Rewriting the Stories We Tell Ourselves

I've been working on growth mindset, too.

Since I first learned about the power of growth mindset while researching my book, I’ve been trying my damnedest to cultivate it in my kids. Whenever I see an opportunity to tie their achievements to their efforts, I jump on it. Whenever we discuss frustration and failure, I remind them that it takes time to master skills, and that the more we practice, the better we’ll get.

And yet, recently, I realized that my own brain is very much steeped in a fixed mindset. And this mindset has shaped the course of my life.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a novelist. Fiction writing felt like my one true calling, and I wrote endless short stories. I even published a monthly magazine, Magic Magazine, every month for two years during fourth and fifth grade, for friends and family. Each issue was 30 pages long, contained a multitude of short stories and cost 25 cents.

Then, in high school, I took a creative writing class that left me frustrated. I started telling myself that I wasn’t a fiction writer. It was too hard. I remember feeling paralyzed by my own imagination — there were too many possibilities. A story could go in any number of directions. I didn’t know how to rein my ideas in and focus. So I stopped writing for many years. When I finally picked it back up again, it was in the form of nonfiction, because writing that was constrained by facts and reality felt much easier. I never attempted fiction again.

I’ve done this with other things, too. After years of successful parallel parking, I had a mortifying experience in 2006 trying to parallel park on the left side of the road in the UK while a British driving instructor was in the backseat, after which I told myself I was somebody who “couldn’t parallel park anymore.” In 2010, wanting to keep up with my avid bicyclist of a husband, I rode my bike around Brooklyn a few times with him which I hated because OMG traffic, and I told myself I was “not a bicyclist” and gave away my bike.

Fast forward to a few months ago, when I listened to a conversation between psychologist Lori Gottlieb and author Ryan Holiday on his podcast The Daily Stoic. Gottlieb said: