Using David Yeager’s “Mentor Mindset” In A Time Of Chaos And Big Emotions

In this newsletter, I’m going to provide you a really useful framework for having a challenging conversation with someone you manage, inspired by David Yeager, a professor at UT Austin, so read on! I spent this past weekend at a basketball tournament in Philadelphia with my teenage son, and I read Yeager’s excellent book 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. A wise person in our lives gave it to me in hopes that I could understand my son better. I’m the parent of two teens and one tween and I struggle to give them critical feedback and guidance without them having very big reactions. 

Yeager studies how to motivate young people. I love his work because he is very pro-young people! We complain about youth who waste their time on brain rot but Yeager also points out young people are also winning sports championships, getting into increasingly impossible colleges, navigating thorny social webs and working really, really hard. Yeager is an expert on growth mindset. Growth mindset is an asset-based perspective, and assumes the best of people. “We’re presuming you want to do well, you want to be meaningful but there is a barrier” preventing you from reaching your goal, says Yeager.

Yeager understands that young people are asking very big existential questions: who am I? Am I valued? Am I worth liking? Am I worthy? They are exquisitely attuned to social status and group dynamics.

Parents, teachers, coaches are often pretty bad at motivating young people. Yeager notes that traditional methods usually boil down to instilling fear, e.g., “If you don’t study hard you will never be able to get a job.” Although we mean well, we come across as overly critical, which can deflate young people. They feel dumb, shamed, incompetent, and angry at us.

Or, we default to being what Yeager calls a “protector”- where you assume a young person cannot handle stress and you make things too easy or protect them from hardship. This is equally unmotivating- why work hard if it’s impossible and no one believes in you anyway?

And yet: adults need to give young people critical feedback, because feedback helps us change and grow. And young people need to learn to stick with tasks when they’re boring, tedious, or really hard. They need to learn to handle the grey zones and keep going when things are muddy. All this made me think about work and managers right now and the challenges we face when having difficult conversations when many are on a knife’s edge of emotions. 

Yeager notes that in our attempts to avoid making people feel bad, we give them a “compliment sandwich” – putting the criticism between two layers of praise. But this doesn’t actually work. Research by Stanford’s Geoffrey Cohen and Yeager finds “Young people aren’t just tallying positive and negative comments. Instead, they’re grappling with a more existential question: Does this authority figure think I’m incompetent? Bland praise for trivial matters doesn’t alleviate the fear of being seen as incompetent or being an imposter. In fact, it may reinforce it, as students perceive the attempt at placation as condescending. The result? Listeners often fixate on the criticism, viewing it as a personal attack rather than constructive feedback.”

Most of us are not so different from the younger versions of ourselves when things feel insecure and uncertain. We seek status, assurance, and the belief we have the strength to make it through hard times. And many managers I know are struggling right now to keep doing business as usual when things feel so tenuous and the economy is so uncertain. We're all having big reactions to things because we are anxious and stressed! And so I thought Yeager’s advice on how to provide “wise feedback” is really relevant right now. It’s part of creating a “container of calm in chaotic times,” an invaluable skill set right now.

In 2014, Cohen and Yeager tested this method with middle school students. On essays, they left a simple sticky note accompanying critical feedback: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high standards and I know that you can reach them.”

Students receiving this “wise feedback” were twice as likely to revise their essays and made more than twice as many suggested corrections in a follow-up study. This is what Yeager calls the “mentor mindset:” high standards with high support. 

“The efficacy of wise feedback lies in its ability to address what Cohen calls “belonging uncertainty” – students’ concerns about whether they truly belong or are valued in an academic setting. By explicitly communicating high standards alongside a belief in the student’s ability to meet them, wise feedback creates a foundation of trust that allows for genuine learning and growth.” Citation here.

Now more than ever, people need high support. U.S. consumer fear is at one of its lowest levels on record and of course that translates into our anxiety about our job security. So here’s a script based on my interpretation of Yeager’s work, for when you need to give an employee tough feedback or bad news, and because things feel anxious at work, emotions are running high.

Four Steps To Better Feedback

Step One: Start with a transparency statement. What is this conversation about and what are my goals in having it? This is a game changer, especially when emotions are running high. Think about it: How many times have you been called into conversation with someone who has power over you, and you don’t know why you’re there. It’s nerve-wracking! Yeager writes, “Transparency statements are needed when in the absence of additional information, a lower power person feeling vulnerable and uncertain of their status has legitimate reason to suspect reputational or physical harm from a higher power person.” This sounds like a big deal, but simply explaining why you were having a meeting and stating your goal is an effective transparency statement. When feelings run high people feel anxious if they don’t know what’s going on. They may enter into a threat response. Simply explaining the circumstances in your goals clearly neutralizes things and makes way for a more productive conversation. 

Step Two: Validate their experience and their emotions. Sometimes I even say, “This sucks.” In one of his teacher studies, Yeager highlights the effective methods of a high school physics teacher named Sergio Estrada. Estrada always validates the stress and emotions his students are feeling. “Sergio never minimizes, he never diminishes, he never asks you to hide it away.”  

Step Three: Provide the feedback or news, and acknowledge with a phrase like, “This is a challenge but it’s not more than you can handle.” You can give an example why you know they can handle it. Yeager also notes that helping people who are struggling tap into their values and purpose is very motivating. Remember, everyone wants to feel they have a crucial role, and that they have a purpose at work. As Yeager notes, people feel ashamed and bad when they think a struggle speaks to their own personal failings, but they feel noble when a struggle speaks to a larger cause. How does this challenge tie into a larger goal or benefit to the team or organization? You could say something like, “Things are hard right now. They are truly hard. You can help us overcome this… here’s how.”

Yeager notes that the most impactful managers and teachers often adopt a “conspiratorial” approach, and frame a problem as a “we” issue, not a “you” issue. This helps your employee feel less anxious and turns down the temperature on the situation; it makes a challenge feel solvable.

Step Four: Explain how you will support them in the challenge: “I am here to support you (and here is how… give explicit examples).” Yeager says this is an excellent time to preview any opportunities and incentives (like a promotion or bonus or great review) that might lay ahead if the mentee sticks with the support plan. We want to work hard for a bigger purpose, but we also value personal gain :-) 

Don’t disappear after the meeting; stay present as the challenge is worked through.

My final piece of advice to add on is that modeling emotional fluency is so crucial here. When we are stressed, we feel many emotions. These emotions have the potential to trap us and trigger bad behaviors like saying hurtful things, hiding crucial details, avoiding important matters, yelling, and just generally feeling awful. When we can feel the emotions that accompany stress we take the teeth out of them and allow them to pass through us. We become free (check out my interview with Yale’s Emma Seppälä, Ph.D. on becoming “sovereign” here). 

Morra

P.S: In case you couldn’t tell I really loved Yeager’s book. I highly recommend it!