Recent advances in understanding how the mind and body work together to form our sense of self suggest a new definition of mindset that is both empowering and highly practical in enabling us to adapt to a changing world.

Twenty years of research and practice have led me to conclude that our mindset is more than the ideas or beliefs we carry but how we make sense of ourselves in the world. It comprises three core components: the mental models we use to see the world, the assumptions and beliefs that come with those models that we use to think, and, given the situation we find ourselves in, how that model and its’ associated assumptions make us feel emotionally and physically. Our mindset, in short, is how we feel, think, and see in any given situation. 

Mindset: The Inner Game for Lasting Change

In some shape or form, my work has always centred around human and organisational change.  When I started in the 1980s, much of this focused on communicating ideas, frameworks, processes, and behaviours. Persuasion was seen as the critical factor. If you could convince people of the need for change, they would modify their behaviour, and your organisation would be successful.  Change teams would agonise over wordsmithing and creating pithy pyramids, Venn diagrams and other visual frameworks that could summarise change and encourage thousands of employees to think and act differently.  They seldom stood back to question whether this approach worked.  They didn’t measure belief shifts but the effectiveness of their communication, if indeed they measured anything. 

The underlying assumption that persuasion is the answer still defines the limits of agility in many organisations today. Strategic clarity is, of course, essential, but having more than an intellectual understanding of the need for change is necessary. Especially if you want to move an organisation out of its comfort zone and overturn the myriad of habits and responses built over decades that continue to guide its culture and focus unconsciously.

In the 1990s, psychology, particularly advances in sports psychology, percolated into the playbook of transformational efforts.  In the mid-2000s, the word mindset became increasingly used as an inspiring call to action.  Athletes had long been encouraged to adopt a ‘positive mindset, to reframe setbacks as the trigger for further growth.  It seemed a neat way of summarising the internal state people needed to win or adapt. I increasingly noticed the use of the word, particularly in Silicon Valley, where executives were enamoured by the concept of Carol Dweck’s Growth vs. Fixed Mindset research with children.  

I kept returning to the idea of mindset because it was clear that the inner game of change was missing. Organisations had honed the outer game – the ideas and behaviours of change, performance, and innovation, but the poor returns on transformational efforts were rooted in what was happening within people.  In every workshop, employee survey and discussion, an ‘invisible hand’, to borrow from Adam Smith, set the boundaries of what was possible in people’s minds.

After looking at the research and science of mindset, I came to the following conclusions.

My conclusions about Mindset:

1.    Our existing definitions of mindset are confused and incomplete

The most well-known change models, such as Kotter’s model for leading change and the Kübler-Ross grief model, point to the desire for concrete, behavioural and linear pictures of how people and systems change. While they seem comfortingly logical, they don’t represent how people or communities react to uncertainty, conflicting priorities, and pressure.  Upwards of 70-80% of transformational programmes continue to fail, not necessarily because of poor strategy, communication or execution, but because the fundamental source of change, our mindset, is deemed too abstract to tackle by most executives. In part that’s because our current definitions and understanding are vague in most people’s minds.

I looked at over 1000 papers and books on the entrepreneurial mindset as part of my research for my latest book , and typically, the definition of mindset extends to just one or two paragraphs, often throwing in Carol Dweck’s fixed versus growth mindset as justification for using the term. 98% of the material then jumped straight into describing the observable behaviours of people who had an entrepreneurial mindset. Although there’s nothing wrong with defining what someone with a particular mindset does, it tells little about why or how they have built it. 

2.    Most of our definitions of mindset consist of the beliefs you hold (how you think), or the mental models you use (what you use to think with). 

Having asked thousands of managers what mindset means, the answers consistently reflect the vagueness found in the literature.  They recognise its importance and have a strong sense of ‘knowing’ when someone’s mindset is helpful or not, but their definition is almost always fuzzy and varied. This means the word mindset itself currently doesn’t serve as an unambiguous call to action for people.

Most answers to my question, ‘What is your mindset?’ consistently fall into two categories. The first is mental models and beliefs. Mental models are what we use to look at the world. They are something you hold up to a situation, either intentionally or unconsciously, depending on your education, self-awareness, and the situation you find yourself in. For example, a finance manager has a set of mental models they use to understand how their business works and how to tackle certain situations from the perspective of financial risk.  A mental model enables us to prioritise what information we pay attention to, de-prioritise or ignore.  You can think of it as a lens or frame by which you look at things.

The other category of answers is beliefs about themselves, others and the world.  This may seem like a mental model, but it’s more about how people think, given the model they use.  Another way of thinking about this is to describe it as the assumptions we make to speed up situational analysis, problem-solving and decision-making. For example, the finance manager might assume that all risks can and should be quantified before deciding.

 3.    Mindset is more than behaviour

How many times have you been drawn to the alluring article that claims it will give you the secret code to build the mindset of a successful entrepreneur/leader/CEO, only to find a list of behaviours that you can’t realistically action given your current situation?

Most definitions of mindset I found in the literature end here: the mental model and the accompanying assumptions and beliefs. They will also provide the ten habits or six behaviours to add your desired high-performing or disruptive thinking person here. What they all miss – like the thousands of managers I’ve asked - is one essential component: how we feel physically and emotionally. 

 Our physical and emotional state profoundly influences how we look at situations and the assumptions and beliefs we have.  This is why the logic-based mindset picture is ineffective and often largely unactionable. Our physical feelings and emotions are of tantamount importance to how we make decisions. Certainty is not a purely logical outcome; it’s also an emotional experience. We use logic and facts to reduce uncertainty, but we must have emotional conviction to fill in the gaps of what we cannot know. Without the feeling of certainty, we would never make decisions, as research has shown.

 The ‘describe a mindset as a set of beliefs and behaviours’ approach sits at the heart of much corporate training and explains the prevalence of the knowing-doing gap.  Having gained an intellectual understanding of entrepreneurial behaviour, managers are now expected to think and act like entrepreneurs.  This doesn’t work because how an entrepreneur thinks is informed by how they feel about risk and uncertainty, which differs significantly from the mass of corporate managers.  For example, a field study conducted on a London trading floor by neuroscientists showed that those with a stronger connection to their body, known as interoception, made more profit and had longer careers in what is unquestionably a high- stress environment.  Creating the necessary experiences that build constructive physical and emotional responses is virtually non-existent in most mindset-building coaching and training.

 4.   Your mindset is the key to unlocking lasting change – in work, in life, in health and even in how you age

 Researchers at McKinsey found that a focus on mindset delivers change 400% more successfully in organisations than initiatives prioritising the conventional playbook of strategy, behaviours and project management.  But the most striking evidence of how mindset enables change is in the study of so-called belief effects .  

 These studies show us that our beliefs and assumptions alter our bodies and dramatically influence our desired outcomes. As mindset researcher Alia Crum says, our beliefs ‘affect objective reality’. One of the most studied of these is the placebo effect because every drug trial requires control groups to be administered inert sugar pills, saline injections or other benign inventions. These control groups often report experiencing the beneficial outcomes of the real drug, even when they’re told they are taking the placebo. The effects aren’t just psychological either; their bodies often produce hormones and neurotransmitters that the drug would elicit. In one trial[i], irritable bowel syndrome sufferers told they were participating in research purely to test placebos gained significant improvements over those given no treatment. In a meta-study [ii] of the effects of placebo on this debilitating condition, between 17% and 70% of patients experienced positive benefits.

 How you think about your age and health will also have a powerful impact on how long you live. The ageing researcher Becca Levy suggests that what messages we internalise from society, and our friends about age and the stereotypes we accept influence our self-esteem and behaviour and how we biologically age. In her Lab at Yale University, Levy shows that when participants are subliminally primed to adopt positive frames about age, for example, by using words such as ‘wise’, their motivation, memory, balance, and walking speed can be improved in minutes. Levy found that amongst the 15 per cent of the US population genetically more susceptible to Alzheimer’s, those with positive age beliefs are nearly 50 per cent less likely to develop dementia than those with negative age beliefs. ‘Their risk is as low as someone who doesn’t have that gene.’

 In one of Levy’s studies[iii], she analysed figures from 660 participants in the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement dating back to 1975. Those with a more positive self-perception of ageing lived 7.5 years longer than those with a less positive disposition. ‘This advantage remained after age, gender, socioeconomic status, loneliness, and functional health were included as covariates.’ To find out what was happening, she analysed over 4,000 people for the cumulative stress-related inflammation marker, C-reactive protein, which was significantly lower in those with positive mindsets about ageing. This effect is being measured at a cellular level[iv], where ageing can be seen in telomeres' protective function that keeps our DNA from malfunctioning. Again, those with negative attitudes have older-looking cells.

 In our work, we see the impact of belief effects, for better or worse, every day.

 When you can define it, you can understand it and you can build it

 In future articles, I’ll explore how we can practically harness the underlying mechanisms of our mindset to build a more powerful and flexible mind, enabling us to adapt to uncertainty and change more naturally.

 I’ll share how neuroscience reveals the origin story of perception, emotion, self-awareness and how our beliefs operate and how we’re starting to build an understanding of how our genetics, biochemistry, and neuro-functioning ladder up to form how we see ourselves and others. This, I believe, is the missing link in understanding our mindset and why we’ve defaulted to the observable descriptions of mindset explored in this article. 

 Over the last 20 years, I’ve come to understand that many valuable ideas from psychology about mindset don’t translate into lasting behaviours in most individuals because they rely on the assumption that an intellectual understanding and defining specific behaviours leads to the formation of habits.  In future articles, I’ll unpack the flaws in this approach and introduce you to new techniques grounded in neuroscience that we’ve found are more effective for anyone who wants to make lasting change.

 Tune in for more.

 

[i] Kaptchuk TJ, Friedlander E, Kelley JM, Sanchez MN, Kokkotou E, et al. (2010) Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

 [ii] Patel SM, Stason WB, Legedza A, Ock SM, Kaptchuk TJ, Conboy L, Canenguez K, Park JK, Kelly E, Jacobson E, Kerr CE, Lembo AJ. The placebo effect in irritable bowel syndrome trials: a meta-analysis. Neurogastroenterol Motil. 2005 Jun;17(3):332-40. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2982.2005.00650.x. PMID: 15916620.

[iii] Levy BR, Slade MD, Kunkel SR, Kasl SV. Longevity increased by positive self-perceptions of aging. J Pers Soc Psychol. 2002 Aug;83(2):261-70. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.83.2.261. PMID: 12150226.

 [iv] Pietrzak RH, Zhu Y, Slade MD, et al. Association Between Negative Age Stereotypes and Accelerated Cellular Aging: Evidence from Two Cohorts of Older Adults. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2016;64(11):e228-e230. doi:10.1111/jgs.14452