What is mindset?

Mindset is what we believe about our ability to improve our skills.

What type of mindset exist?

There are two types of mindset:

• Growth mindset: when one believes that our abilities can be improved. Some characteristics of a growth mindset are:
  • intelligence and abilities can be improved with effort and good strategies.
  • Be successful means committing to learning and growth.
  • Failure means not utilising our potential and not learning from our mistakes.
  • Effort is necessary in every field.
  • Intelligent is who learn and improve.
  • Criticisms are a way to growth.
• Fixed mindset: when one believes that our abilities are fixed and cannot be improved. Some characteristics of a fixed mindset are:
  • intelligence and abilities cannot be changed and are only defined by genetics.
  • Success and failure are defined by a single event.
  • Mistakes are not admitted.
  • Commitment is useful only for those who lack talent.
  • Criticisms are considered negative.
  • Intelligent is who do the right things immediately.

Which mindset is better?

Some researches suggest that having a growth mindset is more effective than having a fixed mindset to learn new abilities and improve in life. Other researches suggest that having a growth mindset does not work and learning and improvement are defined by other factors.

To be completed

What is personality?

It is the collection of behaviour, thoughts and emotions patterns that a person is used to adopt in life.

Personality traits are relatively stable over time and influence behaviour.

What types of personality traits exist?

The most supported evidence based researches suggest that there are 5 big factors common to human beings:

• Openness to experience (curious vs cautious)
• Conscientiousness (organised vs careless)
• Extroversion (extrovert vs introvert)
• Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs critical/rational)
• Neuroticism or emotional stability (nervous vs resilient)

How personality is developed?

Researches suggest that personality is highly defined by genetics and therefore it is a characteristic one is born with. The personality’s characteristics defined by genetics are called temperament.

What is self-compassion?

Self-compassion means treating oneself with kindness, recognising that every human is imperfect and that everyone, including oneself, is valuable also when facing failure or suffering.

There are three components that define self-compassion:

• Self kindness rather than self judgement
• Feelings of common humanity that means recognise that suffering and failure is part of the shared human experience.
• Mindfulness

What self-compassion depends on?

Like self-esteem, self-compassion highly depends on the experiences we live in our life and on ones core beliefs.

What is Functional Contextualism?

Functional Contextualism is a way to understanding human behaviour.

What are the main assumptions of Functional Contextualism?

The main assumptions of Functional Contextualism are:

• Behaviour depends on the context which is the environmental factors, what happened before the behaviour and the possible consequences that influence behaviour.
• It is more important to understand the function of a behaviour which is why a person engages in a behaviour in one particular context over to analyse what is the observable behaviour.
• It is more important the effectiveness of a intervention rather to adhering to theories.
• An idea is said to be true when it leads to the achievement of a goal, not in how well it is describe reality.

Is sufficiently sustained by empirical evidences?

The empirical evidences that support Functional Contextualism are derived from researches conducted in the field of behavioural science, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Relational Frame Theory.

What is Relational Frame Theory?

Relational Frame Theory is a theory of human language, cognition and behaviour.

What are the main assumptions?

• Humans learn a lot of things about the world creating relationship between things not shaped by trial and error experiences, but through what other people told them through language.
• Humans can assign a meaning to a word not based on its physical property but on their own interpretation that may depend on the context.
• Therefore words may assume different meaning depending on the context.
• Therefore the meaning assigned to words may not be true.
• Because the meaning assigned to words may not be true and this may lead to behaviour that avoid to act towards our values, the human language has the potential to create psychological suffering.

What are the main criticisms of these theories?

I have not found specific criticism to the main assumptions of the theory, but only to the clarity and the novelty of the theory.