love your people enough to “rewire” them
A deceptively simple fact animates a large number of social phenomena: the way people think of us changes our behavior and shapes our identity.
If we are labeled “high achievers,” our teachers treat us as high achievers. We think of ourselves as high achievers. We act like high achievers. When we achieve highly, we see it as a foregone conclusion. If we have a fixed mindset, our “high achiever” identity becomes something we cling to, and we never take chances on things that challenge us for fear of losing that identity.
A similar thing happens if we’re labeled as “poor achievers,” or “bad,” or “stupid,” and so on. We’re treated that way, we think of ourselves that way, we act that way, and in the end, we are that way. It becomes our identity. If we have a fixed mindset, we don’t believe there’s anything we can do to overcome this, and we stop trying.
So how do people form their opinions of us and decide what their expectations should be? It isn’t pretty. A lot of it is based on snap judgements, conscious and unconscious prejudice, and faulty assumptions. We fail to understand the impact our beliefs have on others. And the fundamental attribution error — a cognitive bias that causes us to attribute people’s actions to their personalities or character traits rather than factoring in external circumstances — means most of us rarely pause to consider things from another’s perspective or wonder if we should give someone else the benefit of the doubt before drawing a harsh conclusion.
I’m not asking you to play psychologist and figure out how and why your colleagues formed negative beliefs about themselves. I’m suggesting you rewire the internal circuitry that tells them how to think about themselves now. I’m asking you to love them enough to put in the work to reframe their identities as high achievers. If you expect them to do well, others will too. They’ll be treated that way, they’ll act that way, and eventually they will be that way. Resetting someone’s expectations of themselves changes their identity and boosts their performance.
-ben
