Letting Go of Unhelpful Labels

EXAMPLE 1: “I’M JUST LAZY”

I hear this a lot from Middle School and High School students I mentor whose grades are going downhill. When I ask them “Who labelled you as ‘LAZY’?” They respond: “I labelled myself as lazy”. Is it surprising that a student who labels themselves as ‘lazy’ will struggle to motivate themselves to do their best when studying for tests, exams or school work? When they realize that one of the reasons why they are behaving this way is because they had developed a Fixed Mindset, their awareness of what’s actually going on and what’s possible starts to go up.

Last month, I wrote an article on how I use the Enneagram to help student’s become more aware of their stress levels, and of how stress affects their ability to focus more, stress less and motivate themselves. I have noticed that students who self-identify as having the Enneagram 9 (“Peacemaker”), the Enneagram 7 (“Adventurer”), and the Enneagram 4 (“Individualist”) stress response patterns tend to label themselves as “lazy” more than others…when they are unaware of their particular stress patterns. Having low self-awareness, these students will observe their own lethargic, low energy, apathetic responses to school work on a surface-level, and simply label themselves as “a lazy person”.

But the truth is that some students are more prone to going into a shut-down, or flight response to stress, and others are more prone to go into a fight response to overwhelming levels of stress (e.g. overworking, overdoing, unhealthy levels of perfectionism). For people who tend to go into shut down or ‘flight’ when overwhelmed by stress, they can start to find it hard to break the cycle of escaping into an imagined or virtual reality (i.e. gaming addiction, excessive daydreaming, Netflix, mindlessly scrolling on social media).

Becoming more self-aware is empowering for students. It’s empowering to become more aware of how a Fixed Mindset towards intelligence, combined with low self-awareness of their particular stress response, is holding them stuck in a state of under-achievement and lack of motivation to try their best in school. When these students choose to start letting go of the old “lazy” label that they had put on themselves, replacing it with a more empowering Growth Mindset way of thinking, their productivity  increases. 

EXAMPLE 2: “I’M BAD AT MATHS”

This is something I heard from a student who kept failing a pre-university entry Maths test. It was causing her to suffer from severe panic and anxiety (10/10) at the thought of having to sit yet another Maths test in a few days time. She was convinced she was going to fail. She was suffering from so much panic that it was debilitating, she could not think or do anything else. We agreed to do three emergency tapping sessions to work together on reducing her stress levels. One of the things we discovered that was at the root of her distress was that she had labelled herself as being “Bad at Maths” back in Primary School, when she had an unprofessional Maths Teacher who bullied and shamed his students in class if they got an answer wrong. The name-calling and bullying was so bad, that she started getting stomach aches on the days when she had Maths, and she started asking her mum if she could stay home to avoid going to his class. When she remembered that old situation that had caused her to form this old belief that was blocking her ability to achieve her potential in Maths, she decided she wanted to let go of that label and tap in a more empowering Growth Mindset. Not only did she pass her Maths test that week, but even went on to choose and do well in a Maths-related module at university.  

EXAMPLE 3: “I’M SMART/I’M CLEVER”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, students who are under-achieving tend to communicate that they have labelled themselves as ‘smart’ and ‘clever’ in indirect ways. They’ll say things like, “I used to get good grades when the lessons were easy enough for me to just listen in class to do well. But now that I have to study to do well, my grades aren’t that good anymore.” If you listen on a surface level, without an understanding of the Fixed Mindset towards intelligence, you could fall into the trap of over-simplifying the problem, and labeling this student as ‘lazy’. However, what we discovered is that her Growth Mindset was really under-developed. Seeing their intelligence as ‘Fixed’ means that these students perceive new and challenging situations as a threat to their ego. In order to protect their ego from feeling like a failure when they get back results from tests and quizzes that are worse than what they were hoping to achieve, they withdraw effort and avoid trying to improve their study habits. They see no point in improving their study habits, as they believe “You’re either smart, or you’re not – and smart people don’t have to study or try hard.” The thought process was: “If I’m not doing well in school, it’s not because I’m not smart. It’s because I didn’t try.”

The other Fixed Mindset-related behavior these students can develop is to lie to themselves, and to their parents, about their failures. Because they see  mistakes or failures as too painful to face (‘If I try my best and I fail, it means I’m dumb’). They tend to overlook the importance of improving your study habits and emotional self-care habits for achieving peak performance. They may even go so far as telling their parents that they did better than they actually did  on a test, or lie about how much work they’ve done on a research project or assignment to a teacher or supervisor. Inevitably, this bad habit increases parent-child, later on, as the truth always comes out in the end, as the parents get a shock when they see their child’s report card. However, not all students who have a Fixed Mindset try to hide their failures or exaggerate how much work they have actually done. Even if you get two under-achieving students together who both label themselves as “SMART” or “CLEVER”, that doesn’t mean that they have the exact same constellation of mindset blocks that are causing them to under-achieve. This is why I find the following exercise is quite helpful for identifying exactly which mindset blocks are stopping a student from achieving their potential.