Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

The Contos family had pulled out all the stops. Nicole Contos, in her exquisite wedding dress, arrived at the church in a Rolls-Royce. The archbishop was inside waiting to perform the ceremony, and hundreds of friends and relatives from all over the world were in attendance. Everything was perfect until the best man went over to Nicole and told her the news. The groom would not be coming. Can you imagine the shock, the pain?

The family, thinking of the hundreds of guests, decided to go through with the reception and dinner. Then, rallying around Nicole, they asked her what she wanted to do. In an act of great courage, she changed into a little black dress, went to the party, and danced solo to “I Will Survive.” It was not the dance she had anticipated, but it was one that made her an icon of gutsiness in the national press the next day. Nicole was like the football player who ran the wrong way. Here was an event that could have defined and diminished her. Instead it was one that enlarged her.

It’s interesting. Nicole spoke repeatedly about the pain and trauma of being stood up at her wedding, but she never used the word humiliated. If she had judged herself, felt flawed and unworthy—humiliated—she would have run and hiddenead it wher good clean pain made her able to surround herself with the love of her friends and relatives and begin the healing process.

What, by the way, had happened to the groom? As it turned out, he had gone on the honeymoon, flying off to Tahiti on his own. What happened to Nicole? A couple of years later, in the same wedding dress and the same church, she married a great guy. Was she scared? No, she says: “I knew he was going to be there.”

When you think about how rejection wounds and inflames people with the fixed mindset, it will come as no surprise that kids with the fixed mindset are the ones who react to taunting and bullying with thoughts of violent retaliation. I’ll return to this later.

RELATIONSHIPS ARE DIFFERENT

In his study of gifted people, Benjamin Bloom included concert pianists, sculptors, Olympic swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists. But not people who were gifted in interpersonal relationships. He planned to. After all, there are so many professions in which interpersonal skills play a key role—teachers, psychologists, administrators, diplomats. But no matter how hard Bloom tried, he couldn’t find any agreed-upon way of measuring social ability.

Sometimes we’re not even sure it’s an ability. When we see people with outstanding interpersonal skills, we don’t really think of them as gifted. We think of them as cool people or charming people. When we see a great marriage relationship, we don’t say these people are brilliant relationship makers. We say they’re fine people. Or they have chemistry. Meaning what?

Meaning that as a society, we don’t understand relationship skills. Yet everything is at stake in people’s relationships. Maybe that’s why Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence struck such a responsive chord. It said: There are social-emotional skills and I can tell you what they are.

Mindsets add another dimension. They help us understand even more about why people often don’t learn the skills they need or use the skills they have. Why people throw themselves so hopefully into new relationships, only to undermine themselves. Why love often turns into a battlefield where the carnage is staggering. And, most important, they help us understand why some people are able to build lasting and satisfying relationships.

MINDSETS FALLING IN LOVE

So far, having a fixed mindset has meant believing your personal traits are fixed. But in relationships, two more things enter the picture—your partner and the relationship itself. Now you can have a fixed mindset about three things. You can believe that your qualities are fixed, your partner’s qualities are fixed, and the relationship’s qualities are fixed—that it’s inherently good or bad, meant-to-be or not meant-to-be. Now all of these things are up for judgment.

The growth mindset says all of these things can be developed. All—you, your partner, and the relationship—are capable of growth and change.

In the fixed mindset, the ideal is instant, perfect, and perpetual compatibility. Like it was meant to be. Like riding off into the sunset. Like “they lived happily ever after.”

Many people want to feel their relationship is special and not just some chance occurrence. This seems okay. So what’s the problem with the fixed mindset? There are two.

1. If You Have to Work at It, It Wasn’t Meant to Be