Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Introduction to Talking to Teens
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Andy Earle: You're listening to Talking to Teens, where we speak with leading experts from a variety of disciplines about the art and science of parenting teenagers. I'm your host, Andy Earle.

The Problem with Linear Goal Setting
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Andy Earle: We're talking today about the problem with how we set goals for teenagers.

We tend to think of goals as very linear things.

But the problem with linear thinking and goal setting is that it only gets you very normal, predictable, standard results.

It doesn't tend to get you somewhere unique, interesting, creative, or different.

Instead of setting goals for our teens, we should help them run experiments.

Introducing Anne-Laure Le Cunff
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Andy Earle: Our guest today is Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

She is an ex Googler who went back to get her Ph. D. in neuroscience.

And is the founder of Ness Labs and the author of their popular newsletter.

She's also the author of the new book, Tiny Experiments.

Welcome to Talking to Teens. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Thanks so much for having me.

Andy Earle: Really excited to speak with you and interested to hear the story behind this book that you have just put out. It's called Tiny Experiments. How to Live Freely in a Goal Obsessed World.

Talk to me a little about that. Why a book? Why do we need to live freely? And why are tiny experiments the way to do that?

Anne-Laure's Journey to Tiny Experiments
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Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, I kind of divide my life in two chapters. And the first one was when I tried to always figure things out in the most efficient way possible. So I had a very linear approach to success, to my career, to my life.

I tried to climb the ladder. To get the next promotion. And whenever I faced a problem, I figured there must be a framework, a tool that I can apply. There must be a way to approach this that is as effective as possible. I found myself in a place where from the outside, I was fairly successful, but, something didn't feel right on the inside.

I felt quite empty and disconnected from myself. after a long transition when I explored different things. I started a startup that didn't work out. I did freelance. I ended up admitting that I was completely lost, which was incredibly freeing.

I finally started experimenting more with the way I was approaching life in general. that's what the book is about. it's designed and targeted for people who, like me, tend to be problem solvers. They want to solve problems. They want to find solutions. They want to work as effectively as possible.

I kind of want to encourage them to maybe have a more exploratory, more experimental approach to life.

Andy Earle: You really attack our entire mentality of linear goal setting in the book. Wow. So talk to me about that. Isn't that how you achieve anything that you want to achieve in life? You see what you want to achieve. And you set a series of goals between where you are now and where you're trying to get to.

And you work your way from one goal to the next goal until you get there.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yes, absolutely. If you want to achieve the exact same thing everybody else is achieving, that's the way you do it. But if you want to achieve your own ambitions, if you want to figure out what you want, and live your own life, not a copy paste from what everybody else is doing, then no, that's not the way to go.

Andy Earle: So, if we don't do that, then what would we be doing? Just tell them to just go in whatever direction they feel like?

Encouraging Teenagers to Experiment
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Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I think something that's helpful with teenagers that we unfortunately rarely do is just try to remember how you felt when you were a teenager. How did you feel when your parents were pushing you and forcing you to try and figure out what you wanted as quickly as possible and try to figure out your career, try to figure out your future, when what you really wanted to do at this age was to explore. You would talk to your parents and you would say, come on, I'm still 16, I have no idea what I want to do. Why are you forcing me to try and figure it out? I think that's very important to remember that experience as an adult, as a parent, remember what it was like for you to be a teenager and, maybe trying to create that space for experimentation for your own teenager now.

I realize that unfortunately, our society is designed in a way where there are certain milestones that you might want to hit at certain times if you want to keep your options open. That's fine. But equally, you can make sure to have those other spaces on the side where they can experiment a little bit more. So you can tell them, you do have to write this essay if you want to apply for this university. Very linear, please do this. I'll be less stressed if I know you're doing this. But also, tell me, what are the things you'd like to experiment with?

Would you like to experiment with writing, painting, sports, traveling, learning a new language, meeting new people? You don't have to give me an answer that means that's the thing you want to do for the rest of your life. Just something you want to experiment with for the next month.

Just tell me and let's make that happen.

The Importance of Starting Small
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Andy Earle: You write in the book that the number one barrier to self renewal is not lack of time or lack of money. It's not knowing how to begin.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Especially for people who like to have a clear vision and a clear plan to get to a clear destination. If you don't have that, you feel like you don't have all of the information you need to get started. And what happens then? You don't start. That's what a lot of people do.

They're paralyzed. They're trying to analyze all of the potential next steps. It's a little bit like people who want to buy I don't know, a new pen or something that's not that important for their house and they end up spending three weeks reading all of the reviews online. When maybe the best decision here would be to just buy a pen.

And if it's really horrible, then maybe get another one. But chances are, you'll be happy with the first one you picked. That's also the mindset that I encourage in the book to develop. It's to just pick a direction. One that feels good for now with whatever information you have at your disposal, knowing that it might not really, not necessarily be perfect decision, but at least you're progressing. And when you're progressing and moving forward, you collect data. And so now you know a little bit more about the world, about yourself, about the task, about the problem at hand. And then you can make another decision based on the data that you collected.

And again, might not be the perfect decision, but if you keep on iterating, you can trust that you will grow, that you will learn, that you will discover new things, even if the path forward is unclear.

Andy Earle: You talk in the book about making a pact. What does a pact look like and why is that such a good strategy?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: In the book I talk about developing an experimental mindset. And that might feel a little bit vague for a lot of people, not knowing, what does that mean, exactly? How do I develop an experimental mindset? So in the book, I describe a tool for developing an experimental mindset. It's something that anyone can start applying right now to start designing their own tiny experiments. It's inspired by the scientific method. The way the scientific method works is that you decide on a test that you're going to perform and you decide on a number of trials.

And the reason why you have several trials is that you need to know if, the same thing happens. So if you do it once and something happens, that doesn't mean anything. You need to perform the action several times. And if reliably, every time you do it, you get the same results, then you can infer there is some sort of correlation here. I do A, I get B. You need to decide on an action and a duration. So, you say, for example, I will write for 10 minutes every day for 10 days. That's a pact that you're making with yourself. You're basically committing to curiosity by saying, I am going to perform this test for a certain number of times, a certain number of trials.

So, that's one you could do, for example. If you're interested in exploring YouTube, that's something that a lot of teenagers are interested in. You don't necessarily need to buy all of the fancy equipment straight away. You could say, I'm going to publish a video every week for six weeks. And at the end of the six weeks, I will look at the data.

I will look at how it felt. Both the external data. Do I have people watching the videos? Do people comment on them? Do they like them? But also the internal data. How do I feel? Was that fun? Did I like it? Do I want to keep going? Based on this, I can decide what my next steps are going to be. So that's really what designing a tiny experiment is.

And this is why a pact is so helpful. You're making this pact with yourself that I'm going to collect this data. I'm going to conduct this experiment and then I'll make a decision.

Andy Earle: How important is it to follow the pact? What if you miss a week? You know, you have your six weeks. You're going to do your videos, but you get really, really busy in week three and you can't make one.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: That's why my book is called Tiny Experiments. I think it's very important to complete the pact. And there is no definition of success or failure in the traditional sense of the term where you're trying to get to a specific outcome. A terrible pact, would be to say, I want to get to a thousand YouTube subscribers by the end of the month.

That's not a good pact. But saying, I want to publish four videos by the end of the month, that's a good pact. That's the commitment. That's just what you say you're going to do. You do it, and then you see how you feel. I would really encourage anyone designing an experiment, and if any parents want to talk about it with their teenager and say, Hey, do you wanna design an experiment?

Just encouraging them to q uestion the ambition of the pact itself, trying to go with something small that they can actually complete. Once they've conducted several experiments, they can go a little bit bigger. But the first ones at least should be quite short. If you have any doubts whatsoever, that things might get busy in a few weeks, then go for 2 weeks.

Say I'll do three videos over the course of the next two weeks. That's fine. Just do that. If you feel at the end of the two weeks, like that was very easy, actually. No effort at all, didn't feel like you were overwhelmed. Then go for a bigger experiment. Go for a bigger pact.

That's okay. But start tiny.

Andy Earle: I think also so often we don't want to get started with something because it would just keep going and it has no finish line. Whereas with what you're suggesting, we take something on, but we already know that there's a finite amount of time that we're going to be doing it.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, that's the main difference between an experiment and a habit. When you try to build a habit, you say, I'm committing for this thing for the rest of my life. I'm going to go to bed at the same time every evening. I'm going to drink that amount of water every day. I'm going to go for a walk three times a week.

And I'm going to do this for the rest of my life because I'm convinced that this is good for me. Whereas with an experiment, you're not convinced. You don't know. You have a hypothesis, a bit of a research question. You feel like, Oh, that looks interesting. I might like this. But I don't know, and I won't know until I try it.

So let me experiment with this. Let me design a pact that is only for a certain duration. And at the end of that pact, I can decide whether I want to keep going. And if I absolutely love that, some experiments can then lead to creating a new habit that you want to implement in your life. But you can start with the experiment first and then decide if you want to make that a habit.

Andy Earle: And I love this because even if you end up hating whatever the activity is, it still is a successful experiment because you gained information.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Exactly. Now you know.

Tracking Energy Levels
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Andy Earle: You talk also in the book about keeping track of your energy levels.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, it's something we've been taught, especially in our modern Western societies, is to keep track of time.

It's everywhere. You go in a classroom. There's a clock right there. We have smartwatches. That's the first thing you see when you open your phone. Time is everywhere. Calendars.

Meetings. It's as if that was the only resource we should manage in our life. And there's another resource that's actually really important. That's our energy levels. Because you can have all the time in the world. If you're exhausted, if your mood is low, you're not going to be productive.

You're not going to be able to focus on whatever it is you want to do.

We live in a society that is ruled by time. So it's not like you can escape that. But in addition to this, pay attention to your energy levels and. the freedom that you have to organize your calendar.

Try to schedule some of the things that you care the most about when your energy levels are high. So you can give them a higher level of attention, of focus, of effort. And try to move the things that you don't care about as much, maybe more like admin tasks, like boring stuff, low effort things, to times in the day where your energy is a little bit lower.

Andy Earle: Optimizing your schedule to be most aligned with your actual circadian rhythms. So, how do you track that? In a, notepad on your phone or something?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Well, the issue I have with tracking it in real time is that nobody does it. We go about our days and you're not going to stop every five minutes and just write, I'm feeling like I have high energy. So that's not going to happen. I recommend doing that retrospectively. So, it's actually very quick. You just sit down, open your calendar, whether on your phone or on your laptop. Then you open either your note taking app or a notebook, and you look back at your meetings in your calendar and you look at what gave you energy, how you felt, what drained your energy.

There's an entrepreneur called Sahil Bloom who has this technique that I think is so simple and brilliant. He's just color coding directly in his calendar green for times when his energy was high. Yellow when it was kind of meh. And then red when his energy was very low.

And so he can just look at his calendar for the week and you can see those patterns emerging. Maybe you notice that actually it's very green in the morning.

You have high energy. But somehow all of your meetings are in the afternoon. For the meetings that you can move, just send a quick email and say, Hey, we're scheduled to talk at 1 p. m. on Thursday. Do you mind chatting at 10 a. m. in the morning? If you're free, just checking, right?

And trying to see if you can move some of these things in the morning when you have higher energy. And also if you notice, for example, that you have a recurring meeting, that's not that helpful and drains your energy every week, maybe message your classmates and say, Hey, you know, we've been meeting every afternoon on Wednesday to do this thing.

It's not very productive. I feel like I'm not the only one feeling like we're wasting our time when we do this. How about we create a short document and everybody puts their notes in there, and that's what we use to keep track of our progress on the project instead of having to sit in this meeting that nobody's getting any value from. So that can be really helpful also to reflect on your energy levels and adjust the way you approach your task, your work and your studies moving forward.

Andy Earle: Wow, sounds so helpful. You get so locked in as a teenager because high school is always these certain hours. Practice is at this time.

Based on your schedule, your only time to do homework is at 3 p. m. to 4. 30 between school and practice.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, that's why, it's very important to do that, with the little freedom you have with your schedule.

That's the same for adults as well. A lot of people who work in companies, it's other people adding stuff in your calendar, and you don't really have a choice as to when you're going to work on this task. But I think that's why it's particularly important to be mindful of those tasks that we place ourselves in our calendar.

I think for parents and teenagers as well, just having those conversations, also. Because there might be things that we plan to do together and we never really ask ourselves that question. We just say, Oh, we have time on Sunday morning. Let's just do that thing together. And it might actually be that sleeping in is more important.

At that time for your teenager. And so just asking and saying, Hey, how are your energy levels? And there's this thing I want us to do together this week. So I'm free at those times. What do you think would be best? What works best for your energy levels? And again, might not always work, but I think it's important to at least have those conversations and make it evidence that yes, time is important, but energy is very important as well.

Andy Earle: I found this really interesting in the book. You're talking about the work of Professor Kerr, and it is a model of motivation. There are these different factors in motivation. The rational head, affectional heart, and practical factors.

Why is that so important to understand?

Understanding Procrastination
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Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I describe this model of motivation in the context of procrastination. Procrastination is something that I've always found fascinating because everybody loves to talk about it at a conceptual level, but nobody wants to admit that they struggle with it.

It has a really bad rep. We associate it with laziness, with lack of self control, right? So that's not necessarily something that we talk about a lot. You might tell your close friends, I've been procrastinating on this thing for so long. But you're not going to tell your boss that you've been procrastinating on something.

If you've been late on a project, you'll blame external circumstances. But you're not gonna say, I've just been procrastinating. And in this chapter of the book, I try to have an honest discussion about what procrastination is and try to encourage people to reimagine the relationship with it. Not seeing it as an enemy to fight and to destroy, but seeing it instead as a helpful signal that we can learn from.

And you talked about those three factors and I share a little tool that I call the triple check. the tool works like this. Whenever you find yourself procrastinating, instead of blaming yourself and using your willpower to push through, you can just stop, pause and ask yourself. Where is the procrastination coming from?

Is it coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand? If it's coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, I'm not 100 percent convinced that I should be working on this in the first place. Maybe the task makes no sense. Maybe I'm not the right person to do it. Maybe it's not the right timing. But my mind is trying to tell me, why are we even working on this?

Why are we even worried about this? If it's coming from the heart, it means that at an affectional level, we're not quite convinced this is going to be enjoyable. We don't think this is going to be fun. Even though we think that we should be doing this thing. We don't feel like it.

And if it's coming from the hand, it means that even though we think we should be doing this, we feel like that could be fun, at a practical level we believe that we don't have the right tools, the right skills, or the right support to get the task done. What's amazing about the triple check is that not only does it help you figure out where the procrastination is coming from, but it also helps you find a solution for that problem.

So if it's coming from the head, you can just go back to the task itself. that might be going back to your teacher parents or whoever created that task. ask for clarification and ask whether this is really the right task to focus on or maybe there might be a better way to do this.

If it's coming from the heart, you can make it more fun. that could be grabbing a friend, going to your favorite coffee shop, and really trying to design it in a way you're going to enjoy it a little bit better. And if it's coming from the hand, instead of being paralyzed because you feel like you can't do it, you don't have the right skills, then raise that hand, let someone know that you're struggling, say, yeah, I'm fully convinced I should be doing this, but I don't really know where to start.

I don't feel like I have the right resources. Tell someone. Again, that could be teacher, parent, that could be a friend, another student. Just asking for help. When you ask for help, people will be super happy to help you. And instead of being stuck, you're just going to be able to know what are the next steps to take.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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Andy Earle: Thanks for coming on the show. I found there to be really helpful ideas in the book.

I would highly encourage people to check it out. Get a copy. The book is called Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal Obsessed World.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Thank you so much. This was great.

Andy Earle: Where else can we send people to learn more about what you do, to maybe follow updates from you, or to hear about what you're doing next?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Absolutely. The best way to know about all of my work, as you mentioned, is my book, Tiny Experiments. I write a newsletter every week. You just go to nesslabs. com, enter your email address, and then you'll receive it every Thursday. I discuss a lot of the topics that we talked about today.

Andy Earle: Very cool. So grateful to have you on the show. Congratulations on the book.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Thank you. Thanks so much.

Andy Earle: We're here today with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, talking about how to help your teen move from goals to experiments, and we're not done yet. Here's a look at what's coming up in the second half of the show.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Everything is a signal from your brain and your body trying to communicate some important information to you. And unfortunately, we're so focused on trying to get things done that we don't take the time to think about the best way to get things done. If we forget about the traditional definitions of success, if we forget about all of the milestones for teenagers that they have to keep up with all the time, are there things that you're curious about that you'd like to explore? Even if it's not tied to making money. For YouTube, I decided to design a pact where I said I was going to publish one video every week until the end of the year. And I did it. And then I looked at the data, the external data was good. I got to about 10, 000 subscribers and lots of people liked the videos. But if I looked at the internal data, I actually didn't like recording videos that much.

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Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.