Please Note: This is a summary of a TED talk. You can access it at https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing_that_you_can_improve.

Dweck, the psychologist behind the “growth mindset” concept, explains her research showing that how people think about ability shapes how they respond to failure. Students and employees who believe intelligence and skill are fixed traits tend to avoid challenges and give up when things get hard, since struggle feels like proof of inadequacy. Those who believe ability can be developed treat setbacks as information, not verdicts, and keep pushing. Dweck walks through classroom studies where simply praising effort instead of innate talent changed how kids approached difficult problems, and how a small shift in feedback language produced measurably different persistence. For L&D, the talk is a foundational argument for how you frame feedback, performance reviews, and learning objectives: praising the process rather than the outcome, treating errors as data, and building psychological safety around “not yet” instead of “can’t.” It’s often the starting point for organizations trying to build a genuine culture of continuous learning rather than one that quietly punishes visible struggle.

If you’ve tried to build growth mindset into a program, what worked (or backfired)?

Drop your thoughts in the comments — we’re keen to see how this plays out in real workplaces, not just in theory.

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