Mindset & New Ways of Working
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Mindset Matters
”The psychological and physiological effect of anything in our lives can be and is influenced by our mindset”, Dr Alia Crum.
Thanks to Dr Alia Crum and Lisa Gill I am increasingly curious (and occasionally mindblown) by the impact that mindset can have on New Ways of Working.
Lisa Gill is always two steps ahead of the community of New Ways of Working nerds and has been talking about the importance of mindset for years. Dr Alia Crum is a Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and is interested in how mindsets can be changed to affect organisational and individual performance.
The following are my notes from the Huberman Lab podcast on the science of mindsets with Dr Alia Crum (link at the bottom). Also at the bottom is a wonderful 20-minute TED Talk by Dr Alia Crum which offers a more bite-size summary of her research into mindsets - highly recommended!
Thank you, Alia and Lisa for bringing this critical piece of the New Ways of Working puzzle to our attention 🙏
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What we think & believe shapes our reactions
What we think and what we believe shapes the way that our body reacts to things like the food we eat, stress, exercise, and even New Ways of Working!
What we believe (our mindset) about the nutritional content of our food, for example, changes the way that food impacts our brain and body to a remarkable degree. And the same is true for mindsets about exercise, stress, medication and New Ways of Working.
Mindset definition
Alia Crum defines mindsets as a “setting of the mind”:
Core beliefs and assumptions that we have about a domain or category of things, that orient us to a particular set of expectations, explanations and goals.
An assumption you make about a thing that shapes our expectations and attitudes toward that thing.
Example
Take stress, for example. What are your core beliefs/assumptions about stress? Enhancing, inevitable, natural, helpful, or debilitating? These are your mindset, and they are more powerful and impactful than we realise.
We have mindsets about many things and our mindset or core belief/assumptions shape our responses to these things, what we’re paying attention to, what we’re motivated to do, and potentially even how our bodies respond (physiological effects).
Mindsets have an enormous impact on our biology and our psychology, and these interact with both our minds and our bodies.
“How we react to peanut allergies (or New Ways of Working) can be profoundly shaped by whether or not we are educated about the side effects of the peanut allergy treatment (/New Ways of Working experiment), such that if they learned that the side effects were a by-product of a treatment that would help them and they learned a little bit about why the side effects arose and the side effects might even help them, had an enormous impact on how much they suffered from the side or not from the side effects of the treatment (/experiments)”.
Mindsets are a kind of portal between conscious & subconscious processes.
They operate as a default setting of the mind. If programmed in there you have stress = good/bad or New Ways of Working = awesome/too hard, that sits there as an assumption of the brain. So when the brain is figuring out ‘how should I respond to this situation?’ and the assumption is that ‘stress is bad/New Ways of Working are hard’ then that’s going to trigger a certain response through our subconscious.
So how do we consciously and deliberately change our mindsets?
The first step is just to be aware that you have them. That your beliefs are not an unmitigated reflection of reality. Our beliefs/mindsets are filtered through our interpretations, our expectations, our frameworks and simplifications of that reality. Most of what goes on in our brain is an interpretation of reality. Mindsets are just simplified core assumptions about things.
The second step is to start to think about what the effects of those mindsets are on your life. How does your mindset that stress is debilitating (for example) make you feel? What is it leading you to do? Is it helpful or harmful? Not is it right or wrong - you’ll find evidence on both sides. Is it helpful or harmful? And then, if your mindset is harmful, you can go about seeking ways to adopt more useful mindsets.
*Of course, this ain’t easy - we have a lot of baggage weighing us down, so it’s hard to change mindsets. So lighten up trying to get people to do certain things and focus more on helping them to adopt more adaptive mindsets. Resist the urge to use force as a means to get people to do things. This will reinforce the mindset that the thing you’re forcing is hard/horrible.
A useful exercise is to ask: what is the effect of my mindset about experimenting with New Ways of Working in my team? See what’s serving you and what isn’t. Find more useful, adaptive and empowering mindsets and live by those.
Do not discount the potency of mindsets
We needn’t become dogmatic about having the right mindset, but it is a piece of the puzzle that is really empowering because we have access to it and we can change it. But know that it is a piece of the puzzle - we can change the setting of the mind and this will change the psychological and physiological effect that New Ways of Working have on us. Ditto our current challenge/ colleague/ boss/ team/ organisation 🤯
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Amazing, right? If you have any great resources on this topic I’d love for you to share them with me.
Here’s the podcast: Dr. Alia Crum: Science of Mindsets for Health & Performance (101 mins), and below is her 20-minute TED Talk:
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