[MUSIC] Hi, my name's Paddy Steinfort. I'm the Head of Mental Performance for the Toronto Blue Jays in Major League Baseball. But, as your can hear from my accent, I'm not from around these parts. I actually originally started in sport as a young man. Straight out of high school I was drafted into the Australian Football League, which is our biggest professional sports league back home in Australia. And I spent seven years as a professional athlete in what was, fair to say, an up and down career. I faced a lot of challenges. Had some successes too, but by the end of it I was left with a nagging question. Why wasn't I able to fulfill what I had thought was my potential at the start of the career? I went and did a few odd jobs back in the real world, I guess, straight after being a professional athlete. But a few years later, I was attracted back to coaching in that same league. As I did some development work with some of the younger draftees, that question kept burning. I came across a number of different approaches. And one of the ones that really grabbed me, and intuitively spoke to me as a potential competitive advantage was Angela Duckworth's work on grit and its effect on performance in a lot of different settings now. As I dug into it and read more about it, it seemed like there was a fantastic promise because a lot of education work showed great effects. Some really good correlations in the military setting, but there was nothing specific to sport. And so I actually ended up accidentally being in Philadelphia coming to visit a professional football team here in the off season from back home. And when I found out that University of Pennsylvania was in Philadelphia, I reached out just total moon shot. And luckily enough I happened to connect with someone who did know Angela. And that put me in touch. Now at that stage, I only really had time to ask a brief question. Could it be trained, could we do something with young athletes who turned up and weren't really as good as they could be, or maybe they didn't access their character strengths as much as we might want them to? And the answer was a little bit mixed, we don't think so but we're not sure. And so with that lit a fire in me, I went back to the Australian Football League and coached for another season. But by the end of that year, that fire had become a raging inferno, I guess, and it ended up motivating me to jump back overseas and move over here and actually study under Angela. I joined the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program here at UPenn. And from there I got to work direct with Angela on, I guess, the hypothesis I had which was, intuitively I felt there was a connection between individuals and specifically high-level performers who could persevere, under extreme duress in some cases. Both psychological pressure, but also physical damage, for something that was a real long-term goal of being an elite athlete or being a career athlete. And that if they possessed grit, it was going to help them maximize their talent. I thought I had grit, and we'll circle back to that later. But I wanted to know whether, if that was there, did it give someone a better chance in spite of all the luck and hardships that may be thrown at them? My second hypothesis was, I did believe that it could be taught or it could be tried, at least to some extent. And so working with Angela and also during theories and research from other areas. I set about testing that hypothesis in practical ways and in real world ways with professional athletes both football back in Australia. But also basketball and American Football here and now obviously working with Major League Baseball's professional athletes are at the top of their game. Literally, the best in the world. And trying to find out a, does having grit or having a positive approach to work and accessing strengths rather than focusing on weaknesses, does that give the best in the world a better chance at maximizing their talents and becoming champions? And secondly, are coaches in those realms able to actually pass on lessons and tips that can actually help improve an athlete's ability to access those strengths and to persevere under extremely trying circumstances? And it turns out we found some really positive and promising results which I'll touch on in a little bit. >> When I was in Angela's classes learning about character strengths, I was really fascinated by the way in which all of these different constellations of strengths can really help an individual perform at their best. And I was really curious about the ways in which that could be translated from the individual to the organization. And of course it's different. I mean, psychology is about studying an individual and the ways that they individually, think, feel, and do. And in organizations there is more sociology going on than just psychology. But nonetheless, it felt like it'd be really interesting to be able to take the work of figuring out what an individual's unique signature strengths would be. What their unique thumb print of strengths would be and try to figure out what would be the equivalent in an organizational setting? How could we treat the entire corporation a little bit like an individual and figure out what their unique signature strengths would be? What the right combination of values and behaviors would be that would allow them to truly perform at their best? I felt that if we were able to truly help that organization figure out what their unique signatures strengths might be, what their values and behaviors would be, that would allow them to be able to collaborate in different ways, to be able to work in different ways. To be able to ultimately work to achieve something bigger than necessarily what any individual is working on. If the whole entire organization could pursue these values, these behaviors, these strengths together, my hypothesis was that they'd be able to create high performance within the organization. They'd be able to, if it was a customer facing organization, create the kind of client experience that would create higher loyalty. Or if they were working on productivity issues that they'd be able to wrestle with these things to try to figure out how do we create the highest productivity ratio. Or if they were just trying to make money, how could they grow the business as much as they possibly could, that these strengths as an organization could truly help that organization succeed. >> Hi, my name is David Meketon and I joined Angela Duckworth in the lab about five years ago. But I came from 40 years in public education in a variety of roles. I worked as a teacher in history, in English, in elementary school, but I was also a counselor and a school administrator. One of the things that is so clear to anyone who's worked with children in education, is that there's more to the story than just their cognitive ability. I met Angela about 14 years ago when she was studying my students at the school in Philadelphia. And this was a school for gifted kids. Virtually all the kids were two standard deviations above the norm in IQ. And yet, as in any school, there was a huge range of achievement. So, the kids were all smart enough. They all had the talent. But there was a first in the class and a bottom in the class. And the question is, what was the difference? If it wasn't talent or ability, then what was the influence on how they would achieve in school? The other interesting thing, just in terms of my own experience and background, is besides for the kids that I worked with, the gifted kids. I also worked with individuals in their families who had been incarcerated. The individual's been incarcerated and I worked with a support group that would help them and their families re-enter. So here you have this significant curve of ability and even for or maybe even especially for men who had been incarcerated, what would predict their success was equally these non-cognitive skills. These things like the ability to defer gratification, and persistence, and grit. It certainly took a lot of grit, takes a lot of grit for these individuals to persist. But, when I entered education, it was at a turning point in how we were looking at human potential. The humanistic movement in psychology was at its peak and the works of people like Maslow and Rogers. And individuals like that was having a big effect. But at the same time B.F. Skinner's work in behaviorism was having a significant impact. And it was believed, when I was a brand new teacher back in 1973, that what would make the difference was essentially stimulus and response, either rewards or punishment. But I came to learn, over time and certainly through this work, that extrinsic stimuli, like reward and punishment, may not be so lasting. And if anything, maybe it had a temporary impact, but it didn't really persist. It wasn't, that the effects of these extrinsic rewards and punishments were short lived. And so, with my own experience, my hypothesis certainly as a young teacher that students were a product of how they learned about themselves through these various rewards and punishment, it changed. The other thing is that while I believe, and still I believed, and I still believe, that these things are malleable, they can change, I don't know how deeply I believed it. I suspected that we are born with a certain predispositions. We are raised in certain ways and these things certainly or more than a little bit influence who we become. And so, I was drawn to this work because I was fascinated with how can we help individuals to be the best they can be, despite their life circumstances? Angela persuaded me pretty early on, that yeah, all of us might eat that first marshmallow that Warder Michelle described so well 50 years ago in his work. But the question is, okay, so if you lack that self control, what can you do about it? And so my intuitive hypothesis was young people change, they grow, they evolve. And it's clearly more than just talent. It's not just intellectual ability, there's much more to it. But it evolved to mean so much more because it began to also entail what can be done. What interventions, what methods are there to change these things, to get people to be the best selves they could be. And that it's not magic, that there's science that can be applied here. So as I continued in this work, and I continue in it, I'm continuing to learn and see that there is infinite capacity for impact in human behavior. And a big part of that would involve self awareness and meta cognition. But also very specific strategies for change.
