How to Bridge the Generational Gap and Inspire Young Adults: Unlocking the Mentor Mindset | David Yeager, PhD

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Episode Transcript:

David Yeager, PhD: [00:00:00] I think one thing that’s a part of any good life is you’ve left a positive impression on somebody else, and you can look back on the people whose lives have been changed, the people who will attend your wake and your funeral and will write about you after you’re gone and tell stories about you after you’re gone. And I think a life well lived is one that leaves that kind of residue. And what’s nice about the mentor mindset is you’re just always prepared to leave that lifelong, life-changing impression on somebody and you don’t ever really know when that’s going to happen. When are they going to forget what you did and when are they going to remember? But if you just have that stance enough in your interactions with young people, it’s going to happen. Leave a residue of inspiration and lives changed behind you. And a mentor mindset is a way that anyone can do that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:47] So whether you’re a parent, caretaker, uh, uncle and, uh, guardian teacher boss, there seems to be this ever growing divide between Gen Z, millennials, Xers and boomers. It’s like we’re all speaking different languages. And lately, regardless of who you are, we’ve been hearing so much about the disconnect between what young adults want and need and are willing to work to make happen and what the older set wants from and for them. It’s kind of wreaking havoc, causing a lot of friction and family and personal and work relationships and making everybody feel like they’re not seen or heard or understood and often appreciated or respected. And when you’re trying to connect with or inspire or even motivate folks in that pivotal 10 to 25 year range, it can feel like there’s an impenetrable gap. The typical advice really just doesn’t work anymore if it ever did. The question is what does? How do we bridge this gap? And in doing that, bridge the divide of understanding and connection between young adults who want to be seen and heard and valued, rightly so, and parents and caretakers and teachers and bosses who want the best for those young workers and young adults, but also want the best from them. That’s where we’re headed with today’s guest, David Yeager, a pioneering researcher and one of the world’s leading experts on effectively motivating young adults. His new book, 10 to 25 A Groundbreaking Approach to Leading the Next Generation and Making Your Own Life Easier.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:19] It dives deep into developing what he calls the mentor mindset and approach that perfectly blends exceptionally high standards, also with high levels of support, and David’s decade plus studying resilience and growth in young people alongside folks like Angela Duckworth, Carol Dweck and others made him one of the world’s most influential psychologists. But he also walked the walk as a middle school teacher and a coach before becoming a professor and researcher. In this conversation, he really pulls back the curtain on what truly drives young people’s motivation and hunger to grow and how we get it so wrong. And we explored the crucial difference between having high standards and being overly harsh as an enforcer who breeds resentment. And he outlines practical steps that any parent, any teacher or leader can take to embody this mentor mindset themselves. So if you want to unleash the brilliance of young people in your life, this may be the most important lesson of the year for you. So excited to share this conversation with you on Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project.. I’m super excited to dive in. The, uh, especially as a parent of somebody who’s sort of like right in the middle of the age range of the young folks at your new book is focused on. But before we even get to the book, I want to take a bigger step back and maybe a more broad step in the work that you’ve been doing for quite some time.

Jonathan Fields: [00:03:49] Recently had the opportunity to read a paper that you co-authored with Carol Dweck back in 2019 called mindsets A View from Two Errors. And for a lot of people listening to this, they’ll probably have some familiarity with Carol Dweck’s name and the phrase mindset. And, you know, like fixed versus growth mindset and the general concepts, you know, it was a huge book and really went out into the zeitgeist about like, this is how we grow, this is how we learn, this is how we become more forgiving and humane in the way that we try and strive towards things. And then that came like, sort of like this second wave pushback. A lot of people started questioning that early work and starting to point to potential like replication issues with it. So I thought it was really interesting to see both of you and you’ve been researching in this field as well. Right. And have, you know, like work with her in a former incarnation. I thought it was fascinating to see you both come together and say, can we actually have this conversation in public in a way that’s respectful, in a way that honors or like this is the thought process from the almost like the origin story era of this work. Now here’s the thought process from the era that’s following that. And how do we weave these together? I’m so curious how that came together.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:05:02] Well, so I was a middle school teacher and I loved working with kids, but I ultimately left the classroom because I felt like the advice I got as being trained to be a teacher wasn’t great. And I ended up in graduate school, ended up taking Carol Dweck’s class on motivation. She wasn’t my assigned advisor at the time, and that was my first encounter with mindset research. But what really got me excited about it was this idea that you could say A or B and A would be better than B, and that sounds simple, but you look at the literature and a lot of it is not as clear as that. It’s like, well, we measured this attitude or that attitude, so maybe you can extrapolate to this or that implication. It’s kind of like, you know, reading a kind of 800 word Forbes article about some concept like authenticity and work. It’s like, what am I supposed to do with this information? That’s most education research. So what I loved about mindset was, okay, if a kid is struggling, don’t be like, you can do it. You’re smart because that’s going to make them think that maybe if they don’t get it right, they’re not smart Like that kind of answer was just so satisfying for me. But as I dug into the work and worked more and more with Carol Dweck as a graduate student, then I started realizing that these ideas are going to get popular, and when they do, people will rush to apply them everywhere. And there’s two phases I tend to see. One is a phase of skepticism that’s like, no, the reason why people get ahead is like their IQ or if their parents are rich or these other things. It’s not something as ridiculous as did you tell a kid they’re smart, you know? And obviously we don’t think that parental socialization is the only thing that matters.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:06:45] It’s just the research is showing it matters more than you expect. But at the same rate, people were skeptical at first. If you look back to school reform or even management in the 2000, right, it was all about the management is performance incentives and education. Was are the teachers lazy and well trained or not? That was the main dialogue at the time. And once the beautiful experimental work that Carol and her previous students had done started becoming popular. Then there was the second phase, which was, oh my God, this is a panacea for everything, right? And that’s about when I came on the scene and I had just come from working in very poor schools with kind of hopeless situations and parents who are pulling their hair out. And I’m like, Carol, everyone’s going to try to use this, and they’re going to do it really badly. And like, you have no idea how people can misuse a good idea. Not just in education, but in, like, any real world setting. And luckily, Carol was game. She was like, oh my God, we should actually do some research on what to do. So our concern with replication predated any of the revelations around scientific misconduct or fraud or anything like that. And it really came from. To Carol’s credit, a sense of integrity about people wanting to use your work now that it was becoming popular and her feeling like she needed to do what scientists do, which is not just figure out where your ideas work really well, but where are they not working and why. And that launched the second era of of growth mindset research.

Jonathan Fields: [00:08:15] Yeah, I mean, it is really interesting though, right? Because research very often is siloed. And when we think about siloing, often we think about siloing between domains. But also I feel like there’s a fair amount of siloing that happens between the laboratory and the real world. You know, it’s sort of like, look, I can prove that this happened when I can control all of the variables, like, this is the outcome and I can replicate that. But you came in and you said, okay, okay. Even if that’s true, the real impact of this work, the scalable value of this work, is when it actually interacts with kids in classrooms. And you’re coming from a classroom where it’s a hard situation, it’s under-resourced, and you’re saying, look, I’ve been there and I see your ideas and here are issues. And to her credit, rather than saying I’m focused on the laboratory, she’s like, oh, wow, let’s bring this into it and see if we can expand this and understand how do we create something that is robust enough to actually work, not just in the laboratory, but actually out in the world? Did I get that right?

David Yeager, PhD: [00:09:11] Yeah. I mean, I think that you could describe a lot of the most popular social psychologists, as in the business of getting an idea to work once and then promulgating it as the solution to everything that’s even mildly related to that. And there’s a reason why they do that is because, you know, authors like Malcolm Gladwell have like, led people to think that that’s the case, that you do one study of Texans in the hallway and all of a sudden you understand aggression going back 400 years with this, you know, the Scottish farmers coming to the south southern states of America. And I understand the place for that approach in the economy of ideas like it makes sense to me that it needs to be simple. But like, honestly, I was coming from schools where it is just so hard to do anything. I remember thinking, I don’t know how to get kids to line up and go to an assembly without punching each other in the groin, like that was my problem. And like all of, like the supposed research best practice in the world about performance goals and mastery goals like this is not solving my problems. I just come to it with a skepticism that nothing is going to be a magic bullet, but also kind of a faith in humanity and our ability to grow and learn. And I think that’s really where the best of mindset and mindset style research sits is. On the one hand, you’re not saying, look, all you need is a magic phrase, and all of a sudden you’re achievement gap disappears or whatever your issue is. But you’re also saying, look, people have a lot more agency and power than we give them credit for.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:10:48] We often sit there thinking, we need to do everything for you, or if you’ve been harmed as a child or had a toxic upbringing, then we can’t possibly help you. You know, there’s a lot of beliefs like that out there at the time, 15 years ago, kind of crazy to say no. You could take kids who actually didn’t have great home lives with respect to education and give them a seed of a powerful new idea that your brain can grow like a muscle, that when you struggle in math, it doesn’t mean your brain is dumb at math for all time, for example. And then they can exert agency and be like, I would like more hard homework please teacher. And then if they did that homework and they did well, then the kid would be like, now I know more math like that sounds obvious, but that was not at all the dialogue at the time. So we’ve always kind of tried to split the difference between acknowledging the realities of the complexities of kids lives and anyone’s life, and also believing that the right message at the right time can change someone’s life because it sets in motion what Greg Walton and Jeff Cohen at Stanford have called recursive processes. Make a choice here gives you a skill. You make a relationship, it builds. You get into a harder class, you don’t fail, you get a better job. You get a better manager. Those life events build. You believe in the power of the agency of the person while also believing people need help to navigate where they fit in with that context?

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:11] It really does speak to that underlying belief, right? That you look at people and you say like, hey, nobody’s hopeless. You know, you may be in a really tough situation and you may not have entire control over your circumstances, and many people don’t. And yet it’s not. You don’t just completely abandon hope that that same kid, that same person, can somehow access the resources needed to feel a sense of agency, even just enough so they can take an action that then gives them a response that makes them like that, turns a light bulb in their mind and says, oh, wait.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:12:43] Or you yourself could be believing in yourself. Yeah, and I think that it’s kind of telling who is most critical of mindset research, right? It’s in general, I mean, first of all, anyone who’s a good scientist should be skeptical of anything. So I don’t ever begrudge someone who’s like, I don’t believe you. It’s like, okay, I’ll do a better study. That’s fine with me. It’s more like the dishonest critiques I think come from one of two places. One is a belief people who have a belief that your genetics and your IQ are the only things that could possibly matter. And so if a study purporting to show that a message about the brain growing like a muscle has an impact, that’s a threat to their worldview. So they’re motivated to do whatever they can to discredit it. But another group of people are the opposite, and those are the people that say, look, the only thing that matters is like your neighborhood and your home life. And if that’s not great, then a little mindset message isn’t going to do anything. We found the latter group of people to be far more open to collaboration, and some of our best studies have been sociologists who are inclined to say the neighborhood matters, the teacher matters, the school matters. What do you mean? A little mindset message matters. And then we’ve said, well, let’s see how they matter together. And that’s been what’s been really gratifying and exciting for us.

Jonathan Fields: [00:13:57] Yeah, I mean, the ability to sort of like to break down the silos, to collaborate, to say like, rather than just attacking each other. What if we actually run something together? What if we do something that sort of brings in all the ideas and let’s just test them rather than fight it out? Let’s actually run the test and see what the data tells us, which I think, and I agree with you, often it doesn’t happen because people are so invested in protecting where they’ve come from and the ideas that they have that, you know, that have put them in a place where they currently are. Because to dismantle that idea, oftentimes, especially in the world of academia, it means to then have people questioning your status and everything that’s led up to the point where if you’re a tenured professor or whatever, the prestige or status that you have is that’s on the line, and people would rather defend that than get to the truth, which is a weird thing.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:14:45] Yeah. I mean, I think that the sad fact about a lot of the most popular and well known failings of psychology is that there often is an element of somebody who really wanted to come across like they had discovered the secret and the thing, and they were not either in their early stage studies, not interested in any limitations or for whatever reason, didn’t want them to be public. And in my experience in developmental psychology, that’s not really the style. I mean, some of the greatest developmental psychologists in the world, like Carol, are very humble and open and may not be as well known publicly as Carol, but are just as amazing. And I think to Carol’s credit, she didn’t get into science to look like the best or smartest. She didn’t. She got into science to find the truth and share it. What’s been really fun? To have her as a mentor and then try to add what I can, um, to the next steps.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:40] Yeah. And you also referenced another called a problem, I guess that comes up, which is like you start with an idea, you prove something has worth in controlled circumstances. And then in this particular case with the notion of the growth mindset, it then goes out into the world like Caroline’s a publishing the book, which becomes this massive, massive thing which sells like a zillion copies. And now it’s in the hands of everybody, and everybody is saying, oh, I just read the book and I know how to do it right. And then that goes into the world of education. And then we have these things, which is often been phrased as false growth mindset. And then when people are saying this doesn’t work, they’re assuming that they got the message, they understood that they’re doing the thing right, and that the idea itself is broken, rather than saying we’re actually not. There’s a translation error here. We’re not taking that original idea and translating it into practice. And that’s where the breakdown is, which creates sort of like another layer of complexity.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:16:36] Yeah, it’s a weird I mean, this is I don’t know how much people care about this kind of an inside baseball argument, but social science is weird because the clearer you are when you explain your ideas, the more that readers think they can do them really well. Like very few people would read a paper about how to, like, synthesize the RNA and create the Covid vaccine and be like, I’m ready to go to my garage and make a Covid vaccine, you know? And in fact, they write those papers in ways where they don’t care if anybody reads them, to be honest. And they’re inscrutable. For the most part, it’s just acronym after acronym. You know, we’re obsessed with communicating clearly, and we want the ideas to have intuitive appeal. And an interesting side effect is I think people read it and they’re like, oh, it sounds like I just say something about the brain and there we go. Or tell you to have a growth mindset. And it would be like reading a paper about the Covid vaccine, then making your own version in the garage and then giving it to a thousand people, and then showing that it didn’t prevent Covid. And you’d be like, therefore, all Covid vaccines are a lie. That’s the conclusion. And that’s like kind of what happened, not for all studies, because like I said, there’s legitimate differences in where growth mindset works or not. That’s a big sample of studies that seem to show nothing, but it’s rarely in bad faith. In general. What people want to do is help kids. It’s not like a criticism of the intentions, but it’s more an observation based on the idea that social science ideas just feel more doable than highly technical treatments.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:18:07] But then we end up applying this kind of weird logic about whether it works or not. And that’s why in our work, what we do is we say, all right, let’s have the experts create the actual treatment, and let’s not perfect it, but make sure that it represents what we think growth mindset is. Okay. But then when you evaluate it, then you hand it to third parties who are going to go recruit the schools and get the kids in front of the computer or whatever. But at least you know that they’re giving, like the Pfizer version of the vaccine. You want the growth mindset treatment that Carol Dweck personally wrote. If you’re going to make a decision in any time that’s happened, then you see on average replicated effects, but that vary in different contexts. And that variation is interesting. The kind of variation that’s like somebody made it up, then they call the local school district down the road. They didn’t have a control group. They just had a teacher one semester do the treatment and the next semester they didn’t. And then it’s like 80 kids and like that’s like less informative. If that works, that’s amazing. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t tell us much. But if you give the exact same. Carol Dweck created treatment in 76 schools across the country to all the freshmen and half get it and half don’t. And in some schools you get bigger effects than other schools. Well, that’s interesting because now it’s like, well, what is it about those schools where the really good version of the treatment is working in other schools where it’s not? Yeah.

Jonathan Fields: [00:19:29] Do you have some sense of that also? Because I know that the protocols now and you’ve been a part of scaling this both in person but also in online platforms. Do you have a sense for what, like those like the differences in the margins are that actually really lead this to get really good results? And then in another set of schools, not so much.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:19:45] Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is that if you’re trying to change someone’s mindset, you have to come at it with a strong argument that’s clear and memorable. And so the writing of the materials have to be pretty good. But once we’ve done that, at least for a population, like in our main study, called the National Study of Learning Mindsets, we picked ninth graders just starting high school, and we wrote it for them. What are they worried about? Well, they’re worried about middle school is easier than high school. All of a sudden I’m in the harder classes now, I feel dumb or I ask my colleagues for advice or help, and they look at me like I’m an idiot, right? Those are the kinds of fixed mindset concerns that ninth graders have, right? Or like, I’m not in a I’m in an easy class. Does that mean I’m in the dumb math? I’m in a hard class, is it? But I’m getting a C? Does that mean I should drop? We crafted the treatment for that. Then the question is suppose we’re changing kids mindsets at that critical juncture at a very high rate. Like, say, we can 8,090% of the time we can inch you towards growth mindset more the idea that abilities can be developed. If you read our 35 minute treatment, and in general, that’s about the case that most people change in the direction we expected when they read the stuff that we created for them.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:20:55] Okay, now think nine months later they got higher grades or they’re in like harder classes. What are all the things that have to happen in the interim to have that short 30 minute exercise translate into on your high school transcript. You’re now in algebra two rather than geometry, right? Or you have an A in advanced algebra rather than a C. So many things have to happen. And in fact, like for any of us who have kids, I have four kids. Most of my kids forget everything I say to them within four seconds. It’s like getting shoes and pants on, right? It’s like in one ear, out the other. So why would a 30 minute treatment the beginning of ninth grade last? For some, it’s amazing that it ever does. It was kind of our approach. So what are the things that could make a difference. And what we found is that there are things that make the growth mindset argument that you can grow your abilities, you can improve more true for you in that setting. There’s social things, and if it feels more true for you there, then we tend to see benefits.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:21:59] One is the peers. So do the peers seek out challenges, or are the peers the kind of people who make fun of you? If you ask for more homework or you ask to correct a misunderstanding and so on, So the peer group ends up being pretty important. And then the second thing is the teacher. So does the teacher create a culture that supports the student’s growth mindset. And what we found is that about 3,540% of teachers in our studies, national studies think, you know what? No matter how hard you try, you’re not going to get smarter at math. They have a fixed mindset about math when they believe that, then they were less likely to allow students to revise and submit their work, less likely to view student questions as a positive thing. They’re more likely to say questions just slow down the class. They were more likely to find ways of celebrating small successes the student have had on their way to growth and learning. So fixed mindset teachers, if you can’t revise, your kids are thinking, if I can’t revise my work, if my mistakes mean that I wasn’t paying attention, or that you dislike me, if you’re looking down on me for asking a question, why would I ever live out my growth mindset? Like it makes no sense.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:09] It’s like you’re getting punished for it, right?

David Yeager, PhD: [00:23:10] You’re getting punished for it. You’re getting yelled at for being gung ho and like, please, I want to learn more, or Mr. Teacher. And the teacher is like, yeah, but if you would have paid attention, you would have known everything. So get out of here is more or less what’s happening. And you can just think of 15 year olds as being the world’s greatest hypocrisy detection machine, right? They’re going to notice inconsistencies between what they learned in the treatment and what the teacher’s doing in the classroom. And we find that fixed mindset culture squashes the treatment, and that’s useful information. That’s not like I saw one online critic who wants to be clever in this space. He was like, oh, growth mindset only works on Tuesdays. For Virgos. It’s like, dude, no, it’s like if the peer group is good and the teacher is supportive, then it lasts. If it doesn’t, then we only change your attitudes, but it fades out. How is it that complicated? I mean, it’s complicated to fix that problem, but there’s nothing suspicious about that pattern of results, in my opinion.

Jonathan Fields: [00:24:04] Yeah. No, that makes so much sense to me. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. As you’re describing that, also remembering some of the research, I guess, around what’s been popularly called the Pygmalion effect and remembering how I think the fundamental experiment, and you can correct me if this is wrong, was, you know, like basically a teacher was told that half the that kids were given a test on their proficiency and the teacher was told half of them were like a certain level and others were really gifted. And then they retested at the end of a semester or a year, and it turns out the gifted ones actually scored higher. But the teacher actually wasn’t told the truth in the beginning. But they reset her expectations around one group being sort of like lower performing, the other group being higher performing, and then the teacher and all sorts of ways that maybe they weren’t even aware of treated the kids who who they thought were gifted in a way that was maybe it was more growth mindset oriented and that became this outcome. Did I get that kind of right ish? Yeah.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:25:01] So it was Rosenthal who interestingly, was like also one of the founders of meta analysis, popular method. And Rosenthal is an interesting guy. He first got famous for studying expectancy effects in an experiment. So he would like randomize a laboratory assistant to either know the hypothesis or not know the hypothesis, and then would compare the data. And it turns out the more that the undergraduate research assistant knew the hypothesis and maybe was rooting for it, the more the. The study seemed to work. That’s why when I do an experiment, I blind the research assistants to what we’re studying and why. Best practice. Not everyone does that, but they should. Rosenthal at some point gave a lecture and someone was like, I bet you you could do the same thing for teachers if you told them the results of the experiment of your classroom for the year, then they would root for that and make it true. So he didn’t tell the teachers that half were smart. He told them that half were bloomers, that they were about to see a dramatic increase in their IQ. So it was like a growth mindset treatment that it’s like, I’m giving you a starting hypothesis that your students are about to grow.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:26:10] And then what they found is that in the same classroom, the kids who were randomly assigned to be labeled bloomers tended to actually increase their IQ scores more. And there’s all kinds of subsequent stuff like, you know, I think legitimate criticisms that the gains in the first studies were so large that they’re impossible, like the equivalent of like changing a thousand genes, you know, it’s like not likely. But the results are very consistent with research on growth mindset and stereotype threat, where basically low income kids and students of color who happen to be named bloomers, therefore had the lowest starting point because of achievement gaps and therefore supposedly had the highest slopes. Those are the ones who actually gain the most. And in our growth mindset studies, we tend to find that if you already have straight A’s, growth mindset might help you take on more challenges. But I can’t make you get more A’s like it’s statistically impossible. And so we tend to find lower achieving students who are the ones who are like, maybe not as confident in their abilities, but they have it in them to do well. Those are the ones who bloom the most, uh, when we give them the growth mindset treatment.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:14] Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense to me. I feel like that kind of drops us into your current work also. So your recent book, 10 to 25 The Science of Motivating Young People, and I’m actually just curious about that also because when you’re naming something like this and you want something to appeal to a group of people or to the end to the people who are supporting them, the phrase young people, some people would probably be like, sure that there are those young people, the young people themselves. I wonder how they feel about that phrase that sort of like naming convention.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:27:41] You know, I ran it by a bunch of young people because I wanted to be the kind of book where you’re not embarrassed your parents or teachers reading it, you know, like if your parents reading how to get through to an outrageously out of control and grateful brat, it’s like, that’s not I’m embarrassed. My parents reading that book. So I wanted you people to proudly have it on their shelves and that people aren’t. They don’t mind the term. I mean, you know, adolescent is a is a synonym because adolescence is defined as from the onset of puberty at age ten until you acquire an adult like role, which might be 25. But the lay version of adolescence is is not that age range. And so you’d have to win an argument with someone before they read the book. And so I didn’t want to argue have that argument.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:24] That makes sense.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:28:25] But I would say that 10 to 25, you know, I could have named it what we’ll talk about, I assume the mentor mindset or whatever my thing was. But I kept um, I kept just talking it to parents at like, parties, like cocktail parties or, you know, dinner parties or whatever. And, like, you’re writing, what are you writing a book about? And the only thing that got them interested when I was is when I said, you know, how, like, no one knows how to motivate from, like the moment puberty strikes until like your mid 20s and you’re just constantly frustrated and it feels like you’re at a loss for words and like the next generation thinks differently than you, and it’s totally frustrating. The book will solve that problem. Like, okay, I want to read that book. So that’s why I ended up with 10 or 25. If you care at all about someone in that age range, or know someone who cares about someone in that age range, then the book is for you.

Jonathan Fields: [00:29:11] That makes a lot of sense to me. Let’s talk about this a little bit more. So this is going to be 10 to 25 age range, whether it’s ten years ago or ten years from now or 30 years from now, as we currently have this conversation, we’re fundamentally talking about Gen Z, who’s about 12 to 27, if I if I have it right. And this is a generation where you’re seeing so many people, um, really roll their eyes like, like, I don’t know how to I don’t know how to motivate them. Like, I don’t know what what what do we do with them? Like, how do I communicate effectively? They’re just they seem so different than everyone else. There’s so much mythology around this age, especially about how checked in or checked out they are. Like, fundamentally, what do we actually getting right and wrong about all of this, the mythology around it?

David Yeager, PhD: [00:29:54] Yeah, I think that there’s you’re absolutely right. There’s a there’s a big conversation about Gen Z, and it feels like their ears are in a permanent off position, like nothing we’re saying is getting through to them. And I hear so many people saying, I just can’t imagine what they’re thinking. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. And I think the frustration is is real. And I’ll tell you what, I hear it on the other side, too. The young people feel misunderstood. They feel like they’re not being listened to. They feel talked down to. They feel like normal stuff they’re doing is pathologizing. But probably the biggest sentiment is they’re like, we’re just making sense of the world that you guys created. Like, if you don’t like the way we’re adapting to your world, you should have created a different world or fixed something like, what’s wrong with you? It’s like, um, years ago when Alex Bogusky, who I write about in my book, was coming up with the world’s greatest anti-smoking campaign, The Truth Campaign, he interviewed a bunch of teenagers about the tobacco companies, and he was going to call his marketing campaign rage. And the idea was, you should be enraged by how the companies have marketed cool characters to you to try to get you to get addicted, basically, while you’re 13, 14, 15.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:31:11] And they hated the concept of rage because they said, we’re not mad at the companies, we’re mad at you adults for not protecting us. You didn’t create a legal environment that held these companies to accountable. You just let them run rampant and market to us. And now all of a sudden, you’re telling us that we’re shortsighted because we’re hooked to cigarettes like, this is the world you created? So I think about that a lot. Where now, going back to Gen Z adults think I have just made it through adolescence into the real world. So I understand how it works. So I’m going to explain to you what you need to do and how you need to sacrifice, and how you need to make choices so that you can make it out the other end. And young people are thinking, you left me a screwed up world. Like, why should I trust anything that you say? And I think that a big conflict is over the word listening. Increasingly, my friend Rosalind Wiseman, throughout the final phase of editing the book, read every chapter and helped me create it. And also Rosalind wrote, uh, or helped helped me write the practical sections at the end of the book.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:32:16] So how do you apply the ideas? And so we become good friends over the last few years. And her big takeaway from the book is when adults say the word listen, what they mean is that they want Gen Z to do exactly what they say with full compliance without explanation. That’s what they mean by listen to me, young people mean I want you to understand my perspective. And so if I’m not doing what you say, maybe I have a good reason for it. Or maybe I’m skeptical of something. So there’s this equivocation over the word listening. And I think a lot of it comes down to adults feeling like there’s no point to listening to young people because they’re unwise and unruly and shortsighted and just wimps. And so why should I get their perspectives? It makes no sense. And young people feel like there’s no point in being honest with adults because they’re never going to get taken seriously. And that creates, I think, a conflict between the generations that, to be honest, has been with us since the time of Aristotle or earlier. You see every generation writing about the various complaints that they have towards the next generation.

Jonathan Fields: [00:33:21] Yeah. Do you feel like there because so many people say Gen Z is different, that this group now is different? Is that true, or is this really just like the repetition of what we’ve seen for time immemorial?

David Yeager, PhD: [00:33:32] Well, it’s like saying there are things that are different about every generation, and they’re mostly driven by changes in technology or spread of ideas. So there’s nothing inherently different about the generation, but they’re responding to a different social reality. A lot of their parents don’t really remember a time before nine over 11, and the world has constantly been in crisis since 2001 or earlier, depending on, you know, what your crisis is, and it feels like it’s never going to let up, and it’s just getting worse and worse and worse. So that has an impact on people. And then you add to that technology and smartphones and so on. So there are different realities that they’re responding to. But the fundamental motivations of Gen Z are not different. I mean, there’s human evolution hasn’t changed in the last 15 years compared to the hundreds of thousands of years that preceded it. And the core motivations that young people have that drive their attention and behavior are, in general, something about their social standing and their group. Because as you go from being a protected child to being an independent adult, there’s a period at which you have to make a name for yourself and make a reputation, and show the group what you can add to the group and how you add value. That’s how you define adolescence, is that your main job is to earn a socially valued and respected reputation in whatever social group it is that you belong to or choose to belong to. And there are lots of great studies. Look at the neuroscience and hormones, etc., suggesting that this social reawakening that’s at the heart of adolescence drives a lot of the behavior that adults look down on, makes us slap our foreheads and say, what are you thinking? But once you understand it from their developmental needs, their behavior makes way more sense. And actually you can figure out how to respond to it.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:19] That makes a lot of sense to me. And it kind of brings us to what you shared earlier, this notion of what you describe as the mentor mindset. If we’ve been knocking heads, if the way that we’ve been trying to communicate with each other, both sides are frustrated parents, adults, grownups, caregivers, teachers really frustrated like young adults, super frustrated too. So what is a better way? Take me into this concept of the mentor mindset as a different way.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:35:43] As I was writing the book, I wanted to get out of the Ivory tower of academia and not assume that I know everything about adolescence and therefore you, the reader, need to just take my advice on my word. And instead, what I did is I went and found exemplary adults who don’t have this problem of the rebellious teenager that doesn’t listen, and that causes all the frustration and not like they don’t have it at all, but they like, have figured it out and they know what to do with it. So I found, for instance, the most successful high school physics teacher in Texas, the name Sergio Estrada. And he routinely gets great results from his students. And at Riverside High School and in El Paso, Texas, where just 5% of kids are college ready and 95% past college physics every year. And he’s never sent a kid to the principal for discipline at a school where last year a kid was stabbed and killed. So what is he doing? Like? That’s ridiculous. Like, it’s amazing what’s happening in Sergio’s class. At some point, I emailed the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, and we had a conversation about finding the CEO of Microsoft. And we found this amazing manager named Steph Okamoto, who does a fabulous job with her young employees. They spend all this time hiring great talented young people, and other companies lose those people within a few years, but Steph keeps them and they move up the pipeline and contribute. And they’re not this like constantly complaining, wimpy generation like the Gen Z stereotype. They’re motivated, they’re energized, they’re making contributions. So what is Steph doing.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:37:20] And you can go on and on. So NBA coaches, parents professors I found all these people. And what they all have in common is what I’ve now called a mentor mindset. And that’s a combination of two things. One is they have very high standards for whatever their role is relative to the young person, and which means they’re not pushovers and they’re not giving out participation trophies, but they’re exceptionally supportive. So their standards may be very high, but their supports are as high as their standards. So Sergio, for instance, I mean, he’ll assign a hard physics lab where students have to, like, find the force of friction with a matchbox car and a track. And that’s pretty hard. And he won’t tell them the answer, and they’ll be like, Mr. Estrada, is this right? And he’s like, I don’t know, is it right? They have to think about it. But he scaffolds it and builds it up so that students are prepared to do that kind of inquiry. And if they don’t get it right the first time, then they have a chance to fix it later. So he’s very high on intellectual standards, but in terms of logistics, often pretty flexible, so very supportive both emotionally and also logistically. And so the mentor mindset I found is a good way to deal with the adolescent need for status and respect that basically, if you imagine a world in which you’re just high standards and very low support, you’re like an authoritarian dictator. You’re yelling, telling blame and shaming. You know, nothing you do is good enough. Meet my standards, right? People don’t feel respected in that scenario.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:38:54] They might feel pushed, but often they’re just going to feel angry. They’re going to resent feeling ashamed. It’s not motivating, especially not for adolescents. So just the standards alone doesn’t capture the adolescent motivation to feel respected and to have status. Nor does having very low standards, but very high support. So having very low standards and very high support, I call a protector mindset. And that’s the idea that I’m just going to protect you from distress. So if you are, maybe you’ve been through a lot, you’re worn out, had a bad childhood or there’s a lot going on these days. I’m not going to make it worse for you by demanding more from you. That kind of low standards, high support feels like it’s going to be nice. Like they’re going to have a relationship with the teacher, but the students don’t feel respected and they know what you’re doing. They know you’re lowering standards because you’re looking down on them. So that doesn’t work either. So what I found is that the combo though of very high standards, therefore I believe in you. I respect your abilities plus support. Like I’m going to help you actually get there and earn a reputation for someone who can do something impressive. That’s the kind of mentor that can change your life. And you don’t have to be. You don’t have to make it your full time job to be a mentor for every person. If you’re a leader, that can just be your mindset, and it turns out that it can still have an important impact on young people.

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:15] Yeah, that makes so much sense. You know, it’s this blend of, I’m going to challenge you. I’m going to expect a lot from you. I’m also going to respect you and give you the support that I feel that you need to perform to this level, whatever that may be. I’m so curious about this and what your take is underneath that is this belief that we kind of talked about earlier, which is that whether you’re the teacher, the parent, the leader in a company of young young adults, the underlying belief is that everybody who is sort of like, under my charge is capable of performing at that level. And we see, especially in organizations like one of the phrases that that bugs me to no end in organizations is this phrase high potential? You know, like people try and like the leaders, like they’re trying to like we need to identify and pick out the high potentials here. And then and then we’re going to give them what they need, because they’re the ones that are going to take us to the next place. And I it it bugs me to no end because it’s like the Sorting Hat that says, like, you’re worthy of humanity and you’re not like you’re worthy of investment and you’re not. Rather than just like we all are. Like the job of a leader is actually to figure out, like, where is the potential and how do we nurture it, rather than just assume people have it or don’t. And it feels so destructive. But I feel like there’s this belief that’s indoctrinated, especially in the organizational world, that basically says it’s fixed, it’s fixed mindset. Believe, right. Some people have it, some people don’t. We’re going to find the people who have it and support them. Rather than saying no, let’s just set high expectations for everyone and give them what they need to rise to that level. How do you shift the underlying belief system?

David Yeager, PhD: [00:41:51] Yeah, I mean, I think that that what’s interesting about jobs is that people have to apply for them, so they have to want to do it, but then you’ve got a choice of who to pick. And so I think a lot of the obsession with talent is driven by an air. And once you have someone that you’ve hired and spent a lot of time recruiting, then the question is, what do you do with them? And I think at that point it’s maybe a little misguided to foreclose certain opportunities because they’re not defined as high potential in month one. And I don’t really see the best organizations doing that. At least that’s not how they’re doing it in the long run. Let’s take it out of the white collar world and think more about retail. So one of the situations I write about in the book is about some time I spent trailing and watching and meeting with managers at grocery stores, and I think retail is so interesting. It’s a place where I want to do a lot more research, and a big reason why is you think about what about 70% of Americans, maybe a little less, don’t have a college degree. And retail is often working for a large company. One of the only ways that they can have a steady wage that with a company that might invest in them over time.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:43:07] And yet many retail jobs are inhumane and not good jobs managers look down on you that basically you feel accused at all times of trying to sneak away and smoke weed in the break room so you can goof off and not work. Okay. And I hear this from a lot of people. So I found this grocery store in Norway, and there’s a manager named Ole. And Ole gets great results. So it’s in a small town outside of Stavanger, western Norway, and their store overperforms dramatically compared to the amount of revenue you’d expect and compared to the average for that grocery store across multiple chains. And so I talked to the employees at every level and they were like, oh, he’s so serious. Like he really pushes us. So he’s not like a fun and games manager at all. Like every morning as they arrive, he’s on the walkie talkie saying, all right, this was our goal yesterday. We didn’t meet it, but today we’re going to set a higher goal. And the goals are like, how long are you making people wait in line at the self-checkout? So if there’s an old lady, are you actually helping them get through the self-checkout or not? People have to do returns if they can’t find things, you know, if they’re moving around the end caps like he sets goals for the speed of all these things because they’re directly tied to revenue, but they don’t resent him as like a an authoritarian dictator.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:44:31] They love him because he he basically makes it clear to them, I’m taking you too seriously as a employee in order to have low expectations for you. I don’t want you to go home and say, I just worked retail, I did nothing, I’m and I have no value. He’s like, if you’re going to work here as long as you choose to, I want you to feel like you contributed something impressive and that we needed you. And so every day people go home feeling like they did something real. Maybe it was just an old lady who didn’t have to wait in line as long. Or maybe it’s the store. And like, collectively, they have this sense of accomplishment. There was one great story where a young woman, 19 years old, didn’t go to college, got hired at Bob’s, the grocery store, and unfortunately gotten under the wing of a 65 year old who was on her way out. And she had bad habits from a previous manager. She was like pretending to work, goofing off, hanging out in the break room, trying to avoid getting put on shift or go walk the floor.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:45:27] And Ole called her in and gave her a serious talking to like. You know, I know you can do a lot more. This is not acceptable. This is not the standard of the store or whatever. And I remember asking her, I’m like, did you were you offended? Did you call all your friends and complain? Did you like post on Twitter that you have a monster boss? And she was like, no, he cares about me. He wants me to be great. And now she’s in a leadership track program where she’s shadowing the assistant manager. She’s already had eight months of like, organizational leadership, reading Wharton MBA books again, never went to college, and she sees herself as a future leader in the organization. And I just what I like about that is, you know, if he would have defined her as high potential or motive, you know, high trajectory in the first few months, who knows what she would be doing? And there aren’t a lot of great jobs that are if you have a certain level of education that are better than retail. So probably a lot of worse jobs. She would be working, but now she has a sense of self-respect. And I think that’s really important for managers to keep in mind.

Jonathan Fields: [00:46:27] That’s so powerful also. Right. Because so often you feel like people feel they are the victim of a certain quote, class or category of jobs. This is just what they’re doing rather than saying, and if you’re the leader or the manager in that situation, you’re like, I can turn this into something extraordinary regardless of what the job title is, regardless of what the setting is, I can take a fast food place, I can take a retail, I can take a call center, whatever it may be, where people have these associations of them being like monotonous eye rolling, like I’m just going to suck it up and do the minimum possible and phone it in until I can get through this. And you can turn them into these extraordinary growth experiences by simply like showing up differently. I mean, it’s it’s powerful because it puts rather than saying it is what it is, you’re saying, no, we can take what is and we can transform it simply by shifting the way that we step into that container and form it and treat people. And it’s empowering in a lot of ways where I think there were these are situations where people don’t have power on all the levels, on both the, the management level and in sort of like the, the front line, the employee level. And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. One of the things that that occurs to me, and this is one of the things you write about also in this context, is you describe a level of transparency and directness that I think often isn’t there. And I wonder also if, like that lack of transparency, that lack of directness is part of the problem.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:47:54] Yeah, I think that there’s two versions of a lack of transparency that are a problem. One is more of a protector mindset version where you tiptoe around the truth, right, right, right. And you’re trying to protect someone from the disappointment, honest feedback. And I write about one manager who’s the best manager at Microsoft or was for a long time, and her rookie mistake was to not be direct with her direct reports because she cared about them as people. And then the performance review came around and they were labeled underperformers. So it hurt their promotional trajectories, it harmed their bottom line. So lack of transparency, there was a problem. The other thing that I write about even more, I think is a bigger issue, is when leaders are out there trying to have a mentor mindset or something like it. They’re like, I’m tough, but I’m supportive. I care about you. I believe in your growth. I’m on your side. But the employee or the student or the child doesn’t see it that way. They just think you’re a jerk who’s a maintaining impossibly high standards, and I’m mad at you for it. And I’ll never forget I was at a wedding. I was halfway through writing the book, and a buddy of mine’s wife, who’s a brilliant lawyer, former professor, just cares deeply about doing the right thing. Just amazing person. She was like, David, here’s my issue I have this.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:49:15] She was a mid-level, about to make partner at a law firm, and she had a 24 year old hotshot from a top law school she was working with. And she was like, I give this young woman direct feedback on her briefs. They’re not good enough to file for the client because they’re very important cases. So the senior lawyers have to look at them. But she’s offended that I’m giving her all this critical feedback. And the junior employee, the junior lawyer, thinks, oh, this all this critical feedback means I’ll never make partner, that the person is looking down on me. And my friend is like, I built $1,000 an hour, like, we’re charging a client for your critical feedback, and we’re doing that with integrity because we believe that your work is good enough. If we charge a client for work that was worthless, that’s mail fraud. Like, you can’t do that. So you have to believe in the work you’re doing. So that’s how much we believe in you. But she didn’t say that part out loud. She was like, oh, you got to fix these things. And so there was a disconnect where the young person thinks this criticism, these high standards, means I’m no good, and they’re looking down on me and I. They’re biased. And the senior person thinks the fact that you can’t take the critical feedback means that you’re a weak, feeble Gen Z snowflake who you know can’t do anything.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:50:36] This is a problem because obviously managers, it’s frustrating for them. But also you end up losing your junior employees if they resent you all day, or they just never get better and then you can’t put them on the real clients cases, and then you and then they, they eventually just phase out because they don’t get put on projects. Yeah, it’s a real dilemma. And what what I found in our experiments is if you just are way more transparent about what you were doing and why. Then the young person can start seeing your mentor mindset for what it is meant to be. It is that leader’s care and concern for you, their belief in your potential, their investment in you and your future. And once you have that, then young people are really motivated. They often will seek out critical feedback like, hey, can you look at this? Can you react to that? Because I value your input and opinion, it’s going to help me better. So a little bit of transparency often can be the unlock for having our interactions go better, especially if if we think as the leaders that we’re already doing everything right. Just explain about. My rule of thumb is explain about 2 to 3 times more what your intentions are and why. Then you think you need to. And then you’ll see in, I think, some meaningful changes.

Jonathan Fields: [00:51:47] Do you feel like there’s an analog in parenting as well, or are there differences there? Oh, totally.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:51:51] Especially as kids grow when they’re three, four, five, we’re constantly telling them what to do. And we don’t ask. I mean, maybe some positive parenting people are Q and A with their kids. Most people are like, get your shoes on, right? And we don’t worry about that because it’s our job to get you to school on time. And I’m not threatening your autonomy as someone who wants to go shoeless, it’s like it’s time to get your shoes on. But for a 12 year old, it’s like, take a shower. Well, yeah, we giving them honest feedback that they stink. But also it’s their body and it’s their social reputation. And so there is a little bit of we’re imposing our opinions on what seems to them like a personal choice, even if we don’t think it’s a personal choice to wear dirty clothes in school, we’re still from their perspective, it doesn’t feel life or death and therefore personal choice. And so I think that in parenting two, there’s the same kind of disconnect. We say one thing, they hear another, and you fight over the misinterpretation and transparency about what we’re doing and why. And honestly, also sometimes some questioning, asking them what their perspective is and why. That combination I think works really well.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:04] Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. I like that you folded in the questioning there also, because it’s sort of saying you have a voice in this, and oftentimes not only as parents do we not ask kids like those those questions tell me, like, what are you thinking? Like what’s you wouldn’t say, what’s your rationale? But like the equivalent of that, basically, like I want to really hear like what’s going through your mind like about this sort of like is making you make this decision, I value that. I want to understand it, that you just don’t ask that. And I think the pace of life for so many people and so many families has picked up so much that we just feel like, I don’t have time for this again, really. Like we need to get to X, Y and Z we get to. So that goes out the window. And then there’s this slowly deepening resentment that builds because both sides feel disrespected. Rather than saying, let me take an extra heartbeat and just ask a question and then actually listen, rather than asking the question, waiting the obligatory 15 seconds, then cutting them off and say, okay, I heard you, now you still got to do it this way, which I think often happens a lot in parenting. Um, yeah.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:54:07] I think that the reason why people don’t ask questions, I’ve come to conclude, is fundamentally that we don’t think their perspective is legitimate. If they’re home past curfew, we might ask, what were you thinking? But that’s not a legitimate question, because what we mean is you weren’t thinking and you’re an idiot and you made the wrong choice. And I’m mad at you, right? Sometimes a legitimate question, though, would help be like, well, I tried to leave an hour early. A friend of mine was suicidal, so I talked to her in the hallway and I talked her off, you know, the metaphorical ledge. And then I missed the bus. Those would be, like, a legitimate reason for being home late. But the parent who’s. It’s 11:00, you’re like, it’s time to go to bed. What were you thinking? If we’re in that kind of dictator mode, what I call enforcer mindset, even if it works for us in the moment, it’s still not good. Because if it works in the moment and they fully comply with what we think and do, then they’re not prepared to think for themselves in the future, and life’s just going to get more complex in the event that where they don’t listen to us, then now it’s a big blow up and it’s a big conflict and they resent us. So you actually don’t win at all. Aside from the very temporary relief of whatever thing you’re trying to accomplish by demanding, telling, yelling, blaming, shaming.

Jonathan Fields: [00:55:22] Yeah. As we have this conversation, I’m nodding along like, of course this makes sense. And then as a parent myself, as somebody who is a leader, as somebody who, like, runs businesses, it’s a very different experience to intellectually understand these ideas. And then in the heat of the day when you’ve got five things going on, to actually say, no, actually, this really matters a lot. I need to take an extra beat and operationalize this into the way that I exist in the world, into the relationships that I have. And so often I feel like we just steamroll past it because we’re like, oh, I’ll have the ability to do better next time, but right now and then it goes and goes and goes and goes and there’s never that time. And then there ends up being a chasm.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:56:01] I think it’s a really profound point. I wrestled with this a lot in writing the book because, you know, as a developmental scientist, I know of plenty of books out there that seem to have been written by a psychologist sitting in their quiet office, surrounded by books, not while the macaroni is burning and the repairman’s at the door, and your two kids are fighting and someone’s calling you on the phone, and you need to get someone to go pick up your kid from practice because, like, it’s the latter moments that where I really where the wheels fall off in my parenting and it’s not the former. Like I can hypothetically have any conversation, right? So what I like about the people I went and found for the book is their approaches work in the hustle and bustle of daily life, And they’re not trying. It’s not like some diet book that’s like, just give up carbs, right? Or like how to get over your drinking dependency. Don’t ever drink. It’s like it’s not like that’s not realistic advice for most people. And I’m not trying to write a parenting book like that because there’s plenty of mediocre parenting happening in my house. I wanted to write the kind of book that I needed to read. As a parent of four with a job, and my spouse works and we got a million things going on.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:57:13] What do I need to know? And probably for me, the two big takeaways were one. Have certain routines that are more or less memorized but open ended. So questioning routines, transparency routines, ways of helping a kid tell a different story to themselves in difficulty. So these are all chapters where it’s like, all right, here’s four steps. You can kind of memorize where when you’re distracted, you’re doing a lot of other things. You can do these things. And the second this came from our parenting coach, I interviewed, Lorena Seidel, who I think is very profound. She was like, you can do a do over, which sounds obvious, but that was not obvious to me. I thought when a given conversation with a kid, you’ve yelled at them in the kitchen, that’s your only shot. And she said, no, you can totally do a do over. You can just go say, hey, a second ago, I didn’t handle this in the way that I planned to based on the values in the family. I want to apologize to you for that. What I meant to do was the following. Doesn’t mean we’re going to have no standards, but it does mean I should have taken the time to listen to you. So could you please just explain to me, and then we can figure this out? And she’s like, that takes seven minutes.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:58:17] Maybe. And maybe that’s hard when the macaroni needs three minutes of attention. But if you do that a few times, pretty soon they’re going to know what you’re going to say before you say it, and you end up saving a lot more time later. And right now, when she hears her kids fighting across the house, she can just lift an eyebrow and the kids will be like, okay, mom, we’re fighting because we don’t know how to get what we need and we really should have talked about it first. So now we’re going to have a conversation and they’ll just recite the whole thing to her because they’ve heard it so much and it saves her so much time and frustration. So I think that’s the takeaway for me is, is mental mindset. I’m not asking you to do the equivalent of going from not exercising to 90 minutes in the gym every day. It’s like some impossible commitment. It’s like just a different philosophy and a few things that can be memorized. And then give yourself the grace to have a do over. And I think what people will find is just like the growth mindset we have about the kids, we can have a growth mindset about our own leadership styles.

Jonathan Fields: [00:59:14] Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. And the notion of I love the do over thing. I found myself doing that a few times and being surprised. I’m like, oh, that actually really helped. I couldn’t believe it worked.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:59:24] I was.

Jonathan Fields: [00:59:24] Like, it’s like, do you want.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:59:25] To hate me forever? Like, no, I just wanted to be listened to.

Jonathan Fields: [00:59:27] It turns out. Yeah. And it also serves as a pattern interrupt because the kids like kids like, wait, wait, what what’s what’s happening here? I’m being respected. I’m being seen. Like I’m being treated like, with dignity. And she goes back to Rosalind Wiseman’s work a lot also, you know, like, it’s it just it really makes a difference and it and it becomes something that they then see respect coming rather than disrespect coming. And that becomes the assumed container rather than a container of disrespect. And it just, it makes it so it doesn’t have to be so effortful moving forward.

David Yeager, PhD: [00:59:56] Yeah, I think a huge part of our generational conflict is they are overreacting to what they expect, not what we actually did. So they’re reading between the lines, like peering through a barrier of mistrust that’s coloring everything we’re doing. But the good part about, I think what we’ve laid out in the book is that you can actually give them a different lens, a different lens that like, even in a conflict, you’re going to be respected and taken seriously. You’re not going to have all the control. It’s not. It’s not like a totally open ended democracy where the parent and the child share all authority. But still, you’re going to have some say in how things go, and that’s because you have something to say. Once they start expecting that, then you can avoid a lot of the immediate overreactions that come from something as small as telling a kid to put on their coat, or call me when you get there, because in the old view, call me when you get there. Put on a coat is I don’t trust you as your parent, right? I think you’re incompetent and I don’t trust you. But in the new view, it’s like, wow, my parent cares about me. Even with all the other things they have going on, they still want to know how I’m doing. And so once you have that different interpretation, they’re going to react from the start a little differently.

Jonathan Fields: [01:01:07] Yeah, it gives them a different model so that then when they move out into the world and they move into different contexts, different relationships, they have a sense for what’s possible so that if they’re not experiencing that, instead of saying, oh, this is just like, this is just what grown ups do. This is just how it is in the world of work. This is just what it means. If I want to be like in this, in this type of field or something like that, like, no, no, no, actually, I know it can be different. So let me find the context that allows me to actually step into that same type of dynamic and respect, and so it gives them something to a little bit of a compass to look for in these different contexts and move, you know, away from you and say, like, I actually know what’s possible. So I’m going to seek that out. I’m going to invest energy in finding or creating that, because that context really matters. And that’s the way that I want to live my life.

David Yeager, PhD: [01:01:56] Yeah, I think that’s really profound because ultimately, for any young person under our care, whether it’s an employee or a student or a child, we want them to still be empowered and have skills after they leave our care. You’re planting a tree. You don’t know what it’s going to look like for years and years, and you want to stumble upon that tree later and be like, man, that tree looks awesome, like a kick ass tree, and just have that pride that you prepared a young person for doing something great later. I think it’s something I saw again and again from the people I interviewed was they never bragged about their accomplishments. I had to, like, look it up and go find it in other places. But they talked a lot about their mentees accomplishments, whether it was students or their children or anybody else that they were in charge of.

Jonathan Fields: [01:02:40] I love that it feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well, and folks can dive into the book. There’s so many more topics that that are in the book that we haven’t even had a chance to touch on, that really deepened into, you know, from purpose to belonging to navigating stress that touch on like, how do I show up in this way and how do I how do we really create this dynamic that’s that’s powerful and constructive and supportive. But as we come full circle in this conversation, in this container of Good Life Project., if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

David Yeager, PhD: [01:03:08] Well, I think the themes here are there are many ways to do it, but I think one thing that’s a part of any good life is you’ve left a positive impression on somebody else, and you can look back on the people whose lives have been changed, the people who will attend your wake and your funeral and will write about you after you’re gone and tell stories about you after you’re gone. And I think a good life, a life well lived, is one that leaves that kind of residue. And what’s nice about the mentor mindset is you’re just always prepared to leave that lifelong, life changing impression on somebody, and you don’t ever really know when that’s going to happen. When are they going to forget what you did and when are they going to remember? But if you just have that stance enough in your interactions with young people, it’s going to happen. And it’s some of the most joyful things that have happen in my life is when young people come back to me and they’re like, remember you said this to me? I was like, no, I don’t remember that at all. But it sounds like something I would say and I could change my life. Great, I love that. That’s what I want to add to the thoughts about a good life is like leave a residue of inspiration and lives changed behind you. And a mentor mindset is a way that anyone can do that.

Jonathan Fields: [01:04:18] Mhm. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode Safe bet, you’ll also love the conversation we had with Ashton Applewhite about ageism. Find a link to Ashton’s episode in the show. Notes. This episode of Good Life Project. was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help By. Alejandro Ramirez. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project. in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did. Since you’re still listening here, would you do me a personal favor? A seven second favor and share it? Maybe on social or by text or by email? Even just with one person? Just copy the link from the app you’re using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you’ve both discovered. Because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life project.