How to be the type of person everyone wants to know

This is the secret to showing people a good time

You can listen to this piece in four parts here: TikTok (Part I, Part II), YouTube (Part I, Part II) and Instagram (Part I, Part II).

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Some people are simply a joy to be around. The conversation flows effortlessly. You laugh, or you learn something. You look forward to seeing them and when you part ways, you feel like their company was a valuable use of your time.

Obviously, this connection has partly to do with chemistry – how much you have in common and how your respective lives are going at the time, blah blah blah, but what if there’s more to it than that? I believe this kind of person actually has a secret ingredient.

Understanding your mindset

According to psychologist Carol Dweck, a person’s mindset can come in two basic flavours — fixed or growth — and by understanding the difference between them, we can shed light on why some people are better than others at showing us a good time.

1. Fixed mindset – "I am what I am"

In a nutshell, someone with a fixed mindset believes we are what we are, and that things — meaning personality traits, capabilities, beliefs about ourselves, etc. — don’t really change. For example, with a fixed mindset, if I’m bad at maths, then that’s just the way I am. I’ll always be bad at maths, and there really isn’t any point in trying to improve my skills. If I think of myself as funny, or creative, or nice — then these things will always be true, and, importantly, the skills involved will always come easily. 

2. Growth mindset – "I am what I am now, but that’s different from what I was before and what I will be in the future" 

On the other hand, someone with a growth mindset believes in constant evolution. I am what I am now, but that’s different from what I was before, and what I will be in the future. So, if I’m bad at maths right now, I can work at it and build proficiency, potentially getting really good, given the proper motivation. 

Equally, if I don’t find myself to be very funny now, I can practise my joke-telling skills and comedic delivery, and maybe I’ll have them rolling in the aisles one day. Everything is a matter of effort.

The thing is that while it can seem like a really confident thing to believe ourselves to be fundamentally good at something, in the long run, it backfires, leading to anxious social comparison, fear of failure and self-doubt… and these things, as well as weighing heavily for us, can sometimes make us quite difficult to be around. 

When in this kind of anxiously fixed mindset, we tend to think pretty much exclusively about ourselves – worrying about how we look, what we’re saying, and how we come across. This is a natural reaction to fear of any kind – our brains start to check in, trying to keep us safe – but it means that we can completely forget to think about the wellbeing or happiness of anyone else, and (as well as not being so great for them) that can keep us in our own negative cycle. 

The mindset continuum

Some people tend more toward a fixed mindset and others toward growth, but, like pretty much everything in life, this is not binary. Most of us will shift between the two outlooks depending on context and mood and a whole load of other things. And because our mindset is relevant to almost every part of life, this means we can potentially find ourselves sliding up and down the scale in a pretty much constant state of flux, which has the potential to be quite stressful and disorienting – although not as stressful as spending the whole time at the fixed end. Let's dive into some of the main problems that come with having this particular outlook. 

This is why you need to let go of the idea that you're special 

The way we evaluate our personal sense of worth, success and ability differs depending on where we sit on the continuum. 

If you believe in natural talent more than the human ability to learn and develop not just skills but personality traits and perspectives, too – in other words, if you're one to say "I'm just no good at X so there's really no point in trying" or "I'm naturally good at Y. Failure isn't an option" – then you probably have what's known as a fixed mindset. And regardless of whether you're in the "I'm awesome" or "I'm awful" category, this could be holding you back more than you've ever realised. 

Someone in a fixed mindset automatically judges themselves against others – they have to in order to have a benchmark or definition for "talented/good" vs "not talented/bad". So, in order to feel good at something when we have this outlook, we need to be better than everyone else around us, or at least somewhere near the top. 

Now, that might seem okay if it gets us to the top, but in reality it's a precarious thing. When driven by this need to compete and win, fear of failure ramps up, and we'll likely end up shying away from the challenges that would actually advance us, even — in fact, especially — in the areas we consider ourselves "gifted". 

The belief in giftedness (or lack thereof) is like the engine of the fixed mindset.

“Child prodigies, it turns out, rarely go on to change the world. When psychologists study history’s most eminent and influential people, they discover that many of them weren’t unusually gifted as children. And if you assemble a large group of child prodigies and follow them for their entire lives, you’ll find that they don’t outshine their less precocious peers from families of similar means.”

Adam Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Change the World 

Of course, child prodigies exist and this would seem to suggest that some ability comes as part of the original package, but that doesn't mean that all ability is innate. And, as Adam Grant explores in Originals, even when someone is born with some kind of ready-made genius, they're actually no more likely to change the world than the rest of us. 

The real problem is that if we fall into the trap of believing that all talent is inherent, and that we're either good at something or we're not, then mistakes become a much, much bigger threat than they need to be. This is because any failure threatens to jeopardise our “talented” status. 

One slip up in this black-and-white world, and we're no longer the genius that we thought we were.  Because if we're talented, it should all come easily, right? Better to not risk it at all.

Ultimately, "talent" locks us into a very narrow comfort zone, and everything beyond those limits – new, creative ideas, the joys of making something unexpected, following our imagination, or just being playful – is made unavailable to us.

To make matters worse, the fixed mindset tends to create an accidental arrogance, because — looking down from our fiercely protected spot at the top of the heap — with this mindset, we have an unconscious need to feel superior to those around us in order to experience a sense of worth, which is exactly why we create that situation (albeit unconsciously). Of course, the veneer of superiority is egg-shell thin, liable to break at any moment and expose the abundance of shadowy self-doubt it's designed to hide. And we know it. In other words, to live with a predominantly fixed mindset is a very stressful business indeed. 

Someone with a growth mindset, though, will feel successful, worthy, and purposeful whenever they’re learning. Instead of judging themselves against others, they judge themselves against who they were or what they were capable of yesterday or last week.

What this essentially means is that failure, as a discrete concept, doesn’t really exist. Or, at least, it doesn't pose so much of a threat because the harder a task or an undertaking is, the more we stand to grow as a result of doing it — even (in fact, especially) if we don’t do it perfectly. Instead of basing our self-worth on the results we achieve, we get a sense of intrinsic motivation and purpose from challenging and stretching ourselves. 

I'm not saying failure will ever be enjoyable, necessarily, but with a growth mindset, we will welcome challenges because instant success and recognition are not the ultimate goal; growth is. And you only get to grow when you're pushing the limits. 

Needless to say, in the long run growth-minded people have the potential to go further and grow bigger in pretty much all aspects of their lives.

But here's the real kicker – to someone really, really wedded to the fixed mindset, the very idea of changing that mindset will seem like an impossibility. I can't tell you how many times I've talked to people about this and seen their shoulders slump as they realised they had a fixed mindset, as if that meant they were doomed. If you're doing that right now, then put those shoulders back where they should be because you are not doomed. Just like almost everything else, the growth mindset can be grown. And part of the way to do this is to update the beliefs involved.

So, my challenge for you is to pick just one of the belief pairings below, take the growth version, and then give it some thought. Think about it while you're waiting for the kettle to boil, journal about it, if you do that kind of thing… just give your mind a chance to get familiar with this new and shiny belief, because it could make a huge difference to your life. 

How does mindset apply to being great company?

Have you ever had a friend who was a lovely person, but also somehow managed to make you feel a bit crap about yourself? This is what might have been going on there:

Some fixed-minded people tend to act in a way that can make us feel small, and they seem to relish it, too. They might be the ones who smirk when we slip up, the ones we wouldn’t want to show an unfinished project to, or to see us in tracksuit trousers and a battered t-shirt first thing on a Sunday morning. They’re the ones we wouldn’t want to say anything stupid in front of, and if we did, we would feel the need to justify ourselves to save face.

If we slip into a fixed mindset, suddenly everything and everyone around us begins to function like a mirror. We ask: "How does this friend, topic, job, choice of music, etc. make me look?” 

Mindset is contagious 

Like a spiteful, competitive group of school children, everyone around a fixed-mindset person can catch the bug and end up falling into an uncomfortable pattern of one-upmanship which can quickly turn very ugly.

So a fixed-minded friend can be uncomfortable to hang out with because they have the potential to handicap our growth as well. Anticipating judgement causes us to take up a defensive stance, and because we’re so busy protecting ourselves, we hold ourselves back. We don't take risks when we’re under threat. We can’t stretch ourselves when we’re fearfully clinging to a sense of self-worth that seems to suddenly be under fire.

How another person's growth mindset can make us feel good

On the flip side, there are really good times to be had with those who make us feel comfortable enough to explore. When we’re with growth-minded people, we can be present much more easily. 

A freedom to engage develops out of a liberation from the constant need to check or contain ourselves. If someone we’re with is in a growth mindset, we can sense that they've let go of the concept of failure, and so we can therefore be infinitely more comfortable in making our own mistakes.

Additionally, because growth-minded people don’t have to look in those proverbial mirrors all day, they’re better able to really see and connect with those around them in a much more authentic way. 

In the company of this kind of person, it’s easier to feel understood and welcome. And when we feel accepted, we can start to let go of our own need to self-reference. Suddenly, the space between two people becomes the focus, and is more easily filled with meaningful conversation or activity or whatever else it might be that we can learn the most from at that time.

What's more, with competition off the table, growth-minded people find it much easier to feel genuinely happy for our successes, and we can feel unconditionally proud of theirs too. 

In other words, these are the people whose good moods lift us up. Their bad moods may not be completely absent, but when they happen, they're less likely to drag us down with them. They’re the ones who will like your stuff on social media without feeling like they’re handing over some of their own power.

Some of my oldest and greatest friends are exactly like this, but you don't need to know someone well to pick up on their mindset. In fact, I'd say you can sense this positive quality in a person the moment you meet them. But this isn't because they are pandering to you or that they're just constantly positive – someone of this kind can still critique your works in progress, or laugh at the stupid thing you just said… It's just that when they do this, we don’t feel as if they’re mentally removing chips from our worthiness stack.  

How do we end up in a fixed mindset?

So, how did we get to this place? For people living in the developed world — meaning those of us for whom basic survival isn’t an enormous challenge — our deepest worries seem to spring from questions regarding our adequacy; our good-enoughness. Which raises the question – good enough for what? Or, perhaps more importantly, for whom?

Would I worry about saying something silly or looking stupid if I were the only person left on the planet? Of course not. At the root, our greatest fears concern our acceptability and likeability. Our lovability. And it’s those fears that can freeze us into a fixed mentality. How? Because we cling fearfully to anything we see as proof of our worth as if it can save our lives.

So there’s a sad irony to all of this. Although the most fixed-minded people can come across as arrogant and superior, it’s usually a deep, and sometimes unconscious, insecurity about themselves that causes them to behave in that way. Those who compete or even bully other people are usually, deep down, doing so out of a desire to feel worthy of those same people’s admiration, love or attention. But of course, by striving for connection in this way, they’re far more likely to achieve the opposite.

So, if you do have someone like this in your life or if you feel that you might fall into this category and want to change, then compassion is where you need to start. Assuming there is no neurological impediment, anyone can learn to replace their fixed mindset with a growth mindset, but in order to do so, they will need to feel safe, seen and valued for who they really are.

Choosing growth 

You can be truly great to hang around with when you accept yourself as an evolving entity. 

So, be comfortable with the fact that you’re growing, not grown. What I’m not saying is that you have to be 100 percent self-assured to be fun to know and be around. That would be a daunting task and overconfidence is usually a trait that belongs to the fixed-minded anyway. What I am saying is that being an easy person to hang out with has more to do with being comfortable with your vulnerability. It’s about being able to let your guard down because you know that your weaknesses don’t define you.

If mindsets are contagious, then there’s no real way to know who caught the fixed bug first in any relationship. It could have been you, or it could have been them, or you may have both started that way. But awareness of the two mindsets as well as your own thought patterns means that you have the potential to dole out the antidote as well as the ailment. By adopting a beautifully contagious growth mindset, you can put a stop to the epidemic and inspire others to grow with you.

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Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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