Episode 158: Dr. David Yeager on the Science of Motivating Gen Z, Alpha, & Beta

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Today Counts Show Episode 158

Preview

Jim Piper: I literally saw this with me and one of my grandsons. My intentions and my motives were pure and lovely and hope for all that. But it’s like we will ask a kid a question and we’re conditioning them to be risk adverse to the point of no creativity, no sense of trust in the relationship because when we ask them a question and they hesitate to give us an answer, we immediately go into lecture mode and so all that does is reinforce that “I’m the adult, you’re the kid. Sit down, shut up. Here’s the deductive learning, take it, and if you’re smart, you’ll do something with it.”

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Introduction and Episode Overview

Jim Piper: Welcome back to the Today Counts show. I’m your host, Jim Piper. Today, we are going to be talking about life and leadership, specifically, at least the words I’m going to use or the word I’m going to use is mentoring. And that’s why this particular episode is so important to me. My guest today is Dr. David Yeager. And I believe he is a professor at UT, but I’ll let him spell that out in a minute. But the book that I want to talk about and wherever it leads us, is one that he has authored recently 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. Dr. Yeager, thank you for joining the Today Count Show today.

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jim Piper: Hey, I want to jump in first with okay, I get it. You’re an educator. You’re into research. That’s the part of the doctorate program that I did not like is the research part. So kudos to you for sticking with it and being a pro versus a bit of a rebel like me. What led you to do the research for this book?

The Compelling Puzzles of Communication with Young People

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah, first was just the compelling nature of the puzzles. In 15 years of being in the field, I haven’t met many people, if any, who feel 100 % confident that they know what to say to a young person, whether they’re unmotivated or in a crisis or overwhelmed. Just in general as a society, we are not great at communicating with the next generation.

And you don’t have to just look at people’s confidence. I mean, you can look at the fruits of our labors. I mean, when you review programs designed to improve adolescent health, on average, you see nothing works, right? Anti-drug campaigns, campaigns to promote healthier eating, anti-bullying, especially in the adolescent years, like very few things are effective. But also you can just see, we have lots of challenges, whether it’s the crisis with boys where they’re going to, you know, graduate school, et cetera, at a lower rate than undergraduate. I think graduate school at a lower rate than ever before to teen mental health crisis disproportionately affecting young girls and on and on.

So we need help is kind of the first thing. And not only because we care about young people in the next generation, but also because our own lives as leaders are worse off when we can’t reach the next generation. I mean, I talked to managers at grocery stores, for instance, who are like, “I’m 25 and managing the 17-year-old. And I don’t know what to say to them to get them to be reliable,” or parents who have a freshman in high school. And they’re like, “How do I get this kid to care about algebra or geometry and on down the line?”

So I think the first reason why I wanted to do the rigorous research is that there are real puzzles and problems that affect a lot of people and influence our lives and our happiness. The science that had been conducted is often not very useful or wrong or just kind of, you know, done for the ego of some scientists in an ivory tower, not done with the people who would use it in mind.

And so I became a lunatic about the science and the experimental method, hypothesis testing and really rigorous research, not just because I like spreadsheets, although I’ve come to love them, but because I feel like the evidence that we bring to bear on these problems needs to be as serious as the problems are in our lives. That’s kind of my big driving motivation.

The Shocking Research on Medical Compliance in Young People

Jim Piper: Good. In the beginning of your book, the first part of your book, what kept me turning the pages is what you already referred to in your research, which I was ignorant of and it was a bit shocking to me because self-preservation is something that I think is innate in us as human beings. And so when you brought forth the ideas that we have these kids that have chronic and potentially fatal conditions, diseases, whatever, and some of them just don’t see the need to take their medicine or whatever.

And then of course, you introduce the different ways in which we try to encourage them to do that and fail. That to me is what set apart the research, you know, because when you’re talking about dealing with your adolescent, when you’re talking about sports, when you’re talking about, you said, geometry or algebra or learning grammar, whatever it is that we’re trying to get them to see the importance of, though that’s important, I wasn’t sure that that would have been a big enough hook for me to continue to go on because I would probably just said, “You know, it’s been like this since we began. What’s the big deal, David?” But when you started off with this research about their medical condition, that blew me away.

And I had this thought. Now it goes back aways, I’m gonna chase a little bit of a rabbit. I have learned that inductive learning sticks much better than deductive presentations where I tell people the answers or give them the answers, they’re just not sticky. But doing the inductive thing, it takes more patience, takes more time. It’s almost like you got to, you know, maybe I’m dating myself, but you got to do the Colombo, you know, almost approach. That is kind of what you’re saying, is it? Is it not or, but towards the latter part or the middle to the latter part of your book, you really get more into this idea of collaboration. I don’t know if I made myself clear, but can you maybe clear that up a little bit talk about that?

Generational Disconnect and Blaming Technology

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah, I mean, just a few things. So first is, you’re right that the frustrations that older generations have had interacting with the next generation have been around throughout human history. So I’m not saying anything new about that. But that’s important in part because when we fail to realize that, then we grasp onto very local and time specific solutions. We say, “Oh, there was a golden age where everyone got along well with the next generation. And if that’s true, then something is screwed up about our current age.”

So then you just pick literally anything you happen to notice about the current age and blame it. I mean, it’s kind of like people are like, there’s an increase in diagnoses of ADHD. And so, but, also is an increase in plastic. So therefore, plastic is a cause of, you know. The human mind tries to invent connections and it doesn’t matter how ridiculous or implausible it is. That’s what people tend to do when you’re looking at trends over time and trying to come up with time specific examples.

And we see that a lot when people think of young people today as uniquely bad compared to previous generations. And so then you’re like, “Well, what’s different about this generation?” And then our minds invent all kinds of stuff like, “Well, they’re on social media,” or “Well, there’s devices everywhere. Everything is too easy for them. And because it’s so easy, then they’re all just a bunch of wimps wandering around with stupid, idiotic, addicted brains that can’t get off their social media.”

That’s the narrative, right? But guess what? The people I know who are most addicted to social media are my mom and her friends, like Baby Boomers. She comes over to my house, and rather than talk to her grandkids, it’s like, “I need to check Facebook and see what my 75-year-old friends have posted.” So it’s kind of implausible on its face, but that hasn’t stopped lots of authors and supposed health experts blaming all ills of society on more recent technologies.

Which isn’t to say that technology isn’t important, but every culture has their own technological change and every time that happens, there’s a new boogeyman to blame. In the ’60s, it was long hair and the Rolling Stones and on and on and on.

Jim Piper: That’s good. Yeah, that lands. That lands really well. I kept having this recurring thought as I was working, you know, through it, through your book, I mean, and the thought was, though, there’s some exceptions. And of course,  you’ve narrowed your research, according to the title of your book. And of course, the contents say the same thing. But in working with executives, working with business owners, working with ministry leaders and then of course, having my own children, of course, my children are 40, or at least knocking on the door 40. But then I’ve got seven grandchildren. And so obviously, I’m really paying attention to my grandchildren as I’m reading through your book, but this reoccurring thought kept coming to me.

Wouldn’t this research also demonstrate a lot of similarities for all age groups? Or do you really believe that the principles that you– I mean, we’re going to get to some of your terminology, right? I mean, mentoring is– When that word was brought up, and you started really defining it, that was a breath of fresh air. But mentoring to 10 to 25 is just one category. I mean, there’s 26 to 30, there’s the 30s, there’s the 40s, there’s whatever. And I kept running into principles where I’m going, “I don’t know why that wouldn’t apply in my practice. I don’t know why that wouldn’t–”

Because frankly, because of EQ and somebody’s childhood, or because of heightened stress, someone’s ability to collaborate is challenged in that. I mean, have you had those thoughts too? I wonder if this is also true, at least in a broader way to us all.

The Universal Desire for Status and Respect

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah. And so by this, what I think you’re referring to is the claim I make in the book, which is that young people today are not fundamentally broken and or, you know, their brains haven’t been hijacked and rewired by some specific thing that happened in the last few years. But instead, throughout human history, there has been this disconnect between how adults have tended to treat young people and what young people want at a fundamental level. And what do they want? What I argue is that they want a sense of status and a sense of respect. And that’s important because–

Jim Piper: Whether they know that consciously or not, correct?

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah. I mean, it’s like if you’re hungry for protein, you’re not always conscious of that. But if you have only starch, you’re like, “I’m still hungry.”

Jim Piper: That makes sense.

David Yeager, Ph.D: Right. If you’re dying for electrolytes and you only drink water, then you’re like, “I still need something else.” So you don’t have to be conscious of it to crave it. And what young people are craving is a sense of feeling like they’re socially valuable and that they are viewed as someone of worth in the eyes of someone whose opinions matters to them.

The reason that’s important is because really young children, like a three-year-old, they’re not evaluated in terms of how much they keep the tribe alive. Like when humans are wandering the savanna in our evolutionary history, you don’t like get mad at a three-year-old because they didn’t kill a mastodon today. You’re like, “No, I take care of the three-year-old.” But at some point, if you’re like 16 years old and you’re sitting there like a lump on a log, people are going to stop bringing you protein and stop protecting you from a warring tribe or whatever it is.

And so you need to be able to show your value to others in a meaningful way publicly in order to transition from being a child that’s taken care of to an adult that is part of the group. And so that kind of craving for status and respect turns on in that age group. Now, what some people have sometimes said to me is, “But wait a second, I want status and respect as an adult. I mean, isn’t that what drives all of us all the time?”

And what I would argue is that the strongest developmental claim is between really young children and adolescents, because again, like a three-year-old doesn’t get offended if we put their shoes on for them, right? But a 16-year-old would get offended if we put their shoes on for them because it implies that we think they’re too incompetent to put their shoes on. And so all of a sudden, the behaviors that carry a social implication of incompetence, therefore threaten their status and become an issue.

Now, older adults, my 50s, again, maybe if I paid someone to put my shoes on, it’d be a sign that I’m high status. But if someone went out of their way, be like, “You look like someone who can’t put shoes on, you need Velcro,” like I’d be offended, right? So wouldn’t you still say status and respect matters in adulthood? And the answer is yes, but once we take on an adult-like role and are afforded a measure of influence in our society, it kind of stops being the main thing we’re concerned about.

It’s kind of like if you desperately want a romantic partner and you don’t have one, you think about that a lot. Like the main thing you might be thinking about is how do I win someone over so that way they’re coupled up or whatever you’re thinking, right? But if you have a loving, good relationship with a romantic partner, you might think about maintaining that, but you don’t think about getting a romantic relationship, or at least a lot of people don’t, because you have one. And so you think about other stuff, like, I don’t know, your kids or your career or whatever it is.

The Adolescent Predicament and Mismatched Expectations

Similarly, young people are in this predicament where in general, adults think of them as less competent and status worthy than they want to be felt and they want to be looked at. And that creates a disparity, a mismatch that I call the adolescent predicament. To illustrate, a great study was done by Ruck and colleagues in 1998. And they asked a bunch of teenagers when they thought they should have certain rights and privileges. And then they asked adults when they thought the teenager should get those rights and privileges.

So an example is whether you can write a letter that’s critical of the principal and publish it in the school paper. And teenagers, we’re like, “I should be able to do that in seventh grade, eighth grade.” And adults are like sophomore, junior year. So there’s like a two-to-four-year gap between when adults think you have the right and when young people think they should be ready for it. And that creates this uncertainty about status and respect that adults, once you have an established career and you’ve got people deferring to you and you have resources and wealth and all these other things you get, if you kind of play the game in our adult society, then it becomes less focal.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t fall back into being like a teenager. So, there’s an example I gave. A guy who’s a general counsel at a Fortune 100 company contacted me. He’d read my book, was very excited about it. And he said, “I’m mainly worried about offending my young lawyers. I want to do a good job.” And so he was worried about being the mentor, but he’s also preparing for retirement. Part of his preparation for retirement was to go to graduate school and learn how to be a teacher. He’s going to teach once he’s retired.

And I was like, “Well, imagine you’re in your first day of teaching and the principal comes in the back of your room and sits there with a clipboard and quietly writes a bunch of comments about your teaching and then shakes his head and walks out of the room. Like, how are you going to feel?” And like, “I’m going to be so terrified, offended. Like I’m going to be like a teenager again.”

So I think any adult can go back into that adolescent predicament when your status and respect becomes uncertain. And so a lot of the tricks I talk about do apply across generations. But they particularly apply when you’re in that adolescent predicament of a mismatch between the status you want and what you’re afforded by your culture and your society.

Jim Piper: Yeah, and I think that’s a very important part of your book, which if I’m following you right, David, that’s the second section of your book. But prior to that, you throw out a term that caught my attention. And then I’m really kind of focusing, I’m trying to apply right now in my life, which is this mentor mindset here. You know, you’ve discussed some of it, you’ve walked around some of it, but without completely giving your whole book away on a podcast. What is, because if I can’t really do these things that you’re encouraging me to do, if I don’t first have a foundation cultivating this thing called a mentor mindset, would you say so? And if so, give us a little bit of a taste of what a mentor mindset is.

The Mentor Mindset: High Standards, High Support

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah, so if we’ve got this perennial problem of a disconnect between the generations and it’s something about the desire for status and respect not being met. Then a question is, “All right, well, are there any adults out there or leaders who get it right? Are there any people who kind of don’t have this problem where they say one thing, the young person hears another, and then there’s a fight over the miscommunication?”

And the answer is yes, there’s a lot of these people and I found them for the book. And I tried to look at what they all have in common. So one example is Texas’s greatest high school physics teacher. Amazing promoter of learning and achievement, even in a low-income, high-poverty neighborhood. Another is the NBA’s best shooting coach. His name was Chip Engelland. For 17 years, he coached the Spurs. On the last two years, he’s been the shooting coach for the Oklahoma City Thunder who have gone from the worst team in the NBA to the best in those two years. Who was the best manager at Microsoft for almost 20 years? And on and on.

What I found is that even though these are very different kinds of roles and very different people, they all have one, at least one thing in common. And it’s this philosophy of leadership that I call a mentor mindset. Tthe mentor mindset very simply refers to the idea that you have very high standards for someone, but you also support them to meet that very exacting standard.

And so why does that work? It works because it’s respectful for me to take you seriously, right? If you’re a lower power person than me and I’m the boss and I’m in charge and I have this, you know, standing in my culture or my community and I take you seriously as though you could do something impressive, you can go above and beyond, and I’m impressed by what you do, that’s a way of me allowing you to earn a reputation as someone who’s respect worthy.

And that’s important because if I just held those standards but then didn’t care if you actually met them and I never supported you, you would never earn that reputation. You would just be someone who failed to earn a good reputation. Or if I lowered standards and I was like, “Let’s just take it easy on you, you can’t do anything.” There too, again, you’re not going to earn a prestigious high-status reputation because you’ll never do anything impressive.

So the mentor mindset is like high standards, high support. And I call it mentor mindset because you’re aligning your expertise, resources, time, et cetera, with the long-term wellbeing growth and development of the person you’re working with. It’s a mindset because it’s just your philosophy and approach. It’s not like a new formal role we’re trying to give you. I’m not trying to make everybody, I don’t know, pick someone to have coffee with on Thursdays and give them career advice.

You know, I mean, that’s a nice thing to do, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s really like anytime you’re giving feedback, anytime you’re deciding who’s going to do which project, anytime you’re having a tough conversation, in your mind, having the mindset of “I’m going to be tough, but supportive. So that way, this person is benefited in the long run, not just for this, to solve the short-term problem.”

Applying the Mentor Mindset in Real-Life Situations

Jim Piper: Do you get any questions or pushback in this whole, this mental mindset when you’re dealing with, you know, a 12-year-old, a 13, a 14-year-old in the sense of acute situations versus chronic issues? It seems as though there’s only– You illustrate this in your writing, but it seems like there’s only a certain amount of time in a day where if you take the writing altruistically 24 seven, you’re always collaborating, you’re always asking questions, how does how does one decide that, “Yeah, this is a situation where I just need to tell. And this is a situation where I need to maybe take a longer-term approach. I’m not going to try to score a touchdown today. I’m just going to try to gain a few yards. But I want to do it together.” Am I making sense on that question?

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah. So this idea of a mentor mindset, if I’m going to have high standards, but I’m going to be kind of relentlessly supportive. And so you can meet them is not controversial at a high level. People are like, “Of course, it makes a lot of sense.” But then, if you’re a parent and you’re sitting there and like the macaroni is burning on the stove and the repairman’s at the door and you’re late for soccer practice and two kids are fighting, it feels like that’s not the right time to sit and have a Socratic dialogue about and go into Colombo mode and be like, “Huh?”

Jim Piper: You just gave everybody a pill of relief right there. Go ahead.

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah. And so I think it feels impractical. And I guess I would say two things to that. One is, yeah, I mean, I get it, I’m a parent for kids and like, it’s not like I, I am trying to record audio for the world’s greatest parent podcast every single time my kids are in a fight, you know, but I do try to turn that moment into a learning moment five to 10 times more frequently than I would have before, for sure.

And that absolutely pays off because then you save yourself more time in the future because in the parenting case, your kids are more independent. They understand what you want of them and they proactively do the right thing the next time. So yes, in a crisis, it feels like there’s no time, but do you really have the time to have that same fight 30 more times over the next two months? Wouldn’t it be a lot better to have it like twice instead of 30 times?

So that’s one answer is that there’s a little upfront cost that totally pays off. And the second answer is I learned this from a parenting coach I interviewed for the book. Her name is Lorena Seidel and she has this concept of the do-over and she’s like, “You’re not going to get it right the first time, or even the fifth time, but you can go to your kids afterwards and say, look, ‘I didn’t live up to our family values there. I’m really sorry about that. I should have been more curious about what was going on with you and why it was an issue. At the same time, I need you to do the right thing here, but could you just take time explaining to me what the issue was so that way I can help you problem solve? ‘”

And a lot of times kids will remember that more than the initial blow-up or the initial poor choice that we made as parents. So we can use a mentor mindset even on a do-over. And that takes away this pressure of having to be the always perfect parent. I didn’t want to write a book that basically said, “If you screw this up, you give your kids toxic stress and then they’re ruined for life. And you’re going to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars in therapy the rest of their lives.” Like you can do a do over. You can use a mental mindset, and they’ll appreciate that.

The Enforcer and Protector Mindsets vs. The Mentor Mindset

Jim Piper: That’s good. You use terms if I remember right– Because some of this I’m pulling off the top of my head, but some examples of what is a mentor mindset is not this enforcer or this protector. Did I get those terms right that you used? Yeah, describe that a little bit because I think a lot of people can resonate to that. So that way they can differentiate between you know, kind of what I’m–

Because as you point out in your research, which I don’t think you probably get much pushback on this at all, but even though we say, “I’m never going to act like my dad did,” or “I’m never going to act like my mom did,” voila, one day we just find ourselves doing that, a product of our environment, so to speak, particularly under times of stress. Maybe if you gave a little bit of an example of those two or whatever else, that is a clear differentiation between the mental mindset that you’re talking about.

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah, so the mentor mindset is that very high standards, very high support. Framing it that way implies that there are two kinds of halfway there errors. One is super high standards, no support. I call that the enforcer mindset because you’re enforcing very high standards but not really spending any time trying to help someone meet them. And that’s the kind of person or the kind of approach in which you say, “Look, young people today, they’re so entitled, they’re sensitive, they’re whining. I’m not gonna cater to all their feelings and I’m too busy and frankly, I object on principle that I should be such a pushover.”

And so at the same time, “Young people are untrustworthy, unruly problems about to go nuts. So in order to prevent a descent into chaos where I’m the last bastion of sanity in an insane world, then I need to maintain tough and rigorous standards. And I refuse to relent on my standards. And I also refuse to cater to your wimpiness by helping you to meet them.”

So that’s the enforcer mindset. And I get it. I fully understand where it comes from and why people do that. But it only is half the formula because what happens is young people feel like they’re being held to impossible standards. And then blamed for the fact that they can’t meet an impossible standard, which feels very unjust.  Then often enforcers resort to a kind of shame, blame, yell and tell approach. So they’re like, “Well, this is what I needed you to do. And you didn’t do it. The fact that you didn’t do it means you don’t care or you’re not a good person or you’re not serious.” And so it’s a character issue, whenever you fail to meet the standard rather than a competence issue.”

When a competence issue is blamed on a lack of character, that’s like the definition of shame. Right? Like embarrassment is when you try earnestly to do something and you do it poorly because you’re not competent enough.  You’re embarrassed of it. Like you really want to water ski. You’re not strong enough to hold the rope and you fall over. You’re a little embarrassed, but you’re not a bad person. Right? But blaming you for being a bad person like, “You’re failing math because you refuse to do your math homework and you refuse to do it because you’re not serious. You don’t care about your future. And you don’t care about your future because you’re short sighted and a bad person.”

Right? So that’s shame. And shame is like not a productive emotion. It doesn’t help people get better or troubleshoot. And so enforcers end up using a shame and blame approach. It’s not motivating. And because it’s shaming, it is an affront to status and respect. And therefore, it’s the biggest turnoff to young people’s motivation than you could possibly do.

The other kind of flaw is what I call the protector mindset. And that’s very low standards, very high support. And low standards, high support, again, makes sense from a certain perspective. I mean, that’s where you say, “Look, young people have been through so much, they’re traumatized, they’re stressed, we can’t expect too much of them. Maybe they’ve been through COVID or they’ve had early childhood trauma or whatever it is. Or their brains are now kind of weak addicted mush because of their cell phones and the internet and stuff like that. And so I’m not going to expect anything impressive from them.”

And young people might like that in the short term because they’re skating by on something easy. But in the long term, that makes them terrified because it makes them feel like they’re never going to be prepared for a kind of terrifying world. A world that is full of constant threats, whether they’re economic or social or in terms of actual war. Right? This idea that they’re going to transition into adulthood without any real reliable skills that will help them to do better in life is terrifying for them.

And so again, it comes across as a disrespectful approach because it’s basically adults saying, “I have such low expectations for you because I think very little of your competence.” That’s an insulting implication. So the enforcer and the protector both come from good intentions, right? The enforcer, the intention to prevent a descent into chaos. Protector, the desire to show that I care and I want to protect you from the terrifying world. But both have these big flaws because they don’t combine the standards and the support.

And the argument I make in the book is, look, I’m not trying to put you in a box if you’re an enforcer or protector and say you’re no good. Instead, it’s more like, “All right, enforcers, you have the standards, great. Let’s add the support. Protectors, you’ve got the support, great. Add the standards.” And either of them can transition to the more of the mentor mindset of high standards and high support.

Fear as a Driving Emotion in Different Mindsets

Jim Piper: You didn’t use the word but it sounded to me in both cases, the enforcer and the protector slash rescuer, I wanted to throw in there maybe as a synonym, you know, to that. Is fear a common denominator that might be the driving emotion?

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah, I think everybody’s afraid of something in some way. But I think they’re afraid of different things. So I think the enforcer is afraid of the chaos that would result if they don’t enforce extreme standards and discipline, right? It’s kind of like the teacher who worries if I leave the room, then the kids are going to be hanging from the rafters. And it turns out that enforcer classrooms are like that, that when the second the teacher like relents with their iron fist, then the kids go nuts.

Jim Piper: Yeah, it’s waiting to explode. It’s being suppressed and waiting. Yeah.

David Yeager, Ph.D: Exactly. This is classic 1930s Lewin and his experiments about the effects of authoritarianism and Nazi Germany and stuff. So I think the enforcers are afraid of that, of the chaos that comes if they relent from being a dictator. And protectors are afraid of the crushed spirits and the psychological harm that would come from stress and failure. Both of those can be overcome if the enforcer realized young people are capable of independent, hard, good work and good decisions if they’re supported in the correct way. And the protector’s fear can be addressed by explaining that actually stress doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It can be a good thing. It can be a sign you’re doing something ambitious and important and that you’re growing.

But the mentor, I think, is afraid also, but they’re afraid of different stuff. A mentor is afraid of wasting a day in which they could have changed somebody’s life. They’re afraid of saying, “I had knowledge, expertise and a powerful position and I didn’t use it today to help somebody else on the journey to becoming excellent and making our society better.”

Jim Piper: That’s good. Yeah, that’s really good. Yeah.

David Yeager, Ph.D: And Sergio is afraid of that, this teacher I write about. Every day because he grew up in this low-income community. It was 99% kids from Mexico, lots of poverty and stuff like that. And he’s worried that he will have squandered the good fortune he had of getting out of the community and having the choice to come back by not changing the lives of young people. And so he’s a lunatic about his mentor mindset in part because of that fear.

Surprises in the Research: The Power of Mindset Shifts

Jim Piper: Before you wrote this book, David, you’ve obviously been well studied in the world of psychology, at least, and I don’t know what the rest you would add to your girth. So you probably came in with some pretty clear sense of hypothesis that you were going to explore as you did. I’m making some conclusions here. Were you surprised by any of what you found in the results of your research? Were there any surprises that you were not expecting?

David Yeager, Ph.D: I mean, very, very early on, I was shocked by the power of this mindset approach. I mean, if you ask a typical person, “How are you going to change someone’s behavior?” You might say, “We’re going to give them a new habit. So I’m going to force them to do the new habit for a while until it becomes routine. And then they’ll continue to do it.” But that implies you have to stand over their shoulder and, kind of think like you’re coaching a baseball player like, “Keep your elbow up, keep your weight back, keep your head–” Unless you’re like in a cast doing it exactly the same way every time, then you’re going to form the bad habit and you’re never going to change your behavior.

And a lot of people think of not just sports, but of moral character, intellectual change as requiring that kind of hypervigilance. Very early on we found that yes, of course there’s a role for direct instruction. A lot of times, you can achieve change just by changing someone’s beliefs in a really subtle way and that a very small framing of a reframing of some idea or some behavior can have a big effect.

So a good example is very early in my career, I conducted this research on a purpose for learning and the conventional view of why young people might learn or, for instance, why they might do a bunch of boring math worksheets, right? And it’s called freshman math. The conventional reason is I’m going to try to get an A. Once I have an A, I go to the next course. Once I take all those courses, then I can get into a good college. Then once I’m in a good college, I get a good major, get a good degree. And then I graduate, get a good job. Then I have money or whatever in my mid-thirties. And then I can barely afford a mortgage one day is a goal.

And so that’s the conventional view. We did an experiment, though, where we didn’t talk about any of that stuff, like never mentioned the future. Instead, we said, hey, what makes you upset about the world right now? And it turns out most teenagers can answer that question instantly. They’re like, “Everything, but here’s a list. How long do you have? I’ll tell you all the problems I see,” and you know, political polarization and conflict and war and economic inequality. And like, they’re worried about all this stuff. Right?

And then we say, “All right, well, how could having a stronger brain help you to make a difference toward one of those issues?” And they’ve never been asked that question before, because it’s usually learning is for the sake of grades and exchanging for a credential in years in the future. But the idea that right now my strong, smart brain is going to be of importance and be of consequence, that’s new.

So then they could write about that. And then we say, “All right, well, can you write a letter to another student like you who’s struggling in high school, can’t get motivated and explain to them how they too could develop a strong brain to do something about issues that matter to them?” And it turns out that if they write that kind of letter, then it persuades themselves of that idea.

So that can take 15, 20 minutes. It doesn’t take long. And we found kids were more likely to like, show self-control on their homework. So they’re more likely to do boring math tasks rather than goof off on the internet. And then months later, we’re more likely to get higher grades in their classes, especially low achieving students.

And that suggests that a small shift in mindset from a worldview in which learning is only an instrumental step in this long yellow brick road to prosperity in 20 years or 15 years. That’s the conventional mindset. But we gave them this beyond the self-contribution mindset, this purpose mindset.

And then that changed the meaning of their daily experiences. So like that’s surprising for a lot of people because they think if I’m going to change your mind, I have to yell at you and tell you a million times what to think, or I have to tell you how to behave. We didn’t tell anyone how to behave. We just changed the meaning of their experiences and that had these enduring effects. So that was a big surprise for us earlier.

Grace, Guilt, and Shame in Relationships

Jim Piper: That’s good. That little narrative run there just released all kinds of memories and thoughts and ideas in my head. See what you think about these. You mentioned morality and, you know, I have a background in theology and psychology and business. And one thing that I find is a contradiction, at least in the Christian faith, the Christian faith is about grace.

The contradiction is that I think one of these words is an actual word. And I think the other one is going to become one in the evolution of communication. Grace is a contradiction to religiosity. And grace is a contradiction to churchianity. The standards are so high that it’s really difficult. I mean, the journey to commit oneself to those standards in and of itself is a lifetime. It’s a lifetime.

But when someone is in adolescence and they fail, going back to the words that you used, in theology, guilt means, “I can see what I did wrong and I feel bad about that and I’m gonna change my mind and move in another.”  You can do something with guilt, you can do something with making a mistake. But when you’re shamed, as you said, you know, even in coaching executives, to separate behavior, the person’s poor behavior from their value as a human being is extremely important that that is done in a relationship.

I jumped back to this fear thing and we’re going to give everybody because I feel the– I love your spirit, David, your spirit isn’t condescending, you know, you guys all suck and this is the way to do it. I can tell that you yourself are going, “Wow, this could really work. This does work. And being that I’m human, I don’t always do that. But I can get a do over a redo, you know, whatever, and continue to get better.”

But the thing that I thought of while you were talking, was listening to you, I literally saw this with me and one of my grandsons. And my intentions and my motives were pure and lovely and hope for all that. Of course, I’d be a liar to say that somehow my own self-worth isn’t attached to the subject or the conversation. But it’s like we will ask a kid a question. And we’re conditioning them to be risk adverse to the point of no creativity, no sense of trust in the relationship. Because when we ask them a question, and they hesitate to give us an answer, or they give us an answer that we think is dumb, we immediately go into lecture mode.

And I’m speaking for myself. And so all that does is reinforce that I’m the adult, you’re the kid, sit down, shut up. Here’s the deductive learning, take it and if you’re smart, you’ll do something with it. Where they’re probably saying inside, “Dear God, have this end as soon as possible so that I can move on.” That’s the vision that came into my mind. And I actually see that that could probably be true for both the enforcer and the protector. Both of them are fearful. So one is either going to tell them what to do and the other one might do the work for them.

The Importance of Asking Questions and Shifting Mindsets

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah. I mean, I think that there’s this interesting set of practices that follow from our leadership mindsets. It’s kind of like this idea I just talked about where I didn’t tell the teenagers in our purpose experiment to go do more math or work, but it occurred to them because all of a sudden, it’s a route to having a stronger brain that could change the world. So a different set of behaviors occurred to us depending on our mindsets and our worldview. And that’s true not just for the young people whose mindsets we shift, but for us as adults.

So what behaviors make a lot of sense to an enforcer? Well, like you said, going Colombo and asking questions in a curious way, in a Socratic kind of leading way or anything like that, that makes no sense to an enforcer. It’s ridiculous because if a young person has made a mistake, whether it’s a young adult made a financial mistake or they screwed up a presentation or your teenager came home drunk from a party or whatever it is. There’s no sense in asking questions from an unfortunate perspective because you know why they made the mistake. They made the mistake because they weren’t thinking, they weren’t being serious, and the reason why they weren’t thinking or being serious is because they’re immature and they’ve got a puberty-induced frontal lobotomy that just makes them an immature idiot.

Jim Piper: It’s a downward spiral from there, right? Yeah, it just keeps going.

David Yeager, Ph.D: Right. And then now that I know why you made the mistake, which is this kind of condescending view of your competence, then I resort to relying on my expertise as the adult. Right? It’s like, you engage in what I call grown explaining, where it says, I just try to pour the contents of my smart adult brain into your dumb young brain. And that’s not what mentors do at all. Mentors ask questions.

And the reason why is because they’re legitimately curious why a young person was mistaken, but they also make a different set of assumptions because they have a different mindset. Their assumption is, “Oh, the young person was being earnest and would all else equal prefer to do the right thing. But for whatever reason, they got mistaken or they saw the situation the wrong way. And so, I need to understand how they saw the situation in order to help them think differently.”

So anyway, there’s a lot more in the book about specific practices that mentor mindset people do. But the key thing to remember, and I read about this a lot in the appendix of the book, where I’ve got 90 pages of like workbook stuff. So it’s very practical scripts and so on. I’m like, if you don’t address first what your mindset is as a leader, you’ll never do the mentor mindset practices, even if I convince you that they’re good for young people, because you fundamentally don’t believe they’re going to work.

Like if I think that you don’t have a prefrontal cortex, I would never engage in collaborative planning with you because I would think your brain can’t handle the planning. So I would either make the plan for you in whatever. Like make you so afraid of getting yelled at by me that you do exactly my plan. So I think that just to close, there’s a lot more in the book about the practices of great mental mindset leaders. But if there’s one lesson for people, we have to interrogate our own enforcer or protector mindsets and try to shift them towards a mentor mindset or else, I could tell you all about the best manager at Microsoft and the best basketball coach. And you’d like, “That could never be me because I don’t believe anything that they believe.”

Why Read “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People”?

Jim Piper: David, I’m going to hold the book up for those who watch this on YouTube. This is what it looks like here. You can get it on Amazon. I think you can see that all right. And the question might be a little bit unfair. But if you could step out of the fact that you are the author and you already did a pretty good job at it right there. But why should– I’m going to answer this question since I have read the book. Stepping outside of it just for a minute and looking at this from a worldview perspective, why would this be good for somebody to invest, you know, not just the dollars to buy the book, but frankly, the time to read through it and consider it?

David Yeager, Ph.D: Yeah, it’s a developmental psychologist spent years finding people who have solved some of the most frustrating problems that people have, which is how to motivate and engage the next generation. And then you get to learn the secrets of those people, what do they believe and what do they do without having to spend decades yourself acquiring that wisdom of practice. So it’s a cheat sheet-

Jim Piper: That’s good. That’s good.

David Yeager, Ph.D: -for the problems that you’re most concerned about and it makes your own life easier.

Jim Piper: I’m glad I asked that question because my answer is much more of a platitude. And yours went down into the bedrock. My answer, and for those of you who know me who are listening, you know I say this all the time, but this is perfect case and point. And our lives are so darn busy that we often neglect ourselves in the pursuit of getting better at what we do. And that platitude is we don’t spend enough time working on our business because we’re too busy working in it.

Or you could say it this way. We spend so much time working in our life that we don’t spend enough time working on our life. And for me, I did not speed read through this book because it had enough meat in it that was fast moving enough if that makes sense. That I said, “All right, this is worth my time.” Even 20-minute blocks, you get a lot done in 20-minute blocks if you make that part of your schedule.

So for me, this was very good for me to sit back and not only help me with my profession, but really help me to be the kind of grandfather that I want to be to my seven grandkids. And frankly, I work with a lot of folks that are older than my grandkids. My eldest is 16 years old, but I work with a lot of 20-somethings. And, man, this is becoming a textbook for me.

So Dr. David Yeager, thank you so much for putting all this work together. I hope your book just continues to do well. From what I can tell, it’s moving along really well. And you seem to have the right countenance to back it up, which gives you the moral authority to really make this something special. So thank you and thank you for coming on the show.

David Yeager, Ph.D: I really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Jim.

Outro

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