A Change of Mind

Feb 5
10 min read

On a sun drenched afternoon on February 11th, 1990 the eyes of the world were focused on the front gate of a small prison on the outskirts of Cape Town.

Everyone was waiting to catch sight of a man almost no one had seen for a quarter of a century.

The last time the world had seen Nelson Mandela was in 1964, when he was handed a life sentence for conspiring to overthrow the apartheid government.

Since that day he'd been confined to a prison island and the state had made it illegal to photograph or republish any photo of him.

As a younger man he was remembered as an intelligent lawyer, and a charismatic and driven leader.

A man who after years of political resistance against the racist state, had ultimately turned to violent struggle.

His birth name ‘Rolihlahla’ was a Xhosa name that colloquially means “troublemaker”.

Years later he reflected, “As a young man, . . . I was very radical and using high-flown language, and fighting everybody.”

So he was also remembered as an impulsive, prideful and ambitious militant.

If that was the man that was about to walk free into a country at the precipice of dramatic social upheaval, many feared that the nation would be torn apart by violence and retributions.

But the man who emerged was jarringly different.

He looked almost unrecognisable; thinner, grey haired and now in his seventies.

Still intelligent, charismatic and intensely focused on his goals.

But he had also developed into an empathetic leader, comfortable with reassessing his thinking, and now he truly believed people could change.

His 27 years of enforced time to consider his own mindset had changed him remarkably, as he later wrote: “The cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself, to search realistically and regularly the process of your own mind and feelings.”

“The fact that you could sit alone and think gave us a wonderful opportunity to change ourselves.”

He’d developed into what proved to be the perfect leader for a fractured nation needing to reconcile centuries of injustice and exploitation.

And he made that change clear in the very first thing he said when addressing a crowd of 100,000 people: "Comrades and fellow South Africans, I greet you all in the name of peace, democracy and freedom. I stand here before you not as a prophet, but as a humble servant of you the people.”

For the next four years he forged a path through the crucial and tense negotiations to end white minority rule and transition to the first multiracial, democratic election in South Africa's history.

And in 1994 after voting for the first time in his life he was elected as the first black President of South Africa.

Nelson Mandela was an extraordinary man, who was incredible in part because of the significant step change in mindset he developed through his life.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.” - Leon C Megginson paraphrasing Charles Darwin

Running on Automatic

Our brains are complex and always active.

The parts of our brain (our ‘old brain’) that generally deal with the things that keep us alive, including the speed of our reactions, evolved over 200 million years ago.

The rest of our brains (our ‘modern brain’) that enable us to plan, reason and be creative, evolved about a million years ago.

These two very different physical parts of our brain operate together in an extraordinarily complicated network of reactions and thoughts.

As part of this messy evolutionary heritage we think in two overlapping ways that were popularised by Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow.

System 1 is fast thinking.

It dominates most of the time, operating with little to no effort, to handle perception, intuition and automatic reactions.

Fast thinking allows us to make quick decisions and judgments based on patterns and past experiences.

System 2 is slow thinking.

It is deliberate and conscious thinking that kicks in when something requires intentional effort.

It intervenes occasionally when problems are complex, analytical, or where more consideration is necessary.

And we think with both systems simultaneously.

We believe we are making rational decisions, but our System 1 reactions and biases drive many of our choices and behaviours.

As Kahneman highlights, “System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine - usually.”

These automatic processes vastly outnumber our conscious ones.

Our brain creates neural networks that are built on instinct or past experience that fire off when needed.

When we encounter something, the most relevant and well used network reacts and we respond quickly.

If the coding is great then good news, but if it’s misguiding us we can react in less useful ways.

Combinations of these automated thinking processes are called our mindsets.

Mindsets Matter

Your mindsets are a collection of assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes that dictate how you make sense of and respond to the situations you encounter.

“Mindset drives and shapes all that we do - how we engage with others and how we behave in every moment and situation.” - The Outward Mindset

They are the mental lens that determines how you face challenges, opportunities, relationships and how you view your own potential.

Your mindsets do three things:

They filter overwhelming amounts of information our brains receive to focus only on the things that seem most important.

They then interpret this information in unique ways.

And based on that interpretation they will activate different parts of your personality system.

Mindsets are the reason why two people can face the same challenge, but react and act in completely different ways.

Mindsets are invisible and hard to measure but they are key to success in life and work.

They enable you to make the most out of your talent and abilities.

Yet most people have no idea this is how their brain is operating.

Nate Boaz and Erica Ariel Fox describe this in their article in McKinsey Quarterly, Change leader, change thyself : “Interestingly, many people aren’t aware that the choices they make are extensions of the reality that operates in their hearts and minds. Indeed, you can live your whole life without understanding the inner dynamics that drive what you do and say. Yet it’s crucial that those who seek to lead powerfully and effectively look at their internal experiences, precisely because they direct how you take action, whether you know it or not. Taking accountability as a leader today includes understanding your motivations and other inner drives. . . . Successful leaders develop profile awareness at a broader and deeper level.”

Fully understanding and being able to develop your mindsets is a significant advantage.

“But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing our development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others – qualities which are within easy reach of every soul.” - Nelson Mandela

In a world where skillsets, hard work and knowledge are commoditised, how you think is what separates the most successful from the rest.

The Mindsets

Mindsets come in sets.

They are a scale with a negative side and a positive side that enable people to operate much more effectively.

There are many different mindsets, but there are four that are backed by a compelling amount of academic study and evidence across the past 30 years.

Growth <> Fixed

Growth mindset is the belief that abilities, intelligence, and skills can be developed through effort, learning, and persistence.

Mind the Performance Gap

Where you land on those scales can vary depending on the situation you are facing.

If you normally operate with a promotion mindset you can find yourself reverting to a prevention mindset in moments of stress.

In those moments you can experience a disconnect between what you know you should do and how you actually act.

It’s why you can leave a tense situation thinking, “why did it say that?”, or, “why didn't I do that?”

Erica Ariel Fox in her book, Winning from Within, calls this your performance gap.

It’s the distance between your current reaction and your optimal reaction.

The more you can close the gap to where you are reacting in the optimal way, the more effective you can be as a person and as a leader.

In top level sports you can see this effect in the why very best athletes (and darts players) perform under the most stressful circumstances.

W. Timothy Gallway talked about this in his book, The Inner Game of Tennis: “Every game is composed of two parts, an outer game and an inner game. The outer game is played against an external opponent to overcome external obstacles, and to reach an external goal. . . . The inner game . . . is the game that takes place in the mind of the player . . . and it is played to overcome all habits of mind which inhibit excellence in performance.“

They have trained their mindsets.

“Internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one’s development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others – qualities which are within easy reach of every soul.” - Nelson Mandela

Changing Minds

Like those athletes you can change and develop your mindsets.

Your brain acts like a muscle and by exercising it you can change the way you react and behave.

This change requires conscious System 2 thinking initially, but with deliberate practice new and more positive neural pathways can be established and become a new System 1 default.

As Daniel Kahneman said, “Mental activities become fast and automatic through prolonged practice.”

It takes deliberate effort and practice to change the way your brain reacts, as described by the psychologist Daniel Goleman when he talks about emotional intelligence:

“The neocortex, the thinking brain that learns technical skills and purely cognitive abilities, gains knowledge very quickly, but the emotional brain does not. To master a new behaviour, the emotional centers need repetition and practice. Improving your emotional intelligence then, is akin to changing your habits. Brain circuits that carry leadership habits have to unlearn the old ones and replace them with the new. The more often a behavioural sequence is repeated, the stronger the underlying brain circuits become. At some point, the new neural pathways become the brain’s default option.”

“One of the most difficult things is not to change society – but to change yourself.” - Nelson Mandela

The Problem With Behaviours

Mindsets define your capacity.

Think of your mindsets as unseen electrical wiring of a building.

If you try to add more and more large electrical appliances all running off the old wiring, the circuits will fail, fuses will blow, and nothing will work.

To add more appliances you have to upgrade the wiring.

Because it's hard to see the direct effects of mindsets, and because they take effort to improve, they are often overlooked.

When people try adopting new behaviours they skip straight to the actions and expect it to take hold by force of will.

It’s why so many attempts to lose weight, or eat healthier, fail.

If you just focus on introducing a diet without changing your neural pathways and how your brain reacts to food, the new behaviours will not take hold.

You have to change the underlying attitudes and beliefs that drove the old behaviour in the first place.

This is also the reason that so much leadership training fails.

Joanna Barsh and Johanne Lavoie, the authors of Centered Leadership, described the cause in a 2014 article: “When we think of leadership, we often focus on the what: external characteristics, practices, behavior, and actions that exemplary leaders demonstrate as they take on complex and unprecedented challenges. We need to see what’s underneath to understand how remarkable leaders lead—and that begins with mindsets.”

If your mindset is at odds with the technique you've just been taught it will not take hold.

If you try to train a leader how to mentor and develop people, but that leader has a fixed mindset and believes that people fundamentally cannot change and develop, that training is doomed.

“When leadership development efforts overlook mindsets, they are overlooking the most foundational element of the leaders’ effectiveness.” - Gottfredson & Reina

If your new technique is just a bolt-on it will not take.

But if you help that same leader develop a growth mindset, and now they believe people can change, they will embrace the training and effect real change.

If you change mindsets the behaviours will follow.

Foundations & Pyramids

Think of it as a pyramid.

Mindsets are the hidden foundation that decide which behaviours you choose and the effectiveness of those behaviours.

And those observable behaviours drive results.

If you want to target improved results, you can’t get there by starting with behaviours.

Without a foundation your pyramid will collapse.

But if you start with mindset change, you shift the foundations and naturally bring the behavioural change with you.

Always lead with mindset change.

“Education is the great engine of personal development. . . . It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.” - Nelson Mandela

Mandela, N., "Long Walk to Freedom", Little, Brown and Company (1994)

Mandela, N., "Conversations With Myself", Macmillan (2010)

Mandela, N., "Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations", Macmillan (2011)

Kahneman, D., "Thinking Fast and Slow", Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2011)

The Arbinger Institute, “The Outward Mindset”, Berrett-Koehler (2016)

Gottfredsson, R., “Success Mindsets”, Morgan James Publishing (2020)

Boaz, N., Fox, E. A., “Change leader, change thyself”, McKinsey Quarterly (2014)

Fox, E. A., “Winning from Within: A Breakthrough Method for Leading, Living, and Lasting Change”, Harper Business (2013)

Gallway, W. T., "The Inner Game of Tennis", Random House (1974)

Daniel Goleman, “Leadership That Gets Results”, Harvard Business Review (2000)

Gottfredson, R., Reina, C. S., “Illuminating the foundational role that mindsets should play in leadership development”, Business Horizons (2021)

Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., “A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing Situations, Dispositions, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure”, Psychological Review (1995)