Category: Growth mindset

Thin slice your skills, and your story

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Last weekend, we visited my daughter at college. She’s a first-year student, and is running on her school’s cross-country team. On Sunday, parents and siblings were invited to join the team for their long run (typically 10-15+ miles).

Clearly this is an invitation one should decline!  Which might explain why exactly three parents (myself included), plus two younger sisters (including my youngest daughter) showed up in the pitch black at a woodsy parking lot at 7:25am on a Sunday morning.

None of our group of five had illusions of keeping up with the XC team. But it appeared that I was the only one in our small group who had not been running regularly.

One of the parents, a regular marathoner, popped out of her car and announced, “We agreed we’re running 8 miles at an 8:30 pace.” I knew I was way out of my depth. The four of them (including the 13 and 14 year old) did, in fact, run 8 miles at an 8:20 pace. I, working very hard, managed half that distance at a slower pace.

As I finished the run, it was tough not to compare myself with everyone who ran further and faster than I did, and tougher still not to tell myself a story about my fitness.

“I’m just not in the kind of shape I used to be in.”

A few days later, I came across a video of a running coach giving a scientific explanation of the value of Zone 2 (comfortable pace) running.

The gist of it is: your heart, your circulatory system, and the energy transfer system that gets oxygen to the mitochondria in your cells all improve dramatically when you run at 60% pace. Specifically, the mitochondria, which convert oxygen to energy, get more efficient at that process; they even move closer to the surface of the cell (!!) if you’re running consistently.

Something about that explanation clicked for me. I’ve not been running, so I’ve not being doing the exact activity he said helps with oxygen transfer, so I don’t do that efficiently. That led to a much more specific, useful story:

“Having not run regularly over the last 10 months, my body is less used to converting oxygen to energy, and my mitochondria aren’t hovering around the surface of my cells to create maximum efficiency.”

That feels a lot less damning, and a lot less existential, than “I’m just not in the kind of shape I used to be in.”

The difference is important, because the “what kind of shape am I in?” story is personal, it’s big, and it might have some staying power in terms of how I see myself, the choices I make about health and fitness, etc.

Whereas the more specific analysis leads to very different conclusions about what is or isn’t going on with my mitochondria and the specific actions I could take to change that. This narrow story doesn’t ladder up to a mess of inaccurate meaning. It doesn’t entice me with a woeful tale of the long, declining path I’m on.

I just haven’t been running, and if I were to run more, I’d get better at running.

What I’m doing here is thin-slicing my story. Visualize it like this, with the highlighted part describing the story I’m telling myself.

I could just say “I’m just not in the kind of shape I used to be in.” That kind of story looks like this.

And this is a story at the level of identity, one that’s much bigger and much more personal than what actually happened.

Whereas a story that starts with “Having not run regularly over the last 10 months, my body is less used to converting oxygen to energy…” looks a lot more like this.

This story, focused on specific skills and aptitudes, stays at that level. I can decide that developing those skills is (or is not) something I want to invest in. But that whole conversation is very contained, and it runs little / no risk of taking on a life of its own.

You can apply this thinking in a million situations, as in:

I just got rejected on this sales call, again.

  • I’m a terrible salesperson OR
  • I’m not calling the right people / not identifying a need correctly / not asking the right questions

A teammate didn’t help me when I asked for help.

  • They don’t like me or care about my success OR
  • What’s going on in their day? / Did I make it super clear what needed to happen by when? / Did I express both the what and the why behind my request?

My boss is mad that there was a mistake in the materials we presented to the client.

  • I’m a total screw up, I’ll never succeed in this job OR
  • I need to create a system where I give myself a 24-hour break before doing a last review of client-ready materials

Thick-sliced stories about our identity keep us stuck. They are the antithesis of a growth mindset, because “I” (our ego) is always at the center of these stories.

Thin-sliced stories, fed by thin-sliced skills, are both more accurate and more useful. They highlight what’s really going on and where we can focus our energy. With a thin-sliced story, a shortfall, a misstep, or a slow run is just what it is, nothing more, nothing less…and certainly not a verdict about you as a person.

Want to Change? Then Commit 4 Days a Week

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Four days a week is what we need to commit to something if we really want to grow.

Twice a week is enough for maintenance.

Three days a week is enough for improvement.

But four days a week creates transformative change.

It doesn’t matter what sort growth you’re working on–you might want to improve your sales, singing, soccer, swimming, saxophone or salsa dancing. Perhaps you’re working on tambourine, thoughtfulness, tact, tenacity, tap dancing or Telugu.

Give it four days a week and change will happen.

Also, while it goes without saying that 0 times a week gets you nowhere, be especially wary of once a week—it may be the most dangerous cadence of all if we care about improvement. At once a week, we feel like we’re doing something regularly, but we never change. It’s perfect fodder for the “I’ll never be good at this” story we like to tell ourselves.

We will be good at this, one day.

And 4 is the magic number to get us there.

No Better

~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

It’s easy to confuse the time we spend thinking about getting better at something and time we spend doing the work of improving.

“I’m no good at fundraising.”

“I’m terrified of public speaking.”

“I don’t stand up to people when I disagree with them.”

These are our going-in narratives

Then we start thinking about how we’d like to be better at that thing, maybe we buy a book or take a course or join a gym in service of that goal.

We’ve done something. A thing. It’s more than nothing, just enough to tell ourselves we’ve started.

But improvement is slow. We get distracted. We do a little bit every now and again, but not much.

And then something subtle and truly dangerous creeps in: an old story. The part of ourselves that enjoys the narrative of this particular limitation mounts an argument in favor of how we’ll never get from here to there. It does this by winding the clock back to that first day we noticed a gap, then skipping forward to today, and says something like, “You see? A full year has gone by and I’m no better. Just goes to show that I never will be!”

As in: never mind that I’ve only talked to 10 potential investors in the last six months, look at my meager fundraising results. There’s something wrong with my pitch and with my capacity as a fundraiser.

As in: I’ve only given a stand-up talk in front of an audience twice since last March, yet when I watch someone else nail their speech I’m quick to decide she’s more talented than I am and that she’s never been as nervous or as fumbling as I think I am today.

As in: my appropriate and legitimate fears about challenging authority notwithstanding, I’ve never used the safer spaces around me to practice speaking up. Yet I beat myself up when, at that one moment when the stakes are highest, I don’t speak my mind.

It’s clear when you describe it this way: the thing that keeps us from persisting, from growing, from ultimately transforming is that quiet, alluring voice in our heads that smiles and says “You see? You’re still no better.”

Your reply is simple: I am. Just a bit. And I’m going to keep at it until I get there.

Sarabande: What’s one plus one?

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Here’s an excerpt of Handel’s Sarabande, which you may have heard on its own or as part of the soundtrack for Deer Hunter, American Horror Story, 21 Grams, or more than 100 other movies and TV shows.

My son has been learning this on the piano, and as you might be able to tell from all the markings, we’ve spent a lot of time together trying to get these three measures right.

What’s tricky about this piece is that it has three separate voices but the pianist has only two hands. (If you’re not a musician, don’t panic, this is easy: the notes on the top staff with the stems pointing up are the top voice; the ones on the top staff with the stems pointing down are the middle voice; and the ones on the bottom staff are the bottom voice. So in this section you need to play, and think about, two voices in your right hand).

Watching him take this on is a sometimes-sobering reflection on how learning really happens.

The way you pick apart a piece like this is to work on one hand, or one voice, alone; then work on the other voice or hand alone; and then put it all together.

So, right hand first, over and over again until it is easy and natural.

Then left hand, over and over again until it is easy and natural.

And then, voila! Both hands together.

What drives my son insane is that it just doesn’t work like this. Not even close.

There “voila” doesn’t happen because when you put both hands together, things usually fall apart. All the old habits and wrong notes and fingerings that don’t quite work – the ones that are ingrained at a deeper level of (muscle) memory – come roaring back in the face of the complexity of trying to put all of the pieces together.

And so, it’s back to the drawing board. To each hand alone. To putting hands together in tiny increments until those hold together. To putting bigger and bigger pieces together, and having those fall apart too. And then, bit by bit, it sticks, you can play the whole thing.

And then you sleep on it, you come back the next day, and it’s fallen apart. Again. Only this time the putting back together happens more quickly, more naturally.

And then one day, you arrive.

What we’re experiencing is that the act of putting together more than one new behavior isn’t a 1+1 = 2 process. It’s a 1+1 = 1 process, over and over and over again until, if you stick with it, if you don’t get too discouraged, if you’re willing not to abandon ship, 1+1 = 4.

More often than not, it’s not the learning of new things that we find hard, it’s the work of not giving up. We are often unwilling to slog through that awful period in the middle, that part where we know what we’re trying to do, we’ve done a bunch of work, and the new behaviors don’t hold together. We often have little reason to believe, in the midst of not getting there yet, that we are actually on the right path, that this is what the work looks like, that real growth and progress are never linear and that new skills are fragile things that crumble, at first, when exposed to the light.

Until they don’t. Until they become a part of us. Until they become natural and we just show up and play, beautifully.