Carol Dweck and the love of struggle

Some of you may have seen on Twitter recently that I was fortunate enough to be able to host a conference at the RFU where the keynote speaker was Professor Carol Dweck who was talking about her life's work which centres around the concept of developing a 'growth mindset'. For anyone that needs a quick recap, this article does a great job of summarising Professor Dweck's work http://www.fastcompany.com/3039181/why-determination-matters-more-than-smarts-in-getting-ahead

Something Professor Dweck said during her keynote presentation really struck a chord with me, she stated... "We should be having struggle conversations all the time..we would never get home from work and say 'honey, I have had the most fabulous struggle!'". It really made me think about how young people today are surrounded by people with fixed mindsets that are creating a culture that is 'failure averse'. It also made me reflect on how much work I do to create environments that are full of challenge and where failure is part of the daily language.

This has really prompted me to go further with my feedback where I have resolved to started talking about failure and struggle much more..."what was the best failure team?" "What did we learn from that?" Or "who wants to share the struggle they had today".

I have often said that I evaluate my sessions not by the smiling faces and 'great session' comments I get from the players but by the air of 'slight disgruntlement' that is in the air. Ideally I have got the the players to a place where they love the struggle and the challenge and so they still recognise the value of the session and have enjoyed it but I definitely don't like seeing players that are totally comfortable as I know that I haven't stretched them enough.

I like to use words like 'stretch', 'reach' and 'strive' liberally to surround the players with language which points towards the process of learning and really try hard to avoid giving outcome based praise like 'that was brilliant' or 'awesome skill' which feels nice short term but creates a world where the players are only interested in the outcome and avoid failing for fear of not being identified as successful.

I came across the video below on the blog of Simon Nainby (well worth a read) which I think is very apt within this discussion it gives an amazing insight into the corporate culture within the music streaming service, 'Spotify' where the word failure is in everyday use and the corporate culture reinforces this on a regular basis. I have to say that it looks like a fantastic place to work!

Spotify Engineering Culture - part 2 from Spotify Training & Development on Vimeo.

I think that this is a really great piece which really challenges the prevailing culture within most spors organisations and corporate entities. I certainly think that in the world of coaching we are too often reluctant to deliberately engineer failure and struggle for fear of the potential consequences of how we are perceived either by the players, parents or others.

I will be sharing some of my best failures in the coming months and hope you might do the same.

Happy failing!

Links:

http://vimeo.com/94950270#t=50s

http://undergroundathletics.co.uk/importance-of-failure/

http://www.fastcompany.com/3039181/why-determination-matters-more-than-smarts-in-getting-ahead