The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias

Dolly Chugh celebrates the benefits of cultivating a growth mindset and approaching failure as a learning opportunity in each section of her analysis, connecting each of her points to these touchstones—two critical actions that readers must take to transform from believers into builders. She defines the term mindset as “our belief about our capacity to learn and improve” (23). Individuals with a growth mindset see themselves as works-in-progress with the capacity for change, growth, and improvement. By contrast, those with fixed mindsets see themselves as fully formed. The growth mindset is malleable, while the fixed mindset is “an “either/or” mindset” that eliminates the possibility of development and positive change.

While activating a growth mindset requires individual will, Chugh demonstrates ways it can be cultivated and nurtured by external culture and community. In workplaces, for example, supervisors who want workers to cultivate a growth mindset must foster psychological safety. If workers feel safe speaking up, proposing ideas, disclosing inability, confessing uncertainty, asking for help, admitting mistakes, and taking blame, it enables learning, which, in turn, improves performance. In anti-bias work, the fixed mindset prompts individuals to walk on eggshells out of fear of saying or doing the wrong thing.