G R O W Y O U R W I N G S

I last posted on July 30th, over a week ago.  It's been a heck of a time.  Not sure I'm ready to go into all of it yet.  All's okay.  But it's been a ride.  I'm talking about work here BTW.

A couple of nights ago I was a'googling.  Looking for some answers to Life, the Universe, and Everything (more about my angst later when I feel capable of posting it to the world--or at least my flist.)

I ended up on this article, "How Not to Talk to Your Kids.  The inverse power of praise."  Written by Po Bronson and published online on nymag.com on Feb 7, 2007.

For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly.

This psychologist, Carol Dweck, is a genius to me. 

But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.

I've had an ephianie.  Bought about by a painful work experience.  And this article caused all the puzzle pieces to fall together.

I'm not trying to be cryptic here.  I'm just not yet ready to lay it all out there. 

But I did want to point people to this article.  I found it very interesting.  As I was telling fickleone this afternoon, this article basically says what I told my best friend over 25 years ago.  I just didn't realize it may be a key to something for me.  And if it is.  It will be one of those "duh" moments.  Kinda like it's something so obvious that you can't even see it until life BANGs you over the head enough times or STRONG enough that you finally notice.

This says it all...

Dweck had suspected that praise could backfire, but even she was surprised by the magnitude of the effect. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”