For most people, losing an arm would have been a career ender, and for Hamilton it could have meant stopping her career nearly as soon as it began. Paddling out over waves with one arm could have been much more difficult, and balance nearly impossible to achieve. But not for Hamilton. She has a growth mindset. Hamilton described her mental state: “Whatever your situation might be, set your mind to whatever you want to do and put a good attitude in it, and I believe you can succeed.” She took this as an opportunity to show both herself and the world that she could relearn her sport.
We may not find ourselves surfing with sharks in Hawaii or working toward national-champion status, but a growth mindset is just as important when working toward our own health goals. Like any pursuit that really matters, our search for success might first or often be marked by failure. We mustn’t shy away from them, and should avoid fixating on showcasing perfection. Dweck coaches us to adopt the mantra “Becoming is better than being.” Embrace the missteps. Look for the places where we can improve, acknowledging the shortcomings they imply. Frame up the constructive criticisms. They are the stepping stones to success.
* * *
—
I’m not a good surfer. I’ve gotten about a half dozen private lessons from an excellent teacher who, because of her excessive patience and friendship, continued to offer instruction despite my inability to reciprocate with anything even as simple as getting my feet on the deck during a wave. Neither am I a particularly skilled skier. I needed six months of rehabilitation and reconstructive surgery on my knee after I tried hitting the slopes out west for the very first time. But I don’t define myself by these athletic gaffes. I tried. It didn’t work out, but, at least for surfing, where the falls hurt far less, I’ll keep on trying again.
When it came to writing this book, the missteps I experienced shared some of the same sting as those athletic exploits. In brainstorming the content of each chapter and the messages I would share, I reworked my plan a total of nine times, scrapping about 80 percent of my ideas from one take to the next. It felt like a herculean effort to land on something I was proud of, much as it does when I try to get the board underfoot in the surf. From one iteration of the manuscript to the next, I could have focused on the content that had landed on the cutting-room floor, seeing that scrap as an indication of my inability. Maybe I don’t have the chops to become a writer, I could have wondered. But that mindset would have ensured a failed final product, as it would for any skill we deem ourselves fundamentally and fatally incapable of improving enough to meet our mark.
Those eight versions of the book’s plan that now sit in a folder as rough cuts won’t ever have an audience. But they still have a starring role in this story. With each version, I pushed to think differently and try again with a new tack. I think of these eight iterations as mile markers in my intellectual marathon. I see them as flags representing important moments in this adventure. Crossing over the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan and later entering Central Park for the final leg of the New York City Marathon are points of note for those who run the race. They mark evolutionary phases of the challenge. And so do the versions of this book you won’t ever see.
I also have cloistered evidence of my evolution as a drummer, and that too won’t see the light of day. A few recording sessions were videotaped before I had showered for the day, and my bed head was on point. Some came during the first few weeks of my training, when my style was reminiscent of a baby giraffe trying to run. I don’t think of these clips as evidence of inability, and I didn’t at the time of filming. They were markers in my musical marathon. They were stages in my personal evolution, not verification of inability.
A mindset of becoming, not being, shapes a culture within us and outside us. Edward Deci is an expert in motivation science and a professor at the University of Rochester. He’s taken his insights and applied them to improving employees’ lives at some of the biggest companies in the world. One example from his work showcases the motivating power of framing up the positive. At one point in Deci’s career, a Fortune 500 company specializing in office machines called him in for a consult. It was a tough time in the industry—competition was steep, profits slim. Employees were worried about job security, and rightly so: layoffs and pay freezes were not uncommon. Morale was low.
Deci was brought in to help. He started by conducting interviews and discovered that, on the whole, managers gave far more negative feedback than positive. Managers structured their comments in ways that commented on employees’ worth as individuals rather than the value of their actions. This needed to change.
He created a program that trained fifteen thousand employees. Managers learned how to take the employees’ perspective, soliciting, listening to, and understanding their ideas, reactions, and experiences. Employees learned how to take initiative and were offered opportunities to do so.
Most important, managers received guidance on how to structure feedback to praise their employees’ efforts when it was warranted. Over the course of three days, at an off-site location, managers learned how to deliver constructive, positive, and even flattering comments in response to employees’ ideas and decisions—and to do it more often.
The results? The managers’ new positivity spread to their employees, who reported seeing more possibilities for career advancement, feeling more satisfied with their jobs, and having more trust in management—including trust in those at the highest levels in the organizational hierarchy, with whom employees would not previously have had any contact.
Years later, Jacques Forest, a professor of management science at the Université du Québec à Montréal, and his team analyzed the financial impact of this shift. Did the decision to train managers in delivering effective positive feedback pay off? Yes. They calculated the cost in current dollars incurred by rolling out the training, and the mental-health-care savings the organization had accrued. Forest discovered that the return on investment for the company was more than three to one. A sound investment indeed.
The Right Tool for the Job
It might seem like a mixed message, what I’ve offered for how to approach feedback. I suggested ways to frame up others so we can read their emotions right, even if that means finding out they aren’t so happy with us. I’ve also suggested framing up the faces of people expressing encouragement, selectively tuning in to aspects of our social environment that might make us feel good. We can frame up our world in ways that highlight some of our best contributions to it, and we can also frame it up to see it as it truly is.
When we’re looking to enter into a new venture, we find motivation in accentuating the positives. We can also frame up our visual surroundings in ways that promote a complete and true reflection of what the world really holds. Sometimes that way of framing might reveal something about ourselves that could seem like a vulnerability or shortcoming. But this inspires progress—as long as we approach the opportunity with a growth mindset. When we believe in our potential to change, adopting a frame that exposes where our efforts might best be placed can improve the odds of success. Just as the visual strategies for seeing our way to success act as different tools that might serve unique purposes, so too might the options for framing up our visual surroundings to see the world as it is or as we’d like it to be.