Greg Walton, Ph.D.
Michael Forman University Fellow and Professor of Psychology and co-director of the Dweck-Walton Lab at Stanford University
Jacqueline Woodson
Award-winning writer of dozens of books for adults, children, and adolescents
Ordinary Magic: The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts
BONUS AFTER-HOURS EVENT: Attendees who purchase a copy Ordinary Magic from FAN’s partner bookseller The Book Stall are invited to attend an AFTER-HOURS event hosted by Walton that will start immediately after the webinar. Details on the webinar registration page.
The emotional questions we face can define our lives. If you’re expecting an interaction to go wrong, that expectation can make it so. That’s spiraling down. But as award-winning Stanford psychologist Greg Walton, Ph.D. shows in his new book Ordinary Magic: The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts, when we see these questions clearly, we can answer them well. Known to social psychologists as wise interventions, these shifts in perspective can help us chart new trajectories for our lives. They help us spiral up.
This is ordinary magic: The ordinary experiences that help us set aside the ordinary worries of life to unleash extraordinary change. Through vivid storytelling and insightful analysis of fascinating research—both his own and others’—this science gives us a new vision of what is possible for our relationships, communities, institutions, and the world. Examples of wise interventions include: the few choice words from a parent or a teacher that builds trust and achievement; how learning that everyone feels as out of place at first as you do at a new school—they really do—can unleash extraordinary potential, improving your life a decade later; how the right opportunity to reflect, for just a few minutes before a conflict conversation, can engender greater intimacy among couples—even a year later.
Walton is the Michael Forman University Fellow and Professor of Psychology and co-director of the Dweck-Walton Lab at Stanford University. His research has been covered in major media outlets including The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Los Angeles Times.
Walton will be in conversation with Jacqueline Woodson, an American writer of dozens of books for adults, children, and adolescents. She is best known for her National Book Award-winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. After serving as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, Woodson was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–19. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2020. Later that same year, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
This event suitable for youth 12+. It will be recorded and available on FAN’s website and YouTube channel.
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