Mindshifting is recognizing and shifting from the mindsets that hold us back to the mindsets that push us forward
About 8 years ago, I received an email from the UPenn Graduate School of Education that the African Development University in Niger wanted US EdTech entrepreneurs to talk to their education undergraduates. From that email, I ended up creating and teaching two 2-day workshops in Mindshifting to a total of about 150 University students in Niamey, Niger.
The crux of each workshop was demonstrating how we are all victims of our own minds and then teaching ways to guide our brains toward resilience and resourcefulness.
There was a standing ovation at the end of each workshop, because we don’t teach this in school, and yet these are the tools that allow each person to become happy and successful.
My mission is to give the next generation those skills to be able to shift their mindsets so that they can lead wonderful lives and save the planet. If you teach, coach, or educate children or teens, perhaps you can help lead this effort.
Technology, too much or too little, new tech initiatives
Classroom management and behavioral issues
Group and peer pressure
Critical thinking, deeper learning, and creativity
Attention, engagement, and motivation
Teacher and student burnout,
Empathy and personalization
Navigating conflicts and promoting collaboration
Working with the diversity of backgrounds, home lives, and learning abilities in the student population
What if those problems were all related and not separate? What if they were all solvable through understanding mindsets?
People who know how to regulate their mindsets are more engaged, happier, more collaborative, and just plain more effective. That's not just common sense, it's backed up by cognitive science. And people who are more engaged, happier, more collaborative and more effective are a lot more likely to implement and carry out initiatives to improve outcomes in any and all of these areas.
How do the two aspects of our brains, the Survival mind and the Sage mind, affect all human attitudes and actions?
A mindset refers to the attitudes, beliefs, and ways of thinking that determine a person’s behavior, outlook, and mental attitude towards a situation. The interplay of the quick survival mind (or limbic system) and the much slower higher order thinking (or Sage) parts of our brains affect the mindsets of every single human being in the world, children, adults, scientists, politicians, educators, parents, students, every single one of us.
When the limbic brain is activated, it reacts quickly, often with fight, flight, or freeze. Reacting fast with little information was a critical factor in survival. But how often are we faced with life or death situations in our modern society? It's our Sage mind which enables empathy, response flexibility, emotion regulation, morality, intuition, and attuned communication. But this same Sage mind is shut down when our survival mind focuses on what it perceives as danger, risk, or embarrassent.
When our mindsets stem from our limbic reactions, we don’t have access to our abilities to empathize, explore options, think critically or creatively, evaluate alternatives based on our goals, or persist through difficulties and challenges.
Learning is primarily a Sage mind activity. Problem solving is primarily a Sage mind activity. Innovation is primarily a Sage mind activity. Active listening is a Sage mind activity. None of these are accessible when our limbic system takes charge.
That’s why the mindsets of educators and students, and the ability to switch to resourceful collaborative mindsets, are the foundation for solving each one of the problems above. Mindshifting produces the fertile environment necessary for any intervention to flourish. Mindshifting teaches how mindsets are formed, how to recognize when we or others are in suboptimal mindsets and how to switch to resourceful mindsets in order to increase the chances of beneficial outcomes and work with others even when they get in the way, disagree, oppose, or compete.
What do you learn in the three MIndshifting courses?
Here are some of the skills that are developed in Mindshifting:
Increasing motivation and perseverance, including overcoming procrastination, obstacles, and setbacks
Reducing behaviors that have a negative effect on the learning environment and student achievement
Self-management and executive function, regulating, co-regulating, and self-regulating emotions and behaviors and building personal agency and responsibility
Understanding the impact of stress and long term stress, including trauma-informed interventions and converting stress from a demotivator to an achievement accelerator
Converting conflicts from antagonistic interactions with destructive consequences into ones that promote positive relationships and build lasting solutions
Why Mindshifting
All change starts from mindset
Why do all successful attempts to solve problems start with mindsets? Mindsets determine how we perceive the situation, the approaches we use, our motivation, persistence, and resilience. The ability to switch to resourceful collaborative mindsets is the foundation for change and progress.
Mindshifting teaches how mindsets are formed, how to recognize when we or others are in counterproductive mindsets, how to switch to resourceful mindsets in order to increase the chances of beneficial outcomes, and how to work with others even when they get in the way, disagree, oppose, or compete.
Reflections from the Teachers
Understanding how complex situations can impact our lives and the difficulty of making decisions has impacted my way of looking at the small and big pictures of situations.
I respond better to situations that could have been frustrating and caused a misunderstanding. I think because I plan ahead to use empathy and take a deep breath before reacting.
Today in my classroom I caught myself on limbic mode and reacting poorly to student behavior. I took a deep breath then came back to think about what I should be doing and how to refocus myself and actions.
Mindshifting 1
Mastering Your Resilient Brain
The course starts with practical examples of how our minds fool us into positions of powerlessness and techniques that tap into our natural resourcefulness. The course progresses through a framework for understanding how our minds can rapidly make decisions, but also how those quick reactions often lead us into flight, fight, or freeze mindsets, whereas ideally we would think critically, innovate, and collaborate.
What are the limbic and higher order parts of the brain?
What does the limbic brain do for us?
Flight, fight, freeze reactions
Habits and Fluencies as ways the survival brain simplifies problem solving and reduces cognitive load
Mirror Neurons and the positive and negative effects of copying others
Prefrontal cortex and higher order thinking
Fear hormones: how the limbic brain controls the prefrontal cortex
Cognitive biases, cognitive dissonance, and how our brains deceive us
Harnessing the five powers of the resourceful brain
How to intercept limbic mindsets
How to activate resourceful mindsets
Persistence, critical thinking, creativity and the resourceful brain
Lesson plans from educators who are teaching Mindshifting so their students can be more resourceful
Mindshifting 2
Flexible Mindsets for Long Term Success
This course is especially helpful for applying habits of mind even when things go wrong, and will provide educators and students a framework for assessing problems and opportunities, coming up with solutions, listening to how other people are framing situations, and choosing what to do next in order to start and continue down a productive path instead of endless debates, inaction, half-hearted attempts, and dead-end game plans.
Why classical decision making doesn't work
Why our brains treat all problems as if there is one right solution
Decision-making in complicated situations that require analysis or expertise
Decision-making in complex situations where no one really knows what will work
Handling real and imagined dangerous situations
Problems of miss-assessing a situation as simple or urgent
Why we so often fail, and how that can help us get better
Learning how to iterate effectively, instead of a succeed/fail mentality
Slow iteration to diagnose problems and develop solutions
Fast iteration to react to problems in the moment
How and when to use experts
Coming up with possibilities even if we initially feel blocked
How to avoid the negative consequences of failure
These are skills that can help us in every day life, in our jobs, and which we can learn to teach our kids to be better prepared to handle their own adversities and challenges.
Mindshifting 3
Conflict and Collaboration
Most of the problems and opportunities we encounter involve other people. Sometimes people disagree with us, sometimes they oppose us. Success is often all about shifting mindsets. As educators, we are interested in the ultimate success of our students, and yet, ironically they often resist our efforts. This course will cover a wide range of techniques educators can use to motivate students to learn, to coach students on constructive methods of conflict resolution, and to inspire students to change from destructive attitudes and behaviors.
How we act when we are all resourceful vs how we act when we are stressed
What do our brains do when we disagree?
How to remain calm and composed during disagreements
Why our normal methods of coping with disagreement don't work
Responding to disagreement with empathy and rapport
The five methods of conflict resolution
Differences between compromise and collaborate
Constructive and destructive conflict
How to talk with someone who is difficult and recalcitrant to move to collaboration
Effects of stress and wellbeing on learning, decision-making, and actions
Helping others overcome stress Overcoming the negative influences of group and peer pressure
How to articulate requests and suggestions
Applying Mindshifting to teaching and instruction
Comments by Participants
Here are comments by past participants of Mindshifting classes:
I think this course gives us a lot of alternatives to help anyone through distress and onto productive options.
This course is life changing. If you feel that you are too quick to respond and regret how you deal with stressful situations this course can help you identify why you might want to change your tactics and how.
I opened up students to rethink their story or script using some of the questions from the course. It made them get a connection to the information that was being taught.
I learned ways to de-escalate students during different situations.
I have so many ideas about implementing lessons with my students now that I have a better understanding of conflict and conflict management.
I really enjoyed this course and have a lot of take aways. Understanding whether a student or coworker is in Limbic mind or Sage mind will allow me to approach and support them accordingly. When are you going to do the next course?
I feel that this course has an incredibly solid mix of the science behind how we react and methods that are useful in practice. My toolkit when dealing with difficult situations has been greatly expanded.
I learned how to help students express themselves without judgment and recognize their feelings and needs.