“I don’t divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures… I divide the world into the learners and non-learners.”
–Benjamin Barber
This video is the 2nd in a series about fostering academic success from The Raising Happiness Homestudy. Watch the rest of the videos here.
(1) Deconstruct success. When your children—or anyone!—succeeds, find out about the effort that went into their achievement. What led to their success? (Was it an extra practice? A new strategy? A good coach?) This is particularly effective in creating a growth mindset when we see celebrities that seem to be “instant” successes, and we encourage kids to do a little research into what led to their successes. What failures did they overcome, and how?
(2) Practice “innate talents.” Encourage kids to practice things that they assume are personality traits or innate talents, such as being a good friend, a good artist, or being kind or grateful. When we practice anything deliberately and consistently—even if we start off terrible—we tend to improve rapidly. This is a powerful lesson for kids to learn!
(3) Keep practicing using growth-mindset praise with your children (and everyone around you). If you’ve gotten the hang of it in the first area that you scripted last week, think about another situation in which you typically embody a fixed-mindset. (This will be your action trigger.) Then, script the change: what will you say instead that is growth-mindset?
Further Reading: Chapter 1, Raising Happiness, pp. 50-55.
If you would like to download the audio version of this video to listen to in your car or on the go, click the link below.
DOWNLOAD AUDIO HERE.
This post is taken from “The Raising Happiness Homestudy,” an online course I created as a companion to my book Raising Happiness: 10 Simple Steps for More Joyful Kids and Happier Parents. I’m sharing one “class” from this online course per week here, on my blog. Want to see previous posts? Just click this Raising Happiness Homestudy tag. Enjoy!