Elaine Elliott-Moskwa - The Growth Mindset Workbook

Growth sounds so enticing until you get stalled by attitudes and behaviors that sabotage your progress. The Growth Mindset Workbook teaches you to observe your personal pitfalls and respond to them with strategies that can sustain your progress. If you are serious about improving your work or personal life, this engaging book shows you how to bring a growth mindset into your daily life with practical and life-changing effects.

Christine A. Padesky, PhD , coauthor of Mind Over Mood and The Clinicians Guide to CBT Using Mind Over Mood

Parallel lines of rigorous psychological researchcognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindset researchhave documented how we can improve our well-being, life satisfaction, and happiness. In The Growth Mindset Workbook , Elaine Elliott-Moskwa brilliantly describes how to effectively use the proven strategies of CBT to establish a growth mindset. By following Elliott-Moskwas step-by-step program, the reader will learn to identify and overcome barriers to a growth mindset, and master proven CBT strategies to lead a more meaningful and fulfilled life.

Dennis Greenberger, PhD , coauthor of Mind Over Mood , and director of the Anxiety and Depression Center in Newport Beach, CA

The Growth Mindset Workbook is a book that can change your life. How often have you thought, I cant do that? Elaine Elliott-Moskwa provides us with powerful, practical tools to identify your biases about change, and tools that help you overcome obstacles. Highly readable, informative, and immediately useful, you will find that these ideas and techniques can help you in almost any area of your life. This is a detailed plan for Yes, I can thinking.

Robert L. Leahy, PhD , director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy, and author of If Only: Finding Freedom from Regret

Elaine Elliott-Moskwa has written a superb workbook that can transform your mind and change your life. Her approach is based on a simple and powerful idea: your mindset has an enormous influence on your mental health. As an expert clinician and one of the foremost scholars in this field, Elliott-Moskwa created a masterful workbook. I highly recommend it.

Stefan G. Hofmann, PhD , Alexander von Humboldt Professor at Philipps-University of Marburg in Germany, and coauthor of Learning Process-Based Therapy

What is a self-help book about if its not about growth, and growth beginsaccording to Elaine Elliott-Moskwawith a growth mindset. In The Growth Mindset Workbook , Elliott-Moskwa, an authority on the topic, presents a host of CBT skills to cultivate and nurture a new growth-oriented mindset. If youre stuck, stagnant, or paralyzed; if youre anxious, sad, or suffering; pick up this book, learn these skills, and grow.

Michael A. Tompkins, PhD, ABPP , codirector of the San Francisco Bay Area Center for Cognitive Therapy, and author of The Anxiety and Depression Workbook and Anxiety and Avoidance

Elaine Elliott-Moskwa has delivered an interesting and exceptional workbook to help the reader move from a fixed to a growth mindset, a go-to tool for everyone. Weaving her personal story along with relatable, professional, and everyday life examples of others, the reader is systematically helped to shift their mindset, remove the barriers to goal achievement, and build resilience and success.

Leslie Sokol, PhD , president elect of the International Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (IACBT); fellow of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT); distinguished founding fellow of the Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies (A-CBT); and coauthor of The Comprehensive Clinicians Guide to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Elaine Elliott-Moskwa takes her work on resilience to write a compelling, must-read book on how to transform a fixed mindset into a growth mindset. By showing us that a fixed mindset is a habit, she helps us learn that we can develop a growth mindset. Replete with examples, The Growth Mindset Workbook is an excellent resource for us to learn how to welcome challenges and convert them into successes.

Lata K. McGinn, PhD , professor of psychology at Yeshiva University, cofounder of Cognitive and Behavioral Consultants, and coauthor of Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders and Treatment of OCD

Elaine Elliott-Moskwa has done a masterful job of practically presenting a growth mindset. Readers are led through exercises to get themselves unstuck from seeing challenges as fixed and insurmountable. The growth mindset has been embraced by schools and corporations. She applies this perspective in a personal and specific way. By basing her working in CBT, Elliot-Moskwa harnesses the power of science to help the reader enhance their potential.

Lynn McFarr, PhD , professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); president of the IACBT; and founder of CBT California

Publishers Note

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

Copyright 2022 by Elaine S. Elliott-Moskwa

New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

5674 Shattuck Avenue

Oakland, CA 94609

www.newharbinger.com

Cover design by Amy Daniel

Acquired by Ryan Buresh

Edited by Brady Kahn

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

Contents

Foreword

Elaine Elliott-Moskwa was one of my first PhD students ever, and was among the finest ever. She did amazing research on how peoples goals could foster persistence and resilienceor the opposite. She found, for example, that people who focused on the goal of learning something new and challenging tended to be more resilient in the face of failure. But those who, instead, worried about measuring and validating their ability were more vulnerable to distress and helplessness when they encountered setbacks.

Her groundbreaking doctoral research set the stage for the discovery of peoples self-theories or mindsetsthat is, a fixed mindset in which people believe their personal qualities, such as their intelligence, are just fixed and cannot be developed, versus a growth mindset in which people believe that through hard work, good strategies, and help from others, they can grow their abilities.

Dr. Elliott-Moskwa then trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Cognitive Therapy with Aaron T. Beck, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). And she was hooked! From there, she went on to have an illustrious career, practicing CBT for over thirty years. She established a cognitive therapy fellowship program at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital and is president of the Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies.

Meanwhile, decades of research documented the ways in which a growth mindset could help people thrive in terms of both their achievement and well-being. And all along the way, Dr. Elliott-Moskwa has been the bridge between this research on mindsets and the practice of CBT.

Now she has written this trailblazing bookthe best Ive seenon how people can bring the two together in their own lives. That is, how people can bring an understanding of mindsets into their lives to help create the change they are seeking and reach the short- and long-term goals they are trying to achieve. Frankly, I was riveted by her fascinating case studies of people operating in the different mindsets, and inspired by the way she led the reader to see the mindsets in themselves. Finally, she provides a step-by-step program for viewing life through a new lensthat of a growth mindsetand shows how this not only can empower people to take on challenges but can guide them to act in more constructive and effective ways.