I’ve been reading Mindset by Carol Dweck lately. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a (really fascinating) nonfiction book about how the way we think about our potential affects our ability willingness to learn.

Dweck posits two common mindsets. In the fixed mindset, intelligence is unchangeable. Oh, you can increase you knowledge, but your intelligence is something you are born with. In the growth mindset, through effort, you can increase your intelligence. You are not innately intelligent or innately stupid; your intelligence develops if you put work into it and doesn’t if you don’t. (If you’re curious, you can do the test here.)

Before starting the book, I was quite sure that I had a growth mindset. After all, I set up my classroom so that students are always encouraged to redo work in order to improve their understanding. I give copious amounts of (generally written) feedback to help them figure out where they are and what they could do next to move forward in their understanding of concepts. I firmly believe that although there are some areas we find easier and some that we find more difficult, neither ease nor difficulty guarantees our success or failure.

There’s a wonderful quote that I’ve seen attributed to Kevin Durant and Tim Notke:

hard work beats talent

I have no doubt that this is true.

So why, then, did I say at the beginning of the post that I believed I had a growth mindset “before” starting the book?

Because I’m starting to realize that I may believe in a growth mindset for other people, but when I apply it to myself, the actions and feelings I see are more fixed than growth. I’ve worked incredibly hard over the past few years to prove myself to one person … and every time my work was disregarded, I felt not just that I had failed in my goal, but that I myself was a failure. I loved the work I was doing – both within and without the classroom – and I would have done it regardless. When this person didn’t notice what I was doing, however, (or worse, devalued it), I would feel like my worth as a teacher was being denied. I know – and knew – that I wasn’t working for recognition but for my students … and yet when feeling unrecognized, I questioned myself.

When I was a child, I was told that I was a “talented and gifted writer.” (Everyone who’s read the book just winced.) I loved writing – I still do – and as a child I would write all the time. I always had stories on the go, a couple of poems I was churning out, written role plays with other members of the bulletin board of which I was co-sysop.

As I grew up, though, and writing and publishing a book became a real possibility for me, I stopped writing so much. What if I wrote something, and it was really bad? What would people say? What would that mean about this supposed gift I had?

So much easier to just not write – at least, not outside of teaching. I knew that I could help my students move forward in their writing skills by showing them mine: I would do demonstration writes and explain that my hook was really bad, but I would come back to it in a future draft because it was more important to get the words down on paper; or I would show them how I would think through my revisions by reading my writing out loud in order to hear what it sounded like so I could get closer to what I wanted.

In my personal life, however, there is no one I can help with my writing.

And so I don’t write.

Or more accurately, I haven’tanything is to put the work into doing it. I have a violin that I haven’t played for months. It doesn’t matter how capable a musician I could be if I never pick it up and practice. I enjoy painting – but I’m never going to be a good painter if I don’t put paint on the canvas. If I want to call myself a writer, journaling and letter writing isn’t going to cut it.

More importantly, though, I don’t want to be merely a lecturer. I teach by example – or I try to. If I want my students to challenge themselves and to realize that their ability is dependent on their effort … maybe I need to start putting effort in myself.

Because my mind is not “set.” I am a lifelong learner. This is just one more area in which I can push myself.

What’s yours?