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Growth Mindsets
Emotional Development
11 November 2024

Want Growth Mindsets? Take Risks.

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Focus

Growth Mindsets have been popular in education for some time now, almost universally accepted among educators. However BUILDING a Growth Mindset can be tough. With healthy risk taking though, there’s many opportunities.

Summary

Growth Mindsets are transformative, encouraging resilience, persistence, and a focus on authentic success, especially when developed early through healthy risk-taking. Risky Kids integrates personalised challenges and success-oriented feedback, helping young people replace Fixed Mindsets with adaptable Growth Mindsets that empower lifelong confidence and self-improvement.

  • Growth Mindsets encourage resilience, creativity, and focus on genuine success.
  • Healthy risk-taking helps build confidence and reinforces successful behaviours.
  • Fixed Mindsets limit potential, focusing on appearance rather than true progress.
  • Early mindset development compounds over time, leading to lifelong growth.
  • Risky Kids uses guided challenges to foster self-belief and adaptable thinking.

What Is A Growth Mindset

Mindsets shape our perception of opportunities, influencing whether we see potential for growth or fear of failure.

  • Growth Mindsets drive creativity, persistence, and authentic success over appearances.
  • Fixed Mindsets foster excuses and discourage real effort, focusing on image over growth.
  • Mindsets vary across life areas, and with effort, Fixed Mindsets can become Growth.

Mindsets are best described as the filters through which we see the world. We can look at the same lesson or opportunity as something that fills us with dread of failure, or the anticipation of success and learning.

The Growth Mindset was identified by psychologist Carol Dweck and emphasised that people, especially young people, perceived ability as either capable of growth and change, or as fixed and individual. With this came behaviours which would drive success.

Those with Growth Mindsets would think creatively, be persistent and more likely to succeed and grow. Those with Fixed Mindsets would be more likely to give up, make excuses and even cheat, believing that the priority lay in appearing successful, rather than being successful.

However people don’t just have one or the other, they’re different for all aspects of our lives and can be changed. The objective of Dweck’s work was to empower educators and everyday people to change their Fixed Mindsets to Growth.

Success Oriented, Not Participation Based

Healthy risk-taking fosters Growth Mindsets by orienting efforts towards meaningful, success-driven outcomes.

  • Success-oriented risks encourage strategic thinking and perseverance toward valuable goals.
  • Failure in risk-taking offers emotional feedback, clarifying paths to improvement.
  • Growth Mindsets weaken with rewards that overlook genuine success and achievement.

Healthy risk taking is a powerful tool for helping develop Growth Mindsets for many reasons. One of the most important is that risk taking is success oriented. When we’re taking risks, it’s to obtain something we feel is valuable, and this means that we’ll be rewarded for our success and have to build strategies to achieve it.

Failure to navigate these risks will impact our emotions, clearly helping us to define when we have and haven’t succeeded. Whilst these emotions might be challenging, they’re a powerful form of feedback for us.

Growth Mindsets are set back by participation based, or non-success oriented rewards. Simply celebrating people for putting in effort, even if not remotely successful, leaves them confused and unclear on what successful behaviour looks like.

Risk Is Universal and Accessible

Healthy risk-taking in personalised challenges supports Growth Mindsets and makes confidence-building accessible to all.

  • Individual challenges empower self-growth aligned with personal goals and abilities.
  • Reducing barriers enables everyone, regardless of abilities, to build Growth Mindsets.
  • Early successes in accessible challenges reinforce confidence and effective learning pathways.

Building Growth Mindsets should be open to everyone, and this is where healthy risk taking shines. When paired with individual challenges, like parkour, painting or pottery, people are able to push themselves in ways which reflect them and their goals.

Because building Growth Mindsets are so important, reducing barriers to this for people who move or think differently is critical. However it also means that it’s easy to learn the fundamentals for everyone.

This creates powerful early learning, with lessons being reinforced by clear pathways to success which improve confidence.

Early Anxiety

Fixed Mindsets Create Barriers

Jeremy joined the program with relatively low self confidence when he was just 7. His family had tried several programs before, and were kind and supportive of his efforts, but he was fearful of failure and this meant his first few sessions he was anxious.

However he saw through the lessons that there was no one way to do the moves being taught, that all that mattered was to get better and explore. He learned this as the Coaches taught him the “Your Way” Mindset which is taught to young people to emphasise that there will never be a “perfect” way to do something.

Instead what matters is getting stronger, getting better and learning YOUR WAY to do something. But the only way to do that is to keep practising, keep trying and to take failure and learn from it.

Jeremy took this Mindset and began trying things more readily, which he was rewarded for as he got better and better. He began to move through the program steps and his family soon found not only was his confidence stronger, he was using the Risky Kids Mindsets in other parts of his life as well.

The Reward of Success

A Growth Mindset fuels personal success, confidence, and continual self-improvement.

  • Growth Mindsets drive us to pursue and achieve greater versions of ourselves.
  • Belief in change encourages actions that lead to personal and social rewards.
  • Success from growth fuels further confidence, strengthening the mindset over time.

Having a Growth Mindset isn’t just about seeing things as being capable of change though. We want a Growth Mindset because it leads to success! We want to be stronger, more confident, healthier, more capable versions of ourselves as often as we can.

By having a Growth Mindset, we will be rewarded with success, which will fuel it and help it become stronger. If we see ourselves as capable of being funnier, we’ll try new conversation techniques. If we believe we can become fitter, we’ll train more regularly. In return, we’ll make more friends and be healthier and stronger!

Breaking Fixed Mindsets

Fixed Mindsets affect everyone, but challenging them leads to genuine growth and improvement.

  • Excuses and talent assumptions reflect a Fixed Mindset holding us back.
  • Growth Mindsets apply to passions and life essentials, not everything.
  • Challenging fixed mindsets requires self-awareness and supportive community reinforcement.

Fixed Mindsets do exist though, we all have them. Whenever you make an excuse after you fail, that’s your Fixed Mindset talking. Whenever you look at someone with talent and in the back of your mind say “some people are just born with talent” that’s your Fixed Mindset.

Having a Growth Mindset doesn’t mean pursuing growth in everything though, but it does mean that when you’re passionate about something, or something should be a part of your life (like eating healthy and exercising!) you don’t see yourself as incapable.

We break Fixed Mindsets by confronting them. We have to challenge those excuses and justificatory thoughts, and surround ourselves with a community that helps us do this. When guiding young people, we do it by only praising success oriented effort, and by giving genuine, helpful feedback with a focus on success.

Guided Mindset Development

Instilling growth mindsets early fosters long-term health, happiness, and lifelong growth potential.

  • Growth mindsets expand over time, amplifying personal growth and resilience.
  • Risky Kids promotes growth through healthy risk-taking and success-based feedback.
  • Breaking fixed mindsets builds confidence, self-belief, and adaptability in young people.

If we build these mindsets when people are young, not only will it help them have happy and healthy childhoods, it’ll lead to positive, long and healthy lives. The interest on them compounds as well! The longer we believe we can grow, the more we grow.

The team at Risky Kids uses healthy risk taking as a way to build Growth Mindsets every day. Inspired by Dweck’s work, we created our own deck of Mindsets for younger Risky Kids, and Perspectives for older participants. Ways of thinking that help us believe we can become better.

We deliver real, success oriented feedback every day and help break Fixed Mindsets, develop self confidence and give young people a belief in themselves that they can change for the better in anything they want to do.

Richard Williams

Richard Williams

Risky Kids Founder, Director of Programming

Richard Williams is a fitness industry consultant, gym owner, business coach and professional stunt actor with more than a decade of experience in the health and fitness industry. With an education in psychology and criminology, Richard blended life experience as a fitness industry consultant with Spartan Race, gym owner, elite-obstacle racer, ultra-runner and professional stunt actor to create the Risky Kids program.

Richard has a passion for enacting meaningful social change through all avenues of health and wellbeing and believes that obstacles are the way. Some of Richard’s key achievements include:

  • Key consultant/coordinator Spartan Race/Tough Mudder/Extreme Endurance
    (Australia/NZ/Global)
  • OCR World Championship Finalist –  Team & Solo (2015)
  • OCR World Championship Silver Medallist – Team Endurance (2018)
  • Professional film and television stunt performer for 15 years

Considered one of Australia’s foremost experts in the fields of fitness, wellbeing and behavioural science, Richard is frequently in demand as a guest speaker for relevant government and non-
government bodies and organisations. Speaking engagements centred on the success of the Risky Kids program, philosophy and approach have included:

  • Expert speaker/panellist Sports & Camp; Recreation Victoria and Outdoors Victoria forums
  • Closing expert speaker at the Australian Camps Association National Conference
  • Expert speaker at the National Fitness Expo, FILEX