3.1 What is a growth mindset?
A growth mindset is the belief that abilities and intelligence can develop through effort and learning. With this mindset, failures become opportunities to improve, and setbacks are seen as part of the learning process.
Activity 5: Exploring your mindset
Timing: 10 minutes
Complete a short self-assessment to determine whether you tend towards a fixed or growth mindset. Reflect on how this influences your response to setbacks. Consider one area where adopting a growth mindset could change how you approach research setbacks. For example:
- Fixed mindset: ‘I failed, so I’m not good at this.’
- Growth mindset: ‘I failed, but I can learn and improve.’
Below are a few options, pick the one that works best for you.
- Psychology Today: Growth Mindset Test [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] This one is quick to do and helps you to see where you fall on the mindset scale.
- IDRlabs Growth Mindset / Fixed Mindset Test This is based on Carol Dweck’s work and offers a more detailed self‐assessment.
- UNC Mindset Quiz (PDF) A printable worksheet version; useful if you would like a paper version to work through instead.
In this video, Prof. Francesco Crea discusses how researchers can stay motivated over time by connecting their work to meaningful impact. He reflects on how setbacks can be reframed as part of a larger journey, helping to sustain focus, purpose, and engagement in research.
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 2: Staying motivated in research – learning from setbacks and driving real impact.
Transcript: Video 2: Staying motivated in research – learning from setbacks and driving real impact.
[text on screen]
What does resilience mean to you as a researcher?
Francesco Crea
I’m not a big fan of the term resilience to be totally honest, because it’s a term that was originally used to describe materials.
Being a biologist, I’m a firm believer in the fact that humans, as biological organisms, are much more than materials.
So I think that as a researcher, rather than resilient, you should be able to learn from past experience and bounce back as a way of growing.
So I think that motivation and growth are much more important than resilience itself.
[text on screen]
How have you developed motivation and resilience during your research career?
Francesco Crea
I think that developing motivation is absolutely important and sustaining motivation is important.
Well, the first thing about being a researcher is being passionate about your research.
So, for example, my research is about finding new therapies in incurable cancers.
So my motivation, for example, was as a medical doctor to actually see some of these patients with the incurable cancers and understanding the importance of research in finding new therapies for these patients.
Another big motivation once I had the fortune of becoming principal investigator is the young scientists around me.
They are all very keen to learn and do exciting experiments and, obviously this has a very positive impact on myself and seeing some of them growing and becoming independent scientists of themselves.
This is another big motivation.
And then of course other motivations are to have like a real impact on clinical developments.
So for example, one of the of the liquid biopsies that we have co-developed to basically find, it’s a blood test that is used in cancer patients to predict their response to certain therapies, now is in a phase two clinical trial.
So seeing that a long story that started in the lab is slowly evolving into something that has clinical impact is another motivation.
So you need to take your motivation from different, different aspects of the work because of course the work is also full of disappointments.
[text on screen]
What practical strategies do you use to stay motivated?
Francesco Crea
Well, in order to stay motivated, I try to go back to the original reasons for doing research, which for me, as I said, is to have a positive clinical impact.
But I also have some practical tips like for example, when I have a disappointing feedback like again, a grant rejection or a paper rejection, I try not to think about it for a while, maybe do something fun with my family or just going for a walk. We are very lucky at the OU, We have a beautiful campus.
So normally after, you know, disappointing grant rejections, I will go out for a for a walk in the, on campus and try, try not to think about it for a, for a while and, and come back to the rejection itself, to the feedback with fresh eyes and trying to think as, of these rejection or, set back as a, as an opportunity for growth.
That’s why I think it’s growth, it’s a really key step in, in keeping motivation during your research career.
So go back to that reviewers feedback, for example, which you didn’t like at the beginning, and trying to see what parts of that feedback you can use to improve your research to become a better researcher.
[text on screen]
How do you cope with setbacks?
Francesco Crea
So I think I answered the question about how to cope with setbacks partially in my previous answer, but I’ll expand on that.
I think it’s really important not to take, for example, reviewers feedback personally, but actually to see them as an opportunity to grow and to learn how to be a better researcher.
For example, if the way you have analysed your data is criticised, you go back and you try to improve your way you analyse the data.
Or if you should be, if you are told that you should be clearer in how to analyse, or expose your hypothesis, you go back to what you’ve written and try to improve that particular bit.
So try to analyse carefully the feedback and try to abstract from, from what you find maybe unpleasant and just objectively look at your work and say, yes, I can actually improve these little bits.
And also being consistent and, and trying to make even small progress everyday really helps you to get out of the of the negative moods that maybe a set back can generate.
It’s also really important to seek support from mentors, for example, from your peers.
I’m very fortunate. I have wonderful collaborators in the UK, US, Canada, Italy and other countries, and we all work in a very similar field.
And, and so we support each other and it’s really important to talk to these peers after a set back and try to find ways of again becoming better researchers.
And finally, talk to your research group.
Early career researchers are normally very enthusiastic about their work and they can be really inspiring.
And also it’s really important to have good mentors.
Again, I’m very lucky here at the OU I’ve had some wonderful mentors who really helped me understand how to build my career.
And they warned me that, you know, success is not something that you should take for granted and that if you are successful one time, maybe you will be unsuccessful the next time, but it’s not a good reason to give up.
[text on screen]
Can you share one personal example of a challenge you faced and how you dealt with it?
Francesco Crea
Yes, I think I’ll go for one of the biggest grant I had applied for.
It was, it was called the Research Innovation Award.
I had applied and this is a very long process.
It’s like a one year process.
You submit as in many grants, a stage 1 application.
Then if you are lucky you are short-listed, very few applicants are short-listed.
And then you submit a bigger application and then you have reviewers comments and you have to respond to the reviewers comments.
So this process, let’s say starts in October of one year and going through the different steps, it ends up in July of the following year.
So it’s almost one full year of work.
And for this grant, I was leading a big international team.
We had wonderful feedback from the panel.
We were encouraged to submit to Stage 2.
We had good feedback also from the reviewers and I was fairly motivated, very positive about it.
But then in the end, the grant was not, was rejected after more than one year of work.
So obviously this was a huge set back.
And like I said, you know, I went for a walk on campus.
It wasn’t very helpful in that particular occasion because I had spent a lot of time and invested a lot of work and hopes in these.
But gradually I came to realise that, that particular funder had appreciated the fact that what we proposed was innovative, but they thought in this particular case what we were proposing was a bit too risky.
So I thought, I asked myself, is there anything maybe a bit less innovative but more closer to clinical application that I can propose?
And I actually went back to my data and I said, yes, there is.
There is actually this, this idea which I could propose, which was a practical idea which could change possibly the lives of many patients, which I had shelved because I thought it was not innovative enough.
So I went back and I proposed a project which was more, more practical and I went through another year’s project and this time we were, we were lucky enough to be to be funded.
So I think in that particular case, I’ve learned that striking the balance between innovation and practical applications is important.
So in the end, I’m, I’m actually glad that the second grant was funded rather than the first one because I think with the second one we are able to actually do what I really want to do which have clinical impact on patients that have like incurable cancers.
Video 2: Staying motivated in research – learning from setbacks and driving real impact.
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