07-11-2011, 03:20 PM
While at swim meet this weekend I attended a talk given by the performance director of swim scotland on defining what exactly is talent and a new view on why junior high flyers frequently do not become senior high flyers. One of the problems they have identified is that in the past they have concentrated on identifying talent based on a swimmer's personal best times (pb: think chess grading) and wasted a lot of resources on a group that always experienced high drop out rates.
There are some obvious reasons why one swimmer appears better than another within a particular age group e.g. when born - rank any bunch of swimmers with the same birth year and you will find the vast majority of the top 10 or 20 will be born in the first quarter. No doubt something similar will apply in chess.
The main factor they focused on in this talk was mindset and because they believe it is such a significant factor it is now part of the selection criteria for the national squads.
In essence they have identified two main mindsets - 'fixed' and 'growth' which all swimmers (indeed the academic work behind it is not sports based and so applies to all of us in most activities) have a mixture of. See page 4 of the following pdf http://www.scottishswimming.com/assets/f...0Oct11.pdf
In summary the 'fixed' mindset basically has at its core the belief that your success is essentially largely due to natural talent, whereas a 'growth' mindset emphasis that success comes from hard work. Those with a growth mindset tend to seek new challenges, are not put off with having to work hard to learn new skills and take ownership of their own success. They tend to be less put off by set backs. Those that have the fixed mindset tend to shy away from doing things that they think may show that they are not talented. If you believe that your talent is innate it is much harder to justify the work to progress beyond whatever level your 'natural talent' gets you to.
As consequence, the growth mindset is to be taught/encouraged in swimming training. One study showed that simply the language used to praise success has a significant impact: those praised in a growth mindset manner ("you've worked hard for that ...") progressed faster than those that had fixed mindset praise ("You are talented").
Thoughts?
There are some obvious reasons why one swimmer appears better than another within a particular age group e.g. when born - rank any bunch of swimmers with the same birth year and you will find the vast majority of the top 10 or 20 will be born in the first quarter. No doubt something similar will apply in chess.
The main factor they focused on in this talk was mindset and because they believe it is such a significant factor it is now part of the selection criteria for the national squads.
In essence they have identified two main mindsets - 'fixed' and 'growth' which all swimmers (indeed the academic work behind it is not sports based and so applies to all of us in most activities) have a mixture of. See page 4 of the following pdf http://www.scottishswimming.com/assets/f...0Oct11.pdf
In summary the 'fixed' mindset basically has at its core the belief that your success is essentially largely due to natural talent, whereas a 'growth' mindset emphasis that success comes from hard work. Those with a growth mindset tend to seek new challenges, are not put off with having to work hard to learn new skills and take ownership of their own success. They tend to be less put off by set backs. Those that have the fixed mindset tend to shy away from doing things that they think may show that they are not talented. If you believe that your talent is innate it is much harder to justify the work to progress beyond whatever level your 'natural talent' gets you to.
As consequence, the growth mindset is to be taught/encouraged in swimming training. One study showed that simply the language used to praise success has a significant impact: those praised in a growth mindset manner ("you've worked hard for that ...") progressed faster than those that had fixed mindset praise ("You are talented").
Thoughts?