How you react to adversity is really telling - some of us throw in the towel and simply give up, and others, facing almost insurmountable obstacles, don't think twice about continuing. What makes us strong on and how do people find the strength within themselves to carry on in the hardest of times?
As an avid cyclist, reading Lance Armstrong's 'It's Not About the Bike
' is of course an amazing illustration of how he turned his life around, being diagnosed with cancer, battled four cycles of agonising chemotherapy enough to make the best of us curl up in agony and came back to win a total of 7 Tour de France victories. As he puts it in his consecutive book 'Every Second Counts'
"The experience of suffering is like the experience of exploring, of finding something unexpected and revelatory. When you find the outermost thresholds of pain, of fear, or uncertainty, what you experience afterwards is an expansive feeling, a widening of your capabilities.
Pain is good because it teaches your body and your soul to improve. It's almost as though your unconscious says "I'm going to remember this, remember how it hurt and I'll increase my capacities so that next time, it doesn't hurt as much". The body literally builds on your experiences and a physique and temperament that have gone through a Tour de France one year will be better the next year, because it has the memory to build upon. Maybe the same is true for living too.
If you lead a largely unexamined life, you will eventually hit a wall. Some barriers can be invisible until you smack into them. The key then is to investigate the wall inside yourself, so you can go beyond it. The only way to do that is to ask yourself painful questions - just as you try to stretch yourself physically."
Professor Carol Dweck at Stanford examines exactly this. 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.
[from Stanford Magazine] "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).
To me this approach is really interesting, because not only can it influence the way we approach life, career and learning, but through the quote from Lance Armstrong - it can also be applied to physical performance. And to great result, as proven. So what does this all mean? Milton Chen talks about how children can be taught to "feed their own brains" through
understanding that their brains and intelligence can be grown and how
this mind-set actually improves their academic performance.
As Chen explains: "I asked Dweck about the implications of her research -- what
teachers and parents should do, for instance. In an email interview,
she recommended the following strategies:
- Teach students to think of their brain as a muscle that
strengthens with use, and have them visualize the brain forming new
connections every time they learn.
- When they teach study skills, convey to students that using these methods will help their brains learn better.
- Discourage use of labels ("smart," "dumb," and so on) that convey intelligence as a fixed entity.
- Praise
students' effort, strategies, and progress, not their intelligence.
Praising intelligence leads to students to fear challenges and makes
them feel stupid and discouraged when they have difficulty.
- Give students challenging work. Teach them that challenging activities are fun and that mistakes help them learn."
Funnily enough - my own voracious appetite for reading anything and everything is very much in line with the same thinking. I believe we can learn anything we set our minds to and it is those moments that feel a little like vertigo, when new horizons of discovery open up in front of your mind's eye, that keeps me going and motivated. A full life isn't one without a continous expansion of our mind, abilities and wisdom.
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