Rethinking Mindset in Careers: Meta-Mindset as a Meta-Competency

Mindsets refer to implicit beliefs about the extent to which the personal characteristics that shape behavior can be changed. Decades of theorizing and empirical research have focused on how holding a growth mindset tends to serve individuals better in their careers than a fixed mindset. Scholarship on the role of mindsets in career interests, development, and outcomes almost always culminates in calls to encourage individuals with a fixed mindset to adopt a growth mindset. In this conceptual paper, we advance three critiques of current careers scholarship on mindsets: its tendency to dichotomize mindsets as either fixed or growth, its ambiguity about whether mindsets are treated as stable traits or malleable states, and its neglect of the potential downsides of resolutely promoting growth mindsets. We discuss the relevance for the vocational behavior literature of the recent advent of mixed mindsets, the dual-process model of mindsets, and compensatory growth mindset messaging strategies for averting harm resulting from growth mindset interventions. We thereby reframe mindsets from a simplistic, panacea-like individual difference to a dynamic, contextually situated mental framework that individuals can—via the meta-mindset career meta-competency—reflect upon and deliberately nudge to shape how they engage with and experience their evolving careers. We conclude with implications for research, as well as for organizations, career counselors, and individuals engaged in their careers.