Rewiring Your Brain for Growth

Cultivating a growth mindset is one of the most critical skills needed for career development. A lot has already been said about this term so I won't rehash this knowledge, but this article acts as a good primer, and includes this quote:

A growth mindset, fundamentally, is the belief that our abilities, intelligence, and talents can be developed through dedication, effort, and persistence. This perspective transforms challenges into opportunities for learning, encouraging us to stretch beyond our perceived limits.

Instead, what I'll cover today is something that has always fascinated me - the science behind how to train your brain to build a growth mindset.

Barriers to Growth

In order to develop a growth mindset, we need to understand what barriers exist in the first place. There are a lot of factors that go into this, but contrary to popular belief age is not one. While fluid intelligence might peak in your twenties, the experience gained with age is often a benefit to learning. Other factors like opportunity & time are also generally within our control. So why do we feel like our ability to learn slows down?

The answer actually lies in the science behind emotions. Our brain develops responses to emotions over time, meaning we subconsciously have emotions that get triggered by what we do and what happens around us. This also applies to learning new things, for example:

This is too hard why did I go down this path (doubt)
This isn't what I signed up for (surprise)
I work harder than everyone else but don't get what I deserve (resentment)
Why is does this person think they can give me this feedback (defensiveness)

The reality is that these emotions increase the overhead with learning, making that path feel harder and unachievable. And as time goes on they get baked into our brain, similar to muscle memory.

Now, we know that suppressing emotions & feelings is not a sustainable approach. So in order to overcome this barrier, we need to understand how emotions work and how to rewire some of them.

How Emotions Work

This is a great article that covers the basics of emotional physiology. Essentially, emotional experiences have three components:

a subjective experience (trigger)
a physiological response (response)
a behavioral or expressive response (reaction)

All emotions begin with a subjective experience that acts as a stimulus. This stimulus triggers a physiological response, which is the result of your autonomic nervous system's reaction to the emotion you're experiencing. Finally, there is a behavioral response which is the expression of the emotion, it includes facial expressions, body language, what you say - basically, your external reaction to the trigger.

Now that we understand how our brain deals with emotions, we can begin the process of rewiring some of them so they don't get in the way of building a growth mindset.

Rewiring your Brain

Methodology

The best way to rewire your brain is to build competence. This process has 4 key steps:

Unconscious Incompetence - You don't know what you don't know.
Conscious Incompetence - You know what you don't know but you haven't developed the skills for it yet.
Conscious Competence - You're actively working on developing the skills.
Unconscious Competence - You've now mastered the skills and can instinctually use them.

Step 1: Understanding Triggers

Unconscious Incompetence → Conscious Incompetence

The first step is to deeply understand the triggers that act as a barrier to your growth. In order to make this achievable, start with one emotion that you feel consistently gets in the way of your career development. As you go about your workday, whenever you feel this emotion, take a couple of minutes to quickly note down what happened (the trigger). And promise yourself that you will spend some time reflecting on this later today. This achieves two purposes:

Begins training your brain to identify the triggers to this emotion in a memorable way
Tells your brain not to get stuck thinking about it because you promise to reflect later

Make sure to spend time daily reflecting on what you wrote down. It doesn't need to be purposeful, but it should be introspective. Once you feel like you are doing this well for one emotion, add another emotion to the process (and so on).

Step 2: Rerouting Responses

Conscious Incompetence → Conscious Competence

Now that you have a system to identify triggers & introspect them, we can begin working on rerouting the response. In order to do that, we need to teach the brain a new response, and the best way is to learn from others - get feedback, talk to a therapist or coach, research what others have to say. For example - feeling resentment when getting feedback may be rooted in your sense of self-worth, or wanting to give up when learning is hard may be rooted in a fear of failure.

Identifying the cause behind these responses takes time and a willingness to look inward. In some cases it might even involve an arduous journey into understanding yourself better. What I can validate is that the journey is worth it for the learning you get at the end.

Step 3: Changing Reactions

Conscious Competence → Unconscious Competence

Finally, with a good understanding of triggers & response, we can begin the process of developing new skills. These skills are what you had planned to work on anyway, but the path to them is now unblocked. Here's an example to illustrate this:

Old method - Your manager gives you some hard feedback in a 1-on-1 (trigger) → you feel the feedback was unwarranted (response) → you push back with an explanation (reaction).

New method - Your manager gives you some hard feedback in a 1-on-1 (trigger) → you recognize that the feedback is not a reflection of your skill or value, and that you can use it to help you do better (rerouted response) → you lean in and ask more questions so you can better understand the feedback and how to act on it (new reaction).

Recognize that after all this work you may realize that in some cases you had the right reaction the first time. That is perfectly okay, because now you have learned WHY it is the right reaction.

PRACTICE!

The most important thing you can do is to practice this daily and rigorously. It takes time to learn to do this subconsciously. Once you start doing this well, you will see the validation reflected in how people respond around you. The best part is this can be used to develop new skills in all facets of your life!