Do you and your company have a Fixed or Growth Mindset? Is your intelligence fixed or changeable?

A Fixed Mindset believes that intelligence is fixed and defined by your genes.

A Growth Mindset believes that your intelligence is unknown and unknowable, but that it can grow through training, effort and purposeful engagement.

Alfred Binet, the father of the modern IQ test summarized some of his work in this statement:

“A few modern philosophers…assert that an individual’s intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity which cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism…With practice, training, and above all, method, we manage to increase our attention, our memory, our judgment and literally to become more intelligent than we were before.”

What do you think, did Alfred Binet believe in a fixed IQ or mindset, or one that can grow?

Read the post/lesson above, then test and improve yourself using the flashcards below.

The first four flashcards contain a front statement: Determine it as either a Fixed Mindset or Growth Mindset statement before turning the card over.

The last two flashcards contain statements about IQ taught by Alfred Binet, the father of the modern IQ test. Try to recall what Alfred Binet believed and why.

Strive to practice until you can integrate each card-front statement with its corresponding card-back answer and using your own words explain why and how it applies to yourself and your company in the answer blanks below.

In the future, we will add video role playing to show you how to demonstrate and teach the growth vs. fixed mindsets.

The mindset concepts are adapted from Dr. Carol Dweck’s excellent book, Mindset, published by Ransom House.