Today is the day when the DSE results are released. Whether you are a candidate or a parent, if you have the wrong mentality, you will easily fall into cognitive traps, forming catastrophic thoughts dissociated from reality – “broken dreams”, “unlucky my whole life”, “life doomed to failure”, etc. How can we avoid this kind of thinking trap?
In life, to overcome all kinds of difficulties, you must have faith. Faith refers to something that one deeply believes in. Something that calms you down, regains your strength and eliminates your delusions and panic when you face difficulties. While searching for faith, I was fortunate enough to find the “growth mindset”, which gradually became my faith.
The Growth Mindset was proposed by psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck. It states that knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes are built up afterward. Simply put, it means people can continue to grow and improve through learning. Focus on the gains in the process (what have you learned?) rather than the performance or results (such as awards, rankings or scores). Believe that you will gain and grow as long as you work hard. Treat challenges as opportunities. Treat mistakes made during the learning process as learning opportunities, as every experience leads to wisdom. Learn from other people’s comments and suggestions, whether they are praise or criticism, in order to grow. As we believe in the growth mindset, we know there is no such thing as “doomed to failure”.
The growth mindset is completely in line with the development and operation logic of the human brain. The human brain is a complex neural network. Regardless of age, what we come into contact with every day continues to shape this network. When you stop learning and using a particular skill due to complacency or discouragement, the associated neural networks disappear along with the skill. On the contrary, with persistence, the networks and their associated abilities will be gradually built up, even though the speed varies from person to person.
If the sight of your exam results causes you pain, treat it as a rare opportunity to learn. May the growth mindset be useful to you throughout your life.
Written by: Dr. William Chui
Originally posted on: Health HKEJ
Translated by: Cheuk Long Chan
