Ep 195: The Mindset of Success

Ruth Gotian, author of The Success Factor, explains how teens can cultivate the right mindset for success. Plus, how our kids can figure out their life’s purpose and find strong mentors to guide them. If you've enjoyed Talking to Teens, we'd love if you could leave us a five-star rating, and if you have time, a review!  Full show notes We want our kids to be successful: find and excel at their passions, achieve remarkable things and of course, make enough money to be independent from us! But how can we help them get there? Some teens have plenty of ambition but can’t quite match it with work ethic. Others seem pretty apathetic to their future career, and some just don’t know what to do with their lives!  Whatever situation your teen is in, the road to success is bound to be a rocky one. 

Luckily, there are ways we can help our teens make success a reality! Teens can achieve anything–if we just guide them towards developing the right mindset. There are tools we can use to help lost teens find their spark, and bring already ambitious teens even closer to their dreams and goals.

Our guest this week is here to share some incredible tips for cultivating a prosperous life! Her name is Ruth Gotian, and she’s the author of The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Business Performance. Ruth is the Chief Learning Officer and an Assistant Professor of Education in Anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medicine. Her work is featured regularly in Forbes, Psychology Today, and the Harvard Business Review, and she is internationally recognized as an influential thinker in the world of management and leadership.

In our interview, we’re talking about how teens can develop the right mindset for success. We’re also discussing how we can help teens find their life’s passion and why mentors and social circles are so critical to finding success. How Our Mindset Can Make or Break Us When we talk about becoming successful people, we tend to talk about habits. We imagine waking up at 5 AM to exercise, mediate, drink green smoothies and watch the stock market. Then we try all that….and it we just end up tired, hungry and still far from successful! While these habits can help some people, they’re realistically not for everyone, says Ruth–especially not for teens! With the grueling schedule of high school, homework and extracurriculars, these kinds of habits are only going to exhaust them, not bring them closer to success.

Instead, Ruth suggests that we help teens emulate the same mindset, but figure out their own habits. She recommends we prompt teens to evaluate their schedule to figure out the hours in which they’re the most productive–which is likely not 5 AM! Ruth refers to these as “peak performance hours”, when teens can do the most challenging active tasks. Then, during times when they typically get more tired, they can schedule in some passive tasks like answering emails or reviewing flashcards! Figuring out how to optimize productivity is one of the most essential parts of having a success-oriented mindset.

In the episode, Ruth and I also discuss how the right mindset can help teens block out negativity! Ruth explains how we can act like either teflon or velcro when someone tries to bring us down. If we act like velcro, we allow their negative words to stick to us all day and make us feel less than. But if we decide to adopt a teflon mindset, we can deflect their comments, and let them slide off of us without a care. Easier said than done though, right? In our interview, Ruth shares some tips for adopting this teflon mentality.

Even if teens have the ambition and mindset for success, they might not know what to apply it to! It’s not always easy for teens to find their purpose, but with Ruth’s help, we can guide teens to figure out their life’s passion. Helping Teens Find Their “Why” It can be frustrating when teens seem to quit everything they try, leading us to wonder if they’ll ever figure out what they’re passionate about. Ruth encourages us to be patient and let them try lots of things until they discover  what’s right for them. Doing this allows teens to find their “why”, which Ruth defines as the underlying motivation for anything and everything they do. In her work with med students, Ruth has found that those with the strongest “why” are the ones who persevere through every challenge.

For some people, their “why” is self-improvement, pushing them to become great athletes or musicians. Others may have lost a loved one to an illness, and want to join the medical field to help others in need. Some are angered and saddened by injustice, leading them to become lawyers or politicians. The sooner your teen can figure out what gets them out of bed in the morning and motivates them to work hard, the sooner they’ll start seeing successes in their lives. 

In the interview, Ruth and I talk about how teens often don’t feel passionate about what they’re learning in school–and how we can change that. As an educator and former PhD student herself, Ruth knows what makes students thrive or struggle. She explains that subject based learning, where teens master facts and numbers, doesn’t quite stick the same way as applied learning. When young adults understand how they can actually use the information being taught to them, they’re much more likely to retain it. We discuss this further in the episode!

If teens have the right mindset and a passion-fuelled goal to work towards, they can also benefit immensely from having mentors and the right social circle. Why Mentors and Peers Make a Difference It can be pretty hard for teens to find strong mentors, but it’s often because they’re not looking in the right places, says Ruth. Teens often search for people with whom they share many similarities, but oftentimes those people aren’t going to help teens break out of their comfort zones and consider new perspectives, says Ruth. Ideally, teens should have lots of different mentors from different industries and corners of life. Together, these people can shape your teen in individual ways that are altogether greater than the sum of their parts.

Ruth advises against asking someone outright to be a mentor. This can make people feel nervous or uncomfortable, and they may not feel like they have time for another commitment in their busy life! Instead, she suggests that teens simply ask them for help with a specific task, and demonstrate how interested they are in the achievement at hand. For example, if teens want to become educators, asking a teacher for some college teaching program recommendations could be a great way to show a possible mentor that they’ve got ambitions and may need some advice!

Ruth and I also talk a lot about how the right social circle can either elevate a teen to success or bring them down. When they’re spending time with other high achievers, they’re constantly surrounded by a high standard. This encourages them to push themselves towards their full potential. Teens who spend time with slackers might not see the value of striving towards success when the standard set by their peers is lower. Finding the right set of peers is one of the most important parts of becoming a successful individual, says Ruth. In The Episode… Ruth has a lot of great advice, whether your teen is a go-getter or still needs a little push to reach their potential. On top of the topics discussed above, we also talk about….