High standards, high support: the mentor mindset behind great teaching

The Short Version

The best teachers, coaches and parents don't choose between being demanding and being kind; they do both at once. Psychologist David Yeager calls this the mentor mindset: hold a very high standard and make it clear you believe the young person can reach it with your help, rather than acting as an "enforcer" (high standards, no support) or a "protector" (support, but a lowered bar) [1]. Joe Liemandt built Alpha School's adult training on exactly this framework and argues that high standards are the source of students' happiness, not a threat to it [2]. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang describes the same balance from the neuroscience side: adults should wrap around young people so they can grapple with hard questions, in spaces safe enough for real thinking [3]. Andrew Huberman's review of the mindset research explains why it works: praising effort and treating struggle as a sign of growth keeps young people reaching for harder problems instead of protecting a label [4].

Table of contents

What They Said

David Yeager: the mentor's dilemma and how to solve it

Yeager, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, starts from what he calls the mentor's dilemma, drawing on research by Geoffrey Cohen and Claude Steele [1]. Leaders, teachers, coaches and parents find it hard to criticize someone's work and motivate them at the same time [1]. The obvious options seem to be a demanding, autocratic style or a low-standards pushover style [1]. The research answer is to pair an appeal to a very high standard with an assurance that the person can meet it with support [1].

His analogy is the roller coaster sign. Saying "you have to be this tall" and walking away isn't reassuring; saying here is the standard, and I believe you can reach it, is [1]. In small studies, seventh graders were about twice as likely to use a teacher's critical feedback on their essays when it came with that brief message [1]. Yeager names the two failure modes: the enforcer, with high standards and no support, and the protector, who cares but lowers standards to spare someone stress [1]. The mentor mindset takes the best of both [1]. He is careful to say it isn't about magic words; it's about the experience of being taken seriously, with dignity and respect, at a vulnerable moment by someone who has power over you [1]. Huberman connects this to Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture, where the time to worry is when your coaches stop pushing you, and to Dr. Becky Kennedy's idea that parents can hold high expectations and love their kids at the same time [1].

Yeager's broader work explains why support has to be the right kind. Growth mindset, he says, is "simply the belief that your abilities or your potential in some domain can change", but the common misunderstanding is that trying hard means you can do anything [1]. The real idea is that "under the right conditions with the right support change is possible" [1]. That sentence contains both halves of the mentor mindset: change is expected (the standard), and conditions and support make it possible.

He also shows how a well-meant push can backfire. Many people hold what Carol Dweck calls effort beliefs: "the belief that if it's hard it means you're doing the wrong thing" [1]. If someone believes effort signals a lack of ability and you tell them to try harder, you are effectively telling them they have no potential [1]. So a high standard delivered without a new understanding of struggle lands as a verdict, not an invitation.

His evidence for brief, respectful interventions is strong. In a 2019 study in Nature with Dweck, Greg Walton, Angela Duckworth and others, ninth graders did two sessions of about 25 minutes each, and eight or nine months later earned better grades and were more likely to be in harder math classes by tenth grade; unpublished results show effects four years later on graduating with college-ready courses [1]. The study was built for skeptics: a third party processed the data, schools were a random sample, and analyses were pre-registered [1]. Such sessions must persuade without making people feel talked down to [1]. Yeager jokes about a statistician who spent 25 minutes telling his son everything he was doing wrong, only for the boy to forget it five minutes later [1]. Lecturing, condescending messages don't stick [1].

Crucially, the mindset lasted only where the environment backed it up: schools with supportive classroom cultures and, in the four-year results, schools that offered advanced courses [1]. If a student wants pre-calculus and the school doesn't offer it, the mindset can't do much [1]. Support, for Yeager, includes structural resources, not just encouragement [1]. He calls growth mindset asset-based rather than deficit-based: it assumes people already want to learn and removes the barrier of being made to feel dumb for struggling [1].

Stress fits into the same model. Yeager distinguishes the stressor, the appraisal of it, and the stress response [1]. A threat response happens when you judge the demand to be more than you can handle; a challenge response happens when you believe you have the resources to meet it [1]. The key, he argues, isn't finding the perfect level of difficulty but matching the demand with a belief that you have resources, whether confidence, the ability to reappraise, time, training or a friend to turn to [1]. That is the mentor mindset in physiological terms: a high demand plus perceived support produces challenge instead of threat. Drawing on Alia Crum and Jeremy Jamieson, his team teaches people to read a racing heart as the body sending more oxygenated blood to brain and muscles, thinking "this is actually a sign that I'm preparing to optimize my performance", rather than "being stressed about being stressed" [1]. He notes that most stress advice tells people to distract themselves with a walk or a bubble bath, when someone about to present should instead get ready to do well [1].

Yeager's model example is physicist Keivan Stassun's lab at Vanderbilt, whose Fisk-Vanderbilt bridge program admits students regardless of GRE scores [1]. About 85% go on to the PhD program, and his lab produced the first Black first author on a Nature physics paper [1]. Weekly lab meetings involve everyone critiquing a trainee's figures and writing, very demanding, but always from a place of belief in the student's potential [1]. Yeager adds that standardized tests often reflect coaching and school quality more than ability, and what matters is how students are mentored once they arrive [1]. The opposite is what Mary Murphy calls a culture of genius, where people trash others so they won't be attacked themselves and fear of mistakes leads to hiding them; Yeager cites Satya Nadella's line about needing a culture of learn-it-alls rather than know-it-alls [1].

Adolescence raises the stakes. In the teen years, the recipe for feeling better shifts from parents' approval to social standing and contribution value in the wider group [1]. Teenagers called lazy are often the ones waking at 4 a.m. to train for the Olympics or practicing guitar for hours [1]. Respect is the currency: a mentor who treats a teenager as capable is speaking to that drive. So is purpose. Rather than leaning on fear of loss, Yeager cites Dale Miller's "norm of self-interest", our habit of assuming everyone acts selfishly and appealing only to that [1]. San Antonio Spurs shooting coach Chip Engelland didn't threaten players with lost millions; he pointed out that "the average time in the league is two and a half years", and that a reliable shot could mean a ten-year career that helps a player's family and his family's family [1]. In experiments with Duckworth and others, students told that tedious math would help them build skills to contribute to others learned more deeply, persisted longer and earned higher grades [1]. Purely selfless appeals didn't work; the winning message combined personal benefit with contribution [1]. He quotes Viktor Frankl: "the person who knows the why for their existence is able to bear any how" [1]. Huberman's reaction: "I think this is one of the most important concepts frankly ever discussed on this podcast" [1].

Joe Liemandt and Alpha School: high standards are why kids love school

Liemandt, principal of Alpha School, says the school makes three commitments to kids, and the first is that they will love school [2]. More than 90 percent of students say they do, and when asked whether they'd rather go to school or on vacation, between 40 and 60 percent choose school [2]. At the same time, he says Alpha is the number one academic school in the country, with every grade level in the top 1% in every subject and a freshman honors track averaging 1,400 on the SAT [2]. Parents ask whether that means high stress. His answer: "the key to your child's happiness is high standards", and "I can't run a school that they love more than vacation if I have low standards" [2]. He calls that tension "the magic of Alpha school" [2]. "Kids want to do hard things. Kids have to do hard things," he says [2].

He credits Yeager directly. Yeager's book, he says, "is all about high standards and high support", and Yeager created Alpha's guide training: "all the adults in our buildings follow that" [2]. He describes the same two failure modes Yeager does. Most parents, he says, "They're either high standards, low support. I'm just going to throw my kid and expect them to do great. And that's not good. Or they're low standards, high support. I never want my kid to have stress. That's bad too. And the real answer is you do both." [2] "School should have high standards and high support," he adds, and "great coaches do that" [2].

His theory of development is a loop: "The key to developing a child is that they struggle and fail on their road to success supported by a caring adult." [2] Alpha builds that loop into life-skills challenges. Kindergartners climb a 40-foot rock wall; at the San Francisco campus, kids learned to ride a bike and rode five miles across the Golden Gate Bridge without stopping [2]. Ten weeks into school, some kindergartners get stuck halfway up the wall, worried, "And the parents want to go rescue them." [2] The point is not to rescue, but to make sure the environment is safe, with "the adult in charge is making sure it's not low standards" [2]. According to Liemandt, 85% of Alpha parents said they saw their child do something they thought was impossible for their age [2].

When Huberman pushes on what "support" really means, Liemandt's answer is individualized instruction [2]. Sports already works this way: coaches give direct, individual instruction, demand reps, and insist on fundamentals [2]. If a player loses the ball 20% of the time, the coach works on ball handling, not dunks; in school, an 80% grade in fourth grade means moving on to fifth-grade material while the gaps compound [2]. He cites Bloom's 2 Sigma finding that individual tutoring to mastery can bring students to roughly top-2% performance, and stresses that mastery is half the effect, the half people forget [2]. AI tutors, not chatbots, make that affordable, assessing what a child knows and generating lessons at their level [2]. Alpha students averaged 121 minutes a day in the apps last year and, he reports, learned more than twice what peers learned in a full school day plus homework [2].

Support also means removing shame and mental blocks. Huberman highlights that individualized learning means nobody knows an eighth grader is working on third-grade material [2]. Liemandt says schools should be measured on growth rate rather than raw achievement, and the adults' job is to find and remove each child's blocks, such as "I'm not a math person." [2] Students transferring from expensive private schools averaged 2.2 grade levels behind, but because a grade level in one subject takes 20 to 30 hours for K–8 students, he says a gap of years can be closed in months [2].

And support means human beings. Liemandt says AI frees guides to do what teachers originally signed up for: developing kids [2]. Alpha moms, he says, describe the most socialization-rich environment possible, "It's because of the guides, the humans, the culture, the building." [2] 100,000 people applied for guide roles last year, including former teachers, top athletes and coaches, anyone great at motivating kids [2]. The result he wants parents to see: "my kid is being held to high standards but loves it and is struggling through it" [2].

Alpha's approach to motivation includes one controversial tool. Liemandt bet his daughter, who didn't see herself as a math-and-science kid, $1,000, and she reached the top 1% and later said it changed how she saw herself [2]. His "100 for 100" program paid seventh graders $100 for each perfect state-test score, starting at third grade, motivating them to fill gaps [2]. He believes paying for a breakthrough can create intrinsic motivation afterward, though some Alpha parents object [2]. On suffering, his view is that if something can be taught without suffering, it should be; people willingly struggle toward goals they care about [2]. At Alpha's Texas Sports Academy, kids far behind academically finish their two hours of academics so they can get to afternoon practice; one mother said her son went from skipping a quarter of school days to waking her up so he wouldn't keep his coach waiting [2]. The summary notes that Alpha's results are its own reports, with independent randomized trials with MIT's Blueprint Labs still underway [2].

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: wrap around young people, don't control them

Immordino-Yang, a USC professor of education, psychology and neuroscience, approaches the same balance from the study of emotion and development [3]. Her critique of schools is that they often combine low trust with the wrong kind of demand. By adolescence, exactly when teens develop the capacity for complex meaning-making, schools double down on control, which she links to the teen mental health crisis [3]. "We are frightened to let our young people have that power," she says [3]. Instead, "the role of adults is to wrap around young people and help them learn to be reflective, to be systematic, to be rigorous with themselves" as they learn to deconstruct and rebuild their own beliefs, aims and understanding [3].

Her standard is high, higher in some ways than test scores. She wants young people "willing to sit with uncertainty in complex problem spaces" rather than settling quickly on one solution [3]. What school usually expects, she says, is to "Settle immediately onto one solution, which by the way is the solution I already had in mind when I gave you the question" [3]. Her alternative is to give young people, in safe and appropriate ways, "the space in which to actually grapple with complex, powerful questions" [3].

Her flagship example is the New York Performance Standards Consortium, public schools exempted from the Regents exams that assess students through months-long interdisciplinary projects, where students must invent the question as well as the work [3]. A Sudanese immigrant student who had never passed a math class spent months on Zeno's paradox of walking halfway to the door, learned fractions because he needed them, and became fascinated by the finite and the infinite [3]. That's high expectations with support: a hard, self-chosen problem and adults who help the student meet it. "So we've got the cart before the horse", she says; skills are the cart, and the real measure is the development of the horse [3]. Near the end she says "Learning's not the goal"; the goal is the development of who a person becomes [3].

Her view of great teachers adds a specific picture of what support looks like in the room. Huberman describes the best instructors in Stanford's first-year medical neuroscience course, world experts who keep flipping into the position of someone learning the system for the first time [3]. He says this "Ignites the emotional systems of the learner's brain in such a powerful way" [3]. Immordino-Yang agrees: "He's inventing the knowledge in front of them", rather than being "a squirrel with nuts and giving all the nuts to the kids" [3]. The expert keeps the full standard of the field while modeling the struggle of learning it.

Her principle about emotion explains why pressure alone fails. "Whatever you're having emotion about is what you're thinking about", and therefore what you learn [3]. If students' emotions center on grades and whether they will flunk, they learn about performance; if they center on ideas, they learn ideas [3]. High-stakes accountability, she argues, has taught students that the emotional reward of school is performance, and those who don't get it dissociate [3]. Ruling by pressure teaches students about the pressure.

Safety is the other half. The default mode network, which supports the sense of self, imagination and alternative perspectives, is incompatible with vigilance [3]. "When you're in an unsafe space you are not in a space that is conducive to constructing and deconstructing meaning," she says [3]. Meaningful thinking together "Is only really possible when people feel safe to think together" [3]. Safety is not softness, though. She argues that burying hurtful ideas only hides them, and that we can only fix unsafe spaces "by actually boldly going in there together" [3]. Schools across every subject should build spaces where people deconstruct their own beliefs, not each other's, around shared values [3]. "We have to trust one another," she says [3]. Huberman offers his own version of structure within freedom, a rule from graduate school: "you can swear but you can't swear at people" [3]. He also suggests having students debate controversial topics from the side they disagree with [3].

She also shows how low expectations can be built into environments. Her third-grade son was troubled by a classroom behavior chart even though he was always on green [3]. In a letter to his teacher, later published in the National Academies' How People Learn II, he explained that the chart implied every student might misbehave, when "every single day is new" and school is supposed to be about learning [3]. Her lesson: environments can impose low expectations on people [3].

Andrew Huberman on the research: praise effort, reframe struggle

In his solo episode on growth mindset, Huberman reviews the studies that explain why high standards must come with the right kind of feedback [4]. He uses Alia Crum's definition of a mindset: "a mental frame or lens that selectively organizes and encodes information." [4] Mindsets carry whole identity narratives, often absorbed from parents, coaches and teachers [4].

The landmark study is Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck's 1998 paper, "praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance." [4] More than 100 children received intelligence praise (you're so smart), effort praise (you tried hard, you persisted), or no specific praise [4]. Intelligence-praised children later chose easy problems to keep earning praise, while effort-praised children chose harder ones that could teach them more [4]. On a second problem set, the intelligence-praised group's performance dropped significantly and the effort-praised group's rose significantly; the intelligence-praised children also attempted fewer problems and were more likely to lie about their scores [4]. A 1996 survey, he notes, found 85 percent of parents believed intelligence was fixed [4]. Timing didn't matter: identity praise before or after a performance lowered later performance, while effort praise raised it [4]. But praise must be genuine; telling someone they worked hard when they coasted doesn't work, because we know when we are being lied to [4].

This is the protector's trap in miniature. Telling a child they're brilliant feels supportive, but it lowers the bar they choose for themselves. Huberman's advice is to use verbs, not labels, especially after success, since calling someone brilliant or talented sets them up to struggle when challenge arrives [4]. When analyzing errors, don't sugarcoat them; focus on the actions that led to them rather than harsh labels [4]. That's the mentor balance applied to feedback: honest about the gap, respectful of the person.

A brain-recording study by Mangels and colleagues, with Dweck as senior author, shows the mechanism [4]. People with a fixed view of intelligence showed a larger error-related signal over a front part of the anterior cingulate cortex, linked to emotional and bodily responses, when told they were wrong; in people with a growth mindset, the error signal leaned toward areas associated with cognitive appraisal [4]. Growth-minded people direct attention toward understanding the error, while fixed-minded people mostly feel the sting [4]. He contrasts this with advice like "set your ego aside," which offers no process to follow [4].

He then describes Yeager's July 2022 Nature paper, "A synergistic mindsets intervention protects adolescents from stress" [4]. A single 30-minute online session teaching both growth mindset and a stress-can-be-enhancing mindset outperformed either alone [4]. In the Trier Social Stress Test, where students give a speech to a frowning audience and do arithmetic aloud while told when they're wrong, students who learned both mindsets showed better peripheral blood flow, changes in cortisol and a shift toward seeing the stress as a challenge [4]. The intervention tells students that "difficulty struggle and frustration when you're learning something are not signs that you've reached your limits they're signs that you're expanding your limits." [4] It quotes calculus professor Uri Treisman telling students that everyone will struggle and that stress means understanding is deepening [4]. Results included about a 40 percent improvement in self-regard, a 14 percent improvement in passing particularly challenging courses, and more willingness to take on hard challenges long after [4].

His first practical tool is directly about teachers: whenever possible, both teacher and student should learn these mindsets, which leads teachers to see students as less fixed and students to see themselves the same way [4]. He also suggests seeking help, asking others why you fell short and why you succeeded, and, if you have no mentor, becoming your own by writing a letter to the next person learning what you are learning [4]. And he revises the "mind is like a muscle" analogy: learning gives no immediate pump; while learning, you feel worse and confused, and that strain is what triggers change, which consolidates during recovery and sleep [4].

Where They Agree, and Where They Don't

All four sources reject both halves of the usual trade-off. Yeager names the enforcer and the protector and says the mentor takes the best of both [1]. Liemandt describes the same two parent types, high standards with low support and low standards with high support, and says "the real answer is you do both" [2]. Immordino-Yang criticizes schools for pairing control with low trust and asks adults to wrap around young people while expecting them to grapple rigorously with hard questions [3]. The Mueller and Dweck research shows that even warm-sounding praise can quietly lower standards, while honest, effort-focused feedback raises them [4].

They also agree that support is not rescue. Liemandt's kindergartners stuck halfway up the rock wall are left to work through it, with an adult making sure it's safe [2]. Yeager's support is belief plus resources, not lowering the demand [1]. Immordino-Yang wants safety so students can boldly engage difficult ideas, not avoid them [3]. And Huberman's research says to analyze errors without sugarcoating [4].

They agree on respect. Yeager emphasizes being taken seriously, with dignity, by someone who has power over you [1]; Liemandt removes the shame of being behind by individualizing work [2]; Immordino-Yang calls for trust and spaces where people deconstruct their own beliefs rather than each other's [3]; and Huberman shows how fixed labels trigger an emotional sting instead of analysis [4].

The differences are about what the standard is and how to motivate. Immordino-Yang puts development and meaning ahead of skills, warning that high-stakes accountability teaches students to care about performance [3]. Liemandt, by contrast, measures success partly through top-1% test scores, SAT results and mastery of fundamentals, arguing that fluency in basics is what frees students for harder work [2]. The two aren't irreconcilable: Liemandt also emphasizes growth rate over raw achievement and fills afternoons with passion projects and building [2], and Immordino-Yang's Zeno's paradox student learned fractions as part of a meaningful project [3]. But one leads with mastery and scores, the other with self-chosen questions.

Motivation is the sharper split. Liemandt pays kids for breakthroughs, like $100 per perfect state-test score, and bets his daughter $1,000, arguing extrinsic rewards can unlock intrinsic motivation [2]. Yeager warns that we lean too heavily on narrow self-interest and fear of loss, and his data favor purpose, though combined with personal benefit rather than pure selflessness [1]. Immordino-Yang would likely see payment for test scores as focusing emotion on performance rather than ideas [3]. Liemandt himself notes that some Alpha parents object [2]. Each side has reasons: Liemandt sees money as a cheap way through a self-limiting belief like "I'm not a math person," while Yeager and Immordino-Yang see lasting motivation coming from meaning and contribution.

On suffering, Liemandt says anything that can be taught without suffering should be [2], while Huberman stresses that the confusion and frustration of learning are what trigger change [4]. These fit together if suffering means pointless pain, while struggle means productive strain; Liemandt himself centers struggle and failure in his definition of development [2].

Why It Works

The sources give several mechanisms.

Appraisal turns a demand into a challenge. A demand becomes a threat when we judge it beyond our resources, and a challenge when we believe we can meet it [1]. Support, whether a mentor's belief, time, training or a friend, is part of those resources, so high standards plus support produces a challenge response instead of a threat response [1]. Beliefs about stress change stress physiology itself: shorter cortisol release, more peripheral blood flow and clearer thinking under pressure [4].

Feedback shapes what learners choose to attempt. Intelligence praise leads children to pick easier problems to protect their label, while effort praise leads them toward harder ones [4]. Labels tied to performance leave identity vulnerable; verbs tied to process transfer to new domains [4].

Attention after errors decides whether people improve. Growth-minded people shift attention toward analyzing mistakes, fixed-minded people toward the emotional sting [4]. After failing, fixed-mindset undergraduates in a study by David Nussbaum and Dweck repaired their self-esteem by looking down at people who did worse, while growth-mindset students looked up at top performers to learn their strategies; both recovered self-esteem, but only one group got better [1].

Emotion directs learning, and safety enables deep thinking. Whatever you feel strongly about is what you think about and learn [3]. Pressure focuses emotion on performance; meaningful challenges focus it on ideas [3]. The brain systems for building meaning and taking perspectives are incompatible with vigilance, so an unsafe environment blocks the very thinking high standards should demand [3].

Individualization removes shame and fills gaps. Mastery-based tutoring lets each student work at their level without anyone knowing, and filling gaps before moving on keeps problems from compounding [2].

Adolescents want status and to contribute. Teens seek respect and contribution value in the group, and they will practice obsessively for things they care about [1]. Being treated as capable and connected to purpose speaks to those drives [1].

Environments must back up the message. Mindset effects lasted only where classrooms were supportive and advanced courses existed [1].

Where It Applies, and Where It Doesn't

The model applies across parenting, classrooms, coaching, labs and workplaces. Yeager's examples range from seventh-grade essays to the Spurs and Vanderbilt physics [1]; Liemandt applies it from kindergarten rock climbing to SAT prep [2]; Immordino-Yang to middle and high school [3]; and Huberman applies the mindset work to adults learning on their own [4].

There are limits. First, it isn't a script. Yeager warns that it isn't about magic words; it's about the lived experience of being respected [1]. Praise must be genuine [4].

Second, belief without resources fails. A student who wants pre-calculus in a school that doesn't offer it can't benefit from a mindset message [1]. Liemandt's version of support depends on individualized instruction, which he says only AI has made affordable at scale [2].

Third, the evidence varies. Yeager's national study was pre-registered with random school sampling [1], and Mueller and Dweck's work is experimental [4], but Alpha's results are the school's own reports, with independent trials underway, and selection effects are a live question Huberman raised [2]. Some of Yeager's feedback data come from small studies [1].

Fourth, safety matters. High standards in an unsafe environment trigger vigilance rather than growth [3]; Liemandt insists that challenges happen where the adult in charge keeps children safe [2]. Stress helps mostly when it's not chronic and doesn't wreck sleep [4].

Fifth, extrinsic rewards are contested. Paying kids is Alpha's experience, not a consensus practice, and some parents object [2]; Yeager's research favors purpose combined with personal benefit [1].

What To Do With It

1. State the standard and your belief in the same breath. When giving critical feedback, say you're holding them to a high standard because you believe they can reach it, and offer help. That brief message about doubled seventh graders' use of feedback in Yeager's studies [1].

2. Praise the verbs, not the child's label. Replace telling a child how smart they are with specific actions: you persisted, you tried a new approach, you kept going after a wrong answer [4]. Do it especially after success, and only when it's true [4].

3. Analyze errors honestly, without shaming. Don't sugarcoat mistakes; point to the actions that caused them [4]. Help young people shift attention from the sting to the question of why it happened [4].

4. Teach that struggle means growth. Explain that difficulty and frustration are signs of expanding limits, and that a racing heart before a test is the body preparing to perform [1][4]. Both teacher and student should learn this [4].

5. Don't rescue from productive struggle. When a child is stuck halfway up a hard task, keep them safe but let them work through it, as Alpha does with its rock wall [2]. The loop is struggle and fail on the road to success, supported by a caring adult [2].

6. Individualize and fill gaps before moving on. Like a coach working on ball handling before dunks, find the specific gaps and close them instead of advancing on an 80% [2]. Measure growth rather than rank [2].

7. Give young people real questions and room to grapple. Let students choose hard, meaningful problems and sit with uncertainty rather than guessing your answer [3]. Model the struggle yourself by rediscovering knowledge in front of them [3].

8. Build safety and trust, then go into hard topics together. Set clear norms (you can disagree, but not attack people), ask students to deconstruct their own beliefs, and try having them argue the other side [3].

9. Connect effort to purpose. Show how hard work lets young people contribute to others while also benefiting themselves, as Chip Engelland did with his players [1].

10. Back the message with resources. Make sure the harder course, the tutoring or the time actually exists, because mindset without opportunity fades [1][2]. And ask yourself Liemandt's question for parents: are you high standards and low support, or low standards and high support? The answer is both [2].

Sources

1. Dr. David Yeager: How to Master Growth Mindset to Improve Performance · Huberman Lab
2. Joe Liemandt on Alpha School, AI Tutoring, and Learning Faster Through Mastery and Motivation · Huberman Lab
3. Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: How Emotions & Social Factors Impact Learning · Huberman Lab
4. How to Enhance Performance & Learning by Applying a Growth Mindset · Huberman Lab