Stanford’s Carol Dweck has become the doyen of mindset, with her bestselling book on the topic bringing the concept of the fixed and growth mindset to the masses.  In new research, Dweck adds another phrase to the mindset lexicon, suggesting that the most successful among us tend to be strategic in our approach to life.

The research suggests that those with the strategic mindset tend to look for a range of options whenever confronted by challenges or setbacks, which results in them tending to apply more effective strategies towards achieving their goals.

“These findings are exciting because psychological science has long known that having a wide repertoire of strategies matters. But until now, we hadn’t understood why some people use their strategies more than others at the right time. We developed our research on the strategic mindset to explain why this might be,” the researchers say.

Strategic thinking

The researchers recruited nearly 1,000 volunteers from across the United States to understand how their mindset affected their performance at work and in the classroom.  For instance, among students, there appeared to be a strong correlation between the strategic mindset of students and their overall grades.

When adults were assessed, it emerged that a strategic mindset helped them in a wide range of professional, health, and educational goals.

As with the growth/fixed mindset, the researchers believe that a strategic mindset is something that can be learned, and they proved this by giving some volunteers access to a short training session on the topic, before setting them a difficult task to accomplish.  Compared to peers who were not given the training, this group were consistently able to apply more strategic behavior towards completing the task.

“There are key points in any challenging pursuit that require people to step back and come up with new strategies. A strategic mindset helps them do just that,” the researchers explain. “As you approach whatever challenging goal you are pursuing, you can ask yourself, ‘What are things I can do to help myself (and others)? Is there a way to do this even better?’ If something you have been working on isn’t going so well, can you step back and ask yourself, ‘How might I go about this differently? Is there another approach I can try to help this go better?'”