Mindset and Love

Have you ever had to change your mind about something important? Have you ever had a conviction that you thought you would never lose, only to completely change your mind later on?

We all change as we age, but sometimes we tend to get stuck in our thinking. We may have developed core beliefs at an early age and never questioned them or tried to change them. This is not inherently a bad thing, but I believe it can be a healthy practice to question our preconceptions and beliefs, to reassess why we believe what we believe and integrate new information we learn along the way. Otherwise, we might get stuck in our ways.

This brings me to something I’ve been contemplating recently: the concept of fixed mindset versus growth mindset, and how that relates to spirituality and religion.

Fixed Mindset

Our mindset about ourselves and our reality affects much of our behavior and outcomes. Psychologist Carol Dweck has developed much of our current understanding about mindset and motivation. Many of us struggle with having a fixed mindset, defined here: “A ‘fixed mindset’ assumes that our character, intelligence, and creative ability are static givens which we can’t change in any meaningful way.”

Having a fixed mindset means you limit yourself by thinking you can’t truly grow or change. You are stuck where you are in life, and there’s little you can do to change anything.

For most of my life, I have operated with a fixed mindset. I believed that there was a predetermined path for my life, and all I had to do was follow along with what the authorities in the church were telling me what to do. This worked fine as long as I followed all the rules, never questioned authority, and stayed quiet and submissive as a woman in the church.

My fixed mindset kept me in a box where only straight, white, conservative folks were truly welcome. I viewed others outside this box as outside of God’s family, outside of grace. How very wrong I was. I operated in a world where thinking I had little more to learn about others or myself was the accepted way to live.

Growth Mindset

I started to move away from a fixed mindset when I left home. In college, when I began working as a tutor for a community college, I had a training about the differences of fixed mindset and growth mindset, and how that impacts a student’s capacity for learning. Of course, as I learned how to help students have growth mindsets, I was also learning how to develop a growth mindset for myself.

But what is a growth mindset? “A ‘growth mindset’. . . thrives on challenge and sees failure not as evidence of unintelligence but as a heartening springboard for growth and stretching our existing abilities.”

Having a growth mindset means you believe that you are not limited in your growth, that you can change. You don’t see problems or failures as the end, but as ways to grow.

When I started experiencing the impacts of spiritual and emotional abuse, that’s when my fixed mindset began breaking down. When I saw the impacts on others who didn’t fit in the box I thought we were all supposed to fit in, my mindset was completely deconstructed. This took time, and I acknowledge that I am a flawed person who is still working on breaking down the barriers of my own biases and ignorance. But because I now know how a fixed mindset can limit understanding, I truly strive to lean into a growth mindset, both about myself and about others.

How Our Mindset Changes How We Love

I think about Dweck’s research on mindset often. Her work has impacted how many educators help students break out of the limits they believe about themselves as they grow to love learning. I wonder what would happen if we took this approach to mindset and learning and applied it to how we love.

In my personal experience, if I have a fixed mindset about other people and my relationship to them, I am limiting my capacity for love. If I believe they fit into a stereotype or are a “bad person,” then I am willing to cast them aside, to consider them not worth having a relationship with.

This was a common way to view others in the religious community I grew up in. If someone didn’t follow the rules or didn’t fit into the subculture, we were free to view them as “other” or “less than.” We didn’t use those words per se, but it was clear that those who didn’t align with all the group’s beliefs weren’t fully welcome.

This type of thinking might look different depending on the community. In mine, the outcasts were working women, teenagers who had doubts about faith, and divorced people, but mostly LGBTQ+ folks.

I’m not a theologian, and I don’t have the space here to detail all the factors that shaped how I became affirming and more accepting of others. But I do want to pause on this experience I had of changing my mind about the people we deemed outcasts when I became an outcast myself.

Before, when I had a fixed mindset, I believed there were limits to who I could be and who I could love. After I broke free, I found that those limits didn’t need to exist.

As I’ve opened myself to the possibility of loving others more fully, of seeing them as more than stereotypes, I’ve grown in my love and in my freedom.

Cait West is a writer, reader, and publishing professional who lives with her husband in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After leaving the stay-at-home-daughter movement, she started over by studying creative writing at Michigan State University, working in education and literacy, and eventually finding her way to an editorial position in book publishing. Find her at caitwest.com and on Instagram and Twitter at @caitwestwrites.

Photograph © Jennifer Uppendahl, used with permission