Giving Compass' Take:

• Research indicates that employing a strategic mindset can help accomplish difficult tasks, rise to challenges, and be overall very successful.

• In what ways can donors practice a strategic mindset to find success in charitable giving? What strategies are you employing to be an effective giver? 

• Read why donors shouldn't shy away from strategic philanthropy.

The study shows that people with a strategic mindset are the ones who, in the face of challenges or setbacks, ask themselves: “How else can I do this? Is there a better way of doing this?”.

“These findings are exciting because psychological science has long known that having a wide repertoire of strategies matters. But until now, we hadn’t understood why some people use their strategies more than others at the right time. We developed our research on the strategic mindset to explain why this might be,” says lead author of the study Patricia Chen, assistant professor at NUS Psychology.

Chen and her collaborators at Stanford University conducted a series of three studies involving over 860 college students and working adults from the United States.

One of their studies on 365 college students found that students’ strategic mindset predicted how much they reported using effective learning strategies in their classes. And the more they used these effective strategies, the better they performed in their classes that semester, and also in new, different classes the subsequent semester.

A second study surveying 365 adults across the United States about their strategic mindset, and relating mindset to how effective these adults pursued professional, educational, health, and fitness goals of importance to them, produced similar findings.

Can people learn a strategic mindset? Yes, find the researchers. In an experiment, they randomly assigned some people to learn about a strategic mindset through a brief training session. Later, they gave these people a new, challenging task to accomplish as quickly as possible. Compared to other people in the study who were not exposed to these strategic mindset ideas, those who had learned about a strategic mindset later applied more effective strategies to accomplish the task. Their strategic behaviors, in turn, translated into faster task performance.

Read the full article about strategic mindset from National University of Singapore at Futurity.