Level Up Your Learning With a Growth Mindset
This article comes from Just Rijna, the founder of StringKick!
You probably have thoughts about whether you have musical talent or not. But whether you think you’re a naturally gifted musician or that you have no musical talent to speak of, you might be better off forgetting about this whole talent thing altogether. Why? As you’ll learn in this article, your ideas about talent will affect your musical journey in subtle, but powerful ways.
What’s your mindset?
Think about something you achieved recently, such as mastering a difficult piece of music. What do you think made you succeed? Was it your raw, natural talent or the effort you put into it? According to Carol Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, your answer to these questions indicates whether you have a ‘fixed’ mindset or a ‘growth’ mindset. If you have a fixed mindset, you view your successes and failures as indicators of your innate talent. But if you have a growth mindset, you tend to view your abilities as the result of the time and effort you’ve invested into developing them.
As we’ll explore later on, your mindset is not black and white. We all have a complicated mix of both fixed and growth. But before we look into that, why does your mindset matter?
How your mindset affects your progress
Now, why does this matter? Here are five different ways that our mindset shapes our actions.
1. Avoiding or seeking out challenge
If failing means you lack talent, challenges can threaten your self-image. So with a fixed mindset, you may shy away from attempting a difficult piece or exploring a new musical genre, fearing that failure would prove you aren’t talented. But with a growth mindset, challenges are opportunities to improve, meaning you actively seek them out.
2. Giving up versus persevering through obstacles
If you have a fixed mindset, you’re more likely to quit when you come across an obstacle and fail. After all, failing is evidence of a lack of talent. So when you’re trying to learn a challenging piece, you’ll assume you simply don’t have the talent to master it and that you might have reached your ‘talent ceiling.’ By contrast, with a growth mindset, failing is a necessary step on the path to mastery, making you more likely to persevere.
3. Putting in hard work
If your talent is ‘fixed,’ there is little point in practicing. In fact, the need to work hard is seen as evidence that you lack natural talent. But with a growth mindset, you believe that effort and hard work are the keys to becoming a better musician.
4. Making the most out of feedback
Criticism is a direct attack on your competence as a musician if you have a fixed mindset. After all: everything that’s ‘wrong’ with your playing now, will never improve (or so you believe). As a result, you’re likely to become defensive and ignore feedback. But with a growth mindset, you know that shining light on your blind spots through feedback can help you improve and refine your abilities.
5. Drawing inspiration from other musicians’ success
With a growth mindset, seeing people succeed is instructive and inspiring. It shows you what you can accomplish when you put in the work. By contrast, with a fixed mindset, other people’s success isn’t motivating at all. It only shows that there are other people who are more ‘talented’ than you are.
Your mindset is a mix
Reading through these points, you probably recognise elements from both a fixed and growth mindset in yourself. We all have a mix of both fixed and growth elements depending on the skill or topic at hand. For example, when I teach guitar, I notice that most students assume that it takes practice to learn their first guitar chords or to master the major scale on guitar. But when it comes to ear training, we’re tempted to think that this is something you should ‘naturally’ be able to do. This is most likely because when you see someone play music by ear, it looks so easy and automatic, that we assume it must be natural talent. What we can’t see when someone ‘effortlessly’ plays back a melody are the many, many hours that went into developing that ability. In short, our ideas about what we should and shouldn’t be able to do ‘naturally’ are flawed.
How to change your mindset
So, how can you put this knowledge to use? How do you grow a growth mindset? This is something that takes time and attention. It starts by becoming aware of your thought patterns and assumptions. Simply notice when you decide not to do something ‘because this isn’t my thing’ or ‘I could never learn this.' Whenever you learn anything new, there will be frustrating moments where you feel like it’s too hard or that you’re not good enough to ever learn it. That’s okay. The trick is to know those moments will be coming and to let them come and go. Remember that all the greatest musicians in the world have had those moments too!
Next, challenge your assumptions. Maybe there’s a piece you want to learn but think is too difficult. Spend a couple of days practicing it, starting slow and speeding it up bit by bit. You’ll probably find that you can achieve a lot more than you initially thought! After your first win, you’ll be more excited about embracing other challenges as well. After all: who knows how far you can go? Over time, you will internalise a growth mindset more and more, setting the stage for a musical journey that’s both more fun and fulfilling.