Three Steps to Change Your Mindset

Think of a particular challenge in your life. What if you could change your mindset to create a positive snowball effect in less than an hour? This is exactly what the interventions of Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton do. For example, he did one intervention with minority students at Harvard who felt they didn’t belong. The students who did that hour-long intervention had remarkably higher GPAs after four years than the control group who had not. So what does the process involve?

1) Introduce a New Perspective

The students who felt like they didn’t belong watched videos of seniors who shared that they felt similarly as freshmen and that the sense of not belonging was temporary. This caused a shift in understanding from, “I feel I don’t belong and therefore I shouldn’t be here,” to “Other people feel this way too, and maybe I will start to feel like I belong soon.”  

2) Reflect on the New Perspective

Students were asked to journal about the new mindset, exploring what evidence they have that confirms the mindset from their past and how it might apply to them now. They were also asked to share their reflections out loud with peers. 

3) Reinforce the New Perspective Through Action

Students were asked to take actions that were in alignment with the new mindset. Many of them joined study groups and attended the office hours of their professors. These actions made the mindset real in the students’ social network, which created a snowball effect to confirm the new mindset. All of this created feedback loops that further reinforced the sense of belonging and academic flourishing. 

This week, I invite you to examine a particular challenge in your life:

What is your current mindset about the challenge? What is a new perspective you could take that would help you better engage with the challenge? What evidence do you see in your past for the new mindset and how might it help you in the future? What actions will you take that could reinforce the new mindset? 

God bless,
Dan