G+ Hangout With Ellen Galinsky | The Seven Essential Life Skills | Big Think Mentor

Welcome to everybody watching. I'm Jason Gots with Big Think, and this hangout is brought to you by Big Think Mentor, our lifelong learning platform on YouTube for personal and professional growth. I'm here with Ellen Ginsburg, president of the Families and Work Institute and author of "Mind in the Making." She's here to talk about the seven essential life skills that are the subject of her book and her workshop for Big Think Mentor. Welcome, Ellen. Thank you for being with us.

Thank you so much, Jason. It's a real pleasure, and I'd also like to welcome three members of our Big Think Mentor Community: Christian, Krio (and please correct me if I say your name wrong), Nicholas – oh, actually, Nicholas Anhorn couldn't be with us – and Patrick Johnson. Welcome, guys. Thank you for having us.

Okay, so I'd like to start us off with a question for Ellen. There was a big article this week in New York Magazine, which I'm sure you saw, on the negative power of praise. It's one of many such articles I've seen recently. American parents tend to focus on boosting kids' self-esteem, and maybe Western parents generally, but the research of psychologist Carol Dweck and others suggests strongly that overpraise can actually demotivate kids, making them reluctant to work at things that don't come so easily to them. They give up more easily. How seriously should parents, teachers, and even employers take this message or these findings? Should we be going back to the days when teachers followed the maxim "no smiling before Christmas"? Is it that serious and substantial?

As Carol Dweck says, we have been through the self-esteem movement. She did a survey and found that the large majority of parents believed that the way you boost kids' self-esteem is by praising them. But it's not that it's praise per se that's bad; it's the kind of praise that really matters. Most parents, and most of us, praise personality. We praise character. We say, "You're really smart" or "You're a good artist," and we don't praise the things that motivate us to try harder, to try that next challenge, to take on a challenge. In the "Mind in the Making" view, this is one of the important life skills.

If we praise both adults and children's efforts, say, "You tried really hard" or "You used this particular strategy," then kids and adults will work hard and stay motivated. There's also research that says that the type of praise, whether you give very specific and concrete praise or larger global praise, also matters. That is, if you're trying something that's a real challenge, then talking about very specific first steps that an adult might take tends to be more motivating, not "I'm going to lose weight," but "I'm going to lose five pounds." So that also matters in terms of how we talk to people and how we talk to ourselves.

Great. Now I'd like to open the floor to Christian and Patrick, and we'll just go round robin. Christian, if you could ask one question, then Patrick, and then we can go back to Christian and Patrick and do two questions each that way.

Thanks, Jason. I want to thank Big Think and Ellen. This is a great opportunity. It's very exciting to have the opportunity to speak directly with you and hear your insights. The first question I had, Ellen, was in skill number three, communicating. You stated that employers are reporting that communication is a critical skill that the younger workforce is lacking. Is there a particular cause that you see for why that's the case in the workforce?

We asked an open-ended question of a nationally representative sample of employers in the research that the Families and Work Institute does, and by and large, they said that young people, new entrants to the workforce, are not very good at both oral and written communication. I think it's because we don't teach people to communicate in a sense. You can easily blame...