Growth Mindset: Growing My Writing Process

Though I've been skipping the Wednesday retellings for this class, I've been doing a lot of other creative writing for other classes and outside projects, and I decided to use that opportunity to try a new growth mindset option: the "grow-your-writing-process" challenge.

This semester, I'm working on a YA novel for a final project in a course, and a YA novel that I started last November, which I'm hoping to finish up and submit to literary agents this summer. Usually, I work on my homework-novel during breaks between other classes and in the afternoons when I get home, and I try to squeeze in time to work on my personal project during free time in the evenings or right before I go to bed, even if it's just 100 words or so.

After reading about this particular growth mindset challenge, though—which suggests mixing up your normal writing process, like switching from typing to longhand or writing at night to writing in the mornings—I decided to go for it. Specifically, getting up early to write as opposed to staying up late for it. I've always been kind of a night owl, and I come from a long, proud line of them, so I wasn't sure how well it would work out for me.

As it turned out, though, I actually ended up with pretty positive results. I'd expected to be too tired early in the morning to muster up some decent focus or even really write coherently, but after trying it for a couple of mornings, it looks like that scatterbrained tiredness is more of a factor when I try to sneak in writing late at night, after a long day. Ten minutes or so after waking up, I tend to be warmed up too—and since I'm writing first thing in the morning, before other responsibilities or concerns crowd in and distract me, I'm actually able to focus better; the fact that everyone else in my house is still asleep probably helps. I'd also read online once that it's better to work on creative projects first thing in the day, before you give away your creativity and willpower in little slivers to other issues and projects that crop up, and it looks like there might be some truth to that. In any case, this is definitely something I'd like to keep trying—on good days, it would even allow me to write early in the morning and right before bed, which would make the juggling-projects thing easier too.



Image Credit: Pocket Watch, by mortiz320. Source: Pixabay.

Review Week: Week 8 Growth Mindset

Since being exposed to the idea of the growth mindset theory last semester in the Myth-Folklore class, I've tried to keep it in mind for situations outside of class, too. Learning about it came at pretty much the perfect time in my life, when I was starting to realize what I wanted my life to look at but also that trying to make that happen was also kind of scary, and was going to call for a lot of small changes to add up to big, eventual change.

I think part of what makes that so unnerving is the idea of changing not just my habits or beliefs, but changing me myself. I've always been strong in the belief that it's important to be yourself and stick to that gun, and a lot of the times, it's easy to think that self-acceptance and self-improvement are two diametrically opposed things. But really doesn't have to be that way, and I'm working on making myself more of a people person—at least enough of one that I'll be better at connecting and networking and being able to get the kind of career I want—without feeling like a sellout. It's a slow, sometimes uncomfortable process, but it's worth doing, and I'm working on it.

That said, I'm still a raging perfectionist, and I haven't gotten much better at letting go of things and moving on if I haven't gotten them the way I want them yet. Even stuff I shouldn't really care about. While cleaning out my family's garage the other week, I found an old letter from my second-grade teacher to my mom, explaining that I was too much of a perfectionist and was in danger of falling behind in class. I've gotten to the point that I can make that work without falling behind, but everything else is about as fraught as it was back then. And even though being a perfectionist is kind of miserable on a personal level, I can't say I don't want the results. One thing at a time, I guess, but for now, I'm okay with it—as long as I keep working on the balancing act between that and functionality.




Image Credit: "Trust the Process" by BK. Source: Flickr.

Growth Mindset: To Thine Own Self

To grow yourself, you must know yourself.

It's a saying I've heard before, and it's the saying I chose from the Growth Mindset Cats blog, and it's even a saying I agree with.

To an extent.

Because the thing is, knowing yourself is key to growing yourself—it's kind of the key to everything. I'm pretty big on the idea that if you want to make anything of yourself or be your best at anything, you've got to know yourself better than you know anyone else. Better than you know anything else.

But this is one of those swords with two edges—because that way of thinking is essential, but it's also a trap.

Constantly growing means constantly relearning who you are. Not in the sense that you should sell yourself out or anything, but that it's important to keep in mind that the you you are today isn't the you you're going to be for the rest of your life. Just like going back and reading a journal entry or school essay written by your fifth-grade self is in some ways reading something written by a totally different person, a list of things you're good at or capable of is going to change as you do.

The trap, I think, is when you fall into the trap of the idea that you know yourself, and you know your strengths. It's an issue I've been trying to work on since I first learned about the Growth Mindset concept in Mythology & Folklore last semester: Instead of just doubling down on my strengths, things that seem like more efficient time investments, I need to work on other areas, too. I need to invest in myself.

Sometimes, yes, that means honing skills that're already there, practicing stuff that's important to me and that informs the way I view and know myself.

But sometimes it means relearning who I am, too, and not just thinking I already know who I am, which means not thinking I already know what I'm good at, capable of. That's how I kick down the walls of the fixed-mindset box I've traditionally lounged around in, and it's how I learn to flex muscles I've never realized I have.





Image Credit: "To Grow Yourself, You Must Know Yourself" by Laura Gibbs. Source: Growth Mindset Cats.