Stanford Researcher Dr. Mary Murphy on How to Cultivate a Growth Mindset

27:08Yeah. Oh, I hear that. I hear that audience. I'm looking at you. I'm looking at you. I hear that from a lot of people. People say, I'm too late to the party. That's right. That's right. And that's our fixed mindset, sort of rearing its head in the moment, right? There's nothing I can do about it. I'm just too late. And a lot of times it will stop us from taking action going forward, unless we can occupy our growth mindset where we can sort of say, okay, I'm now in a different moment. I can learn, I can grow, I can develop, I can try some things. What we see is that in our growth mindset, people are really tuned to data.

27:44In our fixed mindset, a lot of times we just rely on our gut. If we have it or we don't, we think we're smart. We just are willing to take risks based on our gut rather than actual information and data collection. But if we can move to our growth mindset in the moments where we think we're too late to the party, we can actually start to learn. We take in new information, we can develop, we can grow, we can gather data along the way and make sure we're making progress in the right direction and gathering that data relatively frequently so that we can pivot soon when we see that we're off track.

28:19It's actually a much more effective investment and a strategy through the lens of the growth mindset than the fixed mindset. Going back to success of others, that reminded me of something that I've heard you describe, the culture of genius as opposed to a culture of growth. Can you talk about what a culture of genius is? Because it sounds, when you talked about the success of others, it reminded me of this genius worship that we sometimes can have. Exactly. Exactly. So the culture of genius is a context. It could be a team. It could be a one-on-one relationship. It can be a whole organization that really embodies that fixed mindset idea.

29:04You either have it or you don't. It could absolutely be a family. It could be in a friendship, but it's this embodies that idea of the fixed mindset together in that dynamic. So in Cultures of Genius, we focus on star performers. We give those star individuals, the ones who have it, usually with some idea that they have some kind of innate talent or skill. They were just born with it. They're just born lucky, right? Or they're just born knowing how to be good with money. And we kind of worship that individual. We put a lot of resources and status and strategies around them. They get to decide how it is that we're going to invest.

29:40They get to decide how it is in the workplace that we're going to make a strategy and move forward in our plan of execution of that strategy. And so the culture of genius really reifies these individuals who are thought to have it. Those who are smart, those who are talented, those who are naturals right at this. The culture of growth, on the other hand, really embodies and holds at the center that growth mindset belief that no matter where we start, no matter when we start, we all have potential within us that we can grow, learn and develop with the support of others and seeking help on our stock and pivoting and trying new strategies.

30:17And so that is a really different context because then those contexts actually do provide a lot of support for people to grow, learn and develop. Right. And they're going to give people feedback on a regular basis because they know that that feedback is going to be used and helpful for someone to figure out what their strengths and weaknesses are and then how to develop in that context. What I often hear about startups and about new companies is so much of it is based on who the founder is. And does that founder have a vision and can they execute on that vision? And as a founder, you do have to have a vision.

30:57You do have to be committed to it. You do have to sort of filter out the noise from the cacophony of people who are telling you to change course. So how do you square these together? Yeah. You want a culture of growth and a culture of collaboration, but also you do at some point need a visionary. And I kind of say that with air quotes, but also with, you know, I mean it in the most literal sense possible. Yes. You need a person with vision who is committed to that and who is willing to filter out noise that is a distraction from that. Yeah, I think that a lot of times people think that there's a trade-off between ability or leadership and mindset.

31:40And what we know from the literature and from our own research studies is that these things are orthogonal to each other. They are independent. And so everybody wants, particularly when it comes to investors who are looking to invest in early stage companies and entrepreneurs and others, they're going to want high ability people, people who are visionary, people who are leaders. The question is, do you want those individuals to have a fixed mindset about their vision, a fixed mindset about their leadership and their skills, where they really, we have seen in the data, actually become very rigid in the ways in which they think that vision should be implemented or kind of blind and deaf to the market conditions that they might need to actually pivot and move around.

32:27And you can see people actually get very fragile in that context because that fixed mindset about this is what I'm good at. This is what our company is going to do. This is how the company is going to do it actually puts people in a box, not just the people who are working for that individual, but that person themselves. We actually find that the highest performers prefer a culture of growth to a culture of genius because in that culture of growth, right? There's room for growth and learning. There's room to make a mistake and to learn from it. There's room to actually assess on a weekly basis, on a quarterly basis, on a monthly basis, looking at the conditions around us to say, what is it that we actually need to learn here?

33:11What do we need to do to pivot? How are we going to respond to these kinds of contexts while maintaining that vision, while maintaining that high level of ability as a leader? The culture of genius puts a straitjacket on leaders. There's no room to grow and develop. A mistake is deadly because it's a sign that maybe you don't have it, that you're not skilled, that you're not talented, that you had the wrong vision. Because in a culture of genius, it's you either have it or you don't. Right. And then this is where imposter syndrome can flourish. 100%. We've talked a lot about how these triggers and these cultures influence a given environment.

33:48We've talked a lot about how this plays out in the workplace. So I want to ask this question with two branches. Some people who are listening to this are employees of big, large institutions that are very static and slow to change, largely because of their size. So maybe they work for universities. Maybe they work for government agencies. Maybe they work for Fortune 500 companies. right? What can those listeners do to influence more of a culture of growth or growth mentality within their organization? So that's one element of the question. Big question. The second branch of the question is for the other portion of the audience, who they either work at super small businesses or they are entrepreneurs.

34:38And they either work solo as freelancers, or maybe they have a small team of two, three, four, five people, right? What can they do? Because they're starting a brand new culture from scratch, from the ground up, and it's nimble and it's flexible because it's their company or it's a very small business. That's right. So two situations. We'll tackle each of them. Let's start at the beginning of that question. So one thing I will say about this is that I am a strong believer that everyone, regardless of their role, regardless of their organization, regardless of their team, culture and climate, everyone is a culture creator.

35:21and we have the power in our personal interactions, what we say and do, how we interact with each other, how we give feedback to each other, how we ask people to join us on various projects and in teams, right? We all have the power to create the mindset culture around us. So I'll just start there. Then the question is, how do you do this in sort of a slow moving organization or worse, maybe in a dominant culture of genius, right? Where the whole organization seems to have a pretty strong culture of genius. What I'll say is that just like personal mindset is not fixed or growth, right? It's a continuum and we move between it.

35:59So too is mindset culture. It's a mindset culture continuum. And what I see in most very large scale organizations is that many of these companies are a mixture of a culture of genius and a culture of growth. So one of the things I do when I start working with a very large company is we usually use pulse surveys that already exist in these companies and we'll measure mindset culture in the context. And then we will look at the different teams and divisions of the organization and we'll do what we call a bright spot, hotspot analysis, where we can really find the places that are super culture of genius, very fixed minded.

36:37And we can find the places in the company that are very growth minded. and what we can do there is really understand and go deep, create these case studies that really show how did that culture of growth actually take root? What are they saying and doing to each other? How do they lead team meetings? How do they give assignments? How do they do all of the work that everybody's going to do as part of the company, particularly to build the strong culture of growth? And then we can understand that and share it with others. Now that's at the organizational level. If I'm an individual, let's say, and I'm surrounded by more of a culture, a fixed-minded culture of genius, there's several things I can do.

37:16One is to find other people who are dedicated to growth and development by creating our growth mindset pods, right? Sometimes those can be individuals inside an organization. Sometimes there are people outside of an organization, other friends that work at other companies, because they might have different ways of, of growing and learning and developing that I might not think about in my own organization, but with some creative thinking, with some creative strategies and approaches, I might be able to adopt them for myself in this environment. Another thing is to really understand the mindset triggers of your boss.

37:49If you're a regular individual contributor and your supervisor or manager has particular mindset triggers, understanding their fixed and growth mindset triggers so you can present your work to them in a way that's really going to help them see where your strengths are and how you can develop further. One thing I talk about a lot is if you are an individual contributor and you really want a growth opportunity and you see that your manager has a particular task, they have to do it weekly or monthly. It's kind of annoying to them and they know how to do it while they could do it in their sleep. You can ask if you can help support them on that.

38:24That gives you a growth and learning opportunity. It also frees up their time so that they can try something new. And so you're subtly creating, right? This like culture of growth, even though the dominant culture might be a culture of genius. So there's room for these micro cultures within larger cultures in organizations, especially these large companies. So create a micro culture. That's right. Create a micro culture. Look at everything through the lens of learning. How can you actually rest the learning on a day-to-day basis from the things that you're already doing. And that's where being able to talk with someone else, here's the way I've always done it.

39:01I want to try something new. I want to kind of move into this other direction. How do you think I should go about doing it? Who should I talk to? Those kinds of ways, really mindset we have learned is not something you need to do on your own because it's not just in our head, right? It's something you create in context and with others in company of others. And so finding that growth mindset pod and building that over time can really be helpful. Hiring isn't just about finding someone willing to take the job. I need the right person with the right background who can move our business forward. A couple months ago, I wanted candidates who matched what I was looking for.

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42:26You know, a lot of people who are listening to this have a side hustle that they maybe at some point want to build into a business, but it's going to start at least as a small business, a business of one, two, three people, maybe four or five. In those cases, you're starting a company culture from scratch. I'll preempt this question by saying prior to starting Afford Anything or prior to really growing it, I never really understood the notion of company culture. But as we were starting to grow out the team, it became clear to me like, wow, Now, company culture is, it's not just a nebulous term.

43:06It's incredibly important. Yes. And it guides everything about our day-to-day interaction. That's right. So when you're starting a culture from scratch and you really get to think about how you want to build it, how do you build it in a way that facilitates growth mindset? And I guess within a family, you're also creating culture. How do you create that growth mindset culture? Yeah. Yeah. So there's a couple of ways I could take this. One, I will just say that we have a lot of research on this question. I've done studies with hundreds of entrepreneurs, founders, and early stage leaders in like series A, series B type companies.

43:45And what we find is that the mindset beliefs of those leaders are extremely important for shaping the way in which they will set the mindset culture of their company. So that, how does it actually show up? It shows up in who I look to recruit, who I look to retain, how we deal with mistakes, how we deal with challenges that we're going to come up against. All of these questions are shaped by our mindset. So let me give you an example. What we found in this study of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and these were largely technology companies, we found was that when founders and leaders had more of a fixed mindset belief, they wanted their company to be innovative.

44:25They wanted it to be really grow their market share of whatever they were producing or developing, but they didn't want to hire people who were smarter than them. That's a real problem. That's a huge red flag. Good luck to you. Right. Trying to build a company at the edge of technology, pushing that technology forward, but you want people who have a skillset that is less than yours so that you feel good about yourself. So you feel like you're the resident genius and nobody else. Right. And we see story after story and example after example of growth-minded individuals who really, when they bring on team members, they're going to look for complementary skills.

45:02They're going to look for skills that actually don't already exist in the company so that individuals can really figure out how to grow, how to move in directions and the knowledge base that they're bringing is something that's actually going to challenge perhaps the leader's ideas. That's true growth mindset culture is one that's willing to learn from others, that's going to seek out people with different kinds of skills and abilities. When we make a mistake, do we kind of flinch? Do we fire people automatically? Do we bring them along to help them learn and grow? Do we kind of wrest the learning from that and share it across the small organization so that everyone benefits so we don't make that mistake again?

45:39And we can iteratively and more quickly and efficiently make progress towards what it is we're doing together as an organization. How do we apply this to families? Families, it's a really interesting dynamic. One of the favorite practices that I have seen, and it's based in research, several studies have shown the effectiveness of this, is a lot of times people talk about highs and lows at the dinner table, right? With their kids to sort of show that every day you're going to have a peak and you might have a valley, a rose and a thorn, right? That's good. It shows the dynamic nature of what we experience in life, shows that things can change, which is growth minded.

46:19but instead I recommend the practice of my favorite mistake. So what was my favorite mistake that I made? What was your favorite mistake that you made today? Right. And we can sort of, some of them will be serious and some of them might bring some tears and some of them are going to be funny and kind of, we can laugh about them, but either way you're sort of showing that making mistakes is good. It's something we actually want to celebrate doing. And we want to be learning from those mistakes together as a group. And if we haven't been able to learn from the mistake yet, Maybe that's something we can do as a family, right?

46:51Over dinner, over conversation. The ways in which we describe mistakes, the ways in which we respond to shortcomings in our family environment really creates the mindset culture. I'll say another thing in families, particularly when there's more than one child in the family, a lot of times what we see, and this happened in my own family, this kid is the good one at school. This one is the smart one. and this kid is the sporty one and this kid is the creative one. What does that do to us over time? Right. It's very fixed minded and it's a culture of genius because then you're supposed to excel at the thing that you're, yes, that you have been identified as being good at.

47:33Right. And you go down that route and then suddenly you wake up, you're 30 and you're like, wait a minute. What if I want to try art? What if I want to try music? What if I want to try something totally different than the academics that I've been put in the box for, right? It's a process of unbecoming. It's a process of becoming someone new. And it's challenged by that previous fixed minded culture of genius that was created in the family. So we can actually think about how we do that, how we actually support growth and development, trying new things, even though, yes, we might have some strengths initially, or some places where we really excel, trying to keep our kids flexible in that and pushing them.

48:13Michelle Obama used to say that for her kids, she would give them a choice. They would be involved in two activities, extracurricular activities, one that they got to pick, and it was usually the thing they were very good at, and one that she got to pick, and it was usually something that she thought would be a challenge for them that they might not like immediately, but that was the deal, right? Because that's how you create a culture of growth. You kind of expose kids to these ideas that challenge learning something new, even if you don't like it at first, you never know. It might be something that ends up being a passion, right?

48:45But you don't know unless you don't try. And it wasn't that she forced them to stay in those areas, but that actually just the process of trying new things created that growth mindset for themselves and created a growth mindset culture in the family. Well, we're coming to the end of our time. My final question for you, what would you say to anyone who's listening who thinks I'm bad with money or I'm a bad investor or I really suck at saving? Yes. Well, I would say it sounds to me like you're in your fixed mindset. Let's figure out ways to go towards growth, right? So maybe you can surround yourself with people who could be money mentors, people who you could learn from in a safe way, right?

49:29About how to get progressively better, looking and doing some research on what small steps and actions you can take to kind of move yourself out of that way of seeing yourself. I think the first thing we have to do if we want to move towards our growth mindset is to recognize that we are in our fixed mindset, that we've put ourselves in these boxes. And then to realize how that's holding us back, it actually makes us less likely to take the first step, to do research, to figure out what those next steps could be, to actually gather data along the way to see if we're making progress and Is our effort effective or not?

50:02And so I would say understanding, okay, wow, that's my fixed mindset. Oh, there's my fixed mindset again. It's normal to have a fixed mindset. Oftentimes about money, especially if we grew up in contexts where there was that kind of language or it was a comparative context, or we were in a situation where we were in lack, right? In many contexts, then we can come up to think about ourselves as not having enough money or not being good at money or seeing this kind of thing. but recognizing that that's our fixed mindset and then being able to say, okay, I'm not going to let that hold me back. I know that it's possible to move towards growth.

50:36And here are some initial steps I can take to do that. That's what I'd say we can do. Nice. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they'd like to hear more about you and your work? Yes. You can find me at marycmurphy.com. There you can see my book. You can take a mindset trigger assessment. You can actually, based on your own context, whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you are in a very large company, you can do a culture cues audit to see whether you're in a more culture of genius or culture of growth and get some strategies for how to affect and be a great culture creator.

51:16Thank you, Dr. Murphy. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, Dr. Murphy establishes the definition between a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. And understanding the distinction is crucial for the discussion that follows. The fixed mindset is a belief that we have that suggests you either have it or you don't. You're smart or you're not. Talent, intelligence, ability, it's a relatively static trait. We're born with a certain amount. And though we can change in some ways here and there, those levels can't really increase significantly over our lifespan.

51:57The growth mindset, on the other hand, is the belief that our talents, our intelligence, our ability, their potentials, and we can grow and develop them with trying new strategies, seeking help from others and persisting through challenges. We all have the fixed and the growth mindset within us, and it exists on a continuum. I call it the mindset continuum. and we move between our fixed and our growth mindset based on different predictable situations and the people around us. And so fixed mindset versus growth mindset exists along a continuum. That is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two.

52:36In the second key takeaway, Dr. Murphy describes the research around how external environments can impact the mindset that we hold. Understanding this allows us to more intentionally choose the environments in which we place ourselves so that we can choose environments that facilitate growth rather than environments that lead to us feeling stuck, stifled, or unfulfilled. We actually see that it's much more about behavior. It's what we actually say and do with each other that shapes our mindset in a moment. And given that we all have the fixed and growth mindset within us, it's those things that move us along the mindset continuum.

53:17We all have a mindset set point on the continuum where we kind of might chronically hang out on a day-to-day basis. If nothing's going on, we wake up in the morning. How do we generally tend to feel around whether what we can do today is something we can grow and develop and learn, or whether we'd rather play it safe and kind of do the things that make us feel smart and intelligent and talented, right? So you have some level of our mindset set point, but as soon as we're in interaction with other people, As soon as we're in context where we might have to prove or perform for someone else, that's when we know that we shift along the mindset continuum based on those interactions with people around us.

53:57And so that is the second key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway number three. Now, let's recap. So far in our takeaways, Dr. Murphy has shared the definition of fixed and growth mindsets. She has described the fact that mindsets actually shift back and forth, and she has talked about how our immediate environment can influence these mindset shifts. In this last takeaway, Dr. Murphy shares which factors within our environment are most influential at triggering shifts between fixed and growth mindsets. I think the first thing for us as individuals to do is to really understand our mindset triggers that really move us between our fixed and growth mindset.

54:46These are evaluative situations, high effort situations, critical feedback, and the success of others. And knowing which one of these or ones of these, if you're like me, all of them can trigger you between your fixed and growth mindset means that then you can be aware when that situation is in front of you and that you can sort of move yourself with many different strategies more towards growth than fixed. Evaluative situations. High effort situations, these situations are potent influencers as we shift between fixed and growth mindset. Once we understand this, we can start implementing strategies that help us shift towards the growth mindset that we desire, the growth mindset that's good for us.

55:31And so those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Dr. Mary Murphy. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please do three things. Number one, most importantly, share it with a friend or a family member. Number two, please follow us in Apple Podcasts and Spotify, as well as on YouTube. You can find us there at youtube.com slash affordanything. Number three, please leave us up to a five-star review in your favorite podcast playing app. Please subscribe to our show notes if you are not subscribed yet, affordanything.com slash show notes so that you can get a summary and description of every episode.

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56:58Again, that's affordanything.com slash community. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pan. This is the Afford Anything podcast. Oh, before I sign off, a reminder, we have a course on rental property investing. It's called Your First Rental Property. This course is open for enrollment now through May 31st. After that, we close our doors. So if you are interested in learning more, please go to affordanything.com slash enroll. Again, that's affordanything.com slash enroll. There you will find an enormous amount of information about this course. So if you've ever thought about investing in rental properties, and particularly if you're not sure how to handle rental property investing in the high interest rate environment of 2024, if maybe you find yourself getting stuck in analysis paralysis, you will benefit a lot from the camaraderie and the education and the support provided in this course.

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58:18Thank you.