Belle Liang: Transcending the Performance Mindset

This week Dr. Reyes talks to Belle Liang about the transition from her early years, feeling the drive to succeed in order to meet the expectations of her family and community, to pushing past those expectations to reshape how she defined success for herself. The strong mentoring she received as a graduate student led to her own desire to study the positive outcomes of mentoring that lead young people to discover their sense of purpose.  

Dr. Belle Liang is a professor of counseling, developmental, and educational psychology in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. She is a licensed clinical psychologist, and an expert in mentoring and youth purpose. She founded the Purpose Lab, and has published nearly dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters to advance the science and practice of mentoring and cultivating purpose in schools and workplaces. She co-authored, "How to Navigate Life: The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career, & Beyond" (St. Martin's Press, 2022).

Portrait Illustration by: Triyas
Music by: @siryalibeats

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Transcript

Patrick Reyes: Welcome to another episode of the Sound of the Genuine, the Forum for Theological Exploration’s podcast on finding meaning and purpose in your lives. I'm Dr. Reyes the host of the Sound and Genuine, and today we have Belle Liang, who is a professor of counseling, developmental and educational psychology at Boston College. She's also the founder of The Purpose Lab, which is a great resource for those who are trying to find meaning and purpose in their lives. 

And how I came to know Belle is through her book, How to Navigate Life: The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career & Beyond. It's a brilliant book for those who are working with young people about finding meaning and purpose in their lives. 

Before we get to the episode though, if you can, give us a review of this podcast. It helps us get this podcast into new listeners ears. And now my interview with Belle. 

I'm excited we were able to make this happen, Belle, for you to be on the Sound of the Genuine. I read the book and immediately reached out because your writing is on vocation, meaning, and purpose. We don't very often have scholars of what we do on the show, so I'm so grateful you said yes. But I want to know more about your journey, your call journey. How do you get to be a scholar who researches this? Take me back to the beginning. Take me back to your people. Take me all the way back to your genesis.

Belle Liang: Okay, well first of all, it's such an honor to be here. Thank you so much, Pat, for inviting me. So my parents immigrated to the US to give my brothers and I a better education. And to do that, my father had to borrow money and leave behind my mother and my six-week-old brother, at the time.

It was two years before they were reunited. My mom left her family and her career goals. Both of them made tremendous sacrifices for us so that we could have the education that we got in the US. And so I did everything I could as a high school student, as a college student to make their sacrifices worth it.

And that meant, for me, working hard in school. I felt like that was the best gift that I could give them, was to succeed in school. Our family believed that if you worked really, really hard and that hard work led to achievement, then you could earn the American dream. So that's what I did.

When I got to high school, I did everything in my power to get top grades, to be involved in student government, to be socially successful. And it was kind of my superpower to fit in. And my parents were like really pleased with that. They were really pleased with the fact that they viewed their sacrifices as leading to our success in school and fitting in.

Later when I enrolled in college [at] Indiana University, in Bloomington, I continued the same approach to life. You know, what I think of now as a performance mindset. I did everything I could to fit in and to meet everyone's expectations. And so in my family, what was the most prestigious goal? It was to become a doctor.

So that's what I pursued. I became a pre-med major. I worked hard to get A's in math and chemistry and biology. In the summers I shadowed physicians and I worked as a dental assistant. I worked on an in-patient unit for a summer. I was excelling academically and socially, but there was a problem. The further that I got along with this pre-med major, the more internally conflicted I felt. I was beginning to realize that the part of healthcare that I felt most compelled by was the relational aspect. And that realization made me wanna become a psychologist. So I decided to go to graduate school and get my PhD in clinical psychology.

This was the first time I started resisting, what I viewed as, the expectations around me. What I viewed as a different kind of vision for my future. And I still remember the day that I sat my parents down and I told them, I broke the news to them that I was changing my major from pre-med to psychology.

It didn't go well. They were like, "Have you thought this through? Can you get a job doing such a thing? How could you do this to us?" You know, they were incredibly worried and disappointed and they were terrified because their mindset around success was the only thing that they knew. And I recognized how much this decision would disappoint them, but I did it anyway.

It was really just the first small push away from what I now call the performance mindset. That is how it began, this journey of mine from my own personal perspective on how to define success to where I started to head.

Patrick Reyes: And tell me about the community. So if you're on this performer mindset, you're pushing your life. Tell me about the community around you. Were you surrounded by other performers? Like was it group of you who were like, ready to go? Is it a community that formed you or was this a solo effort on behalf of the family? Who was surrounding you as you're pursuing this?

Belle Liang: So I had kind of a dichotomy of different values surrounding me. So I was part of a peer group who, some of them had the performance mindset, like a good number because it was one of those like high achieving, affluent, suburban communities. My parents like worked to get us into that school system because they had heard that it was a good school system. And so there were quite a few peers of mine who had a performance mindset, but you know, I was part of a crowd that was really about having fun and super social. So not all of them had a performance mindset, a fair number had what we call now a passion mindset.

But my own family and my extended family were all about this performance mindset. Like they felt that the most important thing was to get an education so that you could, you know, raise yourself out of poverty, become successful in the world's eyes. And so really, you know, I was surrounded by a number of different kinds of value emphasis. And for a long time I was really most compelled by my family of origin's value around education and the education meritocracy.

Patrick Reyes: What do you do with this next? So you, you sat your parents down. They're worried about, you know, this pursuit of clinical psychology. What happens next in your life?

Belle Liang: Yeah, they're so worried. They're like, we don't even know what, you know, psychology is and what does a psychologist do? And keep in mind this is a different generation and they're also from a different culture and country where there was not a strong presence of psychologists and there still isn't actually. They immigrated from China. They did not come from a place where psychologists were prevalent, so they had no idea what psychologists did. And it didn't fit in with like sort of their two or three categories of career trajectories that would be a guarantee for financial security, prestige, success in their eyes.

And so, they were quite concerned. I went to Michigan State anyways. I started my clinical psychology PhD program. And it was a difficult start because even though I knew that I wanted to be a psychologist, I was still the child of immigrants, you know? And a first generation doctoral student coming from a family that was questioning this decision.

So from day one, I struggled with a really bad case of imposter syndrome. Deep down I didn't feel like I had the same preparation for doctoral studies that my peers had. You know, many of them came from families who had higher education and they seemed really well-read and knowledgeable in class.

And so I just listened and barely spoke. I constantly felt like I had to prove myself. And then, you know, sort of funny to look back on now, what felt like to make matters worse, I was paired with this mentor who was the exact opposite of me. I was kind of this tentative soul and she was somebody who was really intimidating to a lot of the students and to even her peers, because of her strength, because of her outspokenness.

I was this person who was afraid to misspeak and she was never afraid to speak her mind. She emanated power and I felt powerless. I was all about not rocking the boat and she was not afraid of sinking the boat if she felt it was the right thing to do. The other aspect of her is that she didn't play by the rules.

I didn't fit into what I saw as the traditional mold for a student who would be successful in a program like this, but she couldn't care less about the mold. And so, as different as we were, she took a great interest in me and she ended up changing my life. She saw in me something before I saw it in myself.

She saw my personal power. And she affirmed, she validated, she celebrated my efforts. She fanned the little flames that she saw in me until they caught fire. And this wasn't a coincidence. She was somebody who was great at mentoring because she was dedicated to mentoring. Her research focused on mentoring. And so ultimately her mentoring really changed my life. It instilled in me this desire to study mentoring myself. So it's my research and mentoring started from when I was a graduate student under her mentorship.

Patrick Reyes: What were some of those research questions you were looking at as a doctoral student with her? Like what was sparking in your imagination? Like, I could really dive deep into this area of research and scholarship.

Belle Liang: So an interesting thing is when I started studying mentoring with her in her lab, a lot of the research on mentoring in the field tended to focus on eliminating negative outcomes. So reducing risky behavior in youth, reducing truancy or dropout. A lot of the research focused on, you know, sort of curbing negative behavior and negative outcomes in young people..

But I had seen so much positive impact on my life that I made it my goal to study positive outcomes in young people as a result of mentoring. One of the biggest outcomes of mentoring that I saw from the research that I was doing is that like specific kinds of mentoring relationships - close, abiding mentoring relationships, cultivate a sense of purpose. A desire to follow one's heart around what is personally meaningful, and at the same time a desire to contribute in the world beyond oneself. And so I became really interested in setting the outcomes of purpose in young people.

And that research had continued when I became a tenure track faculty person. I started recognizing that a lot of the research in the field on purpose focused on just the positive outcome of purpose, but not a lot on how do you cultivate purpose in young people. How do you actually increase purpose in young people?

And so that's what my research has focused on since then is how do you create purposeful young people? What are the elements of purpose? How does mentoring contribute to bringing about purpose in young people?

Patrick Reyes: What does that research look like and what are you learning? What are some takeaways? I mean, I've read the book. I'm the hugest fan. I mean, I think you've gotten everything right, but if you could share with our listeners, like what is it that you're learning about cultivating purpose, especially in young people's lives?

Belle Liang: Yeah. So there are, several things that we have been discovering about the cultivation of purpose. One is that there seem to be four elements that are very tied to a sense of purpose that when young people have discovered these four elements about themselves, they increase in a sense of purpose.

And the first is a sense of their character strengths. What strengths make them their best selves? The second is, what are the skills that they're most motivated to learn? So these are not just the skills that they're good at. You know, a lot of times we think that the most important thing around purpose is just to do what you're good at. But actually, you know, what we are finding is that it's more important to pursue what you are intrinsically motivated to pursue. And sometimes they're not the skills that you're good at yet, but you're motivated to learn them. 

And then the third is what makes you who you are? What makes you, you? What are your most core values? And then the fourth element is, what are the needs in the world that you feel inspired to address? How do you wanna be making your contribution? What impact do you wanna be making in the world around you? So those are the four elements of purpose that are highly tied to having a sense of purpose.

Patrick Reyes: I mean, when we talk to researchers, especially around meaning and purpose, I think an assumption would be made that, if I'm thinking about these four things, character skills, what's unique to you and the needs of the world, that someone would come to you and say, oh, you must, you must be full of purpose then! As a researcher who knows this, you must be able to cultivate it. Tell me about your life as a researcher who's doing this? How are you finding meaning and purpose, and how do you apply these four characteristics to your work and life?

Belle Liang: You know, the thing that is so amazing about purpose is that the more you ask yourself the big questions around purpose, the more purposeful you become. It's probably like any kind of research. You know, this idea that we approach the very things that we ask questions about.

And so that's certainly been true for my life. You know, as I study purpose, as I work to cultivate purpose in the lives of the people around me, whether they're students, whether they are clients, whether they are, you know, readers who are seeing our research. I feel, you know, more and more purposeful in my own life.

And so that's what's been fantastic about doing research like this is that it's teaching me a lot about myself. One of the things that it's teaching me is that, as much as people are convinced that purpose is an important thing, it's a daunting thing. You know people get overwhelmed when you say that, you know, cultivating purpose is an important thing. If they're a parent, they're like, oh, another thing that I have to worry about, you know, for my kids. Now I need to cultivate purpose in them. So, part of our research and our work is to really allay their fears that actually people have intrinsic interests and purpose and what we're doing as a parent is not something that is as hard as it might sound.

We're just trying to help to uncover the seeds that are already there. Children from a very early age, they have intrinsic interests. You know, they're playing in ways that they're intrinsically interested in playing. And it's not until they get to school that we sort of beat out of them that intrinsic curiosity.

You know, really the cultivation of purpose is more like a shift in your attention rather than it is like going out there and working really, really hard to attain something that you don't have yet. Instead, it's like Michelangelo’s David, the sculpture. He said, that, you know, I went to the quarry. I saw this piece of ugly stone and all I needed to do was to chip away at the excess stone because out of it emerged David. And so it was a chipping away of excess stone. 

And I think that that is a lot like the journey towards discovering one's purpose is that we have intrinsic purpose and we're trying to chip away at some of the distractions, some of the scripts that we have been living by, that are really fear driven and are distracting us from our purpose. So that's what I've been doing for myself and that's what I've been trying to help others to do.

Patrick Reyes: That's amazing. And I know that work happens within a team too. So can you tell us a little bit about the Purpose Labs and what you're up to up in Boston, in terms of how to cultivate this in the broader culture and in the people that you get to work with?

Belle Liang: So we're having such a great time at the Purpose Labs. You know, it's really been an opportunity for us to take the ideas from research and translate them into really plain, accessible language for real people. That's where we're at in Purpose Labs. We're continuing to do our scientific research and publishing in scientific journal articles, but we've also shifted some of our attention to trying to make the research accessible on Main Street to people who normally wouldn't be reading scientific journal articles.

It's just been so meaningful for us. It's been kind of like living our purpose, to work with people outside of academia - work with parents and educators, people in the workplace, to help them to cultivate purpose in the spaces where they work. And part of what we do is that we take the research findings and we create curricula around it that is fun, that is engaging, that helps people to, you know, really be able to work together in teams and in relationship with their mentors, in relationship with their peers, with their schools, in order to begin to recognize what those character strengths and skills and motivations are that they are, you know, really compelled by. 

One of the big, big things that we do is to help people to identify what their personal story is, kind of like you're doing with me right now. We help them to identify what their envisioned future is. So we ask them questions like, how do you wanna be remembered?

And they think about these questions that no one's ever asked them before and then they connect their past to it. Like we ask, so that's your envisioned future, what are some of the formative experiences or meaningful relationships that you've had in the past that really have led to that envisioned future?

So we help them connect the dots between their future and their past, and then we help them connect the next dot to their present self. What are some ways that you could be using that character strength that you wanna be remembered by today, in order to approach that envisioned future?

And so we're really helping them to discover what their narrative is and to start living by it. To really connect with the purpose that they have rather than, you know, oftentimes what we do in life, which is to just, you know, worry about a lot of things that don't really matter to us, they just feel urgent in the moment.

We don't, oftentimes work towards the things that really matter to us in the future until somebody starts asking us these bigger questions of life. So that's really, you know, that's some of the work that we've been doing in corporate spaces, in schools in higher ed and secondary schools. And it's been really, really, gratifying for us to see people engage in the work, excited, feeling hopeful. You know, during a time where lots of people have been experiencing burnout or disengagement. There's the great resignation, great migration, quiet quitting, all these examples of societal disengagement from work. 

And, you know, we are seeing that the purpose work that we're doing and that others are doing, like yourself, Pat, are really needed right now. And that people are clicking with it and excited and being transformed by it.

Patrick Reyes: That's so inspiring and I love what you're doing in the world. I think you're right. This makes such a…it makes such a difference in the people that you're able to work with and to be able to connect those dots. I ask everyone who comes on the Sound of the Genuine this question, this is my last question. As you think about your own sense of purpose, your own sense of call, how much of it has been driven by some sort of, we talked a little bit about the performer, you know, the performance mindset earlier - the internal drive to honor yourself, your own sort of curiosities, and how much has been driven by the world, the outside, those kind of needs? Whether it's your parents or your mentor, you know, how much has been driven by you and how much has been driven by the world?

Belle Liang: Ah, that's such a great question. I think that, you know, for me, it's been an integration of influences inside and outside of myself. I feel like, you know, as much as some of the choices I made earlier in life that led me to make choices that were not my own, that were about living at other's expectations, that at the same time, I'm so grateful for those influences. I'm so grateful for my family of origin, my cultural upbringing, because it's given me insight into what so many of our, you know, students, our respondents on our studies have expressed. 

You know, it's kind of a universal feeling I think that extends beyond the cultural expectations and ethos that I described before. It's kind of a more societal, ongoing ethos. This sense of I feel like I'm living someone else's life. I don't know myself, I don't know who I really am and what I want in life.

The fact that I lived that has given me insight into cultural ethos, and it's led to the research that I do today. And it's led to the writing of our book to help free people from that ethos of living someone else's life, to give them more clarity around who they are and how to pursue their genuine, authentic self.

And so I feel like I'm a product of, you know, many influences. My cultural roots, my family and my own sense of internal calling that has helped me to really pivot from some of those early influences, to appreciating those early influences to becoming who I am today. And I'm still on the journey.

I'm still learning about, you know, what is my authentic voice and self and appreciating the fact that it is not a one and done thing, that there's a real, I think a good struggle. It's a good fight. Maybe I haven't always appreciated it, but I'm very, very grateful, feeling very blessed to be on this journey.

Patrick Reyes: That’s amazing. I have a bonus question. This may or may not make it an official interview cause I think everything's already gone so well, but this is my own curiosity. Your parents and your mentor, did they ever meet and what was that like if they did?

Belle Liang: Yes. So, my mentor came to my wedding, so, she met everybody in my life - all 380 guests from my, mostly from my extended like extended family and faith-based community. And it was really wonderful and interesting to see my worlds come together. And recognize that they had very different influences and ways that they spoke to me, in terms of like what to value. Like my parents really wanting me to say, take the safe route. My mentor really helping me to break out of some of my own sense of security to go out of my comfort zone and do things that felt very growth enhancing but they required risk.

At the end of the day, you know, consistently across these communities, I saw these are the people who believe in me. Like they may have different ways of advising me around what success looks like, but they're all a part of my story. And I'm so grateful just feeling so much love across the different approaches of mentoring and parenting me.

Patrick Reyes: That's amazing. That's just so incredible. Well, I'm so grateful for this interview. If folks wanted to learn more about the Purpose Labs or about the book, where would they go to find more information?

Belle Liang: Yeah, so the book is sold wherever books are sold, How To Navigate Life is the title. It's by Belle Liang and Tim Klein. You can find it on Amazon. You can contact us through how to www.navigate.com, which is our website. And we look forward to hearing from everyone. There's a way to get connected with our LinkdIn there and with our newsletter. So thanks for asking.

Patrick Reyes: Oh Belle, thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your journey. Thank you so much for your research. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being on here! I'm glad we made this work!

Belle Liang: Thank you, Pat. This was wonderful. So appreciate this.

Patrick Reyes: I want to thank you for listening to the Sound of the Genuine and Belle’s interview, make sure to go pick up her book, how to navigate life. I want to thank my team, Elsie Barnhart, our executive producer, who puts all of these stories together. And @siryalibeats for his great music. As always you can go over and check out our resources at www.fteleaders.org. And we hope that this podcast and all of our resources help you find the Sound of the Genuine in you.