Growing Up

Last week, I took some time off work to go to my daughter’s ‘graduation’ afternoon at nursery - essentially, a chance to celebrate the end of an era for the families who are about to leave the early years behind and enter the primary school phase of life. The kids sat out in the nursery garden on some tiny red chairs, they said what they wanted to be when they grew up, they wore little t-shirts with ‘Class of 24’ on the back and all the parents cried as we wrestled with the fact that these small people who were babies only yesterday will be in formal education come the autumn. I am so excited for this next phase in my daughter’s life (and not just because of the positive impact on my bank balance - is it bad to think of school as ‘free childcare’?) but I also feel a little apprehensive about her entry into the education system. School is where so many of our beliefs about ourselves get shaped and this, in turn, can have a huge impact - for the better or for the worse - on the rest of our lives, including (maybe even especially) in the workplace. 

I was a relatively academic kid at school, and had the privilege of being within a system that suited me - I found the work easy, had supportive parents (themselves teachers) and was praised, by the school staff at least, for my achievements. I viewed myself as someone who was good at learning and believed in my capacity to try and succeed in new things. As I entered the workplace, I never had any formal training, so learned everything on the job from other people and loved being able to gain new practical skills, like some basic coding, how to design marketing materials in photoshop and how to manage a budget. 

Then, about ten years ago, after I got my first leadership job and had a smidge more disposable income, I decided to take up a new hobby. My partner, for one of my birthdays, had bought me a circus experience day where you got to try out a few different disciplines over the course of an afternoon and it was the most fun I’d ever had. I decided I’d sign up to a weekly introduction to aerial course, where I could (hopefully) learn how to do some fancy stuff on a rope or spend a bit of time swinging around on the trapeze. I turned up on the first week excited, ready to experience the thrill of weightlessness and the satisfaction of mastering something completely new. Me and a bunch of other students stood in front of some ropes and the teacher explained the first steps in learning how to scale it. I watched a few other people attempt it with greater or lesser success and then stepped up to give it a go myself. 

Reader - I couldn’t climb the damn rope. I tried. I really did. I listened to what the teacher was saying, I tried to move my hands and feet in the way that she told me, tried to take the advice she was giving me as I held on for dear life and flailed my legs about. But it was so new, so different from everything I’d done before, that I simply couldn’t do it. Not on that first attempt, and not on the second or third either. By the end of the class I’d made a tiny bit of progress, but nowhere near as much as some of my fellow students. 

Photo by İpek Dükel on Unsplash

I went home completely and utterly crushed. My partner asked me what was wrong as I sat on the couch with a face like a thundercloud. I felt annoyed, frustrated, angry, and didn’t know whether I had it in me to go back the following week. I felt like I had wasted my money - I’d signed up for a course that I clearly wasn’t equipped to complete. I said as much to my partner who, gently, made the suggestion that perhaps it was perfectly normal not to be able to do this completely new thing the first time that I’d tried it, and going back next week would mean that I could build on what I’d learned and start to make some progress. I rolled my eyes. Didn’t he see? I just couldn’t do it - not now, not ever. 

It had been years since I’d been in a proper learning environment and what that experience taught me (other than rope climbing which, I’m proud to say, I now have some very basic skills in) was that I held very fixed beliefs about what I was able or not able to do. If I couldn’t climb the rope the first time, in my mind, it clearly meant that I would always be incapable of climbing a rope. Whilst I’d thought that I enjoyed learning new things, if I were honest, these were all in areas that were already well within or at least adjacent to my comfort zone. Learning how to climb a rope was way outside of it, putting me in the position of a complete beginner trying to learn something that didn’t come naturally. 

The psychologist Carol Dweck is an expert in this area and coined the terms ‘fixed mindset’ and ‘growth mindset’. You can find a summary of her theory in many articles online - including this one - but in brief, someone with a fixed mindset believes that their talents are innate, and someone with a growth mindset believes that their talents can be grown, developed and improved with practice. I had heard of Dweck’s work, and had always assumed I had a growth mindset because that’s what sensible enlightened people have, but, turns out, I absolutely don’t. 

In this article for the Harvard Business Review, Carol Dweck applies her mindset framework to the workplace, and one thing I found particularly interesting is the idea that a pure growth mindset doesn’t exist. Dweck writes: “Everyone is actually a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets…Many managers and executives have benefited from learning to recognize when their fixed-mindset “persona” shows up and what it says to make them feel threatened or defensive”. If we think about our own approaches to leadership in this way, we begin to notice where and when our fixed-mindset points emerge - whether we think we can’t understand a complicated spreadsheet, we’re not tech savvy, we fear and shrink from confrontation, or we’re terrible at public speaking, it’s easy to assume that these are simply facts about us rather than areas for growth. I think this can be cemented still further when we watch someone who is good (in our eyes, at least) at those things and assume that, for example, they were simply born being able to give cracking media interviews, rather than having honed their craft or done some training. 

The reality is, we will all have areas which feel comfortable and come naturally, and areas where we have to work really hard to improve. My goal is to aim to be ‘good enough’ in those areas that I find tricky - maybe I’ll always feel a bit afraid of conflict, but I can equip myself with the tools, the structures, the approaches to have the difficult conversations that I will have to have over the course of my leadership career. This approach, I think, helps us to lean into the areas we find hardest, rather than avoiding or ignoring them in the hope that they go away (spoiler: they won’t). 

My daughter is incredibly excited about starting school in September, and I’m hopeful that the learning environment she’ll enter will be set up to support her and the other children to develop a growth mindset, which is probably a much more important thing to aquire over the years spent at school than learning the features of an oxbow lake. I know there are going to be moments where she encounters something difficult and wants to walk away from it - and, if she does, I’ll be on hand to tell her the story of how mummy learned to climb a rope.