Growth Mindset for Soldiers: What the Research Actually Shows

Sit in on a debrief after a failed test and you'll usually see two responses.

The first candidate asks what specifically went wrong, writes it down, and asks what to change before the next attempt. The second goes quiet, decides the DS has taken a dislike to him, and spends the evening explaining to anyone who'll listen why the test was unfair, rigged against him blah blah blah.

Same failure. Same information on offer. Two very different trajectories over the following weeks.

That gap is what Carol Dweck's work is about, and it's the part of preparation almost nobody trains deliberately, because it doesn't come with sets, reps, loads or a stopwatch attached.

A growth mindset is the belief that your abilities, intelligence and physical capacities can be developed through effort, strategy and feedback. A fixed mindset is the belief that they're broadly set, and that performance mostly reveals what you already are.

This updated article covers both, along with something the older version didn't: what the research does and doesn't support. The evidence base has moved a long way since Mindset was published in 2006, and some of it hasn't been kind. If we're going to tell you mindset matters, we should really tell you how much too.

For related reading, see our introduction to mental performance and three steps to optimise your inner voice.

What is a growth mindset, and what is a fixed mindset?

The distinction sits on one follow up question: can this be changed?

A fixed mindset treats ability as a property, like height or eye colour. You're either a natural navigator or you're not. You're either a good shot or you're not. Under that belief, every task becomes a measurement of who you are, so difficulty feels like exposure and feedback feels like an accusation.

A growth mindset treats ability as a state. It can improve, and it can also decay if you neglect it. Under that belief, difficulty is information about where the work is, and feedback is the cheapest source of that information you'll ever get.

Nobody sits permanently in one camp. Most people hold a growth mindset about the things they're already good at and a fixed mindset about the things that have embarrassed them. That's the pattern worth hunting for in yourself. You'll happily add 5kg to your deadlift after you’ve worked for it, and you'll happily tell anyone who asks that you've "just never been a swimmer" (after never having worked at it).

Does growth mindset actually work? What the evidence shows

Here's where most articles on this topic quietly stop reading the literature.

Dweck's original research produced large, exciting effects in small samples. What followed was less tidy. Sisk and colleagues (2018) ran two meta-analyses across hundreds of studies and found the average relationship between mindset and academic achievement was weak, with intervention effects that were small and inconsistent. Yeager and colleagues (2019) then ran the largest properly randomised test to date, nearly 12,500 American ninth graders, and found a real but modest effect: around 0.05 grade points overall, roughly 0.10 for lower-achieving students. Relevant, replicable, and a very long way from the transformation the popular version of the idea promises.

It got sharper. Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) re-examined 122 studies and concluded that most of the apparent benefit was explained by weak study design, reporting flaws and publication bias, with no significant overall effect among the studies that followed best practice. Burnette and colleagues (2023), analysing broadly the same literature with different statistical methods, reached a more favourable conclusion: small but meaningful effects on academic achievement (d = 0.14) and larger effects on mental health (d = 0.32), concentrated in the groups you'd expect to benefit most.

That argument is still live and it's unlikely to be settled soon. But the two camps agree on more than the headlines suggest, and the agreement is the useful part:

1. Mindset is not a performance multiplier. It won't make you faster, stronger or more aerobically fit on its own.

2. Effects are largest in people who are struggling, under real difficulty, and at risk of disengaging.

3. Effects come from changed behaviour, not changed belief. Believing you can improve does nothing. Believing it and therefore asking for the correction, retraining or training the skill, staying on the task, and re-attempting is what produces the result.

Point three is the one that matters operationally for our community. Nobody is claiming a mindset shift alone adds physiological changes - What it changes is what you do on the days training goes badly, and those days compound over a preparation cycle that runs eighteen months.

Another point for context: when researchers have looked directly at what predicts success on selection, the psychological variable with the strongest track record isn't mindset, it's ‘hardiness’ or Grit. Bartone and colleagues (2008) assessed 1,138 US Army Special Forces candidates and found graduates scored significantly higher on psychological hardiness, the tendency to view difficulty as meaningful, controllable and worth engaging with rather than as threat. Related work by Crum, Salovey and Achor (2013) found that people holding a stress-is-enhancing mindset show more adaptive cortisol responses under pressure and, notably, actively seek more feedback while stressed.

Notice what those two findings have in common. Neither is about confidence. Both are about what you do with discomfort.

Where does mindset actually help in military training?

Not on the good days. On the good days everyone looks easily coachable and trainable.

It hits in six specific moments, and if you can recognise them as they happen you've done most of the work:

• The first time you're publicly bad at something in front of your peers.

• The debrief where the feedback is accurate, unflattering and coming off the back of a ‘failure’.

• The plateau, where you've been training properly for eight weeks and the numbers haven't moved.

• The injury or downgrade, where you lose the identity that came with being the fit, athletic one.

• The comparison, where someone you've quietly measured yourself against outperforms you (because they’ve been training it and you haven’t).

• The re-attempt, after a failed test or a failed course.

Table 1 shows how the same event splits.

Table 1. Fixed and growth responses to common training and course scenarios.

The pattern running through the fixed column is avoidance of visible failure. That's the cost. A fixed mindset doesn't make you lazy, it makes you selective, and you end up unconsciously steering your training towards the things that already flatter you.

Which is exactly backwards, because course failure tends to come from your worst attribute, not your best.

Why do fixed beliefs form in the first place?

Usually because something worked.

The soldier who's always been the fittest in the platoon has rarely had to be genuinely bad at something in front of people who matter. Being fit became part of who he is rather than something he does. So the first time he's mid-table on a hill session with better athletes, the threat isn't the session. It's the label.

Early success is a common route into a fixed mindset. So is praise aimed at the person rather than the process. Tell someone for ten years that they're a natural, and you've given them something to protect. Tell them their pacing discipline on the second half of a tab was excellent, and you've given them something to repeat.

Dweck's own later work is blunt about this. She coined the phrase "false growth mindset" for the version that spread through schools and workplaces, where people praised effort without teaching strategy, and told struggling learners to try harder without changing anything about how they were working. Effort with no change in method is just repetition of the same mistake at higher intensity. Soldiers are excellent at that particular failure mode.

Intelligence is no protection either. Some of the most rigid thinking you'll encounter comes from experienced, capable people who've concluded their way is settled. It shows up as discrediting a visiting instructor's method before they've finished demonstrating it, or as withholding knowledge from the team to stay comparatively valuable. Both are ego protection wearing a professional costume.

Mindset self-assessment

Below is a short audit. Read each statement and score honestly: 2 if it's often true of you, 1 if it's sometimes true, 0 if it's rarely true.

The honesty matters more than the score. Everyone knows the correct answers, which is precisely why self-report on this is usually worthless. Answer as you actually behaved in the last three months, not as you'd like to be described.

Table 2. Fixed mindset audit. Maximum score 20.

Green (0-6). Broadly growth-oriented. Keep an eye on the specific items you scored 2 on, because fixed beliefs are domain-specific and yours will be hiding in one or two areas.

Amber (7-13). Typical. You're coachable in most areas and protecting yourself in a few. The protected areas are almost certainly the ones limiting your course readiness. Name them.

Red (14-20). Your preparation is being organised around avoiding discomfort rather than around the demands of the course. This is fixable, and it's more urgent than your next training block.

Run this again in twelve weeks. The score is less interesting than the direction.

How do you shift towards a growth mindset?

Belief follows behaviour more reliably than behaviour follows belief. So don't try to think your way into this. Change what you do in the six moments listed earlier and the belief updates itself.

Ask for the correction, not the verdict. After a poor performance, most people ask some version of "was that bad?" That's a request for a judgement, and you'll get one. Ask instead: "What was the single biggest thing costing me time there?" You've now converted an ego threat into a coaching point, and you've made the instructor's job easier, which is not a small thing when there are forty of you.

Keep a record of things you used to be bad at. Genuinely, write the list. Map and compass is the standard example for a reason. The first time you were handed one you had no idea what the contour lines meant, which way you were facing, or how long a leg would take. You got competent through practice, repetition, error and time. That list is direct evidence against every fixed belief you currently hold, and you'll forget it exists unless it's written down.

Add "yet". It sounds trivial and it isn't. "I can't hold sub-five-minute kilometres under 25kg" is a closed statement. "I can't hold sub-five-minute kilometres under 25kg yet" opens a programming question. One of those leads to a plan and a progression - the other becomes an identity.

Deliberately take the exposed position. Point of the stack. Lead navigator on the hardest legs. First to demonstrate a new skill you’ve just been told. You'll be far worse than you'd like and you'll receive feedback in front of people. That's the entire mechanism. Discomfort tolerance is trainable in the same way tissue tolerance is, through graded exposure, and you can't build it while hiding in the middle of the file.

Separate the review from the emotion. After a failed test or course, give yourself a fixed window to be emotional about it - get it out of your system like shedding skin, sleep on it, then run the review emotionally cold. Forty-eight hours is usually enough. What was the actual gap? Was it aerobic capacity, load carriage durability, strength, skill, sleep, or preparation structure? Write it as a training problem, because that's what it is. A review conducted while you're still angry will produce excuses, and a review conducted six months later will produce nothing because you've forgotten the detail.

Use testing as information and opportunities, not as a verdict. This is why we run Red, Amber and Green standards rather than pass and fail. A red score on your loaded march time isn't a statement about you, it's a statement about where the next twelve weeks of training should point. Test regularly enough that no single test carries much emotional weight.

Change the method before you add effort. If eight weeks of hard work haven't moved a number, the answer is rarely more of the same work. Audit the structure. Are you accumulating enough low-intensity aerobic volume, or is everything landing in the grey zone? Is the load progression sensible? Are you sleeping? Trying harder within a broken structure is the most common way people spend a year going nowhere.

Praise process in other people. Partly because it's useful to them, and partly because it trains you to notice process rather than outcome. Tell someone their pacing on the back half was disciplined. Don't tell them they're a machine.

Hand your experience down. If you've deployed, been on the course, or made the mistakes already, the people behind you haven't. Withholding that to preserve your standing is a fixed mindset behaviour dressed up as professionalism, and the team pays for it.

Table 3 sets out where to apply these.

Table 3. Practical responses at each of the six pressure points.

What growth mindset is not

It isn't blind optimism, and it isn't the belief that everything works out. Plenty of people with excellent attitudes fail selection, and some of them fail it twice.

It isn't a substitute for physical preparation. You can hold a flawless growth mindset and still be beasted on the hills because your aerobic base is thin and you've never carried 30kg for four hours. Belief doesn't build stroke volume or tendon stiffness. Training does, over months.

It isn't effort for its own sake either. That's the false growth mindset problem again. Effort applied to a poor structure produces fatigue and not much else.

And it isn't the removal of standards. Growth mindset language has been used in some quarters to soften failure into a learning experience and leave it there. On a selection course, failure is failure. The point isn't to reframe it as a win. The point is to extract every piece of usable information from it and turn up better prepared next time.

Conclusion

Mindset is worth training, but it deserves a realistic place in the hierarchy. Your aerobic base, your strength, your load carriage capacity and your injury history will decide most of what happens on course. Mindset decides what you do with the bad days, and over an eighteen-month preparation there will be plenty of those.

The research supports something narrower than the popular version of the idea, and more useful. Small effects, concentrated in people under real difficulty, driven by behaviour rather than belief. Which suits us. Ask for the correction. Take the exposed position. Review failures cold and turn them into a training problem. Change the method before you add the effort.

You can start that tomorrow, and you don't need a single extra session in the week to do it.

Frequently asked questions

What is a growth mindset in simple terms?

It's the belief that ability, intelligence and physical capacity can be developed through effort, better strategy and feedback. A fixed mindset holds that these things are largely set. The practical difference shows up in how you respond to difficulty and criticism.

Does growth mindset training actually improve performance?

The evidence supports small effects, not transformation. Large randomised trials such as Yeager and colleagues (2019) found modest but real benefits, concentrated in people who were struggling. Meta-analyses disagree on the size of the effect. What's consistent is that benefit comes from changed behaviour rather than changed belief.

Can you have a growth mindset in one area and a fixed mindset in another?

Yes, and most people do. Fixed beliefs are usually domain-specific and cluster around things that have embarrassed you. It's common to hold a growth mindset about strength training and a fixed mindset about swimming, navigation or running.

How does mindset affect selection course performance?

Mostly through how you respond to feedback, failure and plateaus over a long preparation. Research on selection populations points to psychological hardiness as the stronger predictor, meaning the tendency to view difficulty as controllable and worth engaging with rather than as a threat.

How do I stop taking criticism personally?

Convert it into a specific question. Instead of asking whether your performance was bad, ask what the single biggest correction is. Specific coaching points are much harder to read as personal attacks, and you get more usable information.

Is mindset more important than physical training for military selection?

No. Physical capacity, load carriage durability and injury resilience determine most course outcomes. Mindset determines how consistently you train and how you recover from setbacks, which then feeds into those physical qualities over months.

What is a false growth mindset?

Dweck's term for the watered-down version: praising effort without teaching strategy, and telling people to try harder without changing how they work. Effort applied to a broken training structure produces fatigue rather than progress.

How do I know if I have a fixed mindset?

Look at what you avoid. If your training consistently favours the things you're already good at, and you find reasons not to attend sessions where you'd be visibly weak, that's the signal. Use the audit above and score yourself on the last three months of actual behaviour.