Show Notes
Description
Heather Brod visits the studio as we explore the growth mindset in academic medicine. A fixed mindset leads to burnout and poor job performance. Flipping to a growth mindset transforms our learning, feedback, research, clinical work, and career fulfillment. Tune in to learn how!
Topic
Growth Mindset in Academic Medicine
Learning Objectives
At the end of this activity, participants should be able to:
- Define growth mindset and explain how it differs from fixed mindset.
- Describe the neuroscience supporting mindset shifts and behavior change.
- Analyze how fixed and growth mindsets influence identity, performance, and feedback reception.
- Apply strategies to cultivate and sustain a growth mindset in academic medicine and leadership roles.
Guest
Heather Brod
Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant
Author, The Insider’s Pocket Guide to Navigating a Faculty Career in Academic Medicine
Links
Heather Brod: Coaching Professionals, Developing Leaders – Centered in Authenticity
The Insider’s Pocket Guide to Navigating a Faculty Career in Academic Medicine
Neuronal Reward and Decision Signals: From Theories to Data
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
The Power of Believing That You Can Improve
Mind Your Errors: Evidence for a Neural Mechanism Linking Growth Mindset to Adaptive Post-Error Adjustments
Association of Burnout, Professional Fulfillment, and Self-care Practices of Physician Leaders With Their Independently Rated Leadership Effectiveness
Episode Transcript
[Dr Mike Patrick]
This episode of FAMEcast is brought to you by the Center for Faculty Advancement, Mentoring and Engagement at The Ohio State University College of Medicine.
Hello everyone and welcome once again to FAMEcast. We are a faculty development podcast from The Ohio State University College of Medicine.
This is Dr. Mike and it’s FAMEcast episode eight. We’re calling this one the importance of a growth mindset in academic medicine. I want to welcome all of you to the program.
So, we have an important and fascinating topic for you today as we explore the growth mindset in academic medicine. Now, what exactly is this? A growth mindset?
You know, as I, as I prepared for this episode and collaborated with our guests on the content, some of these, these concepts were familiar, but I don’t think I had ever in my mind put them together in this way and really understood what a growth mindset is and how having one can help us in our careers. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. What exactly is a growth mindset?
How does it work and why does it matter? Well, it turns out many of us in academic medicine and healthcare leadership approach our careers with a fixed mindset, which can easily lead to burnout and decrease satisfaction with our work. This in turn leads to poor performance and has a negative impact on our roles in teaching administration and patient care.
However, there is some really good news. We can flip our fixed mindset to a growth mindset, which can really transform our learning, feedback, performance and fulfillment across all the domains of academic medicine. How you ask?
Well, that is where our episode comes in as we explore the neuroscience of growth mindset and share practical strategies for developing this important skill. Of course, in our usual FAMEcast fashion, we have a terrific guest joining us in the studio to discuss the topic, Heather Brod. She is an executive coach and leadership consultant and author of the insiders pocket guide to navigating a faculty career in academic medicine.
She’ll join us shortly, but first I do want to remind you, the information presented in FAMEcast is for general educational purposes only. Your use of this audio program is subject to the FAMEcast terms of use agreement, which you can find at Famecast.org. So, let’s take a quick break.
We’ll get Heather Brod settled into the studio and then we will be back to explore the growth mindset in academic medicine. It’s coming up right after this.
Heather Brod is an executive coach leadership consultant and author of the insiders pocket guide to navigating a faculty career in academic medicine.
She has extensive experience supporting individuals, teams and organizations through coaching leadership development and strategy consulting with a particular passion for higher education, healthcare and academic medicine. Heather’s book was published by Springer in 2024, and it offers a coaching based approach to professional development that helps faculty members create fulfilling, sustainable careers aligned with institutional objectives. She joins us today to explore the concept of a growth mindset in academic medicine.
So, let’s offer a warm FAMEcast welcome to our guest, Heather Brod. Thank you so much for visiting us today.
[Heather Brod]
Thank you, Dr. Mike. I really appreciate the invitation to be here. It’s a pleasure.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
We appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to join us right out of the gate. We have lots to discuss, but I wanted to let folks know that they will be able to learn more about growth mindset and the work that you do by checking out the resources in this episode’s show notes over at famecast.org.
It is episode eight, and we’ll have a link to your website on coaching professionals, developing leaders centered in authenticity. So, we’ll have a link to that. And then we’ll also have a link to the insiders pocket guide to navigating a faculty career in academic medicine.
So, lots more information in those two resources, but we’re really going to hit the highlights today. And I wanted to start with a, what exactly do we mean by a growth mindset and how did this concept originate?
[Heather Brod]
Yeah. So, growth mindset was developed by the eminent psychologist, Dr. Carol Dweck. She is currently at Stanford, I believe.
And she was interested in failure and how some people cope better with failure than others. And so, she designed this study, which I just love where she brought some kids in. I think they were, you know, maybe around 10 years old and she gave them puzzles and she would invite them to do a puzzle that was fairly easy or appropriate for their age.
And then once they successfully completed it, she would say, do you want to do another puzzle like the one you just did? Or would you like to do a harder puzzle? And she was really struck when some of the kids would be like, Ooh, yes, I love a good challenge.
I want to do the harder puzzle. And she was curious about that. Like why are some kids gravitating toward challenge, but more were more inclined to choose the comparable puzzle.
And so, she developed a theory on that, that when these kids, and you know, translate into adults then are choosing to do something that they already know, it’s really reinforcing that sense of self that like, I can do this, therefore I’m okay. And so, she calls that like the fixed mindset, you know, we’re oriented to what we already know. Whereas the growth mindset is we can look at opportunity not as something to be fearful of.
Like if we don’t succeed, then we’re not successful, but an opportunity to learn and grow and challenge ourselves in different ways.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
You know, as I think about that medical students, we probably almost all of them would have a growth mindset because I mean, you are really challenging yourself to go to medical school and an undergrad to take organic chemistry and all the, all the things that you need to do and all of the other requirements to get into medical school, like getting involved in a research project and making sure you’ve had great exposure to healthcare. Like there’s just so much growth mindset.
And yet here we are talking about faculty that maybe we lose that growth mindset as we get settled into our career. And that’s really why it’s important that we’re talking about this today. Am I on track with that?
[Heather Brod]
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that the curious thing about growth mindset is that it is or fixed mindset for that matter. It’s not static.
And so, we can have periods of time when we are more oriented to growth mindset, periods of time when we’re more oriented to fixed mindset, we can have situational things that we’re oriented to with respect to growth or fixed mindset. And so, I would imagine, you know, kids as they are, you know, learning and developing and kind of proving themselves, they, they could very well have a growth mindset. And sometimes they can have, they can do very well.
They can be very high achieving, but it might be the fixed mindset actually that’s more predominant and they’re getting that feedback reward of, you know, okay, I got the A, therefore it’s success, therefore I’m good. And if they are more or less inclined to doing well on something, you know, if, if let’s say organic chemistry, which I’ve, oh, I never took, I’ve always heard is very, very hard. And it can be kind of a thing that weeds people out.
Right. And some people might get weeded out of organic chemistry because they get into it. They’re like, this is so hard.
I can’t do this, which would be the fixed mindset versus this is so hard. I have to figure this out. How am I going to do this?
Which would be more of the growth mindset. So, you know, that or any other challenge for that matter could be kind of the differentiator. But then, you know, to kind of answer your question about faculty, you know, I think that there is a moment of, you know, you go through all of this work, you prove yourself time and time and time again, and you become rewarded for your expertise, for your mastery, for doing things well in a consistent basis.
And it can become, it can start to feel unsafe to not know something, especially when you become an attending or become a faculty member, you’re, you’re the PI of the lab. And now you have other people really looking to you, you know, what do I do here? What’s the answer?
And to be able to say, I don’t know, I think it can feel really risky to people. And so, the, the fixed mindset or just that fear of looking incompetent, the fear of being unsafe of, you know, maybe losing your job that kind of risk over your head maybe can promote a little more orientation to fixed mindset.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.
Speaking of Carol Dweck, who you had mentioned, we are going to have a couple of resources in the show notes from her. She did have a book called mindset, the new psychology of success. So have a link to that.
And then also there’s a great YouTube video that I came across the power of believing that you can improve very motivational. And I’ll put a link to that YouTube video in the show notes as well. Again, over at famecast.org episode eight. So then how does the brain respond differently when we’re in a fixed mindset versus when we’re in a growth mindset?
[Heather Brod]
Yeah, that is really interesting. So, neuroscientists have actually put people in MRI machines and demonstrated this. So, they have demonstrated that through an experiment where they give people a test or I don’t know if it’s a test per se, but they give them some sort of a problem or something to work on.
And while they’re working on this, the experiment is designed to produce an error. And so, what they’ve seen is that once the error is produced in people who have more of a fixed mindset, it’s just kind of blank. Like there’s no real neural firing happening there.
It’s almost like those individuals are just kind of shut down, moving on. Whereas the individuals who have a growth mindset, once they get to that error, activity lights up in the brain. They’re forming new neural connections as they’re processing what happened, what did I do?
How did this error occur? How can I prevent this error from happening again? And so, it just demonstrates how much learning occurs via a growth mindset and actually the formation and connection of new neurons.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah, that is really cool. For the data nerds out there, I do also have a resource from the journal Physiologic Reviews, Neuronal Rewards and Decision Signals from Theories to Data. So again, if you really want the science, the thick science here, you’ll be able to find it in that link, which is in the show notes.
[Heather Brod]
I asked ChatGPT to help me understand that article.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
And that is something you can do. You can either put the link to the article or you can copy and paste the text and just say, hey, sum this up for me. And maybe even if it knows a lot about you or you’re going to, I’m going to go off into a ditch here, but if it knows a lot about the things that you do and your writing and your voice and projects, because the more that you work with an AI, the more that it understands you, then it can even take that article and kind of explain, well, how does this impact your work and your life?
And that can be so insightful. I don’t know this. It’s, it’s a little scary, but, and actually we’re going to, we’re in future episodes of FAMEcast.
We’re going to talk a lot more about artificial intelligence. We have sort of a series that we’re going to, that we’re going to do coming up. So just a little preview there.
Another concept is really our identity versus our performance. And why is it important then to separate who we are from what we do?
[Heather Brod]
Yeah. So, in Dweck’s research, you know, she shows that when we exhibit the fixed mindset, we are really trying to protect our sense of self. So, if we are encountering something that’s challenging to us, we might say like, well, I’m bad.
I’m stupid. I’m a failure, you know, because I can’t do those things rather than I haven’t learned to do those things yet. Or this is something I can learn, or challenge is okay.
You know, whatever other kind of message that we might send to ourselves. So, we want to separate identity from performance because if we view our performance in things as an extension of our very being, it becomes really close to us and it manifests in things like perfection, perfectionism or procrastination or other negative types of tendencies that we might have. But if we can view our work as, you know, what we do, you know, something that we put out into the world, but not necessarily a reflection on our very being, then we can create a little distance with it, which both allows us to be more in a growth mindset about things and also receive inputs back about that work in a way that doesn’t harm our sense of self.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
That really makes sense. And as I think about my own career, I do pediatric emergency medicine. And so, I’m not really an expert at anything and yet I’m supposed to be an expert on everything.
And so, I’ve sort of established a culture with my learners right out of the gate, even as a young attending, that I don’t know everything, and that’s okay to not know everything. But the important thing is to know where to find the answer and to know what you don’t know. And so, I think for just a little advice for young faculty out there, like if you approach it from that mindset right out of the gate and you just do that your whole career, it does become more natural to do that.
But I think being in emergency medicine, it’s a little easier for me to say, oh, let’s phone a friend. Oh, let’s look that up. Whereas if I’m an expert in endocrinology, I really am going to feel like I need to know everything.
And so that can become a lot more stressful for folks.
[Heather Brod]
Absolutely. Yeah. And, and I think what you were also talking about is what a great leadership trait it is to be able to model that for the people around you that, you know, it is okay to not know it, but there are ways that we gain information.
You know, this is how we process what we are observing. Something can look the same in two different contexts and can have a different result, right? So, the effort that we put forth towards something is really what counts.
We don’t have a lot of control over the outcomes that we get at all times, but we do have control over the effort that we put to learn, to grow, to understand. And so, yeah, I just think that that’s a wonderful example of role modeling for the people around you.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
One important part of teaching and learning is feedback. And especially in clinical medicine, where folks are engaging with patients and families and then hearing how they did based on someone who’s observing them, for example, or when a resident presents a case or a medical student presents a case and getting feedback on how they’re doing. Whether you have a fixed or growth mindset can really make a difference on how we receive feedback.
And then that becomes important because receiving feedback well helps us to grow. So how does that mindset impact feedback and how can we make that better in our, in our careers? Yeah.
[Heather Brod]
Yeah. I find the giving and receiving of effective feedback to not occur nearly as often as it could or should. And I think it’s, you know, for a couple of reasons, there’s discomfort in giving it.
We don’t want people to feel bad. And also, there’s so much discomfort in receiving feedback oftentimes because it can feel threatening. It can feel like an attack.
And I think some people are really good at delivering it. And so even if you’re in more of a fixed mindset, you know, somebody delivers it very gently and thoughtfully and in your best interest, you know, here’s something that would really help you grow, and I’m so committed to your success. It can be easier to hear it then rather than, you know, oh, this should be done like this, you know?
So, it goes back to that notion of us trying to keep ourselves safe and we can really interpret feedback sometimes as threatening to our sense of selves. Like I, it reinforces that I am not good rather than a, oh, here is something I have an opportunity to learn or to do better.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Do you, do you find that fixed mindset is a barrier to our growth and how we can you know, why then is that so common in academic medicine?
[Heather Brod]
Oh, absolutely. I think fixed mindset is a huge barrier to growth. And I think it’s common, you know, kind of hearkening back to what we were talking about at the beginning.
You know, there’s this emphasis on mastery, on expertise, on proving your worth and your capability. And you’ve been kind of wrestling or competing all along the way to get to this place. And you know, and something else that comes to mind too is comparison.
And I think it’s really hard for faculty or really for any high achieving person to not compare themselves with another high achieving person. And so, we have these environments and we’re looking at our colleagues and we’re thinking like, well, that person has, you know, X number of papers and grants and they won a mentoring award, and you know, why are they doing everything so wonderfully? I must be a failure because I don’t have what they have.
And I would encourage individuals instead just kind of turn that around with respect to, you know, well, what is important to me? What do I value? What are the types of things that I want to produce in my career, the type of impact I would like to have?
Because if we can reorient ourselves to our own values, it helps us A, be more in growth mindset and out of that space of comparison. And I just love the little adage, you know, comparison is the thief of joy. I keep that in my mind a lot because, you know, I think a lot of us are prone to comparison.
And so, which is part of the reason I’m not on social media a lot, you know, it’s that I see somebody out there and like, wow, they are killing it and I’m envious and that I feel less than, and I’m like, nope, this is none of this is healthy. So, it just, you know, being in that mindset for yourself where you can be healthy, where you can understand what your priorities are, where you want to grow, I think helps move us toward growth mindset. But there is a lot just within the culture and the environment.
I think that kind of sets us up to compare and to do other things that, you know, might take us out of our best tendencies to be in growth mindset.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah.
[Heather Brod]
Yeah.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
You know, I think that I use the example of like an endocrinologist, you are an expert in that, but even within a field, things are growing and changing so fast. Like, you know, basic principles of endocrinology, many of them are the same as they were when a particular attending trained and many of them have changed. And I think with AI, we’re going to have an explosion of new ideas, and you know, new information, new data, and how we put that all together.
Like we really, even if you’ve been an endocrinologist for the last two, three decades, there’s going to be a lot of change. And so that growth mindset is really going to help us to grow along with this, you know, the new frontiers of medicine, so to speak. But there are also, we’re going to fail in that, you know, we’re going to forget new things or not take a particular data set into account.
Or maybe we didn’t hear about another study or, you know, maybe there’s a different way that some of your colleagues are doing things that you haven’t come across yet. And so, we are going to have some failure from time to time, even the best of us. And so how then can growth mindset help us reframe that failure?
[Heather Brod]
I love that. Yeah. I’m so, I just want to touch on the first part of that because I am fascinated to see what happens with respect to AI and evolution and you know, how we learn and develop as people and to see how that influences medical practice.
Because I think even now, we’ll see a new protocol or drug, or procedure come out and the time to uptake can often be really long. And I’m not talking about the bench to bedside. I’m just talking about the it is in the market or, you know, the, the society has issued the protocol and yet clinicians don’t adopt it for a very long time due to skepticism.
So that’s just an aside, but I am really curious to see how AI influences all of that. But to answer your question, growth mindset can help us reframe failure by reminding us that failure is part of growth. So, you know, in the startup world, they have an adage fail fast and what that enables entrepreneurs to recall is that it’s better to test something out and learn very quickly whether or not it’s going to succeed, then continue to go down a rabbit hole and persevere in something that isn’t going to be successful because ultimately what do they want to do?
Well, they want to get product or something to market, right. And they want to profit from it, you know, for people in academic medicine, for clinicians and researchers, for instructors. I mean, think about it the same way.
If you fail fast, you know, you get closer to the impact that you want to have, you know, this course of action isn’t good. So, let’s go and find the course of action that is going to achieve the desired result.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. So, so important.
And I’m going to have another link for the data nerds out there. This one is from Psychological Science. Mind your errors evidence for a neural mechanism linking growth mindset to adaptive post-error adjustments, which is really a fancy way to say how can we learn from our failures and growth mindset’s an important part of that, right?
[Heather Brod]
Yes. Yes, absolutely.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
So, we want a growth mindset. What then are the risks of just maintaining a fixed mindset throughout our career?
[Heather Brod]
I mean, I think the biggest risk is just staying static. You know, there’s, there’s such a, there’s so much information out there. There’s so much that we can do and grow and learn in.
And if we’re busy protecting ourselves, protecting our egos, then we’re not able to deliver the best that we can for the people that we’re ultimately trying to serve. So, our patients, our students, our families, you know, don’t get the benefit of the best of us. So yeah, I would just always encourage that orientation to growth mindset as a mechanism to create some expansion.
And I do appreciate the fact that it can feel hard to do that because when we are in self-protection mode, when we are feeling like the environment is in some way threatening to us, or we don’t necessarily see the path forward or feel like we have to prove ourselves, it almost seems counterintuitive to the, well, I’m just going to go out there and admit I don’t know a bunch of things or try things that are radically new and different. And yet we can take small steps toward that, that can help us then, you know, continue to create that expansion in our lives.
So, we don’t have to go zero to a hundred. We can go zero to 10 and, you know, then begin to grow and expand from there.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
A lot of listeners may be wondering, am I in a growth mindset or am I in a fixed mindset? What are some signs that someone may be stuck in a fixed mindset?
[Heather Brod]
Oh yeah, that’s a great question. I think one of the signs is how do you talk to yourself? So, we all have a little inner narrative and if we can tune into that and really hear how we talk to ourselves, or if you have somebody in your life who can reflect that back to you, you might hear things like, if you’re saying like, oh, I’m, I can’t do this.
I’m an idiot or things like that, right? We’re really hard on ourselves oftentimes. We’re very judgmental.
But if we’re saying I am, you know, that’s talking about our being, that’s talking about our fixed self there. If we’re saying, I wish I could do this better or I wish I had an opportunity to learn this or I don’t know this yet, that’s more reflective of being in a growth mindset. Similarly, if we catch ourselves in that space of comparison a lot, like we talked about before, that’s a huge signal that we might be kind of defaulting to a fixed mindset and it provides a nice opportunity to get into growth mindset.
And then one other thing I would say is, you know, if there’s something that you want to do, if it’s any, I mean really anything, it doesn’t have to be in our professional space, but if you’ve always wanted to learn to play the piano or something and you’re saying to yourself, gosh, I don’t, I just don’t think I can’t, I could do that or that seems, you know, really scary or I’m not going to be any good at that, that’s a good indication of fixed mindset. If, you know, if it’s something that speaks to you on some level and you’re just kind of scared of it because you’re scared of maybe making a fool of yourself, that’s, that’s probably fixed mindset.
So, you know, what’s, what’s the worst that can happen?
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And then how do we take baby steps to shift our thinking from fixed mindset to growth mindset?
Because like you said, it’s, you can’t necessarily do that all, you know, from one day to the next.
[Heather Brod]
Yeah, exactly. And I do find, you know, it fluctuates too, right? And it is situational.
You know, I can say for myself, you know, being more in the thinking, academic-y space, that’s more of a sweet spot for me. I feel comfortable there. I’m feeling growth mindset there.
I haven’t had repercussions from acknowledging I don’t know things there. Where it shows up for me tends to be things like around sports. You know, I learned to play tennis as an adult, which is one of the best things I have ever done for myself.
Because it was so far outside of what I already knew. I’d never played racquet sports as a kid or at any time in my life. And so, learning something completely from scratch was an amazing way to develop growth mindset.
So, I would recommend this for anybody who wants to start taking a baby step is go to a space where you are a true beginner and evaluate or acknowledge for yourself how it feels. And you can do it in a really low risk way, right? I mean, you can go to one of those like painting classes, you know, one of those like in a couple hours you paint the easel, and you have a glass of wine.
But if you feel really uncomfortable about, you know, your skill as an artist, that’s a great way to just go dabble with it. Note that it feels a little uncomfortable for you. Note that you’re outside of your comfort zone.
And then also note the growth. So, we tend to look at the outcomes. We tend to look at, okay, well, I did the painting, and it looks like the instructors, but that’s not the objective.
The objective is more along the lines of I overcame this discomfort. I went through the process, and I produced something right. And it’s okay if it doesn’t look like the instructors, but you know, just I didn’t think I could do it and look now I did really helps build growth mindset.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
You know, as I think about medical students, that’s kind of the process where they are right now in terms of, you know, they really are taking a step out. They don’t mess. They’re not experts yet in, you know, whatever rotation that they’re on.
They may be very nervous about their upcoming surgery rotation and then they get through it, and it was fantastic. So, like as, as educators putting ourselves in that situation and it kind of does make sense, you know, you’re, it would be difficult to put yourself in that situation in your career. I mean, to some degree, if you’re going to start a new research project or, you know, take on something you haven’t done before.
But if we’re talking babysat steps, you know, learning maybe even pickleball before you learn tennis may be helpful, but it also helps you understand what your learners are going through right at this moment.
[Heather Brod]
Yes, yes, it’s so true. And you know, there’s, there’s something about the beginner’s mindset and you know, the older we get and the more mastery we accrue, it can be harder to remember and to access the beginner’s mindset. And so yes, doing something in a low stakes environment can absolutely recall what that’s like and then make us more empathetic and better for our learners.
But it also, you know, I just love what you bring up there because it recalls the vulnerability too of being in that space. And, you know, and I’d, so I just think about the, you know, the power, power, you know, loosely used that in attending has, you know, to really shape how their learners are receiving the information. And so, anything that can bring a little more humility, vulnerability, empathy to that, I think is just such a benefit for, you know, all parties.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. Another word I want to bring up is curiosity.
And that kind of plays into all of this as well, right? Like you were curious about what might it be like to play a racket sport. So how can we nurture curiosity, especially if we’re feeling burnt out in our career?
[Heather Brod]
Oh yeah, that’s, that’s a good one. I mean, curiosity is, I don’t know if everybody on this will or anybody will be familiar with the mood elevator, but there’s a, and I think it might be a, um, I don’t know who did the tool, McKinsey, maybe it might be a McKinsey tool, but if you just Google mood elevator, you’ll, you’ll find it. But the mood elevator kind of has the top, top moods that are more positive affect bottom, which are more negative affect.
And then right in the middle is curiosity. So, curiosity is the attribute that can move us from kind of a negative feeling space into a more positive feeling space. So, if we are feeling burnt out, and that is a really real thing that we feel and that we experience.
And so, I don’t mean to diminish this at all but even getting curious about that provides an opportunity to move into the positive effect. So, you know, why am I feeling burnt out? What am I struggling with?
What can I remove? What can I add? What would make me feel better?
You know, anything like that, just those curious types of questions we can invite for ourselves, you know, can help us begin to make the shifts that then, you know, move us into the direction we would prefer to go.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. I would think that then another challenge is going to be making this sustainable. So, like right now someone’s listening to this podcast, we’re going to get all excited and we’re going to be curious about something new.
We’re going to model growth mindset with our learners and be vulnerable and be humble and admit that we don’t know everything, all of these things. But then that can kind of get tiring after a while and we might just slip back into a fixed mindset again. Are there strategies for sustaining a growth mindset?
[Heather Brod]
Yes, there are. There are definitely strategies. And also, I do want to just normalize that.
Yeah, it’s quite likely if you are more inclined to a fixed mindset, you will default back to it. You know, I speak from experience there. So, but one of the best things that we can do to sustain a growth mindset is celebrate wins.
And I think that many of us don’t do that very well. And what I mean by celebrate wins is we’re not always looking for the outcome. We’re not always looking for the milestone.
If you are only going to celebrate getting promoted to associate professor and then getting promoted to professor, that’s two celebrations in your entire life. That’s not enough. So, you know, what are the small wins?
Is it, you know, throughout the course of your day, you had a really great mentoring meeting with somebody, you had a really great patient encounter. The important thing to note is the effort that you are applying to that. So, it’s not the outcome per se, but how did you show up in the way that you wanted to show up?
Those are the things to celebrate. Or in the long term, you know, something that I like to do is even like a, it’s not exactly a gratitude journal, but it’s kind of a reminder to ourselves of how much we’ve grown. And you know, not to belabor the tennis example, but because that’s been such a space of growth for me personally, I’ll remind myself of things that I didn’t used to be able to do that now I can do.
And I still might not be great at them, you know, and I’m never going to play tennis like Serena, unfortunately. But, you know, even being able to look back and, you know, saying to myself, gosh, you know, two years ago, I didn’t even have a slice. And so, I would love for my slice to be a little more knifey, a little more dramatic, but you know what?
I just, I’m really grateful that I have one now I can use it in matches and it’s effective for me. So, you know, even being able to reflect back on where we’ve come from and where we are now can be a great reminder to ourselves of, yeah, I, I would still like to go further, and I have come so far. And then again, we liken that and correlate that back to the effort that we have put forth, not that it’s just some gift from the universe.
And we’re so fortunate that, you know, we’re able to, you know, swing this racket with success.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. That’s really self-care then, isn’t it?
Like your journey with tennis and if you were feeling burnt out with work, even just doing the tennis thing and then thinking about, well, what new things can I do with my job? And I mean, that really can mitigate burnout because burnout really oftentimes is sort of boredom with just doing the same things over and over and over again. Right?
[Heather Brod]
Yeah, it is. It is. And also, I would say, you know, not boredom, burnout can stem from feeling a lack of agency.
So, when we’re feeling like, you know, stuff is happening to us, and that’s really common in the medical profession, right? In academic medicine, there’s a lot of stuff we just have to do. It’s, we don’t have a lot of control over how the health system works.
We don’t have a lot of control over what our patients or learners are doing. And so, we can get really detached from that feeling of agency. And so, yeah, if we can find our agency in other spaces, like I have complete control over this racket in my hand.
I mean, well, to some extent, it doesn’t mean I’m not going to shank the ball, but, but it does. And it really can help, you know, restore that sense of confidence of agency. And that does, it infiltrates into every other aspect of our lives.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah. One more resource for folks in the show notes, and that is an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, Association of Burnout Professional Fulfillment in Self-Care Practices of Physician Leaders with Their Independently Rated Leadership Effectiveness.
So again, to sort of break that down is how can we get out of feeling burnt out and instead feel professionally fulfilled. We’re taking care of ourselves. And then that really does translate into how effective of a leader we are.
If you’re just burnt out, I don’t know. I think being burnt out makes me grumpy. And if you’re grumpy, that really does come across to the folks that you are leading.
[Heather Brod]
Oh my gosh. Yes, absolutely. And so, I mean, I like that you called it self-care because it really is.
And sometimes, you know, we still think if we attend to our needs, it’s selfish. And yet if we don’t attend to our needs, how are we really showing up for the people around us? Probably not great.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
And then I think finally, as we discover growth mindset and we really apply it and think about it and really try to switch from fixed to growth, I think we’re going to have more fulfillment in our career. We’re going to have less burnout. And then I think the next step is to want to share that with our colleagues.
So how might us being coaches of growth mindset, what does that look like? You know, how can we coach our colleagues and our learners to buy into this?
[Heather Brod]
I love that. Gosh, that’s a great question. I mean, I think just any time you can share your own experience, you know, sometimes we think that others either don’t want to hear from us or we don’t really have something worth sharing.
But if we can tell people that we have decided intentionally to adopt more of a growth mindset and here’s specifically what we’re going to do, or here’s specifically what we’re noticing about how that’s working for us, or not, you know, the struggles along the way, whatever it is, we’re just creating a space and a dialogue that invites other people in and, you know, allows them to appreciate the journey and, you know, maybe get excited about it and want to experience it them for themselves. Cause I think, you know, sometimes the default can be, we just get, you know, we get grumpy and then, you know, when you are with somebody, you just kind of commiserate together, you know, it doesn’t always feel good.
So, it just kind of goes back to, you know, how do you want to show up? How do you want to be the change that you would like to see and how do you kind of role model that for other people and be inspiring and, you know, inspiration doesn’t always come from, you know, grand successes either, but simply, you know, being open and able to share.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been a wonderful conversation.
And I feel like just, you know, in, in these 40 minutes, I have really learned a lot about growth mindset and I’m excited to, to put it into, into action. I would encourage folks to check out the show notes. Again, that’s at famecast.org.
This is episode eight and all of the things, including Heather’s book, we’ll also have the insider’s pocket guide to navigating a faculty career in academic medicine. I think this would be a great one for your bookshelves. And so, we’ll have a link to that in the show notes and all those other resources that we’ve talked about along the way.
So once again, Heather Brod, executive coach and leadership consultant and author of the insider’s pocket guide to navigating a faculty career in academic medicine. Thank you so much for joining us today.
[Heather Brod]
My pleasure. Thank you again. Really enjoyed my time here today.
And I hope that others will go out and find their growth mindset if they would like to.
[Dr Mike Patrick]
We are back with just enough time to say thanks once again to all of you for taking time out of your day and making FAMEcast a part of it really do appreciate that. Also, thanks to our guest this week, Heather Brod executive coach and leadership consultant, also author of the insider’s pocket guide to navigating a faculty career in academic medicine. Don’t forget, you can find FAMEcast wherever podcasts are found or in the Apple podcast app.
Also, Spotify, I heart radio, Amazon music, audible and most other podcast apps for iOS and Android. Our landing site is famecast.org. You’ll find our entire archive of past programs there along with show notes for each of the episodes, our terms of use agreement, and that contact page.
If you would like to suggest a future topic for the program, or if you just want to say hi, you can do that too. Reviews are helpful wherever you get your podcasts. We always appreciate when you share your thoughts about the show.
We do have additional resources available for you on our website. So, if you head over to famecast.org and click on the resources tab, it’s at the top of the page. We have two links to faculty development modules on scarlet canvas.
One of them is advancing your clinical teaching. It’s a whole set of modules and then another is a F D for me, which is faculty development for medical educators. And there are scores of learning modules on scarlet canvas on both of those sites.
So be sure to follow those links to find lots more useful information specifically targeting academic medical faculty. A couple of other podcasts that I host, PDA cast CME. This is a podcast for medical providers.
We offer free continuing medical education credit for those who listen. It’s actually category one credit and that includes physicians of course, but also nurse practitioners, physician assistants, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, social workers, and dentists. And since nationwide children’s is jointly accredited by many professional organizations, all of the ones that I just mentioned, it’s likely we offer the credits you need to fulfill your state’s continuing medical education requirements.
Shows and details are available at the landing site for that program. PDA cast to CME.org. You can also listen wherever podcasts are found.
Simply search for PDA cast CME. I also host a podcast for parents called PDA cast without the CME, just plain PDA cast. It is an evidence-based podcast for moms and dads.
A lot of pediatricians and other medical providers also tune in as we cover pediatric news and interview pediatric and parenting experts. Shows are available at the landing site for that program. PDA cast.org also available wherever you listen to podcasts. Simply search for PDA cast. Thanks again for stopping by. And until next time, this is Dr. Mike saying, stay focused, stay balanced, and keep reaching for the stars. So long, everybody. Okay.
