What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness | Ro...

What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? If you think it's fame and money, you're not alone – but, according to psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, you're mistaken. 

As the director of 75-year-old study on adult development, Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction. 

In this talk, he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life.

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Driving yourself to perform: If not you, then who? | Eugene Whelan

We all want to do better. Better at work, better in life, better at everything. But how do we achieve this and do we really know what better is?

Performance at work has always been a hot topic. At worst, performance (or the lack of it) can put a company under, at best it can make it positively flourish.

It's the reason we have performance reviews, targets and KPIs – so that our boss and the management of the company can tell how we, and they, are doing by performance results.

But performance isn’t just about facts, figures and targets. It’s not just about meeting expectations to a satisfactory level within the work place.

In terms of ourselves, performance, and our understanding of it, is the key to personal and professional development and the business success.

Or to use a driving analogy: if you can't see where you are on the map, how can you work out your route, or know when you have arrived.

So it's down to you to manage your own performance at work if you want to get the results and recognition you want and get to where you really want to be.

 North, South, East or West?
Back to our map analogy. Do you know where you are in terms of performance at work?

Have you looked at your performance, analysed your strengths and weaknesses and more importantly accepted them?

Have you ever conducted your own performance review? If not, then you need to, now.
Choose a time-frame – say the last year. Brainstorm a list of your achievements (don’t be shy), your failures (do be honest!), your challenges and issues, obstacles you feel you overcame, situations you think may have got the better of you and anything else you think may affect or contribute to your performance at work. These can include factors outside of work as well.

Group the different elements together and you will have a good idea of where you are on the map performance-wise. Then you need to decide what you need to change so you can improve your performance.

 Analysis and Investment

Change is usually a good thing, but invariably very hard to do, especially when it needs to be self-motivated.

However, now you have reviewed your current position, you will have a very good indication of where you may be falling short, not only in terms of your mindset around your job and your company, but also in terms of where you may need additional learning and development to do your job better and improve your position.

Having a good awareness of the skills/abilities you lack to improve your performance and further your career is the starting point to doing something about that.

This is when communication with your superior is key. You will need to make an investment in yourself and ideally the source of the investment will come from your company. You just need to convince them why it will be commercially profitable for them to do so. Performance reviews are the perfect time to do this.

It's this simple:

1. Arrange a meeting with your supervisor to discuss your self-review and use it to point out your strengths but also the areas where you feel you are lacking. (Ask for their feedback on this.)
2. Highlight the type of training or investment you have identified you need to undertake, to improve upon those areas. (Do they agree with you?)
3. Discuss how afterwards, you would be more effective and productive in areas, and how this would impact on your contribution to the company as whole. (What's their opinion?)

Well it’s not really that simple but you have to be the “driver” in this situation, your boss won’t just stop and hand it to you.

 So. Get your Performance Sat-Nav in Gear

If you want to get better at what you do, if you want to succeed and if you want to further your career then you need to take control.

These days, the burden of self-improvement is squarely on the shoulders of employees not the managers. The thinking being that if you want to “get ahead” then you need to do something about it. And the more pro-active you are the more favourably it will be looked upon.

That means you need to know where you are headed and how you are going to get there.

Based on your own performance review and your assessment of the investment you need to improve your skill and performance levels, you need to create a road-map of actions that will help you make it happen.

Again take the time-frame of a year (or three if that’s more reasonable) and decide where you want to be at the end of that time. Then work backwards as to what you need to do to achieve that goal.

Could it be finding and paying for your own training if it is a crucial area that just can’t wait? Is it a daily strategy or ethos that will lift your performance levels and your mindset? Perhaps you need to change the way you do or approach certain tasks or projects?

Whatever it is, it’s up to you to decide. And at the crux of all of this is honesty.

You need to be truly honest with yourself about what you need to improve upon, so that you can actually make those improvements happen.

If you can’t then you will be looking at a map with no roads and you’ll be going nowhere.

So ask yourself this question: What have you done to improve your skills, abilities, and your performance in the last six months?
Author's Bio:


Eugene Whelan is a qualified business and life coach and is the owner of One To Ten Coaching.

He has over 25 years experience at senior management level in the manufacturing and distribution industries.

Eugene has worked in various senior roles including, sales, manufacturing and commercial.

During this time he has gained an invaluable insight into the day-to-day pressures that go with such leadership roles and the expectations to be met.

Eugene is a direct and enlightened business consultant, able to see the practical side of people and situations as well as the more intangible qualities and potential of both.

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Christmas Stress Relief

Christmas can be a very stressful time of year.  For many the Christmas holiday period is a mass of complex social interactions with family or relatives, some of whom you may rather not see. 

There could well be expectations, or at least perceived expectations, to create a ‘wonderful Christmas’ with presents and perhaps the most important meal of the year. 

Some people rate Christmas as being more stressful than divorce or being burgled.  We don't want to add to the stress and have deliberately avoided putting images of holly, robins, snowmen or anything else Christmassy on this page!

The page does, however, provide some tips and advice to make your Christmas as stress-free as possible. Don't let the festive season get you down: follow the tips and advice you find here, relax and enjoy yourself.

Plan Ahead

Start making a list of things you need to do for Christmas early: for example, shopping, food and presents, decorations, seating plans or travel arrangements.  Make the list as detailed as possible, include people’s phone numbers or email addresses to make contacting them simpler.

If it's already too late, bookmark this page ready for next year and set yourself a reminder to do this in mid-November.

Try to prioritise the items on your list: can they be done now, and are they essential?  Do not overestimate how much you can achieve on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  Many recipes can, at least in part, be made ahead of time and frozen thus reducing tasks in the immediate run-up to Christmas Day.

Delegate the responsibility for certain tasks to other family members since this will reduce your workload.  Keep your list for next year; it’ll need tweaking and updating but will give you reminders of the sorts of things you need to think about.

See our pages: Time Management and Delegation Skills for more ideas of how to get organised and prioritise your tasks and time.

Shop Online

Although shopping locally has many advantages, High Street shopping just before Christmas can be particularly stressful, often cold and wet (in the UK anyway) and with hundreds of other stressed people trying to find the ‘perfect’ gift. 

Shop online from the comfort of your own home as you’ll not only save time and be less stressed but will probably save money too.  Always make sure you buy from reputable online retailers and check that they can deliver before the big day.  Take advantage of a cash back site such as TopCashBack in the UK to save even more money on your purchases.

If you haven’t already tried it, you may be able to do your food shopping online too and have it delivered directly to your door. Remember to book your delivery slot early though as the prime delivery slots may well be booked early.

Christmas Cards

Start writing your Christmas cards early too!

Many people receive and send lots of cards at Christmas time so start in mid-November, if you can, and write a few cards and envelopes each day keeping them to one side before posting or delivering.

Know When to Stop

Decide when you will stop your Christmas preparations and start to relax and enjoy the holiday.  Work towards and try to stick to this goal, even if it is in the late afternoon on Christmas Eve.  Remember that Christmas is your holiday too.

Christmas Day and Beyond

Keep Calm

Play some relaxing music, perhaps seasonal carols, and burn some scented candles, incense or aromatherapy oil. Take a relaxing hot bath to unwind.

Our pages: Relaxation Techniques including Aromatherapy for some advice about how to relax.

Seating Arrangements

If there is someone coming to dinner that you dislike, avoid sitting opposite them and instead seat them to one side and opposite somebody who they get on with better.  Invite a few more reasonable people along as it will help dilute any stress caused by relatives.  It’s a case of the more the merrier!

Keep Calm

Play some relaxing music, perhaps seasonal carols, and burn some scented candles, incense or aromatherapy oil. Take a relaxing hot bath to unwind.

Our pages: Relaxation Techniques including Aromatherapy for some advice about how to relax.

Seating Arrangements

If there is someone coming to dinner that you dislike, avoid sitting opposite them and instead seat them to one side and opposite somebody who they get on with better.  Invite a few more reasonable people along as it will help dilute any stress caused by relatives.  It’s a case of the more the merrier!

Turkey

If you are planning on cooking a bird then turkey or pheasant are good choices. They both contain tryptophan which our bodies use to make serotonin, a powerful brain-calming chemical.

Have Decaffeinated Coffee

When your body is under stress it produces cortisol which prepares you for ‘fight or flight’ situations. Caffeine does too; see our article: Stress, Nutrition and Diet for more information.  

Offer everybody decaffeinated coffee and tea, or herbal tea alternatives, since this will help keep the stress levels down and has the added bonus that people may fall asleep after dinner!

Practise Breathing

When we’re stressed our heart beat increases and our breathing shallows, it’s all part of the fight or flight reaction.  Work on reversing this process and take time to breathe deeply. 

Breathe in deeply through your nose, hold for 15 or 20 seconds and then breathe slowly out through your mouth, repeat for a few minutes to instantly help reduce stressful feelings.

Have a 'Great Escape' Plan!

It's a good idea to have some pre-planned excuses to escape from proceedings if they get too stressful.

Be imaginative and use things such as leaving the room to make a phone-call to a friend or perhaps checking on a neighbour. Just by having planned a couple of escape routes you’ll probably feel less stressed anyway but actually leaving the situation, even for 10 minutes, will help clear your mind and relax you.

Make Time for Exercise

Christmas is, for many, a time of excessive eating and drinking and exercise can be easily overlooked.  Diets are particularly popular in January!  Exercise is a great way to reduce stress as it burns off hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and helps produce mood-enhancing endorphins.  Try going for a walk after dinner as the fresh air and exercise will lift your mood and make you feel better.

Avoid Excessive Alcohol

Most de-stressing articles will tell you to avoid alcohol altogether but, let’s be realistic, it is Christmas!  However, do avoid excessive alcohol as it dehydrates your body and makes your liver work overtime to process it. Drink as much water or juice as alcohol as this will help you to stay hydrated, feel better and therefore cope better with stressful situations. You'll also feel better on Boxing Day.

Have Fun!

Remember it’s your Christmas too so try to relax and have fun, laugh and be merry.  If you do find others around you difficult then try to rise above the situation.  If things don’t go to plan try not to worry too much, instead laugh about them and make them into fun memories that you can talk about during Christmases to come. "Remember that time Mum set fire to the sprouts!".

Have a great, stress-free, Christmas break!

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Energetic NLP: How to Retrieve Your Energy from Other People | Art Giser

This is a powerful 10 minute video explaining the importance of reclaiming and clearing your energy when you feel depleted, and shaking off other people's energy.  This is a 2 minute daily routine that can change your life.  

Why not give it a go let me know what you think below!

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How to Become Happy -- The Secret of Happiness | Richard Bandler

A simple perspective on the attainment of happiness.  

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The Effort Effect | Marina Krakovsky

According to a Stanford psychologist, you’ll reach new heights if you learn to embrace the occasional tumble.

One day last November, psychology professor Carol Dweck welcomed a pair of visitors from the Blackburn Rovers, a soccer team in the United Kingdom’s Premier League. The Rovers’ training academy is ranked in England’s top three, yet performance director Tony Faulkner had long suspected that many promising players weren’t reaching their potential. Ignoring the team’s century-old motto—arte et labore, or “skill and hard work”—the most talented individuals disdained serious training.

On some level, Faulkner knew the source of the trouble: British soccer culture held that star players are born, not made. If you buy into that view, and are told you’ve got immense talent, what’s the point of practice? If anything, training hard would tell you and others that you’re merely good, not great. Faulkner had identified the problem; but to fix it, he needed Dweck’s help.

A 60-year-old academic psychologist might seem an unlikely sports motivation guru. But Dweck’s expertise—and her recent book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success—bear directly on the sort of problem facing the Rovers. Through more than three decades of systematic research, she has been figuring out answers to why some people achieve their potential while equally talented others don’t—why some become Muhammad Ali and others Mike Tyson. The key, she found, isn’t ability; it’s whether you look at ability as something inherent that needs to be demonstrated or as something that can be developed.

What’s more, Dweck has shown that people can learn to adopt the latter belief and make dramatic strides in performance. These days, she’s sought out wherever motivation and achievement matter, from education and parenting to business management and personal development.

As a graduate student at Yale, Dweck started off studying animal motivation. In the late 1960s, a hot topic in animal research was “learned helplessness”: lab animals sometimes didn’t do what they were capable of because they’d given up from repeat failures. Dweck wondered how humans coped with that. “I asked, ‘What makes a really capable child give up in the face of failure, where other children may be motivated by the failure?’” she recalls.

At the time, the suggested cure for learned helplessness was a long string of successes. Dweck posited that the difference between the helpless response and its opposite—the determination to master new things and surmount challenges—lay in people’s beliefs about why they had failed. People who attributed their failures to lack of ability, Dweck thought, would become discouraged even in areas where they were capable. Those who thought they simply hadn’t tried hard enough, on the other hand, would be fueled by setbacks. This became the topic of her PhD dissertation.

Dweck and her assistants ran an experiment on elementary school children whom school personnel had identified as helpless. These kids fit the definition perfectly: if they came across a few math problems they couldn’t solve, for example, they no longer could do problems they had solved before—and some didn’t recover that ability for days.

Through a series of exercises, the experimenters trained half the students to chalk up their errors to insufficient effort, and encouraged them to keep going. Those children learned to persist in the face of failure—and to succeed. The control group showed no improvement at all, continuing to fall apart quickly and to recover slowly. These findings, says Dweck, “really supported the idea that the attributions were a key ingredient driving the helpless and mastery-oriented patterns.” Her 1975 article on the topic has become one of the most widely cited in contemporary psychology.

Attribution theory, concerned with people’s judgments about the causes of events and behavior, already was an active area of psychological research. But the focus at the time was on how we make attributions, explains Stanford psychology professor Lee Ross, who coined the term “fundamental attribution error” for our tendency to explain other people’s actions by their character traits, overlooking the power of circumstances. Dweck, he says, helped “shift the emphasis from attributional errors and biases to the consequences of attributions—why it matters what attributions people make.” Dweck had put attribution theory to practical use.

She continued to do so as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, collaborating with then-graduate student Carol Diener to have children “think out loud” as they faced problem-solving tasks, some too difficult for them. The big surprise: some of the children who put forth lots of effort didn’t make attributions at all. These children didn’t think they were failing. Diener puts it this way: “Failure is information—we label it failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’” During one unforgettable moment, one boy—something of a poster child for the mastery-oriented type—faced his first stumper by pulling up his chair, rubbing his hands together, smacking his lips and announcing, “I love a challenge.”

Such zest for challenge helped explain why other capable students thought they lacked ability just because they’d hit a setback. Common sense suggests that ability inspires self-confidence. And it does for a while—so long as the going is easy. But setbacks change everything. Dweck realized—and, with colleague Elaine Elliott soon demonstrated—that the difference lay in the kids’ goals. “The mastery-oriented children are really hell-bent on learning something,” Dweck says, and “learning goals” inspire a different chain of thoughts and behaviors than “performance goals.”

Students for whom performance is paramount want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process. For them, each task is a challenge to their self-image, and each setback becomes a personal threat. So they pursue only activities at which they’re sure to shine—and avoid the sorts of experiences necessary to grow and flourish in any endeavor. Students with learning goals, on the other hand, take necessary risks and don’t worry about failure because each mistake becomes a chance to learn. Dweck’s insight launched a new field of educational psychology—achievement goal theory.

Dweck’s next question: what makes students focus on different goals in the first place? During a sabbatical at Harvard, she was discussing this with doctoral student Mary Bandura (daughter of legendary Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura), and the answer hit them: if some students want to show off their ability, while others want to increase their ability, “ability” means different things to the two groups. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, it feels like something static that lives inside of you—whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck explains. People with performance goals, she reasoned, think intelligence is fixed from birth. People with learning goals have a growth mind-set about intelligence, believing it can be developed. (Among themselves, psychologists call the growth mind-set an “incremental theory,” and use the term “entity theory” for the fixed mind-set.) The model was nearly complete (see diagram).

Growing up in Brooklyn in the ’50s, Dweck did well in elementary school, earning a spot in a sixth-grade class of other high achievers. Not just any spot, it turned out. Their teacher, Mrs. Wilson, seated the students in IQ order and even used IQ scores to dole out classroom responsibilities. Whether Mrs. Wilson meant to or not, she was conveying her belief in fixed intelligence. Dweck, who was in row 1, seat 1, believes Mrs. Wilson’s intentions were good. The experience didn’t scar her—Dweck says she already had some of the growth mind-set—but she has shown that many students pegged as bright, especially girls, don’t fare as well.

Tests, Dweck notes, are notoriously poor at measuring potential. Take a group of adults and ask them to draw a self-portrait. Most Americans think of drawing as a gift they don’t have, and their portraits look no better than a child’s scribbles. But put them in a well-designed class—as Betty Edwards, the author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, has—and the resulting portraits look so skilled it’s hard to believe they’re the work of the same “talentless” individuals. The belief that you can’t improve stunts achievement.

Culture can play a large role in shaping our beliefs, Dweck says. A college physics teacher recently wrote to Dweck that in India, where she was educated, there was no notion that you had to be a genius or even particularly smart to learn physics. “The assumption was that everyone could do it, and, for the most part, they did.” But what if you’re raised with a fixed mind-set about physics—or foreign languages or music? Not to worry: Dweck has shown that you can change the mind-set itself.

The most dramatic proof comes from a recent study by Dweck and Lisa Sorich Blackwell of low-achieving seventh graders. All students participated in sessions on study skills, the brain and the like; in addition, one group attended a neutral session on memory while the other learned that intelligence, like a muscle, grows stronger through exercise. Training students to adopt a growth mind-set about intelligence had a catalytic effect on motivation and math grades; students in the control group showed no improvement despite all the other interventions.

“Study skills and learning skills are inert until they’re powered by an active ingredient,” Dweck explains. Students may know how to study, but won’t want to if they believe their efforts are futile. “If you target that belief, you can see more benefit than you have any reason to hope for.”

The classroom workshop isn’t feasible on a large scale; for one thing, it’s too costly. So Dweck and Blackwell have designed a computer-based training module to simulate the live intervention. Their hip multimedia software, called Brainology, is still in development, but thanks to early buzz from a Time magazine article and Dweck’s recent book, teachers have begun clamoring for it, one even asking to become a distributor.

Unlike much that passes for wisdom about education and performance, Dweck’s conclusions are grounded in solid research. She’s no rah-rah motivational coach proclaiming the sky’s the limit and attitude is everything; that’s too facile. But the evidence shows that if we hold a fixed mind-set, we’re bound not to reach as high as we might.

Although much of Dweck’s research on mind-sets has taken place in school settings, it’s applicable to sports, business, interpersonal relationships and so on. “Lots and lots of people are interested in her work; it touches on so many different areas of psychology and areas outside of psychology,” says Stanford psychology professor Mark Lepper, ’66, who as department chair in 2004 lured Dweck away from Columbia, where she’d been for 15 years. “The social psychologists like to say she’s a social psychologist; the personality psychologists say she’s a personality psychologist; and the developmental psychologists say she’s a developmental psychologist,” Lepper adds.

By all rights, her appeal should transcend academia, says New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, who is well known for making psychological research accessible to the general public. “One of the most popular pieces I ever did relied very heavily on work done by Carol Dweck,” he said in a December interview in the Journal of Management Inquiry. “Carol Dweck deserves a big audience. It is criminal if she does not get that audience.” Perhaps Mindset will help; it was written for lay readers.

It certainly cemented Tony Faulkner’s belief that Dweck could help the Blackburn Rovers soccer team. Unlike the disadvantaged kids in Dweck’s middle-school study, the Rovers didn’t think they lacked what it took to succeed. Quite the opposite: they thought their talent should take them all the way. Yet both groups’ fixed mind-set about ability explains their aversion to effort.

But aren’t there plenty of people who believe in innate ability and in the notion that nothing comes without effort? Logically, the two ideas are compatible. But psychologically, explains Dweck, many people who believe in fixed intelligence also think you shouldn’t need hard work to do well. This belief isn’t entirely irrational, she says. A student who finishes a problem set in 10 minutes is indeed better at math than someone who takes four hours to solve the problems. And a soccer player who scores effortlessly probably is more talented than someone who’s always practicing. “The fallacy comes when people generalize it to the belief that effort on any task, even very hard ones, implies low ability,” Dweck says.

Her advice for the Rovers rings true for anyone stuck in a fixed mind-set. “Changing mind-sets is not like surgery,” she says. “You can’t simply remove the fixed mind-set and replace it with the growth mind-set.” The Rovers are starting their workshops with recent recruits—their youngest, most malleable players. (Faulkner realizes that players who’ve already earned millions from being “naturals” have little incentive to reshape their brains.) The team’s talent scouts will be asking about new players’ views on talent and training—not to screen out those with a fixed mind-set, but to target them for special training.

In his 2002 essay that relied on Dweck’s work, Gladwell cited one of her best-known experiments to argue that Enron may have collapsed precisely because of the company’s talent-obsessed culture, not despite it. Dweck’s study showed that praising children for intelligence, rather than for effort, sapped their motivation (see sidebar). But more disturbingly, 40 percent of those whose intelligence was praised overstated their scores to peers. “We took ordinary children and made them into liars,” Dweck says. Similarly, Enron executives who’d been celebrated for their innate talent would sooner lie than fess up to problems and work to fix them.

Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer says Dweck’s research has implications for the more workaday problem of performance management. He faults businesses for spending too much time in rank-and-yank mode, grading and evaluating people instead of developing their skills. “It’s like the Santa Claus theory of management: who’s naughty and who’s nice.”

Leaders, too, can benefit from Dweck’s work, says Robert Sternberg, PhD ’75, Tufts University’s dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. Sternberg, a past president of the American Psychological Association, says that excessive concern with looking smart keeps you from making bold, visionary moves. “If you’re afraid of making mistakes, you’ll never learn on the job, and your whole approach becomes defensive: ‘I have to make sure I don’t screw up.’”

Social psychologist Peter Salovey, ’80, MA ’80, dean of Yale College and a pioneer in the field of emotional intelligence, says Dweck’s ideas have helped him think through a controversy in his field. Echoing an older debate about the malleability of general intelligence, some scholars say emotional intelligence is largely inborn, while others, like Salovey, see it as a set of skills that can be taught and learned. “People say to me all the time, ‘I’m not a people person,’ or ‘I’m not good at managing my emotions,’” unaware that they’re expressing a fixed mind-set, Salovey says.

Stanford psychology professor James Gross has begun extending Dweck’s work to emotions. In a recent study, Gross and his colleagues followed a group of Stanford undergrads as they made the transition to college life. Those with a fixed mind-set about emotions were less able to manage theirs, and by the end of freshman year, they’d shown poorer social and emotional adjustment than their growth-minded counterparts.

As she approaches the end of her third year at Stanford, Dweck has embraced the challenge of cross-country culture shock in a manner consistent with the growth mind-set. Nearby San Francisco provides her with the benefits of a great city, she says, including a dining scene that rivals New York’s; and the University supplies a more cozy sense of community. She’s also brought a bit of the New York theater scene with her in the form of her husband, critic and director David Goldman. He founded and directs the National Center for New Plays at Stanford.

At the Association for Psychological Science convention in May, Dweck will give the keynote address. The topic: “Can Personality Be Changed?” Her short answer, of course, is yes. Moreover, holding a growth mind-set bodes well for one’s relationships. In a recent study, Dweck found that people who believe personality can change were more likely than others to bring up concerns and deal with problems in a constructive way. Dweck thinks a fixed mind-set fosters a categorical, all-or-nothing view of people’s qualities; this view tends to make you ignore festering problems or, at the other extreme, give up on a relationship at the first sign of trouble. (The growth mind-set, though, can be taken too far if someone stays in an abusive relationship hoping her partner will change; as always, the person has to want to change.)

These days, Dweck is applying her model to kids’ moral development. Young children may not always have beliefs about ability, but they do have ideas about goodness. Many kids believe they’re invariably good or bad; other kids think they can get better at being good. Dweck has already found that preschoolers with this growth mind-set feel okay about themselves after they’ve messed up and are less judgmental of others; they’re also more likely than kids with a fixed view of goodness to try to set things right and to learn from their mistakes. They understand that spilling juice or throwing toys, for example, doesn’t damn a kid as bad, so long as the child cleans up and resolves to do better next time. Now Dweck and graduate student Allison Master are running experiments at Bing Nursery School to see if teaching kids the growth mind-set improves their coping skills. They’ve designed a storybook with the message that preschoolers can go from “bad” one year to better the next. Can hearing such stories help a 4-year-old handle a sandbox setback?

Dweck’s students from over the years describe her as a generous, nurturing mentor. She’d surely attribute these traits not to an innate gift, but to a highly developed mind-set. “Just being aware of the growth mind-set, and studying it and writing about it, I feel compelled to live it and to benefit from it,” says Dweck, who took up piano as an adult and learned to speak Italian in her 50s. “These are things that adults are not supposed to be good at learning.”

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Evaluate Where You Are | Zig Ziglar

You have to evaluate where you are, to determine what you have to do to get to where you want to be.  This is the important step that so many forget...

Let me know what you think below.

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