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We often hear hero stories about success, where everything works out.
But today's guest, Dr Alexis Redding, says we hurt the next generation when we leave out the messy parts of the journey.
Alexis is a leader at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-author of The End of Adolescence.
In this episode, Alexis shares her own story of dropping out of a top university And what standing in front of a massive crowd on the prestigious TED stage with shaky knees taught her about being brave.
We talk about how our memories trick us, the power of 15 minutes micro mentorship meetings and why we need to stop acting like normal life.
Struggles are crises.
If you've ever felt like you didn't belong or you struggle to find your path, Alexis shows you that you are not alone.
Let's dive in.
I think this would be a fascinating place to start would be talking about your feelings about giving a TED Talk.
Because when?
Because when people look at you and everything that you've accomplished, knowing that you speak so much, they'd say of course she's done a TED Talk.
That's what somebody of her caliber would do.
And but when you get to see the person behind the TED Talk, I think that that just humanizes you.
So can you tell us about your experience?
Sure, I am.
I love that we're starting our conversation there.
I think I, you know, I said to my wife one of my goals for the next couple of years is to do a TED Talk.
And I was thinking it takes a long time to find the right fit, to be chosen, to get to the stage.
Through sort of the perfect confluence of events, the topic that absolutely matched my research popped up.
And it was a matter of like six months later that I found myself on the TEDx stage.
So as I stated that as a goal, the idea was I have years to practice.
I have years to settle into this to refine my message.
But suddenly it was right in front of me and such an incredible opportunity to share my work more broadly.
I tend to not love being in front of the camera.
And so being in front of the camera for me is difficult.
What I do, because I care so deeply about my message.
And I know that I'm the best person to share this message because I've been doing this work now for 25 years.
But it doesn't mean that I really relish the opportunity to go stand on stage in a spotlight and to deliver a talk.
It's always great afterwards, but that lead up is kind of challenging.
And so I, you know, I knew exactly what I wanted to say.
I knew the message I wanted to convey.
But the idea of standing there being recorded by five or six cameras at once, with a photographer who looks like a nature photographer with that big, long lens in the back of the room, that's an entirely different dynamic than the stage that I'm normally standing on, which is speaking to parent and family audiences, speaking to students.
It was a much smaller venue.
It was only 300 people.
I've spoken to several thousand at once.
But the idea of that spotlight, that red dot, all of those eyes that were not in the room, that would ultimately be on you, that was a real growth edge for me.
And I will be honest, it was, I think, the worst talk I've ever given.
Like, it just...
It did not.
I mean, I'm pleased with how it ultimately came out.
You know, the editors are fantastic.
But anyone who really knows me can see how scared I was.
And this thing happened to me on stage, which has never happened before.
I'm standing on the red dot.
I'm ready to start with my line.
I have been preparing now for months, practicing, practicing in the sauna.
So I'm hot and stressed, practicing walking down the street through, like just everything I could do to get ready for it.
And I'm standing on the red dot.
This is as prepared as I can be.
I'm ready to go.
I open my mouth and there is a terrible feedback in the room.
I was the first presenter of the day, so they hadn't calibrated that yet.
And the first line of the TEDx is about my father who passed away not that long ago.
And so I had to sort of in real time pivot and start again and say that line about my father a second time.
And I just had that little voice in my head that said, oh, this isn't going to be perfect.
OK, I'm going to have to embrace that.
But my body disagreed and my knees started to tremble.
Never happened in my life.
I was a. performer.
I did acting and dancing as a child.
I'm on many stages now.
My body has never rebelled, but I stood on that red dot and my knees were shaking in place in a way that had never, ever even occurred to me that that could happen.
And so if you watch the talk now, you'll see that I never move.
I never move from that spot because I couldn't let go of being grounded, because I wasn't sure I could stand there if I started to move around too much more than that.
It was a surreal experience, I would say.
Wow.
Well, first of all, thank you for sharing that story.
And thank you for sharing your message because the message is so powerful.
And when you are familiar with your level of performance, you can be your own harshest critic.
And then when people look at it, I didn't get that vibe.
It's incredible because it doesn't match.
And I think that can be really reassuring for folks who are looking at you admiring everything that you've accomplished, because you have a long resume with a lot of respected institutions and a lot of wins.
And to see that somebody of your caliber can still feel human and be human but still overcome in the moment.
I think there's a lot that we can take from that, outside of what it is that your thought leadership already provides.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
I think it's almost a perfect meta message.
I mean, one of the main things that I'm trying to communicate in all of my work is that it is really hard to figure out who we are and what we want to do with our lives.
And that's often focused at a college student audience.
But that is true for all of us across the lifespan.
And that was me standing on a red dot that also represented a real growth edge of Am I going to step out of the academy and have a conversation that I know is important for people to hear in this other forum, even if it terrifies me?
And the answer is yes.
I was going to stand there on shaky knees and I was going to do it.
Yes.
And just an aside, it is a terrifying thing when your body rebels, when it's like, oh, hold up.
You know, I've heard other people describe that situation, but thank goodness I am above this.
And then you find out in that moment, well, I guess I'm not.
That's got to be scary.
How did you how did you gather yourself?
You know, I. There were two things sort of simultaneously going through my head.
One is. is that my wife and three dear friends were sitting in the front row.
And so I felt deeply supported by people who were going to love me, whether I fell over on that stage or not.
And two, This was my moment.
I was either going to lead into the fact that my body was rebelling step off stage or somehow completely flub.
Or I was just going to see could I deliver a talk with shaky knees and cover that as much as possible?
And so I figured, OK, it doesn't look like people are concerned about me.
Like there's nobody coming with a stretcher.
Nobody feels like something imminently is about to go wrong.
So let me just pretend that I'm not scared.
And let me say this thing that I have been rehearsing because I think it's important to say.
And I looked down at my wife and she was smiling and I'm like, okay, I guess I can do this.
I guess I can get to the other side of this.
And eventually, you know, eventually I exhaled.
I don't think my knees ever stopped sort of knocking in place.
It's amazing.
So I think a couple of things we can take from that is, you knew who your tribe was and the fact that you would always be accepted within your tribe regardless.
And sometimes it requires a little borrowed confidence if you don't have the confidence yourself.
Because Dory sitting front row.
If there was a true medical emergency she would have.
You would have seen the concern on her face.
She would have jumped in and done something.
But the fact that she's smiling encouragingly, she's like listen, I might not feel the confidence that I need right now, but I see it in her.
And if she believes in me, then I believe in me, too.
And it's so funny because, again, your message by itself and we will get to it.
It is so powerful.
But I think it would be.
I would be remiss to not explore this element because it's it's a different way to serve the audience, because we folks listening to this they're on the precipice of greatness in many ways in their life.
There might be difficult conversation that they know they need to have and they feel like my body is rebelling.
But now they know hey listen, you will feel that way and you can still get the job done at a high level.
I mean, you can do your best to get to the other side.
And you're right, the people who love you are still going to show up and support you.
Support you through it all.
And also, I think really importantly, be honest.
I mean, my wife could not be a more supportive human being.
She is my biggest cheerleader.
And she is the one person who agrees with me that yeah, I could have done a lot better, because she's been sitting in the front row for so many of my keynotes, so many of my talks.
And she knows me better than anyone.
And so she can see, especially in those first couple of minutes, the pacing is a little bit off.
I'm slower than I normally speak because I was really just trying to breathe and stand there in place.
And there's something.
It's incredibly comforting to know that there is a person my best friend actually.
So there are two people my wife and my best friend are both like yeah, not your best.
Good.
You did fine.
It's great to have the message out there.
Not your best.
There's something so almost comforting to know that there are people who can tell you the truth.
Because I knew it.
I innately knew it.
And they validated that.
And there's something, yeah, there's something I love about that.
Yeah, I mean it's nice when you have people that you can love and trust.
That won't positively gaslight you.
You know I tell my folks on my team and people in my life I'm like hey, my goal here in this conversation, I don't want you to make me feel better.
I want you to help me to be better.
And so I need some actual real feedback.
And I think, even though, based on what you're saying, it wasn't your best performance in a performative type of way, I think it's still actually a massive win because you're performing under duress in a new environment.
And also, now you know that you don't need to be at your best to have a massive impact.
It's a nice reframe.
I like that.
And they often don't recognize how far above the standard they have climbed.
To the point where if they perform below standard, people don't recognize it and it still gets the job done.
I still think there's a lot of positive you could take from that.
I absolutely love that.
I think for me the other win although that now feels like the biggest one, but the other win for me is my wife asked me afterwards would you do it again?
And my answer was no.
I would like to do it tomorrow because now I know what it feels like.
I know that I can overcome it.
I could do so much better tomorrow.
And so my goal moving forward is, OK, let's get on another red dot.
Let's perform better and let's even heighten the way that I can get the message out there.
Because, at this moment in time, I think young people and the people who care about them and are supporting them need this message more than ever.
Yes, I agree.
And now listeners, we have we have turned the page on this story.
And the conclusion is Alexis is much tougher than me because because I did one TED talk and I got off the stage like crying.
And I was like, I am never doing this ever again.
It went it went well, but I'm like the level of duress.
And I felt that moment was so tough.
And because when I present, it's kind of, I go with the flow, kind of improv-esque.
I like to play off the crowd a bit, even in the keynotes, interactive elements.
You know, and I this was the first time I was fully scripted for the whole time.
And that really messed with my head like word for word down by memory, because they didn't have a comfort monitor or anything.
So it was just word for word verbatim.
I've never presented like that before and I've never presented like that again.
So, again, to the conclusion of all of this, Alexis is tougher than me.
People ask, would you ever do another TED talk?
I'm like, hell no.
I mean, I think we should go and do it together.
The only scripted talks both of us give.
We can cry backstage.
I'll bring the, you know, extra soft puffs, plus with lotion, so we can, you know, wipe our tears afterwards.
But, you know, get up on that red dot and, you know.
I love it.
This is great.
And now we've spoken so much about one of the tools you use to spread the message.
Now let's get to the message because I think it's more important now than ever.
And so in the spirit of talking like Ted, fun fact, the guy who wrote that book is up next.
He's the next guest who's coming on in like an hour or two.
But in the spirit of talking like Ted, what is your idea worth spreading?
So the short version of my idea, worth spreading, is that it is really hard to figure out who we are, what we care about and what we want to do with the rest of our lives.
And we forget when we are on the other side of making a lot of decisions, Will I go to college?
If I do, what will I major in?
What will be my first career?
What will be my second career?
We forget how hard it was in those moments of transition, which means we don't give really good advice to young people.
We tell a sort of heroic story of overcoming, but we don't tell the nuance, the messy middle, the emotion of insecurity uncertainty, of pressure, figuring those things out.
And so most of my work today really is centered around that idea of telling very authentic stories about our lived experiences that help students better and that also meet them where they are.
Oh, that last point, meeting them where they are.
We understand that's a fundamental of storytelling.
We have to know our audience, meet them where they are.
But clearly, when it comes to this conversation, we are missing the mark.
What makes it so hard for us to meet them where they are, even when we're trying our best to give solid advice.
Yeah, it's actually a byproduct of how our brains work and how we encode memories.
The idea is called the peak-end rule.
And essentially, when we look back over our lives, we remember the most intense emotional part of something that happened And we remember how it resolved.
And we forget all of that emotional texture in between.
So we forget the uncertainty.
We forget the loneliness.
So we tell the story of I walked uphill to school in a blizzard.
That part because that was the intense emotional part.
And then we tell the end of and I was OK and I toughed it out.
But we forget because our brains don't encode it in the same way.
How miserable and sad and frustrated we felt in that journey and translate that journey of walking uphill to school into any journey that we take.
And so, as we are trying to give good advice, we forget that there is so much more texture before we know, before we know that we can get through the first failure, before we know that not getting one job means that we're open to get the other job, before we have realized what it is to overcome failure and obstacles.
And when we're giving advice to young people, they're doing this for the first time.
And so we inadvertently give them bad advice of, oh, I did that hard thing.
It was fine.
I was lonely in college, but then I found my best friends and they stood up for me at my wedding.
We've left out the, and those were really rough days.
And on those days, I felt really isolated and all of that peace in between.
So the young person who's getting the piece of advice doesn't feel inspired.
They feel minimized.
They feel like, oh, okay, I guess it's easier to figure this all out.
I guess I'm the only one who's struggling.
And if there's one thing I've heard in 25 years of working with young people, they consistently tell me I'm the only one who is experiencing this, which means we need to do a much better job of validating.
No, everybody has these moments of insecurity, loneliness, this longing for connection.
That is a common piece of the developmental experience of growing and changing over time, of growing up, becoming an adult.
This is powerful.
And you are so correct.
There are so many challenges when it comes to communication as it relates to memory, but not just the science and psychology behind memory, but our lack of understanding of how memory works and how profoundly bad it is.
And when you access a memory, every time it becomes somewhat warped.
And one of the things that I've recognized too.
For me, as somebody who's building, as a thought leader, I had to create a life narrative that had a nice little bow on it, that people could understand within 30 to 60 seconds.
And I think about with everybody's personal brand.
Think about even when you're interviewing.
You don't need to be a thought leader for this.
How did you get here?
How did you come into the field?
We have to have a really, we have to have like our elevator pitch for this.
And I feel like we rehearse that story so much that we start to believe it, as if it was what it really was.
But we leave out a lot of those granular details because it doesn't serve the neat narrative that we're trying to convey.
That is so 100% spot on.
And I think the challenge for all of us is to create that elevator pitch that involves the moments of failure and centers them even.
I did a keynote at the University of Michigan for their mental health and graduate education conference a few months ago.
And, As we were talking about, we do not script our talks right when we go into them, not the way that you do for TED.
And so not at all planning to say this when I took the stage at Rackham at the graduate school.
The first words out of my mouth were after I said welcome.
I said and I am a University of Michigan dropout.
Nobody who had hired me to come and do the keynote even knew that I had dropped out of the University of Michigan.
But I started the conversation about why I had started at the School of Social Work after I did my first master's degree.
And I dropped out because it was the wrong program for me.
It was a program that was designed to work one-on-one with people and to support them.
And I realized that I actually wanted to work at a systems level.
And I had the opportunity to go back to Harvard and to join the doctoral program.
So I dropped out of the University of Michigan.
But in some ways, that's a failure, right?
In some ways, it's a success.
I realized what I wanted to do and I pivoted.
But nobody was expecting me, standing on that stage, to lean into something about my story that didn't have a bow on it.
And I'm so glad that I did, because I think I both earned the trust of the people in that audience and I showed them exactly why I cared so much about the message I was delivering, about the supports that we need when we are figuring things out for ourselves.
And So the supports that we need when we're figuring out that we made a wrong choice, that we made a bad decision, that it didn't fit authentically what it is that we want to do.
Yes, this is brilliant.
So, so many things I want to address.
First of all, we need to get you to the Ohio State University to share the same story.
Just saying.
I didn't drop out of there, but I share my failure story on any stage.
We'll bring you to Columbus.
That'll be great.
And then to that story.
I think we need more professionals like you, who are accomplished, who are also willing to that, have the fortitude within themselves to be vulnerable about those moments too.
Because a lot of times we don't share that story, because we assume the negative biases that people would have on that story but we don't recognize that we have the power to shape our story and use it in a way that's beneficial to us.
Because the thing is what I'm realizing so much when it comes to our perception of reality in so many things, and this is not like equivocation of what is real and not, but whatever you believe is true.
So if you have a story like yours, where you dropped out, you could have a disempowering narrative.
And if you believe that, then it would then be true.
But if you have an empowering message about it, then it becomes an empowering story.
And when it comes to the process of making decisions, I think it is not appreciated enough.
The fact that When it comes to decision making, a lot of times we make these decisions in isolation.
But it's just like the military saying, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
You can think very highly and in depth on this topic, try to make a decision.
And through no fault of your own, it doesn't work out.
And then you just say, hey.
That didn't work.
I'm going to adjust.
And that's how we find ourselves in the right place.
But again, if you're not willing to share that messy middle and acknowledge the fact that you had some challenges, then you don't help people to recognize that sometimes the pathway to making a good decision is making an inadvertently bad decision.
Absolutely.
And most of the time when people, especially young people, who I spend a lot of time speaking with and mentoring, when they're coming to me for advice they're coming to me because they are at exactly that pivot point of something isn't working.
And the last thing they need from me in that moment is, here's a heroic story of how things work.
That doesn't validate their experience.
That doesn't make them feel connected.
That doesn't inspire them in any way.
But being able to just drop the pretense and I know exactly how that feels.
Here's how I ran that calculus for myself.
Here's why it worked for me.
Here's here are the doubts that I would have if I were to do it again.
And to give them real lived examples of that.
What is possible, but also the you know the pros and cons, the cost and benefits of a pivot point like that.
But that's what they need in that moment.
They don't need to know that I figured it out.
They need to know, wow, I was scared too.
I wasn't sure if I was really screwing up, but I took the leap of faith.
Here's how it worked for me.
Right.
Oh, so powerful.
And for the folks who are listening, I know a lot of them might be parents.
A lot of them might be aspiring parents, hope to be in the future.
But a lot of us.
No matter whether we have that in the cards for us or not.
We will encounter young people who look up to us for advice.
And one of the most, I think, eye opening parts of your research and thought leadership is the concept of the disappearance of adolescence.
Can you go into that?
Because I think this could be a paradigm shifting for the folks listening.
Sure.
So this is the work that I do with my colleague, Dr Nancy Hill, and together we run the Transition to Adulthood Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
And what we're doing in this work is trying to complexify the story of what it means to grow and change from sort of the end of adolescence so we're thinking 16 to 18 years old into this period of time of young adulthood where we're really really exploring all of those big developmental questions.
And what's really exciting about this particular moment.
So between 18 and 25, our brains are doing really cool developmental stuff, preparing us for the rest of our lives.
And if we, in that window of time, are able to expose young people to new ideas, opportunities to explore.
It's like our brain is primed to take in new information and to gather it in a new way.
And so what we've done in our study is follow a group of people across an arc of 50 years, people who came in, who were first interviewed in the 1970s, when they were college students.
They were interviewed every year at the end of their academic year for four years, telling the story of what stood out to them from college.
And then this study was actually sort of abandoned by the original research team, lost to history.
And I found it in 2016, or found out that it existed and then spent basically a year reassembling these interviews, sort of challenged some of our assumptions about the differences of generations, based on these interviews, in a book that we wrote called The End of Adolescence.
And in it, what we found is that these stories from the 1970s highlighted all of the same insecurities loneliness, challenges that the students in our classrooms today were experiencing.
And so the first part of our puzzle was What has really changed about the process of growing up?
Because our cultural narrative is that the generations are profoundly different.
The data says something else.
And so that was our first book.
The project we've been working on since then, I think, is even more exciting.
We were able to get permission from the provost of the university to reopen this abandoned study and to contact the folks who participated 50 years ago, who have mostly forgotten that they even took part in this study, have certainly not really thought about it in the half century since they graduated.
And we were able to contact them and first interview them to ask them what do you remember from college?
What's happened in your life since then?
And then let them listen to the interviews of themselves at 18 19, 20 years old And then come back and reflect on what they heard.
And what we've learned from.
That is a lot of what we've been talking about around memory and how much our memory leads us to believe this sort of triumphant narrative that leaves out all of the details, the sort of granular emotion.
Because they told us the story of what happened in college, but we had heard the story.
And then they heard the story.
They came back to us. really surprised by how different those things were.
I mean the typical response from the participant after listening to their first interview was I remember the broad strokes.
I did not remember how I felt.
And that is an incredibly powerful realization to see that.
And also to see, across 50 years, what actually mattered, from when they were 19 20, 21 years old.
And, spoiler alert, it's not what we would have guessed.
It is a much more nuanced and complex story that helps us to think about what kinds of programs, what kind of mentorship do students need today that is actually going to shape the next five decades of their life.
And we have this unprecedented opportunity to actually see how that played out.
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Oh my goodness.
First of all, my team loves you because you started talking in social media hooks and it's glorious.
This is great.
The clips are making themselves.
It's not what we would expect.
I love it.
So so what did you please tell us now?
I have no other insight to add to this.
I'm just giddy and interested to know what you discovered.
I think the most important discovery is something that I've written about with with my colleague, Nancy Hill.
But I've also had the opportunity to write about with Dori Clark, with my wife, where we've been able to take some of these insights and translate them to a broader audience and a business-focused audience.
And the insight is around mentorship.
So our classic story of what people need in a mentoring relationship is they need a years-long, in-depth, deep relationship with someone who is very high level in an organization.
And there are absolute benefits to that kind of mentorship, of course, but that is much harder to come by.
And it turns out, based on our data, not what is transformational.
What actually mattered for the young people in our study, looking back across their lives 50 years later, were moments of what Dory and I call micro-mentorship.
15 to 20 minute conversations in which somebody was focused on them, saw them, heard them, validated what they were experiencing and offered meaningful, tangible advice.
What was so interesting about this finding in particular, is it's something that, in writing the book, Nancy and I had flagged as being an important theme, but we didn't know because we hadn't met these folks.
You know, all these years later than if they would tell a story about mentorship the way we had analyzed the story.
We didn't know how their lives had unfolded.
But when they came back 50 years later, they literally told us about those same moments the 15 minute, 20 minute interaction with someone that changed the course of their life.
And then we heard how that life unfolded.
The person who opened the door to think about, have you ever considered teaching?
That's where I see you really light up. becomes a college professor.
The person who could not at all figure out how to live up to their potential as a doctor when they discovered that they actually hated being in a medical facility with people crying and with blood.
Had a 15 minute conversation with someone who said you know, you could make just as much of a difference as a researcher.
That person has, you know, become a medical researcher, a top tier medical researcher, who also runs a mentorship program for young female identifying scholars as well.
And so, We assumed that those moments mattered from our analysis, reading their stories.
They then came back and they told us not only did it matter, it actually defined the course of their lives.
This is mind-blowing.
This is great because when you were first describing this and you were saying well, what we discovered wasn't that it takes years of long deep relationship.
As you were writing, as you were saying that, I realized that's what I thought mentorship had to be in order to be impactful.
And that's what a lot of times people say.
And really, I think one of the biggest things that I'm taking from this is that, whoever it is that's listening to this, you can be a mentor.
The excuse is done.
I mean, this is almost like drive-by mentorship.
You can spend 15 minutes talking to somebody and the things that we might say almost in passing, they have such an impact.
I remember this is a kind of it was my dad who said this, but I just remember just kind of the passing comment really resonating with me.
My dad's a surgeon and, And for a long time I wanted to be a doctor as well, just kind of following his footsteps.
And then I was doing these leadership programs for medicine.
And just one day in passing, he's like, you know you don't need to be a doctor.
And then just went on.
I was like, what?
I have a choice?
Wow.
One of the things in my TED talk.
I talk about a mentor who just passing comment to me that honestly, the really one of the few things I remember him saying was there's a big difference between like, between being liked and being respected.
That's what switched for me, recognizing I couldn't continue being a people pleaser.
I had to change.
And it's so impactful for me to hear this from you and then thinking back to my life and It's not the mentor.
It's not the fact that people wanted to have a very regimented, rigid approach to mentorship.
The people who had the deepest impact on me, it wasn't that we had a high frequency of interaction.
It was the depth and precision of those interactions that we did have that made all the difference.
Absolutely.
And you've named your father as one of your mentors.
And that's another thing that comes from the work that Dory and I write about a lot, which is the idea of mirror mentorships.
So a mentor can actually be, and is often very powerfully, a person who knows you best.
So a parent, a partner, a best friend, a roommate, a close colleague, that's somebody who sees you very clearly and who can reflect back to you what they see in a way that We don't always see for ourselves.
It's the person who can say to us I know you think that you want to be a doctor, but where I actually see you light up is when you're talking about this other thing.
Or you've committed to majoring in English, but whenever you come back from your English class, you're in a really bad mood.
Where you're not in a bad mood is when you come back from sociology class.
We lean so heavily into our narratives of who we think we are becoming, or who we think we are supposed to be, that we don't always see ourselves clearly.
So that person who can hold up a mirror, and in exactly the way you just named, your father, did for you with this passing comment of you know you don't need to, That's because he saw you.
He saw that there was something about that path that didn't fit you authentically.
You were trying to fit into a narrative that that he knew in some way might not have been the perfect one.
And what a powerful message that is in how many words?
Just a couple.
Just a couple.
Right.
And, you know, the my parents, they didn't get that doctor, but I married one.
So, hey, there we go.
There you go.
Yeah.
This is really, really interesting.
Okay, so now let's think about the book that's coming out for you now.
Because this is the culmination of a lot of research.
You've already published an incredible amount of thought leadership on this.
What was it in the past year or so, as you were developing this new work, that made you say to yourself I need to put something else out into the world, because there's something missing?
Yes.
Oh, I love that framing of the question.
And I'm really excited for the new book to come out.
It's called Mental Health in College.
And it is an edited volume.
So it's actually my opportunity to uplift the voices of a lot of other scholar practitioners.
And the original idea for it comes from a class that I teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
We have a professional development arm where we work with people who work at colleges and universities around the country to And they come in to do a virtual program that takes place across two months with me.
And I was tasked with creating this program.
And it was such a wonderful green light opportunity of let's do something different around the conversation of mental health and young people today.
And so my goal in crafting the program was I would like 10 people who are never in conversation with each other.
Because I've been to different conferences where it's the same four people on a panel having the same conversation again.
And so I wanted people who were from the Jed Foundation thinking about suicidality and self-harm.
And I wanted people who are doing career guidance from the Life Design Lab or working in the past at the Life Design Lab out at Stanford.
I wanted those people to be in conversation about.
How do we, in all of these different ways, from all of the silos and perspectives that we're bringing to the work, how do we have a shared conversation about what young people are experiencing in college?
By design, that program is quite small, so that we can have a really in-depth cohort and do a lot of co-learning together.
And as I sat throughout the first two years of the program listening to these people in conversation with each other for the first time, it dawned on me that this needed to be a broader conversation where more people had access to these kinds of insights.
And so I put together the proposal, and then we spent a year sort of crafting this book that follows young people from the admissions process through the career search process.
So even our story of what the college years are, we're pushing at the bounds of that.
It's not starting the day you step foot on campus or log on to your online portal for the first time.
It is starting when you begin looking at what would this college journey be for me, and it is ending after we've settled into the workforce.
And so we're really trying to expand that narrative and think in this cross-pollinating way of all of these ideas from incredible scholar practitioners who are part of this conversation with me.
Oh.
Fascinating.
I love how this came together.
And admissions through career search, it's such a great window of time.
What is it about that window of time that you think practitioners or just everyday folks misunderstand the most?
For me and the conversation around mental health in college.
What I think we are all misunderstanding is we think that everything raises to a level of crisis.
And we don't understand that there are actually two things that are going on.
There are very real, very normal, very typical developmental challenges that people are having during the college years.
The challenges of loneliness, finding connection, the uncertainty of making decisions and paving the path to your future.
And then there are clinically diagnosable challenges, where people need supports from a counseling center, from a trained professional.
But what has happened is we've conflated those two things into one story.
And so whenever somebody expresses loneliness or uncertainty or insecurity, the default assumption now is that that must be a clinical challenge.
And we are doing young people such a disservice in this reaction.
And it comes from the best of places, right?
We don't want to underreact because we want to meet students where they are.
We want to help them.
We don't want to miss something important.
But what happens when we overreact and someone comes into our office and says that they're having a hard time with loneliness and we pivot and direct them to the counseling center?
We've missed the opportunity to normalize how lonely college is for a lot of people.
And we've also named it as something much more serious for them.
And that student may or may not go to the counseling center for all sorts of reasons.
They might have trouble getting an appointment.
They might not trust the counselors there for any number of reasons.
So we have to start the conversation from a what is typical and normal about the challenges, and then what rises to the level of concern.
We can't just assume that everything rises to the level of concern because we're pathologizing normal behavior in a way that does not help young people.
This is so fascinating.
So let me see.
Tell me if this recap is fair.
So the issue is the pathologizing of everyday, very human experiences.
So we want to make sure that we validate what it is that somebody is going through by acknowledging yes, this is difficult.
You will feel lonely.
You will struggle with decisions.
You will make mistakes.
That is hard.
And that is also life.
So feel it.
And here are some tools that you can use to navigate it, rather than saying this is an indication of something that is broken within you that needs to be fixed through counseling, therapy or maybe even medication, when it doesn't need to amount to that.
And so it's almost like creating these self-fulfilling prophecies.
We have placebo, but we also have nocebo, where we create this scenario where the person's like I'm feeling lonely.
And then they say, well, you have a problem.
They're like, I have a problem?
I thought I was just lonely.
And now it turns into something that's much darker than it actually needs to be in certain circumstances.
Yes, that's absolutely the perfect recap.
And what happens in that is we miss the opportunity to genuinely help by pathologizing what's going on.
We also, when we can have this much more even conversation about what's going on in the loneliness, in the unpacking of that conversation, we might realize that, oh no, that student does have a clinical concern.
But now we know and we can direct them to the right place.
We just can't start from immediately sending somebody off for clinical care because they might not get it.
They might not get the help they need, but we have the window where they're telling us what's going on.
And this is really full circle to our whole conversation.
The sharing what our experiences were, the being very authentic and very truthful about our own challenges is what actually empowers young people to share with us what they're going through, but to validate that what they're going through is normal and typical.
We have in the archival work that I do.
So I spend a lot of time with the interviews from the 1970s because those are complete sets.
But I have interviews going all the way back to the 1940s with college students who are talking about loneliness anxiety stress, the inability to sleep, not wanting to show up in class because they have such a profound sense of imposter syndrome.
They don't use that language, but those are the emotions that they are experiencing.
And so one of the things that I do, especially when I speak to both parent and student audiences, is I share those quotes with them, initially without telling them that they're from the 1940s or from the 1950s, because they're so recognizable.
Because I would love to sort of cut through the noise that this is new, this is different, this is specific to Gen Z, It's not.
We have always seen a profound sense of loneliness and disconnection in college.
We just haven't named it, we haven't talked about it and we haven't normalized it so that students prepare.
Instead, what we tell them is, college will be the best four years of your life.
No four year period is ever going to be the best of anything.
You're going to have highs and lows, ups and downs.
This is the real world.
You know, yes, you're going to have some great days.
But when our story of college for young people is it will be the best.
You will meet your best friends.
They will stand up for you in your wedding.
What does that set them up for on the Tuesday, when they're in their dorm room feeling like they haven't yet found their friends?
They're not really sure if they've chosen the right major.
They're missing home.
This is the best four years.
What a dichotomy to set up for them.
Instead, let's lead with, you know, college is going to have lots of ups and downs.
It's going to be challenging and exciting.
There are going to be opportunities and setbacks.
Telling a more real and humane story about what that's going to be like helps them not to feel so alone when they don't live up to the benchmark of the best four years.
Because who can't?
Exactly.
And what I love about this too, is that especially the way that you introduce it, showing the stories and what people say, but not letting them know it's from the 70s.
That also creates.
It kind of starts to cut through the bias that both sides have, where the person who's older who says they can't understand me, things are so different back in my day, etc etc etc.
Just a little aside.
I you know I'm a very self-compassionate person, but I really hate when I find myself starting off a sentence with my sons back in my.
Oh my it's, it's in me too.
I cannot, I can't believe I said that.
Right.
And then on the other side too, I think it helps the younger generation say yeah they, They experienced a different climate.
They had experienced different technologies.
But at the heart of it, this is a human experience.
We might be in different generations, but now I can actually listen to the person who's older, not because they know about TikTok or Snapchat, but because they know about what adolescence feels like.
And I think that helps us to connect on a deeper level intergenerationally.
One of my favorite experiments that I've done throughout the process of co-directing the transition to adulthood lab was very early after I found and began to digitize the transcripts.
I invited a group of current college students.
So these were students in the class of 2018 to sit down with me and to engage with some of the transcripts.
And I was totally transparent with what I was doing.
I said, these are transcripts from students who attended the same school that you did, and they were conducted in 1975.
And what I want is your help.
You've got two highlighters.
I want you to highlight everything in green that rings true, feels familiar, that you feel connected to.
And I want you to highlight in pink everything that feels like it stands out and you couldn't connect.
And then I watched them just fill these pages with green ink of all of the ways that they recognize themselves on these pages of people who were literally their grandparents' age.
You would not assume you had this much in common with your grandparents if you were a college senior.
And when we got to the end of it, what they had highlighted in pink were the moments of, you know, anachronistic detail the student asking for a light or an ashtray because they were smoking as they were doing, the interview, or the reference to president richard nixon as a contemporary figure.
None of it was the emotion of what people were feeling.
And so we got to the end of the evening and one of the students looked up at me, who had obviously participated in other psych experiments in the past where they had been tricked about the real purpose of the experiment and how they do like a puzzle, but it's not really about the puzzle.
And so I looked up and they said OK, what was this really about?
I said, no, it was really these are transcripts from the 1970s.
These are students who graduated from this institution the way you're preparing to.
And she just looked at me like that can't possibly be true.
It was so paradigm shifting for her that somebody 50 years ago could have had what she felt was a unique you know, experience of college.
And indeed, there was this connective tissue across the generations.
And I really.
It's exciting to me to be able to uplift that message, because we don't have to have had shared technology, a shared historical moment, despite all of the ways the world is different.
And of course, we all grow up differently.
That core component of growing up and figuring things out is something that connects all of us.
And I think that's incredibly empowering for young people, but also for all of us as adults, that what we experienced growing up is actually more relevant and can be more useful than we might assume.
Brilliant.
This is so fascinating.
And I'm wondering because there are a lot of paradigm shifting moments that I've had in this conversation, but it's always backed up by research and evidence, which I appreciate.
And I'm wondering, as you've socialized this to your peers and other folks in leadership, have there ever been any moments of resistance?
Oh, yes.
Of course.
I mean, the core of what I'm saying flies in the face of what our expectations are.
The cultural narrative is kids these days, or Gen Z is, or a post-pandemic generation is.
And so I'm standing on stage or facilitating a workshop in which I'm saying that those instinctive ways we are framing the world are not actually borne out by the data.
And so, Even though my colleague Dr Nancy Hill and I feel very strongly that we had gotten it right in doing our book eventually, we got so much pushback that we were like okay, let's replicate the original study.
And so what we've actually been doing for the last five years is replicating a one-to-one comparative sample with the classes of 2025 and 2026 at the same institution.
Doing the exact same protocol interviewing students at the end of each academic year for four years, asking them just the one question that the original research team asked, which is what stood out for you, and then capturing that.
So that we would be able to see in a one to one comparison is the emotional experience really the same with social media?
Post COVID.
And indeed we're running the analysis for the class of 2025 now and it is exactly as we expected.
The continuity, the connection between the class of 1975 and the class of 2025 is exactly as we predicted.
And that is profound because the class of 2025 came into college in the midst of the pandemic.
They came in having graduated online from their high school programs.
They came in, you know, in isolated pods, not eating in a dining hall, getting takeout that they would bring to their room.
That's as different as you can imagine from our cohort that came in in the early 70s.
And yet all of the emotions, the experience of who am I?
What do I care about?
Who do I want to be?
Asking those questions elicited the same amount of uncertainty and confusion and loneliness in transition.
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It's interesting because I feel like for me as somebody who, well, yeah, time flies.
I'm at that age where I would be giving the advice now.
My goodness.
But it helps me because now I can focus on the human element and the commonality of the human experience, rather than feeling like I need to become some expert in the differences between generations in order to give competent advice.
I think ultimately it's empowering to see this as a very deeply human thing.
And the reason why I asked you about whether or not there's been pushback is because our previous guests we were talking about your professional branding and how often you can be very correct in what it is that you're pushing forward.
But it doesn't mean that there will not be resistance.
The story we used was how hard it was for the, The doctor who recognized that washing your hands would save lives, and germ theory, and how his life turned out and how people were like what germs.
Please, no.
And so it's interesting to see because I wanted to see if there was any if you've had to make any strategic adjustments in how you've been presenting this in order to circumvent some of the resistance that you might be feeling.
Yeah, I would say the only sort of strategic thing I've done in the presentations is mentally prepare myself that when I open for QA, after inevitably the first or the second question is going to start with well, that's interesting, but kids these days are.
Okay, let's go back to Brat Stacks.
But to really understand and not even have an emotional or visceral response to that of this, is somebody who has just heard me say something that literally flies in the face of the assumptions that they have about how the world works.
My hope is that, by responding in a way of I felt exactly the same way, telling the story of beginning the study in which we were looking for generational difference,
I mean, I spent a year analyzing these data.
I coded them using three different analytic techniques because I was trying to find generational difference.
But what I found again and again was generational similarity.
And so, sharing that of, I understand how deeply this does not resonate with what we're thinking or what it is that you think that you're seeing in your student population.
And I also remind myself that what I am inviting people to do is to have a more humane perspective on today's generation and not to dive into a kids these days are or a.
Why can't they just story and instead think about?
In what ways does this actually resonate with my lived experience?
In what way can I be helpful to this young person in front of me?
Because ultimately, we're not going to help anyone if we start a story from kids these days.
I mean, maybe it helps us briefly feel superior, but that's not really useful.
There is no tangible way that we are improving the lives of young people if we start with this deficit narrative about their experience or their lack of resilience in quotes or whatever story we want to tell.
And indeed it's really hard to tell a story about young people today if you sit down and you spend your career listening to them, because they are fascinating and determined and resilient and beautiful human beings.
And I hope to capture all of those stories and to be able to share them.
Amazing.
Amazing.
And just I want to give you flowers here, too, on the way that you responded.
You would respond to those situations, because I'm not sure if you did this intentionally.
But in in real estate, there's a classic response to folks who are kind of giving.
Resistance that's not born in the data.
So it's the feel, felt, found response.
So they would first acknowledge what they're hearing.
So I understand that you're feeling this, and then they would show that they are acknowledging and understanding it.
And then they would say, other people in your same situation have felt the exact same way.
But then after looking at the research, what they found is this.
So you perfectly mirrored that.
I didn't know.
I love it.
I love it.
That is great.
And before you go, let's say this.
Hypothetically, if everybody in the world reads this book and they download it and instantly believe it, how does the world change?
The first book or the current book?
The one that's coming out in April.
All of them.
Okay.
Then the connective tissue across those books, or even if you don't have several hours to read, the nine-minute TED Talk is.
That you will lean in to a more generous interpretation of what young people are experiencing and hopefully embrace a more authentic narrative of your own, so that you can genuinely meet them where they are and support them.
Oh.
That is so good.
And before you go, just to remind the listeners again about your books plural and how they can reach out to you and work with you too.
Wonderful.
So my first book is called The End of Adolescence, The Lost Art of Delaying Adulthood.
That is the 1975 study, the first piece of it.
The book that's coming out in April is called Mental Health in College.
And you can find me at my website, www.alexisredding.com.
I'm on Instagram and LinkedIn.
And my YouTube channel is Professor Redding.
Amazing.
Alexis, thank you so much for joining us.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
This was a wonderful conversation.
And I love knowing about the three F's and having the crop pollination of the ideas from the real estate world.
That's fantastic.
