Why Can’t I Get It Right? By, Ari A. Hoogenboom

“Why Can’t I Get It Right?”

 By Ari A. Hoogenboom

First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn

August 2, 2014

 

The last few years, the education world has been abuzz with the work of Carol Dweck on the growth versus fixed mindset.  If you believe in the fixed mindset, you assume that your intelligence and talent is fixed—perhaps at birth, perhaps some time in your 20s or 30s.  You know that the adage, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, is true.  In contrast, if you subscribe to the idea of a growth mindset, you believe that your brain can continue to develop throughout your life, like a muscle.  You believe that you can develop new habits, talents, or skills.  You subscribe to the adage that “it is never too late” or “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  Research now confirms that the brain retains its plasticity throughout our life, new neural pathways can be continually developed.  This is great news for almost all of us.  We can keep up with our hopes, dreams, and desires.  We can change.

As Unitarian Universalists, I would think that we must believe or at least want to believe in the growth mindset.  After all, the “spiritual growth of our congregations” is part of the 3^rd principle.  As a congregation, we want society to change in the fight for social injustice and we celebrate personal and societal growth in accepting and celebrating all human beings.  Indeed, in religious terms, the fixed mindset is a form of Calvinism: it is pre-destination.  You are saved or you are damned.  You are smart or you are dumb.  You have it or you don’t. 

Most educators like the idea of the growth mindset.  It means that what we do can really make a difference.  But it does take away a convenient excuse.  When a student doesn’t understand and you believe in the fixed mindset, the reason is obvious:  the kid is dumb.  Once you believe in the growth mindset, the onus is on you the teacher.  One immediate response to Carol Dweck’s work is that we no longer praise students for being smart or intelligent.  Those qualities feed into the notion of the fixed mindset; they seem to be innate, such as having blue eyes or being left-handed.  Instead we now try to praise students for what they do, not who they are:  “you tried several approaches to discover the right one,” etc. 

But enough about students, what about us?

A story:

Two monks were washing their bowls in the river when they noticed a scorpion that was drowning.  One monk immediately scooped it up and set it upon the bank.  In the process he was stung.  He went back to washing his bowl and again the scorpion fell in.  The monk saved the scorpion and was again stung.  The other monk asked him, “Friend, why do you continue to save the scorpion when you know its nature is to sting?”

“Because,” the monk replied, “to save it is my nature.”

Why can’t we change?

Why do almost all New Year’s Resolutions fail?  Same with all diets?  Why is the self-help section so big in all book stores?  Why do so many business books focus on the difficulty of achieving meaningful change in companies—or in families or churches for that matter.  If we believe in growth, why are we so often fixed? 

[Now please turn to your neighbor and for one minute share a resolution or goal that you’ve had this past year that hasn’t quite panned out the way you wish.]

Robert Kegan has dubbed this phenomenon “Immunity to change.”  Even if we try to change, try to grow, it is as if we have an antibody that kicks into action whenever change—a kind of disease—infects our body!  This immunity prevents us from changing.  Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky of the Harvard Business School state that social and institutional systems—even dysfunctional ones—are that way because the people in them “want it that way” (p. 17).  Organizations—and this includes families and churches– are perfectly calibrated to give the participants what they actually want—even if they say or believe something else.  Kind of sad, isn’t it?

It is relatively easy to state what the problem is; it is harder to find the right approach or lever to alleviate the problem; and it is hardest to actually apply that approach so it works.  So we understand the problem.  We have an immunity to change and we actually have the systems that in some deep down way we want; now that we know this, what can we do to get past that immunity to change?

I think the answer is counterintuitive:  the enemy of change is, paradoxically, goals and motivation.  Or to put it another way, it is focusing on the end rather than the means.  By focusing on the goal, we are ignoring the process, the journey.  Pay attention to the process and the product will come.  Focus on the product and the process will derail you.  Perhaps this is because goals, by their very nature, are fixed:  “I will lose 15 pounds by December,” for instance.  So to really achieve your goals, you have to forget your goals.  To be smart, you have to forget about being smart.  To grow, you have to forget about growing.  You have to focus on doing.

But how do we do THAT?

I think the secret lies in a small book by Stephen Guise, called Mini Habits.  He wrote a blog called, “just one push up,” which pretty much says it all.  He argues that motivation is non-sustainable and sets us up for failure through the law of decreasing enthusiasm, also called the law of “diminishing marginal utility.”  We all know this law.  The fourth slice of pizza never tastes as good as the third . . . the third is not as good as the second . . . and so on.  So when we embark on fulfilling a new resolution, developing a new skill or habit, the second week of our new regimen is never as exciting as the first . . .and after a while we just give up.   The motivation to lose 30 pounds seldom lasts through the entire 30 pounds.

Willpower is no better; it waxes and wanes.  When you come home after a tough day at work, you feel you deserve ice cream.  Newer studies have uncovered evidence that willpower is a muscle, and like a muscle, it gets depleted, so if you use a lot of willpower in the morning, it will be weakened by the afternoon.  Of course you will succumb to ice cream after a day of using your willpower at work.   One way to give our willpower a boost, one study determined, is through glucose.  At this point, if you are on a diet, it all starts to seem hopeless and nonsensical—if you want to resist desert, have a sugary drink???  If that’s the only way to get willpower to work, what’s the point?

So if motivation doesn’t last and will power doesn’t get us far, what can we use to grow?  Stephen Guise says it is habits, but not big habits such as the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  Think of the mundane habits of every day, mini-habits, the small bricks that Dorothy Day refers to in our reading earlier.  Our lives are littered with small habits that we perform day in day out—even when motivation and willpower are absent–such as brushing or flossing our teeth. 

Stephen Guise talks of establishing mini-habits that are so ridiculously small that willpower—even depleted willpower—can get them done.  For instance, he suggests that if you want to be a “fit writer” you can take on 3 mini-habits:  do 1 push up a day, read 2 pages a day, write 50 words a day.  These tasks are so ridiculously small that you wont skip a day (you can do them just before bed in 10 minutes); they are also so ridiculously small that once you get started you will probably do more.  And that is the point.  Guise recommends that you stick to three mini-habits maximum.  What would a mini-habit for a Unitarian Universalist be?  [Turn and talk]

Brilliant, eh?  So go home and do one of these mini-habits every day.  Or go home and pick a mini-habit for spiritual growth, for health, for personal development, for professional development.  Out of that list, take just one or two, keeping the habits nice and small, and do it every day. 

See yourself grow—and then also see if Robert Kegan’s theory on the immunity of change rears its ugly head.  You might find yourself tearing down your new mini-habit. Perhaps the mini-habit chafes against your notion that you are a free spirit; or perhaps the very smallness of the task and the rate of change frustrates you.  After all, many of our heroes and exemplars seem to rise above needing a mini-habit to change themselves or the world.  Can you even imagine Martin Luther King needing a mini-habit to motivate him to write his letter from Birmingham Jail?  Sure, we understand intellectually that change is incremental, but emotionally, we often want to be heroic, with the drama and the excitement of a complete makeover.

I’ve decided to make peace with the messiness of change and the fact that I have aspects of both the growth and fixed mindsets—not to mention a healthy dose of immunity to change.  Some of this isn’t a horrible thing.  After all, can’t loyalty, dependability, and commitment be aspects of a fixed mindset? 

Perhaps both growth and fixed mindsets exist in all of us as a kind of dualism, a yin-yang.  This co-existence is not comfortable, but out of this tension comes genuine growth and renewal.   The impulse to grow is part of the human condition, but so too, is the failure of this growth.  Sure that frustrates us, but it also brings us full circle: Carol Dweck argues that failure is an integral part of the growth mindset.  So why can’t we struggle and fail at growth, too?

To quote G.K. Chesterton, whose words we sang at the beginning of the service, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly.” 

Change is definitely worth doing.

May it be.