Growth Mindset

 (Growth Mindset cat meme created using cheezburger. Posted by Laura Gibbs to her Growth Mindset Cats blog on January 17th, 2017)

This idea of emphasizing the "not yet" doesn't sound entirely appropriate, even though the concept behind the phrase sounds promising. To me, "not yet" still implies failure through a feel of superiority and an overall sense of disappointment from the messenger. In addition, I still have the mindset plugged into me of expecting myself to be perfect to do the best work and getting the grades to prove it. Some kind of term closer to "getting there" or "nearly there" sounds a bit better, but not entirely the solution.

In order to truly inhabit growth mindset, I have a feeling instilling in myself will have to come from being on break from schoolwork, as some good and heavy-hitting ideas like the Learn by H.E.A.R.T challenges, looking up more video resources for growth mindset and discussing said mindset with friends and family appear to take up a large amount of time. Unfortunately, I feel spare time is not an easily acquired commodity in college classes, where my mind needs to be focused in different assignments.

That said, I can take smaller steps to integrating growth mindset into my semester, starting with this class, as I would love to get recommendations and instructions on how to tell stories in new formats, refining and expanding my writing skills and ruminating on them. The easily consumable and instantaneous effect of memes also gets me interested in the idea of perusing growth mindset memes. And it doesn't just have to come from me, I can look at other students' growth mindset posts if I have some spare minutes.

As for Learn by H.E.A.R.T., practicing engaged listening might benefit me in the long run with focusing on lecture materials in my other classes, as I often do consider myself the absent-minded type. I don't know if I can participate in them myself, but hearing others' experiences with the challenges could also give me ideas on how to better manage my time and attitude.

Growth mindset is not something I can totally adopt for this semester, but I could probably inject bits of it to make my mind a little less insane.