Believing

Believing

Transcript for Believing (Full Episode)

​[00:00:00] 

Eileen Williams: It is 90.1 KZU Stanford, State of the Human.

Eileen Williams: Can the act of believing actually save your life? It did for Viktor Frankl. Frankl was a brilliant doctor. A brilliant doctor with very bad luck. He happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a Jew living in Europe during World War ii. By 1944, he had become a prisoner in Auschwitz. In his book, Man Searched for Meaning. He describes his experience in the camps.

We were cooped up in a shed built to accommodate probably 200 at the most. We were cold and hungry and there was not enough room for everyone to squat on the bare ground, let alone to lie down. One five ounce piece of bread was our only food in four days. Hungry, afraid, and alone, Frankl was on the verge of giving up.

One day working as a prisoner in Auschwitz. He was stumbling through the darkness. On a forced march, he tripped over big stones and threw large puddles. Guards were constantly shouting at the prisoners, hitting them with the butts of their rifles. On that walk, tired and aching, Frankl had a sudden realization. At that moment, he claims that he came to understand the meaning of life. From that point on, he believed that love would be the salvation of man. He clung desperately to this thought, and it saved him. He survived. But in 1945, when Frankl was [00:02:00] finally liberated, his release was bittersweet.

He soon learned that his mother, his father, his brother and his wife were all dead. Frankl was left with virtually nothing. Still, he went back to work as a psychologist and psychiatrist. He had learned a lot in the camps, both personally and professionally, and after the war, his focus shifted. He started to ask new questions.

He wanted to know how ordinary people could survive in the most inhuman conditions. He thought of that day, trekking through the woods about his realization and about his fellow prisoners. He noticed something. There was a pattern to who survived and who did not. The survivors, the ones who fought death, they believed in something.

Frankel himself believed in love, but in general, it didn't matter exactly what a person believed, just as long as he believed in something. Some meaningful framework about how and why the world worked and that powerful belief, the belief in something bigger than ourselves. That is what allows us to survive.

You are listening to State of the Human, the radio show, of the Stanford Storytelling Project. I'm Eileen Williams. Each week we select a common human experience like joking or obsession, and bring you stories that explore and deepen our understanding of that experience. Today we're bringing you stories about believing.

Often when people say that they believe, they apply the word to very basic concepts, I believe that I am alive. I believe that I will wake up tomorrow. We need these sorts of beliefs to get through our day to day life. They help us function in the world. If I believe that fire is hot, I won't touch [00:04:00] it and get burned. But today, that is not what we mean when we say belief In this show, we are focusing on a different kind of believing the kind that isn't technically necessary for survival. For the next hour, when we say belief, we are talking about something bigger. Believing in something, the kind of believing that is often considered a defining human characteristic like language.

We understand the world in terms of a bigger unknowable framework, and as Frankl discovered in the most horrendous circumstances, the capacity to believe as much as food and water can make the difference between life and death. Today we want to find out what this specific type of believing means for our lives.

How are we changed by belief spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically? What can believing do? In today's show, we are bringing you five stories about believing. First, we will hear the story of journalist Beth Duff Brown, and how her visit to a small African village helped her to achieve a lifelong dream.

In our second story renowned journalist, Krista Tippett explains how her beliefs have evolved and how this evolution has changed her life. In our third story, maddie Chang and Rosie La Puma tell us about the relationship between philosophy, belief, and action. In our fourth story leading researcher, Carol Dweck explains how to harness the full power of belief to improve one's performance. And in our final story, senior producer Will Rogers tells us about his journey from Christianity to a more well, universal perspective on belief. Here we go.

First up, Beth Duff Brown tells us her story. [00:06:00] As a reporter, Beth has learned to rely on verifiable facts and scientific data to make sense of the world. She's traveled through war torn Africa and contracted malaria. She's written many important and well-received articles, but despite her academic success and accomplished career. She always felt that something was missing. This all began to change in a tiny village called Campondede. It was there that she began to open her heart to belief, and the results were astounding.

Here she speaks with associate producer Laura Kelly.

Laura Kelley: Beth Duff-Brown went into the Peace Corps in the early 1980s, confident and ready to make change. But finding herself changed too, she began to question what she had always taken for granted. 

Beth Duff-Brown: I'm Beth Duff Brown. Everything to me comes down to data and science and facts. 

Laura Kelley: In 1979, Beth Duff Brown joined the Peace Corps. She went to a tiny village called Campondede. This is in Zaire, which is now called the Congo. As a Peace Corps teacher, she came in to teach facts that she had learned at her Western College. But the spiritual beliefs of the village slowly began to take hold on her. In the early eighties, Zaire became dangerous and she had to leave. She was the last Peace Corps volunteer there. Before she left, she made a promise. 

Beth Duff-Brown: I vowed then that I would keep the people of Campondede in my heart and that I would return one day. 

Laura Kelley: Beth went on to get her master's in journalism from Northwestern. She landed a year long internship at the New York Times. She worked her way up as a journalist in the US, but the whole time was yearning to work overseas. A piece of her was missing, so she became a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press. She married Chris, a photographer, and together they covered stories in West Africa. Now back in West Africa, [00:08:00] Beth was reminded of the people of Camponde and the promise she had made.

In 1996, 15 years after leaving Camponde, she had the opportunity to return to the village, this time as a journalist looking in. 

Beth Duff-Brown: Uh, I thought it would be interesting to see how the villagers had changed, how I had changed, how the Civil War might impact the village. 

Laura Kelley: Beth arrived in Camponde after a couple cargo flights and a ride down dirt roads in a Jeep.

Beth Duff-Brown: It was quite a surprise when I showed up. They weren't expecting me. There was no way for them to know that I was coming. 

Laura Kelley: Beth had been expecting her friends in Camponde to ask her all about her fast-paced career and her husband, but they didn't ask the questions she had anticipated. 

Beth Duff-Brown: Really the only thing they wanted to talk about was why I didn't have any children. Because of course, in all of Africa, much, much of the world, your wealth or the, the richness of a family is measured by the number of children you have. And so, and they learned that, um, Chris and I didn't have any children. They felt that I was very poor and they felt, you know, really badly for me. And a lot of them got very angry and said, you've put your career ahead of, you know, being a mother and you know, this is why you were put on Earth. And I told them, I, you know, that we had tried many years and they said, you know, don't worry, we're gonna take care of it. We're gonna say some prayers. We're gonna, we're bring you a child. 

Laura Kelley: She had been trying to get pregnant for months. The doctor said her chances weren't good at this point. The people in Camponde began to pray for her, but she didn't think much of it.

She was touched by the gesture, but soon went back to her fast-paced life as a journalist. She traveled around West Africa working as a reporter. A few months after leaving Camponde, she got malaria in 1997 in Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo. The political situation was unstable and the streets were dangerous.

Beth Duff-Brown: The rebels were approaching the capitol, it was an extremely stressful time. There was a lot [00:10:00] of violence. Um, a lot of people were fleeing the capitol. Um, there were hundreds of journalists who had flown in from around the world to cover this story. 

Laura Kelley: The future of the country was on the line. Even as she was recovering from malaria, her own health was the last thing on her mind.

Beth Duff-Brown: And I remember one night, um, talking to another friend of mine, Donna, another AP correspondent, saying, wow, I just don't really feel that good. I'm, I feel nauseous and sort of tired. I'm gonna go to bed. Can you take over? Because we were on sort of a 24 hour watch. And she sort of joked with me and said, are you sure you're not pregnant because you sound like you have all the symptoms?

And I said, no, no, no. I'm not pregnant. Went to bed that night. Woke up in the middle of the night, nauseous again. Started doing the math in my head and realizing that, um, wow, I had missed my period. It had been a couple weeks now. Mild panic set in. 

Laura Kelley: That panic stayed with Beth as she prepared to leave the Congo, but now it was mixed with elation, confusion and hope. Had she actually gotten pregnant? Had the villager's prayers come true? The safest way out was by water. Beth prepared to flee the Congo in a canoe. 

Beth Duff-Brown: And I remember being on that canoe, crossing the river and you know, being somewhat petrified, I knew that there was fighting behind us and I knew, didn't really know what awaited us, but I also remember being very calm and thinking.

They did it. Somehow, they pulled it off. They have given me a child. 

Laura Kelley: Beth went in for a pregnancy test by now at her base in Côte D'Ivoire. The test was positive. She was pregnant. Her elation mixed with fear as the doctor wondered about how her malaria would impact the fetus. She rushed to New York and went to see a doctor there. This doctor's answer wasn't reassuring. 

Beth Duff-Brown: He said, you know, I'm sorry, [00:12:00] but we don't have enough data about malaria during the first trimester, and the only thing that you can do is hope that it doesn't reoccur. 

Laura Kelley: Uncertain, Beth awaited the birth of her baby. She maintained hope. 

Beth Duff-Brown: The amazing thing was that throughout my pregnancy.

And I was approaching 40, you know, so I was an older woman too, and they were all concerned about that. I never again had one headache, one piece of nausea, no recurrence of anything. I had the absolutely healthiest, most peaceful pregnancy you could imagine. 

Laura Kelley: Beth gave birth to Kaitlyn later in 1997. She was overjoyed. But when she thought about the village and their prayers, she didn't quite know what to make of it. 

Beth Duff-Brown: Now, often I'll look at her and wonder, is this the child? You know, is this the result of all of those actions that were taken in my name and I feel very blessed. 

Laura Kelley: Beth hoped the village in the Congo could hear that their prayers had been answered.

Beth Duff-Brown: And I remember immediately after Kaitlyn was born, taking photos and writing letters and sending those letters, sort of knowing that they probably wouldn't get there because the postal system has just collapsed there, but hoping that somehow, some way that they would would find the village. 

Laura Kelley: Almost 10 years later. In 2006, Beth had the chance to find out for herself whether anyone had seen her letters. Leaving 8-year-old Caitlin at home. Beth returned to Camponde for a third time. She arrived in the village late at night and began to spread her happy news. It didn't stay quiet for long. People were shouting, celebrating, hugging their return friend Beth Beth recorded this music at a village party. 

Beth Duff-Brown: The villagers sang songs and, and this time in the songs I could hear not only Miss Elizabeth, but Kathleen is how they pronounce Kaitlyn's name, and I heard her. Um, heard her name in the songs and when they asked what they were saying, it was [00:14:00] again them saying, you know, mama Elizabeth had, you know, deep roots in this village, and her seeds were planted. And, um, while the seed that gave her Caitlyn was far from, from our village, she still has her roots here in Camponde. 

Laura Kelley: Beth's story had become part of the story of Camponde too. Caitlyn is now a senior at Palo Alto High School. 

Caitlyn Duff-Brown: I'm Caitlyn Duff Brown. I feel like I've always been more of like a spiritual person. 

Laura Kelley: Even so, she has a lot of questions about her mom's time in the Congo.

Caitlyn Duff-Brown: I don't think they got her pregnant, but I think, you know, they helped her with having more hope and not giving up and things like that. I don't think they necessarily like I reached her and made her pregnant, but I think they did help her spiritually in wanting to keep trying. 

Laura Kelley: Her mom isn't fully convinced either, but at a certain point that doesn't matter.

Beth Duff-Brown: I'm not a religious person, as I've said. Um, everything to me comes down to data and science and facts, so I don't know if it's true, but. I know that it's a lovely thought and it's something that has helped me through very difficult times. 

Caitlyn Duff-Brown: I think it would be amazing to go and like meet all of them and actually have a full understanding of what happened.

And every time she talks about it, like it's incredible. So I feel distant, but at the same time I feel special and blessed to have been a part of this experience.

Eileen Williams: This piece was produced by Laura Kelley, contributor here at State of the Human. It featured the voice of journalist Beth Duff Brown, as well as music by Greater Than or Equal to D and Krakatoa.[00:16:00] 

Today on State of the Human, we're bringing you stories about the very powerful effects of a universal human need, the need to believe. In our next piece, Krista Tippet tells her story. She explains what she learned growing up and how her belief system has evolved. This is a story about how beliefs can change and about how this change can profoundly impact the way we live.

Krista hosts and produces a radio show called On Being where she explores the driving questions behind our religious and spiritual practices and traditions. Her work has recently received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. More importantly, it has affected thousands of people on a profound personal level, including myself.

I grew up religious. My family was Jewish, and by default, so was I. Every Friday night, my house would fill with the inviting aroma of my mom's freshly baked Challah bread. We would sing prayers and light candles to usher and Shabbat. At the time, I believed because my parents believed, and that was good enough for me.

But as I got older, I began to question my faith. I looked at the world around me, turned on the news, watched people suffer and die. What once seemed obvious, became uncertain. How could any God allow this to happen? It wasn't a creative question, it wasn't original, but for me it was earth shattering.

By the time I was 13, I wasn't sure what I thought anymore. I didn't know what to think or what to do. I wanted someone to tell me, so I kept going to services. Every Saturday morning, I sang prayers and read Hebrew and kissed the Torah as it passed through the [00:18:00] synagogue. My rabbi at the time was incredible, and I hoped that she could somehow explain all these frustrating contradictions.

One morning when I was 14, I was sitting in temple. It was time to open the ark and remove the Torah. The rabbi said, please rise. So I did, and then I fainted. I woke up lying sideways in my mom's arms. I realized I had passed out for about a minute. I had been unconscious and I had seen nothing. No God, no blinding light, only blackness. At that moment, I decided that God did not exist.

My mom has always been very spiritual and my cynicism really upset her for a couple of months. She tried to talk to me, but I refused to listen. I was on an empiricist kick and I needed direct evidence to prove that God was real. She couldn't provide any, and I felt sure that belief was pure superstition, practiced only by the naive and the foolish.

One Sunday my mom was driving me to a friend's house. It was cold and raining, and I was dreading all the homework I had to do. All I wanted was to sulk in peace. My mom turned on the radio. Ugh, NPR.

Krista Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett. This is Speaking of Faith. Stay with Us. 

Eileen Williams: Little did I know that a tradition was about to be born that morning and nearly every Sunday thereafter, my mom and I would listen to a radio show called, speaking of Faith, Krista Tippet, the host. Explored questions of religion, spirituality, and meaning, 

Krista Tippett: and she discovered a delight in other religions as well.[00:20:00] 

I'll speak with Karin Armstrong about her love for figures like the Apostle. 

Eileen Williams: At first I was annoyed, but Krista was smart, she was interesting, and so I listened. When the show ended, my mom and I would sit and talk slowly. I started to accept that I may not know everything. Even as I began to admit that believing was important for some, I couldn't quite conceptualize why.

Especially for a woman like Krista Tippett, educated, intellectual, and articulate, why would she, of all people choose to spend her day with rabbis and priests? What could faith possibly do for her? I kept listening every Sunday hoping I'd find out. Then this past summer. I got the chance to ask. Hello?

Hello. Hi, Krista Tippett was born and raised in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Her grandfather was a Southern Baptist minister. She believed in God because, well, everyone believed in God. 

Krista Tippett: I mean, I grew up hearing my grandfather preach. It's almost like I was born with a lot of beliefs that I inherited a lot of beliefs.

You know, there were just, you know, kind of the core biblical truths. It, it felt like they were woven into the fabric of reality. 

Eileen Williams: But for her, as for me. The world didn't stay simple forever. 

Krista Tippett: I went away to college and, and at that point, um, that whole world of inherited, you know, assumed belief really fell away. And that was pretty unsettling and also kind of exciting. 

Eileen Williams: It was 1982. The world was divided into east and west into two entirely different systems of belief. Krista was a junior at Brown University and she was enamored with the new found vastness of the world. She did an exchange program [00:22:00] traveling to East Germany. When she came home for Christmas that year, she brought an East German student with her. 

Krista Tippett: And, uh, we were driving along one day, my grandfather really took a shine to this young woman, and uh, and I heard him in the backseat of the car one day near the end of the trip and reading her his pivotal Bible verses and asking her to take Jesus into it, it her to take Jesus into her heart.

Um, because, you know, and it was so, so much a part of him that he really believed that anyone, um, you know, that she was, she was damned to to hell if she didn't, if he didn't impart these beliefs to her. And that was a really poignant moment for me where my worlds collided and they made no sense.

Eileen Williams: That day in the car, her grandfather realized he couldn't change this woman's mind with his religion. The two agreed to disagree, but the experience did change krista. She realized something. 

Krista Tippett: I knew that that belief system of my childhood, that it seemed so sovereign and self-contained, um, existed within a larger world in which it didn't seem so sovereign and self-contained.

Eileen Williams: Krista began to understand that the world was a whole lot bigger than Shawnee, Oklahoma. After that moment in the car, Krista no longer believed that religion could and would fix everything. She started to think that maybe politics was the best way to help people. She went back to Germany and in 1987 she became Chief Aid in Berlin to the US Ambassador to West Germany.

Krista Tippett: Even though I was working at a really high political level at that point, first as a journalist and then with the State Department, that what I did start to think about was that were those fascinating human dynamics. Because the truth is that, um, you could have everything in [00:24:00] West Germany and have an empty life and you could have nothing in East Germany. And, and in fact, people did carve lives of great beauty and intimacy. 

Eileen Williams: So at first she had thought that religion was the solution. When she realized its limits, she turned to politics instead. But now that didn't seem quite right either. 

Krista Tippett: What I saw in that city, what I experienced was the human dimension of that, which was so much more complicated and so much, so much more messy and so heartbreaking.

Eileen Williams: In Germany, Krista realized that East and West were different in many ways. Not all of them political. There was no good side or bad side, or happy side or sad side. 

Krista Tippett: One thing that I, that was so clear to me and, and, uh, and hard to live with was that it, it wasn't my material. Um. All the things I had that they didn't have that set me apart.

It was all the possibilities I had. And it was, it was my ability to dream about who I would be and what kind of future I would have and, and also it was the freedom, not just to move, but to think. 

Eileen Williams: With this thought in mind. Krista traveled through Spain, England, and Scotland, observing many new systems of belief. When she returned to the US she decided to study these myriad traditions. She went to Yale and got her PhD in Divinity. Appalled by the lack of civil conversation in the spiritual sphere, Krista started a radio show. Speaking of Faith, this is the same radio show that my mom and I listened to together.

Krista Tippett: Core virtue of compassion that you described that you find in religious traditions. It's especially tested in our time .

Eileen Williams: Today, the show is called On Being. 

Krista Tippett: So I, I like to say that, um, that what on being does is it explores, um, the animating questions behind, um, behind human [00:26:00] existence, behind our religious and philosophical traditions. What does it mean to be human? How do we want to live? And, uh, and we explore how 21st century people are posing and living and reframing those questions in all kinds of disciplines. 

Eileen Williams: As the show has evolved, so has Krista, she's continued to grow and to challenge herself. I asked her what believing means to her today.

Krista Tippett: I, I, like, I'm really still working with this idea of, you know, belief as our embodied knowledge, our grounded knowledge. I mean, the places where people. Just really that that tethered a life and also that help us get moving again when, when things go wrong as they do. 

Eileen Williams: For example, though she's had great triumphs, Krista has also had challenges. Her views are based on more than interviews and research. They also come from personal experiences with her own challenges, such as depression. 

Krista Tippett: In the middle of a depression. Y you, you cannot see beyond it that that's the terrible thing. You can't see outside it. And, um, you can't believe anything anybody says to you about how you will get better right? Mm-hmm. Or, you know, or it's not as bad as you think it is, or you're a wonderful person, you know, you cannot believe any of that. 

Eileen Williams: Depression strips away the ability to believe that things will be okay. We have to find some other way to survive. 

Krista Tippett: You know, the one thing that can be a ray of hope is actually seeing, hearing somebody and you, and you can see that they have moved through the place you're in and beyond it.

And that in itself is, you know, emboldening. And it, it, you know, in moments it's enough to just persist. And, and that's the other thing [00:28:00] about belief, faith, you know, this part of life when it is sustaining, it's, it's not solitary, right? It's also about a recognition of our need for others and our connection to others. And that's true in the most extreme circumstances and um, as well as just in kind of incorporating that into the fabric of our I identity in the everyday, 

Eileen Williams: even when lofty ideals fail, we can still hold onto hope. We can hold on to each other. 

Krista Tippett: Human beings always fall short of any ideal. And so, and you, you end up having to place your faith in people. Um, you know, you end up believing in people.

Eileen Williams: At 13, I thought that belief was outdated and unnecessary. It couldn't possibly do anything for me. Science was there to answer the questions of the world. Religion just started wars, but as I've listened and talked to Krista, and as I've gone through dark patches of my own, I have come to realize that I need other people like my mom to challenge and support me, I cannot make it through this life on my own. And in order to feel truly connected, I have to believe.

This piece was produced by me, Eileen Williams, associate producer at State of the Human. It featured the voice of radio host Krista Tippet. And music by Paddington Bear and Timber, as we've seen, belief can have a profound impact on individuals, but not everyone agrees that we need it to survive. In our next story, two of our producers here at State of the [00:30:00] Human explore this question.

Maddie, what do you think? 

Maddie Chang: Okay. Lemme just start by saying that the entire premise for this show is false. Sorry. What belief, believing that is, it doesn't matter at all. We're not driven by a need to believe in this world. We're driven by a need to have action in it. 

Eileen Williams: Okay, Rosie, can you please confirm that Maddie has gone crazy?

Rosie La Puma: Yep. I would definitely say that Maddie has gone crazy. Maddie, you are crazy. 

Maddie Chang: Thanks Rosie. 

Rosie La Puma: Of course, my beliefs are important. My ideas, my values, they're everything. 

Maddie Chang: Okay, hear me out for a second, Rosie. Like take my somewhat squiggly path to Stanford. Okay. Well, it was pretty straight all the way up until the end of high school.

I have a great loving family, a fun group of friends. I love school and I, I knew I was headed straight to college. Things started to change around February of my senior year of high school. In the morning, I would wake up around 4:00 AM. Not able to fall back asleep, super anxious, and I had no idea why.

And shortly after that started happening, I suddenly had this paralysis when making decisions like I'd be at a restaurant and feel like my life depended on whether I chose the kale or Caesar salad. And then after that, I started not wanting to listen to music. I was barely hungry. I wasn't really interested in seeing friends.

And mostly I just had this strange feeling that I was going through my life watching it happen as opposed to actually being in it.

Rosie La Puma: Did you tell anyone this was happening?

Maddie Chang: I mean, not really because I didn't have one good explanation for all of these little things happening, and so I didn't wanna say anything for fear of sounding crazy or something. Um, but you know, as they say, it was slowly then all at once. And that all at once for me was the realization that I was in a depressive episode and that was pretty scary because I, I'm normally very happy and social, and then I found myself the complete opposite, really antisocial, [00:32:00] anxious about everything to the point that I couldn't even get out of bed.

I remember really distinctly feeling like I had fallen in this bottomless hole that I would never be able to get out of. And in that state of mind, the thought of coming to Stanford seemed practically impossible, but also just super unappealing at the time. 

Rosie La Puma: So then how did you do it? 

Maddie Chang: Well, I didn't, even though there are all these people in my life, my family, my friends, people at school who were expecting me to go straight to Stanford, I decided instead to take the year off.

I ended up traveling to Jordan. I learned some Arabic and I worked in South Africa and worked in Kenya, but more importantly, I changed my own trajectory and took control of what for me, was a pretty major decision. And making that decision helped me kinda make the smaller decisions around that, which in turn helped me regain a sense of peace of mind. That's why I think at the end of the day. We're not driven by what we believe. We're driven by what we can do. Our actions. I'm not alone in this position either. Take Friedrich Nietzsche. He had the same theory.

Rosie La Puma: Wait, Nietzche is the philosopher who said God is dead. 

Maddie Chang: Yep, that's him. But he also had this theory called will to power, which basically says that humans are driven by a need to take action in this world. That what we really want is to control our surroundings, something Nietzsche calls being effective. And because there is no higher power, no God, what we think or believe doesn't matter. 

Rosie La Puma: Okay. I, I sort of see that now, but I also know that in my own life, I'm not purely driven by a need to impose my will in the world. I think we're more driven by a need to rationalize the world. You know, it's an internal process, a believing process. 

Maddie Chang: Okay. Yes, in theory. [00:34:00] But what would this believing process even look like? 

Rosie La Puma: Well, I don't know. I feel we do it all the time, but I know a time when I used belief to take control of my life was back in high school right after someone very important to me had passed away. Her name was gni. She was our live-in nanny for a while when my sisters and I were growing up, sweetest person ever, but when I was a junior in high school, she passed away unexpectedly. A doctor had made a mistake in what should have been a minor surgery, and, uh ironically, the thing that got me was not the death itself, but the things people told me to comfort me.

They'd say, don't worry, she's in heaven now. She's not in pain. She's in a better place. And frankly, I just became fed up with the whole idea if heaven's so great, I thought then why would any loving God put his children through pain on Earth first? But see, now I was caught in this trap because I had these two ideas I'd held before.

The idea of heaven and the idea of a loving God that suddenly didn't fit together. And so I spent a lot of time puzzling it out myself and came to this idea that maybe it had to do with understanding like how you can't understand heat until you've been cold, or security until you felt threatened. Maybe God's rationale in making us go through suffering was so that we could better understand heaven when we got there. And this brought me a lot of comfort at the time. It was super satisfying to be able to reconcile what I was experiencing with the things I held to be true and not at all in the nietzche sense of imposing my will.

And I don't necessarily agree with my 11th grade self anymore on divine justice and heaven, but that's because I'm constantly updating my [00:36:00] beliefs. I'm driven by a need to make sense of the universe, not a need to control it. 

Maddie Chang: That makes sense. Like now when I look back at my depression, I do think of it in the same way that you do with Joni, that experiencing extreme sadness has now made me more able to experience or at least appreciate happiness.

Rosie La Puma: So we're both using belief it seems, when we're trying to make sense of things that have happened to us in analyzing our own life story. But as you said, action is still very important when we wanna take control of our decisions. 

Maddie Chang: Eileen, you still there? Yeah. All right. You can continue with the show now.

Eileen Williams: This segment was produced by Maddie Chang and Rosie Puma, associate producer and contributor here at State of the Human.

Today's show is called Believing. We're investigating the very real effects that belief can have on our bodies, our relationships, and our lives. In our next story, carol Dweck helps us all use the impact of belief in the most positive way. Professor Dweck researches education, but this story begins when she was a student back in the sixth grade.

Carol Dweck: My sixth grade teacher seated us around the room in IQ order. 

Louis Lafair: This is Carol Dweck, professor of Psychology at Stanford University. Back in elementary school, her teacher, Mrs. Wilson, believed that intelligence is fixed, that everyone is born with a set number of capabilities. Mrs. Wilson arranged her classroom accordingly, favoring those students she saw as intelligent over those she saw as well. Unintelligent. Imagine Sally is the fourth highest iq. So Sally sits in the front row, fourth from the corner. And Joseph, he is the lowest iq, so he sits in the [00:38:00] very back corner 

Carol Dweck: and it obviously wasn't fun for people who were in the bad seats. Mrs. Wilson, my teacher, wouldn't let them even carry a note to the principal, carry the flag in the assembly, or even wash the blackboard. 

Louis Lafair: Mrs. Wilson's classroom was humiliating for people in the bottom IQ seats, but it was also bad for people in the top IQ seats. 

Carol Dweck: Much to my disadvantage, I was in the number one seat. So being in the number one seat, you worry about, am I keeping this seat? Is the seat in jeopardy? And then being smart becomes your claim to fame rather than taking challenges, learning, stretching yourself, falling on your face, getting up and trying again.

Louis Lafair: In that sixth grade classroom, professor Dweck learned to fear failure. Fast forward through high school and college and grad school, and Professor Dweck found herself teaching at Columbia University where because she was afraid of failure, she researched how people cope with, you guessed it, failure. She worked with 10-year-old students expecting them to hate failure in the same way she had in Mrs. Wilson's classroom. The students surprised her. 

Carol Dweck: I was shocked to find that there were kids who not only weren't afraid of failure and not only coped well with it, they relished it. I was giving them problems that were too hard for them to solve, and they were saying things like, I love a challenge, or These are 10-year-old kids. I was hoping this would be informative, so I thought, wow. I have something to learn from these kids and if I have [00:40:00] ever had role models, it's these kids. 

Louis Lafair: Though she didn't know it yet, professor Dweck had stumbled upon which she would eventually call Growth Mindset. 

Carol Dweck: A growth mindset is when people believe that their basic abilities, their basic human qualities can be developed.

They believe you can get smarter. You can augment your talent, you can augment your personal qualities. In a fixed mindset, people think no, you are dealt a certain hand, and that's what you have to play with throughout life.

Louis Lafair: Of course, fixed mindsets don't just happen in classrooms where teachers arrange seats based on iq. Fixed mindsets really. Are all around us. Whenever we say, I'm bad at math or tennis is too hard for me, or I'll never be as good as so and so, in her research, professor Dweck saw students with fixed mindsets and students with growth mindsets.

Carol Dweck: There were kids who wanted to. Just keep validating their abilities. And that had a certain implication that the ability was fixed and you had to keep showing you had it. There were other kids who wanted to grow their abilities, stretch them, increase them, and that had the implication that abilities were fluid, dynamic, could be augmented. And so we realized these two different ways of thinking about ability were really fundamental and could be creating kids, adults who went for [00:42:00] it and stretched themselves and took risks. 

Louis Lafair: These two mindsets, these ways of seeing the world not only cause a person to act differently. They also cause physical changes in the brain. 

Carol Dweck: When we encounter an error in a fixed mindset, the area that processes errors is silent in a growth mindset, it's on fire. So all of this is happening in our brains. 

Louis Lafair: And our brains are malleable. Professor Dweck discovered that it's possible to shift from a fix to a growth mindset by rewarding perseverance instead of innate talent.

Her growth mindset principles transformed a low performing class in a school on a Native American reservation. Unlike Mrs. Wilson, remember Professor Dweck's, sixth grade teacher, parents and teachers of the reservation learn to encourage their students to appreciate the struggle that comes before success.

Carol Dweck: Parents were taught and teachers praise the process. Praise the child's hard work, their strategies, their focus their improvement. And when a child contributes at home or in class, they were told, thank you for growing our learning. Thank you for growing our brains. Those kindergartners and first graders who were typically at the bottom of their district, went to the top of their district in, uh, reading oral reading fluency within a year.

Louis Lafair: Professor Dweck now sees the impact of her work in a variety of settings, schools, sports teams, and businesses. Her research has become a model for parenting and teaching. Growth mindset is transforming the lives of people young and old. [00:44:00] Inspired by how others have changed their lives through growth mindset. Professor Dweck has challenged herself to do the same while teaching at Columbia University, she enrolled in an Italian class starting and struggling with a language she had never taken before. 

Carol Dweck: That the, the, there's a funny story associated with this. Um, one of the students in my psychology course came into the Italian course, she was taking it and she saw me sitting there and she said, you teach this too? I said, no, I am a student. And there were several students, uh, from my psychology course two or three that were in this Italian class with me raising our hands.

Louis Lafair: But the transition from a fix to a growth mindset was not easy for Professor Dweck. 

Carol Dweck: It was unnerving because the whole way you measure yourself and feel good about yourself is gone. You don't put stock and counting up your successes over and over, so it takes a while to transfer. Um, the, the thrill, the sense of reward to stretching yourself, making progress, even taking risks that don't work out.

I remember sitting at my desk one day and I thought, this is hard. I was working on something. I thought, this is hard. This is fun. And I then I thought, who said that because in a fixed mindset, something hard is threatening, maybe you are at the edge, the limits of your ability, maybe you won't solve it and you'll, you might have to revise your opinion of your abilities. But now I was thinking this is a challenge [00:46:00] and I was relishing it like that 10-year-old boy. 

Louis Lafair: Today when asked how her Italian is, professor Dweck proudly responds. belief in our own learning potential has transformed Professor Dweck's life. Beliefs define us. 

Carol Dweck: Beliefs are a huge part of who we are. They're a core part of how we function in the world. But that's good news 'cause beliefs can be changed. Therefore, we can change to beliefs that foster more effective ways of being in the world, more satisfying ways of being and growing as people. 

Louis Lafair: Beliefs define us and beliefs are malleable. So how can we change our beliefs?

How can we develop a growth mindset?

Carol Dweck: The very first step is to hear that fixed mindset voice in your head. We all have that voice saying, watch out. That's hard. You might look dumb. Or when you make a mistake, hide it, it won't look good. People will judge you. Or if you see someone more accomplished than you, you say, oh, I'm not like that person.

I feel intimidated, demotivated. So that voice is often there. Just listen to it. Don't judge it, listen to it, unearth it, learn about it, and then one day, start talking back. Say you're going to take on that challenge, otherwise you won't grow. You'll limit yourself. That mistake, [00:48:00] it's fine. What can you learn from it? That person who's better than you? Now, how'd they get there? What can you learn from them? Go ask them what they did, how they did it. So gradually, you talk back with the growth mindset voice and that voice becomes louder and louder. 

Louis Lafair: Michael Jordan got kicked off his high school basketball team. Thomas Edison failed to make a light bulb 1000 times. JK Rowling received 12 rejection letters for her first Harry Potter novel. What would've happened if these individuals hadn't talked back with the growth mindset? Okay, we too will face failures, struggles, intimidation, setbacks. But a growth mindset helps us persevere. Here's the key, here's the cool thing. Simply changing how we think the brain works changes how we perform and behave in the world. 

Carol Dweck: A growth mindset makes me so excited about the future. There are so many challenges, so many opportunities on the horizon. Um, I just can't wait to see what the future will bring.

Eileen Williams: This story was produced by Louis Lafair and Sonya Gonzalez, it featured the voice of Carol Dweck, author of Mindset as well as music by Poddington Bear.

Today on State of the Human, we are trying to discover what it means to believe and how belief can change our lives and our final story. We follow the incredible journey of senior producer Will Rogers, as [00:50:00] he lives through three different beliefs about nothing less than the destiny of all humankind. First, it's Jesus, then it's collapse, and then it's something a lot like Jesus, only different.

Will Rogers: When I was a kid, there was this book called Left Behind and Left Behind is about how the rapture occurs, and all of the true Christians have been brought up into heaven. And those who are not true Christians have been left behind. And I was totally into it such that one day when I got home from school and nobody in my family was home at the house, I went from room to room thinking like. Is this it? Did I get left behind? Am I not a true Christian? No will. You haven't been left behind like you're a true Christian and your family is somewhere like you will find them. And having that kind of belief that at any moment Jesus was gonna come back to fix everything or to to save everybody was a really um. It, it made everything better and knowing that that is what's gonna happen in the end is a source of great comfort to the 15-year-old version of me. And having that I could like go boldly into the world and know that everything was gonna turn out okay. And. Um, the tough thing is when, like, I, I kind of realized that maybe a lot of the stuff that I [00:52:00] believed about how everybody else was wrong wasn't necessarily true, and I got to a point where like the belief I could no longer hold onto it with the same rightness.

Once I met enough people who seemed to make enough sense about their way of seeing how things were going down in the world, I could no longer really fully believe that Jesus was gonna come back at any minute to to fix everything, and that was really hard. One ritual that I developed that helped me get through college was this friend John and I would break into classrooms on Friday nights. Every Friday night we would find an open door or an open window and get into a classroom, access the DVD player and the um, projector. And we would watch documentaries every Friday night. It really was a comfort for me. Um.

A theme of many documentaries is what's called doom and gloom, and having, having this as my go-to like comfort alongside this inability to believe that Jesus was gonna come back and fix everything, led me to believe that we were doomed. In other words, the story that I was living in was a story in which we as a society are rapidly approaching collapse of a of a huge scale. At any moment, on any day, the big one could hit California and we could see Hurricane Katrina along this whole coastline. The instability could ripple across the entire country and across the entire world. At any moment, this could happen.

And so as soon as I graduated from college, I moved into the mountains of North Carolina to this eco [00:54:00] village off the grid. Much of the food there is grown on the village, and my job was to grow plants. I grew fruit trees and berry bushes. Okay. Every day I'd walk out of my house down a hill on a gravel path, over a footbridge and up another hill.

And then I would be at work potting plants, watering plants, and packing plants in the truck, and taking them to town where I would sell plants to people so that they would have these fruit trees and berry bushes to grow in their own yards. And the story in my mind was that whenever everything falls apart, at least these people would have at least these plants to help feed themselves and their families. And that felt so good on such a deep level to be feeding people in this way.

The other big thing that went on for me while I was there in the village. Was this desire to reconnect to my Christian past, connecting the way in which I saw the world to the Christian ideals and when you hang out with plants for a ton of time, your mind can do things that are different than when you're hanging out with people all day.

I came to recognize each type of plant as a different answer to the question of what it means to be alive and, and in the mountains. You can look up into the stars and see tons of stars, y'all. It's ridiculous how many stars there are out there. And I, I remember like also thinking a lot about aliens at this time, and I had never heard this idea that someone could definitely believe in aliens.

And just realizing that that was an option for me opened up this idea that we could be living in a [00:56:00] universe that's just bursting with life and bursting with other kinds of answers to this question of what it means to be alive. And so something did click into place. I could start to think again about somebody coming down from the heavens at any moment and changing the game here on Earth and reminding us that all of the drama, all of the crisis that we're facing here could be really shifted in a huge way at pretty much any moment, even now. Maybe this is it.

And, and now I feel like this space in my heart is starting to be filled again. This magical wonder of the planet. At any moment, something new could happen that either brings great joy or it could be like disaster. Like, who knows? And maybe it's Jesus, you know, I'm, I'm not. I'm not gonna say that it's impossible that Jesus left the planet a couple thousand years ago and has been moving at light speed since then and is like ready at any moment to like come down.

Who knows? It's possible. And so that's where I finally came to with this whole journey of like. Connecting the Jesus story to a story that I could actually believe in again. And even though there's a lot in my life that's uncertain, it feels so good to have a story that I can be a part of. That feels good again, and I delight in sharing that story with you.

Eileen Williams: This story [00:58:00] was told by Will Rogers, senior producer at State of the Human, and edited by me, Eileen Williams.

That's it for today's episode. This program was produced by Eileen Williams, Rosie La Puma, will Rogers, Claire Shone, and Jonah Willinhganz. Special thanks to Beth Duff Brown Krista Tippett, Lisa Hicks and Carol Dweck. Thanks also to Laura Kelly, Louis Lafair, Sonya Gonzalez and Madeline Chang, and all the staff at the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Music You heard during the Introduction and transitions on this show includes artists, Poddington Bear, and Broke for free. For their generous financial support, we'd like to thank the Stanford University Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. The program in Oral Communication and Bruce Braden.

Remember that you can find this and every episode of State of the Human on iTunes, you can also download them and find out more about the storytelling projects, live events, grants, and workshops at our website, storytelling.stanford.edu. For State of the Human and the Stanford Storytelling Project, i'm Eileen.

See you next week.