A Growth Mindset moves your practice forward

One of the often repeated quotes of Pattabhi Jois is “Practice and all is coming”.

We know that there two things that you need to do to accomplish any task.  They are:

• Work and
• Mindset

This article is going to focus on the second element: Mindset.  But first lets talk a little bit about Work.

Work

This is the part where the “Practice and all is coming” quote applies.  We all know this. And most of us are very willing to put the work in. We want to take the steps to get the body a little more flexible, to reduce stress.  What ever the reason is that we do yoga, we are very willing to put in the time and the effort to move us closer to that long range goal.

You’re motivated.  Maybe you’ve done some goal setting or visualization, so you have a pretty clear picture of where you want to go.

You have been told that if you put in a sustained, focused effort, if you keep doing your practice  (not trying the same thing over and over, but shifting your approach until you find the one that works), you’ll make it happen.

Your Mindset

But you know that Work is not the only thing that you need to get to your goal.  There is another ingredient and without it you will not stick with your yoga practice until your goal is achieved. Without the proper mindset you will not stick with your yoga practice.

With the Fixed mindset you will come up with all kinds of reasons why yoga is not working for you.

With the Growth mindset you will continually be looking for ways to improve how you approach your yoga practice or a particular posture.  You know that if I change this, try that, that perhaps it will be better next time.  You know lots of techniques that do not work and you are still looking for the right one that will help you move forward and improve.

The Fixed Mindset

An interesting side-effect of the fixed mindset is that you tend to take everything in your life as evidence of your innate ability.

Try a pose and it doesn’t work? You must be a stupid failure. You were never meant to do it anyway.  Your body is not flexible enough.  That’s the way your body is.  I can not change this.

People with the fixed mindset tend to buy into hierarchies, because they think that people are where they are because of some innate quality.  The yoga teacher has always been that flexible.  They must have been really flexible when they started yoga.

Some attributes that tend to go with a fixed mindset are a slavish respect for hierarchy, a willingness to cheat to keep your spot on the totem pole, and a lot of really depressing self-doubt.  If you think there’s a limit to how much better you can get, it’s incredibly hard to take the action you need to take.

The Growth Mindset

If you’ve adopted a growth mindset, when you do something that doesn’t work, it’s a data point. It gives you information you can act on. The growth mindset says “I haven’t found the right combination yet.” What fixed-mindset folks call “failure” is actually energizing when you have a growth mindset. (How weird is that?)

Growth mindset folks tend to work harder and learn more. Unable to do a particular posture?  You might try a modification that does work for you right now and then pick up some books on yoga postures, or take a weekend workshop. You might ask friends how they manage to do the pose. You may spend more time practicing the particular pose and seeing which different approach works better for you.

“The harder I work, the better I get” is a growth mindset phrase.

People with the growth mindset plain old work harder, because they have a lot of confidence that working hard will get them what they want. They view work as fun (they may not call it work, in fact), because growth is fun. And they see more opportunities, because they’re not ruling out anything as “not for people like me.”

The Growth Mindset is your natural state

All babies and small toddlers have a growth mindset. If you’ve ever watched a baby learn to walk and talk, you’ve seen the growth mindset in action.

They get frustrated, sure. But giving up is never an option, even for a moment. They’re driven by that quest for mastery. No one fails to learn to walk or talk because we get depressed and think it’s too hard or we aren’t “talented” enough.

Most of us, as adults, have a little bit of fixed mindset in our thinking. We fail to really work for that beautiful dream because we’re afraid of being disappointed. We protect ourselves from feeling like losers by opting out of the game, or by giving it half our effort. We convince ourselves that what we’ve always been is the same thing as what we’ll always be.

When I first started my yoga practice many years ago, I was not flexible, I lacked upper body strength, core strength.  I could not bind in many poses.  Folding forward was a real challenge.  I had an injured muscle from high school (30 years earlier) that prevented me from even attempting a few poses.  However with consistent effort (see the Work part above) and reading books, going to workshops, attempting different techniques (see the  Growth mindset above) I was able to move my practice forward and gain the many benefits of yoga.

Try the Growth mindset and see where you and your practice end up.