As spring gets underway, you may wish to consider setting some resolutions for yourself, or at least resetting your intentions in order to harness the optimism that the end of winter brings.
Your approach to tackling challenges or failure might be a good place to start. A fascinating theory from the world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck relates to just this. She believes that there are two types of mindset we can adopt in the face of the inevitable obstacles that life throws at us.
A ‘fixed’ mindset is one that is fearful of making mistakes. People with this viewpoint believe that to fail is shame-inducing and painful. In neuroscientific terms, the right ventro-lateral pre-frontal cortex is firing off all sorts of pain signals and the levels of the stress hormone cortisol are rising.
Shame is one of the five basic human emotions that fall into the ‘avoidance’ category (the others are fear, anger, disgust and sadness); this means the brain will do anything to avoid you feeling like this and you will do whatever it takes not to fail. As well as living life by the book and sticking to your routine, you are likely to avoid taking risks, so your creativity, innovation and curiosity all suffer.
By contrast, a ‘growth’ mindset is one that fears losing out on opportunities. For someone who thinks this way, failure is a positive and it can even be exciting. In neuroscience-speak, excitement is on one of the spectrums in the ‘attachment’ category of basic human emotions, alongside joy, love, trust and surprise.
Someone with a growth mindset would feel excited to take a risk, and their brain would release the attachment and bonding hormone oxytocin, which makes them feel warm and good. They might even feel ashamed if they sat on the sidelines while someone else ran off with a great idea, and would experience stress as a result of this.
The good news is, if you identify with one mindset but want to become more like the other, you can. Neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to remould and change itself in response to experiences, means that you can rewire the connections in your brain to engineer the way you react to failure. The catch is that it takes practice. You need to consciously and deliberately focus on what you want to change about your behaviour, and then take action to make it happen.
The cliché ‘do one thing every day that scares you’ is true. Acting against what your brain tells you is a risk helps to retrain your perceptions of what is scary, and over time you will start to view fear and failure in a different light.
So, get out there and face your fears – there’s no better time for starting afresh than spring.
