Coaching Tool by Carol Dweck: Using Praise as a Motivator

Carol Dweck is quoted as saying: the wrong kind of praise creates self-defeating behavior. The right kind motivates students to learn. It can be an effective coaching tool.

Have you ever done any reading from Carol Dweck? If not, you’ll probably find her research on using praise very interesting. This will be particularly true if you have children or grandchildren in the extended family.

Why may you ask? It is simply that Stanford Professor Carol Dweck has discovered that how we praise our children can benefit or detriment their self-view.

Being mindful of how you praise your child can help your child foster a growth mindset and boost his or her motivation, resilience and learning. All very important to us all, aren’t they?

Who is Carol Dweck?

Professor Carol Dweck is a psychologist at Stanford University and the prime force behind mindset theory. Dweck’s research has led her to the conclusion that each will place themselves on a continuum according to their implicit belief of where their ability originates.

In simple terms, this means that those who tend towards believing in ‘nature’ or innate ability as the prime factor in determining their success are defined in Dweck’s model as having ‘fixed mindsets’ or fixed theories of intelligence.

At the other end of the continuum are those that believe in their success, and the success of others comes from hard work, learning, and persistence. These people are defined as having ‘growth mindsets’ or incremental theories of intelligence.

What are the mindsets?

In the fixed mindset, people believe that their talents and abilities are fixed traits. They have a certain amount, and that’s that; nothing can be done to change it. Many years of research have now shown that when people adopt the fixed mindset, it can limit their success.

They become over-concerned with proving their talents and abilities, hiding deficiencies, and reacting defensively to mistakes or setbacks-because deficiencies and mistakes imply a (permanent) lack of talent or ability. People in this mindset will pass up important opportunities to learn and grow if there is a risk of unmasking weaknesses.

-Carol Dweck

When you praise intelligence, you foster a fixed mindset, the belief that one’s intellectual ability is inherent. Those with a fixed mindset tend to agree with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it.” They see mistakes as a failure and as signs that they aren’t talented enough for the task.

More concerning, they seek experiences that reinforce their ability and prove their intelligence, leading them to avoid challenging tasks. The desire to learn becomes secondary.

In the growth mindset, people believe that their talents and abilities can be developed through passion, education, and persistence. For them, it’s not about looking smart or grooming their image. It’s about a commitment to learning–taking informed risks and learning from the results, surrounding yourself with people who will challenge you to grow, looking frankly at your deficiencies and seeking to remedy them. Most great business leaders have had this mindset because building and maintaining excellent organizations in the face of constant change requires it.”

-Carol Dweck

When you praise effort, you encourage a growth mindset, the belief that intellectual ability can be developed through education and effort. Those with a growth mindset believe that they can get better at almost anything, as long as they spend the necessary time and energy. Instead of seeking to avoid mistakes, they see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge.

Coaching tool: the Dweck experiment

For the past ten years or so, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly.

Dweck sent four female research assistants to New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well.

Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, and then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked hard.”

Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles.

The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

So why did this happen? “When we praise children for their intelligence,” Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.” And that’s what the fifth-graders had done: They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

In a subsequent round, none of the fifth-graders had a choice. The test was difficult, designed for kids two years ahead of their grade level. Predictably, everyone failed. But again, the two groups of children, divided at random at the study’s start, responded differently.

Those praised for their effort on the first test assumed they simply hadn’t focused hard enough on this test. “They got very involved, willing to try every solution to the puzzles,” Dweck recalled. “Many of them remarked, unprovoked, ‘This is my favorite test.’ ” Not so for those praised for their smarts. They assumed their failure was evidence that they weren’t really smart at all. “Just watching them, you could see the strain. They were sweating and miserable.”

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck’s researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score—by about 30 percent. Those who’d been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning—by about 20 percent.

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect.

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

Repeating her experiments, Dweck found this effect of praise on performance held true for students of every socioeconomic class. It hit both boys and girls—the very brightest girls especially (they collapsed the most following failure). Even preschoolers weren’t immune to the inverse power of praise.

Learning implications

Praising kids for smarts encourages them to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, those in which we learn from our mistakes. Without experiencing and focusing attention on mistakes, minds will not revise its models. Mistakes are repeated and challenges avoided. Those with fixed-mindsets seek self-confidence at the expense of self-improvement.

Watch this 4-minute video where Carol explains the impact of this theory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWv1VdDeoRY

Examples to consider

One of the most important concepts I’ve learned is the difference between the “fixed” mindset and the “growth” mindset.

This sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly deep. The fixed mindset is the most common and the most harmful, so it’s worth understanding and considering how it’s affecting you.

For example:

In a fixed mindset, you believe “She’s a natural born singer” or “I’m just no good at dancing.”

In a growth mindset, you believe “Anyone can be good at anything. Skill comes only from practice.”

This is important because (1) individuals with a “growth” theory are more likely to continue working hard although setbacks and (2) individuals’ theories of intelligence can be affected by subtle environmental cues.

In other words, it is possible to encourage students, for example, to persist despite failure by encouraging them to think about learning in a certain way.

Key takeaway

Carol Dweck’s mindset theory is a powerful way of enhancing motivation and the desire to learn. Give it a try; you’ll be surprised to interpret the results.

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So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of collaborative innovation. And put it to good use in adapting to changes in your business environment.

It’s up to you to keep improving your learning and experience with innovation and creativity efforts. Lessons are all around you. In this case, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

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Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

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Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.