Feedback Thoughts

This image is meant to display the elasticity of the brain and how it is not permanently fixed in form or size. (Source: The Tiny Buddha)

A fixed mindset could be holding you back — here's how to change it

I tutor K-12 students and I am constantly trying to explain what it means to have a growth-oriented mindset in contrast to the fixed mindset that rhetoric amongst their peers has instilled in their developing brains. I even picked up the fixed mindset in elementary school and carried it with me to college until I truly found my passion for education. We're constantly taught to think that some people are just "naturally" smarter than us and only some people could make it as engineers while others should choose an "easier" major. It wasn't until I started my international degree, where you're forced to have a somewhat strong understanding of so many fields (economics, political science, geography, anthropology, philosophy, science, etc.) to be able to analyze international politics, where I realized that if you give me the proper resources and if I dedicate enough time, I could become a novice or an expert in any field that I wanted to be. This made be realize that I couldn't just use the excuse of "oh, I'm not a scientist" to not take the time to learn the scientific aspects of climate change and only limit myself to political analysis of the issue. Being a student at OU, with a plethora of academic resources, as well as having access to people that dedicate their lives studying issues of my interests, helped me realize that the only thing stopping me from understanding something that I did not understand was myself, especially when I constantly see populations, such as Palestinian refugees, deprived of their access to these kinds of educational resources. This article teaches its readers to not search for someone or something to put blame on for mistakes. Look for answers, look for reasons, and look for advice within those mistakes and learn how you can not make them again!

A Simple 5-Second Habit to Rewire Your Harshly Self-Critical Brain

This article focuses on the mantra of "recover after setbacks", or reality-based self-congratulation, aka REBS, and I wish I had read it a long time ago. I think I act much more rationally when looking at the long-term goals that I aim to reach, rather than the small obstacles I have to overcome within the journey. As a freshman, I used to be so scared to look at the constructive criticism on work that I turned into my professors because I felt as if my work was TRASH compared to the work my professors have spent their careers creating and realistically, it probably was. But after a couple of semesters, I realized that I definitely should want to have somebody with that kind of expertise to help me in my own academic journey. The minor setback of feeling embarrassed for five seconds about being wrong about something was worth completely changing my initial views for the rest of my career and how I made sense of the bigger picture.

The idea of looking at my long-term goals, and not beating myself up for minor setbacks translates to so many other parts of my life. Is gaining one hour of fun with my friends, really worth going to sleep late before an exam that could impact my grade for the entire semester and my GPA? No. Is 20 minutes of pleasure from eating Taco Bell, really worth undoing my progress from my hard work at the gym that day and hindering my long-term fitness goals? Sometimes!! To me, that Taco Bell is worth the experience, but the old me would have said "Well, that meal threw me off of my diet. I might as well eat terribly for the rest of the day or maybe even the rest of the weekend." It took me looking at my long-term objectives to realize that a minor setback should be just that: minor, and it shouldn't negatively impact the rest of my journey.