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From the Boston Globe, this is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
You might remember that in the third episode of this season I went to talk to an expert about change.
It was a Broad Institute brain expert, and he told us his take on whether change is possible.
Basically.
He said it's hard to change after a certain age because our brains are just wired a certain way by that point.
And of course, that means it can be hard to make positive changes in our relationships.
Today I'm talking to a different kind of expert, a scientist who's more interested in behaviors than in how we change the hard wiring in our brains, a bit like the difference between nature and nurture.
And let's face it, many of us aren't gonna change how our brains work.
But perhaps we can work on being better to ourselves and in our relationships, and that can just become the new normal.
Today's conversation gave me a lot of hope, because I stubbornly believe that people can change, even though I pull the same stuff over and, over and over again.
Let me introduce you to Katie Milkman.
She's an instructor at the Wharton School of Business and she literally wrote a book called How to Change.
First of all, thank you for doing this, because I like to talk to people about change.
That's what we're doing this season. yet I am not sure I know what it is.
So that's why I want to talk to someone like you, because we're trying to answer this question in this season about like can people change?
And of course, we're a relationship podcast, so it's usually in the context of that.
But it has occurred to me in hearing people's stories of change that they're all defining that really differently, like changing who you are versus what you do, external things versus internal things, habits versus like essential parts of your being.
So When I say change, how do you define change yourself?
I define change as I'm a behavioral scientist, which means I focus on behavior.
So I define change based on a change in behaviors.
So if I was a person who never went to the gym and then you observe I start going to the gym, that would be change.
If I am a person who always yelled at my spouse and then I stopped yelling at my spouse, that would be change.
I think of it as behavior change being the fundamental.
Of course, there can be change in beliefs and attitudes, and that's very important too.
But from my perspective, the most important change, and the change that I study, is the observable behavioral change that we can measure.
And your kind of change is like a possible change.
Like we talked to this.
You know neurologist type person at the Broad Institute.
You know someone who was thinking about neuroplasticity and he's thinking about change as like are you actually going to change your person?
Your being right.
And actually science would say my brain at 47 is like kind of what it's going to be.
But when you're talking about change, you're making me feel like, oh, I can, but I can be better.
I might be me, but I can be better.
Yeah.
I mean, just think about, so I'm an educator, right?
So the most optimistic view of change is if you look at education, like we can forever.
We're an amazing species that has this incredible capacity to constantly learn.
That's change, right?
I have new knowledge every day and new expertise.
And I can run scientific experiments and become aware of a new cure for a disease.
And that's change.
So yes, I have a different way of thinking about it.
I'm not thinking about you know, does your DNA change or your brain structure change?
But rather the inputs and the outputs can change.
And that is what life is all about.
Right.
It's about the it's the knowledge we have.
It's the actions we take.
It's the relationships we build.
So those things can all change.
What do we talk about the book, sort of what you set out to discover and and.
What that wound up looking like.
Yeah, so my book is really more an integration of what I'd learned over the course of my scientific career, studying change.
And I had sort of reached a point where I realized wow, we have accumulated a lot of practical knowledge here about how people can structure their environments differently, structure their goals differently, and just think about change differently in order to be more successful.
And a lot of that knowledge is not out there.
People don't have it.
The scientific community has it, but it hasn't been put into a digestible form that can help people.
And so that's why I wrote the book.
That's what led to writing the book.
What science had sort of taught us that I realized I needed to put into this book.
The most important insight was that we skip a step when we're thinking about trying to purposefully change.
Often
Most people do not step back and think what are the obstacles standing in my way and how can I overcome them?
Instead, they just start looking for tactics that sound effective.
I'm gonna set big audacious goals.
I'm gonna visualize success.
Maybe they do pick up a self-help book or talk to a friend about what's worked for them, but often they skip the phase that we know is important in medicine, which is diagnosing what's the underlying condition that is preventing you from succeeding in the first place.
That turns out to be really critical, because there are a whole lot of strategies that science has proven can help us change, but they help when they're overcoming a specific barrier for you, and they don't help if that's not your problem.
So, to be really concrete, imagine someone who isn't taking their medications reliably.
It might be because they don't believe they work.
They think that i have no confidence in this drug, so why would i bother?
It might be because they forget.
It might be because there's a side effect they hate and so it makes them so miserable it's not worth it in their judgment.
All of those reasons for not taking your medications are totally different and they're going to require totally different solutions, right?
Maybe you need reminders if you're forgetting.
If the side effects are bad, you might need to figure out a way, a strategy that would overcome the side effect.
If you don't believe it works, you need to either be convinced of it or switch to a different medication.
It's just an example, and it's a very simple example, but we often neglect that and just say here's an app that's gamified taking your meds, that'll work.
Or we hand people one size fits all solutions.
So the very first step that I focus on is let's think about what are the barriers to change that are most common, that are internal.
There's plenty of barriers that are external, right?
You don't have the financial resources.
You lack the social support.
There's lots of external barriers, and that is not what I study.
They're really important.
As a society, we need to do a lot of work on those.
But even it turns out when everything is lined up in your favor, there's a whole bunch of internal barriers, our own psychological wiring that makes change hard.
So that's kind of what my book takes as its assumption is that we need to figure out the barriers.
And then it's laid out around specific internal barriers, which include impulsivity procrastination, forgetfulness habits and sort of falling back on those existing habits confidence.
If we believe we can do it, it's much more likely that we'll follow through.
Just the problem of getting started can be a barrier.
And so that's another that I talk about.
And then it bridges a little bit to the social and talks about the challenge of conformity and sort of who are our peers and are they supporting us in our goals or not?
So that bridges from the internal to the external.
And so each of those barriers has a different set of solutions.
This all came up for me over the weekend.
I went with my friend and her kids to a bluey exhibition.
I did not know what Bluey was.
I now know what Bluey is.
I'm sorry, I've been missing it this whole time.
But I'm with this friend, right?
And she was a well.
Actually I should probably keep her a little bit anonymous, but she is a friend who has a background in journalism.
I went to college with her, journalism.
We were very focused, right?
And she looked at me and was like I think I might want to retire in my 50s, at 55, and i was like, first of all, how?
But second of all oh, like i haven't even entertained this as a want, but but the but.
The thing that freaked me out was that this is someone who, in our 20s, we were like can we get an internship?
Can we, like we were super productive peer friends who were pushing each other in terms of yes and and that may have changed over the years in some ways, where i got better perspective about the meaning of life, still enjoying my career.
She had children and same thing.
But this was a radical shift.
And what she said to me was like I don't know that I want to do capitalism in the same way for as long as I thought I would.
She is a partner in productivity and success to some extent, whether that's intentional or not.
For many years,
And now she is looking at me and saying, I've changed.
I've changed my priorities.
I've because I'm a human, I'm like, am I doing it wrong?
Am I doing it wrong?
What is, is, is it okay that I don't feel this way?
Should I feel this way?
Maybe I secretly do feel this way.
I found, and then I found myself because we were prepping for this interview.
I found myself thinking a lot about what you've written about of like, like I could be a barrier.
I didn't want to be a barrier to her goals.
How can we help each other?
Uh like, once we get to that point where we're like, here are the barriers, here are the you know, like for my friend, like health insurance.
What would the how would the kids pay for school?
Like, whatever.
But then there's also like.
We have this community, so how can we help each other get to that and how can we figure it out for ourselves?
Look, it sounds like you know if you say you certainly have many friends.
I don't know you, but I'm guessing she's not your only friend.
And you have many friends in journalism.
Right.
So I
To the extent that having one who is saying I'm thinking of opting out of this career earlier, it's certainly going to plant the seed, as it did, in your mind, that there is another way.
And that's probably healthy, right?
It's good to be opening your mind to the various possibilities of the future.
But your support group and your social network, if one person peels off, is not suddenly going to be.
The majority of the people I know in journalism have all left.
It's gonna be one person has left.
And so generally, that's not going to erode your social support structure in a meaningful way or change your narrative.
It's probably healthy that you're seeing a little bit of variety in the paths people take, so that you can reflect and make sure you're fully happy and committed to what you're doing.
In terms of her and how you can support her.
I mean, when we are taking a new path or we're thinking about taking a new path, it's really valuable to look for exemplars and find role models and start having conversations with other people who have taken it and to surround ourselves with people who have
It doesn't mean she can't be friends with you anymore by any means, but to the extent that you know some other early retirees from your network, a helpful thing you could do for your friend would be to make those connections so that she can start understanding what it really looks like when someone does that.
Are they happy?
How did they manage the transition successfully?
We get so much information from having a peer group, a support group, that's going through similar things.
And of course, this happens naturally.
And a lot of us have this intuition.
But the more intentional we are about seeking out those kinds of mentors, the better the results tend to be.
The classic examples of this would be like, oh, I want to run a marathon.
Let me find a running group.
You know, I want to get in shape.
Let me find some other friends who also want to get in shape.
Or I want to study for the... you know, the GREs, let me find a group of friends who also wants to.
So we can create social groups with shared goals and then support each other.
But that's true of every stage of life.
And sometimes we sort of figure it out for structured activities like running a marathon, but don't realize it's exactly the same thing we're going to need for early retirement or for career switching or for getting through a divorce or dealing with a really scary diagnosis.
Without making this too personal, can you tell me And I know you've written some about this and talked about some of this, but of a time where you were able to do this kind of change yourself?
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I have many examples.
I'm going to give you a little bit of a frivolous one, but it's one of my favorites because I think it so clearly illustrates what I mean when I talk about barriers.
So physical health and mental health.
They're not that frivolous, but this was not a life crisis, I should say.
But as a graduate student, I found that very stressful to be a graduate student.
I was studying computer science at Harvard.
I really felt in over my head, I will tell you.
It was not a walk in the park.
It was hard.
And I was struggling with my mental health and my happiness.
And I was not maintaining a focus on my physical well-being, which had always been important.
I was a Division I college athlete.
But when you have tons of crushing problem sets and aren't getting great grades, and sometimes your priorities slip,
So I wasn't finding a way to motivate myself at the end of long days to get to the gym, which I knew was really important and was going to just make me better off.
But that wasn't enough.
Knowing wasn't enough.
And so I realized I need to sort of outsmart the situation and change it so that what felt like an uphill battle was going to become a downhill one.
The barrier there was that I'd had a long, miserable day.
I was tired.
All I wanted to do was basically curl up on the couch and binge watch TV or read my favorite book and relax and decompress.
And what I needed to do was get moving.
That's what I actually needed to do.
That was what was good for me.
And so I'll call it.
I invented something, although many people have done this before me and will do it after me, but I named it.
That's my contribution and did some science proving its efficacy.
I did something that I now call temptation bundling.
I made a rule.
I was only allowed... to listen to my favorite audiobooks.
I wasn't allowed to read anymore.
I got into audiobooks during this phase and I could only listen to them when I was at the gym working out.
For most people it would probably be TV, but I have to tell you this was 2004 and you couldn't whip out your iPad and watch Netflix because that wasn't a thing yet.
So audiobooks.
But now do it with your favorite TV show.
That's what I'll say, and I've converted.
I'm a TV show temptation bundler now.
But it worked for me.
I listened to all the Harry Potter books, the Hunger Games you know like Twilight series all the Alex Cross books at the gym on the elliptical.
It was this magical transformation that happened, from going home and wanting to curl up on the couch.
And that was all I could do, because it had been such a long day to going home and craving a workout, because I knew I'd get to find out what happened to my favorite characters and how the story was unfolding.
It would be my release for the day.
And, instead of sort of being a blob, I started working, exercising regularly, looking forward to those workouts.
Time flew while I was there because I was no longer feeling the pain of the workout.
I was just engaged with the entertainment that I was enjoying.
And at the end of those long days, then I got home, I'd had a workout and I was able to focus.
My schoolwork improved, my mental health improved.
It level, right?
I was a graduate student.
Everything was fine.
But it was a huge change for me.
And it was so positive that I ended up actually doing research and running a series of experiments to show that when you help people tie a chore that's linked to a goal with something that they find tempting, like an audio book, and help them find ways to make it fun so that It's not an uphill battle but a downhill one, so that they're looking forward to pursuing that goal,
You see tremendous improvements in outcomes.
And so that's sort of one of the keys to change that I talk about in the book is actually just the Mary Poppins principle that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.
Don't say just do it.
That's the Nike motto.
No pain, no gain.
We hear that a lot.
It's really wrong.
The right way to achieve our goal is what leads us to persist longest.
Research shows consistently is actually wrong finding a way to make it more enjoyable so it doesn't feel like an uphill battle, just changing the experience.
I mean.
First of all, I thank you for reminding me that the temptation of listening to Twilight can actually be the thing, that It can be positive.
You're validating so many of my choices in life, and yes.
But also I think a lot about now and even during, like when COVID started, just like this accountability companionship, right of like.
I have to work, I have to do this.
It's really hard.
Life is hard.
But if I do this on Zoom with a friend or if I get to eat after out with somebody socially, that obligations can be tied to something wonderful and then start to feel wonderful.
That makes perfect sense to me.
So can you talk about a little bit about, like when you're in your own academic world and research world, the sort of behavioral economics context and what that means?
Sure, yeah.
So I run a research center that I co-founded in 2017 along with Angela Duckworth, who's most famous for her work on grit, but actually in the last decade, has focused primarily not on thinking about grit, but on thinking about how to change situations so that people can achieve more, as opposed to just relying on personality traits, which is much harder.
So our research center is called the Behavior Change for Good Initiative, and it unites a team of about now 175 scientists across disciplines towards the goal of accelerating the science of behavior change in three areas.
So we focus on trying to bring science to improve health decision making and change health behaviors.
Savings
So how do we help people improve their financial security, save more for emergencies and retirement?
And also how do we help people achieve more educationally?
So thinking about how do we help kids persist towards their educational goals and adults achieve more educationally?
Those are our three pillars, and there's a huge amount of overlap in the tools that are useful for each of those.
And so we were trying to cross pollinate by bringing researchers to the table who think about those different challenges and getting them talking to each other and working with each other.
The motivation for that effort came actually from some really interesting data.
I saw about 15 years ago on health outcomes a pie chart that I saw at a seminar of all things like how nerdy is this?
But it broke down the causes of premature death in the United States and sort of showed what fraction are due to genetics, what fraction are due to environmental exposures, what fraction are due to accidents and so on.
And one of the wedges in the pie chart was what fraction of premature deaths are due to behaviors that we could change.
Daily decisions we make about what we eat, what we drink, whether we smoke, if we buckle our seat belts, whether we're physically active.
And what blew my mind about this pie chart was that 40 of premature deaths turn out to be due to those daily decisions.
And I would never have imagined it was such a large fraction.
I would have guessed five, maybe 10.
It was so enormous.
The enormity of that sort of changed my career and research focus and made it clear that you know, if it accumulates, these daily decisions accumulate in that domain.
They must accumulate to have impact in so many settings.
And if we could really harness scientific insights more effectively, just think what tremendous social impact that would have and sort of similarly in these other settings.
You're making me think about people and I wonder to what extent you find this in the research.
You've done that.
Okay, like what do I want to do?
What do I want to do to change to accomplish things, right?
Like, I could write down a bunch of stuff.
They would include moving my body around more.
They would include a lot of things that are pretty typical, right?
You know, being healthier, both mentally and physically, pursuing hobbies, pursuing professional things that I have been putting on the back burner.
A lot of stuff, right?
Like not too much stuff for a normal day and rest, more rest on top of all that stuff.
Yeah.
Sleep.
Absolutely.
But then I look at the list at my age and I think how much of this is stuff I want to do regularly because it's good for me.
How much of it is stuff that I want to do because it brings me joy and happiness and contentment and I feel good about myself.
And how much of it is stuff I think I should be doing?
How do we know when we attempt to make change?
That we've set the right goals.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's a really deep and important question.
I will say, so first of all, I'll give you the wimpy answer.
My wimpy answer is Mostly I'm agnostic on that in my research and sort of focus on assuming people can set decent goals, or focusing on a thing that we know is really healthy and good and that we feel confident there's no gray area and let's help people get there.
So that's my sort of wimpy answer.
But then on the very important question that you're asking of sort of, do we have the right goals?
How do we understand ourselves better so that we can set the right goals?
Those are incredibly important questions.
There's a lot of really wonderful research going on in the behavioral science community about mistakes we make when it comes to happiness.
Still, my favorite book on this is a pretty old one.
I think it's 20 years old at this point called Stumbling on Happiness by Dan Gilbert.
That's really wonderful.
He's a Harvard professor and psychologist who basically studied all of the mistakes we make, all of the misconceptions we have about what will actually make us happy, right.
The big house and the fancy car.
And by the way, income going up does make us happier.
So it's not all wrong to think that you'll like having a big house and a car.
And there were years where we got that wrong.
We had a lot of people said, oh no, more money doesn't make you happier.
But actually the science is pretty darn clear.
More money does make you happier.
The marginal returns are lower and lower after you've met minimal needs, but there's still a positive relationship between more money and happiness.
But there's a whole lot of other things that are maybe not as hard to get that also make us happier.
So it's easier to get a big return that we sort of misunderstand.
Relationships, which is a focus of this podcast, and one of the big things turns out you don't need money to buy relationships and they make you just as happy as having a lot of money.
So investing in some of the things where the returns are really high.
We've talked about sleep and exercise.
Those are incredibly reliably linked to greater happiness.
So goals around that are great.
Will professional success and sacrificing sleep and relationships with your kids bring you the greatest happiness?
A book a year or that new title with 75 words attached to it?
Probably we overinvest in those things and underinvest in the things that reliably bring us joy.
But of course, every person's happiness function is a little different.
And knowing what your own is.
That's one of the keys, sort of trying to understand for you what are the things that are turning out to be as good as you thought they would be?
And so I think, when thinking about goals, trying to look to the evidence base for what are the things that really do reliably create those benefits can be a good way.
And then also reflecting on the past in your own experiences.
If you're fixated on professional goals you probably have been for a while and you might wanna look back and sort of try to collect data from your own past.
Whatever that last mountain was that you were trying to climb and you climbed successfully how happy did it really make you.
Were the returns as big as you thought they would be?
And might you be making the same mistake again to invest on this next big career mountain and think it's going to once I just accomplish this, then I'll be so satisfied.
If that wasn't giving the return you expected.
Maybe you can learn from that past experience yourself and update your beliefs and focus more energy and attention in directions that have been rewarding.
More on how to change, specifically in relationships, with Katie Milkman when we return.
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We're all out of the ordinary.
There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now, we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media, it's season two of The Harvard Plan.
This time, it really is personal.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome back.
I'm talking with behavioral scientist Katie Milkman about her book How to Change the Science from Getting Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.
I know you have talked about your work, Fresh Starts and the timing of change, which I always think is interesting because this is like a January 1st thing, right.
Of like, it's a new me.
Wait, it's not a new me.
This is arbitrary.
But yet, time exists.
So can you talk about... our timing with change.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
So as you point out, January 1 is the sort of grandparent of all fresh starts.
You know, it's the biggest of them all.
Fresh starts are moments that feel like new beginnings to us in the cycle of life.
So every Monday is a miniature fresh start the celebration of a birthday, getting a promotion moving, coming back from a vacation, all these transition points, anything that feels like a new beginning, the start of a new month.
Celebration of holidays that feel like they begin a new season, for instance, Memorial Day and Labor Day, are fresh starts.
And what my research with Hengchen Dai and Jason Reese has shown is that at those moments all of them, not just January 1st we really do feel more disconnected from who we were before.
So January 1st is the most pronounced.
You say like, oh, it's a new year.
It's a new me.
The old me last year, the old me.
Yeah, OK, I didn't get in shape, but it's January 1st.
This year is going to be different.
We do that to some extent with each of these fresh start moments.
It gives us a sense of disconnect and optimism about who we can be, because we're disconnected from those past failures.
And we see upticks in goal pursuit and of all types at all these fresh start moments.
So everything from you know people showing up at the gym at a higher rate at these fresh starts to searching for the term diet more on Google, which is the most popular New Year's resolution for better or worse.
That's the fresh start effect.
The problem, which you also pointed out in your question, is like two days later am I still motivated.
Not really.
This is really a temporary shift that happens at new beginnings.
You know, when you see, if you look at all these things, the week pattern is really fascinating.
Like Monday is the highest.
I'm holding my hand up and the listeners won't be able to see.
I'm like showing you a decline.
You know a mountain that's just like Monday's the highest and Tuesday drops a little.
Wednesday and Thursday
And you just watch it, It's no longer feeling so fresh.
And that's the real problem with fresh starts.
So they're an opportunity if there's a shift you want to make.
But most of us don't have the insight to recognize that if we want to take advantage maximally of that peak in our momentum and motivation, we need to actually use it as a moment to set up structures that will carry forward change, as opposed to just saying oh, I feel motivated today.
I'll go to the gym.
Instead, you know, is it okay?
I'm going to call my friend and we're going to sign up for a class that we're going to go to together for the next three months.
Now I've got three months of commitment.
I've got another person socially supporting me through it.
I put money down, so I'm going to feel guilty about that sunk cost if I don't show up.
Now I've used this moment to hook to something that really will create more than a day of momentum and change.
And this is a relationship podcast, right?
So a lot of people are single, who listen and dating, not dating interested, not interested married divorcing whatever, whatever.
But i do feel like sometimes, when people tell me stories um, and it involves change or want for change, sometimes it's change they can pull off and other times the changes actually uh, would require someone else to make change, which you cannot do from what i have learned.
But i wanted to get your take on that, which is like, especially like if you have a partner who forgot to get the vaccine and keeps not doing it, if you have routines you'd like to change that you hope involve a second third, fourth person friend groups.
My friend saying can you go on a different kind of journey with me as I figure out how to transition my career into something else and prioritize other things?
Like how much can we expect other people to change with us?
How much should we expect?
And how.
You know What would you say to someone who says, like I want us to change, us being the collective, whether it's couple friend, network.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a great question.
Look, yes, absolutely.
The answer is you can help change other people.
It's going to be a lot harder if they're resistant to the change.
Ideally, you know, you're having a conversation.
It's a shared goal.
There's that it's not coercive.
That's going to go a lot better.
But but.
You can use the same tools that you can use to help yourself to help another person.
We talked about making it fun to pursue change for yourself.
Can you make it more fun for your partner to pursue change?
Tandem goals turn out, by the way, to be one way to make goal pursuit more fun.
We did a recent experiment.
We ran this experiment where people signed up with a friend who was their gym buddy and we randomly assigned them to either each get paid a dollar every time they worked out, or they could only earn that dollar if they both showed up and worked out together.
An economist would tell you the second strategy where you have a contingent reward is worse.
Just pay directly for what you want.
Pay them to exercise.
But we actually saw that people exercised 35 percent more when they were given this tandem goal of going to the gym together to get their dollar.
And the reason when we dug into the data was two things.
One, it was more fun to work out together.
They enjoyed it more, and people sort of hadn't realized that, or else they would have figured out they should have just exercised, worked out together when they were being paid independently.
They didn't.
The other is that they felt accountable to someone and that really helped motivate change.
When we have a partner and we want to encourage or we want to achieve change together, having tandem goals can be a big motivator.
We can create structures that support that.
You always want to put up friction between you and and the thing that you'd like to do less of.
Right.
So say you want to eat healthier and you live with another person.
You can make it easier for both of you to eat healthier by making sure that the pantry is stocked not with the unhealthy food but with the healthy food.
Right.
And that's something that's in your control.
Now there's a friction.
You have to like go to the grocery store to buy the ice cream or whatever it is.
And you know you can create other reductions and frictions, or you can suggest If you feel like one of the things that you'd like to do more is socialize, you can be the person who plans that.
You know, we're going to have a dinner date with a friend once a week and I'm going to organize it.
Now I've created very low friction for you to join me.
As long as you're not actively opposed to this, I can make that change for both of our lives.
So you can sign yourselves up as a couple for things or you can change the environment where you are living to support others. different kinds of behaviors, whether that's, you know, now there's no alcohol in the house or whatever it might be.
P.S., this can lead to fights if you do it without buy-in.
So it's important to have those conversations.
But you do have the power to create change.
There are a lot of ways that without coercion or persuasion, you can make a positive impact.
And often I think When we're trying to go on a journey to change something with another person, it's not that they're against it.
It's just that it's not as high of a priority for them.
So if you take the initiative, you can create a situation where both you and your partner are moving in the right direction.
Thinking about that, what role does like self-compassion play in the process of change?
And how is it necessary or part of just figuring it all out?
Yeah, that's a great question.
It's really important.
So, first of all, change is hard.
There's a lot of setbacks.
Even if you're doing really well on some new goal, there's going to be days when you don't nail it.
And it turns out to be really important to have a way to forgive yourself for that.
One line of research on this that I really love is by Carol Dweck of Stanford University, who's done amazing research on growth mindset.
The original research in that domain focused on the idea that there's two different ways and this is, of course, a gross oversimplification, but it's a spectrum but there's two different kinds of ways we can think about intelligence.
One would be with a fixed mindset.
Fixed mindset approach to thinking about intelligence would say, I'm born with it or not.
I'm either smart or I'm not.
And that means that every time that I get feedback from the world say I don't do well on a test, that feedback is telling me about my absolute ability.
So the test goes badly.
I update my beliefs.
I'm really not that intelligent.
Otherwise, I would have done better on this test.
And I don't have that much potential.
That's a fixed mindset.
A growth mindset says intelligence isn't fixed.
I can grow it with effort and energy.
And by learning from mistakes, I can get better.
And so under a growth mindset, I take a test.
I don't do so well.
Instead of having that fixed reaction, which is, I guess this means it's diagnostic for my limited ability, I say, well, I have to work harder to do better next time.
This is important information.
I didn't do well enough.
I failed at this test.
What can I learn from that that will allow me to grow and do better next time?
It won't shock you to learn that the growth mindset is both accurate, because in almost every domain of life we can grow and improve, but also very adaptive and productive, because once you think of the world and every outcome as information and input that you can learn from and grow from to reduce the likelihood of another failure, the way you react to bad outcomes is totally different.
You have so much more self-compassion.
When you have a setback, I didn't get to the gym today.
I had an argument with my spouse that was really a nasty one.
I did a bad job as a parent because I overreacted to something.
You'll have some self-compassion when you have a growth mindset.
Instead of saying oh, I'm just a bad parent, I'm a bad spouse, I'm just incapable of being supportive in the right ways.
And that's who I am.
With that growth mindset, you'll say, that was a mistake.
I shouldn't have lashed out in that way.
I shouldn't have behaved in that way.
But what am I going to learn from it?
The next time I encounter this trigger, how am I going to react differently?
And you can think through and process and grow from that and have self-compassion and recognize it doesn't mean you're a bad person.
It doesn't mean you're hopeless.
It means that there's some skill you need to develop, some growth you need to pursue and you can get there.
And so I would say self-compassion is really important.
And in Carol Dweck's research and research by others.
What they found is just consistently, across the board, people with with a growth mindset have better outcomes controlling for other things, and that it can be learned.
Not only, just like everything else, you can grow your mindset.
Into growth mindset?
Into growth mindset, yeah.
So there are intervention studies where you can teach kids, for instance, that they can learn and grow their intelligence, that it's not a fixed trait, and those kids end up doing better in school, being more resilient to challenge, more willing to take hard math classes, and so on.
We should all be working to adopt more of a growth mindset in all of our endeavors.
It allows us to have more self-compassion when those inevitable setbacks arise.
And instead of treating them as diagnostic of some limited fixed capability we have in a domain, we can instead recognize every setback is a chance to learn and grow, so that the next time the same thing won't trip me up.
I'm wondering what advice you would give listeners who are struggling to make a change.
Like what is there like a like a little thing, a little pep talk you'd give them today?
Barriers.
Figure it out.
Yeah.
I mean, my main pep talk would be it's not it's by no means impossible.
We have lots of scientific evidence that you can do it if you've had setbacks in the past.
Also, that doesn't mean it's hopeless.
That's common.
Change is hard.
And it may be that the challenge I don't know what your challenge is, listener.
Right.
I don't know exactly what you're going through, but Often it's the case that those setbacks you've encountered before those failures, they may have been a result of not being strategic enough about the way you were pursuing change.
And maybe it could help you to think about what are some of the barriers you're up against and to look at some of the science that suggests tools that can be helpful.
Maybe the issue you're dealing with is it's miserable.
Maybe you can make it feel like less of a chore to change.
Maybe the issue is the barrier of you need to sort of structure your life differently and make more plans and set more reminders so that this is a top priority at the moments it needs to be.
Maybe you need more self-compassion and to adopt more of a growth mindset.
Maybe you need to try to think about how you can engineer your peer group to be more supportive and to show you the way a group of people with similar goals who you could spend more time with might help you further on the path.
There's a lot of research on habit that you may be able to harness to think about.
How do you very intentionally build a positive habit?
Can you build in frictions that make it harder to do things that are bad for you and easier to do the things that are good?
Right,
Maybe rid your house of the temptations, make it an easier environment for doing focused work or hopping on an elliptical.
Make it harder to get in arguments by making sure you're only spending time with the people you love when you're well rested and after you've had your exercise and break from a difficult workday.
What are the structures you can set up that will set you up for more success?
That may help you achieve change more readily than the way you've been pursuing it.
But experimentation is really important and also having that growth mindset, recognizing that it's okay if it's been hard, that's normal.
This is so fascinating and no offense to our other experts so far because I feel like I was super validated by hearing that my brain is like fully formed.
But okay, so let's say it's fully formed.
But I also, after talking to you, I feel like I can do a bunch of stuff.
Like, I can still do a bunch of stuff.
It's fully formed, but you still have agency.
I have agency.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe.
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I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
