584: Rewiring your brain for growth, resilience & confidence | Gregory Walton, Ph.D.
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What if the biggest barrier to your potential isn't your ability, but the way you see yourself? Today's guest, Dr. Greg Walton, has spent his career uncovering the hidden psychological forces that shape our lives and how small intentional changes can have a massive impact.

Greg is a professor of psychology at Stanford University, and his research focuses on how our perceptions about ourselves, about failure, about what's possible can set us on a path toward growth or hold us back in a cycle of self-doubt. His work has transformed how we understand motivation, belonging, and even the way we learn. In today's show, we dive into the science behind mindset and how subtle shifts in language, perspective, and self-talk can create powerful, lasting change.

We'll explore why failure isn't a dead end, but a fork in the road, how to break free from self-limiting beliefs, and what it really takes to build confidence from the inside out. Get ready to rethink what's possible. This conversation might just change the way how you see yourself and your future.

So you have a chapter titled, Can I Do It? So my question to you, how do we build confidence? How do we cultivate a growth mindset for ourselves, for others, for our kids? I'll pause there. Yeah.

So one of the things that I think is really important to understand is that worries like, can I do it, are literally given to us by the context that we're in, right? We're not kind of, you know, making up these concerns. So when you, you know, struggle on something and you fail at something and you have that fleeting thought, maybe I can't do this, or when you

somebody asks you your score on a big test and you tell them and they, they give you a kind of, Oh, that's all you got.

That shiver, that feeling is actually given to you by a whole popular and scientific context that tells you what that might mean. So we live in a world of education, for example, that's been dominated by the legacy of IQ testing, this rather bizarre idea that people have within them, this magic ingredient called intelligence that you can assess it with short tests. And it's diagnostic of your prospects.

And that means that when you fail at something or you struggle at something, you can have this rather bizarre thought that maybe that magic thing is lacking within you. Maybe you don't have it. I think it's really important to have that view. Sometimes when people talk about growth mindset,

I actually don't use the word mindset that much in the book for the reasons I'll explain. Sometimes when people talk about growth mindset, they say things like, oh, you should have a growth mindset. Stanford students will tell me all the time that they were told in high school that they should have a growth mindset. But

we're given this lens for understanding ourselves. We're given it by praise practices like you're so smart, by programs like gifted and talented programs, all of which are predicated on this idea that there is such a thing as intelligence. It distinguishes people and it's determinatively important. And then if you fail at something, it can seem to mean that you don't have it. So I think instead of words like mindset,

actually, or words like interpretation, it's better to think about a dynamic of questions and answers. That is, when you have that struggle, and you fail at something, it invites the question, maybe I can't do it, maybe I don't have it. And that sort of change is possible, because if we can anticipate those questions, we can help people build answers to them that spiral up.

So let's take a look at spiraling up versus spiraling down because everyone faces failure and there are some people who just crumble and can't recover and that's it and they give up at whatever they're doing and there are others who fail and say like, all right, let's regroup, let's assess what happened and let's try to make it work and those end up maybe succeeding.

And I equate that to your concepts of sort of spiraling down and spiraling up. So walk us through. Yeah, exactly. So at the heart of that choice point, or at the heart of that fork in the road, is what social psychologists would call a construal. And what I think is easier to think about in terms of questions and answers. So you struggle at something, you fail a test, and then do you think, this might mean I don't have what it takes?

And if you have that thought, then it's harder to engage in that. It's harder to seek out help. It's harder to redouble your efforts. But if you think, I didn't try hard enough, I didn't try in the right way, then there's a way to proceed. When our kids were little, we would bicycle home from preschool with them sometimes, and

They'd be on these little 12-inch wheels, and they would get within a few blocks of home, and it would be like 10 minutes past dinner time, and they'd be eager to get home. And they would stop, and they would sit on the sidewalk, and they would wail, and they'd say, I'm so tired. I'm so tired. And it was like they treated the tiredness as a reason to stop.

Okay, so I started to say to them things like, it's when you're tired and you keep going that your muscles get stronger. So the idea was that the tiredness itself would be a cue to redouble your efforts, just like a setback in school should be a marker to redouble your efforts.

And then I had like maybe the most beautiful moment of grace and parenting I've ever experienced sometime later when we were going through another stretch and there was a steep and windy path going uphill. And our daughter, who was about four at the time, was making, trying to beat her record each time we'd bring chalk and look how far she'd gotten up this twisty path going up this hill. And

One time, I was holding Oliver, our son, and Lucy, our daughter, was going up the hill, and she crushed her previous record, and she obliterated it. And Oliver and I are cheering, and Lucy says, know how I did it? When I wanted to stop, I just kept going. And, you know, I think that's, like, is the feeling that you have to stop, is the feeling that you don't have the ability, that you're running out,

Is that really a reason to stop? Is that really legitimate? And helping people to set that aside and interpret those points instead as opportunities, I think is the way to build resilience. Such a beautiful story. And I think us grownups can learn a lot from that. And so- I have. You know, the beauty with kids is they're so malleable up and maybe to a certain age, but we'll come back to kids. But what can us grownups do

from that experience when, you know, whether we're working out or dealing with adversity and everything else is saying, stop, give up. But I mean, it's also like literally advertising culture, right? So, you know, there's the Snickers ad campaigns. You're not you when you're hungry. That imply that, that, you know, there's this thing inside of you, willpower, and it runs out really quickly. And if you've lost that thing inside of you, then you need a candy bar or a break. Otherwise you're some buffoon. Yeah.

That idea and older advertising campaigns, even the notion of a coffee break was from an advertising campaign in the mid-20th century. That worms this idea into your head that when you're working hard at something, you need to take a break or have a candy bar in order to keep going.

And we can see that, like we can surface that. We can put that dynamic in between us and we can say, is that really true? Is that really going to be helpful for how we want to think about our efforts? And so how do we, you know, I want to come back to spiraling down versus spiraling up. If you can maybe take a moment and define that and walk us through a situation and what spiraling down looks like versus what spiraling up looks like. Yeah, so in spiraling down, it

And in spiraling up, there's this critical cycle, like you might have a challenge or a setback, like you might do badly on a test, for example, or fail on an assignment at work or struggle to learn something new. And then there's this psychological moment. And that's the kind of juncture where you're construing that in the words of social psychologists.

And if you approach that with the lens of a question, a doubtful kind of existential question, like maybe I can't do this, then it seems to imply you can't. And the problem is that that then starts a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.

So you hold back, you avoid it, you don't seek out challenges, you don't seek out help, for example. And that positions you to fail in the future. It makes it harder to succeed. Like you're not learning, you're not building a community around you, you're not building the habits that are necessary for success. But

That same point can also be an opportunity. So if you can instead see that as evidence you haven't achieved that yet, that you have, in a deep sense, a growth mindset about that space, then it's a reason to redouble your efforts, to find a new strategy, to seek out help. And what happens then that's really important from the perspective of spirals is that

It doesn't just stay in your head, right? It actually gets embedded in your lived experience. So maybe you ask a manager, or maybe you ask a teacher, or maybe you ask a friend for help. They give you that help. Now you've built a relationship that's supportive around that area in which you're trying to grow and learn. That's not just in your head anymore. That's actually in your lived experience and in your relationships and giving you the kind of structure you need to spiral up. So it sounds like it all starts with that inner monologue. There's this point and...

the inner monologue, and then from there, it's your experience. And then being able, over the course of time, to go back to those lived experiences and say, hey, this is anew. I face a situation like this, and this was the inner monologue, and this is what ended up happening, and I got through it. I can do this. Yes, that's right. And I think that one of the reasons why this is challenging is because

And often we essentially kind of gaslight ourselves. Like the kinds of questions that are, like these questions are potent when they speak to things that are important to us. Like, can I achieve the goals that I have in my life? Can I have the kinds of relationships that I aspire to? Can I trust the important people? Can I do what I want? Can I become who I want to be?

And those questions are themselves kind of threatening. We don't like to admit them to ourselves or to others. We kind of gaslight ourselves. We kind of suppress them. But when we suppress them, they don't go away. They still stay there as a kind of lens through which you're interpreting daily experience.

So it's very, very helpful then when you can do what I call surfacing, when you can take that thing and you can put it into the space. You can see it for yourself and maybe share it with other people who help you to healthy kind of sustained ways to understand that thing. And something that became clear to me after reading the book, which is excellent, I'll hold it up, Ordinary Magic, you're very intentional with language. I feel like that's like one of the big takeaways from the book. Language is everything.

You even have a subchapter called Guides and Guardrails, Nouns and Verbs. So can you give us a primer on language and how we should be thinking about it? Language is the way that we communicate.

communicate with each other. And a lot of this work that we do is trying to surface these thoughts and feelings that are kind of amorphous that we might be motivated to suppress and put them into a space and then understand them together. So I can understand it so you can understand it. And that gives us a kind of collective representation of what that thing is. And that representation can be healthy or it can be unhealthy.

So one of the just examples that I had in my personal life of this was of how surfacing like that can work. I was serving as the faculty advisor for the Stanford program in Berlin a few years ago. So I was at a Berlin, the group of Stanford undergraduates was at Berlin. I was with them in Berlin. The local staff had organized this dinner at a beautiful restaurant and I was sitting next to an undergraduate

I'd never met before. And so I just asked her to tell me about her life. And she said, like early in the conversation with complete forthrightness, she said, you know, I was a very competitive gymnast in high school. It was a big part of who I was and what I did. And I blew out my knee and then COVID happened. And just that like,

frankness with which she said this allowed me to kind of say back to her, frankly, the circumstance that I thought that might put a person into. So I said to her, did that make you depressed? And she said, absolutely. I was already seeing a therapist, but for sure.

And, like, that's a kind of dialogue between two people where she's direct and frank and then I'm direct and frank that puts that circumstance in the space between us that lets us see that she's a reasonable, normal person. There's nothing kind of inherently wrong with her. A normal person would experience that.

in their life and I'm not judging her and she's not judging you. We're just kind of seeing that together. And that's language that comes up between two people. It's a kind of productive conversation to see that circumstance and then decide, you know, if you're going forward, like what you want to do with that, how to contend with that challenge. So in terms of that conversation, what would be the absolutely worst thing you could say? I mean, I think what we often do is

in our generation where I think we're a little bit less comfortable. Like I was really struck by that because I didn't think that as an 18 year old, I could have had that conversation. And I didn't think that most people in our generation could have had that conversation so directly and clearly.

And so I think what we often do is we don't go there. We suppress that. We don't engage with that. And then if we do, often what we do is we do it in a kind of pejorative way. So if you think about the clinical model to handle and think about mental health issues, it begins with a diagnostic interview.

A diagnostic interview is saying, hey, like Jason, you filled out this thing. You distinctly qualify as having something wrong with you, as being depressed. Like maybe you're irrational or abnormal or kind of distinctly screwed up.

And we wonder why everyone's walking around feeling inadequate, right? Because that model, that business model and that cultural model is literally telling people that there's something wrong with them. As compared to that conversation in Berlin, where you're saying, would that make a person depressed? Of course that would make a person depressed. There's nothing wrong with you. Your response probably built some comfort and established that you could probably go deeper in the conversation. And I do think...

you know, in 2025, maybe we're not having the best conversations. And I think a lot of it has to do with how we listen, how we respond, how open we are. So how do you think about conversation in general and how we build conversation?

meaningful connection. So yeah, I completely, I think that's very right. There is a paper that I've really loved in the social psychological literature by an Israeli psychologist named Niftal Eyal, which talks about the value of getting perspective. So she's just looking in this series of like 20 plus laboratory experiments. She's just looking at conversations between different kinds of dyads. And so

So they could be strangers, they could be couples. And what she does is she asks people to try to take the perspective of the other person. And everybody thinks that that will help them understand the other person better. But she shows consistently across these studies that that does not help. It doesn't help in understanding the other person's emotions or their preferences, what they want, what they feel. In fact, if anything, it makes people less accurate.

So then in a last study, she does something different. She gives dyads, couples in this case, a chance to have a conversation first, a kind of general conversation like, "What kind of things would you like to do on a Saturday night? Which European city would you most likely like to travel to and why?" And with that, people become vastly more accurate in understanding each other. So she calls that getting perspective.

I had a close friend who moved to Dresden, Germany to take a new job. And she was living in this apartment building. And she and her husband had two young sons, elementary school age sons. And her husband was still working in Switzerland where they were from. So she was essentially solo parenting during the week.

And the kids would come home from school and sometimes on a hot day, the wood in the door would actually expand and the kids were too small to shove the door open.

So my friend asked the neighbor if she would help the boys in if that ever happened. And one day in the fall, that did happen. The boys asked the neighbor, the neighbor helped them in. But that evening, the neighbor came over, an older woman who was often home in the evenings, in the afternoons.

So that evening, the neighbor came over and knocked on her door and said, please never ask me to do that again. And my friend who's, you know, like solo parenting in a new job, she's like, I cannot deal with this. Like, I am busy all day. Like, you're here. Like, help me out. Like that nasty, selfish woman. Right. So she's got all this anger inside of her. Right.

But then she's really smart about it. So she makes a little gift, she brings it to her neighbor, and she asks the neighbor what her thoughts and feelings are about this. And she learns, as she does that, that in this particular region of Germany, in Dresden, Eastern Germany, there's a very strong premium on privacy, and particularly privacy in one's home that actually has its roots in some of the political history of this region. And when that

issue comes up in between them, she finds that she can address it very clearly to her now friend. She says, no, you will absolutely not be invading my privacy. And I'm not a housewife. I am a working mother. And my husband is away during the week. And we would be so grateful if you would do that. And the woman always did that. And they became close friends. So the

I can tell you more stories, kind of pointed circumstances where there's more misunderstanding at play in broader sense than the context of research. But I think actually having the opportunity to ask someone in an authentic way to describe what they're thinking and feeling, what their worries are, can give us space to grow. Agreed. And I'll segue. The book is filled with

what we call magic tricks in the book. These small acts, very intentional language. And I do want to touch on some of these because they are just so profound. So one is 17 words that increase the odds that middle school students go to college. What are those words? I'm giving you this feedback because I have high standards and I know that you can meet. But to understand that, you have to appreciate the context.

So simple. So simple and yet so complex. Yeah, I mean, you referenced the idea of magic in the book. And I just want to say one way to think about this is that you can read the book and kind of appreciate all around you this magic. I would hope that when people read the book, one thing that they'll be asking is,

who are the ordinary magicians in my life? What is it that they're doing? For example, writing the book helped me see my mother and her magic work with regard to me and my children in a new way. And then to invite people to think, how can I be an ordinary magician for others? Who are people for whom I can play this role? I can tell you the backstory on what's called wise feedback, or we can go wherever you like. Yeah. Well, that one just to...

Just double click on. Personally, I experienced that numerous times with coaches. I had all sorts of coaches, some good, some terrible. And it's this idea that the bad ones would just drill into you. But there was no up. There was no, and I believe in you. It was, you're terrible. This isn't working. The good ones may be maybe beat you up more than you would expect, but would always be

Yeah. So I think that for coaches and managers and absolutely for teachers, like maybe the most essential role that they play for a person who's trying to learn is coaching.

the vision they cast of who they think that person can become. Like more than any content knowledge, more than any technical conveyance of a skill, that's important too. But if you're working with someone who in word and deed helps you to see a great version of who you can become, if something you're trying to do, something that's hard and how you can get there, that is transformative. So those words...

I'm giving you this feedback because I have high standards and I know that you can meet them is one way to bottle that idea. So this was a study of middle school students in Connecticut. These are seventh grade students. It was a study that was looking at a context in which social studies teachers have assigned students an essay about their hero. So all the students have written an essay about their hero.

And the social studies teachers are all white. And the students are both white and black students in this particular school.

And the issue at hand is that if you're a student receiving critical feedback, really critical feedback on something you've written, on the one hand, that's an incredibly valuable resource for learning. On the other hand, you might think, does this teacher think I'm dumb? Does this teacher think I can't do it? And if you're a black student receiving feedback from a white teacher, you might also think, is this teacher biased? Does this teacher think I've confirmed a negative stereotype about my group?

And those representations, even if they're kind of latent or implicit in the environment, they get in the way and they breed mistrust. And so when the teacher says, no, I'm not giving you this feedback because I think you're dumb. I'm not giving you this feedback because I've confirmed a stereotype. I'm giving you this feedback because I know you can reach a high standard with more work than this feedback. That's why I bothered to do this. Kids respond.

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I would go as far as saying adults respond. Absolutely, yeah. Humans of all ages respond to that. Absolutely. I once gave a talk to a bunch of business people in Silicon Valley, and

And I mentioned this work on wise feedback. And this guy comes up to me afterward and he says, that work on wise feedback is so amazing. And then he says, I manage a lot of people. And then he says, do I have to say it every time?

And obviously the answer is no, right? If you said it every time, it would become insincere, it would become somewhat manipulative, right? So the point is instead to create this space with you and the other people, this culture, where...

Everybody knows that that's what wise, that's what feedback is for. That's what critical feedback is for. So let's go deeper on what you call quote unquote wise interventions or wise feedback. Yeah. So there, so the word wise is in the word intervention. Both are the reason there's a good reasons the book's not called wise interventions. So wise. Ordinary magic is a lot more commercial. If you ask me, you're going to sell a lot more books.

But wise and intervention are both misinterpreted. Okay. So wise, for example, doesn't mean generically good. It doesn't mean effective.

some wise interventions are not effective. It means wise to, in the sense of kind of street smart, like wise to the question that somebody in a circumstance might predictably be asking. So a teacher who is looking at, like if you're a white teacher teaching seventh grade social studies and you're working with an African-American kid who's maybe

maybe average or even a little below average in their literacy skills. You would be wise if you understood that that student might be worried about how you're viewing them and viewing their potential. That would be wise, that if you were able to anticipate that that student might be asking the question, does this teacher believe in me? And then to be wise is to be able to act

effectively, gracefully, deftly, given who you are, given your role with regard to that student. So in the case of wise feedback, the teacher is acting within their role as the teacher to the student, describing explicitly why it is they're providing that feedback to the student in terms of their belief in that student's potential. Okay.

intervention, right? Intervention, we think of something like, oh, you've got a family alcoholic, you're going to sit down and tell them it's us or the bottle, right? Or it's like some like big dramatic event, right? Intervention, like if you look it up in the dictionary, the word intervene just means to do something intentional to produce a change, to change something from one direction, maybe to a different direction. So why is interventions

usually not dramatic. Usually they're quiet, not loud. Usually they're in the course of daily life. They're within the contexts of our roles and relationships to each other. So the teacher who's giving feedback to the student, it's within that teacher's space to tell the student why it is that they're providing that feedback. Feels like in another life you were a hostage negotiator. Laughter Laughter

No, I agree with everything you said. And I think language again is so powerful. And I'm going to segue to another great, I'll just call it magic trick from the book.

the three questions in 21 minutes that can keep a marriage strong. Yeah, right. So this is work looking at people who are married and are in normal kinds of marriages, you know, with their ups and their downs. I don't know, I guess you mentioned your wife earlier. So you're married. My wife and I have been married for a little more than a decade now, right? These couples were like that. They were in the Chicago area.

And in any marriage, there's going to be conflicts that come up, disagreements that come up. And one of the problems is that people can react to a conflict in a way that provokes the other person to react to the conflict. And you get this downward spiral. So, you know, you're late. Your spouse thinks otherwise.

they're not considerate, they yell at you, you're like, "Why are you yelling at me?" and you're spiraling downward. The problem isn't that people don't know their spouse's perspective. You usually know each other pretty well. So how can you get out of that cycle?

So this is a collaboration with Eli Finkel at Northwestern University and James Gross at Stanford and a number of others. And we thought maybe you could just invite people into thinking about that conflict from a third party perspective, a benevolent third party. So we asked people, how would a neutral third party who wants the best for all view this conflict in your marriage?

What barriers might prevent you from taking that perspective in future conflict situations? And how can you overcome those barriers to take that perspective when you're having a conflict conversation with your spouse? So instead of staying within your point of view, and instead of asking people to take their spouse's point of view, which they've already decided is crazy, right? What's a benevolent third point of view?

Both couples did that, but they did that separately. This was a longitudinal study of marriage. And what you saw in the study of the first year before people had gotten this intervention, everybody's kind of slowly declining. They're feeling a little bit less intimate over time, a little bit less satisfied, a little bit less close.

And the intervention is then delivered at the 12-month point. It's just three questions, seven minutes of time at months 12, 16, and 20. So it's 21 minutes total. And it heads off that decline. So people's marriages essentially stabilize once they're able to step back and think intentionally about what would a third-party point of view be on that conflict and how might they take that.

And what are the three questions? Yeah, those are the three. One, how would a neutral third party who wants the best for all view this conflict? Two, what are the barriers to you taking that perspective in a conflict conversation with your spouse? Three, how can you overcome those barriers to take that perspective? You know, you think about it, it's pretty straightforward. It seems very doable and fair. Yeah. Yeah.

It's ordinary, right? It's not, there's no like rocket science here. But I think it goes a little bit back to that kind of gaslighting and suppression idea. Like,

We often don't take space or aren't given space to really think directly, even for just a few minutes, about the things that are really important for us. We're in the day-to-day. You're trying to get the kids out. You're trying to get dinner on the table. You're trying to deal with your damn taxes, whatever it is, right?

And we don't often take space to just step back and think, okay, like here's something that is, you know, worthy of my prefrontal cortex to address and contend with. And what is the stance that would be healthy and productive that I want to take towards this? And when we do that at opportune times, it can be really helpful. Building off of that, can we talk about

How you think about our need to belong to a friend group or a tribe or community and how that's so critical to our well-being. Yeah. I mean, I have been really influenced by in my thinking about belonging by a psychologist, a comparative psychologist named Michael Tomasillo.

who studies things like the differences between how great apes, like chimpanzees and rhinos and how humans work. And Tomasillo has this idea that

One of the really important distinctions between things that makes humans distinct is our intention and our ability to share intentions with other people. That is, we kind of come into the world ready to collaborate with other people.

And if you think about what we do when we do things, like what our goals are and how we achieve them, they all involve other people, right? So if you want to start a business, you want to do some kind of research project, you want to do an educational thing and help people learn, you want to create some kind of new art thing, all of this involves building relationships with other people and finding the different roles that you'll play and collaborating in that project and process. And

So when we feel excluded, like when we feel that we are not accepted or not valued within spaces of goal pursuit that we value, it's like profoundly, it's a profoundly negative experience because it's implying that you're not going to be able to do and be what you want to do and be. So a college student, for example, they come to college and they're

They admire that college. They recognize that college as a space that can really help them grow and become the kind of person that they want to be, maybe contribute to the kind of communities that they want to contribute to. And if they feel, you know, maybe they want to become a doctor, for example, but they go to their first pre-med class, maybe it's a chemistry class, and they get a mediocre grade on a first grade.

And then they go talk to the TA and the TA is kind of a jerk about it and like kind of condescending. Like the reason why that's really negative, the reason why that's just horrible is because that experience is implying to that student that maybe they aren't going to be able to become a doctor and realize that dream of contributing back to their community through medicine.

And so it's a very laden event. It's what I call a tiff bit, in a sense. So tiff bit means tiny fact, big theory. Like one little interaction, one little failed piece set, for example. But it seems to mean you're not going to be able to do and be what you want to do and be. Beyond the aspiring medical student, it feels to me it's important for adults, no matter what, and kids of all ages. There's this...

innate you know need to to find a tribe to fit in you know and anecdotally when you know we moved to miami three years ago i mean we're looking at schools for our kids and i would just find myself looking around look at the parents like these people look like people i would hang out with

I went to one school. It was like 10 a.m., and all the dads were wearing suits. I look at me, and I'm like, we're not going to hang out. I'm wearing shorts and a t-shirt and sneakers. It's 10 a.m., guys. I'm in Miami. What's the point of going to Miami if I wear a suit at 10 a.m.? Go back to the dorm. Yeah. What's your take on

It just feels like it's so important for our emotional well-being. Totally, right? So one of the early studies I did in grad school, we were working with undergrads and we gave them an article about the math department. And there was an article profiling a math major. And in the middle of the article, we put a sensible picture of this person. This is an article we wrote.

And we manipulated whether the math major's birthday was the same day as the participant's birthday or a different day. That's it.

Okay. And then we asked people like, how interested are you in math? How motivated are you in math? We gave people a math puzzle that was insoluble and we looked to see how long they spent working on it. People said math was more interesting. They were more motivated by it. They spent, I think, 65% longer like beating their heads against this insoluble math puzzle when they had the shared birthday and when they didn't. And it was all statistically mediated because they anticipated greater feelings of belonging in math. Wow. So just...

It's like you have this connection, right? And then you think, yeah, like this could be my tribe. This could be my community. This could be a space I could go into. I could be welcome here. You know, it's funny where my head went immediately. We have two little girls. They're five and a half and eight. They're both athletic. My wife and I played Division I sports. Like we're believing women in sports right now. It's incredible. And so...

We encourage them to play and something we've noticed with particularly our older daughter, and it totally makes sense hearing you speak. She is more inclined to become interested, work harder if there's a female coach. Totally. Yeah.

I mean, in school, Tom Dee, who's a colleague here at Stanford in the Graduate School of Education, shows with big, big data that having a same race teacher has big benefits for learning for all students. You know, something like 85% of teachers in America are white.

And it's also female. And that puts boys and it puts kids of color at a bit of a disadvantage. Sure. Makes total sense. So coming back to kids, like for parents out there, what advice do you have for...

for hopefully developing, dare I say, I won't say growth mindset, I'll say building confidence, building emotionally resilient children without necessarily dropping them off in the woods and saying, go figure it out. So my friend and collaborator, Eddie Bermelman, who's at the University of Amsterdam, has written a lot about how to build healthy self-esteem in kids. I find his work very persuasive.

One of the things that Eddie is interested in is how the self-esteem movement kind of led us astray. So like you deal with elementary school classrooms. When I deal with elementary school classrooms, I walk in and I see things all around that say, you're number one, like you're the best. There's all this kind of wanton praise that's uncontingent. It's not actually tied to anything that a young person has done.

So Eddie argues that that kind of wanton praise, excessive praise, one of his papers is called, "My Child is God's Gift to Humanity," like overinflation of praise and children's outcomes. So he has data that shows that when we look at kids who have lower self-esteem, often what our reaction is, is to give them this kind of excessive non-contingent kind of praise.

And that actually produces the opposite of what it is that we're intending to produce. It actually undermines their self-esteem because it's setting up this model that they don't think that they can reach. And then that makes them feel worse. On the other hand, if you give that kind of excessive praise to kids who are already a little self-congratulatory, like that's a recipe for narcissism.

So his formula, and that is that kids need three things. They need realistic feedback on where they are, like, here's where you are, direct, honest feedback.

They need a growth mindset. They need the people that they're interacting with to believe in their potential to grow and develop, not unlike the wise feedback note we talked about before. And the third thing they need, I suspect that your household like ours may have appreciated in Kanto, they needed unconditional regard.

They needed to know that they're loved no matter what. And you put those three together and that's, I love you no matter what. Here's where you are. And I believe you can get there. Well said. So you also have collaborated with Carol Dweck,

legend in the field. Can you talk about how findings one, find your passion, this advice we've all heard, which is well-intentioned might not actually be good advice? Yeah. So Carol and I have a joint lab at Stanford and labs a number of years ago, we had a postdoc named Paul O'Keefe who is interested in how people's beliefs about the development of interests and passions. And at Stanford, there's this, um,

kind of silly phrase describing techies and fuzzies. So techies are people who like technical things and fuzzies are people who like humanities things and psychology is somewhere in between or maybe some of both. And Paul was interested in the idea that some people might have a kind of fixed view of these interests, like I'm a techie and that's how it is, or I'm a fuzzy and that's how it is.

And he showed in an early kind of laboratory study that if you brought techies and fuzzies in and you gave them content like an article that was a techie article and a fuzzy article, they all found the one that was within their interest space interesting. So the fuzzies liked the fuzzy and the techie liked the techie. But the people who viewed interests and passions differently

as fixed, who endorsed the idea that what you're doing is you're trying to find passions, not develop passions. Then those people really discounted the other thing. So the techies didn't like the fuzzy thing. The fuzzies didn't like the techie thing. They're like, that's not my thing.

The people who had the view that interest can be developed were much more open to the other kind of thing. And that's really important. So a lot of the innovations that happen in the world are interdisciplinary innovations. A lot of the companies that we admire, like companies like Apple, for example, integrate technology and design in the case of Apple.

So, Paul later, working with a liberal arts college that attracted a large number of students who were interested in the humanities and social sciences but not in math and science, implemented a growth mindset about interests intervention. So this was an intervention that students did a week before coming to college, and it

The intervention comprised a series of stories from students who talked about college as an opportunity to broaden and develop their interests, including in areas that they hadn't previously explored. That increased interest and, in some cases, grades and required first-year math and science courses. Interesting. It makes a lot of sense. As an entrepreneur, I can say that I tend to spend most of my time in areas where

I'm most confident in, I'm most interested in, and will often shy away, and it's something I'm aware of now, shy away from parts of the business where maybe I'm not an expert, like development. I'll just defer to my co-founder on that. Everything's good over there. I think we all do that.

Right. I think the language of find, this is going back to your point about the precision of language, the language of find your passion is this metaphor that implies that fixedness. And I'm looking around like, is it here? Is it there? Is it the other thing? And then you have a bad experience. You're like, not my thing going over here. Right. And you end up with people just jumping around. Yeah. Or, or really siloing themselves. Right. And I think we do live in,

I think one of my issues as a parent, as I look at sports, has definitely become siloed with the rise of club sports for kids. It's ridiculous. Totally, yeah. Like, I'm a basketball player, not a soccer player. Yeah, exactly. That shouldn't happen until you're in 11th or 12th grade. But club sports is a big business. And I also think of colleges. They're so competitive. You can't just be a great, well-rounded kid. Right.

to get like, you need to, to some degree, like you need to, this is what they say to parents these days, you need to like be exceptional in something. - I think we should push back on that. - Yeah, I agree. Well, you're at Stanford, refer to you. We covered a lot of ground. In closing, I'm curious of every, like again, so many great studies you've done personally, referenced in the book.

I'm curious, what's had the greatest impact on you personally? Yeah, I mean, I would just refer to this work that we've done with kids coming back to school from juvenile justice. This is what we call lifting the bar. And this is, so, you know, imagine you're a teacher and you're teaching 10th grade science or something, and you've got a new student coming into your class midterm who's coming back from the local juvenile justice facility. This is a context where, like,

stereotypes are really palpable. These kids are typically boys, they're typically kids of color, they've all been incarcerated. That's an intersection of stereotypes in our society that's really powerful. And the kid, for their part, has been told more or less explicitly that they don't belong in school, that they're not wanted there, that they're a threat maybe.

And so working for many years in close partnership with an incredible woman in Oakland, California, Ms. Hattie Tate, who's in charge of the district's

processes for supporting young people as they make this transition, we developed this intervention called Lifting the Bar. And earlier, we talked about the value of getting perspective. This is like a structured way to help teachers get perspective on a student. Basically, it comprises of about a 45-minute session with a young person soon after they begin that re-entry process. And in that

in that session, part of what they do is they, well, first they begin by articulating the real true values they have in school, like to be a good role model for a younger brother or sister, to make their parents proud. They hear stories from other students who've gone through this transition that talk about how hard that is, but also talk about the prospect of improvement, in particular by developing strong relationships with teachers in school.

They share advice from future students with their experience about how to do that. And then at the end, they say, we tell them, we might be able to introduce you to a teacher in school who is a teacher who isn't yet, but could be an important source of support for you. And kids will name that person like,

Miss Sanchez, my Spanish teacher, Mr. Johnson, the guidance counselor. And then we say, what would you like that person to know about who you are as a person, your values, the goals that you have, and challenges you face that they might be able to help with? And kids write, they just write the most beautiful things at this point. They basically come down and say,

"I'm a good kid and I'm trying really hard, but it's difficult. Can you please help me with this?" So they're doing two different things at once there. They're saying, "I care about school. I value school." And they're saying, "Here's where you can begin by helping me. Here's how we can start."

And we then share that information in a one-page letter with the teachers. That letter says, for example, "Dear Ms. Sanchez, all students need strong relationships with adults in school. This is particularly true in difficult circumstances. This child has chosen you to be that adult for them. And please help them in their transition, help them in their relationships with others. Here's what this child would like you to know about them." We pipe in at that point what the child has said.

When we deliver this letter, we find that maybe about half the time the teacher cries on receiving that letter. We had a delivery a few weeks ago in Chicago. Our partner delivered it and a teacher said, this teacher didn't cry, but they said, I think you made my week. And then the teachers paused and said, no, I think you made my year. It's like teachers are like stuck in

Teachers and students are both stuck in this stereotype, this stereotype like of a super creditor, like this horrible stereotype. And they're unable to engage with each other as partners in the learning process in school because that stereotype is creating this trust that's getting in the way. And when we give young people this platform to say who they really are and what they want from the teacher, and we present that to the teacher in a very honorific way, the letter says, thank you very much for your work.

You're on the front lines for all of our children. Teachers open up, like their heart pours out and they like snap to attention with the child. We know in a lot of studies how positively their response changes in response to the young person. When we evaluated this in a first randomized controlled trial in Oakland, a small initial study, we found that this actually reduced recidivism to juvenile attention by 40 percentage points through the next school term.

So I think of this as the single most powerful way to remedy mistrust. Yeah, I think the implications go much broader than this group of juveniles. I think about those who, you know, incarceration, looking to reenter society. I think of education more broadly, really profound.

Yeah, I think that we have not. We all kind of know that school depends on relationships, but we haven't actually systematically built in school the practices to make sure that relationships are strong, particularly when they're at risk, not just for justice involved students, but for like literally everybody. We covered so much today. Is there anything we didn't touch on that you'd like to cover before we wrap up? No, thank you. This has been wonderful. It's a pleasure to talk with you. Well, thank you so much, Craig. Thank you.