The Power of Effort Praise in Enhancing Performance

This chapter examines how growth mindset influences performance and learning, stressing the importance of effort-based praise over identity-based praise. It includes research on neural responses to errors and the cognitive distinctions between fixed and growth mindsets, illustrating how feedback shapes motivation and outcomes.

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Episode notes

In this episode, I discuss how to build and apply a growth mindset — the practice of self-rewarding and focusing on learning and skill development through effort — to improve learning and performance. I also discuss how our internal narratives drive our ability to make progress. I contrast the growth mindset vs. the fixed mindset and describe how the type of feedback or praise we receive shapes our mindsets, and the huge advantage of rewarding and celebrating “verbs” (actions) rather than adjectives (performance labels). I also discuss data showing how stress can enhance performance and explain why the growth mindset works synergistically with the “stress-is-enhancing mindset,” and how to combine them. Whether you are a student, coach, therapist, parent, teacher or simply someone seeking to improve at something, this episode provides numerous science-supported tools for how to adopt a performance enhancing mindset.

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