#151 - David Yeager on the Mentor Mindset

i definitely have too many questions for you but i just want to have a conversation i'm so excited for people to hear about your work and we're going to talk about the art of motivation and a mentor mindset but i'd really love to start with what brought you to this work i mean i've seen masterclass with you and carol dweck what brought you to this point

Yeah.

I mean, the most immediate thing, like right now, I wrote a book about parenting and managers and teachers is because I am in all of those roles and I wanted to know how to do those roles well.

And so I have four kids.

I coach three baseball teams, coaching like eight or nine months out of the year basketball.

Also, I teach 150 undergraduates every semester and then I run a lab and and have lots of employees that are paid that are 20 to 25.

So I kind of felt like in general that so much of what we do involves the young and so much of our like hand-wringing and consternation also is about what's happening with the next generation.

And yet we walk around just totally lacking confidence And we just really don't feel like we know what to do or say.

And you can tell this if you just remember, for people who've had children, you have a baby strangers come up to you and like this is so amazing i'm so happy for you like look at this baby you're gonna cherish every minute but if you walk around with a teenager like no one says that to you no one's like remember every moment they're like just lock them in a closet until they're 20 you know and that's just weird to me like how why are we giving up on an entire stage of development And so that's the more proximal thing.

But then what initially got me into that style of thinking is that the, the only kind of work I did when I was young was like youth work.

I worked at the local church and did youth retreats.

I had this nonprofit in high school where we would set up computer labs in the low income neighborhoods of Houston and help kids basically their afterschool programs where kids could go get training.

This is like the nineties where the internet was a big deal.

And then I was a middle school teacher.

And, uh, after college and then that kind of continued that line of service.

And I just felt like I didn't have good advice as a teacher, as much as I appreciated the people who trained me.

It's just, it's hard.

And so I wanted to do science that gave us better advice for how to interact with young people.

And then it turns out that stuff was coming in handy in my own life, uh, later as I went through my career.