Katy Milkman
speaker
200 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 2 Apr
Katy Milkman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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