Why ask, “How are we smart?” rather than ask, “How smart are we?
Are you aware that we each come equipped with at least eight intelligences? Or did you know that IQ is fluid, and not fixed or stagnant?
If we seniors are aware that intelligences grow with use, and regardless of age we’ll also likely not be surprised that we can grow and refine all or some unique intelligences daily.
Sound like a worthwhile reason for adopting a growth mindset that engages fluid intelligences, and letting go of a fixed or stagnant mindset?
HOW DOES A GROWTH MINDSET IMPACT OUR INTELLIGENCES?
We likely remember how a growth mindset is open-minded thinking. How then does a growth mindset help us generate solutions from many intelligences that bounce us back after challenges?
A growth mindset is available to all who take time to practice any or all of our intelligences. Yes, anyone can do it, simply by using each of our intelligences daily or weekly for example. When we choose growth mindset approaches, we choose an art and science of creative reactions that engage any of our eight unique IQs described in this post.
We’ll learn to recognize emotional cues with our intrapersonal or intuitive IQ. We’ll diffuse disappointments, and access a healthier, more agile social brain, as we draw upon and engage our interpersonal IQ. We’ll grow and reinforce an ability to articulate creative ideas by engaging our linguistic IQ, and so on.
Call it a boost for our brain’s multiple domains as we use and extend each intelligence in meaningful and playful ways. To practice growth mindset reactions is to allow ourselves to make mistakes, regardless of what intelligence we operate.
When slip-ups happen, we grow our personal intelligences when we choose to avoid judging ourselves. Open mindedness moves us forward again and again whenever we create opportunities to grow and change in any areas described below. Sounds simple and obvious, right? Well, it’s really all about doing it more, so we can do it easier.
As we practice living a growth mindset by engaging and growing our IQs, we’ll discover ways to reshape restrictive beliefs as we become aware of flexible growth mindsets. The exercises we engage here will give us tools to boost social skills and tackle diverse problems with confidence. With daily practice, we’ll gradually begin to set goals that lay stronger foundations upon which to build lifelong dreams from eight distinctive and growing perspectives.
HOW DOES A FIXED MINDSET IMPACT OUR INTELLIGENCES?
Fixed mindsets are based on a belief that our capabilities are hardwired traits, and our IQ does not grow or change with use. With a fixed mindset we rarely see things as they really are, because we insist on seeing things more as we are.
Our fixed mindset leads us to believe our friends may be natural athletes with high kinesthetic abilities or transformational leaders showing high interpersonal abilities. We will compare ourselves negatively and default to the sad belief that we are born without soccer skills, or leadership acumen.
Simply stated a fixed mindset has us regret that we’re born with certain inabilities and are simply stuck with these deficiencies.
No wonder seniors who fared less well in broken school settings, now tend to give up rather than try new approaches or take adventurous risks to enjoy a full range of fluid intelligences. With a fixed or closed mindset, we likely look at seniors who do well and conclude we can’t learn that same skill they prosper in because it’s too late.
A fixed mindset holds seniors back whenever we believe things about ourselves such as “I’m not organized”; “I’ll never be good at sports”; “Science is too hard”; “I can’t create”; “I’m always late”; “I can’t make friends”; “I’ll never be able to _________.” We can fill in the blank as our fixed mindset keeps these inner fears alive, and keep us sticking to only what we know now and nothing new or revolutionary that spawns with a growth mindset.
No wonder no risk seems reasonable when our personal potential seems stuck. No wonder we feel powerless and inadequate.
A fixed mindset inhibits all of our unique intelligences and stifles our potential for growth. We find ourselves stagnant and robbed of joy. Have we experienced this stagnation, or have we observed others debilitated with fixed beliefs?
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Rather than fall into the trap of a fixed mindset where failure seems final, we can become aware that effort and hard work inevitably ends in thriving and flourishing each and every intelligence detailed below.
We inevitably can reshape our limiting mindset to believe instead that, “Hard work and practice over time helps us immensely in growing personal intelligences, in sports and in endless mental and emotional skills and talents.”
Here’s the skinny:
We may grow musical intelligence by composing a song or attending a musical workshop.
Perhaps we grow mathematical intelligence by organizing a weekly schedule, or researching numerical data to back up an idea.
We grow linguistic intelligence by reading, writing, debating or public speaking.
We might improve spatial intelligence by drawing, painting or sketching illustrations to demonstrate how we are learning a new thing.
Perhaps we’ll improve our naturalistic intelligence by hiking along a river, or testing water quality, or listening to the cadence in bird songs.
We may grow our kinesthetic intelligence by building a prototype, dancing, or taking part in a favorite sport.
We grow intrapersonal intelligence by logging our feelings, journaling, or thinking deeply to clarify our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs.
We grow interpersonal intelligence by interviewing others we admire, or spending time with a friend to learn more about something they do well. We might even then learn even more by teaching that newly learned skill to help another senior or family member.
The best way to measure our ongoing growth mindset and avoid fixed stalls in any intelligence is to simply use that intelligence to solve a problem we face or build a quality product we’d like to invent in order to improve our situation.
Accuracy and quality can be assured by listing five or so attributes we expect to incorporate into our solution, end product or innovation. Each quality trait we listed and embedded accurately or artistically adds another measure of excellence. Simply stated, we measure growth here by tangible outcomes. Does that make sense?
We also engage our working memory (which is the brain’s growth mindset apparatus) to gather new facts, store them temporarily and include them into creative solutions we propose and execute.
We avoid defaulting into our basal ganglia (which is the brain’s storage place for stockpiling frequently followed routines in fixed mindset ruts) with each reuse of these comfort-zone habits.
Even though they are only recognized by the best schools and progressive organizations, we all come equipped with these multiple literacies. We can blame outmoded schools for the fact that we use very few as seniors.
You have likely surmised that we learn best by participating, and learn least by that boring lecture or meeting we endured. Furthermore we’ll likely agree with research that shows how lectures can literally work against human brains. It’s the same for meetings where few seniors talk or engage ideas for the most part. Specifically …
We retain less than 5% heard in lectures, while we retain more than 90% of what we teach others at the same time as we learn, and engage several or all of our unique intelligences. Simply put, lectures benefit speakers, not seniors who hope to learn, and that fact likely keeps rhetoric from one ‘expert” rolling, while many senior brains waste their wisdom.
Multiple intelligences, on the other hand, increase motivation and achievement for honing new literacy skills any topic at every age. Let’s say we wish to learn more about the economy, in order to understand why we’re suddenly spiraling downward.
Ask the lecturer in this video and he will say he engages listeners. He might even go on to suggest today’s audiences expect too much and give too little. Ask senior listeners though, and we may more likely support these 100 reasons to run hard from lectures!
Fixed ideas of HOW SMART WE ARE keep us seniors busy as if on gerbil wheels anxiously chasing perfection.
Flexible growth mindset ideas of HOW WE ARE SMART however, keep us seniors risking creativity to grow and share brilliance. Ready for brilliant over busy?
Perhaps together with a friend or family member we might consider how lately we are reviving our multiple intelligences as a way to develop and grow our unique literacies. If so we’d share how:
1. Mathematical or logical literacy enables us to trace the logical chains of reasoning to discern where problems rooted.
2. Verbal linguistic literacy includes reading and discussing new trends, as well as writing a plan for personal growth, and perhaps even proposing it to our senior social circle.
3. Musical or rhythmic literacy possibly has us composing musical solutions or studying those who have expanded a senior solution through music.
4. Visual spatial literacy would have us create or use images, graphs, or visual portrayals to understand and explain problems and their proposed possibilities.
5. Bodily-kinesthetic literacy would engage us in movement, building and handling materials in ways that deepen understanding about past and future senior challenges and opportunities.
6. Interpersonal or social literacy would help us to discern and respond well to different moods, temperaments, motivation, and desires of different seniors as we relate to life not as a bust, but more as a boost.
7. Intrapersonal or introspective literacy taps into our self-knowledge, wisdom, integrity and discrimination for good or bad life choices we make for ourselves and others to thrive.
8. Naturalistic literacy gives us mental tools to draw on patterns and designs in nature as a way to see real world problems and propose nature-related solutions for ongoing senior growth.
A new look at the brainpower within multiple intelligences is helping us to improve learning by targeting and growing more senior brainpower than can be found in lectures or speeches which leave participants with more brain cramps than usable facts.
So what criteria is required before an ordinary skill became an intelligence?
Multiple intelligences or (MI) were first discovered by Howard Gardner, at Harvard University, who I have known personally for over thirty years.
As discussed, these eight intelligences include: interpersonal, intrapersonal or intuitive, verbal linguistic, visual spatial, naturalistic, bodily kinesthetic, musical and math.
What are the research criteria for MI validity? Each intelligence must contain The following:
1. Psychological tests (so they can be measured)
2. Existent prodigies (such as Mozart at 4)
3. Brain function (or be located in a specific location or domain)
4. Developmental history (show incremental stages of growth over time)
5. Evolutionary history (were development over time)
6. Symbol system (such as included in musical or math symbol system)
Remember that to use all eight of the above IQs is to ask how we are smart as opposed to asking how smart are we?
How we think about intelligence has a lot to do with how we’ll take advantage of our abilities to grow and expand our lives both mentally and emotionally. It will likely start with small and simple changes such as asking ourselves a new question.
What if we were asking the wrong question, though, and that question kept us in a fixed mindset mode? if we hope to discover, grow and engage a wider range of capabilities or intelligences, we’ll simple alter the question to ask, “How are we smart?” as opposed to asking, “ How smart are we?
Let’s consider the original purpose of IQ tests. Alfred Binet was a French psychologist who developed the first IQ test as a tool to identify learners who failed to find support or survive well in public schools.
The French government in the late 1800s commissioned Binet to help them identify learners who needed more support to learn well. With collaborator Theodore Simon, Binet used what we knew then about brains in order to develop the Binet-Simon Intelligence Scale.
To be fair, Binet did not believe that our IQ was fixed and he did adhere to the notion that IQ scores tend to improve with motivation, for instance.
With an advent of multiple intelligences however, new neural discoveries, and Mita brain based tools for growth mindset approaches, imagine the question shifting from asking, How smart are you? to inquire instead by asking, How are you smart?
Our new question, based on updated facts about our brains at any age, changes the way seniors can be even more excited to lead, learn and grow successfully!
We now know that a senior’s intelligence is fluid, not fixed and we are all assured that we can use and grow all eight distinctive intelligences until we either pass on or succumb to serious cognitive decline.
Good news – we already come with a unique mix of IQs and this survey helps us further to discover our awesome strengths as seniors!
We can also enjoy the journey of growing those few areas that we’ve ignored in past, or that may also be a bit weaker.
Discover all the intelligences and then we can track our own smarts using the graphs in this free resource.
What newly discovered strengths will add to our planned senior adventures today?
If we believe IQ is fixed, then it could well be so for us, because of the way belief fuels or limits mental plasticity and brainpower.
If we want more intelligence by the end of today though?
Then we’ll simply act on one or more of our multiple intelligences, and expect our dendrite brain cells to reconfigure for even more intelligence in that domain.
How are we smart? We’ll likely agree with researchers, that’s a far more accurate question, than the traditional – How smart are you?
It also gives us a starting point into growth as seniors, and makes room to develop higher IQ in several areas. How so?
Further Growth Mindset Ways that Seniors Engage Multiple Intelligences
1. Looking for more linguistic intelligence? Want words to come easier, poetry to mean more, speeches to ring truer, or books to yield more wealth?
Then play with words, do crosswords, compete in scrabble, debate, or offer to speak to a local senior club. Search for new ideas on the internet, write a blog, or tell our best idea in 140 letters or less on X, and that too will boost our linguistic brainpower.
What could we do today, to gain even more mastery over language?
2. Interested in more musical intelligence? Want music to move and shake our creative projects? Pop on Gregorian Chant to pop us out of stress. Play Bach or Handel as background music to plan our next creative project. Toss tunes from Shumann, Chopin or Liszt into our romance and watch it grow with senior’s grace. .
Or gain inspiration from Soul, Blues or Calypso. Don Campbell shows how to gain musical intelligence to jack up productivity, or to improve our moods on a bad day?
3. Want more intrapersonal intelligence? Need intuition for better decisions, common sense for keen insights, contentment in our own company, simple ability to laugh more on a busy day?
Thanks to neurogenesis, we now know this intelligence too will grow with use. Panic a bit too fast? Feel sidelined a bit too much? Run from risks or new adventures? Grow sad when others celebrate family ties?
If so, we’d enjoy a heaping dose of intrapersonal smarts to add contentment and turn those tougher days around. Plan a lunch alone at our favorite digs, practice smiling to improve a mood, ask a fun question to uptick our day, or plan a risk today that would ratchet up contentment. Simply put, whenever we do tasks related to introspection or personal intelligence, our brain begins to rewire brainpower for more clever senior wisdom in us.
4. Need more bodily kinesthetic intelligence? Perhaps we’d like to dance better? Then step and move beside a senior who dances well. Want to move with coordinated grace? Then shuffle and stretch in ways we hope to grow more memory within body muscles themselves.
It’s much the same for skills as kinesthetic intelligence equips us to smack a tennis ball with greater ease, or put together furniture with finer flare. Do it to grow it. Then watch for wonder as our senior brain kicks into kinesthetic mode or shifts into movement gears that zap alive with use, regardless of age or limitations that hold too many seniors back.
5. Dream of more mathematical or logical intelligence? Why not start a schedule to plan our coming week, since sequencing and patterning is at math smart’s core. So’s organization at the heart of math IQ as is seeing the bigger picture.
Like other intelligences mathematical genius grows more through math ideas that take us feet first, and then on new flights – with its use. Mistakes add awesome growth opportunities in math. Sadly though, schools use errors as arrows to kill a brain’s best. Even Einstein said that Education’s what remains after one’s forgotten everything learned in school. Have you found a growth mindset senior who shows ways to use and grow logical mathematical, in spite of limitations learned at school?
6. After more visual or spatial intelligence? Grab a paper along with anything that writes and sketch our funniest memory in the last few weeks. Attend an art class, and learn to paint. Visit galleries, surround ourselves with images that teach us more about life, or create an avatar to show our thoughts to an online community. Graph ideas, select visuals to explain life, or take photographs to record the week of people we value to use our spatial intelligence and to develop it more through use.
7. Into higher interpersonal intelligence? Interview a senior you admire to discover what makes that person smart? Ask, “How are you smart?” rather than the more traditional question “How smart are you? Narrow that person’s narrative about personal intelligence into one or two words, and we have already grown intelligence interpersonally. Would we agree that people high in interpersonal intelligence will come away with amazing insights here? Or can we see how the exchange itself offers opportunity to expand our interpersonal acumen?
8. Long for more naturalistic intelligence? If we spend excessive time breathing in refreshing scents of spring, surrounded by sounds of brooks running, or captivated by natures’ change for different seasons, we likely possess good amounts of naturalistic intelligence. We’ll gain more though, by using patterns and designs found outside to solve problem faced in any situation. Soil types, animal or tree patterns, or rock formations – all amount to nature’s wisdom and ours.
It may be far too simple to say use it or lose it, when we consider that we possess more than one or two intelligences. For better balance why not take brainpower to new levels. First let’s survey our multiple intelligences on a regular basis to see what’s stronger and what acumen we’d like to expand even more.
Then, plan one activity today that involves a strength we’d most enjoy, and another that dips into a weaker area we hope to strengthen, for a smoother ride in one of the areas listed above. What shifts would an additional intelligence add to top our IQ image? Why not add that intelligence today and expect the best?
Session 8 – How are You Smart?
Two – Footed Questions to Address Mita Growth Mindset Senior Sessions
1). How does the question, How am I smart? differ from How smart am I?
2). Do you see IQ as fixed or fluid, and how so?
3). Which of the eight intelligences help you shine most?
4). Which intelligence do you use least?
5). What intelligence would those close to you name as your best? Why so?
6). What would be your favorite way to grow your intelligences?
7). How do you see age as an influence on growing our intelligences?
8). What intelligence is your favorite and how so?
9). How do you see a growth mindset as it relates to multiple intelligences?
FINAL Question: What’s one activity we can do to remove a fixed mindset and add a growth mindset for this topic? Graph your intelligences using the graph above, and show your strengths. Then share how you use strengths daily, and describe how you plan to improve on a weaker intelligence by using it in a fun way this week.