The Power of a Growth Mindset: How to Develop Resilience and Succeed in Life with Dr. Brian Davidson
Do you dream of success, but sometimes feel like the cards are stacked against you? Don't worry - your brain is more powerful than fate. With a growth mindset and resilience, anything can be achieved. In this episode, we discuss how to unlock an unstoppable resilience that will power through all odds on the journey toward fulfillment and success in all areas of your life.
In This Episode, You Will Learn About:
What A Growth Mindset Can Do For You
Building Resilience for Success
Turn Challenges Into Opportunities
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About our guest:
Dr. Brian Davidson is the founder and president of MindVue. As chief architect of the MindVue Profile assessment and MindVue Learning Experience, Brian applies his work in measuring and developing mindsets to support educational institutions, healthcare organizations, sports teams, businesses, and the military in maximizing human performance. Driven to build hope, grit, and resilience across the globe, he has had the privilege to work with leading organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, the San Antonio Spurs, Workday, and the United States Military Academy (West Point).
Brian is a frequent writer on the topics of mindsets, mental wellness, and performance optimization and is a contributing author for Routledge's forthcoming Multidisciplinary Handbook of Character Development. Brian graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Iowa with High Distinction and Honors, earning a degree in psychology and a teaching endorsement in secondary education. He holds a master's degree in counseling psychology and a doctorate (with Honors) in educational leadership and policy studies, both from the University of Kansas, where he has also served as a senior research consultant and adjunct professor.
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Looking Into Indicators
I'm an educator at Art still to this day. I started off my career as a high school teacher up in the Twin Cities and back then I was just so intrigued on what made my kids successful. So I had a background in psychology from my undergrad years and then, as I was looking at my very best students trying to figure out, what made them succeed and do well, I started to realize, a lot of these kids were very intrinsically motivated and they had a high degree of self-discipline.
I said, I want to figure out how those qualities develop in people; came down to the University of Kansas, started to study these factors like hope and grit and resilience, growth mindset, all these positive psychological factors. And then started wondering, could we teach and cultivate these skills? So I was working at a university counseling center doing therapy with students. And I started to realize, the whole process of doing therapy was so reactive that we waited until a lot of those students in the counseling center were struggling so much before we worked to equip them with some skills. And so I thought to myself, here I had this background in education. Could we potentially cultivate and grow things like grits and perseverance and resilience and hope as a very proactive way to prevent a lot of those issues that it's facing there in the counseling center. So really from there, the rest is history.
After I finished up all my graduate work, I launched the company. I have a very supportive wife who said, let's go after this dream and from there, it started off in the education industry and really started to grow. It started to transform more into the corporate space, and now it's involved with military and higher education, sports, really you name it. These skills pretty much applied to every single one of us.
You talked about the reactiveness when people are not performing and you're talking about students, when students weren't performing, that's all of a sudden when we jump in and we start to counsel them, and I see that same apply when we're working in corporate. If somebody's not meeting the expectations, and I think about my background in sales when employees were not performing and they were not achieving their quota. Then all of a sudden we look at, okay, what do we need to do to put them on a performance improvement plan? Instead of taking a step back and looking at why are they not performing and how can we more or less take a proactive approach in understanding what motivates these individuals so that they can be exceeding their goals versus coming from a reactive?
What do you notice when you're working with organizations and you see that some of their employees may not be performing? What are the first indicators that you look for?
Number one, the first step is to measure and see what's going on. We often find that there is a reason, there's a “why” behind what you're seeing with regards to behavior or the lack of performance in the individuals.
It's really important to assess and get a gauge of where somebody's mindset is at. And then once you can see how somebody's thinking and feeling, now you can do something about it. Sometimes we'll even see it with high performing individuals, people that the organization says, “Oh my goodness, this is an incredibly accomplished employee. They're doing great.” But then in some cases, Danielle will assess their levels of grit, their resilience, their growth mindset, hope, and all these other indicators of performance and success, and we'll see that they score low. And we'll have a conversation with them and we'll come to find out that they've got a lot of stuff going on in their life. A lot of adversity, a lot of hardship, whether it's challenges with their children at home to changing work situations with a spouse to healthcare scare or diagnosis, something along those lines. Divorce, we see that one pop up time and time again. So we often find that there's a story behind the score, in our work, that there's a reason why we're seeing those results.
Really as a caring, supportive leader, I think a lot of our work comes down to helping those people. I think back to my own experience, back when I was a high school teacher going through graduate school, I was being trained to become a superintendent or school principal in this ED leadership program, and I was working with my principal at that point in time. And in the back of my head I knew I wanted to create this company of mind view, but I didn't know how to do it back then. I didn't know the path in order to make that leap. I started thinking, can I be open with this principal about what I really want to do? And I finally got the guts to tell him this. So we met one time, and I was scared out of my mind to tell him this here. I thought he was going to fire me and tell me why are you wasting my time, doing all this? I said, “Tim, I really don't want to be a school principal. I don't want to be a superintendent at all. I don't want to be a teacher at all. I want to develop a company that would revolve around developing things like grit and resilience and motivation.” All these factors that I'm really passionate about. And I'll never forget his response again, I was thinking he was going to respond in a very negative way. But he looked at me and said, “Brian, what can I do to help you get.” And that was a life changing event for me because here, I had a caring, supportive leader who listened to what I'm passionate about, who listened to what my dreams and ambitions were, and asked what he could do to assist.
I think that's our goal as leaders, is we need to do that with all of our employees. Because every single one of us, you, me, everybody out there, we all have our own goals and ambitions, what we are striving to do. And the question is, how do we get from where we're at right now to where we want to be? And those leaders can play such an important role. And I'll tell you what, after I had Tim share that with me, I was willing to walk through walls for that guy, for the next several years. I continued to be in school and I would just do whatever was needed to help Tim, do great work because he showed so much compassion and support towards me that it's just a game changer. As leaders, I think this is something that we definitely need to strive to do.
As leaders, it's a matter of looking at the whole person. I think about some of the top performers that were on my team, and sometimes they had difficult quarters. When I peeled back the lathers and started to understand what was going on in their life outside of just some of the challenges that they were having in their business, but taking a step back and saying, how are you really, tell me a little bit about some of your challenges, but digging deep into the heart of the person.
There were times where people, their family members, were battling cancer or they were having health scare, or I had one member on my team where their son had just been caught doing drugs and they were sending them to rehab. And sometimes we get so focused on our team in ensuring that they're meeting the metrics that if they fall short, Oh, they're not a good fit for the organization. But the reality is there might be some external factors that are contributing to that low performance when we take the time and understand what it is and provide them with the resources to help them. Then they will become loyal oftentimes because they see that the organization cares about them as a person and not just the performance.
And I think about so much of the messaging behind these concepts like grit and resilience is that this person just has it. Like Danielle just has grit and resilience and she's so motivated, she just has it all. And that's a message that we often hear and sometimes we often share this ourselves.
But what we're finding, and all of our data and all of our analysis of these individuals, organizations, and teams that we're assessing is, grit is not just something that you have or don't have. We have to think of these factors like muscles in our body. Every single one of us has muscle. The question is to what degree are those muscles in kind of good shape, are we strong in these areas? So every one of us has the ability to be grit. We all have the ability to be resilient. Before we hopped on here, we were initially talking about your own experience of when you were younger and facing those challenges in school, and then all of a sudden, things start to shift in your life and boom, you just start to flourish.
The same thing happens with these mindset skills, grit, resilience, motivation. Okay? It's not just about having these factors, but also, do we have the conditions that are right to allow these factors to grow within a person. These things don't exist in a vacuum by any means. Everything that is going on in a person's life can influence how they're thinking, how they're feeling, what are they experiencing in their own mind. And the complexity of this is just absolutely incredible. But if we can create those conditions where grit and resilience can flourish, then that's when people are really going to take off. And really you can't just force somebody to be gritty. You can't just throw it down their throat and say you've demonstrated grit and be more gritty and persevere and all that, and be more resilient. You have to cultivate it within somebody. It's got to come from within as opposed to just forcing them to act and behave a certain way. As we continue to figure out the best ways to do this, we'll continue to share that moving forward.
Getting Back on Track
As you had mentioned, there's been a time in my life where all of a sudden things started to work and I started to flourish in understanding what I was actually capable of. But I've also been a time period where I had spent 10 plus years of exceeding my goals and achieving milestones both professionally and personally, and then all of a sudden I had twins. And I suffered from postpartum depression. And here's taking somebody who's historically been a high achiever, and all of a sudden I had just lost everything.
I didn't know what to do, how to be a mom. I was exhausted and I know the steps that I took and about how I was able to rebuild and get that grit back so that I could fill myself again and get back to being a high achiever. But I want to hear from you for somebody who may be struggling with having this growth mindset. Maybe they've had grit and resilience before, but maybe they're in that negative space right now. What are some steps that somebody can take to get back on track?
I think a big part of this are people that we have in our lives and, unfortunately, the Covid pandemic, a lot of us isolated and withdrew from our social support systems, and that's not good for anybody. But I would just recommend to people to, to stay open to whoever could be, that's willing to support and help you get through some of the difficult times.
I think back to my own journey, back when I was working to do the validation process for this assessment, it took us three years to get it done. And there were times when I was thinking there's no way we're going to be able to pull this off. And there was one evening that, I was sitting there, sulking on a couch. And before this, however, let me go back and give you some background to this story. So my son, okay, he's now nine years old, but back when he was three, he had these little toys we called them stretchy legs. It was like a Gumby thing, where he would play with these things and stretch them out and they'd come back together while he was playing with stretchy legs. He up on my ceiling.
So he is playing with one of these outside, one of the neighbors, and evidently he launched it and he couldn't find it. The neighbor girl and him were trying to go around and search for it and they couldn't find it. And pretty soon Henry is losing his mind, you know that he's lost stretchy legs and the neighbors saying, I think it went down the drain. It definitely went down the drain. It's gone, forever. And little Henry here is going bonkers. It's a little three-year-old. I'm thinking, I said, Okay, can I do to, keep him calm here? I get down to him at eye level, and say, “Henry, you are a Davidson, and one thing that we Davidsons don't do is we don't give up. All right? We're going to keep searching for stretchy legs and we're going to find it. We're going to keep searching and we're going to get there. We're going to find stretchy legs.” And so he wipes away the tears and all that, and we can go around and, minutes later. we find stretchy legs is out in the grass at someplace.
We'll fast forward about six to eight months later, Henry's about four at this point in. I'm trying to validate this assessment, and it is just absolutely brutal, I'm struggling. I'm thinking there's no way we're going to be able to pull this off. I'm sitting here sulking in my misery on the couch with a glass of wine, and Henry comes up to me and says, “Dad, I can't find Woody's hat Woody from Toy Story.” “Henry. now, man. I'm tired, I'm worn out just let me rest here.” And he said, “Dad, no. We need to find Woody’s hat.” I said, “Henry, no, not right now. we'll figure it out later. We'll find it later.” He looked at me, he said, “Dad, remember dad, we are Davidson's and we don't give up. We keep searching. Dad, remember we keep searching.” And I'll never forget that. I heard my four-year-old son at that point in time share with me a message of hope, of perseverance and that definitely got my butt up off that couch, to go search for Woody’s hat, which we ultimately did find about an hour later. But more importantly, it helped to reignite that sense of perseverance in me. That’s okay, yes, I can find a way. Yes, we can persevere, we can get this done. We can accomplish this goal of getting this assessment created.
My advice is to be open to people in your life that can share that message of hope, to be that individual, to provide encouragement, support, and guidance. You never know, it could be your leader within the organization, or it could be your own four-year-old child. That you just don't know of who's gonna provide that inspiration to you. Just to keep going.
I love that story because I think that sometimes I learn more from my kids than they learn from me. They become a reflection of what we speak to and talk to, and sometimes they put us in check as to, we're not giving up here or you're a Davidson, you're gonna do this. I just absolutely love that story.
And I'm glad that you mentioned about the people around us, because I recently had a client, was offered a new job and it was a substantial step up in their career, going from an individual contributor role to a high level executive within an organization. And I remember talking to this person, and I was like, I just noticed something was off. I asked them, I said, “What's going on? Something seems to be off.” And they said, “I had shared with some people at the company I was working with that I got this new position. And people started to ask wow, that's a really big job. Are you sure that you can do this? Are you sure that you're ready for that particular step?” And I said, “I know that you're capable of taking on this role. You know you're capable of doing it. The person that's questioning you is probably too scared to take that risk themselves. Don't let their insecurity project onto you to the point where you start believing it.”
And the same goes for entrepreneurs. I have friends that are entrepreneurs and sometimes as entrepreneurs, we know that our business has peaks and valleys, and you never know what that future's going to bring and where your business is gonna come from. It's easy to sometimes surround ourselves with people who aren't willing to take the risk into entrepreneurship. When we're feeling a little insecure, we're doubting ourselves that knee-jerk reaction and say, oh, go back to corporate. But that's what I say is, as an entrepreneur, surround yourself with other entrepreneurs, get into a mastermind group, meet up with your business coach, meet up with people that understand what it's like to be an entrepreneur, that you can share some of your successes and challenges with, and brainstorm as to what steps you can take to move forward. And that's what I'm hearing from you is surrounding yourself with people that are going to cheerlead you on and be there as a support system.
The Growth Mindset
And I think having that growth mindset too. Growth mindsets is pioneering idea from Carol Dweck at Stanford, this belief that I can constantly, fundamentally grow, change, and improve as opposed to, I just have this talent, or I have this certain level of intelligence and I might always have this or some cases, am I get in situations and recognize that I don't have it. When those people have more of that fixed mentality and then they start to doubt, that's when they can really spiral. But if we can have that growth mindset and realize, hey, I just haven't figured it out yet. And then to lean on people around you for that support and guidance, that helps us get through some of the tougher times.
But wanted to ask you, Danielle, how, in your own journey, how have you gotten through those periods of doubt yourself? When you're launching the company, in your sales role, even in your earlier years when you said you had some difficulties in your middle school teenage years when you had that doubt, what? To not take over for you as opposed to being able to find a way.
I think it's a hundred percent adopting a growth mindset. I think about the times where I was going through postpartum and the first thing that I did was I looked at what are some areas that I can get support and that I enrolled myself in cognitive behavioral therapy, so that I can learn the tools to reframe that mindset that I have going from a negative to a positive. I think about the times when I was starting my business or actually when I was in sales and I said, “Gosh, I'm not hitting my number. What's going on?” And I would always evaluate my business and say, what's working? What's not working? And what are some new skills that I can learn and develop to get me to where I want to go? What I've found is that when I've adopted a growth mindset and I've taken the steps to learn new skills, I've built confidence.
Through that process as well. I am now at a point where I know the value of a growth mindset, that every quarter I am looking at, what investment I am going to make within myself and my business to get me to that next level.
I think about one of the great strategies or techniques you asked me before, some ideas of how to help cultivate some of these factors. One great activity that we've cultivated is this idea where you basically come up with a sheet of paper you can do this for workshops and do this with your colleagues. Take a sheet of paper and put the, the following as the title, my list of what's gone wrong and then have people write down everything over the past three to five years or so that has gone wrong in their life. Some people will just start jotting things down because they've dealt with tremendous adversity over these past several years. And then you have them look at that list, and look at all those things that have gone wrong in their life. And then you ask them to say, okay, next thing I want you to do is look at that title, my list of what's gone wrong.
What I want you to do next is to cross that my list of what's gone wrong, and I want you to write in place my list of what I've overcome. So now you're using kind of that cognitive behavioral technique as if you're flipping, you're reframing your previous adversity into moments of triumph. To understand that we are not just victims of our circumstances, but instead we are highly resilient people. That we've dealt with a lot of adversity and we've overcome a lot of adversity.
And guess what? There's gonna be more coming ahead. We'll always have adversity in our life, but we have the capability to get through that. If we develop that belief that yes, I can be resilient in the face of hardship and adversity.
Sometimes our biggest challenges shape us into the person that we are tomorrow. And I think about my stepdad gave me this great advice and he said, “When you're a kid, the first time you have a goldfish and your goldfish passes away, it's preparing you for when you have a bike and maybe your bike gets stolen, and then when you lose your bike and you recover from that, it's preparing you for your first breakup. And then when you go through your first breakup, it's preparing you for possibly your first job loss.” But everything in life is strengthening us and developing us, and growing us as a person to the person we are tomorrow. And sometimes our biggest challenges become our greatest strength. You think about the challenges that people have overcome, because I went through postpartum, I'm able to teach others how to do it because I've gone through a husband that's been deployed with two-year-old kids and leading a team for a Fortune 500 company all within a year. That's how I've been able to teach others how to prevent burnout.
And I'm so glad that you talk about just that mindset shift from what has gone wrong to what have I overcome? It's such a powerful exercise.
Are you familiar with that whole concept of post-traumatic growth? It's some fascinating research out of the University of North Carolina, I think in Asheville maybe, but some school in North Carolina where they started to look at these people that have had faced significant life adversities.
The idea is once you face adversity, you're ruined. But what they're finding is some people have almost the opposite effect, where they'll go through a really difficult, challenging circumstance, and then you almost use that as fuel to motivate them, to transcend or transform into something new. And so this idea is this post-traumatic growth where you’ve got your level of functioning and boom, you face some adversity, and then you go down. You're knocked down, you're feeling horrible, and it's okay to be there. I think we need to reassure people like, it's all right when you face some difficult times. It's alright to feel bad. But from that, we don't have to stay there; we can use that experience as a transformative moment in our life to propel us to new heights you think of the Mothers Against Drunk Driving Organization. That all happened because a parent lost a child to a drunk driver, and then created this organization that's now gone on to educate people on the harms of drinking and driving. It's using that real adverse moment in life, and then using it for some good so we can take that adversity that we face and to use that as fuel to help motivate us, to help transform us into something that was better than what we were previously.
Sometimes our pain becomes our purpose and the impact that we get to make on other people's lives.
For sure, and we all have it. And I think it's important that we acknowledge that it's okay to not be okay. That kind of slogan. But I'd like to add a little bit more to that. It's okay to not be okay, but it's not okay to stay, not okay, right? If we don't want to continue like that. We want to try to get ourselves to a better spot and to encourage people and support people in that process and to help make sure that they know that there is another way. We don't have to stay in that miserable state throughout our entire lives. We want to get people to a better spot.
That is such a good note to end on where you're, where you're saying that it's okay to not be okay, but we don't wanna stay in that forever. We don't wanna play into being the victim, but really using some of our challenges that we've endured and transitioning into how we've overcome them.
