As a former educator, many education buzz words were discussed during inservice days I attended. These words were meant to help us hone our skills as teachers to fit the needs of our students. Data Driven Teaching, Blended Learning, Scaffolding, Collaborative, and Child-Minded, amongst others, were used to shake us all out of the mundane education week and make our subject matter more interesting to our students. While many of these buzz words are a renaming of tried and true common sense teaching practices that had been around as long as one person was conveying information to another, one term in particular captured my attention: Growth Mindset.
The simplest definition of Growth Mindset is the belief of a student that they can improve. While they may face challenges and set backs, they see these not as condemning moments in their academic career, but an opportunity to grow where they had failed before. Essentially, a growth mindset is an ‘I can’ attitude that is patient with oneself’s failures until they can figure out the solution. This mindset can be beneficial to a child not only in academics, but in all aspects of life. When it comes to the spiritual life in particular, a Growth Mindset can be extremely helpful.. However, it MUST be paired with the virtue of humility if we are to come to know our Heavenly Father.
A Growth Mindset is needed to achieve a good moral foundation for our relationship with God. We will never be able to live the moral life perfectly due to our fallen nature, so we need to be able to learn from our mistakes and not lose hope when we do fail. Over time, our Growth Mindset will allow us to cultivate habits that help us avoid sin and do good works consistently. As a result, people will notice this and be attracted to our lives because they are countercultural.
But too often, the spiritual life is seen as just following a moral system. Do the right, don’t do the wrong, and you will receive your heavenly reward. While this is the foundation of the spiritual life, it is not its fullness. The danger of thinking that the spiritual life is just a moral system is that if we get good enough at doing the right and avoiding the wrong, we no longer see the need to improve. We can develop a pride that eliminates our Growth Mindset. We see this in many devout Christians who at times have become self righteous and judgmental (myself included). The key to avoiding this pitfall is the virtue of humility.
Anytime that we progress in the spiritual life (we do something truly selfgiving, we spend time in honest prayer, or we forgive), we have to realize that we did not achieve this on our own. We do this only through the grace of God given to us through the actions of Jesus. Jesus is the only one who was able to do all these actions in true love during his life on Earth, and He gives us the ability to do them now through the power that we receive from His Holy Spirit. This grace, not our own merits, is what causes us to progress in the spiritual life. While we can form human virtue in perseverance, in order to act in love we need God’s gift of grace. Humility helps us to understand that we need to be weak, so that Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit can be strong.
To live this way is counterintuitive and counter cultural. Many of us have been taught from a young age that we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and create our own reality, and certainly there is some virtue in play here. But most important in accompanying our Growth Mindset is realizing that we cannot do it on our own, and we must humbly ask or even beg for the grace of God to bring us closer to Him.
