by Ann Duckworth

Created on: September 13, 2009

Tools we can all use to Improve Hope and Ability

This article shows how our individual environments greatly affect ability and provides tools to continually change and improve learning, motivation, and mental/emotional health. It shows why Males are falling behind due to more harsh treatment and neglect from society and why Females are surging ahead due to overprotection and continuous support from society. It provides a way to better understand this problem and provides a way to help correct this problem.

The false teaching of fixed intelligences and abilities has made many students and adults feel inferior in different areas. By teaching this harmful belief, we are placing jagged pieces of metal and broken bottles in the hallways to cut and maim our students. This false teaching in society has created anxiety, hopelessness, and psychological suffering, which is leading to many escapes such as drug/alcohol abuse, violence, depression, and suicide. The false teaching of fixed intelligences was designed to maintain class distinctions. I hope you can see the connection between the harmful teachings of permanence in ability and its deadly effect on the mental/emotional health of our students and adults. My cognitive tools provide two large tools we can use to continually improve our abilities and our lives.

We need to see mental stress more accurately as layers of mental frictions that accumulate in our lives and hurt our ability to think and learn. By redefining average stress as average layers of mental frictions, we now have tools to more permanently reduce layers of mental frictions and improve thinking, learning, and mental/emotional health. Some things do not create mental stress at all. Laughing, crying, running, and swimming are not good stresses but low, if any stress. We are using energy, but we are not creating mental frictions from it. In this definition, stress does not occur when energy is expended without mental frictions. By seeing stress more accurately as layers of mental frictions - layers of conscious and subconscious (below the surface) unresolved mental frictions, we can see how our individual environments greatly affect our ability to think, learn, and improve. We can use this better definition of stress to help students and adults continually improve their ability to think and learn by learning how to more permanently reduce layers of mental frictions.

The first tool: stress is more accurately defined as layers of mental frictions.

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