Katy Milkman

And being okay with it.

Okay. Four, inhale.

Yeah, I guess you can see a little bit.

For years working it out.

Align your body.

Really?

She's a great actor as well.

Yeah, well, our motivation to make change is actually just like our motivation to do anything, by the way, tends to be sort of, you know, it ebbs and flows. There are times when we are in a more reflective, action-oriented, change-oriented mode and times when we're more pessimistic or just sort of going with the flow because we're

you know in the middle of things and so actually i've done some research on something i call the fresh start effect this is with um heng chen dai who's down the street at ucla my former student and jason reese senior fellow at wharton and what we have have shown in our work is that there are certain moments that feel like a new beginning in life like when So one that you know about already.

New Year's or? Yes. Exactly right. Like you didn't need me to come here and tell you about any fancy science. You're like, yeah, I know about New Year's.

Yeah. There are moments that feel like, like, OK, I'm turning a page.

Move to a new community. A new job.

You got it. Those are all fresh start moments. Actually, there's trivial ones too, but they can matter. Like the start of a new week can feel like a fresh start. That's true. You sort of sit down, you go into work maybe for the first time in a couple of days, you feel fresh at your desk, ready to sit and think about what are my priorities in a way that you wouldn't in the middle of a week.

start of a new month, following celebration of certain holidays, particularly the kind that we associate with fresh starts. So those are all moments when we feel like we've opened a new chapter. And we have a couple things that go on at those moments. One is that we feel like, okay,

This is a moment when I want to step back and think big picture about things because you recognize that there's that break point. You think actually about your life like you're a character in a book. The way we organize our memories and structure them, it's not linear completely. Instead, it's like the college years, the years playing sports, the years living in Boston, whatever they are.

that's how you structure your memories and and that means there's actually implications for the way you live your life because when you get to one of those chapter breaks that's when you do this big picture thinking interesting and you also tend to feel like your identity is shifting right so you like step into a new role as you you know i'm i'm turning 40 in the year ahead and that feels like a big break to me like i will be

in a different age category when i became a professor i vividly remember like that was a huge shift in my identity i felt like a different okay i have a different set of expectations and roles and ways i should dress and talk and that identity shift that can come even if it's something as as small as you know you're stepping into a new year and you feel like the new year new you you can look back and say well you know

Last year, my old job when I was a graduate student, I didn't manage to eat right. But that was the old me, and this is the new me. And so you feel the sense of optimism and disconnect from those past failures.

It's so interesting. I do think that even when things are good, we can have these kinds of fresh start experiences that shape us in positive ways. I'll give you an example. I had a phone call. I was driving here from Santa Barbara this morning. I had a phone call with a friend who just got tenure. And he is thinking big. His life is great. Tenure is a great event.

Oh, yeah. Fair enough. Not everyone is part of my weird world.

Yes. Okay. So in academia, if you're a professor, this is like the be all and end all of your career. You're working really hard. You get your PhD. You get your assistant professor job. You work really hard. You write a bunch of papers. You teach a bunch of classes.

And if your university says, you know, you're doing great, if you're good enough, they bestow upon you tenure, which means permanent job. Job security basically can't be fired unless you do something illegal. And they're saying, like, you have now total academic freedom. We're no longer going to be evaluating you.

We trust you. And it's like this bizarre institutions created to help people take risks. But it is a big moment in the life of an academic when they get to that milestone. It's like there's nowhere else to go. You've climbed to the top of the mountain. And so it's really exciting. It often happens to people around their 40s, sort of like midlife, when you might already be having some

introspection going on about like, why am I here? What's my purpose? So a lot of academics step back at that moment and think, why do I want to do now? What do I want to do next? I've been climbing and climbing to this point. And I was having this conversation with a friend on the drive here who had reached that point and was having that exact, okay, what's next? And

wanted to talk about writing a book since I'd written a book. And like, what is that? Like he thinks that might be the next big adventure for him, but nothing is wrong. Everything is right. It's just that he reached a moment. He reached an achievement. He, he got to the top of a mountain and looked around and realized, okay, I've climbed to my goal and it's time to figure out what the next one is.

And I think that can be a fresh start too. That's positive.

It's a fantastic question. I'm going to give you a somewhat frustrating answer. It frustrates me. I don't feel like academic research has wrapped its arms around identity the way I would like it to because I think it is unquestionably so important, right? The labels. we put on ourselves obviously matter, but I feel like we don't know nearly as much as we should.

It's one of the things I'm most interested to study. It's your next book. Maybe, maybe. We know a little. One of the things I think is most relevant to the way I think about identity is mindset, which is it's different than identity, but a mindset can come with or can be triggered by an identity.

And one of the barriers we haven't talked about yet to change that I think is really important is whether you believe you can change. And identity and mindset are a big part of that. So we know a lot about mindset from work, for instance, by Carol Dweck at Stanford, who's done this incredible... Growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Exactly. And that's sort of an identity, right?

You identify with being someone who can grow or you identify as someone who is X, right? Like, you know, I'm only this smart. I'm only this capable. So in a sense, there's an identity that comes with believing you can grow or an identity that comes with believing you can't. There's also wonderful research on the placebo effect and how that extends beyond just medicine, right?

We know about it in medicine that, like, if you believe a sugar pill is going to make you healthier, you actually... experience physiological benefits. But there's some really interesting research showing it's beyond, you know, we think of it in this medical context, and that's where it was first studied.

Actually, I learned from a children's book, like Ben Franklin studied this, and I don't know if you know mesmerizing. Interesting. That term comes from Dr. Mesmer, who was the original sort of charlatan in France who was giving people fake medicine. Interesting. Anyway, and Ben Franklin figured it all out.

It does, it was like, and it's also a wonderful children's book. So I wish I'd known that before I wrote my book, it would have been in there. Anyway, there's a lot more though than just the medical component to placebo effects, right? When we believe that we will achieve something that also can improve our achievement, right? When we believe we're gonna get an outcome.

One of my favorite studies that I describe in the book that I think is sort of related to mindset and identity is work by Ali Crum, who's a psychologist at Stanford. She did this really interesting work with Ellen Langer of Harvard, where they randomly assigned housekeepers to one of two groups.

And those housekeepers were either told every day when you go and do your job in a hotel, you are getting exercise at the level that's recommended by the CDC. So you're getting a great workout when you do your job.

Right. I don't know if 1,000 calories is the definition. You're getting a great workout. Oh, good workout, yeah. Maybe it's more like 300. Okay, okay. Just not to get too overboard. And then another group just wasn't told that information. And the question actually was, are there differences in the outcomes those two groups experience a month later in terms of health?

So does a group that believes they're doing a job that comes with health benefits actually end up losing more weight, having more controlled blood pressure? And the answer was yes.

really which is a you know on the one hand you're like is that magic like what's going on on the other hand you can start to see how it actually would play out and how this would be applicable in other settings so they believed their job could give them a workout and all of a sudden maybe they're choosing to take the stairs from floor to floor to get those extra calories or like leaning a little bit more when they're you know using the vacuum right i live in a uh a townhouse

in Philadelphia and someone pointed out to me like it's so great that you live in a townhouse all that passive exercise when you run up and down the stairs and now I am the one volunteering to like you know go grab the ketchup that we forgot if we're gonna have dinner on a roof deck that's exciting I can get extra exercise so there's like different choices that you make once you start to have a different set of beliefs about your ideas

you know, what you're achieving. So anyway, I think of this as related to identity, because if you're now you're starting to have the identity is I am someone doing a career that's physically active. And now you lean into that, and then you experience the benefits. So I think, I think the work on mindset is the the best work I have seen that's really rigorous, and that relates to identity.

Yeah, I think the most powerful thing is who you surround yourself with.

So I think the social context you create, the people around you have so much to do with whether or not you believe in yourself. And by the way, I also want to add like a really quick footnote because the academic in me can't stand not to, which is to say you can have excessive confidence and that can be harmful.

so this is a little bit of a dangerous like seesaw we're on here right you want to be confident enough and believe in yourself enough that you're going to lean into the opportunities and um you know work towards the goals that because you believe you could achieve them but if you're like i've got this i'm perfect you're not going to practice you're not going to work hard so there is anyway it's a it's a little bit of a delicate balance but back to how do you get to that right level of belief

Everything I know from research points to the structure of the people you surround yourselves with, whether it's the people you work with, the people you train with if you're an athlete, the people you socialize with. They give you a lot of those beliefs in yourself and you can choose them.

But they will, with the messages they send you about what's acceptable behavior, what's normal, what they're achieving, and how you measure up, it shapes so much about our confidence.

Yeah, you never choose that. Right, so I think what you're pointing to is like, It's not a necessary condition. Right.

It's not the only. Yeah, there are people who can thrive without it. But if you get to choose and if you want to create an environment where you're going to believe in yourself.

Yeah. Well, okay. Here, let me pivot a little bit to another. We're doing a lot of academic stuff. I like it. I love it. I'm an academic. I'm actually going to tell you a story about a person in academia who is the most important person in my career, and that's my dissertation advisor. His name is Max Bazerman. He's a Harvard Business School professor, great human being, and a great academic.

What he's truly exceptional at is mentoring. His PhD students have gone on to be tenured professors. Now everyone knows what tenure is at every elite institution in the world.

Unbelievably good.

Unbelievably good. And he does all the other things that you need to do to help someone succeed, right? Like, you know good coaches. Of course. You know, the training, like the actual teaching of skills, all those things are part of it. But I think he creates an environment for people to thrive.

And it actually took me a while after I had graduated as one of his advisees and I was trying to advise my own students and figure out what was the secret sauce that made him so wildly more successful as a coach and mentor than anyone else in our field had really, I mean, stratospherically more successful.

And what I realized is he had all the obvious stuff, all those obvious ingredients like, you know, responsive and knew his stuff and gives you feedback. But there was an unshaking belief, like he treated you like family. He was there for you. He believed that you could do it. He always was giving that positive reinforcement.

Another thing that he did that I think is so interesting and related to research is he sort of created, I'll call it like mentoring circles within the students he was coaching so that we were not always just being coached or mentored and advised by him, right, but he would put us in the position to advise more junior students.

So there's this wonderful research that I write about in the book by Lauren Eskris Winkler, who's a professor at the Kellogg School at Northwestern. And she had this amazing insight when she was doing research for her dissertation. She noticed that She was interviewing all these people who were struggling to achieve their goals.

And as she asked them what they thought might help them achieve more, because that's what she was interested in, how do we increase achievement? They all had these really deep insights, you know, struggling salespeople and C students. When she got them to introspect, they actually knew a lot. They maybe just hadn't gotten there and no one had asked them. They also really liked being asked.

Like, what's your advice? How would you coach someone who is in your shoes? And she realized most of the time when someone is struggling or when we're coaching someone, our instinct, even if it's unsolicited, is to just whip out some advice. Like, here are the seven things that I think will help you get further.

And it can be really demotivating because it conveys, like, I think you're kind of, you know, you haven't gotten your stuff together.

You don't have the answers.

I have the answers. I'm going to give you the answers. And that's our instinct. And she thought, what if we flip the script? What if instead of putting our arm around someone and giving them advice, we said, you know... What would you do? What would you do?

And not even just how, would you actually have them coach someone else? Like, put you in the role of a mentor and coach to someone else who has similar goals so that you feel like you're on a pedestal. Wow, someone... trusts me to give this kind of advice, I must be kind of cut out for this. Maybe I'm better at this than I thought.

And then you're going to start introspecting in a way you might not if it was just your problem. Because you've got to help someone else and you don't want to let them down. And then when you do that, you actually figure out, well, I've got some good ideas. Maybe I do know something. And then once you've told someone else to do it, you're going to feel like a hypocrite if you don't do it yourself.

So this is another sort of social trick. Max would put us in these sort of advice-giving circles where the senior students are working with the junior. And he rarely gave advice, actually.

By helping others. And he would, you know, he's nudging along the way and like, good job, or like maybe a little redirection. And if you go to him and you're like, I need to know how to do X, he tells you. But there wasn't a lot of... backseat driving, if that makes sense. And I think that also helped build confidence. It made us believe in ourselves in those roles.

And I now actually have an advice club of people who are former Mac students maybe no accident, we sort of try to keep this going even beyond that point in our lives where he was coaching us. And each of us were at similar career stages, all professors, similar goals.

And we reach out to each other for solicited advice whenever we're facing a challenge, a career challenge, and aren't sure what to do. And it's just been totally amazing. So it's this peer group of people who support each other, care about each other. There's friendship. That's all built in. We see others achieving and it helps us see, oh, if they can do it, I can do it.

But then also we get to give advice and we grow from that as well.

I think, I think a lot of positive feedback is super important that that's like the predominant sense is that this person thinks I'm doing great. Even if they're also telling me ways I can improve. Cause you don't want to only, obviously it's really important to also get well, like a little more like this, uh, you need, you need that nudging, but it needs to be with a positive.

Sometimes people call it a feedback sandwich, right? You like start with the positive anyway. So I do think that positivity and like conveying they believe in you, I think creating social structure for you, which is one of the things Max, there was sort of a whole ecosystem of other students and supporters and who were all striving towards similar goals.

And instead of feeling like we were in competition with one another, it was very clear that we were all part of a team. Almost every email starts with hi team, right? These are academics all vying for jobs and to sort of achieve. And you could see it being very cutthroat and competitive. We weren't on a team, right? We weren't playing for a team, but we were a team.

And that was how we saw ourselves. And then the structuring, you know, everybody's structured to help others who are below them. It's sort of part of your role is working with them. So those are a few of the key things. I'm not sure I've hit your number.

Yeah, putting people in the role of advice givers or supporters and mentors.

Yeah. So maybe we have hit the number you asked for. That's great. I love that. I think those were the keys.

I think he was like 18. Yeah. No, no.

This was in the playoffs. In the playoffs.