What is your natural tendency when faced with a challenge? Do you accept it or avoid it?
You may not be consciously aware that how your parents supported you when it came to challenges in your childhood may be pre-disposing you to favor acceptance or avoidance.
If your parents used “performance praise” on a regular basis, focused mostly on results like great academic grades, stellar sports performance, perfection in piano recitals and science projects, you may be prone to avoiding challenges if you think you do not have a natural born talent to rely on. If the challenge is in your wheelhouse, then you are up for it. Truth be told, it may not even feel like a real challenge to you.
Do a little self check-in if you are prone to be a high achiever, perfectionist or if you believe that earning the top accolades are the only true measures of success. Psychologist Carol Dweck tells us we can develop a fixed mindset in childhood that follows us right into adulthood when it comes to facing challenges that are out of our comfort zone or not a match for what we perceive as our “natural talents and abilities”.
Fixed mindsets keep us trapped in limiting beliefs and have us striving for performance praise. A pivot point in these situations is to free yourself from a limiting belief and try new things. Focus more on enjoying the process and less on winning a prize.
On the flip side, if your parents used “process praise”, you probably have a strong foundation for “trusting the process” and a willingness to put in the effort. Your parents cheered you on for putting in the practice, for making slow and steady progress, for never giving up, and your willingness to seek out coaching or tutoring when you needed help. When faced with challenges today, you already have a reliable track record of accepting challenges and seeing what you are made of.
Carol Dweck would tell you that you’ve been blessed with a growth mindset, instilled in you by your parents and their belief that you are capable of accomplishing anything you set your mind to do. You might even have a love of the process itself, with much less focus on a particular outcome.
In his book, Dealing with Feeling, Dr. Marc Brackett reveals that a parent’s approach when it comes to praise is an integral Pivot Point for how we come to deal with challenges. A parent can set us up for a lifetime of willingness to accept challenges or a wariness that makes us prefer to avoid challenges.
Knowing that our early childhood pivot point was either process or performance praise, helps us in a foundational way to pivot with agency right now when faced with a life challenge.
You get to choose your own pivot point. Adopt a growth mindset and focus more on the process of meeting this challenge, being willing to make some mistakes and learn from them, to begin again (not from scratch, but from a better vantage point gained from trial and error). Be willing to ask for help when you need it and to borrow someone else’s belief in you until you build that confidence from the inside out.
Noteworthy Resource: Read Chapter 8 From Chaos to Clarity in Dealing with Feeling. In this chapter, Dr. Brackett draws on Carol Dweck’s Mindset research, how parenting approaches impact us, and how to chart your own course for better outcomes in the long run.
