Read the full transcript of Episode 72 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features Dan Lerner, author, performance coach, and professor of the famous New York University class “The Science of Happiness,” joining host Morva McDonald to discuss why we might want to rethink the value of positivity.
Morva McDonald: Dan Lerner is a speaker, professor, and coach specializing in the science of happiness, performance, and well-being. He is best known for teaching the popular “Science of Happiness” course at New York University, where he explores how individuals can achieve success while maintaining a fulfilling and meaningful life. What a fabulous course to take as a college student.
His expertise in positive psychology helps people lead thriving, successful lives. I recently had the pleasure of listening to Dan speak to a group of independent school parents and leaders about the science of happiness, and ask important questions about the purpose of school and its connection to the well-being of students—something we all care deeply about.
Hi Dan, we're so happy you've joined us on New View EDU.
In preparing for this conversation, I couldn't help but notice on the about page of your website, you start by asking the question, what does happiness have to do with achieving excellence and success? And I'd like to start there if you could. I mean, I have four kids and so I'm always trying to think about like, what's their well-being like, how happy they are, how satisfied they are, but also like, I want them to be successful in lots of ways. One of those ways, of course, is in schooling.
So just talk to us about like, what do those two things have to do with each other? And what's set you on that journey to figure that question out?
Dan Lerner: So, well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's like, it's such an honor and a thrill to be able to work and talk to you. And especially knowing that we're going to be talking to a lot of parents who have kids who have questions like this. And it seems like these questions are coming up more and more as kids are dealing with more and more challenges, seemingly, in the modern age. So, I'm thrilled we're able to have this conversation.
Let me kick off a little bit with how I got into this, maybe to give you a bit of context. And then we can sort of walk into that relationship between success and happiness.
I had a background in this because my parents are both professional classical musicians.
My dad is in the Pittsburgh Symphony. My mother was an opera singer, sang around the world. And I grew up watching two people who loved what they did. Were very happy people for the most part. And we're human beings. We all have our challenges. I kind of made the assumption growing up that, of course they're happy. They are successful at what they do. I heard the applause. I was in the opera houses and concert halls.
And when I got to my professional life, I saw some things that really caught my attention. There were absolutely people there who were doing really well and were living, let's call it, a fulfilling life, right? Where they seemed to be doing well on stage, their name was in lights, they were making good money, they were doing the thing that they had trained so hard to do. And they seemed to have friends and families and hobbies and things that were giving them a satisfying life.
But I saw something the first time I hadn't seen before, which were people that were just as successful, if not more successful, with the money and the fame and just to say accomplishment in their lives. And they were miserable. And clearly there was lots in between, lots of gray area. But it really caught my attention. I thought, how can you be so successful at what you do and be this unhappy?
And that was one thing that caught my attention. The other was, one of my areas of expertise was younger performers. And when you talk about that in the opera context, it's performers in their 20s. So, you know, I'd go and take these young budding superstars out of the Metropolitan Opera, Young Artist Program, San Francisco, Chicago, and some of them would have careers that would just take off and just zoom, you know, to the heavens. Others sort of plateaued and often would disappear.
And I wanted to understand that as well. What is it that helps us realize our potential? Why did some people realize potential and other people didn't? So that's why I left the business after 10 years. Those two reasons really were, what was this thing that was separating folks who were successful and happy, and successful and unhappy. And also what was allowing people to realize potential? And I figured on both ends, it had to be psychological.
So when I went back to school, first to study performance and sports psychology, and then positive psychology, sport and performance being how do we perform at our peak? How do we practice efficiently? How do we overcome things like performance anxiety, stage fright, and then positive psychology, the science of positive emotions, the science of relationships, the science of meaning and purpose and passion, the science of what makes life worth living.
The question for me was what's the relationship between success and happiness? And what emerged pretty quickly was that there was a relationship between them. So we can look at folks out there who are very successful. Steve Jobs, Whitney Houston, and Andre Agassi, just to give you three different domains of business, arts, and sport. And they're very successful.
Happy? Not necessarily.
Morva McDonald: Not so much.
Dan Lerner: Right, right. And yeah, I don't want to give them blanket generalization, but for the most part, they're known for not being the happiest people. And yet we can contrast them with, in similar domains, Richard Branson, Maya Angelou, Roger Federer, all of whom are just as successful, but who seem to live fulfilling lives.
And so I want to be clear that as we walk through today, this relationship to success and happiness, or let's call it well-being, and we can get into that in a little while. And we can talk about the difference between happiness and well-being. There is a choice to be made. I'm not saying you have to be happy to be successful. That would be pie in the sky. That would be kind of irresponsible to say. But to say that we have a choice, I think is important.
And when we start to look at the science that underpins various aspects of well-being, and we can follow up maybe and talk about what separates well-being and happiness, we see that there are often advantages when it comes to our ability to perform. So for example, and this is a great example, I think for parents out there, we look at a study and this is an older study, but we look at one of the early studies on happiness in kids, right? And in this study, you had four and five-year-olds and they were basically given kind of blocks to play with, with kind of diagrams. Go ahead and build these shapes.
But the kids were separated into three groups. The first group was told just to go ahead and play. The second group was to think of something that made them sad. Just for 30 seconds. And the final group was prompted to think of something like the happiest memory they could. Now they're four and five years old. So all you parents out there know, it's not anything profound. They didn't get to, they didn't get to school that day and say, I got to the sandbox and I saw her across the sandbox and I knew we'd be together forever. It was like, I had pudding for lunch, I got the gold crayon, but those kids who were primed with positive emotion before building were up to 30% more accurate, they were more collaborative than their non-primed peers and up to 50% more accurate, more collaborative and other positive measurements. Up to 50% more so than their peers that were primed with negative emotions.
So we can start to get a sense from this study that the brain is working differently when we're primed with positive emotions. Now, if you're not four or five, and the odds are if you're listening, you're not, even though you might have one at home, right? Then we can look at studies of doctors who had at least three years of medical experience. And when they were primed with positive emotions in a different way, and then they were given 50 symptoms to diagnose, they were just as accurate as their non-primed peers, but they were up to 20% faster. Right?
And then you can extend this to college students. So college students who are primed to think of the happiest memory they can for 45 seconds, and then given words in a foreign language, will on average retain about 35% more words than non-primed peers. Creative tests with the same priming, 45 seconds of positive emotion, they tend to be about 70% more creative. And how do you measure that? It's give them a paperclip. How many different uses can you think of for this, right?
So there are loads, there's loads of data that supports the idea that when we're primed with positive emotions, our brains just work differently and often more effectively, more efficiently, so on and so forth.
Morva McDonald: I'm maybe wrong about this, but I'm interested in this concept, is… We often think about success as something you bring upon yourself, right? You work for it, you're diligent, you work for it. Of course, if you think in sociological terms, we know that context matters to success, we know all of those things, but we have an idea, right, that there's a lot of agency around success. And I wonder if we have the same theory or lay theory about happiness.
I don't think so. I think we tend to think about happiness as something that comes along or doesn't come along. Something happens in the world around us or in our family or in our context, right? And that kind of shapes our emotions, versus we have a role in agency. And kind of what I hear you talking about, at least in these experiments, if you will, is that there's an element of agency around happiness that also matters in terms of success. Is that a fair statement? What do you think about that idea?
Dan Lerner: Yeah, very fair statement. I think you're right on both sides, which is that we do tend to think that we have agency with success. And I would agree with you that we actually do. And that we do often think that happiness is something that happens to us. And that is where I think we're finding the research shows otherwise.
So there is certainly an element, genetic element, component, of happiness, right? For folks listening out there, try to think of someone who you always think of as, that person's always a little gloomier than other folks, right? And that is the way that some people are sort of set. Think about it like a thermostat, right? They are set to a certain number. But we also know people who tend to seem to be a little happier than other people, right? And their thermostat’s set, let's just call it a little higher. So there is certainly a genetic component to that, that we know.
But a considerable amount of how we experience positive emotion is through rightly directed effort, right? So I'll give you an example. One of the better known and also better researched interventions or exercises is the gratitude journal. So what is a gratitude journal? A gratitude journal is when, every night before you go to sleep, take about five minutes to write down three things you're grateful for and why you're grateful for them.
So I'm grateful for my partner because I had a rough day and when I got back, they were there to give me a big hug and talk through my day with me, period, the end, right? What I'm grateful for and why. I'm grateful for my dogs because I ran with them to the park today and it just, gave me a, whatever it might be for you, right? So after about 30 days, what we find in the research is that people, when they do this every night, they tend to have higher levels of positive emotions. Right?
Now, why is that? Is it, what are they really changing? What they're changing is they're kind of rewiring their brain to look at the world differently. So we might walk through our day and have a rough one and get that hug from our partner and have a conversation with our partner and appreciate it, but not really think too much about it. Right? We also might walk through our day and see things, have a conversation with, say a barista. That was a particularly nice conversation. We're like, that's good. And then we, we have basically forgotten about that conversation by the time we leave that coffee shop. Right. It was like, that was nice. Onto the next thing.
The graduate journal, what it helps us do is scan the world for positive experiences. I could, you know what? I could write that conversation down with the barista tonight. That could be an option for a graduate journal. I see someone on the street, drop something with someone else, help them pick it up. And I'm like, that, which might have stuck in my head for five seconds, I go, that's nice. Oh, that's an option for tonight. So we realize there are not three things we're grateful for. There are 30 things or 300 things we're grateful for, even though we're only writing three down.
As we start to rewire our brain this way, we start to realize how many more things there are out there that we can be grateful for. So other folks might go through the world thinking, seeing things through a more negative light. Right. And seeing the person who was rude to somebody else and that weighs on them, but they don't give that kind of weight to the barista conversation or that, or the good Samaritan outside. And so as I said, over the course of about a month, we've rewired our brains to see the world differently.
That's one of many examples, but being able to actively make decisions that help us see the world differently can be beneficial in raising our overall level. And that's, that's agency.
Morva McDonald: When you think about the work that you've done, and a lot of that work has been in higher ed, and you think about a leader in a K-12 institution, an independent school, has a lot of autonomy.
What are some lessons you can bridge from what you understand about learning and higher education and the connection between joyful learning—and also rigor, right? These are institutions that have ideas, whether they call it rigor or not, but have high expectations, arguably for kids. What are some of the lessons you've learned in higher ed and in the work you've done that you think can translate, right, into a leadership model and practice, right, as running an organization that's focused on learning?
Dan Lerner: It's important to note that we don't need to overhaul everything to introduce well-being. It's not to say, well, you know, look, this school has been existing for X amount of years. We've done very well. You know, we can't make massive changes. Just as for all of us parents, as parents or professionals, to suggest that we should spend hours a day on well-being would be unreasonable.
Right, so how do I make changes in shorter periods of time? Gratitude journal is a nice example because it takes five minutes. I would say that just as we do in so much else in society, we tend to look for the things that are not going well. So the first questions you might ask are, what's wrong? What do we need to fix? And those are really important questions. I mean, understand that we're talking about, this is not happy-ology. It’s not, if everyone's happy, everyone's great, right? It's not realistic.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, it's not naïve, yeah, yeah.
Dan Lerner: No, exactly, exactly. But why do we not begin a conversation or a meeting or a classroom discussion with a positive bent? So if we go back to that idea of priming someone with happy thought, how often do you start a meeting with what's most exciting for you this week? What's the best thing that happened to you last week?
Because we realized that we're actually getting cool things done and things that are exciting us and making us happy. And by the way, I should just say that positive emotions are not just about sort of that smile. Positive emotions come in lots of different shapes and colors. When we look at the research on positive emotions, we research different positive emotions separately. Hope is researched differently than joy. It's researched differently than pride. It's researched differently than love. It's researched differently than calm or tranquility or peace.
So being able to go in and allowing someone to express what they're excited about, what they're looking forward to, and then getting into, all right, so what are the challenges? Means we have potentially primed our colleagues or our direct reports or whoever we're meeting with to be operating in a different way.
I think the classroom, in my experience, and yes, I teach mostly undergrad at NYU, the classroom operates similarly. That is to say, if I'm going to walk into a classroom and say, what's stressing everyone out today? Which is a very valid question that I will absolutely ask them, but I generally don't ask them that question until after I've asked them a different question. Like, how was your weekend? What's the best thing you did this weekend? That's great, and sort of get them into that place where they're, their brains were operating differently.
Morva McDonald: Having been a head of school, this is such an interesting lesson to think about and it's to some degree, having been a researcher myself, some of the things we study are like seemingly obvious, right? But then you study them and they kind of become more nuanced. I think that's really important. And one of the things is like the difference between praise and priming somebody.
Right? So, praise is like wow, you've done a good job as a faculty and da-da-da-da. And priming, it seems to me, is quite different. Can you talk about the difference? And then I also want to connect back to something you said earlier related to well-being. Can you help us understand the difference really between, or the similarities, if you will, between kind of happiness and well-being? So, kind of those three things, praise and happiness and happiness and well-being and priming, is, just to help us dig in a little bit more around those ideas.
Dan Lerner: Sure. So when it comes to praise, and as an educator, no doubt that you and so many of the listeners are familiar with Carol Dweck’s work, how are we praising people? Not to be tangential, to go off on a tangent here, but praise for how you're so smart. It's nice. It makes people feel good. But praise for, really appreciate how hard you worked on this, can be a very different thing.
Right? So the latter, how hard you worked on this, can lead toward something like accomplishment, which is an essential aspect of well-being. It can uplift them because they've been noticed, right? For the hard work they do. And as we know from the Dweck work, it leads to a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset, right? Because, being smart, to a kid, means I have to show up smart, as opposed to I work hard and this is applicable to lots of things.
So praising people can be wonderful depending on how we praise them, clearly. Priming is often having people think for themselves on the things that they are noticing about themselves. So what is something that excites you? It gets their brain processing. If you say to them, I'm really excited about this project you're working on, well, that is closer to praise as opposed to what are you really excited about? And it becomes so much more personal.
Then you can lead into other areas, which we'll touch on in a second of, well, tell me why that's so exciting, right? Well, it's because I'm helping this community or because I got to see this kid do a little better and make a big leap. And so the more that they can talk about the things that are inducing those positive emotions or the meaning or other aspects of well-being, the more personal it becomes, the more effective it is.
So I think that can be really helpful. Also, I would argue that, you know, often praise is kind of unidirectional. I'm telling you that you're doing a good job, which is wonderful. Don't get me wrong. But priming tends to open up conversations. It can lead to empathy, where you get to ask those follow-up questions.
One of the techniques that I really love in positive psychology is called ACR, active constructive responding, where when we hear good news, how are we responding to it? If we respond to it actively and destructively, that is someone says, I just got a new job, at a, let's say it's Google. And active destructive would be, well, that's tough. I heard they work really hard all the time. When are you going to see your family? And they're like—
Morva McDonald: —Bummer.
Dan Lerner: Bummer, exactly. And they're like, I was excited until now.
And there are, you know, there are four quadrants to this, but to skip right to active constructive, it's about asking questions. Oh, that's fantastic. Tell me about that. Right. What, what's exciting to you about that? What are you looking forward to? So they get to give voice to that. And you have this bi-directional, not only do they experience it and the research will show that often these conversations will feel even better than when they got the job. Right. Because they get to, they get to have these conversations—
Morva McDonald: —It's more relational somehow.
Dan Lerner: It is, it is. And over the course of six weeks, the data shows that we will feel greater trust after, when we're practicing ACR on a regular basis with that other person, we feel closer to them. So having conversations and wanting to hear from other people, I think that's closer to priming than praise, right?
But for well-being, I think, and this is essential for what we're talking about today. People tend to think that happiness is the goal. And that is totally fair, but I would shift one word in that phrase, which is, happiness is not the goal, it is a goal. It is one of many.
So we teach 27 classes. This course I teach at NYU, the Science of Happiness, we have 27 different classes. In a course called the Science of Happiness, we teach one of the 27 on happiness, being positive emotion, right? Saying this is, this is of course essential, but there are other factors that are important. And the factors that we share with them make up an acronym. The acronym is PERMA, P-E-R-M-A.
The P is for positive emotion. The E is for engagement. The R is for relationships or positive relationships. The M is for meaning. And the A is for accomplishment. And just as a quick summary, positive emotions are just feeling good. As I went through the list before, could be joy, could be pride, it could be calm. Engagement is flow or getting into the zone. Kind of when you lose track of time, you're like, wow, I've been reading for two hours, I've been playing tennis for two hours, I've been teaching for two hours, like how to zip by. Positive relationships are the relationships, not just when you have the positive interactions, but if you have a rough day, you feel like you have a friend you can go to and have these conversations with. Meaning, as we define it, there are many definitions, but we define it as a connection to something bigger than ourselves.
Morva McDonald: Like purpose.
Dan Lerner: Kind of like purpose, they're close. They're related. Meaning is almost like the foundational aspect and purpose is more of an action kind of thing. But very close and often they're used interchangeably.
And then accomplishment is interesting because we tend to talk about it in two ways. One is the capital A and a lot of people think about the capital A. I would argue most people probably do. Capital A is I got into college, I got the job, I got the car, I got the house, I met the person. That's wonderful, but they don't happen every day unless you're incredibly fortunate. They just don't happen every day for anybody.
But the little a are the things you set out to do that day. What, you get up in the morning, what you set out to do. I want to record a good podcast with Dan. I want to, I need to go shopping. I need to get to the grocery store. I want to make sure that I have a good meeting with my student, right?
Morva McDonald: I want to help my kids get to school on time.
Dan Lerner: And yes, that's it, right? That's it. And these things, that actually, depending on our kids, might be a capital A. And seeing as you have four kids, it might be like a massive, bolded, underlying italicized A.
But at the end of the day, you get to look back at the list and say, did I help get my kids to school on time? Check. Did I have a good interview with Dan? Check. Did I get to the grocery store? Check. And if we can see those three things getting done, we have a sense of accomplishment.
But when we look at this acronym PERMA, these five aspects of PERMA, think about them like buckets. They don't have to be overflowing. You don't have to be overjoyed all the time or have great relationships all the time or have meaning all the time. But if you don't have at least a drop in every bucket, it's really hard to be thriving.
There are lots of accomplished people out there. Look at the earlier list, the Jobs, Whitney Houston, Andre Agassi. Agassi's actually an interesting point I want to come back to in a second. Did they have good relationships? Not necessarily. Were they happy? Not necessarily, maybe sometimes, but accomplishment was clearly overflowing. Did they have well-being? That's a different thing. Now we're talking about a richer matrix of well-being versus just happiness. And that's, when I said happiness is one thing to shoot for, but not the only thing, well-being is what we're really shooting for. And these five elements are key.
You know, I bring up Agassi, as an aside, because I think his story is fascinating. Here's a guy who was the number one tennis player in the world, and, incredibly accomplished. He has a celebrity marriage to Brooke Shields. Everything falls apart. He gets into it, he has addiction issues, he gets divorced, drops down to almost 200 in the world. By the way, on his first page of his autobiography, he says, I hate tennis. I hate it with a deep dark passion.
So clearly it seems he was not a happy person. He gets divorced, moves on, meets someone new, Steffi Graf, another tennis player. They get married. They have, I believe it's three kids. And you look at him now, and here's a guy who is playing tennis again, playing pickleball, like really enjoys it. And by the way, after he gets married, he rises back up to win a Grand Slam tournament.
So, you know, super accomplished, seemingly very unhappy. And then he introduces a positive relationship and maybe some meaning. It's a positive emotion. And then to come back to your very, to your first question you asked today, he's playing better, right? And, and he's raising, I think he raised $40 million for a school in Nevada for underprivileged kids. So there's meaning there. So being able to introduce well-being into the pursuit of high level performance, I think Agassi is a great exemplar because he has not consistently had success and happiness.
He had success. He was seemingly not happy, took a nosedive. And then when he introduced those other elements of PERMA into his process, he climbed back up to the top again and seems to be living a very fulfilling life.
Morva McDonald: This seems like just a super important point to me, because I think we have a, sometimes we have a perspective that accomplishment requires sacrifice. That somehow you have to suffer, right? It has to be really, really difficult or really hard.
And like, of course there are moments like that along the way, but I think this is such an important point, particularly for people in schools and for families who are working with young children and kids of all ages to think about the relationship between sacrifice, right, suffering, right, and accomplishment, which is the difference between, you know, if I want to be a track runner, I'm going to suffer. My workouts are hard, right? But like, help me think a little bit about that. And does that resonate for you, that idea?
Dan Lerner: Absolutely. And I can't argue that. One of the other areas that I spend a lot of time in is expert development. What's the process, psychological, physical, and otherwise? So is there suffering involved in high level accomplishment? I struggle to think of an example where there isn't. So absolutely. I mean, it's part of getting better, is pushing yourself.
Look, deliberate practice, for those of you who are not familiar with that term, it's the 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell made famous, but comes from Anders Ericsson's work at Florida State. And it's one of the factors in expert development. And 10,000 hours is not just practicing. If I was going to really minimize it, and there's a lot to it, it's putting a bag of boulders over your shoulder and trying to climb up a hill. And if it gets too easy, you throw another pebble in the bag.
It has to push you just to hit your limits and a little bit beyond, constantly. That's hard. You're sweating and you are, by definition, you are suffering. But what I would argue is when you're, A, let's say your coach is standing next to you as you drag that bag of boulders or your teacher is standing next to you as you're taking the really hard math test. Are they saying you suck, you suck, you're never going to do it?
Or are they saying, you know, you are doing great. I believe in you. I know we can get this done. When you're done with that workout session, do you go home and stare at the ceiling? Is that effective? Or do you go talk to another teammate and you're like, man, that was tough, you know, it's worth it. And I'm so glad you're here to have the conversation with.
You know, let me give you a really, one of my favorite examples. And this, it's right in the front of my head. Every year I go down to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill to lecture for a week. They have a course there called the Art and Science of Excellence. And they have three instructors there in that course, one of whom is a man named Anson Dorrance.
Anson, for those of you who don't know, is arguably, maybe not arguably, the greatest soccer coach in American history. Right, he's been the head, he just retired after 40 plus years as the head coach of the women's team in North Carolina. He was the former head coach of the World Cup team, the Olympic team, 23 national championships, unbelievable. And I've had the really wonderful fortune of calling him friend and a mentor for the last 13, 14 years.
And a couple of years ago, we were down there standing shoulder to shoulder, and he says, and he sort of profiles all his players to me. He's like, that young woman is the fastest zero to five yards I've ever had as a player. That young woman, she should play for the national team eventually. This young woman is an incredibly hard worker, might not get that far, but man, she sets the tempo and the example for people.
And we're standing there and this smaller striker comes driving down the left side of the field.
And this tall rangy defender’s getting ready to defend. And Anson says, you know, that girl with the ball has seen one of the quickest first steps I've ever had. This defender, she's young, but you know, she could play national one day with the right effort. And the little striker cuts to the right, boom, goal, top right corner, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful goal. And he yells out, and I'll use different names that protect the innocent. He goes, Ali, that is who you are. Be who the F you are. She's like, thanks coach. And then he turns to the defender who just got beat. And he goes, Sarah, because he barks everything. Sarah, you are one step away from greatness. Take that step, you are so close.
So are they struggling? Are they suffering? Are they out of breath? They are, but the kind of coaching they got was so supportive, right? To say, you know, you're so close. It's just this, as opposed to you suck, get off the field. You can't do this. So the way that we get that feedback makes a big difference when we are suffering, because does it still count as suffering or does it, are we all of sudden reframing it as an opportunity to get better, with supportive folks around us? I think that matters a lot.
Morva McDonald: I really appreciate that insight about feedback and the nature of feedback and what it sounds like and what it feels like in terms of, can I stretch a little bit further? Am I almost there? Is really helpful.
Dan Lerner: This student, I remember saying to me, you make me realize how much I can learn and what the possibilities are without making me feel like an idiot.
And I love that comment because I was like, that is exactly what I'm striving to do. Like we're here to teach, we're here to help them learn, not to make them feel dumb, but to not pull any punches on feedback. It doesn't mean you have to be so blunt that it hurts and they get defensive. It means giving them feedback that gives them hope, right? And I think there's a big difference there. They still have to rewrite these papers. They still have to take the next test, but
to know that they're closer, to know they're making some sort of progress, and to get a sense of where they're already good. You're so great at writing this. Throw another, cite one more source, and then you have it. It makes a big difference, I think.
Morva McDonald: Such a subtle, somewhat subtle change in language and focus, but such an impactful one, right? So not a big thing to do, not a big shift to make, but a really important shift to make in the way that we relate to each other around lots of things, including learning.
In the book, U Thrive, you say on your website that college has become kind of a harrowing experience where most students are just trying to survive, right? This is the suffer, the suffering through, let alone thrive, right? And you really wrote, think, the book to help college students or students entering college kind of think about how should they enter and what can they do? Where's their agency?
In having some impact on that experience, like, what do you think educators should be doing with kids long before they hit that juncture of college in that transition.? How can we help them? How can we set them up better for that success?
Dan Lerner: That's a great question. Part of it depends on the school and the curriculum. So one of the big changes, in addition, by the way, to moving to a new place, not knowing anybody, not knowing where you're going to eat, not knowing who your roommate's going to be. One of the big ones is that often there are a lot of right answers in high school. And like here's a multiple choice question. Here is... you know, are you answering correctly, as opposed to critical thinking? And I think too often they get to school and they realize that what's expected in high school changes dramatically in college, where all of a sudden you have to propose your own ideas. You have to come up with a topic for a paper that's as opposed to being given that prompt. So I think that being able to develop critical thinking would go a long way, at least for a lot of students that I see, right? That's a big one.
But if we're talking about them as, there's so many educators on this podcast who will know far better than I about those things. That being said, I think one of the things that is a real challenge when they come to college is how much grades matter. Because I get it, in high school, you're trying to get those grades so you can get into that college.
But I get so many students who are really struggling and suffering because if they don't get straight A's, which so many of them have strived to do over the years, then they’ve failed miserably. A colleague of mine once said, Ivy League instructor, when he was an RA, he said, 50% of you are going to be in the bottom 50% of your class. And they were like, aghast. Right?
So the idea that it is less about competing with others, and more about intrinsically motivated drive, matters. You know, when they start looking around and comparing themselves to others, which is a real issue with social media and otherwise, you know, comparison is rough. And there will be someone smarter than you in the classroom. So what are the things that you can focus on? What are your strengths you go into this with? Right? If your strength is hard work, and someone else's strength is teamwork, right? Then how do you apply your hard work to this new venture like college?
If your strength is teamwork and you go to college, you should probably focus on getting a study group together. You know, like who are the, who's the community you're putting together, rather than going to live in the library all by yourself and taking yourself out of that strength zone. So what are the things that I bring not only academically, but also from a values perspective, from a character strengths perspective, that's going to help me as I get into this new world of college too?
Morva McDonald: That is an interesting point and one I think we think a lot about in schools, particularly in independent schools, is a lot about accomplishment and achievement. And of course, we're surrounded really in some ways by competition, but also helping kids reflect on, like, how do I learn? How do I learn best? What do I need to learn in order to do that? And that's part of the transition as they move out of a relatively highly structured environment like high school, to college that's less structured. Of course, there's lots of guardrails in college. But I think that's just a lovely way to think about that issue.
And there is so much to talk to you about, Dan. And there are a lot of places that we can go. But I'm wondering, just for our last kind of minute, if you could wave a wand and produce some major professional development for K-12 educators. How might you see positive psychology really transforming our educational institutions right now?
Dan Lerner: I do want to mention that when it comes to character and character strengths, that's one of the areas that is at the center of positive psychology. So when we think about our grade school kids or high school kids, and again, there are educators who are so well versed in character, there are certain schools out there which have introduced character in the past really decade-plus. And there's a wonderful example that I've always appreciated. And there's a video online.
I think if you Google Newark boys choir school, character strengths, there was a short video. And what they've done is they've given all these kids the VIA, V-I-A, values and actions via assessments, via characterstrengths.org, I believe. which is a free assessment. They've given these underprivileged kids character strengths assessments, and these kids have all gone through the process of identifying which one looks, they, they most, they feel comfortable, most comfortable with at the top of their, their strengths, measurements, their character strengths, and they wear them on their chest. And so people call them out for them. Like, you know, if it was bravery. Someone might say, Michael, I saw how brave you were in the playground. And what they found is it can be really helpful for their self-confidence, for their agency, their sense of so many different things. And those kids tend to be quite successful that way.
I think that having a young person be able to identify a character strength, and then working with them, identifying that with them as a parent, as an educator, saying, you know, your sense of teamwork, your sense of justice or humor showed up there in such a wonderful way. Helping them carry that over to college, I think can be a really helpful tool.
Morva McDonald: That's such a strong foundation for what a person needs as they enter the next stage of their life. Even at 57, I have to draw on my strengths, right, in order to make my way through the most challenging times, whatever those times are going to be. And so I really just appreciate highlighting that need and that foundation.
It's been great to talk to you about happiness. There are so many things to learn from you that I think are really nuanced and very subtle in ways that have just tremendous capacity to impact the way that we lead schools, the way that we think about our relationships with people, the way that we think about our relationship actually to ourselves. And it's a time for educators to really reflect on, and maybe we all need to start our own gratitude journal right now so that we can just pay attention to the good work that we're able to do in the places that we are. So thanks, Dan, for your time today.
Really greatly appreciate it.
Dan Lerner: It's a pleasure. And I just want to say that, you know, for so many folks who are listening on this podcast, one of the most powerful ways that we can address well-being, both in good times and in challenging times, is through meaning, one of those elements of PERMA. And as teachers, all of us as teachers, and as parents, for many of us, there are very few things that lend themselves more to meaning, to the idea that, you know, if you ask yourself the question, how does the work that I do help other people? Or how does the work that I do help make the world a better place? Teaching kids or raising kids or being there for other people is about as good as it gets.
I, there's so much interesting data and so much interesting research on that, which I know we won't go into right now. Maybe, please refer to another podcast, but it is enormously powerful in good times and bad. So thank you for doing this podcast and thank you all for the wonderful work you're doing for our communities. And if I can ever be helpful in any way, please reach out and let me know.
Morva McDonald: Thank you. Thanks, Dan.