In a recent Glo podcast about his book Beyond Belief, author Nir Eyal shares a story from a 1950s experiment conducted by researcher Curt Richter. Richter wanted to see how long rats would keep swimming before giving up. Left on their own, they lasted around fifteen minutes. But when he briefly pulled them from the water, allowed them to recover, and then returned them to the tank, something remarkable happened. According to Eyal, the rats continued to swim without stopping for as long as 60 hours.

How is this possible? Their physical ability had not changed. What had changed was their expectation. Having experienced rescue a few times, they had reason to believe that enduring a little longer would bring rescue.

Whether or not we work in education, most of us recognize this principle from our own lives. We persist when we believe our efforts can lead somewhere. We stop when we become convinced they cannot.

Educators see this every day. Two learners can sit in the same classroom, hear the same explanations, complete the same assignments, and yet respond very differently when learning becomes difficult. One keeps going while the other quits. We often assume the difference is ability, but more often, it is belief. 

In the podcast, Eyal describes motivation as a triangle made up of three elements: behaviour, benefit, and belief. Behaviour is what we do. Benefit is the reason we do it. Belief is what makes us endure and complete the task at hand. Most educators spend a great deal of time designing the first two. We think carefully about learning activities, assessments, and content. We explain why the material is relevant and what learners will gain from it. Yet belief is often left to chance. We assume it will emerge on its own.

Beliefs are assumptions about ourselves and the world, and they can change when new evidence appears. The goal is not to create false confidence. It is to challenge the beliefs that hold learners back.

The beliefs learners hold about themselves

One of the most powerful beliefs a learner carries is the answer to a simple question: Can I get better at this?

Most educators will be familiar with the work of Carol Dweck. Her research on mindset has shaped educational thinking for decades. Dweck found that some learners see intelligence and ability as largely fixed, while others believe they can be developed through effort, practice, and effective strategies. These beliefs, in turn, shape behaviour.

When learners believe growth is possible, they are more likely to persist when work becomes difficult. They are more willing to make mistakes, seek feedback, and try again. Learners who see ability as fixed often interpret difficulty differently. Struggle becomes evidence that they are not capable, rather than part of the learning process.

One of the most striking findings from this field came from a large study involving 12,000 ninth-grade students from 65 US schools as they made the transition to high school. A brief intervention, lasting less than an hour, challenged the idea that intelligence is fixed. For lower-achieving students in particular, and especially in schools where the surrounding peer culture was open to the idea, that small shift in thinking translated into measurable gains in academic performance.

As educators, this has practical implications. We should praise strategies, persistence, and improvement rather than treating talent as the main story. We should normalise mistakes and show learners how expertise develops over time. Most importantly, our actions need to match our words. Learners quickly notice when a teacher talks about growth but behaves as though ability is fixed.

The beliefs teachers hold about learners

Belief does not only work from the learner's side. Every educator also carries beliefs about the people they teach. Sometimes those beliefs are explicit, but more often they are subtle. They shape who receives encouragement, who is challenged to do more, who gets a second chance, and who is quietly expected to struggle. Learners notice these signals, even when they are never spoken aloud.

Research has shown that these expectations can influence achievement. One of the best-known examples is the Pygmalion effect. In a famous 1968 study, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told teachers that a small group of randomly selected students were likely to show exceptional academic growth during the year. The students had not been chosen because of ability, yet by the end of the study many of them had made greater gains than their classmates. The only thing that had changed was what their teachers believed about them.

For that reason, it is worth examining how programs label learners or identify "high performers" early in the process. Expectations can become self-fulfilling. High expectations, when combined with genuine support, can deliver great results.

The belief that success is possible

There is one more belief worth considering, perhaps the most practical of all. It is the belief that you can do the task in front of you. Eyal puts it simply: "We don't do what we can actually do. We do what we believe we can do. And that makes all the difference." In the podcast he references Serena Williams as a prime example; she only began dominating at the net once her coach shifted her belief, convincing her that she possessed the skill to succeed in that specific area of the court.

Psychologists call this self-efficacy, it is the confidence you have that you can carry out the actions a task requires, and research in education links it to more effort, more persistence, and higher achievement. 

Where does it come from? The strongest source is mastery, meaning past success. When learners win at a small step, they believe they can handle the next, which is why good design breaks hard goals into reachable wins. A second source is honest encouragement, grounded in evidence, not empty praise. Point to the real progress a learner has made, then aim them at the next step.

Why belief matters

Does belief change anything in the real world? In one Yale study, the researcher Becca Levy followed 660 people aged 50 and older for over two decades. Those with positive views of their own aging lived about 7.6 years longer than those with negative views, a bigger effect than healthy weight, not smoking, or exercise. People who believed growth was possible behaved differently, and behavior compounds. Like Richter's rescued rats, learners carry more capacity than they show, but only when they believe the effort will pay off.

Turning belief into action

It is also important to realize that we are not talking about positive thinking or convincing learners that anything is possible if they simply believe hard enough. Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University, found that people who only daydream about a goal often relax and do less of the work needed to reach it. People often benefit more from identifying obstacles than from focusing exclusively on positive outcomes.

This insight led to a practical framework called WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan.

Rather than stopping at a goal, learners identify the obstacle most likely to stand in their way and then create a simple if-then plan to deal with it. If I fall behind, then I will schedule an hour on Saturday morning. If I get stuck, then I will contact my tutor. If I feel overwhelmed, then I will break the task into smaller pieces.

The approach is simple, but it helps translate belief into behaviour.

Educators can build this into learning experiences with very little effort. During onboarding or orientation, ask learners what is most likely to derail their progress and what they will do when that happens. The answers often reveal more than any diagnostic test.

Designing for belief

Learning experiences teach far more than the content in a lesson plan. Alongside new knowledge and skills, learners are constantly forming beliefs about themselves. They are deciding whether they belong, whether improvement is possible, whether effort is worthwhile, and whether they are capable of succeeding. Those lessons often determine what happens when learning becomes difficult.

This places an important responsibility on everyone who teaches, coaches, trains, or leads others. The expectations we communicate, the feedback we give, and even the labels we use can strengthen beliefs that help people grow or reinforce beliefs that hold them back. Whether we are teachers, facilitators, trainers, managers, or parents, we are constantly shaping how others see themselves, often without realizing it.

We should ask ourselves whether we are intentionally creating environments that build confidence, resilience, and a belief in growth, or unintentionally reinforcing beliefs that limit what people think is possible.