The Grocery Store, Personal Assessments & Growth Mindset

Ten years ago I underwent a batch of personality tests, including an emotional intelligence test. I was consulting with companies on developing their leaders and we would use these tools often to help people and teams better understand themselves and their environments. 

My personal results showed, among other things, “low empathy”. 

I wasn’t surprised. (Neither were my friends.) Essentially, I shrugged my shoulders as I kind of knew that already, the assessment simply fortified that self-perception, and I went on my way.

For a solid year after that, if someone asked what I thought about something that I didn't particularly care about, my response was basically: “Don’t ask me, I’m the guy with low empathy.” I even got plenty of laughs in workshops and coaching sessions with clients with that response.

The test result and the way I analyzed it gave me permission to be super lazy with this personal weak spot. I probably became even less empathetic than I was before, because it gave me a reason to try less hard in that area. If someone accused me of not listening to them, or thinking about other people, I could just point to the test — “See? It’s just how I am.”

It’s also a trait that was strengthened (or weakened, really) by high-performance sport. Sometimes, empathy can be a distraction when striving to achieve a significant goal. When training — and especially when racing — my team and I needed total focus on the task at hand. We couldn’t think about how each other was feeling or give each other grace if we weren’t 100%. And it wasn’t just about the win; in bobsled, if we stepped up to the line with anything but total focus, the results could be deadly. 

On the other hand, sport did teach me something critically important, which is: a growth mindset. 

At the heart of Growth Mindset, a term popularized by Standford researcher Carol Dweck, is the understanding that anything is overcome-able. There’s nothing that we can’t get better at. There’s no “I’m just not good at that”. There’s always, “I’m just not good at that, yet.”

(I don’t know a single entrepreneur, leader, or athlete I respect and consider successful who doesn’t live with a growth mindset. Here’s a fantastic piece to explain a bit more on Fixed vs Growth Mindset.)

As an athlete, I could never say, “nah, I’m not going to bother squatting today because my squat isn’t as good as my bounding.” Or, “I’m not going to bother with speed work, because I’m the strong guy, not the fast guy.” 

Avoiding my weaknesses was never acceptable. As competitive athletes, everyone on our team had to deliberately seek out their weaknesses and strive to improve them every day. That’s what it took to win. 

It’s also important to note, as I was recently reminded by Craig Senyk from Mawer Investment Management, that one shouldn’t look at improving our weaknesses to a point of mastery but rather to a level of competence. My back squat was never going to be as big as Curt Tomasevizc’s, and Curt’s speed was never going to rival mine - but we each needed to ensure our weaknesses weren’t holding us back.

But ultimately, “I” and I alone was and am responsible for mitigating my weak spots. Yes, I had a coach, I had my teammates. But the growth was up to me. No one else could make the decision to improve and execute on it. It was up to me.

Despite all that growth mindset training, I still slip up sometimes today. In the case of “my” low empathy, it was so easy to put myself in a fixed mindset place. I believed it to be accurate, I demonstrated the behavior often enough, and I “liked” the idea (since coming from the bobsled world empathy often was considered for the weak.)

But was that fixed mindset helping me? Not a damn bit. Just like being weak in back squats was never going to win us an Olympic medal; not being able to practice empathy was not going to help me or my team succeed in my post-sport career.

So, eventually, I smartened up. I accepted that while I might not be the most naturally empathetic, I could get better at it. So I started practicing and looked for simple ways to improve. For instance, every time I went to a store, I’d make a point of chatting with the clerk. Rather than a cursory, “how are you?” I’d actually ask the person multiple questions and listen to the answers. I also deliberately practiced in my emails, work conversations, just about everywhere I could. Doing these things regularly helped me break out of my self-oriented mindset and think about how other people were doing. In time, it became habitual.

I think we all need to create and monitor red lines for ourselves, or else it’s too easy to slip into oblivion. Getting stuck in a fixed mindset is one of mine.

Personally, the moment I fully recognize I’m holding onto a fixed mindset for anything, I F’ING SCREAM and look to make change right away.

To keep myself on track, I do have a home-grown, sport-based 6-step system that I use for self-improvement that’s modeled after how we used to improve various aspects of our training and racing in bobsled. 

Here’s what it looks like:

1. Find both subjective and objective opportunities for feedback (quality, peer-reviewed personal assessments and personality profiles can often provide both.) None are perfect, all have pros and cons. Either for myself or in consulting, I’ve used and found value in the MBTI (personality inventory that helps you understand yourself and others) and EQ in Action, as well as Level 52’s “360 Assessment”. Level 52’s version is more qualitative than other 360’s  I’ve used so it takes a little more effort for both the contacts you ask to fill it out, as well as for you to gain the best insights, but, for me, the extra qualitative feedback helps me find more patterns to understand the basis of people’s feedback better. Just having scores in various areas is good, but having a better understanding of “the why” I find much more valuable.

2. Check-in with myself and others to consider the feedback and decide what I want to take away from it. (Of course, I want to ensure I’m in a headspace to receive it and not act defensively, but I’ve also been taught not to look at these assessments as “fact” but rather as interpretable.) 

3. Accept that I need to improve on that thing or things.

4. Set my intention for what I want to improve.

5. Begin to practice in both relevant and irrelevant (see: grocery store) areas of life.

6. Go back to subjective and objective opportunities for feedback to check on progress.

(My coach Stu McMillan and I used kind of approach to every aspect of the sport. Here’s a great list of 20 aspects of high-performance in bobsled by Stu that we would constantly look at. Think your business is complex? The intricacies of where we were constantly looking for improvement by feedback is awesome to think about.

For more strategies to employ to help your own growth mindset, here’s a great piece largely based on the mother of growth mindset, Stanford’s Carol Dweck’s, research: How to Develop a Growth Mindset: 10 Strategies to Success.

It’s important to remember this is a self-improvement tactic, not an organizational management philosophy. In an organizational setting, it can make sense to focus on people’s strengths. I’ve long admired and attempted to adopt the view Mawer Investment Management, a highly successful investment firm based in Calgary, takes in giving their people the best opportunity to succeed by driving culture through a concept that keeps people in their “area of genius” as much as possible. (Disclaimer: Mawer is a supporter of the non-profit I founded, Classroom Champions)

At Classroom Champions, we also want to make the best use of our team members’ talents by allowing them to focus on what they’re best at — why have your people spin their wheels on something when another team member can do the same thing faster and better (and probably enjoy it more)? We’ve actually re-structured the organization this year to attempt to lean into this more. I’m excited for the potential results.

And speaking of Classroom Champions, there’s clear evidence that teaching kids to live with a growth mindset improves academic performance and emotional & physical well-being. Here’s a great piece from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education on the latter, Growth Mindset and Children’s Health and one from EdWeek, “Growth Mindset Linked to Higher Test Scores...” on the former. And the wife, the good Dr. Mesler, has published research showing, in essence, that teacher growth mindset directly affects student growth mindset. 

But from a personal growth standpoint, my experiences and those I have the opportunity to interact with have taught me there are unending benefits to deliberately improving our weaknesses if we want to be happy and successful at work and life. We can make the decision to improve on something that we’re “just not good at” and then make the choice we’re going to do something about it. 

If we only do what we’re naturally best at, we’ll never grow—we’ll just stagnate. And that sounds pretty boring, don’t you think?

- Steve