What Is a Mindshift?

What Is a Mindshift?

A word without a dictionary entry

Mindshift has no fixed dictionary definition. Nobody knows who first said it.

The everyday phrase “my mind shifted” simply fused into one word.

As a single word, mindshift first appears in English books in 1971 and grows around 2000 (Google Books Ngram Viewer, English books, 1900–2019).

Today, English more often says mindset shift: changing the habits of how you think.

A mindset is the habit of thinking you have picked up from experience.

A mindshift does not switch your feelings. It switches your mindset.

A level 99 warrior does not change jobs

In Dragon Quest III, you can have party members change jobs at the abbey. But their level returns to 1 (Dragon Quest III official site, “SYSTEM” (Japanese)).

A level 99 warrior is strong as long as they stay a warrior. After changing jobs, they are weak for a while.

So they stay. Thinking is the same: a familiar mindset is stronger and easier to get praised for.

A mindset is not the villain. For the same kind of problem, the mindset is what makes you fast.

The trouble starts when the kind of problem changes, and you keep applying yesterday’s way of finding answers to questions with no clear answer.

The harder you push the logic, the more you land on answers you have seen before. Maybe you are still fighting with a warrior’s mindset.

Shifting is a mental function, not a personality

In 2000, Akira Miyake and colleagues studied three abilities behind how the mind is managed (Miyake et al., “The Unity and Diversity of Executive Functions,” Cognitive Psychology, 2000).

The three are: shifting your mindset, updating what you keep in mind, and holding back an automatic reaction.

The three were linked, yet could be measured as separate abilities.

Shifting is not an inborn personality trait. It is a mental function you can measure.

You can practice it. For example, try answering this.

Build the finest castle using things that do not exist.

No stone, no wood. Still, come up with three answers: a castle built only of words, a castle of air no one dares approach, a castle of the memory that one once stood here.

As you line up answers, the mindset “a castle is something you build with stone” comes loose.

The spells you learned stay

Even after changing jobs at the abbey, the spells and skills learned in the previous job carry over to the next.

A mindshift does not throw away your old way of thinking either. Your ability to reason step by step still works inside the new mindset.

By the way, there are similar words too. Try comparing them.

• Mindset: your current job. The habit of thinking itself.
• Mindshift: changing jobs. Switching your own mindset.

Your level goes back to 1. Still, what you built up stays.

Takeaways

The harder I look for the right answer, the more I get the same answer as before. Lately, I feel even my junior colleague, three years into the company, is not really nodding along.

Maybe I was still fighting as a level 99 warrior.

Level 1 is scary! But the spells stay.

Should I visit the abbey while I still can?

Trivia

• Executive functions: a name for the mental abilities that switch or hold back thoughts and actions toward a goal.
• Google Books Ngram Viewer: a Google tool that shows, year by year, how often a word appears in the books it has collected.
• Paradigm: the model way of seeing and solving problems that a field takes for granted.

History

The beginning: people lock onto what worked

In 1942, Luchins used puzzles where you measure water with jars to show how people lock onto a learned method.

He called this lock Einstellung, a German word for set or stance (Luchins, “Mechanization in problem solving: The effect of Einstellung,” Psychological Monographs, 1942).

It became clear that thinking has a mindset, and that the mindset can get in the way.

The turning point: a mindset can be switched

In 2000, Miyake and colleagues singled out the ability to shift mindset as one of the pillars of mental function (Miyake et al., “The Unity and Diversity of Executive Functions,” Cognitive Psychology, 2000).

People do not only lock up. They can also switch, and that became something measurable.

In 2006, the psychologist Carol Dweck published Mindset. She wrote that people who believe abilities can be developed tend to grow more than those who believe abilities are fixed (Penguin Random House, Mindset).

The idea that thinking habits can change spread to schools and workplaces.

What is happening now

• In 2017, the engineer Barbara Oakley published Mindshift, using the word for learning anew as an adult (Penguin, Mindshift).
• In 2018, an analysis combining studies on growth mindset and school achievement was published. Overall, the link was small (Sisk et al., Psychological Science, 2018).
• In English books, the phrase mindset shift grew sharply in the 2010s (Google Books Ngram Viewer, English books, 1900–2019).

What comes next

Mindshift moved from a research term to a slogan for changing yourself.

The wider a slogan spreads, the lighter its content tends to get. People can change their words while their mindset stays a warrior’s.

Who will visit the abbey next is still unknown.