Mixed Mindset: Growth in Some Areas, Fixed in Others

Mixed mindset: not one belief, but several, split by domain

You don’t have a single way of understanding talent. You have several, and each one kicks in depending on the terrain you’re on.

A mixed mindset is the result in our quiz that describes people whose belief about whether abilities can be developed varies depending on the area of life in question. The name is ours; the underlying idea comes from Carol Dweck’s research.

Where this pattern comes from

Psychologist Carol Dweck, the researcher behind the work on growth and fixed mindsets, points out something that’s easy to overlook: domain matters.

A person can have a strong growth mindset at work while, at the same time, holding a fixed mindset about their artistic or athletic ability, without any contradiction.

This split pattern is, in fact, the most common one. As early as 1995, Dweck, Chiu, and Hong distinguished between implicit beliefs about intelligence, about morality, and about personality, and observed that a person could see one as fixed and another as changeable. In 2015 Dweck went further and admitted that she had often presented people as one type or the other, when in reality they are mixtures.

How it shows up day to day

• You keep going after failure on some topics, and give up sooner on others, without this reflecting a general pattern of persistence or of quitting.
• Your reaction to a new challenge depends on whether you believe you have a natural “knack” for that specific kind of task.
• You accept that effort matters, but also that starting talent counts, depending on the terrain.
• Your attitude shifts noticeably from one context to another, more than you’re usually aware of.

The risk of not noticing the pattern

The real challenge with this profile is that, being a partial rather than a general pattern, it’s easy to miss which specific areas your mindset turns more fixed in.

Since it isn’t a single, visible trait but a mix, it can go unnoticed for years that you systematically avoid certain challenges, not out of a lack of interest, but because of an underlying belief about your ability in that specific terrain that you’ve never stopped to question.

Signs of where the more fixed mindset concentrates

Two clues usually point the way:

• The areas that get avoided. The two or three domains where comparisons or weak results are habitually sidestepped. It may be genuine disinterest, or a belief in fixedness that has never been examined.
• How feedback lands in each domain. If criticism helps someone improve in one area but blocks them in another, Dweck reads that as a clue to where the more fixed mindset sits.

An example: someone who happily asks for reviews of their reports at work, but stops going to dance classes as soon as the teacher corrects a step. The reaction isn’t the same because the underlying belief about their ability isn’t the same either.

There’s no need for a uniform growth mindset across the board; it’s enough to know where it isn’t present.

What Dweck says about changing your mindset

In Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006), Carol Dweck devotes a whole chapter to how to change your mindset, and one of her conclusions fits this profile directly: mindset isn’t a single, immovable trait, but a set of beliefs that can be updated with awareness and practice, area by area.

For the mixed profile, this is actually an underrated advantage: you already have proof that sustaining a growth mindset is possible, because you sustain it in at least one area of your life.

The work isn’t learning a whole new way of thinking about talent from scratch, but deliberately carrying over the same strategies (persistence, reviewing mistakes, openness to uncomfortable information) from the terrain where you already apply them effortlessly to the terrain where your mindset is still more fixed.

Dweck does warn, though, that the change is rarely instant: it tends to move forward in small, sustained steps, not in a single, final decision.

Want to see how your mindset splits across different areas? Take the growth mindset quiz.

Sources

• Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.
• Dweck, C. S. (2015, September 22). Carol Dweck revisits the “growth mindset”. Education Week. edweek.org
• Dweck, C. S., Chiu, C. & Hong, Y. (1995). Implicit theories and their role in judgments and reactions: A word from two perspectives. Psychological Inquiry, 6(4), 267-285. doi:10.1207/s15327965pli0604_1