PNTV: 10 to 25

So there are two different orientations to stress. We can think that stress is debilitating, or we can think that stress is enhancing. I will say, and I have said many times, that Carol Dweck's two books are my go-to parenting books. You want to be transparent about why you are saying what you're saying to your kids to help them earn competence. Big theme of his book: kids need to feel like they are competent to belong in the world. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes TV. We've got a great book today, one of my all-time favorites on parenting, called 10 to 25 by Dave Yeager, one of the world's leading developmental psychologists. Subtitled The Science of Motivating Young People: A Groundbreaking Approach to Leading the Next Generation and Making Your Own Life Easier. As always, we've got a Philosopher's Note you can get for free. Check out the show notes. We've got a link to get the note where I pull out my favorite big ideas, and I wanna help you move from theory to practice to mastery together today. I want at least one idea, I hope to share at least one idea that can help you as a parent, a coach, a leader of individuals from 10 to 25. That's what the title is from, Age 10 to 25. There's a science to motivating them effectively. We're gonna take a quick look at this great book. Now, Dave Yeager, one of the most respected developmental and social psychologists in the world, protégé student of Carol Dweck, the great researcher who came up with the ideas for mindset, the growth versus fixed mindset. He takes this and extends it into the parenting domain in some brilliant ways. I will say, and I have said many times, that Carol Dweck's two books, are my go-to parenting books. I have 2 kids now, age 13, Emerson, and Eleanor, who is 9 years old, and her books, uh, Mindset and Self-Theories— we have Philosopher's Notes on them, you can check them out in the collection of 750 notes— have influenced my parenting more than any others. So I love this book as Dave, again being a student of hers, takes it to the next level. Again, a bunch of big ideas. We are going to look at 5 of my favorites now. We're going to start with the idea of why wise feedback, looking at a research study that Dave conducted, um, that's pretty powerful. Then the mentor mindset. You want to have a mentor mindset versus an enforcer or a protector mindset. We'll talk about that. You want to be transparent about why you are saying what you're saying to your kids to help them earn competence. Big theme of his book: kids need to feel like they are competent to belong in the world. Then we're going to talk about stress, and there's two different ways to view stress. Eek, or as fuel. That's not the scientific technical description. Seeing stress as debilitating or enhancing is how they talk about it. But we're going to talk about the importance of that. I'll share some stories about how I work with Emerson, who's really into chess, and Eleanor, who now is as well, to deal with stress effectively, using it as fuel. Then we're going to talk about micro moments of encouragement, finding people in your life who you can mentor and help bring out the best in them. Now, let's get to work. We're gonna start with the first idea here of wise feedback. Here's the quick take on the study that Dave conducted. Imagine 7th graders and their teachers are grading an essay, 5-paragraph essay, on who their favorite heroes are. So the kids do a first draft, they submit it to their teacher. The teacher gives them feedback, right? So, "Hey, you gotta put a comma here, deepen this idea, do this, do that," right? So they give them critical feedback. Now, the study is those students were randomly assigned to one of two groups. In one group, they got a note with what they called wise feedback. Now, the wise feedback was essentially, "I'm giving you this feedback in order to help you improve," or, "Because I believe in your abilities," right? So they're very, very clear on why they're giving the feedback. Whereas the other group, the control group, basically got a note that said, "I'm giving you feedback on your essay." but they didn't say why, right? That they believed in them, that they thought they could improve, and they could see their potential, etc. Anyway, the kids are randomly assigned to one of two groups. The teachers don't know which student got which note, and the question is, what happens? What happens when you give them wise feedback versus not really telling them why you're giving them feedback? Remember, 10 to 25-year-olds are sensitive to criticism. They don't want to be overly judged, but they also want to be respected. They don't want to be looked down upon. Long story slightly shorter, the students who received wise feedback were twice as likely to actually do the things that their teacher advised them to do. 80% of those who received wise feedback took the advice and used it and submitted a revised paper. Only 40% of the other group did. So wise feedback matters. We want to be clear as we give our kids or our students or our athletes or our team members, if we have young employees, um, feedback to help bring out the best in them. That's the first idea, which is related to the second. So the whole idea with this book is you want to be a mentor. You want to have a mentor mindset. And the way that Dave outlines it is he has this little chart, right? A grid rather, and you want to think about 2 different facets of how you give feedback. You want to think about the standards that you hold and how you approach your relationships with anyone, let alone 10 to 25-year-olds. So you can be either low on support or high on support. You can be low on your standards or you can be high on your standards. And if we map out those 4 different possible variables, or 2 different, I guess, apathetic, my goodness, apathetic. If we are, I don't do edits on these videos, by the way, everybody else doing shortcut, shortcut, shortcuts. I wanna have a conversation with you. I wanna act like you're hanging out, we're hanging out at a virtual classroom, old school chalkboard. I'm not perfect. All right, cool, let's go. You won't see any edits unless, Studio's in the house, dogs barking or something crazy. Anyway, if you have low support and low standards, you're apathetic, right? You're not watching this video if you're apathetic. Probably can't read that, but let's go. Now, if you have high standards but low support, you are what Dave calls an enforcer. High standards, low support, low warmth. Now, you can have low standards and high warmth. What are you then? Then you are what he calls a protector, right? Oh, I don't want to hold too high of standards because I might make my kids feel bad, so I'm just going to be really warm and permissive. Or again, if you're the enforcer, then you got really high standards and come on, pull your stuff together. We want to have both high standards and high support or high warmth. If we do that, we are in the mentor mindset. Now, what's exciting about this is if you're not in the mentor mindset, then you're in one of the others. And again, my hunch is you're probably not in the apathetic. You're either in the protector or you're in the enforcer. So my question for you is, where do you tend to fall? Do you tend to have high standards and low support, low warmth, or do you have high warmth but low standards? You just need to adjust one of those variables, um, deliberately and mindfully. That's how you cultivate the mentor mindset. Obviously, it goes off on it more in the book, But that's a quick idea on that. Super powerful. I, personal story sharing time, tend to be the high standards, low warmth when I'm not at my best. So deliberately being transparent about why I am supporting my kids in the way I am, or anyone for that matter, is really, really important for me. Where do you fall? Just plus one it, adjust accordingly. So then how do we become wise mentors and have that wise mentor mindset? Well, Dave has 5 different practices. One of them is— and the first one is transparency, which comes back to the wise feedback idea. Be transparent about why you're giving the feedback you are to your kids. Um, and again, this is as simple as, hey, I'm giving you this feedback because I believe in you. I know you're capable of so much more. And then you also want to connect it to what they want. One of the things that really guides my parenting with Emerson is he wants to be— he's really into chess, as you know if you've been following along and you've read the other notes. He's really into chess. And by really into chess, I mean really, really into chess. He wants to be a chess grandmaster. Now, that's really exciting for me because now I can use everything that I teach through the lens of his purpose and through the lens of him earning what Dave calls competence. Kids want to be competent. They want to have prestige. That's how they belong in the world. And we, as how they feel a sense of belonging in the world, they want to feel that they're capable of achieving the things they set out to achieve. We, as their parents, remember the word parent etymologically means to bring forth. Our job as parents is to bring forth the best within our kids. We want to help them earn competence in whatever it is they aspire to do. Again, that's how they feel a sense of belonging. And if you aren't giving them that sense of earned competence and doing so consistently, they're going to find other sources to belong in different ways, which is why it's so important for us as parents to get really skilled at bringing forth the best within our kids and making the connection between what they want— to go back to the story with Emerson, he He wants to be a chess grandmaster, awesome. Let me make the connection with the feedback I'm giving. Dave talks about asking questions. Get them to be the ones creating the answers to the challenges they're facing. Some obvious things, but really, really powerful things. We talk about some more in the book. But transparency, questions, purpose, belonging are some of the core practices that he encourages us to engage in. Which leads us to the next and perhaps most fun idea, Stress. That's actually the fifth practice, right? I mentioned four. There's the fifth one is how you deal with stress. So there are two different orientations to stress. We can think that stress is debilitating, or we can think that stress is enhancing. If you think that stress is debilitating and is going to decrease your performance and lead to anxiety and all these other things, well, you might fall— you might find yourself falling into a protector mindset. Or if you just want to get rid of it too fast, you can tell people, "Oh, you shouldn't feel that." You can be the enforcer. But the reality is we can see stress as enhancing. We can see stress as fuel to be our best. When we feel our physiology change— and again, this is what I do with our kids when they're competing in chess. "Ah, how's your body feel?" My body feels the same way when I get excited about doing something I care about. Nothing is wrong with you because you're feeling that. That's what you should feel. It's like a race car revving up to get ready to go really fast. So if we can shift our orientation from, oh my gosh, I shouldn't be feeling this stress, to, oh, this is awesome, I must be getting ready, getting revved up to do something great— goosebumps as I say that— it's a completely different orientation. And the science is remarkable on this. If you have a stress-is-debilitating response or kind of mindset, then you see stress as a threat. Something's wrong with you when you feel these different physiological drives. Or if you see it as enhancing, then you see that same challenge as a challenge rather than a threat. Your underlying physiology will change, your performance will change, etc. Now, two practical tools to consider using in this case. I talk about this all the time throughout our Philosopher's Notes and at Heroic. Kelly McGonigal talks about the same idea in The Upside of Stress, where she talks about a study that was conducted where people came into a lab— super quick take on this study— and they were told that they needed to do a— they wanted to stress them out. So they were told they have to— they had to give an impromptu talk, speech, in front of a panel of judges who just stared at them blankly, right? And then they had to count back from some number by whatever, 17 or something, in front of these same judges. They wanted to stress them out. Most people are so afraid of public speaking. They're more afraid of public speaking than dying. So Jerry Seinfeld says he'd prefer to be in the coffin than to give the eulogy. So anyway, bring people into a lab, stress them out. Then before they go to do the talk, give one of two instructions. One, have them try to calm themselves basically. Say, "I'm calm," or try to calm themselves down, or have them simply say, "I'm excited." Long story short, again, the group that said, "I'm excited," was able to reinterpret that energy in a positive way, and they outperformed the group that tried to calm themselves down. Same basic idea. And simply by saying, "I'm excited," or, "Bring it on," we take that energy and we transmute it into a positive fuel that helps our performance go up. So how do you think about stress? Think about that and think about how you can model your own relationship to stress for your kids, which was one of the most life-changing ideas that Carol Dweck had that I got from her books. She said, if you wanna help cultivate a growth mindset, showing kids they can get better at the things they wanna get better at, then you need to model your willingness to learn, your willingness to make mistakes, your willingness to lean into challenges. And she literally said, you should rub your hands together when you face a challenge. However mundane the challenge is, say, oh, I love challenges. This is how I'm going to get better. And I have done that a ridiculous number of times for our kids since before they were born. I read this book before Emerson was born, 13 years ago, and I would constantly say, oh, I love challenges. And then other, other thing we want to bear in mind is you want to reward effort, not native intelligence. So I've never once said to either of our kids, "Oh, you're really smart. That's why you're good at chess." They're good at chess. That's not true. They have a certain capacity, but they work hard. You want to celebrate the effort in your kids. "I appreciate how hard you're working on that. I appreciate how you're embracing that challenge and going all in on it." Um, again, longer chat. We'll leave for now. Leave at that for now, which leads us to the final big idea here: micro moments of encouragement. Dave tells a beautiful story of a professor who, when he was a young boy growing up, kids— his parents didn't go to college. He didn't really have any of that vision for his future. He's 12 years old. He's at a gas station— goosebumps again— and he winds up striking up a conversation with a college student who is getting his car fixed at this gas station. And they wind up talking about the Vietnam War back in that era. And the college student was so impressed with this 12-year-old little guy who grew up in a coal town, right, that he said, "Wow, you're really smart. Have you thought about going to college?" I get emotional sharing this story. And this guy had never once thought about that. He said, "Oh, you really should. Oh, and have you read this book by Dante? Oh, I think you'd really enjoy that book." And this kid had his life completely changed. By one human being who saw his potential and communicated that to him. As it turns out, this 12-year-old wound up becoming one of the leading professors, got his PhD, went to college, got his PhD. He's been a professor for decades. And he says that that moment, more than any other experience he had in his educational journey, most changed his life. And as I was reading this book, the weekend before, I wound up— we were at a chess tournament and I saw a kid high school kid who was clearly at the tournament by himself. And, um, I went up to him as he was looking at his score, and he was— I could tell he was pretty stoked. And we looked at how he was doing. He wound up winning enough points, he's going to win some money. It was a big deal when Emerson won his first money at a chess tournament. I get emotional right now. And I deliberately celebrated this guy. Oh, that's awesome, man. It just took some time to see his potential, to celebrate his potential. We never know when those moments can change someone's life. I've had moments like that, I'm sure you have, where someone saw our potential, shared that, they were transparent about it, and they nurtured a belief in ourselves that literally fundamentally changed our life. So one of the things I like to say, paraphrasing and extending Walt Whitman's wisdom, Walt Whitman said back in the day, "In the faces of men and women, I see God." I like to say with our community and the coaches we train, etc., in the faces of men and women and boys and girls, we see heroes. We see individuals capable of making a huge difference in the world. And we have an opportunity, and I believe a sacred obligation, to do the hard work to become worthy exemplars and worthy wise mentors for the next generation. And this book can help you do it. If you care about the next generation, I think you will love this book. I highly recommend it. Um, and there you go. That's a quick look at 10 to 25, the science of motivating young people. We got wise feedback. I'm giving you this feedback because I believe in you, and I think you're capable of even more. Um, the mentor mindset. Remember, you can be high standards but low support, and then you're going to be an enforcer. You can be, uh, high support but low standards, you're a protector. You want to be high on both. You want to be high. Angela Duckworth, who wrote another testimonial for the book, calls that wise parenting, where you're high in warmth and you're high in your standards. Do that to be a wise mentor. Be transparent, be transparent in your communication. I'm sharing this with you because— help them earn that competence we talked about. Redefine your own relationship to stress and then teach your kids how to reinterpret their relationship to stress. All that stuff that's getting fired up, That's how you're gonna go. It's a rocket taking off. It's a race car. That energy is gonna help you perform better. I'm excited. Bring it on. Let's go. And then that micro moment of encouragement. Remember, in the faces of men and women, in the faces of young men and women, in the faces of boys and girls, we see heroes capable of making a difference in their lives and in the world. All of which leads us to the +1. What is the one idea that I hope you had at least one idea that most jumped out and landed for you. How can you move from theory to practice to mastery and integrate that wisdom into your life more today? It's the whole point of all of our work. Life-changing ideas are only life-changing if you live them. You gotta actually apply this wisdom to your life. Get on that. Make today another awesome day. I look forward to sharing more soon. Um, again, you can get the note for free. I've been told I should tell you, if you want to see more of this, subscribe. Look forward to sharing more. Have a great day.