Using sports to look at things from a GROWTH MINDSET perspective

It’s a holiday tradition within my family to go bowling, and it’s a tradition that I look forward to quite a bit as bowling is one of my favorite hobbies. However, I don’t always look forward to how well (or poorly) I’m going to play. When I was younger I used to be a skilled bowler, but I don’t bowl as often as I used to when I was younger and, as such, I’m far less consistent than I used to be. I’m also far less consistent than I would LIKE to be. That doesn’t stop me from having fun though, and it also doesn’t stop me from using casual bowling as an opportunity to develop my growth mindset.

What exactly is growth mindset, you might ask, and why should you care about it anyways? Well, you may have heard of the terms “growth mindset” or “fixed mindset” before, but what are they exactly and what do they mean?

Growth Mindset - The belief that you can develop your abilities through hard work, good learning strategies, help from mentors and lots of support and opportunities. So in a growth mindset, taking on challenges and learning from mistakes become ways to develop your abilities. (www.apa.org)

Fixed Mindset - A fixed mindset is the belief that intellectual and/or physical abilities are fixed. You have a certain amount of capability and that’s it. You believe “that’s who you are and that’s who you’ll stay” no matter what you try to do about it. That mindset can make undertaking challenges and experiencing mistakes more threatening, so these are often avoided. (www.apa.org)

Now that you’re refreshed on what these terms mean, let’s get back to the bowling.

For context, I bowl right handed and I put counter-clockwise spin on the ball when I release it. That is to say, the ball is constantly trying to move from right to left. This is a very standard approach to bowling and creates an opportunity for the ball to hit the “pocket” which is between the 1 and 3 pins (the front two pins on the right). Effectively, this should give you the best chance to knock the most pins over. Unfortunately, as you are well aware, knocking all of the pins down at the same time in bowling is not easy, even if you’re pretty good at bowling. What often happens due to the spin that I put on the ball and where it most often makes contact with the pins is that the #10 pin often won’t fall over (far back right pin). If you fail to achieve a strike (knocking all of the pins over) on your first ball, you must try to knock them all over. For a bowler that uses counterclockwise spin, the #10 pin is the most difficult pin to hit by itself since the ball is always trying to move away from that side of the lane.

When I was younger I used to get frustrated by this situation, often proclaiming that it was “bad luck” and wondering why that scenario happened so often. However, regardless of the orientation of the pins and how often this particular set of circumstances happened, bowling (and life, as we will soon see) is all about how you look at it. I’ve learned that it doesn’t benefit you at all to be frustrated and upset about something that’s completely out of your control, like whether or not the pesky #10 pin falls over or not. Instead, what works much more effectively is to understand that that situation will often happen regardless of your skill as a bowler, and look at it as an OPPORTUNITY to become better at knocking the #10 pin over. As much as you may wish to get a strike every time you take a shot in bowling, when you don’t accomplish this outcome and only knock over 9 pins, this is an occasion for you to get better at something you are not particularly good at. This is the essence of growth mindset.

Life will often present us with similar circumstances. We wish to achieve an outcome and things don’t go the way we had hoped. Rather than being upset at the current state of things, we can choose to look at the new situation as an opportunity to get better at something we may not have expected to happen. Choosing to have this mindset will not only help you maintain a more level-headed disposition, it will lead you down the path of learning how to handle more situations skillfully.