Lauren Kooistra: February 2018

It's a snow day today, and I'm tucked in my attic(y) bedroom, sitting at my desk. I have tea with me, and a sweater and a candle, and--in my honest opinion--there is not much more to life that you need (on a snow day at least). I sit, reading, about Mindsets.

The word "mindset" is one that fascinates me, because it proposes something I think we easily forget, which is: You can set your mind. To something. Or to another thing.

Here's a reality of my life: I am a trained pianist and piano teacher, operating in a world of humanities scholars in my role as "Associate Director" of a major University's Humanities Institute. I sit down to talk with people on the frequent who have studied and thought and dwelt and written canonical words to guide the world in its being around themes that just do not come up, when you're sitting at a piano.

My point is: I feel in over my head, pretty much all of the time.

(I'm also at least 10 years younger than everyone around me, so maybe tomorrow I will learn to cut myself a break.)

I've been reading about Mindsets for a week or so now, a specific book written by psychologist Carol Dweck. Her work has found that people can operate in a "fixed" mindset or a "growth" mindset. People in a fixed mindset believe that their intelligence and ability is (you guessed it--) fixed. "You either have it or you don't," these people believe. And it manifests in their lives as a continual process to prove themselves, to maintain superiority. Because what does it say about them if they fail at something? It says: You--the very essence of you--is not enough. And this leads people to not even try, because--as one fixed mindset person put it--"Nothing is harder than saying 'I gave it my all and it wasn't good enough.'"* In a fixed mindset, every test has the power to define you.

People with a growth mindset, however, understand that you can cultivate your outcomes by your effort. It has nothing to do with innate levels of ability; instead, it is about problem-solving, trying things out and changing your approach when something doesn't work. People in a growth mindset are not afraid of challenges; they embrace them. They are resilient when they fail, and have greater and more creatively interesting successes.

A fixed mindset, Dweck says, puts an end to "exuberant learning." But a growth mindset makes learning actually fun.

I think about this, all week. I notice what is not a surprise to me: Fixed mindset is my jam. I notice that I often don't have the capacity to fully engage in learning or any other kind of experience because I'm so focused on whether or not I've got the ability, in the same way you might walk around wondering whether or not you've got the plague (as if plague were a real threat...[insert raised eyebrow here]).

What this simply means is:
I'm distracted from the real art of living, pretty much all of the time.

I think about how I tend to sit in those meetings where the-people-who-know-things-I-don't talk about what they know, and the whole time I'm working so hard to try and find the thing in my mind that proves that I belong with them.

I think about this and I think: No wonder I am so freaking tired.

And as I think on these things, I begin to notice that my frame is changing. Instead of looking at a conversation out of what I do not know but should, I begin to look at it as "what do I not know but want to know?"

I begin to notice that my frame is changing to pure and simple Curiosity.

And I begin to notice that curiosity feels so. much. better.

So today, I sit at my desk in the glow of lamp-and-candle-light, the darkened sky flecked with ice crystals beating against my window. I drink my tea and cuddle in my sweater. I set my mind, I change the frame. To curiosity.

*Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, by Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D.