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[post_content] => When our four-year-old daughter came home from her first day at a Montessori preschool, she handed me a swatch of cloth with several buttons sewn neatly onto it. “Where did you get this, sweetie?” I asked.
“I made it!” she exclaimed proudly. She also informed me that she had chopped apples with a “grownup knife” and cut flowers with pruning shears.
I couldn’t believe it. This girl had barely used scissors and never played with a needle before. We weren’t excessively protective parents, but we had no idea that she was capable of doing tasks like these (without hurting herself even). Part of the secret, we learned, was the mixed-age class. In a group of kids ranging from three to six, the older ones were instrumental in inspiring and instructing the younger ones. The teacher explained that when a child sees an adult perform a complex task, she won’t assume she’s capable of doing it herself. But if she sees another kid do it, she naturally thinks, “I’m going to do that, too!” This is one of the many ways I’ve been inspired and instructed by children – and it has informed how I work with adults.
When my wife founded The Dragontree, we wanted to provide a space for people to relax and heal. It wasn’t until some years later that we recognized a shared ambition to support people in whole-life wellness, which includes helping people to discover and actualize their potential. But while a young child may assume she can do what another child can, this isn’t always true for adults. We see other adults doing great things and often think, “I don’t have what they have.”
Most adults have old, fixed ideas about their capacities, largely influenced by teachers and parents. The best research on this subject comes from Carol Dweck, who studies childhood learning and self-esteem, and coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. A fixed mindset refers to a belief that one’s ability in a given area, whether strong or weak, isn’t going to change. Thoughts such as “I’m not good with numbers,” or “I can’t sing,” or “I’m not an organized person” all indicate underlying fixed mindsets.
In contrast, a growth mindset entails the belief that, whatever your current ability, you can work at it and get better. Dweck found that kids with growth mindsets enjoy a challenge, are more confident, and have a stronger work ethic. It probably seems obvious that knowing you can improve your lot would be more empowering than believing you’re stuck with it, but we rarely take the time to investigate and question our deepest beliefs.
Indeed, one of the tricky things about changing a fixed mindset about, say, your skill at math, is that you may also have a fixed mindset about your inability to change your mindset! (“It’s just the kind of person I am!”) Thus, there’s a something of a catch-22 here: in order to shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset you must have a growth mindset around changing your mindset. However, I find it useful to remember that these two configurations – fixed and growth – aren’t equally valid. It’s not a case of “different but equal.” A fixed mindset is inherently incorrect. Though we may fiercely insist that it’s true, it’s not. We can change. We can grow. We can improve. Always.
In his 2014 TED Talk, The Psychology of Your Future Self, psychologist Dan Gilbert teaches that people usually believe they’re unlikely to change much in the future – but they’re wrong. “All of us are walking around with an illusion,” he says. “An illusion that our personal history has just come to an end. That we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” It’s true, his studies show, that our rate of change slows down somewhat as we get older, but it doesn’t slow down nearly as much as we believe it will. “At every age from 18 to 68 in our data set,” Gilbert continues, “people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience [in values, personality, friends, and preferences] over the next ten years.” He suggests that it’s easier for us to see how we’ve changed in the past than it is for us to imagine how we’ll change in the future. “Human beings,” he states, “are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
So, if the science shows that you’re bound to change whether you believe it or not, why not believe it? A willingness to believe (i.e., hold a growth mindset) moves you from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. If you believe you’re capable of change and growth, you can be a conscious creator of the life you desire.
A critical factor in making productive change is the recognition and acceptance of your current status. Many of us have a hard time giving ourselves an honest self-appraisal because of our upbringing. If you or your parents were raised during wartime there may have been a “stiff upper lip” policy of denying weaknesses and carrying on stoically.
Later generations faced a different obstacle – the self-esteem movement. In retrospective studies of the movement that picked up speed in the 1980s, Dweck and others found that kids who were always told they were great tended to grow into young adults with fixed mindsets that didn’t serve them. They saw themselves as awesome regardless of the facts or their quality of participation. And the inevitable dissonance that resulted when they underperformed often provoked disillusionment or depression. The fixed aspect of a fixed mindset implies a kind of rigidity, and thus a painful reckoning when disproven.
I believe it’s important to love and accept oneself completely (what you truly are is awesome) but what happened here might be seen as a form of “bypass.” Rather than help kids to face their deficiencies, we decided it was favorable to pretend they didn’t have any. The self-esteem movement, at least when understood and applied shallowly, aimed to help kids believe in themselves by giving them a gold star no matter what. The “participation trophy” is a good example. How can we grow (or track that growth) if we aren’t honest and accepting of our actual starting point?
Now, let’s get back to that disparity between adults and young children. In our work through the Dragontree to facilitate the emergence of people’s greatness we’ve encountered so many folks who see themselves as fundamentally different from (i.e., inferior to) those they see as great. I’d like to challenge this belief.
While Dweck’s research deals mostly with intelligence and success, we feel the growth mindset also applies to things like our capacity for healing, happiness, power, spiritual connection, and love. For instance, beliefs such as, “There’s no soul mate out there for me,” “I don’t have a connection to a higher power,” “I’m going to be sick for the rest of my life,” “I don’t have what it takes to change the world,” and “I’m just not an optimistic, light-hearted type of person” all reveal fixed mindsets and are therefore untrue – except perhaps in this moment.
If you feel an urge to emerge – to come into your power and make a positive difference – but something is holding you back, I encourage you to first unearth the fixed mindsets that are undermining you and challenge them. If it feels like too much of a stretch to completely reverse a negative belief, start by “trying on” a minor shift in a positive direction, coupled with an openness for things to get better. For example, if you’re mired in “I’m going to be sick forever,” trying to replace it with something like “I feel like a million bucks” may produce some cognitive dissonance; your mind may simply not buy it. But beginning with a statement like, “I allow myself to heal,” is harder for your mind to argue with. And even if a negative belief about yourself is factual right now, holding a growth mindset entails admitting that you don’t know what will happen in the future. Thus, a very small nudge in the direction of growth might look like replacing “I’ll never meet my soul mate” with “I haven’t met my soul mate yet.”
If you don’t believe you have what it takes to be great, answer me this: what do think is the actual, measurable difference between you and, say, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, or Rosa Parks? Were they smarter than you? You can learn. Were they more spiritual than you? You can open yourself to that realm of experience. Were they more dedicated than you? You can begin a consistent devotion to your dreams right now.
This last point is worth emphasizing. In order to be a conscious creator, you need to be able to hold a vision of the change you wish to see. That is, you need to hold it consistently until it’s actualized (and then update it as needed and continue the practice). For many who are mystified as to why they’re unable to bring about the changes they desire, the answer is as simple as this: they keep changing their mind and/or getting distracted. If you notice you’ve been doing this, don’t punish yourself for it (we live in incredibly distractible times); just recognize it and get back on track.
Finally, if you have trouble believing you’re capable of greatness, it may be worthwhile to journal about “What is greatness?” Greatness isn’t the same as fame and it doesn’t require breaking world records. (I’m not trying to convince you that even if you spend your life doing bong hits and playing Nintendo, you can still be great in your own way. Let’s be real here.) Human greatness may not have a universal definition, but I believe it’s much more common than we recognize. There’s greatness in storytelling, greatness in healing, greatness in communication, greatness in teaching, and greatness in feeding the poor. There’s greatness in the smallest of places.
I’d love to hear your feelings about greatness and living to your potential. What have your challenges been? How have you overcome fixed mindsets?
Be well,
Peter
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[post_content] => Welcome to article number five on longevity. I wrote a series on the topic ten years ago and I felt it was time to revisit it because the world needs a dose of positivity and hope. Not only is it possible to live longer, it’s possible to want to live longer despite the perpetual messages of doom and gloom we’re bombarded with.
In the first article I explained why we must start with living for now and loving life. In the second I discussed the value of working, stretching, and relaxing all parts of ourselves (both body and mind). In the third we explored the incredible healing (and playful) potential of dance. In the fourth, we looked at the impact of media on our health and the importance of being discriminating in our media consumption and taking regular media fasts. You can read these articles on our site. Let’s continue.
#5: Bring Consciousness to Your Breathing
The quality of our breathing can have a profound effect on all aspects of our health. Deep, full breaths calm the mind, massage the internal organs, promote digestion, improve oxygenation of our tissues, bring us into the present moment, and facilitate the release of thoughts and emotions.
The first thing I tell someone suffering from stress or anxiety is to slow down and deepen their breathing, specifically lengthening the exhale. The first thing I tell someone who feels overwhelmed, distracted, or unable to remain rooted in the present is to bring more awareness to their breathing.
The mind follows the breath. This means that shallow, rapid breathing goes along with shallow, rapid, anxious thoughts. By “shallow thoughts” I mean those emanating from most simplistic mechanisms of our being – those concerned with mere survival. You may argue, “These aren’t survival thoughts; they’re thoughts about making my deadline, paying my bills, and avoiding COVID.” But in 2020 that’s what survival thoughts look like, especially when accompanied by fear.
Slowing and deepening the breath slows down the mind and draws our consciousness deeper into the ocean of our being – into the stillness beneath the choppy waves that tend to monopolize our attention. Every breath stands to be a simple, elegant (and rather brief) meditation session. Giving the whole of your attention to a single inhalation and exhalation can profoundly change your consciousness and physical experience. Pain can be alleviated. Perspective can broaden. Point of view can shift. Burdens can be relinquished.
Our lungs inflate and deflate through the action of the diaphragm, the muscle that forms the floor of the space enclosed by the ribcage. When relaxed, it forms a high dome like an umbrella, shrinking the space above it and emptying the lungs. When it contracts, it drops and flattens, enlarging the thoracic space and causing the lungs to fill up. Because both the heart and diaphragm do their work automatically, presiding over the filling and emptying of live-giving chambers, the diaphragm has been called “the second heart.”
The rising and sinking of the diaphragm takes numerous organs up and down all day. Shallow breathing makes for a boring ride – there’s barely any movement at all. Deep breathing, through which you should feel the belly expand (because the fully flattened diaphragm pushes down on the abdominal contents), is much more fun for your organs 😉, besides being relaxing and energizing.
Virtually always, except when eating or talking, the breath should enter through the nose. The nose is considered to belong to the lung system in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The lung warms and filters incoming air. It also adds a special treat from the paranasal sinuses – nitric oxide, a gas which opens our blood vessels and improves blood flow. In contrast, mouth breathing tends to promote poor concentration, poor sleep, dental problems, and begets more mouth breathing. Try to breathe through your nose whenever possible – even while sleeping and during vigorous exercise. Also, humming increases nasal nitric oxide production! And it’s hard to be in a bad mood when you’re humming.
Besides how you breathe, what you're breathing matters: clean, fresh, unpolluted air can be powerful medicine. If you don’t live in a place with good air, consider a good air filter, get your ducts cleaned, avoid household chemicals, use no-VOC paints, get houseplants, and take trips out into the woods.
You probably don’t need to be convinced that the breath is connected to life, but the connection is deeper than we may appreciate. Many languages have words that mean both breath and life, spirit, or God. These include the Sanskrit term Prana, the Chinese Qi, Greek Pneuma, and the Hebrew Neshama.
Similarly, many cultures have names for the Divine that parallel the sound of the breath. One is the Jewish Yahweh, sometimes referred to as the “unpronounceable name of God” which is uttered every time we draw the Universe into ourselves (“yahhhhhhh…”) and then release ourselves into it (“wehhhhhh…”). We literally exchange our own atoms with those of everyone else in each breath.
It’s a similar case with the Hindu Soham, which literally means “I am He/She/That” (or “I am one with the Universe”), also said to convey the inhale (“soooooo…”) and exhale (“hummmm…”). Soham is often inverted to form Hamsa (“The Universe/Divine is one with me”) and carried on the inhale as “hummm…” and the exhale as “saaahhh…” If this idea resonates with you, it can add an additional reward to giving your attention to the breath.
Breathe well,
Peter
[post_title] => Don't Forget to Breathe
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[post_content] => Once I went to see a spiritual teacher who planned to write a mantra on my tongue using a leaf dipped in honey. But she ran out of leaves. Or honey. I can’t remember which.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. She told me the mantra and we repeated it together. She also told the same mantra to the other hundred or so people who came to see her. I’ve used that mantra off and on for the past 20 years.
Another spiritual teacher gave me a mantra, but it was just for me. He told it to me privately in a closed room, and he instructed me to never repeat it to anyone. He said that keeping it a secret was part of the power of the mantra. I wasn’t sure whether I believed that, but I have kept it a secret for several years.
You probably know what a mantra is, but I’d like to tell you about a woman who found a magic lamp in her backyard. Well, she rubbed it of course, because that’s what you do, and a genie came out.
“Tell me what to do,” he said.
“Is this one of those three wish deals?” the woman responded.
“Not at all,” said the genie. “I’m at your service forever.”
The woman had the genie clean the house, do the laundry, and cook dinner.
“What next?” asked the genie.
“Oh, neuter the cat, I guess.”
“Done!” the genie reported. “What next?”
“Umm, shear the hamster?” the woman offered.
“Done! What next?” asked the genie.
“That’s it!” exclaimed the woman, “why don’t you take a break.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” the genie said, now beginning to appear more oppressive than helpful. “Give me something to do or I’ll eat you!”
The startled woman was quick on her feet and answered, “Ok, I’ve got it. Climb up that flagpole. When you get to the top, slide down. Then climb up again, slide down again, and just keep doing that until I think of something else for you to do.” It worked, and the woman didn’t get eaten.
The genie is like the mind. The flagpole routine is the primary role of a mantra. Not only does the genie/mind demand constant attention, it gets in the way of our accessing the spiritual dimension and experiencing spaciousness in our consciousness. It tends to take up the whole frame.
A mantra gives the mind something to focus on, which, over time (meaning both over the course of each meditative session and over the course of using it day after day), greatly diminishes the degree to which the mind dominates our awareness. Often, what starts out as a mechanical recitation of a word or phrase (usually silently) becomes something more like a self-replicating wave that occupies the mind while our consciousness expands and transcends it. Of course, every time we sit to recite a mantra doesn’t produce a transcendent or mystical experience, but it’s quite common to feel peaceful and expansive.
Besides simply occupying the mind to facilitate meditation, mantras sometimes have other purposes. Some believe that mantras, through their sonic quality and/or meaning, produce a spiritual or therapeutic effect. Certain mantras are meant to be spoken aloud; others can be “spoken” mentally. Some are meant to open a particular part of the body or aspect of consciousness, to express devotion, to invoke or “install” a certain deity, or to elicit a change of fortune. Using a mantra with a meaning you understand may have the additional benefit of aligning your intention around a positive idea. On the other hand, using a mantra in a language you don’t know or one without any meaning frees you from getting analytical about it.
There are short mantras and long mantras. I recommend a shorter one for silent meditation, since it’s easier to remember. The shortest one syllable mantras are sometimes called bija or “seed” mantras, such as Om, Aim (“aeem”), Shrim (“shreem”), Hrim (“hreem”), Krim (“cream”), Hum, Hu (“hue”), Ram (“rahm”), Vam (“vahm”), Ham (“hahm”), Ong, God, and Love.
Two-syllable mantras go well with the breath, since you can say/think the first syllable on the inhale and the second on the exhale. Some common ones include Shanti (peace), So-Ham (I am that [Divine]), Ham-sa (swan, also an inversion of So-Ham), Sat Nam (I am Truth), and one of my favorites, Open.
Common longer mantras include Om Namah Shivaya, Om Mani Padme Hum (or Om Mani Peme Hung), and Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. There are thousands more. Read about these if you're interested. You may wish to find one that seems suited to your spiritual sensibilities, or one that just feels good to say. There are lots of great books and sites on mantras to explore.
As for the notion that a mantra should be kept secret, some teachers will say that a mantra loses its power if it’s shared. At best this is superstition. At worst, it’s a pretentious attempt to control students, maintain hierarchy, generate mystique, and keep people coming back to pay for increasingly “higher level” mantras. And now I’m going to tell you the “secret” mantra I received: it’s hring. Try it out if you feel like it.
Though I have some disdain for secrecy around mantras, I do believe there’s sometimes value in being selective about sharing the details of your spiritual experiences. Attempts to explain these experiences in words often fall short, and if you share with someone who isn’t receptive, doesn’t understand, or criticizes the experience, this may diminish its significance for you or cause you to doubt yourself. It’s also worth asking yourself why you’re sharing these experiences. Sometimes we do so to better understand them or to be instructive or inspiring to others. Other times it’s because the ego has co-opted our spiritual experiences and is using them to get approval. So it’s a good idea to make sure you’re sharing for the right reasons, you can withstand judgment without losing conviction in your practice, or otherwise to share only with those who can hear you in a non-critical way.
This week I recommend that you try meditating with a mantra. Choose one from above or find one you like online or from a book. Sit comfortably and repeat your chosen mantra silently, at a speed that feels comfortable to you. If your mind wanders, just bring it back to the mantra. See if, compared to simply watching the breath, this makes it easier to enter a relaxed or expansive state.
Be well,
Peter
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[post_content] => When our four-year-old daughter came home from her first day at a Montessori preschool, she handed me a swatch of cloth with several buttons sewn neatly onto it. “Where did you get this, sweetie?” I asked.
“I made it!” she exclaimed proudly. She also informed me that she had chopped apples with a “grownup knife” and cut flowers with pruning shears.
I couldn’t believe it. This girl had barely used scissors and never played with a needle before. We weren’t excessively protective parents, but we had no idea that she was capable of doing tasks like these (without hurting herself even). Part of the secret, we learned, was the mixed-age class. In a group of kids ranging from three to six, the older ones were instrumental in inspiring and instructing the younger ones. The teacher explained that when a child sees an adult perform a complex task, she won’t assume she’s capable of doing it herself. But if she sees another kid do it, she naturally thinks, “I’m going to do that, too!” This is one of the many ways I’ve been inspired and instructed by children – and it has informed how I work with adults.
When my wife founded The Dragontree, we wanted to provide a space for people to relax and heal. It wasn’t until some years later that we recognized a shared ambition to support people in whole-life wellness, which includes helping people to discover and actualize their potential. But while a young child may assume she can do what another child can, this isn’t always true for adults. We see other adults doing great things and often think, “I don’t have what they have.”
Most adults have old, fixed ideas about their capacities, largely influenced by teachers and parents. The best research on this subject comes from Carol Dweck, who studies childhood learning and self-esteem, and coined the terms fixed mindset and growth mindset. A fixed mindset refers to a belief that one’s ability in a given area, whether strong or weak, isn’t going to change. Thoughts such as “I’m not good with numbers,” or “I can’t sing,” or “I’m not an organized person” all indicate underlying fixed mindsets.
In contrast, a growth mindset entails the belief that, whatever your current ability, you can work at it and get better. Dweck found that kids with growth mindsets enjoy a challenge, are more confident, and have a stronger work ethic. It probably seems obvious that knowing you can improve your lot would be more empowering than believing you’re stuck with it, but we rarely take the time to investigate and question our deepest beliefs.
Indeed, one of the tricky things about changing a fixed mindset about, say, your skill at math, is that you may also have a fixed mindset about your inability to change your mindset! (“It’s just the kind of person I am!”) Thus, there’s a something of a catch-22 here: in order to shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset you must have a growth mindset around changing your mindset. However, I find it useful to remember that these two configurations – fixed and growth – aren’t equally valid. It’s not a case of “different but equal.” A fixed mindset is inherently incorrect. Though we may fiercely insist that it’s true, it’s not. We can change. We can grow. We can improve. Always.
In his 2014 TED Talk, The Psychology of Your Future Self, psychologist Dan Gilbert teaches that people usually believe they’re unlikely to change much in the future – but they’re wrong. “All of us are walking around with an illusion,” he says. “An illusion that our personal history has just come to an end. That we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives.” It’s true, his studies show, that our rate of change slows down somewhat as we get older, but it doesn’t slow down nearly as much as we believe it will. “At every age from 18 to 68 in our data set,” Gilbert continues, “people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience [in values, personality, friends, and preferences] over the next ten years.” He suggests that it’s easier for us to see how we’ve changed in the past than it is for us to imagine how we’ll change in the future. “Human beings,” he states, “are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
So, if the science shows that you’re bound to change whether you believe it or not, why not believe it? A willingness to believe (i.e., hold a growth mindset) moves you from the passenger seat to the driver’s seat. If you believe you’re capable of change and growth, you can be a conscious creator of the life you desire.
A critical factor in making productive change is the recognition and acceptance of your current status. Many of us have a hard time giving ourselves an honest self-appraisal because of our upbringing. If you or your parents were raised during wartime there may have been a “stiff upper lip” policy of denying weaknesses and carrying on stoically.
Later generations faced a different obstacle – the self-esteem movement. In retrospective studies of the movement that picked up speed in the 1980s, Dweck and others found that kids who were always told they were great tended to grow into young adults with fixed mindsets that didn’t serve them. They saw themselves as awesome regardless of the facts or their quality of participation. And the inevitable dissonance that resulted when they underperformed often provoked disillusionment or depression. The fixed aspect of a fixed mindset implies a kind of rigidity, and thus a painful reckoning when disproven.
I believe it’s important to love and accept oneself completely (what you truly are is awesome) but what happened here might be seen as a form of “bypass.” Rather than help kids to face their deficiencies, we decided it was favorable to pretend they didn’t have any. The self-esteem movement, at least when understood and applied shallowly, aimed to help kids believe in themselves by giving them a gold star no matter what. The “participation trophy” is a good example. How can we grow (or track that growth) if we aren’t honest and accepting of our actual starting point?
Now, let’s get back to that disparity between adults and young children. In our work through the Dragontree to facilitate the emergence of people’s greatness we’ve encountered so many folks who see themselves as fundamentally different from (i.e., inferior to) those they see as great. I’d like to challenge this belief.
While Dweck’s research deals mostly with intelligence and success, we feel the growth mindset also applies to things like our capacity for healing, happiness, power, spiritual connection, and love. For instance, beliefs such as, “There’s no soul mate out there for me,” “I don’t have a connection to a higher power,” “I’m going to be sick for the rest of my life,” “I don’t have what it takes to change the world,” and “I’m just not an optimistic, light-hearted type of person” all reveal fixed mindsets and are therefore untrue – except perhaps in this moment.
If you feel an urge to emerge – to come into your power and make a positive difference – but something is holding you back, I encourage you to first unearth the fixed mindsets that are undermining you and challenge them. If it feels like too much of a stretch to completely reverse a negative belief, start by “trying on” a minor shift in a positive direction, coupled with an openness for things to get better. For example, if you’re mired in “I’m going to be sick forever,” trying to replace it with something like “I feel like a million bucks” may produce some cognitive dissonance; your mind may simply not buy it. But beginning with a statement like, “I allow myself to heal,” is harder for your mind to argue with. And even if a negative belief about yourself is factual right now, holding a growth mindset entails admitting that you don’t know what will happen in the future. Thus, a very small nudge in the direction of growth might look like replacing “I’ll never meet my soul mate” with “I haven’t met my soul mate yet.”
If you don’t believe you have what it takes to be great, answer me this: what do think is the actual, measurable difference between you and, say, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, or Rosa Parks? Were they smarter than you? You can learn. Were they more spiritual than you? You can open yourself to that realm of experience. Were they more dedicated than you? You can begin a consistent devotion to your dreams right now.
This last point is worth emphasizing. In order to be a conscious creator, you need to be able to hold a vision of the change you wish to see. That is, you need to hold it consistently until it’s actualized (and then update it as needed and continue the practice). For many who are mystified as to why they’re unable to bring about the changes they desire, the answer is as simple as this: they keep changing their mind and/or getting distracted. If you notice you’ve been doing this, don’t punish yourself for it (we live in incredibly distractible times); just recognize it and get back on track.
Finally, if you have trouble believing you’re capable of greatness, it may be worthwhile to journal about “What is greatness?” Greatness isn’t the same as fame and it doesn’t require breaking world records. (I’m not trying to convince you that even if you spend your life doing bong hits and playing Nintendo, you can still be great in your own way. Let’s be real here.) Human greatness may not have a universal definition, but I believe it’s much more common than we recognize. There’s greatness in storytelling, greatness in healing, greatness in communication, greatness in teaching, and greatness in feeding the poor. There’s greatness in the smallest of places.
I’d love to hear your feelings about greatness and living to your potential. What have your challenges been? How have you overcome fixed mindsets?
Be well,
Peter
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