Why Growth Hurts Before It Helps: An Expanding Mindset Story for Strugglers

Here's the thing nobody tells you before you start changing: growth doesn't feel like growth while it's happening. It feels like losing. It feels like you were doing just fine with the old, smaller version of yourself, thanks very much, and now you've broken something and can't remember how to put it back.

I want to walk you through why that happens, using real research, a bit of my own trial and error, and — stick with me — the walking case study that is Kendall Roy from HBO's Succession. He's fictional. His pain isn't. And watching him try (and fail, and try again) to grow is one of the clearest pictures I know of what an expanding mindset actually costs.

The Fixed Mindset Meaning Nobody Warned You About

Let's start simple. The fixed mindset meaning, in plain terms, is the belief that your talent, intelligence, and worth are set in stone. You're either good at something or you're not. You either "have it" or you don't.

A growth mindset is the opposite bet: that ability is built, not born. Psychologist Carol Dweck spent decades studying this split, and her framework basically changed how schools and workplaces talk about potential.

But here's what a lot of summaries skip: the research is more careful, and more interesting, than "just believe in yourself." A 2019 national study led by David Yeager, published in Nature, tested a short growth-mindset lesson on nearly 12,500 ninth graders across the U.S. It found real gains for lower-achieving students — but only in schools where the surrounding culture already valued effort. Plant the same seed in cold soil, and it doesn't take.

Source: Yeager et al., 2019, Nature — nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1466-y

That detail matters. Growth isn't just a mental trick you perform alone in the mirror. It needs somewhere to land.

What Kendall Roy Gets Wrong (and Occasionally Right) About Growth Mindset in Leadership

If you've watched Succession, you know Kendall Roy as the son who keeps trying to prove he's built for the top job — and keeps getting knocked back down, sometimes by his father, mostly by himself.

Kendall is a case study in the wrong kind of growth mindset in leadership. He treats growth as a performance. He rehearses confidence instead of building competence. He wants the win without sitting through the boring, humbling middle part where you're actually bad at something before you're good at it.

That's the trap a lot of us fall into at work, too. We say we want to grow, but we quietly want the growth to be instant and painless. Research on leadership suggests the opposite works better: Deloitte has found that leaders inside high-performing organizations are roughly 28 times more likely to openly take risks and model learning from their own mistakes than leaders in low-performing ones.

Source: TalentLMS/Deloitte research, cited in TalentLMS Growth Mindset in the Workplace report, 2024 — talentlms.com/research/growth-mindset-workplace-report

In other words, the leaders who admit "I got that wrong" out loud tend to run better teams than the ones performing certainty. Kendall rarely lets anyone see him fumble. That's not growth mindset in leadership — that's fear wearing a nice suit.

And yet — give the guy this much — he keeps getting back up. A separate 2024 industry survey found 80% of senior executives believe a growth mindset among employees directly drives company profit, even though many admit their own leadership doesn't consistently model it. Kendall is that gap, dramatized.

Source: Forbes, reporting on TalentLMS research, October 2024 — forbes.com

Growth Mindset Therapy: Why Growing Feels Like Falling Apart First

Here's the part therapists talk about that self-help posts usually skip: change disrupts identity before it improves it. If you've spent years being "the reliable one" or "the one who doesn't ask for help," trying something new can feel like betraying yourself, not building yourself.

This is a big part of what growth mindset therapy actually works on — not just swapping negative thoughts for positive ones, but helping someone tolerate the discomfort of being a beginner again, at any age.

A quick, honest story. This next part is an illustrative scenario, not a documented case — I'm building it from patterns I've noticed in my own career changes and conversations with friends going through similar shifts, not from a single verified source. A friend of mine left a stable job to retrain in a new field at 34. For the first three months, she said she felt dumber than she had in a decade — constantly behind, constantly comparing herself to 24-year-olds who picked things up faster. She almost quit twice. What got her through wasn't confidence. It was deciding the discomfort was data, not proof she'd made a mistake.

That's the emotional core of an expanding mindset: you stop treating confusion as a verdict on your worth and start treating it as the normal weather of learning something real.

Professional Development Growth Mindset: Small, Boring, Repeatable

Most professional development growth mindset advice sounds inspiring and then evaporates by Wednesday. So let's keep it dull and useful instead. A growth mindset professional development habit only works if it survives a bad week.

•      Pick one skill gap, not five. Depth beats a scattered list.

•      Say the quiet part out loud to one person: "I'm still learning this." It removes the pressure to fake mastery.

•      Track effort, not just outcomes. Hours practiced is a number you control; results lag behind.

•      Expect a slump around week three to six. That dip is common, not a sign you're on the wrong track.

None of this promises a straight line up. What it offers is realistic: steadier footing, and fewer days where a single setback convinces you to quit.

Mindfulness Growth: Sitting With the Discomfort Instead of Managing It Away

There's a quieter cousin to all this striving, and it's mindfulness growth — the practice of noticing discomfort without immediately trying to fix, rush, or numb it.

This isn't about becoming calm all the time. It's about building enough distance from a hard feeling to ask, "Is this pain telling me to stop, or just telling me this is unfamiliar?" Those are very different signals, and most of us were never taught to tell them apart.

An expanding mindset and a mindful one work together well. One tells you the struggle can lead somewhere. The other keeps you from white-knuckling through every day of it.

Common Questions About Growth and an Expanding Mindset

What is the fixed mindset meaning in simple terms?

It means believing your abilities are fixed traits — you're either naturally good at something or you're not, and effort won't change that much.

Is growth mindset the same thing as positive thinking?

No. Positive thinking focuses on feeling good now. Growth mindset focuses on believing your abilities can change over time through effort and the right support — even while things currently feel hard.

Can growth mindset therapy actually help with career or life changes?

It can help you sit with the discomfort of being new at something instead of quitting the moment it feels bad, though it's a tool, not a guaranteed fix — pairing it with a real support system matters, per the 2019 Yeager study above.

Why does growth mindset in leadership matter so much right now?

Because teams take cues from the top. Leaders who admit mistakes openly tend to run environments where others feel safe learning too, rather than hiding gaps.

A Realistic Word Before You Go

I can't promise this will fix everything, and honestly, I'd trust this article less if it did. What I can say is this: the pain you're feeling right now, mid-change, is not proof you're doing it wrong. For a lot of strugglers, it's proof you're doing it at all.

Kendall Roy never quite gets there — not cleanly, not on screen. But you're not a character in someone else's script. You get more tries than he ever let himself take.

Two Books Worth Your Time

•      Mindset: The New Psychology of Success — Carol S. Dweck

•      Atomic Habits — James Clear

Your Turn, Struggler

If any part of this hit close to home, tell me about it in the comments — what's the thing you're growing through right now, and what's the hardest week looked like? Or if you're not ready to share yet, that's fine too: stick around and read the next piece on this site. You're not doing this alone, even when it feels that way.