In my personal experience, I feel that I tend to have a fixed mindset with anything related to academics. Throughout school, I remember always feeling threatened by the success of my higher-achieving peers. I always found myself thinking, “I wish I could be as smart as they are.” However I never even thought of the possibility of being able to put effort into growing my own intelligence. To me, it was something they were born with, and since I was not born with it, there was nothing I could do.

I do not think I was the only one with this mindset. I had friends tell me they wished they were as smart as me, or as someone else, but there was no hope inside of them that they could be that smart. We all seemed to be in this same fixed mindset that it was either something you have or don’t have, and there was nothing you could do about it. While it is true that some people are born with an advantage to grasp the academic content easier than others, it doesn’t mean that they are on some level that is unbelievable to anyone else.

With activities outside of academics, I have always tended to have a growth mindset. In my personal experience, I had this mindset when I was a competitive gymnast. I knew nobody who had only been in gymnastics for a year would be able to do a back flip on the balance beam. I knew that these skills were things I would be working towards, and just because I couldn’t do them in that moment did not make me a failure. In my early years, rather than feeling threatened by the higher level gymnasts and their abilities, I looked at them as motivation. I knew it was unfair to be comparing myself to them.