Every athlete knows what it feels like when things don’t go as planned — a race that falls apart, a training block that gets hijacked by other life plans, a goal that keeps slipping out of reach. The difference between athletes who push through those moments and those who get stuck often comes down to one thing: mindset. Specifically, whether you have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. Research by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck shows that the way you think about failure, effort, and ability has a profound effect on how far you go — in sport and in life. In this post, we’ll break down what these two mindsets look like in action, why athletes are especially vulnerable to fixed mindset thinking, and how to start shifting the way you respond when things get hard.
Here’s something no one tells you when you sign up for a race: most of the time, things don’t go according to plan. Not even close. When you sign up for a race, or you’re in your pre-season, it’s easy to put on rose-colored glasses and fantasize about best case scenarios.
But then the reality of the season kicks in. Maybe your training gets derailed. Maybe race day arrives and you’re fighting off a cold and feel like crap. Maybe you’re filled with doubts and just not feeling it that day and suddenly the performance you imagined in your head looks nothing like what’s actually happening. The gap between expectation and reality is disorienting, and if you don’t have a framework for navigating it, it can rob you of all your confidence and joy.
The question isn’t whether things will go sideways — they will. The question is what you do when they do.
Why Failure Hits Differently When You’re an Athlete
For most athletes, sport isn’t just something you do– it’s who you are. It’s part of how you define yourself. You’re a runner. A cyclist. A triathlete. That identity is built through years of early mornings, hard workouts, and sacrifices most people around you don’t fully understand.
So when things go wrong — when the race falls apart or the goal slips away — it doesn’t just feel like a bad day. It can feel like a verdict on who you are.
That feeling is a trap. And it’s one athletes fall into often, because the feedback in sport is so immediate and so measurable. Your time. Your power numbers. Your placing. Sport has a way of making everything feel like a direct reflection of your worth. And when that reflection doesn’t look the way you hoped, it’s easy to draw the wrong conclusions.
This is exactly where mindset comes in.
What Is a Fixed Mindset — And Do You Have One?
Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, has spent decades researching what separates people who thrive and achieve from people who plateau. Her conclusion? It comes down to what you believe about your own abilities.
With a fixed mindset, you believe your talents, intelligence, and capabilities are essentially set. You’re either good at something or you’re not. Effort only matters if you’re already talented enough for it to pay off. And failure? Failure is proof that you don’t have what it takes.
Here’s what that looks like in real life: You have a bad race and immediately start questioning whether you’re cut out for this sport. You avoid signing up for events you’re not sure you can do well at. You hesitate to ask your coach for help because you don’t want to seem like you don’t know what you’re doing (and you even alter your workouts in TrainingPeaks so you don’t have to have the conversation!). You train hard, but underneath it all there’s a quiet fear driving you — the need to avoid looking like a failure. It’s the classic saying: are you playing to win, or playing not to lose?
Don’t worry. If this sounds familiar it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. Fixed mindset thinking is deeply human. It’s a protective instinct. The problem is that in sport — and in life — it keeps you small. It keeps you from ever knowing what you are truly capable of.
Even elite athletes aren’t immune. Pro golfer Rory McIlroy has spoken openly about a period in his career — roughly 2015 to 2020 — where he held back without fully realizing it. Looking back, he put it simply: “You have to be willing to get your heart broken and I think I went through a few years in my career where I wasn’t willing to put myself out there — and I think that is possibly why I didn’t win as much as I could have.” That’s fixed mindset in action at the highest level of sport. Self-protection dressed up as strategy.
What Does a Growth Mindset Actually Look Like in Sport?
A growth mindset isn’t about being relentlessly positive or pretending a bad race didn’t suck. It’s not toxic positivity dressed up in sport psychology language. A growth mindset means you believe you just haven’t nailed it yet. It means you believe your abilities can be developed through effort, good strategy, and help from the right people. When you have a growth mindset, failure isn’t a verdict, it’s data.
Here’s what that looks like in practice: You have a bad race and you’re disappointed — genuinely, deeply disappointed. But after you’ve given yourself time to feel that, you get curious. What happened? What can I learn from this? What would I do differently? You sign up for the hard event even though you’re not sure you’re ready, because you know that’s exactly how you’ll find out what you’re capable of. You ask your coach the uncomfortable questions because you understand that’s how you get better.
With a growth mindset, the goal shifts. You’re no longer training to avoid failure. You’re training to find your edge, and you accept that failure is part of the strategy. You embrace failure as getting you one step closer. And you aren’t defined by the failure, you’re defined by your response to it. You know that you must risk failure to risk success.
That’s exactly the shift McIlroy made. When he finally allowed himself to be fully vulnerable — to risk real heartbreak — everything changed. He stopped protecting himself from losing and started competing to win. The results followed.
Growth mindset doesn’t mean the hard moments stop hurting. It means they stop defining you.
One of the most powerful places to practice this shift is in the language you use.
When you face a setback, your brain moves fast. It wants to categorize the situation quickly — and if you’ve been running fixed mindset thought patterns for a while, that automatic response can hijack you before you even realize it’s happening. Setbacks are inevitable. How far they set you back is largely up to you — and it starts with the words you choose.
I use a mental training tool with my athletes called Obstacles to Opportunities. When you’re facing something you’re dreading or struggling with, try moving deliberately through these four filters. Read each of the defining sentences below and for each sentence, write down the thoughts and emotions that immediately come to mind when you think about your situation through each filter.
- This is going to suck.You’re fighting the situation entirely — which creates psychological and physiological tension that makes everything harder.
- This is going to be hard.You’re still resisting, but you reluctantly move forward. You do it — but you’re miserable the whole way.
- This is going to be a challenge.Now you’re ready to face it. You know it’s going to be difficult and you choose to rise to meet it.
- This is going to be an opportunity.This is the growth mindset in action. You’re not just ready — you’re looking for ways to use this moment to get better.
You may not be able to jump straight to “opportunity” every time. That’s okay. The practice is in moving through the continuum noticing what shifts depending on the language you choose to use. The more you do it, the more natural it becomes.
How Do You Actually Make the Shift?
There’s a metaphor I keep coming back to when I work with athletes on this. Persistence — real persistence — doesn’t mean standing at a closed door and knocking harder. It means having the awareness, and the courage, to step back and try a different door. Not every door is going to open for you. The quicker you can accept that, the quicker you find the one that will.
That’s growth mindset in practice. Not forcing. Not white-knuckling the same approach until something breaks (most likely you). Staying committed to the destination while staying flexible about the route.
So how do you actually build that? Here are three shifts that make a real difference.
Notice the story you’re telling yourself. Fixed mindset doesn’t always announce itself. It shows up quietly — in the way you explain a bad race to yourself, in the excuses you make for not signing up, in the voice that says I’m just not built for this. Start paying attention to the narrative. When something goes wrong, what’s the first thing you tell yourself? Is it about your ability — or about the situation? That distinction matters.
Separate your performance from your identity. You are not your finish time. You are not your power numbers. You are not your placing. These are data points, not verdicts. When you tie your self-worth to outcomes, every setback becomes a threat. When you separate who you are from how you performed on a given day, you create room to improve and protect your relationship with your sport.
Get comfortable being a beginner. Growth requires doing things you’re not good at yet. That’s uncomfortable, especially for athletes who are used to being competent. But choosing to stay in your comfort zone is fixed mindset disguised. Lean into the discomfort. Growth does not happen without growing pains.
Here’s a question worth sitting with: When things get hard, are you moving toward something — or away from something?
That answer tells you a lot about where your mindset is right now. And the good news is, wherever you’re starting from, it can shift. Growth mindset isn’t a personality trait you either have or you don’t. It’s a practice. It’s the story you choose to tell yourself after a hard race, the door you decide to knock on next, the moment you choose curiosity over judgment.
If you’re in a place right now where the setbacks feel bigger than the progress, and the gap between where you are and where you want to be feels more discouraging than motivating, that’s exactly what coaching is designed to help you navigate. Not to fix you, because you don’t need fixing. But to help you build the mental tools to find your edge and actually stay there.
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Great description of the two different mindsets, and a reminder that what we do and how we do never has to be cast in stone. Can apply it to my own experiences as someone who started doing triathlons at age 55 and at first struggled with accepting the reality that some things take time, repetition, and persistence.I will check out Carol Dweck’s book.
It’s definitely a book worth checking out! You are so right – it’s important to accept that things (especially the BIG things worth doing!) require time, repetition, and persistence. I have a quote hanging over my desk that I use as an important reminder when I am trying to force something or find myself frustrated with having to adjust the timeline in my mind: “Our patience will achieve more than our force.” -Edmund Burke