Field Notes #43: Dual-growth mindset for your health and for yourself 🔥

Plus a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, holding "astonishingly beautiful and unbearably hard things in the same palm," and little daily gift ideas for you

Hello, friends. I’m feeling the heavy tug of January, but I’m also planning Winter Camp, a bright light for us to help carry us into spring, and that has been great fun. I hope you are having a joyful week, and I hope you find something useful below.

1 insight

Mindset makes a big difference. Twenty years ago, management professors Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton came up with the concept of “job crafting” — intentionally changing the design of your own job. Job crafting has been shown to increase well-being, engagement and performance. (Here’s an article with examples: What Job Crafting Looks Like, Harvard Business Review.)

A new study by Professor Wrzensniewski and her team takes this another step farther and examines the impact of a “dual-growth mindset” — thinking flexibly not only about your job but about yourself. In their research, they divided participants (149 in-person employees at a Fortune 500 tech company and remotely with 400 full-time U.S. employees) into three groups and took them through an exercise that focused on a job growth mindset or a personal growth mindset or a combination of both.

The researchers share that the dual-growth mindset workshops increased happiness the most over the 6 months they tracked the participants and yield the “stickiest mindset change.” The dual-growth mindset participants also ended up creating much more ambitious plans.

“The nature of the changes people in the dual-growth mindset group were planning were just different,” explained Professor Wrzesniewski. “That’s what we believe explains the longer-term benefits. It seems to be that mindset drives happiness through what you’re able to do because of the mindset.”

This is a useful concept for your career, but I wonder if it’s also a useful concept for our health. What if we think about our health with a dual-growth mindset? What if we consider the possibilities for our particular condition/challenges and and for our self as a whole?

How do you think about your health — how has it been, how is it now, what is possible? How do you think about yourself — what type of person you are, what you can do, what you want to do, what is possible?

Focusing on either your health mindset or your personal mindset is useful, but perhaps focusing on both could be even more helpful.

Read more about the study: To Be Happier at Work, Think Flexibly about Your Job—and Yourself

2 quotes

“If there is a voice in your head saying, ‘You’re too old, too awkward, too big, too broken, too weak,’ physical sensations from movement can provide a compelling counterargument. Even deeply held beliefs about ourselves can be challenged by direct, physical experiences, as new sensations overtake old memories and stories.” —Kelly McGonigal, PhD, in The Joy of Movement

“I don’t invoke the word ‘brave’ lightly, overused as it is in the context of illness and disability. Frida [Kahlo] was not brave because she survived a near-deadly accident and dozens of surgeries. She was brave because she took that experience and transformed it and said, ‘Don’t look away.’ Because she made people confront the reality of what it means to live in a sick body, a hurt body. Because she showed us the very thing I’ve been talking about all year—which I sometimes worry I’m exhausting people with, but that I’m going to say again because it’s the truest thing I know, the thing I remind myself of every day: living means learning to hold the astonishingly beautiful and unbearably hard things in the same palm.” — Suleika Jaouad in Laying It Bare & a prompt on the body by Nell Diamond (Isolation Journals)

3 links

US cancer death rate falls 33% since 1991, partly due to advances in treatment, early detection and less smoking, report says (CNN) — The good news is that we have made enormous progress. The bad news is that the progress is unevenly distributed. There is still a lot of work desperately needed to make sure everyone has access to early detection and the best, affordable care.

7 Things To Do: “Every day, once a day, give yourself a present.” (Sophie Lucido Johnson in the You Are Doing A Good Enough Job newsletter) — I love Sophie’s encouraging tone, and in this delightful list, she offers suggestions of a little ritual each day. For example: “On Tuesday, mindfully listen to a song. Just one! … To mindfully listen to a song, you might have to turn off the lights, or at least close your eyes. You are going to listen to the song in the dark, and you’re going to think about the song while you listen to it. You’re going to let the song fill you all the way up. You’re going to let the song get into the places you don’t even let your closest friends go. This might make you cry, and that’s part of the joy.”

“Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower,” a short, gorgeous, nurturing poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. It begins:

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.

To our journeys,

Brianne