Believing

Believing

Transcript for Believing (full episode)

It's 90.1.

K-Z-S-U.

Can the act of believing actually save your life?

It did for Victor Frankel.

Frankel 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's Search for Meaning, he describes his experience in the camps.

Hungry, afraid and alone, Frankel 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, Frankel 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 Frankel was finally liberated, his release was bittersweet.

He soon learned that his mother, his father, his brother, and his wife were all dead.

Frankel 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 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 Frankel 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.

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 Camponde.

It was there that she began to open her heart to belief, and the results were astounding.

Here she speaks with associate producer Lora 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.

I'm Beth Duff-Brown.

Everything to me comes down to data and science and facts.

In 1979, Beth Duff-Brown joined the Peace Corps.

She went to a tiny village called Kamponde.

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 80s, Zaire became dangerous and she had to leave.

She was the last Peace Corps volunteer there.

Before she left, she made a promise.

I vowed then that I would keep the people of Kamponde in my heart and that I would return one day.

Beth went on to get her Masters 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, Beth was reminded of the people of Kamponde and the promise she had made.

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

I thought it would be interesting to see how the villagers had changed, how high had changed, how the Civil War might impact the village.

Beth arrived in Kamponde after a couple cargo flights and a ride down dirt roads in a jeep.

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.

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

Really, the only thing they wanted to talk about was why I didn't have any children, because, of course, in all of Africa and much of the world, your wealth or the richness of a family is measured by the number of children you have.

And so when they learned that Chris and I didn't have any children, they felt that I was very poor, and they felt really badly for me.

And a lot of them got very angry and said, you've put your career ahead of being a mother, and this is why you were put on earth.

And I told them that we had tried many years, and they said, don't worry, we're going to take care of it.

We're going to say some prayers.

We're going to bring you a child.

She had been trying to get pregnant for months.

The doctors 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.

The rebels were approaching the capital.

It was an extremely stressful time.

There was a lot of violence.

A lot of people were fleeing the capital.

There were hundreds of journalists who had flown in from around the world to cover this story.

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.

And I remember one night talking to another friend of mine, Donna, another AP correspondent, saying, wow, I just don't really feel that good.

I feel nauseous and sort of tired.

I'm going to 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, wow, I had missed my period.

It had been a couple weeks now.

Mild panic set in.

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 villagers' prayers come true?

The safest way out was by water.

Beth prepared to flee the Congo in a canoe.

And I remember being on that canoe crossing the river and being somewhat petrified.

I knew that there was fighting behind us and I 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.

Beth went in for a pregnancy test by now at her base in Cote 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.

He said, you know, I'm sorry, 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.

Uncertain, Beth awaited the birth of her baby.

She maintained hope.

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.

Beth gave birth to Caitlin 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.

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.

Beth hoped the village and the Congo could hear that their prayers had been answered.

And I remember immediately after Caitlin 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, someway, that they would find the village.

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 returned friend Beth.

Beth recorded this music at a village party.

The villagers sang songs, and this time in the songs I could hear not only Miss Elizabeth, but Kathleen is how they pronounce Caitlin's name.

I heard her name in the songs and when I asked what they were saying, it was again them saying, you know, Mama Elizabeth had deep roots in this village and her seeds were planted.

And while the seed that gave her Caitlin was far from our village, she still has her roots here in Camponde.

Beth's story had become part of the story of Camponde too.

Caitlin is now a senior at Palo Alto High School.

I'm Caitlin Duff-Brown.

I feel like I've always been more of like a spiritual person.

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

I don't think they got her pregnant, but I think they helped her with having more hope and not giving up and things like that.

I don't think they necessarily reached her and made her pregnant, but I think they did help her spiritually and wanting to keep trying.

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

I'm not a religious person, as I've said.

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.

I think it would be amazing to go and meet all of them and actually have a full understanding of what happened and every time she talks about it, 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.

This piece was produced by Lora Kelley, contributor here at State of the Human.

It featured the voice of journalist Beth Duff-Brown, as well as music by Greater Than Are Equal To, Deef and Krakatoa.

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 Tippett 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 in 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.

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 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.

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.

This is Speaking of Faith.

Stay with us.

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 Tippett, the host, explored questions of religion, spirituality and meaning.

And she discovered a delight in other religions as well.

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

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.

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.

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 kind of the core biblical truths.

It felt like they were woven into the fabric of reality.

But for her, as for me, the world didn't stay simple forever.

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

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 newfound vastness of the world.

She did an exchange program, traveling to East Germany.

When she came home for Christmas that year, she brought an East German student with her.

And we were driving along one day.

My grandfather really took a shine to this young woman and I heard him in the back seat of the car one day near the end of the trip reading her his pivotal Bible verses and asking her to take Jesus into her heart.

And it was so much a part of him that he really believed that she was damned to hell 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.

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.

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

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 aide in Berlin to the US ambassador to West Germany.

Even though I was working at a really high political level at that point, first as a journalist and then with the State Department, what I did start to think about was that were those fascinating human dynamics.

Because the truth is that you could have everything in West Germany and have an empty life and you could have nothing in East Germany.

And in fact, people did carve lives of great beauty and intimacy.

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.

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

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.

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

It was all the possibilities I had.

It was my ability to dream about who I would be and what kind of future I would have.

And also, it was the freedom not just to move but to think.

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 listen to together.

Core virtue of compassion that you describe, that you find in religious traditions, it's especially tested in our time.

Today, the show is called On Being.

So I like to say that what On Being does is it explores the animating questions behind human existence, behind our religious and philosophical traditions.

What does it mean to be human?

How do we want to live?

And we explore how 21st century people are posing and living and reframing those questions in all kinds of disciplines.

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.

I like I'm really still working with this idea of belief as our embodied knowledge, our grounded knowledge.

I mean, the places where people just really that tether a life and also that help us get moving again when things go wrong as they do.

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.

In the middle of a depression, you cannot see beyond it.

That's the terrible thing.

You can't see outside it.

And you can't believe anything anybody says to you about how you will get better, right?

Or it's not as bad as you think it is, or you're a wonderful person.

You cannot believe any of that.

Depression strips away the ability to believe that things will be okay.

We have to find some other way to survive.

The one thing that can be a ray of hope is actually seeing, hearing somebody, 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 in moments, it's enough to just persist.

And that's the other thing about belief, faith, you know, this part of life when it is sustaining, 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 as well as just in kind of incorporating that into the fabric of our identity in every day.

Even when lofty ideals fail, we can still hold on to hope.

We can hold on to each other.

Human beings always fall short of any ideal.

And so you end up having to place your faith in people.

You know, you end up believing in people.

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 Tippett, and music by Pottington 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 Human explore this question.

Maddie, what do you think?

Okay, let me 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.

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

Yep, I would definitely say that Maddie has gone crazy.

Maddie, you're crazy.

Thanks, Rosie.

Of course, my beliefs are important.

My ideas, my values, they're everything.

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 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 a.m., not able to fall back asleep, super anxious and I had no idea why.

And shortly after that started happening, I suddenly had paralysis when making decisions.

I could 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.

Did you tell anyone this was happening?

I mean, not really, because I didn't have one good explanation for all of these little things happening, and so I didn't want to say anything if you're sounding crazy or something.

But 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'm normally very happy and social, and then I find myself the complete opposite, really anti-social, 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.

So then how did you do it?

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 kind of 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.

Wait, Nietzsche is the philosopher who said God is dead.

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.

Okay, 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 on 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.

Okay, yes, in theory, but what would this believing process even look like?

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 Gioni.

She was our living 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 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 Nietzschean 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 beliefs.

I'm driven by a need to make sense of the universe, not a need to control it.

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 Joanie, that experiencing extreme sadness has now made me more able to experience or at least appreciate happiness.

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.

Eileen, you still there?

Yeah.

All right, you can continue with the show now.

This segment was produced by Maddie Chang and Rosie La 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.

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

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 has 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 very back corner.

And it obviously wasn't fun for people who were in the, quote, 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.

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.

Much to my disadvantage, I was in the number one seat.

So being in the number one seat, you worry about, am I keeping the 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.

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, 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 ever had role models, it's these kids.

Though she didn't know it yet, Professor Dweck had stumbled upon what she would eventually call growth mindset.

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're dealt a certain hand and that's what you have to play with throughout life.

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.

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 it, and stretched themselves and took risks.

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.

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.

And our brains are malleable.

Professor Dweck discovered that it's possible to shift from a fixed 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 expert teacher?

Parents and teachers of the reservation learn to encourage their students to appreciate the struggle that comes before success.

Parents were taught and teachers praised the process, praised 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 reading, oral reading fluency, within a year.

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.

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.

There's a funny story associated with this.

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'm a student.

And there were several students from my psychology course, two or three, that were in this Italian class with me raising our hands.

But the transition from a fix to a growth mindset was not easy for Professor 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 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 then I thought, who said that?

Because in a fixed mindset, something hard is threatening.

Maybe you're at the edge, the limits of your ability.

Maybe you won't solve it.

And you might have to revise your opinion of your abilities.

But now I was thinking, this is a challenge.

And I was relishing it like that 10-year-old boy.

Today, when asked how her Italian is, Professor Dweck proudly responds, Molto bene.

Belief in her own learning potential has transformed Professor Dweck's life.

Beliefs define us.

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, because 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.

Beliefs define us, and beliefs are malleable.

So how can we change our beliefs?

How can we develop a growth mindset?

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, 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.

Michael Jordan got kicked off his high school basketball team.

Thomas Edison failed to make a lightbulb 1,000 times.

Rowling received 12 rejection letters for her first Harry Potter novel.

What would have happened if these individuals hadn't talked back with the growth mindset?

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.

A growth mindset makes me so excited about the future.

There are so many challenges, so many opportunities on the horizon.

I just can't wait to see what the future will bring.

This story was produced by Louis Lafair and Sonia Gonzalez.

It featured the voice of Carol Dweck, author of Mindset, as well as music by Pottington Bear.

Today, on State of the Human, we are trying to discover what it means to believe, and how belief can change our lives.

In our final story, we follow the incredible journey of senior producer Will Rogers, as 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.

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 save everybody was a really, 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.

The tough thing is when like I kind of realized that maybe a lot of the stuff that I 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 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 projector and we would watch documentaries every Friday night.

It really was a comfort for me.

A theme of many documentaries is what's called doom and gloom and having this as my go-to 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 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-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.

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 hang 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 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 remember 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 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 now I feel like this space in my heart is starting to be filled again with 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 not going to 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 ready at any moment to come down.

Who knows?

It's possible.

And so that's where I finally came to with this whole journey of 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.

This story 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 Schoen and Jonah Willihnganz.

Special thanks to Beth Duff-Brown, Krista Tippett, Lisa Hicks and Carol Dweck.

Thanks also to Lora Kelley, Louis Lafair, Sonia Gonzalez and Madeleine Chang and all the staff at the Stanford Storytelling Project.

Music you heard during the introduction and transitions on this show includes artists Pottington 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 Project's 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!