Is It Self-Knowledge…Or Self-Sabotage? 4 Ways to Break Free From a Fixed Mindset

You know yourself better than anyone—and yet, the very things you think define you as a person may be more about your limits than your potential. Find out when defining yourself turns into limiting yourself, and how and why embracing a growth mindset can change everything.

Deciding what you can and can’t do starts early. Too early. Good at spelling; bad at math. Good at Spanish; bad at chemistry. Good at sports; bad at dance. Good at fitting in; bad at fashion.

We go on to classify ourselves in these ways our whole lives, and see ourselves as a set of switches that flip one way or another: I’m either a sushi person or I’m not. Same goes for being a camping person. A concert person. A morning person.

You may be thinking, OK, but this is who I am and why are you making me question it? Here’s why: What may seem like a clear-eyed assessment of who you are can in fact be limiting in ways you may not realize.

For instance, I would have told you when I was younger that I wasn’t outdoorsy or athletic, and definitely not a runner. Cut to me rock climbing in the pacific northwest in my 30s, joining a touch football team in my 40s, and running for miles and lifting weights in my 50s.

I don’t believe we set out to limit our potential. And I do think that a lot of the defining we do is an attempt to know ourselves, to understand who we are, and aren’t. But there’s a fine line between knowing yourself and reinforcing a limit.

Now, if you really don’t like sushi, you do you. But think about the ease with which we dismiss whole swaths of potential (“I’m not a public speaker,” “I’m a bad writer”), and you begin to see the risk of what is, in fact, a fixed mindset.

The Real Difference Between a Fixed Mindset and a Growth Mindset

You can’t talk about any of this stuff without invoking the name of one Carol S. Dweck, the famous Stanford psychologist, researcher, and author of Mindset—and the pioneer of this particular aspect of what psychs call ‘self concept’: the fixed v. growth mindset.

Dweck describes a fixed mindset as believing your qualities are carved in stone, unchangeable; whereas a growth mindset is “based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others,” she writes in Mindset.

Here’s the rub: If you embrace a fixed mindset, and believe you have a set amount of intelligence, ability, talent, you will naturally feel the urge to prove yourself—not once, but over and over.

(It’s not an on/off switch, btw; Dweck says we’re all a blend of both.)

In other words, your whole life becomes about saving face. It could also contribute to imposter syndrome, because you’re afraid of what people will “find out” about who you really are (and aren’t).

Why Assuming You’re a Certain Kind of Person Is a Problem

Mindset itself, by Dweck’s assertion, is not fixed; we can change both our mindset and our abilities. The heart of mindset is the way we interpret meaning — whether we see ourselves as who we are now or what we’re capable of.

The fixed mindset, per design, is going to see itself not as limited, but as self-assured. Here are a few ways the fixed mindset can masquerade as something better than it is.

No one “wants” to be the latter, and yet, I have absolutely fallen prey to perfectionism, egoism, and defensiveness, thinking I was being focused and ambitious. Haven’t you?

How many times have I thought I was being ambitious when I was trying to prove myself to others; how many times have I thought I was engaging in healthy competition when all I was doing was comparing myself to other people? Many, many times.

Of course, it’s easy to applaud a growth mindset, and to lay claim to it (even when we’re fixed AF). But to really know whether we’re embracing a growth mindset or not, we’ve got to ask a few questions.

(Worry that being a procrastinator makes you a bad person? Not so fast. Discover why delaying makes sense — and six other counterintuitive productivity hacks.)

3 Surprising Reasons to Embrace a Growth Mindset

If you truly believe your intelligence, talent, and abilities are fixed, you not only won’t try things you might enjoy and excel in, but you may have less fun than anyone who does.

Here’s what happens when you embrace a growth mindset:

1 | Confidence becomes a lot less important.

A student wrote to Dweck about how she lacks confidence, and how she knows this because her coaches kept telling her not to let doubts enter her mind, to assume she’s better than everyone, and neither things were helping.

“A remarkable thing I’ve learned from my research is that in the growth mindset, you don’t always need confidence…This is a wonderful feature of the growth mindset. You don’t have to think you’re already great at something to want to do it and to enjoy doing it.”

(Sometimes feelings can block your progress. Find out how to mood-proof your work.)

2 | You’ll be more open to learning — and have more fun doing it.

Dweck conducted studies with hundreds of students, giving each a set of hard problems from a nonverbal IQ test. When they finished, the researchers praised some of them for their ability (“you must be smart”), and the others for their effort (“you must have worked really hard”).

Here’s what happened: The ability praise led that group into a fixed mindset: They rejected harder problems. In contrast, when students were praised for effort, 90 percent wanted to take on the challenging new task that they could learn from.

What’s more, after the harder problems, the ability-praised students had less fun; the others thought the hard problems were the most fun!

Their scores reflected this: “Losing faith in their ability, they were doing worse than when they started. The effort-kids showed better and better performance,” Dweck writes.

3 | Be less afraid of your authentic self.

Think assessing your limits makes you more honest with yourself? Try again.

Dweck also found this stunning statistic: When the students in that study were asked to write about their thoughts on the problems and scores they received so that other students could learn from it, 40 percent of those whose abilities (not effort) were praised flat-out lied about their scores!

(Wondering what you’re passionate about? Start with what you hate.)

4 Ways to Shake Loose Your Fixed Mindset

How can we begin to encourage a growth mindset in ourselves? Here are a few ways to start.

1 | Focus on effort, not outcome.
I say this all the time to participants in my workshops and programs: Get your head out of your asset.

In other words, stop worrying about what you’re working on will “be” and whether anyone will like it. The first long leg of any creative work is simply the effort and practice of doing it, and trusting the work.

If you sit down to “write a book” (don’t do this), you will worry about what the book will be and who will buy it.

Instead, I sit down simply to write and see what comes up, knowing that the more consistent and focused the effort, the more it will yield fruit I can harvest later. And decide what kind of pie I want to bake it into.

(Want to write with me in a critic-free, judgment-free container? Learn more about The Studio, a series of live, drop-in writing sessions every week informed by The Gateless Method, which is growth mindset personified.)

2 | Get curious about challenges instead of being cowed by them.

Whenever I get an idea in my head about something I want to do, maybe an ambitious thing (submit a pitch for publication, write to a big-shot podcaster), I tend to first worry about how hard it will be, and how unlikely it will be to be received well or at all. And I have made a practice of saying, “So what? Do it anyway.”

If any of my efforts don’t pan out, I will be right where I am. I will have lost nothing, and probably learned something along the way. What might happen if. If I try, if I explore. I stop telling myself that everything is make-or-break, because usually, it’s not.

3 | Challenge the old ideas you have of yourself.

When my friends invited me to join a touch football league, I gave them all the reasons I couldn’t possibly do it: I didn’t know how. I never had never touched, let alone caught, a football. I didn’t grow up with brothers. I wasn’t athletic enough. Those are a bunch of truths, and one lie. And none of them mattered.

I joined the league anyway, and did what I was told: Tried to get free and catch the ball, which was the most important job of all. One I could do! We went on to win several championships, season after season, and I even earned myself a moniker: Touchdown Terri. I wouldn’t have believed it, either.

4 | Entertain the thing you never, ever thought you would.

I’ll give you the biggest example to date of how wrong I was about myself.

While I never had any interest in marriage or having children of my own, I dated men my whole life. Wonderful men, men whose company I cherished and enjoyed, and yet with whom I kept bumping up against some central and consistent wall: I kept most at arm’s length, and when they wanted more, I always wanted less.

I was, by all appearances and practices, a straight woman. Did I have passing crushes on women over the years? Sure, but I wrote them off for a number of reasons. Namely, because they didn’t fit how I “saw” myself.

Then this year, after a difficult breakup of a long relationship with a man, and having sworn myself off relationships for a while, I have found myself in the most sudden and surprising relationship of all—with a woman.

You want to talk about surprise?

If I didn’t have a growth mindset, I might have been pretty hard on myself about this, and struggled perhaps a lot more than I have. It also helps that it’s 2024 and I’m a lot older than I was when the thought first crossed my mind.

I cannot tell you how exciting this turn has been for me. It’s been wild.

My friend Jenn Lederer, who also broke up with a long-term boyfriend and has been dating women exclusively ever since, says she looks at herself in the mirror now and says, “What else aren’t you telling me?” I think that’s one of the most thrilling questions we can ask.

Of course, you may not have as big an awakening as that (though you might!), but imagine what could happen if you took all that energy you’ve been using to reinforce one idea of you and released it?

What if you went from propping up one idea of you and instead channeling all that energy into something else, something you never believed you could be? You might really surprise yourself.

One thing I know for sure? You just never know.

…What else might you discover if you scratched the surface? Come find out in The Studio, my first-ever membership-driven series of Gateless writing sessions, designed to help you discover all that you have to offer. Learn more at territrespicio.com/studio.