In the paired podcast, Micah Kaczor took me through the past year of his baseball career which featured an impressive senior season at East Tennessee State, going undrafted/unsigned by a Major League organization, playing independent league baseball, signing with the Colorado Rockies organization in the middle of summer, going to 2020 Spring Training, and then getting released as teams released many minor league players due to the impact of Covid-19. He has faced many obstacles in the past 15 months, yet he traveled across the country to train at Driveline Baseball for 2 weeks just to give himself the best chance going into the 2021 season as a free agent. After being released in May, Micah took a week to reflect on what he wanted to do. He had gone through so much to get to affiliated professional baseball only for it to be taken away by an unforeseen pandemic. The recurring thought during the week was how he felt while being at spring training, he knew he belonged and saw his dream within reach. Perseverance had got him this far, and he knew he would never make it back for another opportunity if he didn’t keep the same mindset.
Perseverance is defined as continued effort to do or achieve something despite the difficulties, failures, or delays in achieving success. There are two fundamental belief systems or “mindsets” that determine how someone will respond to struggles, setbacks, failures etc. Fixed Mindset or growth Mindset. These mindsets are largely associated with one’s ability or choice to persevere.
Fixed Mindset:
A fixed mindset assumes your character, intelligence, talent, and creative abilities are static givens that the individual can’t change in a meaningful way (Dweck, 2016). This would look like someone struggling in math class and accepting themselves as just not good at math. In Micah’s case this would be him looking at the fact he didn’t get an affiliated professional baseball opportunity even after doing well in college, and accepting that maybe he wasn’t good enough to play professional baseball.
Growth Mindset:
A growth mindset thrives on challenges and sees failure not as evidence of not being “good enough”, but it is a mindset that sees failure as an opportunity for growth self-improvement (Dweck, 2016). This would be someone who struggles in math class making math a priority in their schedule to transform themselves a “math person”.
A growth mindset is based on the belief that a person’s individual basic qualities are things you cultivate through efforts. Everyone differs in their initial aptitudes and talents, but everyone can also grow and adapt through application and experience. By having this mindset when faced with difficulties or failures, they see them as opportunities and with that comes perseverance.
When having a fixed mindset in who you are and the capabilities you can have, you don’t see those challenges and setbacks as opportunities to grow, you see where you are at as the limit. Dr. Carol Dweck discusses this in her book “Mindset: The new psychology of success”. Dr. Dweck and her team realized these differences when they saw that some people saw risk and effort as possible giveaways for their inadequacies. They would rather not exert that effort or take those risks to improve, they just don’t want their level of competency (or incompetency) to be exposed. This group of people are identified as having a fixed mindset. On the other hand, those with a growth mindset see the effort, risk, and failures as ways to improve so they can achieve what they weren’t initially able to. They aren’t afraid to put themselves in a perceived “vulnerable” position (Dweck, 2016).
Micah adopting a growth mindset through his senior season and into the summer allowed him to not only succeed immediately but develop a plan rooted in optimism regarding his career moving forward. When he went undrafted following his senior season he took that as a challenge to make the personal investment needed to show he can play at the professional level. This approach and perception of the situation ultimately earned him an opportunity with the Colorado Rockies.
After being released by the Rockies, Micah decided against continuing to play independent league this past summer and chose instead to use the break as an opportunity to have a longer offseason to rest, recover, and train to come back in 2021 even better than before. He chose to see what others would perceive as a setback, and used it for an opportunity for growth.
We don’t always have control of the situations we end up in, but we always have a choice of how to perceive and handle them. Having a growth mindset and never accepting things for how they are really changes our personal outlook on what’s in front of us and can make a huge difference in how we value ourselves. There’s always a point or time where we have to accept certain things for what they are, but there is so much room for growth in different aspects of our lives, having a growth mindset will allow us to capitalize on those opportunities and situations.
Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York, NY: Ballantine Books.
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