219: feeling like you don’t belong in school is the norm… let’s change it feat. dr. greg walton

May 3

listen to this episode:

Today's guest is Greg Walton— the Michael Forman University Fellow and Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. His research investigates psychological processes that contribute to major social problems and how “wise” psychological interventions can address such problems and help people flourish.

In this episode, we discuss:

+ stereotyping & how it can affect academic performance

+ the current gap in academics between girls & boys

+ challenges faced by students of color in our education system

+ interventions that help with belonging & achievement in school

+ what every freshman should know before starting college

+ the value of having a mentor as a student

+ gen z’s mental health crisis & what can be done

+ having honest conversations about mental health

+ reframing common mental health struggles that students experience

+ recent DEI policy shifts & those impacts on our education system

+ how our society makes it difficult to feel a sense of belonging

+ so much more!

Mentioned In The Episode…

+ ⁠Ordinary Magic⁠

+ ⁠Share your story of ordinary magic⁠

+ ⁠Stereotype threat study⁠

SHOP GUEST RECOMMENDATIONS: https://amzn.to/3A69GOC

About She Persisted (formerly Nevertheless, She Persisted)

After a year and a half of intensive treatment for severe depression and anxiety, 18-year-old Sadie recounts her journey by interviewing family members, professionals, and fellow teens to offer self-improvement tips, DBT education, and personal experiences. She Persisted is the reminder that someone else has been there too and your inspiration to live your life worth living.

a note: this is an automated transcription so please ignore any accidental misspellings!

sadie: [00:00:00] Welcome to She Persisted, the Gen Z Mental Health Podcast. I'm your host, Sadie Sutton. Let's get into it.

greg: people come to college, , at least in part because they see that space as a space that can help them become the kind of adult that they wanna be, to have the kind of impact that they wanna have on the world to explore the kinds of questions that they wanna explore and do what they wanna do.

And so to belong within the college environment is to belong to that journey, to that process of becoming. Mm-hmm. And. That's really foundational for mental health and mental wellbeing like that's you becoming the right kind of person for you.

Hello. Hello you guys and welcome back to She Persisted. I am so excited you're here today. We have a really incredible episode. We have Greg Walton on the show.

He's the Michael Foreman University Fellow and professor of Psychology at Stanford University. His research looks at psychological processes contributing to major social problems and how wise psychological interventions that target these processes can address such problems and help people flourish over long periods of [00:01:00] time.

He's also the author of a book that just came out called Ordinary Magic, the Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts. The link to that will be in the show notes. This is just such an incredible conversation and one that I've been looking forward to for a long time.

You guys have heard me talk about the Stanford study that targeted belonging and. Priming for adversity in college in so many episodes. Something I heard about in my positive psychology class, and it's just stuck with me. And this is his research. And so it was just such a full circle, incredible moment to get to talk to him about his work, how important it is to have a sense of belonging, how we can improve mental health in college, what Gen Z is struggling with, how interventions can be applied on a large scale to address these types of challenges We talk about biases and overcoming biases, how the way that we mentally navigate situations and attribute things has such a huge impact on their outcome. And so I'm so grateful to Dr. Walton for joining me on the podcast. And without [00:02:00] further ado, let's dive in.

sadie: Thank you so much for joining me today on Cheaper Assistant. I'm so incredibly excited to have you on the show, and I think this conversation is gonna have so much value for young adults and also the communities that support them, teachers and parents, So thank you for joining me.

greg: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

sadie: Of course. , so to get started, I'd love to get into your background, how you into this area of psychology, , focusing on interventions and this particular demographic. 'cause it's definitely a more unique area. and so I'd love to get your background in how you decided to specialize in this area of research.

greg: Yeah, I mean, I was a high school student and I was part of a student group that went into middle school classrooms and led. Role playing exercises and games and things around inequality and identities

and things like race and class and gender.

And it was in the, in the context of that, this was, this was in the 1990s that I read some of the first research about stereotype threat.

And at the time, , you know, I was learning in history class about the [00:03:00] persistence of racial inequality in American education, that there'd been this thing called the Great Society Program in the sixties. Yeah. And there's this big federal investment in increasing support for lower income students and for racial and ethnic minority students, and the whole civil rights movement, , and desegregation.

And yet you saw that, , racial inequalities, , and in math and science, gender inequalities. Had really maintained and they hadn't, hadn't reduced over time. So it felt, , like a very dark time. It felt very discouraging, , at that time to think about, , those problems. And then along came this work, , by my now colleague, Claude Steele, who showed that you could just change how you represented a test in a laboratory setting, and you could see inequalities between men and women in a math context or between, , black and white students in a.

In an intellectual reasoning context appear or disappear, and it was like magic. I thought that's incredible. Like how is that possible? How does that work and what can we learn from that? How could we take that to the [00:04:00] real world and make the real world more like the psychologically safe conditions and less like the psychologically threatening conditions that produces inequality?

It seemed to me like, you know, I grew up as a, , middle class kid in a, in a stable household. I'm, you know, I'm a white man. And it just felt profoundly unfair that the American dream was not a reality for so many people that, , there was this persistent inequality. It just felt profoundly wrong and, , that we needed to find some, some way to approach that problem and solve it.

sadie: Mm-hmm.

And

I'm curious, you talked about this like magical way that we were able to shift outcomes based on the way that the information was presented and if people took intro to psych classes, cause steals work is so interesting. You probably got an overview, but for people who haven't read those studies or aren't aware of how those conditions shifted, such meaningful outcomes, can you give us a little overview of how powerful that messaging is?

greg: Yeah, so Claude and his, collaborators at the time was thinking [00:05:00] about the idea that when you walk into a setting and there's a stereotype about your group and you're trying to perform in that environment, you're kinda laboring, in the context of that stereotype, that if you're a woman going to take a really difficult math test and there's all these people, maybe these men looking at you and thinking you're gonna be like the dumb girl.

Then it creates this extra pressure. It, creates this feeling that if you were to do badly, would take the risk of confirming that maybe these people will think the stereotype is true, that girls can't do math. And if you value math, if that's something that's important to you, if you wanna be an engineer or a doctor or anything else, then that's really upsetting.

It's really disruptive and it's cognitively disruptive, and it makes it harder to perform well, especially when you're trying to do something difficult. So what Claude Steele did.

Was

to bring people in and have them take a, like a GRE test. And in one case, he said, this test is a evaluative of your intellectual reasoning abilities.

It will assess the strengths and weaknesses of your, , verbal reasoning [00:06:00] ability. And in that condition, black students, for example, did much worse than white students on the test, but then in a second condition he said. We're cognitive psychologists. We're interested in how people solve really hard verbal puzzles.

This is not a evaluative of anything, but we wanna learn how people solve puzzles. , so please try your best And black students performance soared and they actually do a little bit better than white students in that, in that case. And so the way that. I understand that, is that that first condition where it's a evaluative, it puts a question on the table, the situation puts a question on the table.

And the question is, will people think people like me are dumb? If I don't do well, , will I confirm a stereotype in their eyes? Will I let down my whole group? And that's really disruptive. It's upsetting and it produces its consequence. It produces almost a self-fulfilling consequence.

sadie: I think what's really challenging about these biases and these like ingroup outgroup biases is that we aren't even necessarily aware that they're taking place or what groups we're attached to.

And I think people hearing that, [00:07:00] they're like, well, I've never walked into a classroom and been told that this test I'm taking is representative of. My grade or my school or my gender or whatever, kind of in-group you're assigned to. Can you kind of explain to us how these pressures show up in these day-to-day contexts, even if we're not explicitly prime to say, yeah.

This is evaluating this dynamic.

greg: I mean, actually like part of what's hard about this dynamic is that it's covert. Right. Yeah. It's not like anybody's walking around

saying,

, I think you're, you know, dumb because you're an ex or something.

sadie: Yeah, yeah. These

greg: cues, it's this suspicion, it's this fear, it's a question.

Right. so the, like, the analog, like one, one way to think about threat is like physical threat. Like you're, you're walking through a forest and you know that there's a bear there that bears might live there. You don't know if there's a bear right there then, right? You don't know if that bear might have malicious intentions towards you, but it there could be a bear.

Mm-hmm. That preoccupies you, you never know when you can put that to rest. 'cause you never know when it's [00:08:00] actually present. So you're, , you know, walking into a space and you're, aware, maybe in the back of your mind, maybe not explicitly, that there might be a negative stereotype in that space and you're contending with that.

One of the things that's interesting about stereotype threat. , is that, , like, , in, in the original research, Claude talked a lot about how people are, , experiencing a threat in the air. And it seemed like from that representation that people would be acutely aware of the stereotype as they're engaging with it.

But actually, if you look closely, , this is worked by my, Colleague Christine Log at the University of Waterloo. , if you look closely at women in math context, for example, Gender stereotypes are less accessible to them while they're taking , test under stereotype threat.

So words like irrational or illogical, they're slower to identify those words while they're taking a math exam under stereotype threat. Hmm. And then after the exam is over. Those words rebound in awareness, kind of like you're trying to suppress a thought and then it, it, it pops back [00:09:00] up. Yeah. But that pattern itself is actually taking up mental resources.

So , the more that people are, suppressing those thoughts, that is the slower they are to detect words like irrational, the worst that they're doing on the test, ,

sadie: example.

Mm-hmm. Because you mentioned gender and test performance. I'm really curious your thought on almost like this like pendulum effect we're seeing with kids now in school where previously we saw this achievement gap with girls, more Resources were directed there, and now we see that boys are falling behind academically and this traditional classroom setting. What are your, your thoughts as it applies to this? Is there, now that new stereotype threat, , are girls more comfortable in this context? Is there still that original threat?

Like what are your thoughts there?

greg: The dynamics with, you know, the, the stereotype threat is a dynamic about walking into a situation where there's a negative stereotyping and girls, do you know? Well, in school in general and better than boys, the, the research on the straight type threat was always about math and science and, and very kind of, [00:10:00] elite.

In selective kinds of math and science context. Yeah. Like we're really demanding and you're really being pushed. And there's this stereotype that like the geniuses are the boys and the men and the girls. Maybe they work hard, but they're not such, they're not such geniuses. Mm-hmm. And that's the stereotype that really, , disadvantages girls and women.

, you know, I think boys contend with a lot of other issues and a lot of those are psychological too. , so for example, we've done a lot of research on. Classroom conflict situations, , disciplinary encounters, on interventions that, , help support trust between teachers and students. , They can address questions like, will I be seen as a troublemaker? Or is this student a troublemaker off the table? , and those can be particularly beneficial for boys.

sadie: Mm-hmm.

You, you mentioned wise interventions, , and this framework you created. People aren't familiar with how these interventions work to address belonging and impact achievement.

rates of like punishment in classrooms, as you mentioned. How did you come across these interventions? Develop them? The outcomes associated? Yeah, all the [00:11:00] things.

greg: So the research on straight type threat was, was really inspiring to me, but it was also just in the lab, right? It was

just this

dynamic in the laboratory setting.

And I wanted to know like, what is this? What does this mean for the real world? When students are going out and they're, you know, introducing themselves to a new teacher, they're meeting new classmates. They're trying to take a test, they're trying to study for something.

And

as I thought about it, I thought about how, , focusing now on.

Students of color, how, you know, so much of education has this deep history of exclusion and, , race-based exclusion. And, , you know, there's stereotypes that say that students of color are less smart than others. That they're less able than others,

that, , they don't deserve higher education opportunities, for example.

And so then, for example, if you're

a. black student going to predominantly white college then, and you look around, most of the people there aren't black. Some people there

seem to believe you don't deserve to be there. that creates a, a much broader kind of threat than the narrow threat of stereotype threat.

It creates [00:12:00] a, a worry about belonging. And in this case, the situation is posing the question, do people like me belong in this environment? And if people are asking that question, like, imagine you're going to college and you're asking that question and then. You take a first test and you don't do very well in that test.

, you try to get in a student group and the student group doesn't want you. , you come home on a Thursday night and find out that everybody went out to something and they didn't bother to include you in that event. Maybe you have all that happen in one week. Like that might accumulate to start to make it feel like.

Maybe I don't belong here. Maybe people like me don't belong in this environment. And if you start to draw that inference, then it's gonna be harder to reengage with the people in that world to go, , you know, join a different student organization to go talk to your professor about what went wrong on that first test, to have a conversation with a peer and.

Ultimately that erodes the kind of relationships that anybody needs to succeed in a college environment. [00:13:00] So, , wise interventions are interventions that are sensitive to dynamics like this. They're sensitive to how people are making sense of themselves and social situations, and in particular to the kinds of questions and doubts that come up as we navigate the world.

So, , in this case, , what they do, what an intervention does is it offers people. A different way to understand those experiences, , , a way of understanding these experiences that says this can happen. , this is normal. It can happen to everybody and it can get better with time. So it, the technology is actually very simple.

It's about storytelling and story sharing. It's about sharing stories from other students that. Talk about transitions and, you know, acknowledge the, , the pride and the enthusiasm people have, for example, to go to college. How exciting that is to move away from home, to go to a new place, to join a new community.

, but don't whitewash it. Also talk about how that's a big transition and there's gonna be times you feel homesick. You might miss California. I missed, Michigan when I [00:14:00] came to California. ,

you might get to that. Did you miss the

sadie: weather or other things? I did miss

greg: the weather. Yeah. It's not really the weather.

I do love California, but um. when I came to Stanford, my first year at Stanford, , I was coming back. It was my first quarter. I was coming back from class, going home to the dorm at lunchtime, and there was this in and out truck that had pulled up and in and out does not exist.

In Michigan, right? Yeah. There

was all, this whole line of students, like my classmates lined up to get in and out. Yeah. And I felt so excluded. Yeah. I was like, like, who are these people? Like I'm not standing in line for a burger like,

duh. So then I go, they only have

sadie: three things on the menu. Like what is this? This

is like

greg: a frigging mystery, like what is this? Yeah. So. I go back to the dining hall and I eat by myself. And , you know, I think that if I had had the awareness that everybody is coming to a new place, everybody's kind of far from home, even if you're from, you know, just down the road, I. Even the people from Southern [00:15:00] California who somehow kind of were the acute example, in

my mind,

I could have gotten in line, right?

I could have asked someone like you and said, what's inn out? Like, why do you like inn out? What is animal style? Yeah. I might have made a friend, right? It would've been a much better experience. And that, that kind of illustrates the way that the belonging intervention works. So like hearing stories, learning from other people that worries about belonging are normal, that it can get better with time, that everybody's going through that transition, not, , kind of.

Overreacting or, or reacting in a really global way when, when something goes wrong helps you stay the course and helps you build relationships and helps you find the kinds of communities that you need to succeed in a new environment.

sadie: We read the study that you did about this intervention, college freshmen in my positive psychology class, and it's one of those ones that just like sticks with you because of what a profound impact it has on outcomes even beyond college.

Can you speak to some of those things that happen when we tell people this will be hard and other people are experiencing this and you [00:16:00] can get through it?

greg: Yeah, so what's really interesting and important about the belonging intervention in particular is how it illustrates what I call spirals, both downward spirals, but also upward spirals.

So. , imagine you don't have the belonging intervention. Imagine you're a first generation college student, , or you're a, a student of color and you have something difficult happen early on. Like, not a big thing necessarily, but you feel homesick. you can't find your favorite foods, um,, you can't find someplace that will cut your hair properly, maybe.

you don't, you know, you haven't made a friend yet, or maybe you've made a lot of friends, but they're all shallow and, and,

and not

really real yet. Yeah. Then, , , if you're worried about the idea that maybe people like me can't belong here, then it, what that does is it makes it harder to engage and harder to actually build those relationships.

And you might, persist in that space. You might continue in that space. You might not, you might. up feeling like you don't belong and leave, [00:17:00] or you might persist and kind of carry through, but not ultimately build the kinds of relationships that you really need. In the belonging intervention, what happens is you share these stories that it's normal to worry at first about whether you belong.

It can get better with time,

and

students still have the same kinds of difficulties, like they still experience exclusions. They still experience homesickness. They still sometimes get a bad early grade, but. No longer do those events mean to them. I don't belong here in general, or people like me don't belong here in general.

And that helps people stay more engaged. Like to study more, literally to study more hours per night, to go to office hours, more with professors, to meet with peers in study groups, to ask questions in class.

And those behaviors then have a consequence that goes out of that psychological system.

It's not just that people are feeling better, it's that people are actually making relationships, like people are developing friendships. They're more likely to develop close mentor relationships, and in the end, that [00:18:00] undergirds higher achievement or even years into the future and greater success as people transition out of college into the adult world.

So in the original study, Which was done at a selective university in the Northeast. , we found that African American adults who got the belonging intervention in their first year of college, , report about 10 years later, being more satisfied in their lives, more successful in their careers, they're more likely to have.

Taken on leadership positions in their community. And the reason why they're able to do that is because, , they're reporting it seems, , that they're more likely to develop strong mentor relationships in college and relationships that persisted after college. That gave them the kind of guidance and structure that helped them move into the spaces that mattered for them as young adults.

sadie: Can

you speak a bit to that mentor value? Because I think it's a, something that is now being promoted more to high schoolers and I'm a TA for Grit Lab and this week we talked about mentoring some guys like, here's how I got my mentors, here's how it's [00:19:00] helpful to structure that relationship. I promise it's so important.

, and when you ask like, who are your mentors? A lot of them said like a parent or maybe an aunt or an uncle. . Truly having these external figures and support systems, especially in the college context, like you mentioned, can have such a profound impact on outcomes.

greg: sometimes there's like mentor programs where people are kind of assigned mentors.

I don't that that can be helpful, but I don't think it works as well as, , kind of bottom up, , authentic relationships that come from the student themself that really match who they are and who it is who they wanna become. Mm-hmm. So, in the belonging intervention.

you like, one of the stories that a student told us at one point, , was that, , he had decided that he wanted to become an engineer and yet he had failed in an introductory calculus course.

Mm-hmm. And so he went to his professor and he said, professor, like. I'd like to become an engineer. , and the professor said, well, you gotta get your act together when it comes to math, because engineering requires a lot of math. [00:20:00] And he had the, confidence at that point then to go out and buy, , like a high school calculus textbook to review the, the foundations that he needed to review.

And, , he continued to reach out to that professor. , and he told us in one of our surveys that. , he actually met with this professor on a weekly basis and the professor, , helped him secure that foundational knowledge in math, and he saw his marks, his grades go up week by week, you know, problem set by problem set, get a little bit better. in the end, that professor who was . I think an emeritus professor, by the time he retired, an older person, he, , became a, a strong mentor and advocate for him and helped him as he, as he got his first job as an engineer, after leaving college. Mm-hmm. And so that like kind of dynamic. , can happen when a student says, here's the kind of person I'd like to become, and the professor or whoever it is says, I can see that I [00:21:00] can value that and I can, I can help you in your growth towards becoming that person.

It's very authentic. It's not networking in that kind of. Shallow way. It's, it's very authentic. It's very real, and it's very much about kind of envisioning the person that a young person can become. Having the young person envision that, having the older person envision that, having a shared vision about that, and then problem solving along that path to achieve that vision.

sadie: Mm-hmm. It's no surprise that Gen Z is struggling in a lot of ways. There's a lot of really great strengths that we experience. I think the vulnerability is absolutely unparalleled. I think there's so much ambition and so much belief that we can make change, but we're also struggling a lot with mental health, , and a lot of concerns and red flags that are being raised by different people having this conversation.

Anytime I have a researcher on the podcast, and especially one that's worked, in interventions. Targeted in these kinds of areas and demographics. I'd love to kind of get your thoughts on what you think is a big pain point or a big point that we could be directing support and resources towards. , [00:22:00] and obviously lots of competing opinions here, whether it's more phones or mentor relationships, scaffolding, all these kinds of things.

What are your thoughts on this like crisis as it's been labeled?

greg: Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of thoughts. I mean, I think one thing to say is about just to stay with belonging for a second. Yeah. Like. Belonging is, , in its sort of most important form within college. It's about belonging within that, , kind of achievement related space.

It's not just about having friendships or, being with other people. It's about really being able to belong within that community.

like I think that it's very healthy for people and very important for people

to feel like they are parts of communities, ,

which they are learning and growing and

becoming, towards the kind of person that they want to

be.

And I think that's part of why belonging in college is so. Like people come to college, , at least in part because they see that space as a space that can help them become the kind of adult that they wanna be, to have the kind of impact that they wanna have on the world to [00:23:00] explore the kinds of questions that they wanna explore and do what they wanna do.

And so to belong within the college environment is to belong to that journey, to that process of becoming. Mm-hmm. And. That's like really foundational for mental health and mental wellbeing like that, that's you becoming the right kind of person for you.

Yeah,

and it's also why exclusion in the college environment, , or loneliness or disrespect, , not feeling fully a part of it.

Feeling adrift can be so damaging. there is research sort of directly looking at the consequences of the belonging intervention itself on both physical health and on mental health, including reduced rates of depression. So when people, , experience the belonging intervention and they recognize worries about belonging as normal, as improving with time, then people report.

Years later, being happier in their lives, they're less likely to meet clinical criteria for depression. , and they actually are going to the doctor less so they're, they're actually healthier. There's a couple of oth other things that I think are really important. So, , a couple [00:24:00] of years ago I had the opportunity to be the faculty member in residence at Stanford's, , program in Berlin.

And so we were, you know, it was a, a group of new Stanford undergraduates, having their study abroad experience, and we were at this welcome dinner. I sat, next to a woman who I hadn't met before, a Stanford student. And so I'd asked her about her life and she said, that she was a very competitive gymnast, , in high school.

And then she blew her knee out, and then Covid happened.

And

she just said it in like this very direct and honest way that allowed me to be very direct and honest back to her. So I just said, the thought that came to my mind, I said, well, did that make you depressed? And she said, absolutely. I was already seeing a therapist, but for sure.

And

what was beautiful about that conversation and what it kind of represented to me, part of the strength of young people today, , is the ability to really surface. , these circumstances and I, I use that word intentionally. Yeah., and put them on the table as kind of common [00:25:00] ground, , , amongst others.

So she was very direct and honest and, , then I could be direct and honest back to her. And then we could see together like, yeah, like, you're 18, you're 17, 18 years old. You love to be a gymnast. Now you can't be a gymnast now you can't see a friend. It's like, would that make a person depressed? It probably would.

Right? Like that would be, that would be the situation. And when we can talk about it that way, , she knows that I'm not judging her. I know that, , you know, I'm not in fact judging her, but we're both recognizing this. This challenge that she's confronted with in her life, and then it becomes a lot easier to handle the challenge rather than being defensive about it or pretending that there's not a problem there.

sadie: Do you think that surfacing those challenges and. Creating space for those conversations on like a peer-to-peer level can have that similar effectiveness or it's crucial to have that like mentorship. I've been through this before dynamic,

greg: I think. I think that it's healthy for everybody, like so definitely with peers and it's part of, I think, a [00:26:00] structural challenge within the mental health business.

Yeah. That is like the mental health business is predicated on a diagnostic clinical interview that. Ostensibly diagnoses you as having something distinctly

wrong with you in order to get treatment. Mm-hmm. Right.

This is the business model, right. , and

it's

very different from a kind of social psychological perspective where you say like, what's the situation the person is in?

Like, would that situation create dynamic like depression? , Like yeah, like it would, and. from that per, if you really have that perspective, it's not even a vulnerable conversation. Mm-hmm. Like it's just like, this is the circumstance. Yeah. This is the reality. Like one, one would be like that.

There's nothing to be vulnerable

about. Mm-hmm. About

at all. , and so I think part of the challenge with mental health is that. We kind of put people through a process, like a process that involves the clinical diagnosis, like the diagnostic interview, like the billing process that is predicated on [00:27:00] defining them as having something wrong with them.

Mm-hmm. Even when that's not what anybody believes, that whole system kind of is

conveyed. You

sadie: can't submit it for insurance without a diagnostic code.

greg: exactly Right. And the diagnostic code says that there's something distinct about you.

Yeah.

And and that's like starting on the back foot. Like I think there's a reason the Barbie movie was such a hit,

like,

you know, everybody wants to feel like they're enough.

Like they're okay. Yeah. But this is a process in which we're starting people off, you know, in contending with a problem by saying that there's something distinctly wrong with them.

sadie: Mm-hmm. And how do you like walk that clear line of like. that validation of like, this is really challenging and it makes sense that you're going through this really difficult experience and this is painful.

And also it's not wrong because we'll experience this, these contexts differently. And like you said, we compare. And how do you kind of balance those two things, at the same

time? Yeah,

greg: I, I think sometimes there's a kind of magic like in, in a dialogue, in a conversation. Like in that conversation, she and I were just kind of.

[00:28:00] Like we were full, fully together, we understood it fully together.

Mm-hmm.

and I think understanding, , like, so in the, in my book Ordinary Magic, I, , refer to, a lot of picture books. 'cause I think there's a lot of wisdom in picture books. Yeah. And one of them is, , one morning in Maine and in one morning in Maine.

The

little girl Sal, , it begins with her saying, mama, mama, , I lost my tooth. I'm not gonna be able to have my, the great day I envisioned and go to Bucks Harbor with daddy.

Yeah.

And her mother says, oh, , when you lose a tooth, that's when you become a big

girl.

And the whole first half of the book is, is Sal kind of trying out that idea.

So she says to her mother, did you lose your teeth when you were little? And the mother says, yes. That's how I got these nice big, beautiful teeth now. And, and then Sal goes out and she inquires whether the seal loses its teeth, whether the bird loses its teeth. And she. Learns Yes and no.

And she gets to her father who's digging clams on the beach, and she asks him and [00:29:00] his, her father says, yeah, it's when you lose your teeth that you become a big girl. And so they're, they're offering that whole dynamic is offering this person, , a new way, a non pejorative way to understand her circumstance that losing a tooth doesn't have to be a catastrophe.

Yeah. And. I think similarly, like we should be like that in mental health situations. So like, yeah, would a person feel depressed in a circumstance like that? Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Like does it mean that there's something wrong with a person? No, they're a normal person.

sadie: Yeah. Right.

greg: That's the situation they're in now.

Like how do we contend with that? How do we work with that?

sadie: I, that was just such like a forgotten memory experience where you're describing it and I'm like, I remember the images. And she like falls on a rock. Like, I have not thought about

that book. Yeah, she slips. Yeah. Yeah. She tries

greg: to mirror in to see the seal close.

Yeah. And then she slips

and

sadie: she's like, ah. And she's like all distressed. She's like a whole, yeah. Like the conflict of the story. . Mm-hmm.

Completely forgot about that. speaking of your new book, you had a quote, when I was researching for the episode, which I thought was just. So interesting and fascinating where you said [00:30:00] maybe the fact that we're feeling the pain of dealing with ambiguity right now means that we're actually doing the thing we came here to do and heading in a new and interesting direction and that like,

greg: that's not my quote.

Yeah. Really?

sadie: Oh my gosh. No, no, no. That's,

greg: that's a quote. That's a quote from, , so people have started to share with me what I think of as these tales of ordinary

magic.

sadie: Okay.

greg: And so that came from a former student who, , shared that experience with me. So she, she was describing how she had felt kind of trapped in a previous career.

Like, , it was kind of too structured. Yeah. So she was looking for something more. Open-ended more, more, more broad. And then she'd gotten into this and was, , participating in this, program. And then she felt adrift and like she didn't have direction and she was kind of re-understanding that adrift ness is maybe what it was that she wanted that was actually freeing for her.

sadie: Yeah. Yeah.

So it's that

greg: kind of mental shift that is a, a kind of tale of ordinary magic in, in her case.

Yeah.

sadie: Those like mental shifts, these attributions, [00:31:00] like the reframes, whether it's like it's not something wrong with you or it's not a failure, but it's challenging and makes sense in this context or this is going to be hard, but it is possible.

These kind of ways that we look at situations differently. Are there any other of those like magical ways that we can reframe things, these really powerful ways of shifting perspective, that are really relevant and common to what you found within this like. College age population, , high schoolers, these challenges that so many people go through.

But again, we're not necessarily maybe surfacing these conversations and like widely discussing how we can reframe them.

greg: Yeah, I mean, let's stay with the mental health themes. So, , another, , example of this is, , , the ways that we have identities often, and they can be mental health identities that are often, .

Cast us as kind of weak or deficient or problematic in some form.

Mm-hmm.

And often these, , so something like mental health, like having, contended with a mental health problem often might be very challenging. Right? Yeah. It, it might be very difficult. but [00:32:00] our narratives about mental health challenges are also.

Often kind of one dimensionally negative. Mm-hmm., they only talk about the negative. Mm-hmm. So one of , collaborators, a woman named Christina Bauer.

Has

developed a technique called, , a kind of identity inversion intervention. So what you do in this technique is you ask people to think about identities they have that are often, , seen as, , sources of weakness or deficiency.

Mm-hmm.

And you say even though this might often be something that's difficult to deal with, this identity might also be a source of strength and agency and goodness. , how have you. Found strength or agency or goodness. in this identity?

Yeah.

In one of the cases, she, , did this work with people with experiences with depression.

So she, gave people who had experienced depression, stories from other people who talked about. The strengths and the agency and the goodness that they had developed in contending with depression and how they use those [00:33:00] strengths and agency and goodness to work toward goals that matter to them.

And then she asked people to tell their own story of that, to tell, you know, what strengths have you developed from contending with depression? What goodness have you developed from that?

And

people, when you ask people questions like this. And they stop and they think about it and they have that space to reflect a little bit.

They'll tell you absolutely beautiful things that completely inverts. I think of it as an inversion. It kind of inverts the meaning of the identity. And Christina then. , what she found is that that actually increased people who'd experienced depression, their, confidence that they could accomplish big goals in their lives and the progress that they made in working towards personal goals over several weeks.

Mm. So

people were more likely to say they made progress on cutting back on social media use or on exercising regularly or getting prepared for a job interview or , you know, working regularly in a school setting or working on a particularly important relationship. Once they'd found strength in that experience of depression.

sadie: [00:34:00] Yeah. At the time that we're recording this, we're in like a very interesting period with educations and intervention and DEI and different initiatives that have been put in place to support these populations and people that might not feel that sense of belonging or might be more susceptible to these challenges when navigating the academic space, regardless of like policy or how things are changing.

What do you hope for in these classrooms in high schools and colleges? What do you think would best equip students set them up for success if you could wave a magic wand and have an intervention like large scale?

greg: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that's been really unfortunate is that , people have kind of treated belonging.

, as a kind of zero sum game.

Yeah.

and as though if one group belongs, another group doesn't.

Mm-hmm. And,

that does not have to be the case, and that's not actually how people work. Really. Yeah. In the end, like in the end, , , we'll all belong more if, if everybody can belong more. If that can be a healthier environment.

So if you [00:35:00] think about like a family environment or a neighborhood environment, or a classroom or school environment. if everybody in that space is feeling good about their membership in that space, it's easier to feel that you too are, belonging in that

environment. Yeah.

, you know, I think that in the, like the political dynamic, like you can understand, you can read, , the November election, and you can read, a lot of the Trump administration policies as.

as, an expression of feelings of non belonging within, yeah, for example, higher education contexts. And, , when people feel like they don't belong, often they do things that can become really hurtful for other people's belonging,

right? Mm-hmm. ,

, and. You get this kind of reverberation, this kind of action reaction.

So my, if I was to be able to wave a magic wand, I would wanna support everybody in those feelings of belonging, , to make college environments, spaces where people from all backgrounds and really all backgrounds really do [00:36:00] feel they belong and are valued and contribute and can be heard, and can be seen, and can hear and see, , that diversity of people who's in that space.

sadie: From the social science perspective in addition to this like one side of the coin being not feeling like you belong, but the people that are promoting and pushing that lack of belonging almost. And I think everyone has been in that context at some point. 'cause we have endless in group outgroup biases.

Why do you think we like is an evolutionary thing, like why are we so zero sum with belonging when we know, like you said, and lived experiences when everyone belongs, it's easier to feel accepted and understood.

greg: Yeah, I mean, you know, it, I, I think that we, have not had the kinds of, , communication spaces that allow people to really talk about their experiences in authentic ways.

Like the conversation I described in Berlin was like a very real, authentic. Conversation where we kind of achieved common ground. Yeah. And I think that the way our [00:37:00] society has developed with separate kind of media spheres, , with, you know, political segregation in neighborhoods and in jobs and in educational spaces,

has not, , facilitated those kinds of conversations in the way that we would need to, to actually kind of get to. a togetherness place. Yeah. then when people feel excluded and they feel non belonging, , sometimes people do terrible, crazy, hurtful things that are hurtful for themselves and others.

that undermines belonging.

sadie: Yeah. It's very challenging. , you mentioned a couple of anecdotes from your book, but if people want to get the book, learn more about the conversations that you had, the research you've been doing, where can people follow along with both of those things?

greg: Yeah, of course they can. The book's available anywhere. You can buy books. , it's called Ordinary Magic, and if you have a Tale of Ordinary Magic, I would love to hear it.

sadie: Amazing. Well, I'll a link to the show notes, both for the book and where people can submit their tales. , thank you so much for joining me.

I know this is gonna help so many [00:38:00] people in college, hopefully like a little mini intervention. Understanding that it's challenging and possible and

having

mentors is so important and crucial in that process. , I'm just really grateful for you taking the time.

greg: Great. Thank you very much, Sadie.

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