Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Dr. David Yeager on Helping Youth Build Confidence & Succeed

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

What motivates young people? How can we help young adults boost their confidence and self-esteem? In this interview, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. David Yeager, a leading behavioral scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, who specializes in youth motivation. He shares insights on the psychological traits of young people, how motivation evolves with age, and practical strategies to help them thrive. Dr. Yeager also discusses his recently released book, 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, which provides ground breaking insights into effectively engaging and supporting young adults. In this interview, you’ll learn . . . The importance of social status and respect in youth motivation Balancing high standards with strong support for optimal growth Reframing stress for better performance and success Essential mindsets for parents, mentors, and educators to support young people And more . . . So, if you're interested in practical strategies for engaging and motivating young minds, click play and join the conversation. --- Timestamps: (06:22) Kid's psychological peculiarities (09:38) Importance of status (13:42) Early social experiences (18:28) Mindsets of young people (26:43) Applying the mentor mindset (32:18) Skill improvement through mentorship (38:47) Stress management --- Mentioned on the Show: Stronger Than Yesterday 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People David Yeager on LinkedIn David Yeager The University of Texas Phoenix

And so life is trial and error. And adolescence is kind of the R&D department of our culture, where they are going through lots of trial and error, trying to figure out what's going to be valued, what's going to be accepted, what's going to be respected. And there will be difficulty. And if something's really hard, that doesn't mean that you're destined to be a loser forever.

It actually could just mean that you're in the process of a really tough R&D process, like you're on light bulb 99 out of 100. Hello, hello, this is Muscle For Life and I'm your host, Mike Matthews. Thank you for joining me today for a new episode, an interview with Dr. David Yeager on how to help young people build their self confidence and achieve success. And specifically how to motivate young people to strive to set high standards, to set high expectations, and then work to achieve those standards and achieve those expectations and develop the resilience that's required to do that and develop the growth mindset that is required to do that. And as you will learn in this episode, the primary factors of youth motivation also apply to adult motivation. They apply to self motivation. So even if you don't have any youth in your life right now

who you'd like to motivate to succeed and to build self-confidence and so forth, I think you will find this episode useful in motivating yourself to succeed and build self-confidence. And finally, if you are not familiar with my guest, Dr. David Yeager is a leading behavioral scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, and he specializes in youth motivation. And he also recently released a book called 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People. That's how I found him and his work, liked it, asked him to 25, the science of motivating young people.

That's how I found him and his work, liked it, asked him to come on the show and here we are. Before we get started, how would you like to know how to drop from 18.9% to 10.2% body fat in just 14 days? Well, forget calories in and out because that is a toxic, colonial construct that's faker than math and triangles. Instead, what you need is timed doses of handstands, bishop's cap, cactus needle supplementation, and sataly breathing exercises. Those things will do the trick.

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And it is eating raw German red garlic one hour before the binge. Cloves and cloves of raw German red garlic. The more the better, my unfabricated data suggests. So yeah, none of that actually works. But it does give you an idea of what you will not find in my newest book that I just released called Stronger Than Yesterday, which is available right now on Amazon. And what you won't find is page after page of quasi-scientific gibberish and pretense geared toward peculiarity and persuasion rather than practicality and performance.

Instead, in this book, you're going to find a few things. One, simple, evidence-based, time-proven diet exercise and supplementation techniques that'll help you improve your body composition, reduce the risk of disease and dysfunction, slow aging, and more. Two, motivational musings that'll inspire you to wallow in fewer cheat days, skip fewer workouts, and generally stay out of your own way on your fitness journey. And three, you'll find zany fitness meanderings that I hope will earn your smile because as Victor Borges said, a smile is the shortest distance between two people. And one of the reasons I wrote this book was simply to

get closer to more like-minded people like you. What's more, about half of the chapters in Stronger Than Yesterday are educational, and the other half are motivational, which means that this is a book you can dip into every day for a morsel of knowledge, a spark of encouragement, a moment of joy. And by doing just that, by reading and absorbing just a few daily pages, you can gradually upgrade your mindset, your diet, your exercise, your supplementation, rest, recovery, stress management, and more. And also, for whatever it's worth, I spent nearly two years working on Stronger Than Yesterday because that's simply what it took to produce something that is good enough to hopefully not just meet,

but beat your expectations. So again, the book is called Stronger Than Yesterday. It's available right now on Amazon, whichever Amazon you shop on. And if you do read it or if you do listen to it, I'd love to hear your feedback. So please let me know. Hey, David. Nice to meet you. Thanks for taking the time to do this. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah. So I came across you and your work via your book,

10 to 25, the Science of Motivating Young People. And as a former young person, I guess some people would say I'm still young, but I'm not 10 to 25. And as a parent of two kids, 112, 17, it immediately grabbed my attention. And the first question I wanted to ask you is looking broadly, what are some of the kind of psychological peculiarities,

if you will, of younger people and the science of motivating younger people versus, let's say, people who are not 10 to 25 years old, people who are older. I'm sure there's some overlap. But that was the first thought that I had that I wasn't surprised that there is a literature specifically for younger people. But that's where I thought it might be interesting to start and just hear about some of those differences. Yeah, for sure. And so there's no kind of hard and fast rule. I'll tell you why I say 10 to 25. So 10 is generally the age at which pubertal maturation begins for young people. So that's accompanied with an increase in hormones like testosterone, estradiol, et

cetera, for the gonadal axis. Also, you see things like growth spurt and changes in the brain relative to, in particular, social status and respect. So there's a kind of social reorienting of the brain at that age. And that's responsible for a lot of things we tend to get frustrated by with young people where the adult says one thing and the kid hears something different. So if we say, don't forget your coat, what they say is stop saying I'm dumb. And it's like, why didn't I say you were dumb?

I just told you to get on your coat. But they say is, stop saying I'm dumb. And it's like, why did I say you were dumb? I just told you to get on your coat. But they're really reading between the lines. And what's happening on the other end, on 25? Well, that is usually in our culture when people tend to adopt an adult-like role. And that could be in the workplace, could be in terms of establishing the professional identity or starting a family, et cetera. Now, 10 is a biological onset, 25 is a sociocultural offset, and so obviously there's permeability in both of those.

But what we find is that there are surprising similarities across that age range where in general what tends to motivate young people is very similar. And it's this being attuned to their social standing, their prestige, their reputation, et cetera. Now, could young kids also care about their social selves? Well, of course. I mean, kids who are, I have an eight-year-old and he's worried about having no friends and that's something he's concerned about. But he's not like mad if I tell him to put pants on. He's not offended, right? It's reasonable for me to control certain aspects of his life and behavior. For an older person, so our 29-year-olds prickly, in general, if you talk

down to them, they would be surprised by it. But for someone who's really well established in their life and their career, they're not as on high alert for being looked down on or not taken seriously. So you couldn't think of 10 to 25 as like a lens that helps us understand motivation in general in terms of people becoming an adult. There's something I call the OXO principle that many people in design have heard of, which is the idea that if you ever use OXO products,

they have big squishy handles. And those were invented by a guy whose wife had arthritis and she couldn't handle a steel potato peeler. It hurt her hand too much. So he made big squishy handles. But it turns out everybody just likes big squishy handles. And so you design for one population that ends up helping others.

And that's how I tend to think about this book also. And so, I mean, this point of status is of course just as applicable as you're saying to really people of any age, but it sounds like there's a sort of consciousness of that that is developed at a younger age. And it makes me think of some research, it was in a book on parenting, I forget which, that was talking about what kids find motivating about school. And according to the research cited in this book, it was two things. It was one, having a sense of success, and two, enjoying

time with friends, having friends, having a positive social experience. And according to the literature that was being referenced in the book, those were the two factors that explained at least the majority of the motivation any kids got from school. And so it sounds like that those two factors, I mean, those things don't necessarily change as we get older, maybe become more complex, but it sounds like the foundations of the psychological foundations of motivation, they develop at an early age. And then are there any major shifts in that psychology as we get older? Yeah, there's, and by the way, the book I like the most on that topic,

you just said is by my colleague Rob Krosno, it's called Fitting in, Standing out. His argument is like in high school, you have two jobs. It's to do well in school but also to look good in front of your friends or at least not look awful in front of your friends. That adds complexities to the process of going to high school. But I'll say that in the book, I have this term that I call the adolescent predicament. And it's very simply the mismatch between the status and respect that you think you're ready for

and what society gives you. And there's a study I like to cite from the late 90s. And it's kind of a hidden study. People don't talk about it that much. But it was very simple. And in this study, the researchers asked teenagers whether they should have certain rights and privileges and at what age, and then they ask adults about those same ones. So an example is when should you be able to write

a letter that's critical of the principal and publish it in your school's newspaper? And adults are like maybe like a 10th grade, that's 11th grade, and kids are like seventh grade. And so there's this disparity between being ready for something and society granting it to you. And when you're in that predicament, then you're like overinterpreting things,

you're reading between the lines, you're trying to be concerned about how people are treating you, because it's focal, it's like at the front of your mind. This extends later. I talked recently to someone who's a general counsel at a large Fortune 500 company, and a big challenge is they'll hire young hotshot lawyers who are 24 who come out of Georgetown and other top law schools.

Then they'll submit briefs for the head lawyer to edit before they go to the client or they're filed at the Supreme Court or whatever. And they're always getting tons of feedback. The briefs are not ready. And from a certain level, it makes sense. Like, why would a 24-year-old be ready to file something for the Supreme Court?

Right, that takes a lot of expertise and experience. But the junior employees think of it as, this person is not seeing me as promotion material. I'm going to be stuck in this entry-level job. Now, that's someone who has lots of status in our culture. They have a degree from a top law firm, they're presumably really smart. You'd think societally they've got it all.

But in that moment, they're in an adolescent predicament that they think they should have certain rights, privileges, and respect, but they're not being granted it. That causes frustration for the manager. Now, the footnote to this is the general counsel I talked to is getting ready to retire and he's going to be a teacher when he retires. I was like, do you think at 60 years old when you're teaching

and the principal comes in the back of your room and starts critiquing your teaching and you're gonna be like yes I'm ready for all your feedback he's like no and be terrified that they're gonna think I'm a bad teacher so the idea is like anytime you have a shift in your status in your your situation you could be thrown back into some of the same mentality that we're in as a 13 year old or a 22 year old interesting and do the experiences, the social experiences, the status-related experiences

that we have when we're younger, I'm assuming that can markedly influence how we respond to these types of situations when we're older, because some of us maybe had very positive experiences on the whole socially growing up. I mean, you mentioned in high school, not wanting to look like an idiot in front of your friends or your peers, wanting to look good in front of your peers. And then you have people who had very negative experiences

specifically in regard to how their peers viewed them, how their peers treated them. Yeah. I mean, I don't really make an argument that is similar to how people think about attachment with young babies. I mean, so there's certainly early developmental research that if you are an unresponsive caregiver to a baby, then it's very hard for them to have attachment and good relationships later in life. I would say that certainly a bad adolescence can leave a mark on people, can influence you, but it doesn't't taint you for life in the way that people worry. Because the unpleasant reality is a lot of times, if you're excluded or left out,

it forces you to adapt and make different friends or change a little bit about how you interact with people. Sometimes that's a positive experience, even though it feels terrible in the moment. So I think that what I tend to emphasize is that everyone's trying to go through life, trying to figure out how to belong and be accepted, and to feel good at what they're doing, whatever it is. And you don't fully know in

advance what is going to be accepted and valued. And so life is trial and error. And adolescence is kind of the R&D department of our culture, where they are going through lots of trial and error, trying to figure out what's going to be valued, what's going to be accepted, what's going to be respected. And there will be difficulty. And if something's really hard,

that doesn't mean that you're destined to be a loser forever. It actually could just mean that you're in the process of a really tough R&D process. Like you're on light bulb 99 out of 100, and that's for Edison. So at the same time, there are certain junctures in life where it really matters that you get over the hump really well.

So we think a lot about the advanced math and science courses that people take that either prepare you to go to a four-year college or not. We think about, you know, did you commit to a sport or some other activity that took four years of commitment? In college, you know, what was your major? If you didn't go to college, did you get hired by an employer that invested in your skills and helped you grow even if you're not going to post-secondary education? So there are certain moments where a small decision could have a reverberating effect, but we try not to be too deterministic about windows of opportunity being missed and your life being ruined afterwards because that just ends up being unmotivating for people.

Yeah, completely. There's a parallel in the world of health and fitness as well regarding body weight and regarding genetics. And yes, some people are genetically predisposed to have a harder time managing body weight, for example, than others. But that doesn't mean that they are destined to forever be unhappy with their body composition. It just means that some people may have to work a little bit harder at it than others, and maybe a little bit more obnoxious for some people than others, but the attitude of maintaining that agency is very important and understanding that you you don't have to give in to maybe you have an outsized appetite, for example,

and that's just kind of a genetic thing. Yeah, I mean I think that in our growth mindset research, which is the idea that people can grow and develop and it's the opposite of a fixed mindset idea that you're one way or not for all time, there's this interesting parallel of comparing yourself to others versus comparing yourself to a potential future self. And when we engage in comparisons to others, then it can feel like nothing we do matters and we can't improve. But if you compare yourself to where you were in the past or where you could be in the future, then actually improvement is really possible.

My favorite lines of research on this is people who had strokes. So if you compare yourself to someone who's never had a stroke, you're like, oh, well, I can't use the side of my face. I have no use of this hand. I'm different and I'm always going to be different. But if you compare yourself after months of physical therapy to how you were right after your stroke, a lot of times you're a lot better.

And you've recovered 80% of your functioning, or 50%. So that's not nothing. So that is growth and improvement. So I think in terms of self-improvement, it's often helpful to focus on within-person comparisons, not between-person comparisons. A great, great point. In your book, you talk about the importance of a few different types of mindsets.

You have the mentor mindset, you have the enforcer, the protector mindsets. Could you talk to us a bit about these mindsets and how they influence younger people for better or for worse? Yeah. So, a mindset is just a person's belief about themselves and the world around them and how they influence younger people for better or for worse? Yeah, so a mindset is just a person's belief about themselves and the world around them and how it works. And you can have a mindset about a lot of different things. In the book, I write about mindsets that leaders have about people they interact with. So it could be parents about their kids, managers about their direct reports, coaches about

their players, or educators about their students, and on and on. There's a long line of research over 80 years on leadership styles. There are styles like being an authoritarian, like a dictator style. That's one style you could have. Another is being more authoritative. It's a very firm but caring. Another is being very permissive, just kind of letting people do what they want.

That research is very useful and very prominent, but hadn't really been integrated across these different type of roles, parenting, managing, coaching, etc. What I wanted to do was to do two things. One is say, all right, well, let's just come up with a set of terms that you could use regardless of whether you're

talking about parenting, coaching, teaching, managing, et cetera. And second, interrogate where those styles come from. It's not like if you have authoritarian dictator leadership style that you necessarily, I don't know, learn that from your dad when you were a kid. And it's not like we do 100% of what our parents did to us. A lot of people do the% of what our parents did to us. A lot of people do the opposite of what their parents did. Like, if everyone did exactly what their parents said, then every child would have the exact same religious beliefs as their parent. And

we know that's not true. So, kids are clearly rejecting some things their parents believe in and do. So, if it's not just inherited as a style, then where do these styles come from? And that brought us to the idea of mindset. That what we learned is that people differ in how they view the younger people or the direct reports that they're in charge of. And those differences of opinion, those differences of belief give rise to different styles and patterns. So, to be very concrete, there's a prominent belief in our culture that young people, in general, are what I call neurobiologically incompetent. That they lack a prefrontal cortex, they're impulsive, they're short-sighted, they can't be trusted, they're a danger to themselves and to others.

And if that's your starting belief, then you have a question to ask yourself. Do I want to be mean and force them to like not be a danger to themselves and others? Or do I want to be nice and just let them know that I care about them? And one mindset is what I call an enforcer mindset. And that's the belief that A, people are incompetent, B, I need to be mean and tough about it. And if that's your belief, then your main goal is to just enforce rigorous standards and uphold really

just demanding expectations. Emotions be damned. Yeah, just get compliance and... Yeah, just to get compliance. And that's like, people can think of classic coaches like Bobby Knight who's going to choke you and throw a chair at you if you break the rules. And it's because he wants to win at all costs. And he thinks players fundamentally are going to be undisciplined and unruly unless they're terrified of the threat of punishment, right? Or if you've seen the movie Whiplash, there's like a ridiculous jazz instructor who's not

happy until Miles Teller's hands are bleeding because he's practicing so much. That enforcer mindset doesn't come from a crazy place. If you truly believe that young people are undisciplined and ready to quit and rebel at any time, then you feel like the only way to be a high performer as a team is to coerce them with threats of punishment and tools of control. Another belief is that yes, young people aren't capable of very much, but I want to be nice to them. And that's what I call a protector mindset. And there it's like, look, the world is cruel and harsh

and I need to protect you from suffering. And I'm going to do that by not expecting very much. And in fact, it would be mean of me to expect a lot and deep down know that you can't accomplish that because then I'm holding you to an impossible standard and that's cruel. So in a protector, you look at someone who's under distress, who's stressed out, who's feeling overwhelmed, and you're like, let's get rid of those expectations.

You shouldn't be doing this. And so, you set very tiny, manageable goals with the hope that they'll build up confidence. Again, but that fundamentally comes from a belief that you don't think someone can do very much. And I see this a lot in sports. They're like, you guys are nine, you can't do anything. You can't zip up your own pants or tie your shoes. So we're not going to expect you to do anything. Can't even understand the rules of the game. So just go kick the ball around.

And then I see this a lot in girls sports. So like when my daughter played boys baseball until 11, and then I was like, all right, these 12-year-olds are going to be jerks, so let's go to softball. And I could not believe the low standards of the softball coaches, like in the same league, in the same area, like on the same field, one day later. And it's like she was playing with all the boys yesterday. Like how come you think she needs to stand in a line of

12 girls and do three grounders per practice? So I think that a lot of people have a well-intentioned desire to be a protector. I think it could fold into our stereotypes about who's capable of doing what. And I see it a lot. I see it with parents, I see it with coaches, see it with teachers. In low income urban schools in America, the it's called a pobrecito mentality, like the poor little one, and I need to protect them from distress.

So both of those mindsets end up not leading to optimal performance if you're leading a team. And so the alternative is to take the best of both. And that's what I call a mentor mindset. And that's similar to the authoritative parenting and leadership style people may have heard of. And that's very high standards, very high support. And it turns out that that ends up getting the most

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Can you talk a bit more about that mentor mindset? High standards, high support, how do you go about doing that effectively? Yeah, so I'll just tell a story. And I'll just say that I spent a long time reading the literature, but I also kind of paused my academic research for years and just followed good leaders around. So I found the most successful high school physics teacher in America, and I called him every Friday for three years. I contacted the CEO of Microsoft and through him met their top manager for young talent.

I found a grocery store manager in Norway who never has the problem of young employees going to hide in the back room and smoke weed and take naps on a cardboard box and pretend to work. That's a big problem in the US. They don't have that problem at this grocery store. And I found America's best basketball shooting coach. His name is Chip Englund, he's a shooting coach for the Spurs for a long time, now for the Thunder. And I'll just tell you about Chip, who's very similar in many ways to these other exemplary people. Very strong mentor mindset. If people don't know basketball, they are an organization that often was winning. And because they were winning,

they didn't have the number one or even number five pick in the draft very often. And so they would draft lower and there was always some flaw in their players that had to be fixed. And they were known for drafting players, for instance, that couldn't shoot very well. And then through Chip's guidance, turning them into great shooters, that allowed them to compete for championships. So Tony Parker, who people follow basketball know as a now Hall of Famer, he used to be so bad at shooting that every time he shot, his coach would say that's a turnover in his head.

And so Chip is a very high standards shooting coach. He's not going to take Tony Parker or Kwai Leonard is another guy who, when he was drafted, would fling the ball over his shoulder. And so it's a very inaccurate shot. Chip's not going to be like, all right, great shot, just keep doing it. Because he knows they're not going to make it, and then the team's going to lose. So he has to uphold a very high standard if they're going to compete at the level that he's held accountable for. But he's also not a monster. He doesn't draft Tony Parker, Kawhi Leonard, or team doesn't draft them. And Chip doesn't say everything you've done

is wrong. Let's break you down and build you up from the bottom. It doesn't do anything like that. But I would have said going in that that would have been my stereotype of a top NBA shooting coach is they would say, you've had all these mediocre travel team coaches your whole life who didn't actually understand shooting mechanics, and you've got all this scar tissue from bad coaching and now I'm going to fix it. That's not what he said at all. It sounds like maybe the objective reality, but it doesn't need to be said like that even though it may be true. It sounds like... Well, so Chip has a different theory

of the objective reality. So just take the example of Quai Leonard flinging the ball over his shoulder when he was drafted. You could say that his coaches didn't care, or you could say his coaches didn't know how to coach shooting. But Chip's theory is that in America, if you're precociously athletic, you play one, two, or three years up on your travel team. And so, Kwai was probably playing with like 12-year-olds when he was eight or nine. And so, arm strength is like the last thing to come when you're a kid. And so, the only way he could score would be to fling the ball, but probably leg strength and jumping and basic athletic ability was probably precocious. And so if you just keep

playing on these select teams and you keep winning and you keep moving up the ranks, playing with older kids, and it's successful at meeting the goal, then they don't change it. And so you could take bad form and mechanics and say, actually, this is a sign that you are such a freak great athlete that you were able to succeed with your adaptation to the task. And the adaptation of the task was flinging over shoulder when he was too young

to have the upper body strength to shoot. So that's the kind of hypothesis, but notice how it starts out as a compliment, not you were undisciplined. You never went to the gym and worked on your shot correctly. You didn't seek out coaching and therefore you're a bad person and a bad player. But that's like a lot of that's the enforcer mindset perspective, right? It's like you probably had coaches who told you how to do it and you decided not to.

So you must be hard headed, pig headed, impossible to coach. Chips is like, no, you're probably it's because you're an amazing athlete. And you adapted and you were successful. But now we're going to go from having a few years of a career where you're the best athlete, but then once your skills decline, you're out of the league, to staying in the league for 15 years

because you develop an outside shot. And they have to respect that. So it's very much a high standard of where you need to fix this shot, but it's very emotionally supportive and never crushing your spirit or tearing you down. And I think there's some lessons in there that if even the NBA's most terrifying coach, Greg Popovich, like in a cutthroat league where players are just cut out of nowhere, right? If even in that setting, the number one best person at coaching, Chip England, for improving your shot,

if he has relationships first before criticism, right? He's building rapport, getting you on board with his vision, treating you like a human in a person before he like relentlessly critiques your shot, then like the rest of us don't have an excuse if we think it's too much work to do the mental mindset because he has every reason to take shortcuts if there was a shortcut. But there's just not a shortcut to transforming shots in the right way and Chip doesn't. And therefore Chip does it this better mental mindset way.

Is there another element that follows? Okay, so you have the building of rapport, you have acknowledging what is good and what is right that you're seeing, that makes a lot of sense. And now you have to get down to the work though of improving this person's skills. Are there any just kind of standout strategies or coming down a level of tactics in your research that just exemplify this mentor approach? Yeah, I'll tell a few things that are really surprising for me. And one is something I call collaborative troubleshooting.

It's an approach that every mentor mindset exemplar I found used. It's very different from yell, tell, blame, and shame, right? So the conventional approach is, I, the expert, know what you should have been doing, and you weren't doing it. And the fact that you're not doing it means that you are rebelling against me. You're impossible to reach. You're trying to sabotage my team, my machine, my group, etc. Or minimally just not caring. Or you don't care. So in general,

a mistake is characterized as a moral failure in the conventional view, because it's like a lack of character, basically, is what's causing it. It's not just sports. I'll tell you, I interviewed this great physics teacher in a low-income school in El Paso, Texas. And I don't know if you've spent any time in low-income public schools, but kids are just wandering the halls at any given time. And it's interesting. And so kids are just wandering to this teacher's class, and I would talk to them. And I was like, who's the opposite of this great teacher we've been talking about?

Like, it's my English teacher. I was like, all right, well, sounds like you got a story there, let's hear it. This kid says, well, we had to write an essay in my English class and I had to write both sides of a persuasive argument, pro and con. I could only come up with half. I went to the teacher after class to say,

I only got half of this. I need the other half. Could you talk it through with me? And the teacher said, this is a predominantly Latino student school. She said, tú no lo entiendes porque no quieres, which is you didn't understand it because you didn't want to. And then she threw a stack of worksheets at him, said, I've already explained it. You need to go read this before I'll talk to you.

And he was in tears as he told me the story. And I was like, well, why? What's the problem? He's like, well, it's so unfair. I'm like, well, why is it unfair? Because, you know, from the teacher's perspective, they're thinking I did explain it, and you're not doing it. And so you must be slacking. And the kid's like, I have ADHD. I only remember half of what anybody says to me. This is the only way I get the other half. Like, I can't imagine doing anything but coming to you and being like, I got half of this, I need the other half. Could you explain it to me? And she's trying to accuse me of not caring.

It's like, I didn't have to come in and get the other half, but I did because it mattered to me. And I always think about that, that like, in the enforcer mindset, we start with a presumption of moral character failure, that that's the cause of a mistake or confusion. And then we kind of imply they need to fix that moral core before we'll talk to them. And you see this on every athletic field.

You see it in the boardroom and in companies, they'll just fire you or take you off important projects because they've made a summary judgment about you as a person. They're like, you're a slacker or you don't care. But in a mentor mindset, it's a very different approach. So what they do instead is anytime there's a mistake, you see what I call collaborative troubleshooting. It's first acknowledging what the person did right already,

relatedly saying the reason why they made a mistake is a legitimate reason, usually because the task is actually hard. And it's impressive to get it 100% right, so shouldn't feel ashamed if you got 75% right. And then what they do is they bridge to a better understanding by figuring out what was going on.

So like why, so they presume positive intent, like presume you were trying to do this. And then they're like, okay, well, why couldn't you take the next step? Why couldn't you fix this? And it turns out that novice mentors at that moment fall for what I call the compulsion to tell, which is they're like, okay, I see what your problem is.

I noticed you did this, I noticed you did that. What you should have done was ABC. So now go do ABC and then you'll be fine. And turns out that that doesn't work. If you look at the top tutors, the one-on-one tutors who help kids turn around their academics, 95% of what they say is a question. They are not sitting there explaining the laws of momentum and physics and explaining how to take the derivative of a function or how to balance a stoichiometric

equation. That's not what great tutors are doing. They're not like reteaching the content. They're mostly asking questions. That's what YouTube is for. We're Khan Academy or something. Right, right, right. Or yeah, or just rewatching the material. But it takes guts to collaboratively troubleshoot because if you ask an open-ended question, you might get an answer you're not expecting. They may have been confused or frustrated or lost for a reason you didn't anticipate, you as the coach or leader or mentor. And then you have to think on your feet.

And a lot of people aren't willing to do that because it's easier to be like, I know what you did wrong, here's why you did it wrong, go do it right. And here's how. And that compulsion to tell feels good. It feels like we've imparted knowledge and wisdom. But in fact, the goal isn't for them to think of us as the only source of wisdom. The goal is for them to be able to think for themselves after they've solved this mistake or problem and think in the future. Chip England, the shooting coach, is like, my goal is for them to have a coach in the head. The right practice with the player for an hour, there's 23 other hours of the day where they need to be coaching themselves

and then six other days in the week. So if I don't give them a coach in the head, they only get better in the hour they're with me and that's not enough time. So a big tactic to answer your question is collaborative troubleshooting. And the key part of that is asking good questions. And a lot of people get that wrong because first, they want to tell. And second, the kind of questions they ask are condescending. They'll say something like, what were you thinking? Well, what were you thinking is not an authentic question because the implication is you were not thinking.

So instead, there's a different kind of question that I call an authentic question with uptake, where you build on their ideas basically, and that helps you troubleshoot. In your book, you talk about helping younger people manage stress, managing anxiety, stressors versus stress response. Can you talk to us a bit about that? Yeah, that's another thing I saw great mentors do again and again in my research. So imagine a world where a mentor has super high standards and they're holding you to them, because that's the path to growth. That's how someone's going to get better. And then the mentor is asking open-ended questions, making the young person explain themselves

and think on their feet. That's uncomfortable for a lot of people. Like the mentees or the people being led may not like being asked all these questions. They may not like being required to meet a very high standard because it feels uncomfortable. And that becomes an issue if you realize that stress, which is the natural byproduct of that discomfort, is often viewed in our society as always a bad thing. And stress is something that harms our performance,

it disturbs us, it knocks us off track. So if that's your belief, then the minute a mentor pushes you and puts you in a stress situation, you're like, this means I should stop, or this mentor is being too hard, et cetera, et cetera. And so what I realize is that you have to adapt language that's countercultural with respect to stress if you're going to hold someone to a legitimately high standard. And the language is countercultural is to reframe actually the physiological arousal of your body as a positive sign that you've chosen to do something important and ambitious, and also that your body's mobilizing resources

to achieve that demand. And this comes from work led by Jeremy Jamieson, who's at Rochester, is one of my closest friends and colleagues, and Chris Bryan, who's at UT Austin in the business school, and several others. And what we find is that giving people an interpretation of their stress as something that's possibly helpful and is potentially a resource doesn't just make them more motivated.

It actually changes how their body responds to the stress. And we know this because we're like sending electrical signals across the chest cavity to see how much blood is held centrally versus going to the periphery. And we're calculating basically the dilation versus constriction of the blood vessels in our studies. And all of those physiological measures are changed when we just tell you that this stress can be enhancing message.

And the stress can be enhancing message is the following, that when you feel your heart racing and you're breathing hard and your palms are sweaty, that doesn't mean you're about to fail, it actually means your body's preparing for success. And specifically, it's because your brain and your muscles are made up of cells and cells are better at performing when they have oxygen. So you're breathing more to get more oxygen into your blood

and your heart is racing to get that blood to your muscles in your brain and you're sweating to cool your body down so that way the blood is cool as it gets to the different parts and also your body is releasing hormones and they get to your extremities faster when your heart is beating. And so knowing that information allows people to reinterpret the butterflies in the stomach as a positive sign that they're ready to succeed. I tell a story in my book about my daughter who was trying out for cello, for first chair. And I don't know anything about cello or first chair or whatever, but she was nervous about it.

And so she got in the car and was like, I have butterflies in my stomach. I don't think I can do this. And I was like, well, Scarlett, do you know what I'm going to say? And she was like, yeah, you're going to say that the butterflies in my stomach are a sign that my body is sending oxygenated blood to my muscles so I can perform at the level of my preparation. And I was like, how did you know I was going to say that? Because I don't remember ever saying that to her. And she's like, oh, two years ago when I was water skiing, and I was floating in the water, and I had never gotten up before, and you were were holding the skis behind me and Uncle Luke had the boat ready to say hit it and I had the same feeling and you said that that is my body getting more oxygenated blood to my

muscles so I can hold on to the ski rope and pop up and have a blast. And that's what I did and I never forgot it. And like I was just floating around for 30 minutes as she was skiing around Wisconsin Lake. And she remembered that stress lesson in a totally different setting years later when she went into cello, and now it's something she finds useful to this day. So these messages don't just have to be taught in a physical performance setting, they can be taught in a psychological performance setting,

and they end up accompanying the push to meet a higher standard. And that stress response itself becomes a kind of support that allows you to meet that higher standard. And an expectation. If you are trying to achieve a high standard, then you already know that it is going to involve experiencing this stress response again and again and again. And that's normal.

It's nothing to be alarmed about. It's actually a necessary part of the process. Yeah. I mean, if you look at these bios of great quarterbacks in the NFL, right, a ridiculously high proportion of them barf before every game. And it's not because they suck at being quarterback. It's because it matters so much to them that they do well, that their body is like super optimizing everything for blood flow to the body and optimizing performance. And they're not nervous. They're like, they have a positive excitement. They're ready

to perform at their best. But if they were just taking a nap, that's like, do you not care? Right? And that's very counter, because if you Google Image Search stress reduction memes, well, you see lots of cat posters for some reason. I don't know why cats are the universal symbol of trite wisdom in our culture. But the non-cat posters would be things like, go drink chamomile tea, go on a walk, go do some yoga, take a nap.

But it's like, if I'm gonna present to my boss's boss in five minutes and I need to like go kick ass, that's not the time to take a nap or go on a walk in nature. It's the time for me to mobilize my resources and optimize my performance. I've shared the little bit of advice a number of times that proceeding something that you wanna be very alert for,

that you need to be at your best cognitively, one of the best things you can do is a short workout. 15 to maybe 30 minutes of cardiovascular is great for this, just moderate intensity, simply for the reasons that you're describing. And also, you probably know this, but some of the listeners may not know that I read about this in the book, it might have been Peak Performance by Stolberg and one other, but it's fairly common with elite athletes to also have this perspective that you just shared. It's very common for them to feel that stress response. You could interpret it as, are you nervous?

Maybe not nervous, but they are definitely teed up, but they interpret it as exactly what you're saying as this means this is a good thing. This means that my body is ready to perform. This means that my mind is ready to perform. If I didn't feel like this, then I should be concerned. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a, I gave a talk recently for all the head coaches at the University of Texas at Austin, and they won the commander's, also I happened to work there, but they're also fabulous because they won the Commander's Cup for the top performing college programs in the NCAA.

And I was talking to the women's golf coach and she's like, well, what do I say to people, my players who struggle with putting? And we talked for a bit and what we jointly agreed on is this idea that if you're up there about to putt and you're thinking, if I miss this, then it means I'm no good. I don't belong. I'm not a good golfer. If the implication of the performance is an all or nothing thing, then that stress is very negative. It's a fear about being labeled something bad forever. Yeah, it like strikes at your identity.

Right. And that leads to the feelings of shame. This is classic, you know, experimental psychology that, you know, shame is a fear that your core self is flawed and has been revealed publicly. And so when we're ashamed, we tend to shut down because you want to hide whatever it is that's causing shame. But a very different way to think about that putt is, I practice a lot. This is a chance for me to show what my preparation has taught me to do. And if I miss it, I either didn't prepare well enough or I wasn't in the zone enough. But it's not that I'm not a bad golfer. It's like, you know, one of those two things. And so it's also a start of troubleshooting, no matter what it is. And so the reason I'm excited is I get to show

people how well I've prepared. and that's fun for me. And when you do the latter, then you tend to not choke. And this, of course, goes back to Sianne Baloch's research on choking. She's now, I think, at Dartmouth as president, but her book, Choke, talks about this, and I recommend it. And there also should be a statistical awareness, too, that even if you're a great putter,

let's say a great putter makes it 70 percent of the time from that distance. Well, and 30 percent of the time, even a great putter misses it. So that probably also is relevant in such a situation. Why don't we're coming up on time. You have another meeting you got to run to. So I don't want to run over.

Before we wrap up here, is there anything else that is bouncing around in your head that you want to share or anything that I should have asked? Well, first, my 12 year old son didn't believe I was going on a podcast called Muscle for Life because he was like, you should go on a podcast called Pudgy for Life or Muscle for High School and no muscle after. Sounds like you're your typical 12 year old. Yeah, which made me feel like, okay, good. I feel like I nailed it in this book.

It feels like I proved my point. But I think that probably the biggest punchline lesson is, look, there's so much advice out there about leadership styles and optimizing performance, and it makes it seem like you have to do everything perfectly the first time and in perfect balance. And my book, 10 to 25, is not like some diet book that says, look, the best way to lose weight is to eat none of the food you enjoy ever. Like that's impractical and insane.

It's more like the book I needed to read as a parent of four. I teach 170 undergrads, 18 to 22 year olds every semester. I lead a team of 20 year olds, like 30 people, sometimes 40. And I coach baseball. I coached eight to 13 year olds four nights a week. So this is like stuff I needed to know. And I would say that in addition to everything I've shared being a revelation when I learned it, I also learned that you get a do-over. You don't have to optimize it every time and the first time. And I learned this from this wonderful parenting coach I interviewed for the book named Lorana Seidel.

And she's like, look, you can blow up at your kids and you have not ruined them for life because you can go talk to them and say, look, I didn't live up to the standard in our family. I still need you to do this thing. It's very important. But I wasn't curious enough about why you were resistant and why you couldn't do it. So I would like a do-over where I ask you first, what were your reasons for why this was not a reasonable request from me so that I can then support you? And what she finds is that kids mainly remember the do-over and probably probably so do employees, and so do players on teams.

They'll remember that more than the first time you were kind of crappy. So I think that's my punchline, is that there's a ton in the book that you could do, but my expectation is these are all journeys that people are gonna be on to helping others, but also making their own lives easier as they try to support the growth of people they're in charge of.

That's a great message and a message that I've given in the context of health and fitness saying, hey, you can quit diets, you can quit exercise programs, you can learn from those experiences, you just can't quit all of them. But you have time, you don't have to be perfect. And a lot of what you've been talking about in today's interview, I think for people listening, it's probably already occurred to many of them, but if it hasn't, I think that there's something to be said for taking that approach with ourselves as well and looking at how do we, are we the authoritarian, are we the protector, or are we a mentor to ourselves? And a lot of the advice I, is also useful in that perspective.

I think that's really profound because all this stuff applies to self-talk as well and how we treat ourselves when we're striving. I think your insights are very important there. Yeah. I think it might be hard if you treat yourself one way to then treat other people in another way. Think of ourselves as works in progress and the people we're leading as well. Absolutely. Well, let's wrap up quickly with people can find you, find your work, obviously the book 10 to 25,

wherever people like to buy books, but is there anything else that you would like people to know about? I'm just a nerd scientist, so I have LinkedIn. You don't have a TikTok? Come on. No, I don't have time for that. I do statistics rather than short videos with advice and memes. But I have a nerd professor email, just that anyone that's publicly available at UT Austin.

I run an institute called the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. So we're always putting out new findings. We love for people to just stay involved and support in any way that they find useful. Yeah, and if people want to learn more about how to put these ideas into practice, we have taped an episode of Masterclass, which is an educational website, that's going to come out around New Year's. So it's me and Carol Dweck who developed the concept of Growth Mindset, Steve Young, who's an NFL quarterback, and then several characters from my book. And so there were a lot of exercises, lots of ways to double-click on this information. Love that if people checked out the Masterclass episode coming soon.

Awesome. Well, thanks a lot for your time. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Mike. Appreciate it. Every day, your biology is changing. It's getting stronger or weaker, faster or slower, healthier or sicker. And the driving factor behind these changes is not your genes or your environment or even your age. It's your lifestyle, how you eat, how you exercise, how you sleep, how you supplement. And not just how, but how often. Because what you do every day is far more important than what you do every so often. That's why I just released a new book called Stronger Than Yesterday, which is available right now over on Amazon,

and which is a daily reader with 169 short and insightful chapters that give straightforward and practical answers to perhaps the two hottest questions in fitness. One, how do I look great? And two, how do I feel great as well? In short, Stronger Than Yesterday is a book that you can dip into every day for a morsel of education, a spark of encouragement, or a moment of joy. And by doing just that, by reading and applying just a few daily pages, you can gradually upgrade your mindset,

diet, exercise, supplementation, rest, recovery, stress management, and more. So again, the book is called Stronger Than Yesterday. It's available right now on Amazon. And I'd be honored if you got a copy, gave it a read, and gave me some feedback. Well, I hope you liked this episode. I hope you found it helpful.

And if you did, subscribe to the show because it makes sure that you don't miss new episodes. And it also helps me because it increases the rankings of the show a little bit, which of course then makes it a little bit more easily found by other people who may like it just as much as you. And if you didn't like something about this episode or about the show in general, or if you have ideas or suggestions or just feedback to share, shoot me an email, Mike at muscleforlife.com, muscle for life.com and let me know what I could do better or just what your thoughts are about maybe what you'd like to see me do in the future. I read everything myself. I'm always looking for new ideas and constructive feedback so thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.