Gowth Mindset Beyond School

Exercise weights

(Source: Max Pixel)

Outside of school, I find myself best taking a growth mindset approach when it comes to health and fitness. Growing up, I felt pretty insecure about my body, as do many young girls that are constantly being told what their body “should” look like. I was most determined to be thin and this led me to taking unsustainable approaches to changing my diet by going on crash diets and forcing myself to do gruesome exercise that I did not enjoy. This would turn me off from “being healthy” because I was so miserable eating boring, low-calorie meals that I thought I had to eat to be skinny and doing workouts that I hated. This made me burn out on living a healthy lifestyle, especially if I did not see fast results, and I would go back to living a life where I did not take care of myself.

It wasn’t until I realized that sustainable efforts that brought progress, slowly but surely, were much more effective in reaching my goals over cyclical progress and failure that would always brought my back where I began. I learned that moderation was key and that I shouldn’t live a life where I am depriving myself of the things that I enjoy and believe that would throw me completely off track instead of just setting me back a little bit. Now I explore new recipes that are healthy but still delicious, I only do exercise that I enjoy, and I do not have an all or nothing mindset about my health and fitness because I focus my long term goals of living a healthy life rather than looking good in the short term.

Now, I have learned to have a growth mindset by learning to enjoy the journey rather than trying to solely reach a certain goal of how I would want to look. Also, I set goals that don’t focus on reaching ideals that might no be realistic and instead, my fitness goals are centered on maintaining progress and challenging myself. For example, before, I would aspire to be a certain pant size. Today, I aspire to reach a certain weight that I can lift or a certain distance that I want to run because it makes me feel driven to constantly challenge myself and I love reaching goals that make me appreciate all of the hard work that I did to achieve them.