Adjusting Mindset to Conquer Mental Blocks
Over the last two and a half years, COVID-19 has profoundly disrupted learning. According to one study, the average student has fallen five months behind on math and four months behind on reading. Recently, the PMTutoring team has witnessed firsthand evidence of this decline through students whose parents talk about the way that their children give up doing homework and are seeing stagnation in their grades and progress.
So why might this be happening? Most often, due to a fear of falling short. When faced with a difficult assignment—or, as in the case of COVID, a feeling of falling behind—students decide subconsciously that they would rather not try than try and fail. You can see why: when people try their best and fail, they feel embarrassed, incompetent, or discouraged. But if they don’t try, they can blame their failure on the simple fact that they “didn’t really try.” Not trying preserves a student’s self-esteem from their possibility of failure.
But some students persevere even in the face of fear of failure. Psychologists call this perseverance “grit.” Grit is often connected with another trait of successful individuals: a growth mindset. A growth mindset (unlike a fixed mindset) indicates that intellectual capabilities can increase and improve over time, rather than remaining static.
Thus, if your child fears falling short, the best intervention is to help them develop grit and a growth mindset by (1) anticipating obstacles and (2) pursuing incremental improvement.
Anticipate Obstacles
When learning a physically risky activity (combat sports, bouldering, stilt-walking, etc.) one of the first and most important lessons is how to fall. By learning how to fall, people lose their fear of failure; if their hands slips or they get knocked down, they know how to land and pick themselves back up. Their failures become opportunities to strategize about what to do differently next time.
Many students who self-sabotage have a fixed mindset; they don’t think that they can improve—they are who they are. To reframe, encourage your child to think about their brain like a muscle. Just like muscles grow through practice and exercise, so do brains. If your child struggles with math but has a friend who succeeds in it, you shouldn’t say that their friend is “just naturally good at math.” Instead, acknowledge that their friend has strengthened the math part of their brain—and your child can do the same thing.
After reframing their mindset, your child should be alert for potential obstacles and strategize about how to overcome them (Principles here drawn from the WOOP model—Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan: Watch this video for a helpful explanation). For example, in a Spanish class, potential obstacles might include not knowing vocabulary, doing poorly on a quiz, or feeling lost during a reading. Help your child think about what to do in response; for example, they can ask clarifying questions or ask for internet resources to follow up on class information. By having a “battle plan” when they experience fear of failure, your child will be able to act rather than getting paralyzed.
2. Pursue Incremental Improvement
In an earlier post, we looked at the theory of personal-best goal setting, which encourages students to pursue goals slightly above their most recent best performance. For example, if your child has always gotten B’s in Spanish class, they should shoot for a B+ on the next test- not an A.
The same principle applies to taking steps to overcome self-sabotage. Students should look for small, powerful tasks that will immediately give them confidence to take on bigger challenges. For example, going to after-school extra help with a teacher might take only 15-30 minutes, but the individual attention will help them learn more than they would in an hour of studying alone. Similarly, when preparing for a test, your child should meet up with a friend and take turns quizzing each other. Other study habits work in the same way—with each small action, your child should see a corresponding improvement in their comprehension and their grades. Over time, these small actions add up to large changes in results.
Discouragement and confusion are parts of the learning process. Rather than fleeing from the fear of failure, students need to learn to anticipate and plan for potential obstacles, and then chip away at them bit-by-bit. For more information about overcoming discouragement, check out our articles on building motivation.