Dec 18, 2025
Are your top performers actually holding back your
organization’s growth?
Today on Leveraging Thought Leadership, Peter Winick talks with
Eduardo Briceño, global keynote speaker, CEO of
Growth.How, and author of "The Performance Paradox".
Eduardo is one of the leading voices on growth mindset in
organizations, building on 16+ years of work with Carol Dweck as co-founder of Mindset Works and
two TEDx talks that have each passed 4 million views. Together,
they unpack how leaders and companies can move beyond one-off
inspiration and build true learning cultures that deliver sustained
performance.
Eduardo explains his core framework: the Learning Zone and the
Performance Zone. Most organizations live almost entirely in
performance mode—chasing metrics, staying “on,” and delivering
results. He shows why that approach quietly caps growth, and how
deliberately creating Learning Zone time is the unlock for
innovation, resilience, and long-term excellence.
You’ll hear how he designs keynotes and workshops like a master
teacher, not a showman. Eduardo starts with clear learning
objectives, then engineers experiences that shift how leaders
think, behave, and make decisions. It’s not about delivering a
great “show”; it’s about making sure people leave seeing their work
differently and ready to act.
Eduardo and Peter also explore what it really takes to build a
growth-mindset culture at scale. They talk about partnering with
organizations over time, embedding the ideas from The Performance
Paradox into leadership programs, talent systems, and everyday
language. Eduardo shares why well-intentioned “growth” initiatives
often backfire—and how to avoid the hidden traps that send mixed
signals to your people.
Finally, they look at impact. Eduardo discusses how he went from
frameworks to a major Penguin Random House book, how he gathered
more than 100 real-world stories to bring his ideas to life, and
why he’s now focused on working longitudinally with clients instead
of just doing single events. For CEOs and senior leaders, this
conversation is a playbook for turning your organization into a
place where people are both learning faster and performing
better.
Three Key Takeaways:
• Always-on performance quietly caps growth;
organizations need deliberate time and space for the Learning Zone,
not just the Performance Zone.
• “Growth mindset” only works when it’s
operationalized—through concrete systems, habits, and
experiences that teach people how to learn and improve, not just
that they can.
• The biggest impact comes from embedding these
ideas into leadership programs, talent systems, and culture over
time—not from one-off keynotes or events.
If this episode reshaped how you think about performance and the
Learning Zone, your next stop should be our conversation with
Phil Geldart on Unlocking Human Potential. Both
episodes tackle the same core challenge—how to move beyond “always
on” performance and build a culture where learning,
experimentation, and behavior change are baked into the way work
gets done. Eduardo gives you the strategic lens and language
(Learning vs. Performance Zone, growth mindset in action); Phil
dives into how to design experiential learning that actually sticks
and changes what people do on Monday morning. Listen to both and
you’ll walk away with a playbook that connects big ideas about
learning culture to concrete tools for driving performance across
your organization.