https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-swZaKN2Ic
"Carol S. Dweck is a leading researcher in the field of motivation and is the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford. Her research focuses on why students succeed and how to foster their success. More specifically, her work has demonstrated the role of mindsets in success and has shown how praise for intelligence can undermine students’ motivation and learning."
The Power of Yet is the idea that when you can't do something, you can't do it YET. Using 'yet' when saying that you can't do something allows you to believe that you will be able to do it someday, as long as you put in the effort to learn it. For example, when you start a course for Mathematics, you can't do Trigonometry. Saying 'I can't do Trigonometry' is a very fixed statement, restricting you from believing in yourself and your abilities. Saying 'I can't do Trigonometry yet' is a much better statement to make to give yourself motivation and allow yourself to improve. As Dweck mentions, by using yet, you understand that you are on a learning curve, and you are not in a fixed state of knowledge, you are able to expand and develop your knowledge base.
People tend to react to challenges in two different ways, there are those with a mixed mindset, and those with growth mindset. Carol Dweck worked with children to see how they react to challenges, whether a growth or a fixed mindset develops as a child, and how can we help children to use 'yet'.
So, how do children react to challenges? Carol Dweck gave the children a task that was challenging for their level of education. Some children were happy about it and even said "I love a challenge" and others thought of it as catastrophic and didn't see it at all as a learning opportunity, they were gripped in the tyranny of now, not of what could be. Some even went to the extent of saying that they would probably cheat next time they were faced with a challenge, and many of them looked for someone who did worse than them to make themselves feel better.
Why are children running away from a little bit of difficulty? By scanning the brain you can see that the growth mindset has more activity in the brain, whereas the fixed mindset has no activity in the brain. Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting A's? Are we raising kids who can't dream big? The only way a growth mindset is developed is by learning from mistakes, however, we are so obsessed with our children's success, rather than the journey they had to go through to achieve this success. It doesn't matter to us how many mistakes and how many times they had to do something over and over again to get to where they are, what matters is what letter they have on their certificate. Children now constantly carry a burdening need for validation, and how do they achieve this? By passing a made up test, created by someone who has probably never sat the course or exam, and getting an A.
We need to begin to praise effort and struggle our children go through rather than the end-product. We need to praise strategies and the way our children work, not intelligence.
Begin by implementing the 'Power of Yet' in your home or classroom, and as Carol Dweck closes "Live in places filled with Yet."