You are not alone in raising your young person. Dr. Thayne talks about the secret weapon otherwise known as an engaged home team, citing studies and stories of the importance of support from all types of people in yours or your child’s life. He outlines three important tips to build a solid home team for your family:
1. Get at least one team member. (moving from 0 - 1 member makes a greater difference than growing from 2 -15)
2. Be vulnerable with people you can trust.
3. Look for opportunities to serve on another’s home team.
You are not alone in raising your young person. Dr. Thayne talks about the secret weapon otherwise known as an engaged home team, citing studies and stories of the importance of support from all types of people in yours or your child’s life. He outlines three important tips to build a solid home team for your family:
1. Get at least one team member. (moving from 0 - 1 member makes a greater difference than growing from 2 -15)
2. Be vulnerable with people you can trust.
3. Look for opportunities to serve on another’s home team.
[inaudible].
Speaker 2:Welcome to the not by chance podcast. This is Talmage Tim thing, son and podcast manager. Today dr Thien is going to be talking about community and specific,
Speaker 3:typically the home team. We all need a home team. This can range from tons of different types of people, from family and friends, coaches and clergy, teachers and other mentors. So without further ado, let's jump into this.
Speaker 2:Hi everybody. I am coming to you from our home here in Lehi, Utah and actually sitting in my wife's home office and uh, I'm excited to be able to talk about a topic today. That means a lot to me and that has a lot to do with the, I think the way we can turn the mental health of our society around. It's a big deal. It's hard to do and I don't have a lot of time to give you all that I want to today. So I'm going to give you some good nuggets here around one of the principles that I call a retro principle for the modern world. Many years ago, I was sitting in the front room of a family that had just received their teen back home. After a few months in treatment, I was sitting there talking to them about about a principle of creating a network of support around their family and around their son. And this topic created a lot of anxiety for them. I was asking them to do something that they had been avoiding and actually doing the opposite of for quite some time. I was asking them to identify people in their life that could play a role for their son going forward, that could be in his corner, that could create meaningful connections and relationships with him. And you would have thought that I was asking them to do the impossible. And I said, who is it that you could share some of your own burden with? And they looked at each other and then they looked back at me and they didn't have an answer. Finally, the mother said, Oh, I've got an idea. She said, you know, I've got my own therapist. My husband has a therapist, and so does our son. So how about those therapists could be on our home team and I, I said, sure, yeah, why not? They should be a part of your network of support. And then I said, who else? And they look back at each other again with blank stares. And finally the dad spotted the dog in the front room, their pet, and he got a big smile on his face and he said, Hey, what about Oreo, their dog? And we got a big kick out of that. But then I started to think this is, and by the way, this is where the title of my next book came this moment in time, this was years ago, and the title it came to me that day was beyond Freud, Fido and Facebook, what the American family really needs. I'm going to be talking to it today about creating networks of support where they're meaningful. They're two way. They're lifting each other's burdens, both directions and those relationships end up becoming indispensable to health and happiness. I'm talking about the home team is what we call it at Homeward bound. Here's a quote that I love. It's from Coretta Scott King. She said the greatest of a community is most accurate. The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members. I think that's true. It's amazing the micro interventions that happen when your part of a community that cares and I think that's really the unique ingredient that the ingredient that creates the magic and it is the caring people can can help each other maybe out of duty, but that's a whole nother level when there's authentic caring that's happening. Growing up in a little town in Northeastern Utah, I was the recipient of what I call 1000 probably 10,000 maybe more micro interventions in my behalf over the course of my childhood and adolescence, I look back out on it now is some really unique situation that was not so unique back then, but in today's standards it's rare and that's where I was in a community of people around us. Even though the nearest neighbor was a quarter of a mile away from us, we knew that, that everybody there basically knew us and most of them cared about our us individually or at least our family name. And so that's the, the setting in which I grew up. There were, like I said, lots of little micro interventions in my behalf. Not orchestrated. There were no, as far as I knew, I didn't even know a therapist back then. And, um, we were out there kind of aware of each other. And oftentimes I witnessed my parents reaching out to others, not just their immediate family to serve them. Let me give you one quick example. You know, compassion, it sounds like it's always going to be kind of this soft sort of kind approach to maybe intervening in somebody's life, but it can go the other direction too. You can have someone care about you and step in and maybe more of a intervention kind of way. Like, I'm going to stop you from doing something that's not helpful to you anymore. And that happened to me many times. I won't tell you all of the times. Uh, uh, but, but I had teachers, I had, you know, extended family members. I had neighbors, I had, you know, people from the church all intervene in my life, both in maybe kind and, and caring ways. But or in maybe more hard, caring ways at different times in my life. One day I remember being in school and one of my teachers got after me. I was prone to talking to other kids in the class, disrupting what was going on, and he pointed that out in the middle of the class and asked me to stop. Please stop talking to him. You're interrupting everybody in your, you're distracting from what we're doing here. I felt focused on, I felt pointed out and I was quite embarrassed as we left the classroom, he positioned himself the door. It was the only way out. So I had to go past him again and as he shook my hand, he, he smiled at me and very quietly says, Tim, do you mind to stay in after I'd like to talk to you for a minute. And then I knew, Oh my goodness, I'm in big trouble now. He's going to come down on me hard and I'm going to have to defend myself because it wasn't just me. It was all these other kids too who were part of it and, and so on. So I had my defenses all up. I was ready to, to battle at some level and as he greeted the rest of the students as they left. Finally it was just the two of us and we walked into his office and like I said, I was ready for battle with the first thing he said. And I believe it's the caring ingredient that really shaped the way this conversation went and also shaped the way I took it in the end. And then what happened to me, I actually look back on it as a pivotal moment in my adolescence. He started by saying, first of all, Tim, I want to tell you, I'm sorry, I'm sorry that I pointed out so directly what was bothering me and the tone in which I did that. Now suddenly here I was in a position of what do you say to that? I'm when ready to fight here. I'm ready to, you know, point out what he did wrong and suddenly I wasn't in that position anymore. And what it is, it flipped the completely flipped it upside down and instead of the defenses, now I'm in another place in my mind and heart and I said, actually, you have nothing to apologize about. I was the one that was disrupting the class and I'm sorry for that. We ended up having about a 10 minute conversation and our relationship grew. What I knew though right from the beginning was that this teacher cared about me, this, this relationship by the way, extended for after I graduated from high school. So the influence of others outside our immediate family is pretty powerful. I was reading a story. Uh, my favorite basketball team is BYU, uh, Cougar basketball and it just turns out that this year they're playing an amazing season and a lot of their success is due to a single player that didn't get to play the first part of the season. And now he's back in the lineup. Obviously he's got great other teammates and he's got a phenomenal first year coach at BYU. Uh, but I want to focus on Yolie Childs for a second. Yolie uh, his mom and dad divorced when he was young and I don't think his father has had really anything to do with him throughout his childhood. So his mother was his rock. She was the one that was kind of the, the, the constant in his life. What I'm going to share with you is maybe the next principle, the power of an outsider, someone outside that immediate circle. And in a minute I'm going to give you some stats and research about a recent study done on military personnel coming back home after deployment and the mental health benefits of a network of support. But let's go back to Yolie for a second here. So here's a kid, no father figure, single mom. She had two sons and he luckily found the game of basketball pretty early in his life. And he, he attached to that idea that he was going to be a basketball player. Yollie was genetically turned out. It was gonna work for him. But for the longest time he was sort of an average player. Even though he had this incredible passion and drive to want to play in the NBA someday, he talks about actually sleeping with his basketball when he was a little kid all the way through, you know, some of his early years. Well, it turns out there was a youth coach that came into his life. His name is Stu Parker. And he was one of many father figures that would come into Yodlee's life, uh, usually in the form of a coach or a neighbor or someone like that. Well, this coach, uh, took an interest in him and Yollie was not that good. And this coach actually had a daughter that played basketball, was really athletic, taller than Yolie. And so he had asked his daughter to play against Yolie and they played many, many games after practice where she dominated him and she was older, taller, and kind of give him a lot of extra practice against someone. Over time, of course, he grew and eventually he was able to, uh, start to compete at a whole nother level because of the interest this man took in him. And that was just one example of many. He did to help him develop, well today Yolie is, you know, a phenomenal player with actually a, uh, a real shot at playing in the NBA and they're going to be going to the NCA tournament in, in the next week or so, and we'll see how they're ranked and, and what a position they're going to start, what bracket they're going to start in. Every great story you hear, it seems like there's somebody else besides just the parent. And then usually the parents a significant key piece to the whole thing. But oftentimes there's someone else that's playing this incredible role. So let me share this study with you. It's on transitioning from military and how important the sh their support network is. And particularly that it's a balanced network or there's, there's different folks that make up this network of support. They were measuring things like depression, anxiety, PTSD, et cetera. Uh, for those veterans who were coming home and measuring what kind of support networks they had. As it turns out that if all they had was family support, some of the anxiety would go down. So that was better. But the depression and PTSD tended to not be affected without other people involved. Now you add other, other, uh, folks to the circle like, uh, peers in the military, friends, others who have gone through that and friends that are at home, um, and also leaders from the military and then a significant other. And they found that when individuals had a well rounded group where there's, I think probably different, uh, perspectives, some that had experienced exactly what they had been through, leaders in those positions, others who had not been in the military but played a different role. That's when you saw that all of these different, uh, mental health categories were being affected positively when they had multiple supports and coming from different circles. Another principle about this is it's almost like the more organic these relationships are, the better. And obviously sometimes we need paid professionals. We need therapists that's not necessarily organic in, in any way, and they can play a significant role for mental health. But there's something about building networks that are really coming out of, um, not some kind of exchange. Like, I'm gonna pay you to spend time. It's more of a natural thing, an outgrowth of a dyadic relationship that's been formed. And by the way, that dyadic relationship con uh, concept, uh, was a part of this past study I mentioned to you as well. Those individuals that had a more well rounded network tended to have the ability create dyadic relationships and connections better than others. And of course when that happens, mental health, you, you'd form more of those relationships and all those indicators of mental health and, and happiness are improved because of it. So let's talk about that for a second. You know, we've had a lot of experiences literally all over the world helping transition teens and young adults back home after treatment. And this concept of the home team is always integral to that. We're trying to help build the natural network of support. And I was driving around one day with some of my coaches from a big city back East and we're talking about how difficult it was for the people there to kind of embrace this concept of the home team. Because like I said before, it's the exact opposite of what you tend to want to do when you're struggling. When you're depressed, it's not really the time you want to reach out or when you're feeling anxious. What you do is isolate instead of reach out. And when there's been behavioral issues in the home with the teen, uh, we tend to try to do this on her own instead of reaching out because we don't want to be embarrassed to her. We're afraid of hurting maybe the reputation of our, our teen. So we're asking them to do something. I know that's very difficult, but I know it's so powerful. It's indispensable actually to mental health. And so we don't shy away from hard things when we know that it can be the difference maker. So I'm driving around this big city with some of my coaches and, and we're laughing about in kind of joking about different things and I said, someday I want to make the home team concept as popular as the Peloton, where people gathered together in these, in these buildings to ride stationary bikes together and exercise together. And my coach has got a big kick out of that because it's counter-culture where the Peloton was like in, you know, integral to too much of the culture of that city. That's still my goal. Let me give you a few tips as I end this segment. I want to give you something to do, some some things that you can do to make a difference. And number one, I want to start with the tip or the idea that the difference, you know, people will, will say, Tim, I, I understand that having a network of support is important, but it's really scary and you know, we just don't have much of a network and you know, they all think that they have to have a big home team or they have to have, you know, 10 or more people surrounding, uh, that, that teen who's coming home. But I want to put this in perspective because when we think about it like that, we tend to not even want to try because how could we ever find 10? My belief is, is that the difference between zero and person being in a person's life is huge. I think it's bigger to go from zero people to one in my life for into my teens life than it would be to go from two people to 15 think about that. The impact of just one other caring, meaningful two way dyadic relationship in a person's life is absolutely huge. Now the sudden they've gone from possibly being lonely and alone to not feeling that anymore. There's someone I know that's out there thinking about me even if I'm not in front of them. A big, big difference between zero and one so start with that. That's tip number one. The next one is, this is kind of an equation. When you think about building relationships that are authentic and organic. It starts with somebody being a little bit vulnerable. The the, the recipe here is that two people ultimately start to sort of roughly equally share some of the real personal things in their life and it can start out not being real deep personal things, but a little bit more personal. Somebody has to take that first step. So that's my next tip is you be the first one to take that first step with someone that you think matches your values. That could be a good two way relationship where you could support them in something they could support you in something. Teach your team this as well. Teach them the idea of going first. Teach them the idea of serving first. And that's my third tip. Think about, uh, what happens in a dyadic two way relationship when one of the parties kind of puts their own needs aside and S and B becomes interested in the other person's health and happiness. That what happens magically is that that's a service that's, that's where someone moves from self to other, from self interest to service to another person. So teach that concept and that principle and what will naturally evolve out of that service is really a relationship where most of the time when love is given, that love is returned. It's a powerful, powerful thing. The last thing I'll say about that is that people are wired to love. They really are. It's without that, without giving back and being of service to somebody else. Our life is not very meaningful. We were missing something that's absolutely essential to our own happiness if it's all about us. And so go into these relationships knowing that people are wired to love and then to reciprocate when they have felt served and loved. Those are my tips today on this what I think most, one of the most important retro principles that's kind of been lost from our society, uh, that, that I can think of and go out and just take a few steps in this direction. I believe very, very strongly and I almost want to promise you, cause I think it's that true of a principle that if you start reaching out in that way, it will read, be reciprocated, it will affect mental health. It will help you and your team to be on more solid ground
Speaker 3:going forward.
Speaker 4:Thanks for listening to this episode. We're really excited to get it to you because there is so much dr Thane can talk about when it comes to community and support and that home team concept. We all need a supportive community and we all need those people on our home team, and we want to hear who's on yours. And so make sure to go on social media. Comment on our most recent post who's on your home team?
Speaker 1:[inaudible].