Mindset : The New Psychology of Success pdfdrive com

Feeling Bad, But Doing Good
Let’s  go  back  a  few  paragraphs  to  when  you  were  rejected  by  the  graduate
school. Suppose your attempt to make yourself feel better had failed. You could
still have taken the growth-mindset step. You can feel miserable and still reach
out for information that will help you improve.
Sometimes after I have a setback, I go through the process of talking to myself
about what it means and how I plan to deal with it. Everything seems fine—until
I sleep on it. In my sleep, I have dream after dream of loss, failure, or rejection,
depending on what happened. Once when I’d experienced a loss, I went to sleep
and had the following dreams: My hair fell out, my teeth fell out, I had a baby
and it died, and so on. Another time when I felt rejected, my dreams generated
countless  rejection  experiences—real  and  imagined.  In  each  instance,  the
incident  triggered  a  theme,  and  my  too-active  imagination  gathered  up  all  the
variations on the theme to place before me. When I woke up, I felt as though I’d
been through the wars.
It would be nice if this didn’t happen, but it’s irrelevant. It might be easier to
mobilize  for  action  if  I  felt  better,  but  it  doesn’t  matter.  The  plan  is  the  plan.
Remember the depressed students with the growth mindset? The worse they felt,
the more they did the constructive thing. The less they felt like it, the more they
made themselves do it.
The critical thing is to make a concrete, growth-oriented plan, and to stick to
it.