Level 3

For a minimum of three days, record every morsel of praise you give to others. Keep record of what you say, as close to verbatim as possible, in a notebook, your journal, or some other document.  At the end of each day, review your list and reflect for 10-15 minutes in writing about how many times you gave growth mindset praise versus fixed mindset praise. Note your three biggest surprises or lessons learned each day.

To help with this exercise, here is a list of some forms of praise which fall under each type of mindset:

Growth mindset

• You must have worked really hard!
• You put a lot of effort on writing that essay, and your improvement shows it.
• I saw you try different strategies to solve that problem, and I really value your effort.
• Although the task was hard, you stuck to it and achieved your goal.
• I think it’s great that you took on that challenging path. It will take a lot of hard work to get it done, but you are going to learn so many things!
• I love the strategy you used to achieve this goal.

Fixed mindset

• You are so smart.
• You are a natural artist.
• You are awesome.
• You are the best.
• You are so talented.
• You are brilliant.
• You are so gifted!