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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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.
Showing 161–180 of 200 · page 9 of 10
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