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

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 Galinsky, 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, GCO, 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. So 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, and she did a survey and found that the large majority of parents believed that the way to boost kids' self-esteem is by praising them. But it's not that 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!" or, um, we don't praise the things that motivate us to try harder 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 effort—"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 praise—whether you give very specific and concrete praise or larger global praise—also matters. If you're trying something that's a real challenge, then talking about very specific first steps 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, and 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 chance to speak directly with you and hear your insights. The first question I had, Ellen, was in skill number three, "Communicate." 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 the Twitter world and the fact that we’re not really talking face-to-face for this, and I’m sure that has a part in how we communicate. But we need to teach people what I would think of as the elevator speech. Think about if you have a limited amount of time to communicate: one, what do you really want to say? And then two, and this involves the skill of perspective-taking: how do you say it in a way that can be heard?

We're not teaching children; we're not teaching adults how to do that. My daughter got a Master's in Strategic Communication; she spent two and a half years at Columbia U because she runs a nonprofit philanthropy that funds social entrepreneurs. She finds that the entrepreneurs they fund, who started Teach for America, City Year, etc., are the ones who succeed because they're good communicators. Although they may have a big, bold idea as social entrepreneurs that can solve a tough problem, if they don't know how to communicate it well, then they don’t necessarily succeed.

Gotcha, thank you! Patrick?

My first question was on perspective-taking and it was about how we live in such a competitive world. How does empathy or emotional intelligence lighten competition?

Well, that's a great question because in some ways we live in a very competitive world. Yet in the business world, the era of the individual hero is gone. We can't just depend on the Jonas Salk to come up with a polio vaccine; it's going to take a team.

The smart employers, I think, are building in team competencies, not just individual competencies. For example, the chemist, the physicist, or the biologist—if you're talking about the prevention of disease—have to figure out how to work together. So I think that teaching the skill of perspective-taking is critically important.

Now, it's different from empathy. It involves empathy, which is “I feel what you feel.” Emotional intelligence is, in a sense, a good concept because it involves social, emotional, and cognitive competencies that help you understand the perspectives of others. I can give an example. Admiral Michael Mullen, who was the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talks about what helped him succeed in countries like Afghanistan or Iraq. Instead of giving the usual history or key facts, he tried to understand how people who grew up in that culture would think. That really helped him succeed.

Or think of medical school. I read in the New York Times today that the cost of healthcare is going up, and one way to control that cost is to improve patient-doctor communication. That involves perspective-taking. Medical schools are increasingly asking future candidates to rate their ability to listen to patients and understand their perspectives, which leads to better outcomes.

The competitive world is an industrial era concept, yes, of course, we're competitive. Yes, of course, we want our organizations to win and succeed, but we can do that best by working with others, not by putting them down or pushing them to the side of the road.

Thank you! Great, back to Christian.

Thank you! These skills just seem so fundamental—this baseline—that it's ironic we're forgetting about them. It's not like this is new stuff at all.

No, it's just, you know, to your point, as industrialization has happened in the technology world, it's so easy to think, "Well, technology is the solution." But without people and without the communications you speak about, technology is worthless. It won't make things better. In fact, I deal in the marketplace, and just counting on computer screens to have all the right information misses the human interaction. You don't get the social aspect; you don’t get people helping because the computer screen just says this, so I'm on to the next customer.

You're missing the fundamentals.

Exactly! I mean, it does seem that these skills are obvious, and yet I went into what became "Mind in the Making." I didn't start out to write a book. I didn't start out to do something called "Mind in the Making." I started out with a real question: What do we do to children to turn off the fire in their eyes? All children are born engaged in learning. It's a survival skill.

Our brains are underdeveloped at birth compared to any other species, so we depend on environmental factors to write the script for our genetic codes. So much of who we become and what we are comes from our experiences after birth. In fact, they’re calling the first three months of life the "fourth trimester" these days because so much is happening during that time.

I could see across disciplines that there were skills emerging, and yet most schools, most classrooms, most parents don’t promote these skills. It’s hidden in plain sight. It's obvious, but we're not paying attention to it in a fundamental way.

But when you know it, when you think about it, then it becomes obvious. The way that I came up with seven? Seven seems like a good publishing number, right? Did I just come up with seven because my publisher said that was a good number? No! I took what I saw in the research from neuroscience, cognitive science, developmental psychology, etc., and looked at where there were longitudinal studies— what had happened in that child’s life to help that child thrive now and in the future.

That’s how the seven skills actually emerged. The seventh skill is kind of cumulative, which is self-directed engaged learning—it pulls them all together. Focus is self-control; the first skill is a baseline because if you can't pay attention, then you can't really learn the other skills. If you don't have the self-control to not go on automatic, then you can't really learn to listen to what someone else says, for instance, with perspective-taking, right?

The response to "Mind in the Making" has been so much more than I ever expected because these are obvious but hidden in plain sight. They are so simple to address—I mean, we can teach these to adults, we can teach them to children, we can promote them in ourselves. It can make a big difference in our lives.

If I could interject before we turn it over to Patrick again, one of the things I like most about what you're saying is that the seven essential life skills are the skills we need to be fully functional, successful human beings. They essentially come down to learning as a lifelong orientation. They enable us to learn; they make us effective learners.

Human beings are learning beings throughout the lifespan, which is something that we tend to think of learning as something that stops when you graduate from school.

And so the idea that learning continues throughout life is not something people necessarily actively engage in past school. On the other hand, we understand that it's good for children to be curious and for them to be active learners, but we have these exigencies of skills that we feel we must teach children concrete things so they can remain competitive. Often this creates curriculums and school systems that do the opposite—put out the fire in children's eyes.

So I wonder what it would take for the orientation of whole educational systems to shift so that we focus on these kinds of meta-skills that make for better learners—not only in progressive schools but everywhere.

That is such a great question; I just love that! All of these are great questions, and the reason I love it so much is that it's like the notion of competitiveness—me against you. None of us will do anything that matters without the help of other people in one way or another, whether it's reading a book or actually working with sponsors or mentors.

The notion of learning is a very industrial-era notion. The movie "Waiting for Superman" illustrates this. There's an image where I went to myself, "That's how we think about learning!" This was a school presumably about education, yet the image was of a kid whose head was cut off with numbers, letters, shapes, and stuff reported. We have this old "empty vessel" notion—we'll pour in the knowledge—when everything we know from brain science says we are active learners.

I met an entrepreneur whose company has been successful and they want to improve the educational system because they’re not happy with new entrants to the workforce. He’s going around the country trying to learn what works and what doesn’t. He was discouraged because he thought most innovation in education depended on one charismatic leader.

Yes, it does if we keep that old model going. But if everyone becomes a learner and if everyone is always trying to improve things, we can keep improving education to better fit what we know from science and better fit what we need in the 21st century.

I wouldn’t have seen the skills, honestly, if so much of my work at the Families and Work Institute weren't with the adult workforce and workplace. I hear that discussion all day long in the research we do and in the employers we work with.

So one thing that has really gratified me—and I'm sorry if this is a long answer—but you hit my soapbox here. We're now in about 14 communities where we have taken the book and turned it into learning modules. We share actual research; you see Carol Dweck in living color doing her studies. You have real experiences in learning, and we’ve seen that have the ability to begin to transform the educational system in ways that I honestly didn’t think were possible.

When you get adults excited and they own the innovation, based on science, I think we can begin to reinvent how we think about teaching and learning.

Great, Patrick, I'm sorry I jumped in there, but I definitely was sparked by the conversation, so go ahead and ask your next question.

Definitely! I agree with you about the way we learn and how we think about it—socially, cognitively, emotionally—and how we can relate that to school, clinical rotations, or something where you get hands-on experience. I see your point there.

I'll go to my next question here—it's on critical thinking. How can critical thinking generate positive or negative actions and reactions?

That's a great question—a complicated question. I feel that the world is so awash with information that it's very hard to know what's real. You can watch the same news story on two different channels and get two totally different interpretations depending on the commentator's point of view.

How do we make decisions? Our decisions—who we vote for and how we live our lives—depend on how we see experiences without direct knowledge. In a pre-industrial agricultural world, we could have direct experience with everything. We can’t do that anymore; we have to outsource our knowledge.

By and large, critical thinking is essential because it’s the ongoing search for valid and reliable information. You have to understand when information is not accurate when it’s confounded because you can’t say that A always leads to B. Other things complicate the equation. Teaching children not just "let's say science" but how scientific thinking takes place has been found to improve performance in various areas. I think of research at Carnegie Mellon by David Klahr.

He found that kids in seventh grade and beyond were never taught how to conduct a good experiment. They were always told, "Here's the experiment and here's what you learned," but not how do you know it's a good experiment. When he taught kids about good experiments and understanding what they learned, it made a big difference in their lives and performance.

So mostly, critical thinking results in positive outcomes. However, we do get lots of knowledge that's hard to determine whether it is reliable and accurate. That's the downside. How do we navigate the thousands of Twitter feeds we receive daily and know what's real and what's not?

Definitely! I think that's what drew me to Big Think. When I'd independently learn, I'd access databases through school and seek research-based articles. There were so many different articles and sources to draw from, and I'm not saying that was a bad way to do it, but I like how Big Think takes it from a different perspective and breaks it down for you, helping you understand it in terms of your own life and what you're doing.

Well, I'm a total fan of Big Think. When we decided to work together, I couldn't have been more excited, as Jason knows because he got my euphoric emails when we started this conversation. I think it brings people together in a way that we can, with technology, have this conversation! You can push back at me, and I hope to push back at you. We can do the big thinking that we need to do to be able to live our lives the way we want.

We're approaching the end of our half-hour. I want to say thank you to everybody out there in the audience for joining us today. Thank you especially to Ellen Galinsky for being with us. You've been watching our Big Think Mentor hangout with Ellen Galinsky, author of "Mind in the Making." You can visit youtube.com/user/bigthinkmentor to view Ellen's video workshop based on her book called "The Seven Essential Life Skills." Thank you so much for being with us today, Christian and Patrick!

Thank you! It's great!

Thank you! It's a pleasure to meet you.

You too! Definitely, you too!