Mindset Follow up

In an earlier post I talked about mindset and how changing our mindset will effect our success. Today I want to follow up with my experience applying a growth mindset to my classes.

When I was a kid I usually excelled at my classes. Because I this I assumed I was just smart and that things would just always would come easy to me. When I started to take harder classes in high school this mentality bit me in the behind and I started to lose motivation to try hard, especially in my math classes. I assumed that I was in fact not a math person.

When I started to go to college I was faced with a decision that we have everyone comes at least once. What should I do with for work? Having been recently married and having a desire to provide for my family I knew that I didn't have time to really search around and waste time. Having always heard that the higher paid jobs use math I started math classes again with that attitude that I was going to work hard and actually learn. Believe or not that is was happened, and as I learned I started to enjoy math. This first decision led my to my current major, statistics, which I really enjoy.

This was my first experience with learning that we can develop skills that we want and that we aren't just stuck with what we were given at birth.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Surprisingly Positive Things about ASU West!

Image
31.3 miles, 35-55 minutes one way. This is one-half of my drive Monday - Friday. You may ask, "why are you driving so far?!?" (You wouldn't be the first). Originally I would have said that I am going to ASU West campus because that is the only place that my desired program is being offered. I wanted to get a degree in Statistics and the drive was a necessary evil in order to do so. After a year and a half of taking classes here my answer has changed. Though I still don't enjoy the drive, attending the West campus is something that I have come to love. Transferring to ASU West was a lot easier than I could have ever anticipated. Not only have the academic advising been great, but the feel of the West campus is right at home for me. Just like the community college I attended the class sizes are small and because of that teachers have been able to take a vested interest in my success. I have taken two classes at the Tempe campus and both were bad experiences for me. O...
Read more

Nurturing a Growth Mindset to succeed

Image
I have always been one to keep to myself. I wouldn't consider myself a complete introvert, but when it comes to school I tend to show up to class, go home and do my work without much interaction between classmates and my professors. While reading Carol Dweck's book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success I realized how destructive this attitude was to my success in classes. As far as my intelligence I had a very fixed mindset. As Dr. Dweck explains it a fixed mindset it believing that our attributes and abilities are fixed, not able to grow or diminish. She outlines that one symptom of having a fixed mindset is the fear of proving to yourself and others that you are not as great as you might appear to be or believe yourself to be. I never thought myself to be the smartest in a classroom, but I do hold the fear that someone might decide that I am not very smart due to a dumb question I asked or a concept I am not understanding. This resulted in my attitude of keeping to myself, a...
Read more

My Smart Goals

Image
This semester we were introduced to the idea of S.M.A.R.T. goals. The acronym stands for I was first introduced to this concept when I was serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Seoul Korea. We actually made personal and companionship goals every day and every week. Since then I haven't really made a SMART goal. Our mentor challenged us to make a couple for ourselves so here are mine.         By the end of the summer prepare myself for my machine learning course next semester by completing an R course in DataCamp and starting a machine learning course.          Improve my relationship with my wife by doing something on her to-do list every day for at least two weeks. Comment on the last one. My wife's love language is very much acts of service, so that is why I think it will improve our relationship. I'll have to be accountable in a later post and let you know how everything went!
Read more