of wellbeing in the world. But if you would like to reduce drastically today the amount of anxiety that you are feeling, then think about sending in your own kindness narrative to me. It doesn't have to be perfect. I can easily edit it on my end. It can be full of ums and pauses and mistakes. You can just send me an audio and I can fix it up and then we'll share it with everyone and it'll give you all these wonderful benefits. If you don't wanna record your own voice, you can send me in a written form. But I ask you to do this not for my benefit, but for yours. You can send in one, you can send in five. There's no limit to the number that you could send in. If you wanna go back and listen to our gratitude episode, which we had a few months ago, I'll put it in the show notes. It can really help you to recognize what it is that practicing gratitude gives you in terms of your wellbeing and your anxiety management. Thanks, and see you next time.

When I was working on my bachelor's degree, the school orchestra went on a tour to California. And we stayed with families in the Los Angeles area and on our only night free, I asked our host if he would loan me a car so that we could go downtown and see Lynn Harrell play a recital downtown. I had always wanted to see him play and he, he loaned us a car, gave me the key to his car, his gigantic new car, and we went downtown. And the evening started off really great. The recital was wonderful. It got out kinda late. But at that, at that point, we went looking for an address to an Ethiopian restaurant. And this took us into a neighborhood where I felt a little bit outta place. And it was about an hour's drive away from, from the house where we were staying. We got to the place and we, we ate well and we left after the restaurant had closed. And to our embarrassment, none of our credit cards worked in the restaurant and we didn't have any cash. So we we had to leave and go out and find a, an electronic. bank teller and then come back. And we, we found one finally and we made it back with the money. By then, it was, it was the wee hours of the morning. , I parked the car across the street from the restaurant and I went in with one of the girls and the other one stayed in the car. And they were, they were happy and maybe a little bit surprised to see us there. And when we didn't come right back out to the car, the girl that had remained in the car came in. And to be safe, she locked the car as she left it without realizing that the, the key to the car was inside the car. And, even worse, I had left the headlights on. So I, once we figured out what was going on, I, I, I borrowed a, a hanger from the people at the restaurant and I tried to use the hanger wire to, to break into the car. I'd done this several times with my own car in similar situations, but this car was, was a fortress. I couldn't, I couldn't squeeze the wire in between the window and the door. I tried for almost an hour before I gave up and I was shivering from cold. It was January. During this time there was a car, one car only, that passed by very, very slowly. It was a beat up car and it had plastic taped over some of the broken windows. The driver was African American and he, he leaned over to look and study out our situation and see what was going on, and he and I caught each other's eye, but without any kind of greeting. I felt a little bit disturbed, but maybe it was just from the cold of the night. Later I found a, a dance hall that was still open, a couple blocks down the avenue, and I found a guy who, to whom I explained my situation. he introduced me to another Ethiopian fellow there who said he was gonna try and help me out. So I went back and waited at the car, and while I was waiting at the car, the beat up car drove by one more time and passed by very, very slowly. And the driver was just looking, staring at me. But this time I noticed a little dog was also staring at me from his backseat. Finally, the car battery got weak and died. The lights, headlights, dimmed, and went out. And for the third time, this beat up car came by, and this time it stopped in the middle of the avenue. The driver got outta the car and came over to me and spoke to me. He said, if you need a jump, I have jumper cables and you can find me in the back of that gasoline station nearby. The Ethiopian from the dance hall ended up giving me a ride in his car during about two hours time to get up to the, the man's house who's where we were, where we were staying, and to get us to wake him up and get a second key. And he didn't accept any, any money for the, for his trouble. A bit behind the gasoline station closer to morning than to the middle of the night, we found the beat up car, the driver of which was sleeping inside with his dog under a really light blanket in about 46 degree cold. He was homeless and he lived in an unregistered car that could not have passed Inspection. Well, like Abraham in the desert, he went out three times in the most inhospitable part of the day to see if anybody needed help. He was worried about me and the girls. All of his possessions in the world were inside that car, and they were very few, but they included jumper cables. They were worn out. The clips had long since fallen off the ends, but he knew how to wrap 'em around the battery terminals in in our car. While he was serving us, I couldn't help but note that he was wearing pants that were knitted out of yarn and that they didn't fit him that well and they couldn't possibly have protected him very well from the cold. He didn't accept any money for his trouble either. But after seeing that our motor started up, okay this angel took his jumper cables and left in his own car. This man's kindness helped us out a great deal and has been an inspiration to me ever since.