Episode 9: What is a Mindset, Anyway?!
A Deep Dive into the Three Layers of Mindset
About This Episode
Today's episode is a little bit different. There have been a ton of ideas and concepts that have only gotten touched on briefly in previous episodes that are worth spending more time unpacking. In the first of what will hopefully be many, I'm taking a look at what we actually mean when we say 'mindset'.
I then break down two different skills that I think are critical when it comes to building awareness and purposefully shaping a more effective mindset.
I want to hear from y'all. If you have questions about this episode, or have thoughts on which skills or concepts you want to deep dive on next, head over to @alldaydr.k and drop a comment in the post for this week's episode.
Links and Resources
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Thinking Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
Don’t Shoot the Dog - Karen Pryor
Mindset - Carol Dweck
Waking Up - Sam Harris
Episode Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
mindset, habits, skill, growth mindset, reality, thought, layer, patterns, meditation, practice
Pete Kadushin 00:10
Welcome to the mental training lab, I am Pete Kadushin, your host. And my job is to have fun conversations that leave you with actionable tools, little experiments that will help you improve your mindset and mental skills so that you can do the things you love at a higher level. I'm gonna do something a little different today. And it's something that I've wanted to do since I first thought about the podcast. And so what ends up happening in the flow have a conversation with a guest is that we end up skating over the top of an idea or we just barely touch on a concept. And it's worth diving into and not forcing you to read between the lines. And at the same time, I don't want to derail the conversation or throw off the rhythm and the flow that we've developed. And so this is going to be the first of what I hope are many little short, deep dives into concepts that deserve a little bit more airtime. And as always, we're going to finish with actionable ideas, things that you can be doing to address these concepts or dig a little bit deeper.
Pete Kadushin 01:13
For the first of these dives, I want to zoom in on the idea of mindset. Mindset is a buzzword. I mean, I use it in the intro. We talk about wanting to help shape mindset. And it's something that comes up with athletes, coaches and performers all the time. And so it's worth examining a little bit more closely. What we mean when we say mindset. What are the components of that specific concept? And then what can we do about it? Right? If we wanted to change our mindset, or set ourselves up so that you could approach training and performance at a more effective level, wow would you start doing that today? And so let's go ahead and unpack the idea and then get right in.
Pete Kadushin 01:54
Okay, so the goal for today is to tackle three different things. The first is to clarify the three key components of mindset, at least from my perspective. The second is to run through an example, so that you can really get a sense of how the pieces of the puzzle interact with each other. And then lastly, I want to close with a couple of concrete skills and exercises that will help you shape your mindset more purposefully, so that you can reap the benefits of everything we're about to talk about. The first part might be the most challenging, since if we asked three different people what mindset means to them, we'd probably get eight or nine different answers. And generally, what coaches and athletes are talking about here is an amorphous, unspecific set of attitudes that kind of hovers over the top of our performance domain. If someone tells you that you ought to be more optimistic, or more resilient, or you know, ding, ding, ding have a growth mindset, they're usually referring to this big blob of tangled thoughts and feelings and actions that aren't necessarily actionable. Not surprisingly, for me, this isn't particularly useful. Stealing from acceptance and commitment therapy, although who knows if this originated there. I think a concept or theory or idea needs to be able to do three things in order to be useful. You need to be able to understand past behavior, you need to be able to predict future behavior, and you want to be able to influence future behavior. If an idea isn't specific enough to help me do these tasks, or to help me help clients in the same way, then it either needs more meat on its bones, or I need a different idea.
Pete Kadushin 03:23
Alright, enough preamble. How can we turn the buzzword of mindset into something more useful? Well, for me, it means adding just a little bit more detail. And there are three components that I'm interested in when I'm thinking about mindset. The first and most visible is the behaviors that our mindset produces. How we act and react depends on how we're thinking and feeling about an experience. And these behaviors are not only visible to us, but also to our coaches, parents, opponents, and the scouts in the stands. The second layer of mindset straddles the line between visible and invisible, conscious and outside of our awareness. This layer is the patterns of mental activation that have developed into habits. We know that the neurons that fire together wire together, and this means that our mind develops really specific chains of thought. Early on, when we don't have a lot of experience with a particular sport or performance, these thoughts are more malleable and deliberate. Since lots of experiences are brand new, we don't know how to think in advance. And then as we shift and start to get more experience, these habits really start to begin to solidify. And when this happens, they move from our conscious awareness into more automatic processing. And this can be a great thing. You don't want to spend any extra bandwidth on paying attention to how you dribble or whether you're inhaling and exhaling on your downswing. Being able to make these things automatic, as long as these actions are effective, is a hallmark of really high level learning and training.
Pete Kadushin 04:45
But this can also be a terrible thing, since ineffective patterns of thought can get baked into our brains just as easily. If you're familiar with Daniel Kahneman's work around cognitive bias or his book Thinking Fast and Slow, you know that our capacity to engage in this kind of fast, reactive thinking is critical to performance success and it also leaves us wide open to making all sorts of shortcuts that lead to errors in processing and decision making.
Pete Kadushin 05:09
So what does this all mean for mindset? Well, the aggregate of all those thought habits tells us a lot about ourselves. Wrapped up in this layer, our beliefs about how and why things have happened. I'm talking attribution theory, for any of you theory fans out there. It's got our values and motivations, our doubts and worries all wrapped up in this. And these mental habits interact with our emotional and our physical experience to create feedback loops that can either help or hurt. If I've missed the last shot in a game in the recent past, the thoughts of that past experience may drift back into my mind, as I'm getting ready to come off the bench in crunch time. This, in turn, may turn up my activation of my nervous system. So now my heart rate and my breathing rate and my muscle tension might go up. And then the habits of interpretation of those physical experiences might either tell me that I'm excited or nervous, which feed back into the system and affect my physiological experience, and so on and so on.
Pete Kadushin 06:03
This tends to be an area that a lot of mental performance coaches look to plug in and intervene. And there's a lot of valuable work that can be done here. By examining the mental habits that have become automatic. By pulling them out into the light of awareness, and deciding if they're helpful or hurtful, we have the opportunity to rewire the patterns that aren't productive anymore. By doing this, we can influence things downstream, which is to say that how you act and react are going to be different as a result of that work. However, that's only two thirds of the picture.
Pete Kadushin 06:32
The last layer of mindset is upstream, and it's usually entirely outside of our awareness. This layer can be described as our perspective or the lens through which we're seeing the world. To be more clear, there is way too much sensory information happening in each moment for our brains to consciously process, which means that our brain has to filter out the stuff it doesn't consider relevant. What this means is that what lands in front of our conscious awareness isn't the whole picture. Instead, it's a curated collage of what our brains have been trained to think is important. The consequences here can be pretty dramatic. And to help demonstrate this principle, in a very non dramatic way, let me roll out a short story.
Pete Kadushin 07:10
So I wanted to dog for my entire adult life. I'd grown up with them and I knew at some point I was going to be a dog owner. So about seven years ago, I'd finally landed on a point in my life where it was time to make it happen. Being the science based geek that I am, that meant it was time for research. Lots of watching the dog whisperer and reading books on dog training, you get the picture. And something funny happened over those couple of months. All of a sudden, I saw dogs everywhere. I saw dogs out walking every time I went to work. I noticed dogs hanging out a car windows and surfing on the back of flatbed trucks. I saw vet signs and grooming signs and signs for dog parks. I mean, it was really quite literally dog mania.
Pete Kadushin 07:49
Now there are two ways to look at this either by magical coincidence of the universe, all of these dogs and dog related things appeared magically, right around the same time I decided to get a dog. And there's certainly a simpler explanation. The explanation could be that there were dogs everywhere all the time, and I simply hadn't noticed them. My filters had been tuned to other stuff, and it wasn't until I'd shifted my lens through a fairly obsessed couple of months, that my brain began to incorporate those pieces of reality into the collage I was shown in each moment.
Pete Kadushin 08:21
What does this mean for us in the context of training and performance? At a foundational level, it means that there are multiple versions of reality. That we're not seeing the whole picture of yesterday's practice or today's game, or tomorrow's race. Now there's a catch 22 hiding in here. The challenge is that what we perceive is what we have to work with, and we generally don't know what we aren't seeing, which means we can't change it on purpose. It's important to not let that discourage you though, because it also means that if we can find a way to access other versions of reality, we can influence everything else downstream from our mental habits all the way down to how we act and react in the moment.
Pete Kadushin 08:59
All right. To summarize, there are three components of mindset. The first and most visible are our actions and reactions. The second is our patterns of mental activation, which over time turn into mental habits. These begin within our conscious view, and overtime gets shifted into more automatic forms of thinking. The third layer is entirely outside of our conscious thought and consists of the lens or filter we're using to understand our version of reality. Hopefully, you can see how these three layers are interconnected and self reinforcing, which is great and creates an upward spiral when it's working, and a really challenging and hard to break downward spiral when the system is aimed in the wrong direction. To make this more concrete, let's run through a quick example before we get to some of the actionable tools and what you can do about it.
Pete Kadushin 09:49
Alright, let's use growth mindset as an example, which was first researched and fleshed out by Dr. Carol Dweck over the last few decades. Now we'll use this as an example because it's really gained traction in mainstream culture, You've probably heard about growth and fixed mindset. And it also overlaps pretty heavily with other mindsets we might try and cultivate, whether that's grit or resilience or learned optimism. A growth mindset is anchored in the implicit beliefs that one's ability can change and grow over time. That means that although not everyone is capable of being the next Michael Phelps or LeBron James or Serena Williams, that our skills and capacity are plastic and malleable, and that with the right effort and attention, we can continue to improve over time. This is contrasted with a fixed mindset, which is anchored in the implicit beliefs that one's ability is stuck. Right, you've got what you've got from birth, and there's nothing you can really do about it. Something either comes naturally to you or it doesn't. Now, one of the important words in both of these definitions is implicit, that these beliefs are generally outside of our conscious processing. But more on that later.
Pete Kadushin 10:55
There's tons of research now to demonstrate the differences in behavior, depending on which of these mindsets is activated. Let's make this extra specific though. Let's say coach has told you to stay after practice to work on a new skill, or to refine a skill that you thought you were already pretty good at. In general, an athlete with a growth mindset is going to invest themselves in the experience, and persist when things get difficult. By the way, they will get difficult because in order to learn, you have to train on the edge of your capacity, right. Now to contrast that, someone with a fixed mindset may stick around after practice, especially if coach is watching. And in general, they're going to bring less attention and less effort, and they're more likely to disengage when things really get difficult.
Pete Kadushin 11:37
So if we move up a layer from behavior, and now consider what's going on on the level of mental patterns and habits. The athlete with a growth mindset has patterns that reinforce their belief that growth, and learning can happen. When coach asks them to stay after, they may frame this as coach looking to help them improve. They may tell themselves that coach believes that they can get better and sees them as a really capable athlete, which now is motivating. And then when they run into an aspect of the skill that's challenging, memories get activated of previous experiences, where they were challenged and frustrated. And then how they overcame that challenge, continue to grow, and how that thing that once was hard, is now easier. They also may be more likely to focus on the positive results of all the hard work they're going to put in, and they may visualize themselves with their new and improved skill set.
Pete Kadushin 12:23
If we think about the fixed mindset athlete, they're experiencing a very different reality. Sensibility is fixed. When coach asks them to work on a skill, they interpret this as a comment on their lack of ability. If they'd been born with more capacity, this would have been easy already, and it wouldn't require extra effort. In fact, a hallmark of fixed mindset is prizing success without effort, which means that sweat and elbow grease become taboo. This can activate other mental habits, which suggests that when they don't have what it takes, there's something wrong, and now it's easy to think that coach might bench them if they don't get any better. And that that becomes a significant threat to their athletic identity. Notice the lose lose scenario that's been created here. They now believe they need to be better than they are and also don't believe that they can improve. And so within this tangled stuckness of those beliefs, they're left unmotivated, frustrated, angry, and probably disappointed.
Pete Kadushin 13:18
Now remember, these beliefs about ability are implicit, they're genuinely outside of our awareness. And the deeper these patterns become, and the more aspects of training and performance they affect, the more likely they are to begin to shift your perspective as well. Both our example athletes may go through the exact same experiences and see reality very differently in ways that confirm the mental patterns that are already established. And all the while, their experience is going to be floating underneath the level of conscious thought, which makes it really difficult to see that they're only getting one version of reality, and that there's actually room for that reality to change if they're willing to do the hard work of shifting their mindset.
Pete Kadushin 13:58
At this point, you can see the power of an effective mindset. It influences the reality we get to see, it shapes the mental habits we have, and it interacts with our physiology and our emotional experience to produce our actions and reactions. It's mostly invisible, doesn't take a lot of energy or willpower to deploy in real time, and can be robust and resilient under stress. So the challenge. How do we work with something that's outside of our awareness and affecting us on so many different levels? There are two different skills and strategies I think are critical if we're going to disentangle all the different components, recognize what's helping and what's hurting, and then begin to groove a more effective mindset.
Pete Kadushin 14:38
The first is structured evaluation or reflection. It is so stinking difficult to catch your thoughts in the middle of a practice or performance, especially if they're automatic and unproductive. In order to pull these out into the light of our conscious attention, you can build the habit of reflecting after each practice and performance. Now it's important to note that reflection is just a tool. It doesn't know what you're trying to accomplish, and so it's really important to aim your reflection towards meaningful outcomes. For this conversation, that means reflecting on the three layers of mindset on purpose. And so if we wanted to shape, let's say, a growth mindset, you might start with three questions. First, what behaviors did I improve today? Second, what mental habits contributed to my improvement? And third, how could I be a little more generous with my framing of the experience? What we pay attention to grows, and by aiming our attention at the behaviors and mental habits related to improvement, our reality begins to shift with it, we start to recognize the areas that we've improved more readily.
Pete Kadushin 15:39
Now this last question is a tough one, since it's hard to imagine a different way of seeing reality. And yet, with some practice flexing our imagination muscles, and with the help of outside perspective, so coaches, teammates, friends and parents, we can begin to entertain the possibility that what I experienced in that moment wasn't the only thing that could have been experienced. And the way I'm thinking about it isn't the only way that it could be thought about. When you reflect with consistency, you're shifting these processes from unconscious to conscious awareness, which gives you some agency and the opportunity to change on purpose. You're also going to notice the ripple effect, where you're starting to catch unproductive thoughts and actions more quickly in practice and performance. So instead of having to wait two hours until the end of practice, you might catch it two or three minutes after that frustrating drill was finished. And with more practice and a little bit more time, you might actually start to catch those thoughts and feelings as they come up in the moment. Again, this only happens if you set aside time first to reflect and evaluate systematically.
Pete Kadushin 16:43
The second skill that's worth mentioning here is meditation. Meditation does two different things for us. First, well, it does a bunch of different things for us. But the two keys to meditation as it relates to mindset are first, that it develops purposeful control of our attentional spotlight. And second, it shifts our relationship to the experience we're having with our mind. Now both of these are valuable when it comes to really trying to engage the three different layers of mindset that we've been talking about.
Pete Kadushin 17:12
Why is attention control important? Well, the capacity to notice when you're distracted by unproductive thoughts, and then the skill and the muscle to shift your attention back to a different target is just necessary when it comes to shaping a mindset because unproductive mindsets come with unproductive thoughts. The freedom and trust you can start to develop when you've worked on your attention control really can't be overstated here.
Pete Kadushin 17:37
The second idea, that we can shift our relationship to our mind so that thoughts are just thoughts and not reality, is of deeper and more fundamental nature. By recognizing that thoughts are just patterns of energy and chemicals bouncing around our central nervous system, we have the opportunity to be less attached to them. This creates a profound flexibility that gives us a sense that a mindset, even a long standing, deeply ingrained mindset can change.
Pete Kadushin 18:06
Now the best way to get started with meditation is to find a teacher and a community that can support your practice. And the second best way, and certainly, for many of us, the more realistic way to start meditation and get into the game is to use one of the many apps available. Now I don't have any affiliation here. And I personally use Sam Harris's app Waking Up. I also have some experience with 10% Happier, Insight Timer and Headspace. And those are all great options as well. There's a lot of different flavors of mindfulness meditation in terms of the types of teachers and the way they teach. And so if you don't find something that works for you right out of the gate, it's worth trying a different app, instead of deciding that meditation isn't for you.
Pete Kadushin 18:47
So, there you have it, we we covered a lot of ground. And if you're interested in popping the hood and taking a look at your own mindset, and then if you're thinking about shaping a new one that's more effective or useful, those two skills that were just outlined are really great places to start. They build not only the awareness of how our mind's working, but also the capacity to work differently with our mind.
Pete Kadushin 19:14
I hope you found this deep dive useful. I'm hoping to do more of these and I would love to know what you'd like to hear more about. You can find me on Instagram over at all day, Dr. k. That's all day Dr. Period K. And you can drop a comment in the post for this episode to let me know if this worked for you. And then certainly what other topics you'd like to see in the future. Now if you know anyone who could use a mindset tune up, don't forget to share this episode with them. And while you're at it, subscribe however you're listening, whether that's Spotify, or Google or Apple or what have you. You can also head over to MTL DOT Academy to sign up for the mental training lab newsletter which includes a worksheet each week related to the mental skills of that week's episode. So it's an opportunity to take what we talk about on this show, and try and put it into practice so that you can continue to level up your mental skills and your mindset. That's all we got. For now. Be well
