West Point is one of the United States' elite military academies. To become a full cadet, you must get through a seven-day training programme known as Beast Barracks. The programme pushes cadets' physical capacity, emotional regulation and willpower to the limit, so in every intake a fair number drop out partway through.
The question is: who drops out, and who keeps going?
Psychologist Angela Duckworth carried out a thorough study of exactly this. She measured the academic results, leadership and even fitness of more than 2,000 cadets — the sort of abilities you would expect to be closely tied to military training. As it turned out, those factors had little to do with whether a cadet would stick it out. Only one factor mattered most: grit.
On the Grit Scale that Duckworth developed, a cadet who scored in the top sixth was a full 60% more likely to complete the training than the others — a difference that striking is rare in psychological research. And grit doesn't only play a crucial role in military training; it is closely linked to performance in studies, in careers, and even to overall life satisfaction.
As with any psychological trait, whether a person has grit is partly innate and partly shaped by experience. Since we now know how important grit is, how can we train it?
You may have already guessed that I'm going to mention mindfulness, and recent studies do indeed show that mindfulness training can strengthen grit. But simply knowing that mindfulness and grit are linked isn't much use. We also need to understand why mindfulness strengthens grit, so that we can use it as a tool for building grit. Before that, though, let me explain a related concept: the growth mindset (Growth Mindset).
The Growth Mindset
One reason we give up on something may be that doing it is painful. When you're working out, for instance, you might quit halfway because the muscle ache is too much to bear. We'll deal with the question of facing pain in detail in the next chapter. But sometimes giving up has nothing to do with unbearable pain. Plenty of people abandon a foreign language partway through, yet it's hard to imagine what excruciating pain there could be in the process of learning one.
Another reason we give up is that carrying on would make us feel bad about ourselves, or threaten the way we see ourselves. For example, if someone has always done well academically but finds, for no obvious reason, that learning a foreign language is especially hard, they may well give up — because the sense of failure threatens the long-held belief that they are clever.
The eminent psychologist Carol Dweck found that people have two fundamental ways of thinking: a growth mindset (Growth Mindset) and a fixed mindset (Fixed Mindset). People with a growth mindset believe that ability, qualities and skills are the result of persistent effort. People with a fixed mindset, by contrast, believe that ability, qualities and skills are nothing more than inborn talent — and that no amount of effort will change them one bit.
People with a growth mindset tend to have far more grit than those with a fixed mindset. Think about it carefully: the two have quite different purposes for what they do, and quite different attitudes towards failure. Someone with a fixed mindset puts most of their energy into doing what they're already good at, because if effort can't improve ability anyway, why not stick to the easy things and prove how capable you are — or at least feel good about yourself? Doing what you're good at confirms your talent; failure, meanwhile, means you have some flaw that can never be fixed. Their energy goes into endlessly doing what they already know how to do, because that's how they prove their ability. So they don't enjoy challenges, they throw in the towel the moment they hit a difficulty, and their ability naturally makes no progress — the very picture of a lack of grit.
On the other side, people with a growth mindset see difficulty in a completely different light. For them, there's no need to keep proving their ability through success, because ability isn't fixed — it grows through continued effort. So they don't treat failure as proof of incompetence; on the contrary, they see it as a learning opportunity. As a result they take to new things more readily and keep taking on harder challenges, so their ability naturally keeps improving. And setbacks don't easily knock them down, because a single failure doesn't stand for some unchangeable defect in their ability.
Reading this, you may be wondering whether you're being held back by a fixed mindset. You might even feel rather despairing, because your own way of thinking seems to leave you short on grit. But the truth is that the way we think is like any other ability: with the right methods, it can be changed (and that very sentence is an example of the growth mindset). Simply being aware of the growth mindset and the fixed mindset can nudge you a little further towards the growth mindset. So congratulations! You already have a little more growth mindset than you did ten minutes ago. The reason is this: very often we assume our own way of seeing things is the only way. Now that you know about the two mindsets, the next time a fixed-mindset thought appears — something like "Forget it. There's no way I can do this." — you'll realise that this is only one angle on the situation, and that it's possible to see the same thing through a growth mindset. The simplest way to cultivate a growth mindset is Mental Noting (Mental Noting): the next time you notice a fixed-mindset thought arise, whether in meditation or in everyday life, just silently say to yourself a few times, "Fixed Mindset, Fixed Mindset", and you'll remind yourself that this is only a thought, not necessarily the way things are.
Want to understand yourself more deeply? MindForest — the self-discovery app that combines psychology with AI helps you explore your inner world and manage your emotions, anytime, anywhere.
Mindfulness, the Growth Mindset and Grit
Now that we understand the growth mindset, we can look at the relationship between mindfulness and grit. Here's the answer first: one reason mindfulness can build grit is that it fosters a growth mindset, and a growth mindset is what lets us rise to a challenge.
What does mindfulness have to do with the growth mindset? In the last section we talked about how mindfulness helps us make better use of the space between stimulus and response, making our own personality and behaviour patterns more flexible. Often, when change comes up, we feel powerless — the goal seems sky-high and out of reach. But it's worth thinking carefully: is the goal really unachievable, or is it a fixed mindset that has us tying our own hands?
Of course, sometimes a goal really is unrealistic. But more often, what happens is that we imagine the obstacles standing between us and the goal, and the emotions and thoughts those obstacles stir up make us throw in the towel — and these thoughts are usually fleeting, ever-shifting things. In English, besides "Emotion", there's another word for feeling: "Affect" — and what it describes is precisely these subtle, momentary sensations. To give an example: a friend of mine had long wanted to start a business, but the moment he thought about it he realised it would mean putting himself out there and dealing with lots of people, and he'd feel a bit tense; then he'd think, "What if I'm no good at it?", and so the plan would fizzle out. Building on the previous section's discussion, we know we can simply observe these thoughts and choose not to act on them. Most of the time, when we don't engage with these thoughts, they fade away on their own, just like "Affect".
Of course, mindfulness isn't about turning you into a block of wood that ignores its thoughts entirely. Just as importantly, it lets you choose to respond to other thoughts instead — especially those that align with your values. For example, that same friend might, at the very same moment, also think, "If I start a business it will be an exciting journey." Through mindfulness he can choose to let this thought influence him, while sparing himself the influence of the others. It's precisely this power of choice that gives mindfulness such great flexibility. As you gradually discover that you can in fact respond to your thoughts, steering the course of things under your own direction, that sense of "being able to control myself" gradually grows stronger, moving you towards a growth mindset.
Comments
No comments yet — share your thoughts.