Gregory Walton on Why Big Changes Start With Small Acts | EP 593

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And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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Whether you're a longtime listener or joining us for the first time, I am so deeply grateful that you're here. You've tuned into a movement dedicated to unlocking your potential, living with intention, and making what truly matters matter most.
Before we dive in, let's take a moment to reflect on an incredible conversation from earlier this week. I sat down with organizational psychologist and bestselling author Tasha Yurik to explore her groundbreaking new book, Shatterproof.
We dug into what it means to be truly self-aware and how resilience isn't about being unbreakable. It's about learning how to rise stronger.
If you missed this episode, I highly recommend going back to check it out. Now, let me ask you this.
What if big changes don't require big actions, but instead small intentional steps? How can the belief of one person transform your life's trajectory? And what would happen if you appreciated every relationship, every interaction from a place of trust, empathy, and genuine understanding? Today we're diving deep into these transformative questions with Dr. Greg Walton.
Greg's journey into human connection and belonging began when he was a teenager, and it was profoundly shaped by witnessing global poverty firsthand and a life-changing experience of being falsely arrested. His curiosity drove him into groundbreaking research exploring how small shifts in our mindset can radically alter our life outcomes.
Greg is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and the author of Ordinary Magic, the science of how we can achieve big changes with small acts. His work has been celebrated by the Next Big Idea Club and acclaimed worldwide for its transformative insights on belonging, trust, and intentional change.
In today's episode, Greg and I explore how belief and belonging can shift the course of a child's life. Why small acts often have the biggest emotional ripple.
How to cultivate intentional empathy and psychological safety and what it truly means to matter to yourself and to others. This episode is a call to action to live with intention, to lead with empathy, and to create meaningful impact in the most ordinary moments.
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Now let's dive into this powerful conversation with the extraordinary Dr. Greg Walton.
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I am so honored and thrilled today to welcome Dr. Greg Walton to PassionStruck.

Welcome, Greg. How are you today?

I'm good. Thank you so much for having me.

Well, I first wanted to say congratulations on your new book, Ordinary Magic,

The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Changes with Small Acts,

which has already been named A Next Big Idea Club Must read. Congratulations.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
I'll tell you, my book came out last year. And for me, when it also became mentioned on the next big idea club, that to me was almost a bigger recognition than any bestseller list could possibly have done for the book.
It's good company. I'll say that.
Yes. So I'd like to start these interviews out by going into your personal journey.
So your work deeply explores human connection. Can you share a defining moment in your life that ignited your passion for understanding belonging? Absolutely.
And it's like a flashbulb memory for me, actually. I was 14 years old and I was in high school and I was learning, I was in a student group, just a totally student-run organization that was interested in students' experience in inequality by race and gender and the persistence of inequality in American life.
We would go to sixth grade classrooms and lead role-playing exercises with students about how identities worked, for example. And in the course of that, at that same time, I read this early piece in the Atlantic Monthly that my now colleague Claude Steele wrote about what's called stereotype threat.
And what Claude did was he looked at racial inequality in test performance. And he showed that in standard kinds of conditions, when you present a test as evaluative of people's ability, you saw white students do better than black students.
And in math context, you saw men do better than women. But what was amazing to me, what literally blew my mind, was that he then looked at the exact same test scores, but he changed how he represented the test.
He presented the test to people just as a puzzle exercise, a verbal puzzle solving trial, and suddenly black student scores soared. And in math, when you did similar things with math, women's performance scored.
At the time in the nineties, it seemed like there was nothing so fixed and hardwired and built in as test performance. It seemed like a true barometer of someone's educational opportunities and the abilities that they had.
And yet here was this social psychologist just changing the representation of the task and suddenly people's performances were jumping all over the place. I was fascinated and I was tantalized

and I wanted to understand more. Thank you so much for sharing that.
And one of the other interesting things I saw by studying your background is you had the opportunity that a lot of people don't get to have when they're young to travel to remote places. You happened to go to a place in Indonesia.
How did experiencing global poverty firsthand, I think you were 13 or 14 at the time, shape your own sense of purpose? That was just before that. My mother was doing research in Indonesia on the island of Java.
And so in the summer before eighth grade and the summer before ninth grade, we took these two very extended family trips to Indonesia. And on the second one, my parents were more ambitious and they took us to some very remote areas.
They took us to place, they took us to the island of Sulawesi. And then we flew from little town to little town and then bus to other towns.
And we then were in central Sulawesi and we contracted with a local Canadian missionary who had a small plane, a little prop plane. And he flew us to this very remote village called Rompi.
And in Rompi, we planned to hike and explore and meet the local people. It's a place where there is a dirt runway.
There were people watching,

came to watch the plane land. There was no restaurant, no hotel.
So there was a small

wooden shack at the airport and we contracted with a local woman to bring us meals. And the woman,

she, my mother asked her a standard question in Indonesia, which is how many children do you have?

And she said that she had four children. And then my mother asked the next standard question, which is, and how old are they? And the woman said, five, four, and one.
And that was all that she said. And the next day, a village headman from a neighboring village came, and my mother asked him about the challenges that he faced as a head person in the village.
And one of the things he said was he talked about infectious diseases like cholera, for example, and malaria. And he said, these don't usually kill adults.
They can debilitate adults, but they do kill a lot of children. And we felt the absence of that one child.
I think that having an experience like that, especially at that kind of age, at the age of 13 or 14, when you're just a young adolescent becoming aware of the world, it really put my problems in context. Like the drama of middle school and high school was no longer that dramatic.
There were big problems in this world. And it also helped me think about what it would mean to help, what it would mean to support.
What does it mean for a person with more to give to a person with less? And how do you facilitate other people in their becoming, in their agency, rather than get in the way? I had this image of, oh, people could just cut this person a check. Like you could just give this person money and they might need the money and the money might be valuable, but it would sap the local agency.
It would sap their dignity and respect to build their communities the way that they were trying to build their communities. That help often has to be given in ways that are hidden and invisible and supportive rather than that take over.

Thank you so much for sharing that. Some of what you were talking about reminded me of the late Emile Bruneau's work on humanization and dehumanization and how we see the other side also reminded me of some of the work that Kirk Gray has done.
Well, one thing I wanted to touch Sean, is I understand that at one point, you guys had a really impactful experience of being falsely arrested at your family's cabin. And I wanted to ask, can you take us back to that moment and what it taught you about trust, power, and vulnerability? This is a complex story, and it really is a story within a story.
So my grandparents, my great grandparents, in fact, homesteaded in Eastern Arizona in the early part of the 20th century. My grandmother has a, she grew up in part in this area outside of Show Low, Arizona.
And as they had this big old ranch, and then when the ranch was sold, they saved part of it for a small cabin that my grandmother and my grandmother built starting in the 1930s.

They hand built this cabin, this adobe cabin in the mountains there.

And then many years later, it became a sort of family place, a place that we always go,

a place that's always been built.

And there are new projects all the time.

Many years later, i took my now wife

lisa to the cabin for the first time on a memorial day weekend and we had a lovely day we hiked

around we explored the local mountains and the canyons and the gullies we looked for arrowheads

and pottery shards and then we went to sleep this is a cabin with no electricity no running water

it's on about 45 acres of land so it's very. It's like dirt road upon dirt road to get there.
And in the middle of the night, at 10 o'clock, we'd gone to sleep at nine o'clock, we were awoken by these flashing lights. We sat up in bed.
There were voices shouting. There were these flashlights, high-powered flashlights probing into the room,

the bedroom, the one bedroom in the place. And people started shouting, come out with your hands

up. We didn't know who this was.
And it was very scary. It was terrifying.
And I was scheduled to

teach in Psych 1 the following week about race and crime and the way that race can affect how police officers interact with people who they're suspecting of potentially being violent. Worked by a researcher named Josh Correll at the University of Colorado.
And so it crossed my mind right in that moment. I'm glad that neither Lisa or I have dark skin because that would make this dangerous situation even more dangerous.
So I stumble out into the kitchen area and they shout,

put your hands up. I put my hands up.
I come to the outside and I ask them before I open the door, I say, who are you? Because I don't even know who they are. And they say, we're the sheriff.
And so I open the door and I step out and I'm immediately pushed to the ground. And Lisa behind me is well, and we're handcuffed on the deck.
And then they start to, they Mirandize us wondering what it is that we're being accused of, what has happened. And I'm thinking about the fact that we're hours and hours in the county seat.
I'm scheduled to teach next week. I have, so I decide to talk to them and they say, did you commit a robbery? And I say, I committed no robbery.
And they say, but these boots, they match the boot prints and these dogs let us up. There's nine men, young men with bulletproof vests.
This is like crazy with bulletproof. For me, it's crazy bulletproof vests and guns pointed at us and a sniffer dog all around us in this, on the deck.
And they're shouting at us and they're belligerent. And eventually they ask me, separate us, and they ask me moment by moment, what did we do during the day? And they ask Lisa similar questions.
And I walk this through. And then they start to relax a little bit.
They undo my handcuffs. We walk down to the flats below the cabin so we can show them exactly where we walked.
And I deduced that they're starting to figure out where it was that they lost the trail, where they got the trail wrong. The story goes on and on.
But the very important part is that at the end, when they decided that it wasn't us who had apparently committed this robbery, the person who committed it was about an inch shorter than me and has blonder hair than me and not quite me, but almost me. Then they were so kind and they were so gracious.
And they said, we're so sorry for interrupting your vacation. They apologized to us like once, twice, three, four times, multiple officers did this.
They came back up to the cabin. They said, oh, we thought this cabin was abandoned, but this cabin is beautiful.
Look at this cabin. When was it built? Oh, we have a cast iron stove like that.
Oh, look, this is the book your grandmother wrote about the building of this cabin. I'm so interested in this.
They were kind and they repaired the damage that they had done. And what was most powerful then was that I recorded a version of this story and I shared it with my colleague, Jennifer Eberhardt.
And Jennifer Eberhardt is an ex-social psychologist, an expert in race and crime. She read a wonderful book called Bias.
And she was teaching a class at the time at San Quentin Prison. And she played my recording for the prisoner students that she had at San Quentin.
And the prisoner students were unsurprised by the story all the way through up until the end. They were not surprised by the terror of people pointing guns at you.
They were not surprised at having been accused of something that they hadn't done. They were not surprised at the indignity of being handcuffed, about being treated as a kind of base physical threat.
But what they were surprised at was they had never had that apology. They told Jennifer after the story that there were countless times where they had been accused of doing something that they in fact had not done.
And even when the officers realized that they hadn't done what it was that they had been accused of doing, they still said, well, maybe you didn't do that, but we'll get you next time. There was no apology.
And for us, that was so important because the officer's behavior had raised this question. It was like a very fundamental question.
Are you a good and decent member of the community? Are you a member of the community in good standing? And by treating us in such an aggressive manner, they raised that question. And if they hadn't apologized, we would have held onto that question.
We would have hated them, frankly. My parents said later, are you going to sue them? And we're like, no, actually, we liked them a lot when they left.
We were proud to have an interaction with them. We were glad that they were going to protect the cabin.
But that was because they did that apology work at the end. And that was what those folks at San Quentin had not experienced.
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm sure you're familiar with Dacher Keltler.
And Dacher and I have talked about his experience at San Quentin. And I want to tie this back to your book because we were talking about his book, Awe, when it came out.
And we were specifically talking about the concept of moral beauty, how we experience awe the most through small acts of kindness. And what he was telling me was that he thought at San Quentin, that would be the least expected place that you would see people experiencing awe.

Yet he said he saw it completely different, that some of the prisoners he observed experienced it more than a common person because they took the small acts as so much more because to them, the small acts that they got to experience were so much more profound because of their captivity. Does that resonate with you at all? I did a guest lecture with Jennifer once in San Quentin, and it was the best teaching experience of my life.
The students are so eager to learn and so ready to explore the world and go beyond their immediate circumstance. It's like the most beautiful representation of education that we all can have, that kind of pinnacle of learning and exploring something new.
And they were all in it for all the right reasons. And that was absolutely an experience of awe.
And that moment too, that moment back at the cabin when the officers apologized, that was also, I think, a moment of awe where the experience completely shift. It was a very small act that they did to take that apology.
But the reason it was so important is because it helped us set aside the question, are we people in good standing here? And all of us want that in a community, right? All of us want to be members of a community in good standing, whether you've done something wrong or not, right? If you haven't done something wrong, you certainly don't want to be falsely accused. And if you have done something wrong, then that may need to get raised.
There may need to be a repair for that, but you also want to be treated with grace and as a person who can improve. Thank you so much for sharing that, Craig.
And I want to jump now to your book. And I must say, it was a really intriguing read for me.
And I loved the stories you told and how you immersed it with science along with the narrative. Well done on how you wrote it.
But as I was reading it, you really emphasized three foundational questions throughout. Do I belong? Can I do it? Who am I? Why do these questions matter so deeply to our ability to flourish? So if you think about who is it like most fundamentally that you want to become, what is it that you're going to want to do?

Those questions are central to that. So you think about a school setting, like school is for the purpose of helping a person develop and become something new that they aren't yet.
or you think about a work setting, a work setting is for the purpose of being able to execute on a mission, ideally to create a good or a service or a product that's going to be

meaningful. Where you think about a work setting, a work setting is for the purpose of being able to execute on a mission, ideally to create a good or a service or a product that's going to be meaningful and important for other people in their lives.
So to be able to belong within those settings is to be able to work towards the most fundamental goals that we have. nested within that question is the question of, can I do this? If there's a particular difficult task that you're facing, a skill that you haven't learned yet, like for me, learning how external microphones work, as we talked about earlier, then that could become a barrier.
It could become a barrier to your ability to actually realize the dreams that you have for yourself. And then in the end, a lot of that's about identity.
And identity is a very complicated, multifaceted thing. It's not just up to you.
It's also how other people are seeing you, whether other people are going to see you and treat you in ways that allow you to become that kind of person that you want to become. Or are they going to pigeonhole you or put you in a box or constrain you in some fashion?

So those questions get to kind of the deepest aspirations, I think, that we have for our lives, for who we want to be and the good that we want to do and the communities that we want to be part of and the impacts that we want to have on others.

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So one of the interviews I did last year was with an author named Jennifer Wallace, and she wrote this great book on mattering where she was really looking at the achievement culture that is so rampant today with children. And one of the things I remember her talking to me about was that a child's sense of mattering really comes from their parents who they look up to and interact with.
And if the parents go to work and they don't feel like they matter and they're emotionally exhausted when they get home, it's almost impossible for them to reinforce the child's feeling that they matter. And where I'm going with this is in the book you beautifully wrote, every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about them.
and where I wanted to go with this is why is unconditional belief so transformative in someone's life, especially a child's? Yeah. So first I just want to give credit to Uri Bronfenbrenner, who's the origin of that idea, who was one of the developmental psychologists, one of the founders of Head Start.
I don't know if you ever saw the Disney movie Encanto, but Encanto is all about a person who's struggling within a family dynamic. So the main character, Mirabelle, lives in a family in which everyone has a miraculous gift.
One person can read the future, another person can change the weather, another sister is super strong, and Mirabelle has no gift. and she feels early in the movie, like that means that she's less them.
That means that she maybe doesn't belong in the family, that she can't contribute to it at the least. And the family home metaphorically falls apart as her doubts are increasing.
But in the end, it's Mirabelle who pulls the family back together and rebuilds the family home on a firmer foundation. And the last song, the beautiful music by Lin-Manuel Miranda is the last song her mother sings to her, that there's this beautiful ceremony.
It's almost like a wedding ceremony where they have the new house and Maribel is going to be presented with a gift and her family and friends are lined up on two sides like an aisle. And she walks down the aisle, almost like a wedding, but it's not a wedding.
And they present her the doorknob of the front door for the house. And they sing that they love her just for who she is.
Just you is the refrain. And so that sense of unconditional regard that you are valuable just unto yourself and you can grow and you can do great things and we believe in that, but that is a firm foundation for love.
If you feel like classic research by my colleague Carol Dweck on fixed mindsets shows that when you praise children for their intelligence, you say, you're so smart. That makes children unresilient when they face setbacks.
So if you keep telling kids, oh, you're so smart, you're so smart, you're so smart, and then they fail at something, it's easy for them to infer, oh, maybe I don't have that magic ingredient smartness. Maybe I'm not so smart.
There's a similar dynamic with love itself. If the pretense is that you are loved or admired or respected or valued just because of some gift that you have, that's a shaky foundation for a relationship.
And so the start has to be that unconditional regard. Thank you so much for sharing that.
And I can't say I've ever watched the movie, but I'm now going to go look into it in more detail for sure. I recommend it, especially if you have an eight-year-old around.
Mine now is a little bit older. You can borrow one.
So as I was reading through the book, it became very clear that mentors have played a big role in your life. And you mentioned Eleanor McAbee.
And I was hoping you could share the story of her encouraging note, because I think it really captured how deeply small gestures can affect us in such a positive way.

I was a college sophomore at Stanford, and she, Eleanor McAbee, was a very prominent social and developmental psychologist at Stanford. And she was already retired when I was a sophomore, but she had written a new book.
The book is called The Two Sexes, Growing Up Apart and Coming Together. It's about childhood peer groups, what boys groups are like, what girls groups are like,

and then how those two groups come back together in adolescence. And so we read the kind of proofs of the book.
The book wasn't yet complete. And she was using our reading as final feedback as she made final edits to the manuscript itself.
And then a year later, she gave me a copy of the published book. And I opened that up and I looked and on the inside cover, she had written for Greg, who does think like a psychologist and may become one, Eleanor McAbee.
And that's a marvelous gift, right? It's this representation of who a person who I could become, and it helped me to organize my efforts to think about that. It helped me to understand that dream, to recognize that idea, and it helped me to organize my efforts at Stanford and after Stanford to start to work towards that image.
It gets to the heart of that Uri Bronfenbrenner quote,

every child needs at least one person who has an irrational attachment to them. There's sort of two things that I really appreciate about that in particular about that quote.
One is at least one adult, like having at least one adult, just one can make an enormous difference. And the second part is the word irrational.
It's particularly powerful when the young person is not there yet, when they're struggling, maybe they're getting into conflicts, they don't understand the math yet, they're having difficulty. And there's no basis yet for that faith that older person, that mentor can provide, but they can see in that person that potential.
And then showing that young person that potential, they give them a kind of North Star to work towards. That's at the heart of lots and lots of research, lots of field experimental research, including our work with Lifting the Bar and many other settings.
So Greg, I wanted to ask you a few questions, probing mattering. And earlier this week, I got to interview Gordon Flett, who I'm not sure if you're familiar with, but he wrote the book, The Psychology of Mattering.
And he and I were having this discussion around why so many people today feel so unseen and how do we become more intentional about genuinely seeing others in everyday life and we started talking about this concept of reciprocity that if you want to feel seen there's a need for you also to make other people feel seen and oftentimes that loop broken. And I wanted to see if this is something that you've run across in your own research.
I think sometimes, like one of, I think there's a lot of complexity here. There's a lot of reasons why people don't feel seen.
One, you can certainly talk about the way that social media has changed how people see each other, right? Social media is all about representations of self that go into a space and seeing other people's representations of self. That's a very foreign and different thing than what people have experienced in our communities and relationships over millennia.
It's a very different way to interact socially. I also think that a really important ingredient in this is stereotypes, because what a stereotype is literally a kind of pre-definition of a person.
It pre-defines who somebody is based on some category membership. And that pre-definition might be, it might be positive, but it might also be negative.
Either way, it's probably simplifying and kind of pigeonholing. And when people are interacting across lines that are defined by stereotypes, then it's very important that you create spaces, sometimes very intentionally, so that people have the ability in their interactions to have really honest, direct communications that say, here's who I am, here's what I'm working toward, here's how I had to be seen, and here's how we can interact well within this context.
So that people, two people, for example, can interact with their full humanity rather than just on the basis of simplifications. I agree with you.
And I think at times the whole concept gets overcomplicated because sometimes we're not trying hard enough and sometimes we're over trying. And I think there's a space between that more research and focus needs to be put on.
Yeah. Let me give you an example of that space between.
So like one in the psychological literature, there's a whole like research tradition on colorblindness and multiculturalism. So when people are thinking about how like race relations should work and how you should see each other across racial lines, like one kind of ideology is, oh, we should just see people for who they are, we should ignore color.
And another ideology is, oh, we should value and recognize the kind of identities that people have and maybe make those primary and surface them directly. And there's a way in which both of those ideologies in their extreme form are really problematic, right? So the colorblindness ideology can erase the real identities that people have, the lived experiences that they have that come from those identities, to pretend that everybody's the same when they're not, to pretend that real inequalities don't exist, for example, when they really do.
It can erase important aspects of people's self. But the other side of that can also be pigeonholing.
If all is somebody's group identity, then you don't actually see the person as a whole person either. All is, for example, a white woman or a gay man or an African-American woman.
You just see a category. You don't actually see their full humanity.
So what we need to get to in general is we need to be able to recognize that identities and group identities and backgrounds are important and play a role, but that we're also always interacting with individual people who have their individual goals and dreams and aspirations and background and personalities and foibles and quibbles and silliness and everything else, right? So we actually have to have human kinds of connections. I couldn't agree more.
And thank you so much for sharing that. One of the things that you do in the book is in each of the parts, you explain answers to the questions that you ask in the parts.
But then at the end of some of the parts, you then go into applying it to things that are really paramount right now in society. And we talked about, as we started your experience in Indonesia and seeing poverty, et cetera.
So one of the things that you look at in depth is global poverty and aid. And you really go into the work of Catherine Thomas's research, noting, because the show talks a lot about intentions, that intentions are not impact.
And through the lens of poverty and programs, how can aid programs specifically better align intentions with positive, respectful outcomes? One of the things that Catherine did is she did a series of studies, low-income settlements in Nairobi, and she brought residents of these settlements into a lab space, essentially, and she gave them aid. So she gave them a small amount of cash aid, what's called an unconditional cash transfer.
And what she did was she just manipulated how she represented that aid. And in one case, the representation was the standard kind of representation that you see when you're thinking about aid, the kind of representation that dominates aid programs generally, which is we're giving you this money because you're poor, basically.
People are in need, people have need, and so therefore we're giving people money. And that has a certain logic to it, right? But put yourself on the other end of the stick.
Imagine yourself being the recipient of that, receiving a handout because you're poor. That's marginalizing.
It marginalizes the agency that you have, the strength that you have to work towards your goals. So Catherine tested two alternatives.
And the alternatives, people again received the same aid, but she represented it specifically in terms of the agency of the people who are receiving that aid. We're giving you this aid so you can work towards your goals.
We're giving you this aid so you can work toward and support your community's goals. And with that, people felt far better upon receiving the aid.
They were more confident in their ability to succeed in their major goals in life. They were more likely, they felt less stigmatized, and they were more likely when they were given the choice to watch videos that were fun, silly videos like soccer highlights or little comedy sketches, or to watch videos that were showing teaching business skills relevant in the local informal economy, like how to calculate profit, how to invest in a business.
People who received the agency-focused representations were more likely to watch those second kind of business development videos. So often when we give aid, we are implicitly or explicitly saying to people, we're giving you this because you're pathetic and you need the money.
And that's a double-edged sword. People may need the money, people may be desperate, but that undermines their agency at a time when they really need that strength and agency to work upward and contend with the challenges that life has presented them.
So the lesson from that work is about giving aid explicitly in terms of the agency and the strength of the people who are receiving it and their ability to execute on that. It's really about stepping back and not letting yourself as the aid giver be dominant in that narrative and allow the recipient of that narrative to really be dominant in it.
I'm just going off a memory here, but if I remember correctly, Thomas's work found that 90% of poverty alleviation programs emphasized weakness and vulnerability. So it was almost a disrespectful.
I think it's 97%. And I liked how, which goes on to what you were just talking about, you emphasize that the best aid makes the helper invisible.
I think that's a really important thing because we don't think about marginalizing people as we're giving this help. There's a beautiful example of that by a researcher, Niall Bolger, who's at Columbia, who many years ago did work on couples in which one member of the couple is studying for the bar exam.
So imagine your spouse is studying for the bar exam. They've gone through law school.
Now they have this very intense couple months stretch where they're just going to be in the books all day and you're their spouse. And what that research finds is that what's especially effective is when the spouse is providing support to that test taker that's invisible, that the test taker themselves doesn't recognize.
Maybe that means like cooking dinner every night, taking care of the kids. Maybe that means clearing the schedule so that your spouse can do it.
Maybe that means like talking them through challenges, like giving them the kind of pep talk that they might need when they're doubting themselves. But to do it in a way that is actually invisible to the recipient allows that recipient to really develop their efficacy and their confidence and not to attribute their success to your

kind of heavy-handed support for them.

So lighter touch is often more effective.

Thank you so much for sharing that advice, because I think it's something that we assume

you should do the opposite instead of the lighter touch approach. That's right.
Yeah, I think that gets us in trouble sometimes. So I wanted to switch the conversation to trust, cooperation, and relationships.
You emphasize the importance of starting interactions by assuming the best, which sometimes it's hard to do. And it makes me think of Jamil Zaki's work on cynicism because we're often starting relationships off being cynical.
But how can approaching people with trust intentionally transform our daily relationships? Sometimes it's easy to see this, right? So imagine that you're in a new, you've started to date, you're dating somebody new, but in the back of your mind, you're constantly thinking, maybe they don't really respect me. Maybe they don't really want to be with me.
Maybe they're not going to be faithful to me. If you are beginning the relationship with those questions, then that is a risky position to be in.
It means that when your partner does something that might be a little careless or a little unkind, you take that as what I call in the book a tiff bit, a tiny fact, a big theory. You take it as evidence of the fear that you have.
And that undermines relationships over time. That causes you to spiral down.
So it's very important to start then with trust, to start with the positive expectations. That doesn't mean that you want to be blind to problems in relationships.
And other research shows that it's also true that a blind faith in relationships is really problematic. A researcher named Jim McNulty, for example, has shown that usually good qualities in relationships like forgiveness are recipes for disaster when people are with a partner who is treating them in a somewhat careless or negative manner.
If you forgive those people repeatedly, you don't keep them in bounds and maintain the equilibrium that you need in the relationship. So you also do need to be able to respond to challenges in the relationship and stand up for yourself and say, this is what I need.
Jim summarizes it sometimes as never do that again. I forgive you, but don't do that again.
There's this kind of balance that we need in relationships. It's an idea that goes back a long time in intellectual history.
So it goes back to the tit for tat strategy and game theory, if you want to talk about that. But it's the same kind of dynamic of begin nice, but respond when there are threats to the good patterns in the relationship.
So maybe we can turn that into some type of exercise for the listeners. Does anything jump off the page for you that we could experiment with? One of the things I'll do go from research here.
One researcher named Denise Marigold, who's a leading scholar of close relationships, has developed an intervention that is designed to help partners really feel the love that exists within their relationship, and especially at times when that might be at risk. So in one of her studies, she brings dating couples in.
So these are serious dating couples, and she's going to have them have a conversation about the most significant conflict in their relationship. But before she does that, she has each member of the couple reflect on a time when their

partner gave them a compliment in the relationship and how that reflects something significant

about how their partner, about the regard that their partner holds for them.

So if it's you and me in this dynamic, we would each separately think about that.

I think, oh, here's a time John said something really, he really likes my book and that makes

me feel really good. And that reflects his regard for me.
And you would think about something for yourself. And then we would come back together and we would say, okay, what's a conflict that we have? And we would then talk through that conflict.
And what Denise shows in this research is that when couples have that chance to first get grounded in the love in the relationship, those conflict conversations are far better. They're not cynical.
They're not destructive. People aren't being sarcastic or contemptful for each other.
It's not that they're avoiding the conflict, but they're productive and constructive and engaging with it. There's more humor in the conversation.
People are on the same page working out the details of working together and being a couple.

To me, one lesson from that is that that's really interesting and that's a technique that you could use. But the second thing that is powerful about that is that it implies that one of the reasons why conflict conversations go awry, like why they become destructive, is because at root, there is this basic worry that one or both members of the couple might have

about... like why they become destructive is because at root, there is this basic worry that one or both members of the couple might have about the regard that their partner holds for them.
And so you might think that you're just talking about the fact that your partner's like late a lot and that bothers you and it's inconvenient, but actually you might be talking about the fact that you feel like your partner doesn't really love you. And if that's really what it is that you're talking about, it's a lot harder to have a productive conversation about the lateness.
So if you can address that worry, you can quell that through that kind of exercise and then come back together to constructively talk about the problematic behavior, whatever it might be, you can do that in a much more efficient manner. That's interesting.
A few years ago, I did a whole bunch of episodes on relationships and I was talking to all these relationship experts. And I remember this conversation with John Kim and Vanessa Bennett, who happened to be married to each other.
And I asked them that question of what do they consider causes the most issues in relationships. And a lot of people were telling me it's money, it's this and that.
And what both of them felt, it was competition between the two people, which kind of lends a little bit to what you were talking about. That's interesting.
Yeah. So one of the things I wanted to make sure we talked about was my kids are now 21 and 26.
But when I look back upon them growing up, I always thought high school was going to be the hardest time because for me, that transition was really difficult. But it seems like today for a lot of kids, middle school is that huge impact period.
And I know it was for both of my kids. And in the book, you write, the joke is that middle school is a time of decline in all things.
Kids' grades and motivation, their self-esteem and body satisfaction, teachers' patience, peace and quiet on the home front. But there's one exception.
It's also when conflict and disciplinary problems spike. And then you highlight your time in sixth grade, and I was hoping you might take it from there.
I took a German class in sixth grade, and I had a teacher who I liked very much. He was a new teacher.
His name was Herr Schmidt, Mr. Smith.
And Herr Schmidt taught in a portable classroom at our school. And one day, a kid in the class, the class was completely out of control and Herr Schmidt had no idea how to control it.
And he exited the classroom via the window. He opened up the window and he rolled himself through the window and Herr Schmidt had no ability to control it.
Later in sixth grade, I had a conversation at lunch with my friends about the difference between walking and running. We decided that the difference was whether both feet were off the ground at the same time that would be running.
And then we sped walked down the hall and then the assistant principal, who I already hated, said to us, no running in the hallway. And all my friends said, we're sorry.
And I said, I wasn't running. I was walking.
And then she said, you have an attitude. And I thought, of course I have an attitude.
How could I not have an attitude? What would it mean to not have an attitude? I think in middle school, like a whole bunch of stuff is happening at once. One thing is that kids are, you know, you no longer have one teacher.
You have lots of teachers. They don't know you as well.
Another thing is that you're becoming more aware of the world and how groups work in the world, you're looking towards an adult world, not just the kind of close family world. Kids become more aware, for example, of racial stereotypes in middle school, and they, and kids of color become aware of how those stereotypes can put them in a box can const constrain them.
They might have heard stories from an uncle or an aunt or a parent or a cousin or an older sibling who had a bad experience in school who felt like they were judged in light of a negative stereotype. Line of research finds that over the course of seventh grade, African-American students trust in teachers in general declines over the course of the year.
And that predicts disciplinary citations in eighth grade. So the more that kids' trust is declining over the course of seventh grade, the more they are getting in trouble in eighth grade.
And that seems to be predicted in part by things like the perception of bias, racial bias in teachers' behavior in middle school. So one of the things, this is going to bring us back a little bit to the beginning, one of the things that's really powerful then is at that key juncture in the beginning of seventh grade is for kids to get back to a positive and growth-oriented and trusting basis for relationships with teachers.
There's lots of ways to do that. One way to do that, though, is to look at a particular juncture of when a teacher is giving a student critical feedback.
So a teacher is taking a student's essay, they've marked up the essay, and they're giving it back to the student. And research finds that usually what teachers do is they just say something like, hey, here's your essay with your feedback on it.
And the problem is for a kid who's becoming aware of stereotypes, who's becoming particularly concerned about being treated in disrespectful ways, that might feel like a ton of bricks. And it might feel like maybe this person views me through the lens of a stereotype.
Maybe they think my whole group can't do it. So when teachers then say, I'm giving you this feedback because I have high standards and I know that you can meet them, particularly when it's a white teacher giving that feedback to a black student, that can sustain students' trust over the rest of the school year.
And then it can have this litany of downstream benefits. It reduces conflicts in eighth grade.
Kids are more likely to get on track, to be on track or above track performance levels in the transition to high school. And literally that one note at the beginning of seventh grade in one randomized controlled trial increased the rate at which African-American kids went to a four-year college on time after high school.
So like getting that transition right, getting back to that belief that the teacher has in you, it can change a person's life. Thank you for sharing that.
And I didn't want to leave this discussion without going back to the work that you and your colleague, Jeff Cohen, did. Because as I was reading this chapter, you went back in grad school and you and he put stories together that you heard in a little package for new sixth graders.
And what I thought was interesting here is that you told them that almost all the seventh graders said that they had worried at first that they did not fit in or belong in the sixth grade. But when you went back and asked them at the end of the year, they almost say to a person that they now know that they fit in and belong.
I remember being in fifth grade and thinking about the middle school that I would go to. It seems very large and there were going to be all these new kids and all these new teachers, and I was going to have to find my way and I might get lost.
And we knew that those feelings that anybody has in the transition can get laced with worries about racial mistrust and whether teachers are going to have your back and whether they'll be supportive of you and whether they'll value you there. So they might be particularly present for kids of color.
So we did these interviews with seventh grade students. We heard their stories about that transition.
And then we retold those stories as parables for a new group of sixth graders. What we found then was that particularly for African-American kids, African-American boys, in our control condition where they didn't get this belonging content, they showed this rise over the course of sixth grade in disciplinary citations for subjective things.
This is being cited for things like being disrespectful or disobedient. And then when seventh grade started, they started the year low in disciplinary citations, but they again showed the same rise, this spiral going essentially a spiral downward of conflict with adults.
And at the end of seventh grade, they started to conclude that the school was racist, that they didn't belong there. And then when eighth grade started, it was just all bad.
They had high levels of these subjective citations, high levels of objective citations. They felt like they didn't belong from the beginning of the year.
But when we did that belonging exercise, when we shared stories that made it normal, that it's

worried, you can worry at first about whether you belong in the transition to the big middle school,

that it can get better with time, that you can learn that teachers have your back, then Black boys never showed those patterns. They never showed that spike in conflict in sixth grade.
they didn't show it in seventh grade. They didn't conclude that they didn't belong at the end of seventh grade.
And when eighth grade started, they were good and they stayed good. And so that was a two 30-minute sessions, two 25 to 30-minute sessions at the beginning of sixth grade.
And the ultimate effect was to reduce disciplinary citations for black boys over the next seven years through the end of high school. And it was all about how they were thinking about their relationships with teachers and whether teachers could be trusted and would support them, whether or not it was normal to have worries about that and whether that could improve with time.
Thank you, Greg, for sharing all that. It's incredible research and it was one of my favorite chapters.
And I just wanted to ask you one more thing about the spotlight you did on improving school for the most vulnerable children. And I'm going to read from here.

You say for a decade, our team has worked in Oakland with groups of young people, most vulnerable to being misseen or unseen in school.

Working hand in hand with educators and youth groups, we create a platform for children to introduce or reintroduce themselves to an adult in school who could support them in their learning and growth. And what I liked about this is that you write that this approach draws on the trust and belonging work that helped tweens forecast and then build better relationships with teachers.
Can you describe this?

You call it empathy mixed with discipline and how that works? Yes. The lifting the bar intervention, which is the focus of that spotlight, integrates conceptually that belonging work for tweens, plus an intervention that my former student, Jason Akanafua, who is a professor now at Brown University, developed for teachers.
And the goal of that empathic discipline intervention was to give teachers an ideal representation of how to work with kids when they misbehave, that is to pull them closer, to listen to them and understand where they're coming from, even when they're being irrational, to stay in those relationships and support their growth from within those relationships. And that intervention has now been tested three times.
A new trial just came out from the United Kingdom two months ago, led by a team in England. And it reduces suspension rates for kids reliably.
So kids whose math teacher in middle school gets randomized to that intervention versus a control are less likely to get suspended from anywhere in the school environment that year and even into the next year in our data. So the lifting the bar intervention, like the empathic discipline intervention, is trying to elicit from teachers their very best

teacher self, like the ideal representation of what it means to be a great teacher for a kid who might be struggling. And to do that, what we do is we create a platform for kids to be able to say who they are, their goals and values in school, and the challenges they face directly to an adult who they choose who might be able to help them.

And so this is getting to the irrationality in that Uri Bronfenbrenner quotes. Imagine you're teaching 10th grade English, and you'd get told by the principal, this kid's coming back to school, he's going to be in your class from juvenile detention.
Like, all you know is that this kid was in juvie, And that's a really powerful stereotype in American society. Anybody would have thoughts like, what problems is this child going to cause? Is he going to be disruptive? Does he even care? Might he even be violent? I wonder what crime he committed.
There's all sorts of thoughts that are not healthy thoughts for a teacher to have if they want to have a strong relationship with the student that actually helps the student grow. And the worst part is the student is fully aware of those thoughts too, right? This is a palpable stereotype that's in the air, and the student is worried they're going to be seen in that light, and the teacher is vulnerable to that, and there they are, and it's not good.
And so what we do in Lifting the Bar is we create a platform that's designed to get teachers into that place of irrational faith. So the platform ultimately produces a series of questions for the student where they're asked, okay, who's an adult in school who isn't yet but could be an important source of support for you? And what would you like that person to know about who you are as a person, the values you have in school, the goals that you have in school, challenges you face that they can help with.
And kids produce, it's hard to describe just how beautiful what kids write here. They say things like, I want Ms.
Sanchez, my math teacher, to know that I'm a good kid and I like to learn and I'm struggling with the math because I haven't been in school very much and I have trouble paying attention sometimes and I'd help with that. It's very simple, right? The kids are saying to adults they care and they're saying to adults, here's how you can begin to help me and support me in my transition back to school.
And then we give that content to that teacher. So we write a letter to that teacher, and the letter says, all kids need strong relationships in school, especially when they're in difficult circumstances.
This child has chosen you to be that adult for them, and here's what they would like you to know about them. Please help this child in their transition back to school.
Help them in their relationships with other people. And the letter itself is very much treating the teachers as the professionals they are.
There's no accountability here. There's no reports that the teachers have to file.
There's nothing in particular that the teachers have to do. The only ask in the letter is, please reach out to the students soon.
And then the letter says, thank you for your work. You're on the front lines for all of our children.
It's just asking a teacher to stand up and be the professional that they are. And when we give teachers that letter, they do stand up.
In fact, like about a third to a half of the time that we hand deliver the letter, teachers actually cry upon receiving the letter. We had a delivery in Chicago public schools not long ago.
Our partner in Chicago delivered the letter. The teacher didn't cry, but the teacher said, I think you've made my week.
And then the teacher said, no, I think you've made my year. It's like the opportunity to be that person for a young person is the reason why one goes into teaching.
It's not for anything else. It's obviously not for the pay or the comfy working conditions or something, right? It's like the opportunity to actually be that adult who can make a difference for a young person in need.
And what the intervention does is it unleashes that potential that's in the teacher and that's in the student that is otherwise stymied and they can't connect because the stereotype is driving them apart. We found in our first randomized controlled trial that this reduced recidivism.
So kids who got this letter delivered were 40 percentage points less likely to recidivate back to juvenile detention than kids who didn't get the letter delivered. So it can, I think, be profoundly important.
Man, that's a huge impact. Greg, we've had a really fascinating conversation today today and one of the things that i love that you did with the book is you followed advice that i got from dan heath who i was asking him advice on how i should write the book i'm working on now we were talking about approach and he said the biggest thing you need to do is you need to keep following the questions I loved how in a lot of the ends of your chapters, you outline all the questions that you answer.
I guess my final question to you would be, as you were going through this book, what do you think is the most important question of all? I think the Barbie movie was like, summed it up. Am I enough? Am I enough? There's lots of ways that people don't feel enough.
You don't feel like you belong. You don't feel like you're the right kind of person.
You don't feel like you can really trust somebody. And there's lots of forms of that question.
You feel like you're treated as less than, but that in some ways is the higher order question. I also appreciate your emphasizing to follow the questions.
I think there's so much of our lives today that involves blame, that's pejorative, and it would be easy to look at a teacher, say, who's reacting in a punitive, hostile manner to a student and judge them and say that there's something wrong with them. But I think what's really important is to understand how and why these questions come up for all of us in circumstances, whether it's a question like, does my partner really love me when you're having a conflict conversation? Or whether it's a question like, is this kid just an F up as they come back to school from juvenile detention? That these are reasonable questions.
It doesn't help us to suppress them and push them away. Instead, we can see them.
We can understand that they're coming from the context that we face, the culture that we live in. We don't have to be defensive about them.
And when we do that, and when we put them in the space between us, you can say, I'm struggling with this question. How can I think about this question? You can do that for yourself.
You can do that with a friend. That's how we make progress.
That's how we start to spiral up. It was such an honor to have you today, Greg.

Congratulations again on the book. And I have to say out of all the people I've had on this podcast,

you have been one of the richest bringing in other people's research into your answers. So

thank you for doing that. And thank you for joining us.

Thank you, John. This is coming from a whole community of people who are fantastic.
It certainly is. And your work is so important.
And I love how much of it that you're focused on kids and school environments and helping teachers connect better with kids so that they truly feel like they do belong. So thank you for bringing this work into the world.
Thank you. And that's a wrap.
What an incredible conversation with Dr.

Greg Walton. His insights into the power of small acts, the science of belief, and the importance

of intentional empathy are truly life-changing. Greg reminds us that the journey to mattering

doesn't require grand gestures. It begins with the quiet, daily decisions to see others, to believe in them, and to be present.
As we close, I encourage you to reflect on a few questions. How can you show belief in someone without taking their agency away? What small act can you take today to reinforce connection and trust? And who in your life needs to be reminded that they matter? If today's conversation moved you, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating and review.
It's one of the best ways to support the show and help these messages reach more people. And if someone in your life could benefit from Greg's wisdom, share this episode.
It might be the moment they need most. For links, highlights, and resources, including Greg's book, Ordinary Magic, visit the show notes at passionstruck.com.
And if you want to dive deeper, watch the full episode on my YouTube channel, where you'll find even more inspiring content. Be sure to hit subscribe while you're there.
And if you're interested in bringing these insights to your organization or team, visit johnrmiles.com speaking to learn more about how we can partner for intentional change. And lastly, please check out our sponsors at passionstruck.com slash deals and support them if you love their products, because supporting them helps me bring the show to you at no cost.
Coming up next on Passion Struck, I'm joined by Dr. Christy Smith.
We discuss why now more than ever is the time to embrace the future of human powered leadership. It's a conversation about purpose, people, and what it means to lead with humanity in a world that's changing fast.
We are living in unprecedented times and have been living in this for the last five years, really, since the pandemic, and maybe a little bit before that. And what makes it unprecedented? Well, we are seeing a super cycle of change happening in the market, happening in our socio-political and economic conditions around the world, which really challenge leaders to fundamentally have to lead differently.
And remember, the fee for the show is simple. If you found value here,

share it. Most importantly, put what you learned into action because knowledge alone doesn't change the world.
Action does. Until next time, live life passion struck.

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