With all the action, information, and activity that happens in our everyday lives, it’s easy to believe that nobody truly has control over their own lives. Change is “forced” upon us and we’ve got no say in the matter. Achieving our dreams is more a matter of luck and external factors instead of working to get it. We are simply products of our circumstances and environments.
Right?
I once had a friend I’ll call Ned. We briefly went to the same college after graduation. Ned had a great affection for movies and was kind of a walking film encyclopedia. He could cite the cast and crew of almost every major motion picture that came out in the 20th century. Although he had an enormous interest in acting, he was discouraged by a family who didn’t believe it had any creative talents.
Ned was drawn to acting in school and signed up for drama class. Every year they’d put on two productions, a play and a musical, and everyone in the class was guaranteed some kind of part. Ned never got more than a line or two in a play, and in musicals they’d always put him in the background chorus. In fact, he never auditioned for major speaking parts the whole time he was there.
We got to know each other a little better when we enrolled in college, and I asked him why, with all his knowledge of cinema, he’d never pushed himself to learn more or gone for a bigger part. “My family is very practical,” he said. “My parents thought there was no future in any kind of artistic activity, and they always told my sisters and I that we weren’t genetically disposed to be talented in the arts.” Drama class didn’t help because there wasn’t a lot of instruction going on—it was either auditions or rehearsals, pretty much all year round.
So imagine my surprise a few months later when Ned landed the lead part in a college production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Did his high school drama teacher miss something that his college professor picked up on? “Nope,” Ned told me. “It wasn’t until high school was almost over that I started to feel that I could be good at acting. My dad felt bad that he might have discouraged me—he really didn’t mean to—and that summer I actually took an acting class. I was surprised by how much of it was a process. I just thought the kids who got the big parts had natural talents I could never compete with. But it turns out they had to work at it, too. So I determined I’d just find out what the work was like and see if I could do it.”
The mindset we discuss in this chapter is one of agency: you’re not a powerless bystander in your own life. Ned had the ability to control his actions and future, and so do you—everything in your life is under your control; you just have to believe it first to put it in action. Change and control are possible, though not easy; outside events and external factors are only part of the equation. Your mindset can overcome all of them.
As hard as it is for us to believe that in times of distress and victimhood, it’s an empowering truth that can see us to our greatest heights. To get yourself into a mindset shaped for controlling your own destiny, there are a few theoretical models that can help you focus on what kinds of thinking you might need to change.
What we believe about ourselves and our abilities is a fundamental part of how much agency we feel we have. Some of us believe we can’t change or evolve who we are, whereas others eagerly seek out new experiences, challenges, and education precisely to grow and develop. These opposing approaches are the “fixed” and “growth” mindsets. This is the first way that we determine whether or not we take agency in our lives.
The fixed mindset states that intelligence, talent, ability, and performance are all firmly determined from cradle to grave—they can’t change or grow. You are what you are, and if you don’t have something by now, you’ll never have it—you never had it in you.
What’s the purpose of trying if you don’t think it’s in you? The fixed mindset is quick to avoid challenges and even give up before a problem can be solved. It doesn’t value effort; it views excessive work as “trying too hard” for little to no payoff. A single criticism can derail an entire project because the fixed mindset has already determined that what it currently has is all it’s going to get. This is where Ned started because he felt that acting simply wasn’t in the cards for him, and so he never took steps toward it.
The growth mindset is fundamentally different because it assumes change and growth are possible. Whatever you are right now is just a starting place from which to grow, improve, and develop. In this approach, nothing is impossible because it takes the position that learning and growth are almost always rewarded in some way. The possibility is there, and thus people seek opportunities out. Challenges and obstacles aren’t avoided; they’re dealt with and learned from.
Constructive criticism is welcome feedback digested in the spirit of helpfulness. The growth mindset is always evolving, always learning how to make things better, and always considering how to improve. This is what Ned skewed toward at the end of the story from earlier because he felt that acting was something he could develop and grow, even though he felt he was initially poor at it.
The growth mindset is what you’ll find in people with higher levels of success. The differences between fixed and growth mindsets manifest in several ways, from a particular kind of action to variances in speech and messaging:
Fixed mindset
Growth mindset
Wants to appear smart or capable
Wants to learn and improve
Says “I don’t have the right set of talents” or “I’m not naturally gifted”
Says “I can learn to develop more talents” or “If I learn this new skill, my capacity will increase”
Gives up when problems or barriers arise
Powers through roadblocks
Disregards feedback or construes criticism as negative
Welcomes constructive criticism
Says “I did the best I could”
Says “It’s okay if I didn’t get it all right in one shot—with gradual work and practice, I’ll get better”
Resists leaving the comfort zone
Pursues new challenges
Let’s take something as simple (yet ambitious) as learning a new language. The fixed mindset enters the endeavor with the expectation or hope that it will be easy to pick up. But a few lessons in, the fixed mindset might get impatient if it’s not getting the pronunciations correct. It’ll get frustrated and reach a certain plateau it doesn’t believe it’ll overcome.
It’ll stop practicing and decide it’s not worth the effort, thinking there’s no point in continuing because it doesn’t have “what it takes.” It’ll declare that it’s just “terrible with languages” and move on to something that feels easier.
But a growth mindset would embrace the opportunity as a chance to expand itself. It’ll complete each step in its lesson plan patiently, working slowly enough to understand and comprehend each part of its study. It knows effort and time is an integral part of its growth equation.
It won’t stop at the first sign of failure, will keep practicing, and will seek out assistance wherever it can get it. It’ll be eager to learn more complex phrases or concepts as it goes along and might even expand its studies by learning more about the culture of its language or even another language altogether. By adopting the growth mindset, you’re exerting control and power over the circumstances in your life. No excuses.
Researcher Carol Dweck, who’s spent her professional career investigating and championing the growth mindset, observed some of the shortfalls educators unwittingly displayed when dealing with their students that led them to a potentially “false” growth mindset.
In essence, the development of the false growth mindset boils down to the educators praising the students’ efforts rather than their process. The growth mindset focuses on the deliberate execution and gradual understanding of concepts. In Dweck’s observation, some teachers praised their kids with generalized platitudes like “good effort!” or “you can do anything you set your mind to!”
Someone with a genuine growth mindset gets more specific about their praise. Rather than applauding the person, they compliment their process. Instead of exalting who their students are, they commend what they do.
For example, a fixed mindset would say, “Gosh, you’re really smart at math!” A growth mindset, on the other hand, would say, “I like how you worked on this problem by trying different approaches and how thoroughly you tried to solve the equation with these notes. You put a lot of work into this.” A false growth mindset would simply say, “Great job for trying! Keep trying!”
Just saying the student is smart—which they very well may be—only reinforces their identity. Complimenting the work they put in strengthens their actions and gives them the reinforcement that change is possible through action and effort.
The instructors certainly didn’t intend to cultivate the fixed mindset in their students, but speaking in such ambiguous praise doesn’t take the step-by-step nature of the growth mindset into consideration. It may have given the students a false sense of progress or expectations, taking their mind off the very gradual experience of the growth mindset.
The primary realization is that the growth mindset is about learning, not generating. Leave the self-congratulations and look toward each next step purposefully. Acknowledging your own progress is important, but anticipating your next moves is a great way to keep you focused on your motivation to always learn and improve.
The growth mindset is obviously well suited to educational endeavors, but it works in many other areas. In business, a growth mindset allows you to seek new opportunities and areas in which you can improve. A businessperson is more enthusiastic about making contacts, understanding employees’ roles, finding untapped markets or approaches, and projecting into the future if they feel that their efforts will have an impact.
Personal relationships and friendships also benefit from the growth mindset. A fixed mindset is always looking for the perfect partner, someone who checks off every trait on their list and will live with them happily ever after. But if they discover flaws in the other person—or themselves—they feel they’re just part of who they are and they won’t be able to change, whereas a growth mindset knows that all relationships take work and honest, active engagement with others. They know love isn’t a magic potion that solves everything; it’s a consistently developing process that matures and grows the more it’s tended to.
Finally, be aware that it’s almost impossible to be in growth mindset 100% of the time—you will, occasionally, find yourself rooted in a fixed mindset where you feel you’ve hit a wall or a ceiling. It happens. When it does, you might beat yourself up a little about it because that’s what a fixed mindset does: it judges according to a final result or lack thereof. But spin off that critical voice by examining what you might have missed, diagnosing it, taking it into consideration, and trying again.
You don’t have the time or pressure constraints in the growth mindset. You’re here to learn. You’ll get to your destination eventually, and by absorbing all you can about your process, it’ll be better in the long run. So will you.
I have a childhood friend that I don’t think has ever taken responsibility for a day in his life. He still lives at home with his parents (at age 35), which by itself is fine, but he does so out of necessity and a career path that may have peaked four years ago. He was also placed on academic probation during college and subsequently flunked out the next semester. And he’s about 20 pounds over what I might call a healthy weight for him.
You can be all of these things and still be a wonderful person—and he is. The problem with him is that he doesn’t believe that any of his life circumstances are actually his fault, and that’s what keeps him there.
He says they are out of his control, he’s done all he can, and it doesn’t matter if he tries—things always just “turn out badly.” It’s never his fault, he’s not meant to succeed, and the cards are stacked against him.
He believes that what happens to him is entirely a result of external factors like fate, luck, people having it in for him, or just because “that’s the way the world works sometimes.” He’s still living with his parents because the economy is terrible and jobs don’t fall out of the sky. He’s not going back to school because he’s not lucky like other people who study subjects they really like and he doesn’t learn well in traditional settings. And his weight? He doesn’t exercise, he’s got a thyroid problem, and he thinks diets are generally scams.
My friend has what is known as an external locus of control, which is part of a theory popularized by Julian Rotter in 1954 about how people view the loci of control in their lives.
A locus of control refers to where people feel control in their life resides—internally or externally. If you feel your life is controlled by outside influences that no amount of effort from you can change, you have an external locus of control. The external locus view decreases the amount of control you have down to almost zero. This is a mindset that is highly detrimental to the pursuit of success, happiness, and maximizing your potential.
When you don’t feel that things are within your control, there is no logical way that you will take responsibility or fault for anything. Thus, you don’t make any effort to improve yourself whatsoever—because in your mind, there is no correlation between your efforts and what happens! Why even bother if you are going to be subject to the whims of the world and other people?
External locus people focus on things that happened in the past. They focus on situations in which they really do not have a say. They focus on the lives of other people. They hope people will magically change or that situations will stop happening to them. They simply hope, wish, and pray that things will be different. This is someone who sits quietly in their room in the hopes that their comfort zone will suddenly burst or increase.
The time you invest worrying about things you have no voice or control over is wasted. You let the fiction that you are not in control of your life get the best of you. You throw yourself a pity party.
Let’s compare that to someone with an internal locus of control. By contrast, a person with an internal locus of control believes that outcomes and successes are directly tied to their level of effort and work. And of course, if they fail, it’s because they did not try hard enough. If the missing element is effort and action, then that’s what will increase ten-fold.
Those with an internal locus of control feel they are impacting the world and making their mark on it, as opposed to just living in it or being subject to it. They are proactive about what they want because they know that’s the only way it will come to them. As a result, they are very goal-oriented and focused because their actions have direct consequences, as do their inactions. They have the power to affect their lives on a daily basis.
Internal locus people don’t accept a lack of success and are active to remedy it. External locus people passively accept whatever comes their way because they don’t feel they can change it.
Here’s an example to illustrate. Say that you keep getting passed up for a promotion by younger, less experienced coworkers. Understandably, this is irking, and this is where the divide of locus begins—the source of that annoyance.
An external locus person might suspect that there is a conspiracy brewing. He thinks, “My boss is an assh*le and has always hated me. In fact, he’s threatened by me because I’m better at his job than he is. Besides, he’s jealous of my wife.” The external locus person blames factors out of their control and doesn’t look inward. They choose to be a victim.
An internal locus person might start looking at their own actions and examining how they tie into their actual job performance. They will ask themselves, “Am I showing up to work on time? Putting in enough hours? Meeting minimum quality standards? Taking too long for lunch breaks or leaving early too frequently?” Their focus is on examining their own actions and not looking outward. This is choosing to be a victor.
If the latter scenario sounds more familiar to you, that’s good news. You realize that your results are directly related to your actions. The results you crave? They are yours for the taking! It all begins and ends with your realization that when you focus on the things you can control, you can change your life.
If the former scenario sounds more familiar to you, that’s not necessarily bad news. It’s probably not intentional on your part. It means you need to adjust how you view your locus of control and acknowledge that your outcomes are indeed directly caused by your actions. Instead of worrying about things you can’t control, recognize that channeling emotional and mental energy can be what changes your life. No excuses!
Ultimately, there is nothing fundamentally different about people with different loci of control. They experience the same events and hardships, but they simply perceive them differently. Successful people with internal loci of control take reality as it comes and impose their will on it. They do not blame other people and circumstances for what happens. They take responsibility and control.
They look at the world as a set of stimuli that they only need to respond to and take control over by using their will. They focus on what they can directly impact until their spheres of control continue to spread.
Henry Ford famously said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
He was speaking to the matter of self-efficacy—the confidence we have in our ability to handle and execute in given situations. The mindset of feeling you actually can do something is a massive contribution to all efforts you undertake, even more than talent.
Self-efficacy is a nearly universal element in almost any success story. By nurturing belief and confidence in your abilities, you can start a chain reaction that funnels down through your efforts, understanding, and accomplishments. The more resolute one is that they can do something, the more likely the chances that they actually will. And the more they accomplish with this mindset, the more control and agency they have over their own fortune. If you assume, even brashly, that you can tackle a task, you’ll try and succeed or try, fail, learn, and then succeed in the end again.
And again, this is a simple switch to flip mentally in deciding how you view the obstacles in your life.
The opposite of self-efficacy is helplessness, in which an individual perceives that they have no control over a given situation—and therefore no control over their own fate. Helplessness promotes a fatalistic outlook, which in turn makes one less willing to put energy into anything. They’ve already decided their goal is out of reach, so why put any effort into it? You might as well just curl up into a ball on the ground.
It’s not always easy to build self-efficacy, but it’s something we can pick up from several sources. Albert Bandura, the Stanford psychologist who first theorized about the self-efficacy mindset, identified four different means by which we can build a self-efficacious mindset.
Mastery experiences, or “just doing it.” You’ve done it before, so you can do it again. With every successful completion of a task, project, or goal, we add and accumulate more self-efficacy and confidence in our abilities. It takes tenacity to power through the process and conquer the snags, but that’s exactly the concrete evidence we need to feel good and reassure ourselves. Any extended time working on a particular skill or project—writing a book, completing an exercise routine, researching a report, making exotic cocktails—helps build the mastery mindset.
Vicarious experiences. As the name implies, these kinds of experiences come from observing those around us, especially people we’ve set up as role models for the kinds of accomplishments we want to make. By seeing others attain favorable outcomes from their efforts, we become encouraged that we can replicate their success ourselves. Using the examples in the last paragraph, those include your favorite author, a physical trainer, a seasoned journalist, and whoever the best bartender in your location is. Monkey see, monkey do is a surprisingly empowering way of thinking.
Verbal persuasion. People who we consider authority or mentor figures—parents, coaches, teachers, tutors, supervisors—play a huge part in developing self-belief, encouragement, and faith in our success. Their support and guidance make us more likely to stick with a given task and transcend obstacles. This could also include personal friends or associates on the same level who respect your enthusiasm and abilities. If someone that has the authority and experience to know otherwise believes in us, we will take it to heart.
Emotional and physiological states. How you’re feeling—your overall mental state and how you feel at that particular moment—will naturally affect your level of self-efficacy, especially if you’re feeling negatively.
It can be hard for someone suffering from depression to build confidence in their abilities, and states of panic or strain can be viewed as susceptibility to challenging situations. The happier we are, conversely, the more assured we are. We think about happy and successful outcomes and assume that things will go our way.
Negative emotions—the feeling of failure after not being able to finish a book, discouragement at your weight training progress—affect your mindset. But don’t underestimate the power of positive emotions on your sense of self-efficacy: the relief of a completed research paper or the satisfaction of a fantastic cocktail with one of those little umbrellas in it.
Self-efficacy is a trait that can be bred and cultivated, and it helps us maintain control over ourselves. We develop self-efficacy by consistently working, watching, and learning from others, courting constructive feedback, and focusing on and celebrating success. After walking through the fire, we understand how we can impact the trajectory of our lives even when everything appears to be going south. Its opposite, helplessness, might be perceived as something that one just “gets,” whether they’re born with it or have it thrust upon them. But here’s the surprising thing: helplessness is something that’s also learned.
In the 1960s, scientist Martin Seligman conducted experiments on dogs that were a variation on the famous classical conditioning trials conducted by Ivan Pavlov in the early 1900s. Pavlov “trained” his dogs to salivate at the ringing of a dinner bell, which to the canines obviously meant they were about to get fed. Seligman, on the other hand, tried to reverse the effect (in ways I personally think were a little cruel—but, well, science).
Rather than food, Seligman used a light to alert the dogs that they were about to receive minor electric shocks through the floor of their cages. His theory was that the sound of the bell would cause the dogs to escape over the wall and into the next cell.
At first, the dogs who were just introduced to the shocks for the first time did try to escape them at the flash of the light. But to his surprise, dogs who had been subjected to the trial multiple times did not try to escape when the light flashed. Instead, they stayed in the electric zone and braced themselves for the shock they were about to get.
Seligman’s conclusions were astounding: over time, we are conditioned to respond to adverse circumstances or imminent misfortune by giving in—admitting helplessness. The dogs had “learned” that there was no way for them to avoid the shocks; they were going to keep happening whether they tried to escape them or not. So in the latter stages of the experiment, they just gave up and lay on the ground and did nothing. Humans do the same thing but in slightly more dignified ways.
The implications of this finding range from annoying to possibly tragic. A person who’s belittled about his intelligence or learning may always figure that he’ll never be able to learn math or science, so he doesn’t even try. More grievously, victims of physical abuse may never try to escape their surroundings because they believe it would be fruitless to even try—things won’t get better anyway.
So the mindsets of self-efficacy and helplessness are both conditions that are learnable and lead to polar opposite results. Self-efficacy increases one’s motivation to work with confidence, take on new challenges, and navigate confidently through trials or negative situations that come up in life. It’s vital to strive toward the self-efficacious mindset and to try to reverse the effects of the helplessness mindset as much as possible. Instead of giving in to feelings of futility, focus on what you can control and know that you have the power to shape your life.
For example, let’s say you work at a company that’s on the verge of making some budget cuts, which could very well mean layoffs. Nothing spreads terror through an organization like the prospect of impending unemployment. A person with the helpless mindset believes the entire process is out of their hands. Their destiny is controlled by an outside force, they were probably doomed from the outset, their morale is in the tank, and there’s no point in wasting any effort.
The self-efficacious mindset, on the other hand, helps people work as diligently and as thoroughly as they can. They realize they can’t control what will happen at a level they’re not on. By working with as much pride and confidence as usual, they know that if they get laid off, it wasn’t because they failed. They know that these challenges happen, and how they manage through these negative situations is what defines who they are. That kind of confidence could lead to a new situation more readily than they might expect (if, that is, you even get laid off in the first place).
The first step in changing your mindset is to understand that you have all the tools you need to make it happen and that the power’s in our grasp.
There is another way to think about the difference between feeling self-efficacious and empowered versus feeling helpless: whether we imagine ourselves to be the main or supporting characters in our lives.
The main character is the focus of the story—they’re the ones whose actions, feelings, and proclamations carry the most weight and whom we pay attention to the most. Supporting characters are essentially there to serve others. Even if they have a special skill or do something that seems heroic, ultimately they’re only important in how they affect the main character. We don’t fall into one role on purpose, but we can easily get caught in being a supporting character in our own lives.
Let’s take a look at shadowy superhero Batman. You might be familiar with the fact that he has a butler named Alfred to attend to his needs and act as a confidant.
No matter how great a butler Alfred is, he’s ultimately there to support Batman. He might flip a switch here and there and do something that impacts Batman, but it’s only as a role player. Batman has to do the heavy lifting and save the world. All eyes are on him. When Batman’s out saving the world, Alfred is contenting himself with a pot of tea. Maybe he’s watching Batman on TV, but that’s all: watching. Alfred doesn’t have any control over what happens to him as a consequence of being Batman’s employee. The plot is all about Batman, and because of that, he wields the power to change things. Which of the aforementioned people do you identify with more?
As the central character in your own story, you’re in control of what happens and have the power to determine how the plot unfolds. I’m sure all this reads like very creative daydreaming. It is, and that’s the point. You’ll be amazed at how framing your life in this way can be empowering and enlightening. It may be a flight of fantasy, but it very subtly teaches you how to gain control of your direction.
Takeaways: