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Create Ownership: Help your Team Enter a Challenge Mindset with Jane McGonigal, Game Designer, Author of SuperBetter
The challenge mindset is a state of mind that you enter into when you have accepted a challenge. It’s a positive way of thinking, a sense of self-motivation and optimism that only comes when you feel in control of a challenge that you’re facing. Now in a lot of workplaces we’re told what to do, we’re given tasks, we’re given projects, we’re given milestones that we have not chosen for ourselves. So we approach it with the opposite of a challenge mindset. We approach it with a threat mindset. That’s why so many people are under motivated or anxious, stressed out at the workplace. They haven’t chosen the challenge for themselves.
One way that you can help people enter into that challenge mindset, which by the way, every time you play a game we’re in a challenge mindset because the game has challenged us to do something difficult. Whether it’s a goal and feel we have to get a little ball into a little hole standing really far away and using a stick, that’s a challenge we willingly embrace when we play games.
Allow others to opt into challenges
So you need to give people the opportunity to opt into challenges. These are goals that they will set for themselves that they are pursuing because of their own interest and curiosity, because they want to develop a certain skill or see what’s possible. You want to give people the chance to decide, to make meaningful choices about which project or task they want to put their energy into so that they can take that power and responsibility and have the challenge mindset instead of the threat mindset. So that’s a really simple way if you want to get people into the gainful mindset you have to make sure that they are making choices about the challenges or the goals that they’re tackling. And the more they own that, the more likely they are to bring their gameful strength into the workplace.