Mindsets

 When reading some articles revolving around the topic of mindsets, they had me thinking about the time I had to do a similar paper on growth mindsets. In my former class, Career Strategies and Personal Resilience, we dove into this topic within the first two weeks of the semester. We identified what type of mindset we had and maybe the reasoning behind it. At first, I believed to have had a fixed mindset. The feeling of being okay with where I was at, not having the motivation to improve on myself. After turning twenty-one, I suddenly had the desire to make a change in my life go back to school, and develop a more growth mindset. While reflecting on this, I was reading the article “Students’ Mindsets for Learning and Their Neural Underpinnings”, I was stopped at the entity mindset description. I used to believe that my intelligence was fixed and cannot be improved. Later the term incremental mindset was used, and this reflected the growth mindset. These same mindsets are present in the Ted Talk by Carol Dweck, The Power of Believing That You Can Improve. It was nice to see this Ted Talk again to remind myself of where I am at and the reasons why I am at Arizona State University. I live for the idea of having positive feedback rather than negative. Often if receive negative feedback, it will scare me and shove me back into the fixed mindset. After reading the article “Beliefs about Intelligence and Learning Success”, what stuck out to me was the effects on the brain with positive/negative feedback. This wasn’t surprising but physically showing me or anyone else can maybe help them rethink certain ways to approach other things. This leads me to some of the questions given to me. MY educational journey has had an influenced my mindset. MY mindset was always based on whether I did well in a class or not. If I saw a failing grade, which I did a lot in my past, it made me think I was not enough and that I was not smart enough. The term “school isn’t for everyone” would stick to me. Throughout college, however, I have learned to take challenging courses and prove to myself that I belong. From that, the mindset impacted my success. When I first saw failure in college, I immediately shut down and decided school was not for me. Later in life when I returned to college and saw success, I started to believe in myself and started to show that growth mindset that I always had. As a final thought, I have benefited from my new mindset. It has allowed me to believe in myself and reach for my goals.