Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

to say, “I also learned something about who’s right for me. I guess every relationship teaches you more about who’s right for you.”

There is a French expression: “Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.” To understand all is to forgive all. Of course, this can be carried too far, but it’s a good place to start. For people with the growth mindset, the number one goal was forgiveness. As one woman said: “I’m no saint, but I knew for my own peace of mind that I had to forgive and forget. He hurt me but I had a whole life waiting for me and I’ll be damned if I was going to live it in the past. One day I just said, ‘Good luck to him and good luck to me.’ ”

Because of their growth mindset, they did not feel permanently branded. Because of it, they tried to learn something useful about themselves and relationships, something they could use toward having a better experience in the future. And they knew how to move on and embrace that future.

My cousin Cathy embodies the growth mindset. Several years ago, after twenty-three years of marriage, her husband left her. Then, to add insult to injury, she was in an accident and hurt her leg. There she sat, home alone one Saturday night, when she said to herself, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and feel sorry for myself!” (Perhaps this phrase should be the mantra of the growth mindset.) Out she went to a dance (leg and all) where she met her future husband.

The Contos family had pulled out all the stops. Nicole Contos, in her exquisite wedding dress, arrived at the church in a Rolls-Royce. The archbishop was inside waiting to perform the ceremony, and hundreds of friends and relatives from all over the world were in attendance. Everything was perfect until the best man went over to Nicole and told her the news. The groom would not be coming. Can you imagine the shock, the pain?

The family, thinking of the hundreds of guests, decided to go through with the reception and dinner. Then, rallying around Nicole, they asked her what she wanted to do. In an act of great courage, she changed into a little black dress, went to the party, and danced solo to “I Will Survive.” It was not the dance she had anticipated, but it was one that made her an icon of gutsiness in the national press the next day. Nicole was like the football player who ran the wrong way. Here was an event that could have defined and diminished her. Instead it was one that enlarged her.

It’s interesting. Nicole spoke repeatedly about the pain and trauma of being stood up at her wedding, but she never used the word humiliated. If she had judged herself, felt flawed and unworthy— humiliated—she would have run and hiddenead it wher good clean pain made her able to surround herself with the love of her friends and relatives and begin the healing process.

What, by the way, had happened to the groom? As it turned out, he had gone on the honeymoon, flying off to Tahiti on his own. What happened to Nicole? A couple of years later, in the same wedding dress and the same church, she married a great guy. Was she scared? No, she says: “I knew he was going to be there.”

When you think about how rejection wounds and inflames people with the fixed mindset, it will come as no surprise that kids with the fixed mindset are the ones who react to taunting and bullying with thoughts of violent retaliation. I’ll return to this later.

RELATIONSHIPS ARE DIFFERENT

In his study of gifted people, Benjamin Bloom included concert pianists, sculptors, Olympic swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists. But not people who were gifted in interpersonal relationships. He planned to. After all, there are so many professions in which interpersonal skills play a key role—teachers, psychologists, administrators, diplomats. But no matter how hard Bloom tried, he couldn’t find any agreed-upon way of measuring social ability.

Sometimes we’re not even sure it’s an ability. When we see people with outstanding interpersonal skills, we don’t really think of them as gifted. We think of them as cool people or charming people. When we see a great marriage relationship, we don’t say these people are brilliant relationship makers. We say they’re fine people. Or they have chemistry. Meaning what?

Meaning that as a society, we don’t understand relationship skills. Yet everything is at stake in people’s relationships. Maybe that’s why Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence struck such a responsive chord. It said: There are social-emotional skills and I can tell you what they are.

Mindsets add another dimension. They help us understand even more about why people often don’t learn the skills they need or use the skills they have. Why people throw themselves so hopefully into new relationships, only to undermine themselves. Why love often turns into a battlefield where the carnage is staggering. And, most important, they help us understand why some people are able to build lasting and satisfying relationships.

MINDSETS FALLING IN LOVE

So far, having a fixed mindset has meant believing your personal traits are fixed. But in relationships, two more things enter the picture—your partner and the relationship itself. Now you can have a fixed mindset about three things. You can believe that your qualities are fixed, your partner’s qualities are fixed, and the relationship’s qualities are fixed—that it’s inherently good or bad, meant-to-be or not meant-to-be. Now all of these things are up for judgment.

The growth mindset says all of these things can be developed. All—you, your partner, and the relationship— are capable of growth and change.

In the fixed mindset, the ideal is instant, perfect, and perpetual compatibility. Like it was meant to be. Like riding off into the sunset. Like “they lived happily ever after.”

Many people want to feel their relationship is special and not just some chance occurrence. This seems okay. So what’s the problem with the fixed mindset? There are two.

1. If You Have to Work at It, It Wasn’t Meant to Be

One problem is that people with the fixed mindset expect everything good to happen automatically. It’s not that the partners will work to help each other solve their problems or gain skills. It’s that this will magically occur through their love, sort of the way it happened to Sleeping Beauty, whose coma was cured by her prince’s kiss, or to Cinderella, whose miserable life was suddenly transformed by her prince.

Charlene’s friends told her about Max, the new musician in town. He had come to play cello with the symphony orchestra. The next night, Charlene and her friends went to see the orchestra’s performance, and when they went backstage afterward, Max took Charlene’s hand and said, “Next time, let’s make it longer.” She was taken with his intense, romantic air, and he was taken with her charming manner and exotic looks. As they went out, the intensity grew. They seemed to understand each other deeply. They enjoyed the same things—food, analyzing people, travel. They both thought, Where have you been all my life?

Over time, though, Max became moody. Actually, that’s how he was. It just didn’t show at first. When he was in a bad mood, he wanted to be left alone. Charlene wanted to talk about what was bothering him, but that irritated him. “Just leave me alone,” he would insist, more and more forcefully. Charlene, however, would feel shut out.

Plus, his moods didn’t always happen at convenient times. Sometimes the couple was scheduled to go out. Sometimes they had planned a special dinner alone. Either he didn’t want to do it, or she would endure his sullen silence throughout the evening. If she tried to make light conversation, he would be disappointed in her: “I thought you understood me.”

Friends, seeing how much they cared about each other, urged them to work on this problem. But they both felt, with great sorrow, that if the relationship were the right one, they wouldn’t have to work so hard. If it were the right relationship, they would just be able to understand and honor each other’s needs. So they grew apart and eventually broke up.

In the growth mindset, there may still be that exciting initial combustion, but people in this mindset don’t expect magic. They believe that a good, lasting relationship comes from effort and from working through inevitable differences.

But those with the fixed mindset don’t buy that. Remember the fixed-mindset idea that if you have ability, you shouldn’t have to work hard? This is the same belief applied to relationships: If you’re compatible, everything should just come naturally.