Neuroscience - considerations for sports organisations, coaches and parents - 'A conversation with Dr Jennifer Fraser'

In this episode speaker, author and award winning educator Dr Jennifer Fraser joins Gordon MacLelland to discuss neuroscience,  what we know now,  what the research shows us and discuss what this means for sporting organisations, coaches and parents.

During the conversation they discuss amongst other things:

• The ability to evolve, train and rewire our brain
• Tom Brady and his use of brain training
• Resilience and how eliminating threat can help develop this sought after skill
• The importance of healthy and effective environments
• Jennifer's new book 'The Bullied Brain'
• The value in parents celebrating the process of  holistic and character development
• Helping to foster intrinsic drive and motivation
• The teenage brain and understanding the importance of peer connection for teenagers
• The early adopters of brain training and the successes associated with it
• Sporting organisations using the happiness of children as a key measuring stick in youth sport to help prevent drop-out
• Coaches adapting their approach to suit all of the different individuals within a group and leading with empathy
• The challenges for parents in supporting their teenagers through adolescent development
•  Developing 'empathic' listening skills when talking with our teenagers
• Are we 'watching' or 'observing' our children play sport?

Jennifer Fraser is an award-winning educator and best-selling author. Her fourth book, The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health, came out in April 2022 with Prometheus Books. It draws on advancements in neuroscience and medicine in order to share evidence-based ways we can all strive to have healthier, happier, more high-performing brains even if we have suffered harm done by bullying and abuse. A science-informed approach, The Bullied Brain is meant to be a useful and practical guide for coaches, teachers and parents. You can find out more at bulliedbrain.com.

Transcript

Speaker 0:01

Welcome to season three of the Parents in Sport Podcast. I'm your host, Gordon Maclelland. I'm delighted to be joined today by speaker, author, and award-winning educator, Dr. Jennifer Fraser. Jenny, thank you for having us on the show.

Speaker 1 0:27

Thank you so much for having me. I love your audience and I love to talk to you. So it's really a privilege.

Speaker 0:34

It's great to have you on. And I I think it's probably about four or five years since we first met. And I joined you for a project that you were working on. It's so long ago that I can't even remember what the project was. But I remember enjoying um coming on and answering some of your questions. So it's great to have you back.

Speaker 1 0:54

Well, I think there's a real shift that's ongoing in sports and in and in psychology and parenting and all of those things. That everything we talked about five, six years ago is still so relevant and important.

Speaker 1:07

Yeah, and I think things are uh beginning to evolve slowly and move, and people are starting to work with things that we now know that we maybe didn't know a generation ago, slowly, but surely we seem to be getting there. I mean, I know obviously bits about your background, but if you could share with our listeners uh your amazing career, I guess.

Speaker 1 1:32

Well, before you and I um I put that workshop together with all kinds of different speakers who are in the arena from around the world. What led to that was I um wrote a book called Teaching Bullies. And I was really looking at the education system, but it went to number one in sport psychology on Amazon. And that's when I realized that people engaged in sport, coaches and especially coaches and parents as well, there's a real passion for um changing and growing and learning more, more than other areas. I find that teachers are a little bit set in their ways, especially when you contrast them with coaches. Coaches want to learn, they want to change, they want to bring out the best in performance. And so when I realized that when I wrote Teaching Bullies and it had this kind of a reaction, um I there was one chapter in the book on neuroscience, and it really changed my way of thinking. And I felt like, wow, what I learned was so um different and so not known. And it's not, it's not, it goes right back to what you said about we're changing things that we used to believe were just absolute fundamentals. Like we used to believe that kids, this is I'm talking dating myself, because when I was growing up, we didn't wear seatbelts as children. It was not known that we would greatly reduce um injuries to children if we had seatbelts on. So a huge change, a big change. Same thing with smoking. You know, you'd go in to meet your doctor back in the day when I was growing up, and he'd be smoking a cigarette. It was thought to be a normal thing, it thought to be a healthy thing, even. It, you know, helped keep your weight down, for example. It helped you look glamorous, you could be more independent. You would be tougher. You would show how tough you were if you were a smoker. All of that mindset had to change. And then our most recent one is concussions. We used to think concussions were get back up on the field, you know, you got your bell rung, show the team that you're you're tough as nails and you can get back into play. Well, we had to change our mindset based on our knowledge, specifically there of the brain. And so when I read that chapter on neuroscience, and being a teacher at heart and a mom, I just felt like everybody needs to know this. And so that's when I started doing a deep dive into reading the neuroscientific findings, the neurobiology, neuroanatomical changes that occur in the brain, simply because we're not taught this and it's actually so important.

Speaker 4:04

Yeah, I think the I think the self-awareness piece of lots of these topics is really important, and people just need to be shown what it is and that it's usable for people. I mean, that some of the things you talk about there, you know, you think back to, you know, I think back to when I started teaching and I sort of finished last summer, you know, after 25 years. But I taught very differently in my last six months than I did 15, 20 years ago, just like I coached very differently. Not that I did anything that was off the extreme end, but I I certainly had an approach that based that was based on, I guess, what was culturally acceptable or what was perhaps the norm or what you perhaps saw other people doing that that was deemed as as good practice. And actually, I guess for all of us, it's just that ability to evolve and take on new information, isn't it? And I think the people who who are maybe struggling in today's world are those that haven't been able to evolve with new information and and time. Because yeah, we will all have made mistakes because, as you say, things were different, you know, back then.

Speaker 1 5:14

Yeah, and I mean that I think that's one of the key takeaways. There's two or three things you said there that from a brain point of view are super important. First of all, they can look at the brains of people that grow up in totalitarian regimes, and their brains are very different than people that grow up in democratic free thinking. You're allowed to absorb all forms of information and then make your own decision. You don't have to follow the party line. And those people, their brains look very, very different than yours and mine do because our brains are constantly evolving, they're flexible, they're changing, they adapt to new information, and they adapt to different practices. And so I think there's there's still a bit of an outdated notion. You know, in the sport world, you might call it a belief that someone is born talented, their brain is born talented, their body is born talented. But from a brain science point of view, that's inaccurate. And one of the best examples of this today is Tom Brady. So Tom Brady was told from the get-go, you'll never be a quarterback because you don't have the right body. You can't do it, you won't be it. We're not selecting you, you're just lucky you actually made the cut barely. You know, I think he was last. And he has proven that actually he is a great quarterback. In fact, arguably he's one of the world's greatest quarterbacks. And then from a brain science point of view, what's so interesting is here he is at 44 and he's competing with 20-year-olds and he's outperforming them. And the one thing that Tom Brady does that many of us don't do and our athletes don't do, he does daily brain training with Dr. Michael Mirzenik's program. So I'm particularly interested in this because Dr. Michael Mirzenik took my book under his wing, and he's one of the world's greatest neuroscientists, uh, alive today, the most highly awarded. And, you know, he was working in his lab with all his neuroscientists and they're doing their research, and they were researching how their brain training program can be designed to help people avoid Alzheimer's and dementia in later life. So you can imagine their surprise when they got a telephone call and it was Tom Brady's trainer, and he was asking, you just said, you guys do know that Tom Brady daily uses your brain training program. And they were like, what? And off they went to the gym in uh to meet with them to find out how it works for them and why. And you know, Tom Brady's program stands out because it's a flexibility program. It's not just about strengthening, it's about being incredibly flexible and resilient. And this is why at 44, he is doing what he's doing. And so all of us, we should we need to learn from that lesson that the more we keep our brains flexible and open to different ideas and open to different approaches and empathic, like aware of other people's ways of being in the world, especially our young people, the stronger and more grit and more resilient we actually are going to be, like Tom Brady.

Speaker 8:09

Yeah, now it's interesting. Some of the things you've obviously talked about there. And I'm thinking about, you know, how we're not necessarily, you know, born a certain way. You know, I spend a lot of time talking to parents about, I guess, key character traits, things like determination, resilience, uh, good communicators, people who are self-organized, creative, adaptable. And I and I always say, not that I've based it on the neuroscience, that we're not born that way. It's it you can foster it and enhance it by the environments you find yourselves in, or indeed what we value as the adults, perhaps around that experience, either as parents, teachers, coaches, whatever that may be, if children see a value in it, they they they may start sort of training themselves to be to be good at it or or find ways of of improving those skills. And you've just mentioned um resilience then. I'm going to pull that one out because every parent I ever meet always says to me, I want a resilient child.

Speaker 1 9:11

How do we go?

Speaker 9:12

So when when do we link that to findings or or the brain or what we're learning? What what what are we what are we seeing or what we're thinking? I know it's a I know it's a million-dollar question. It's far more complicated than you giving me an answer in a couple of minutes on a podcast, but what's your initial gut feeling on on that?

Speaker 1 9:31

Well, the way I think about it, and this is everything I'm saying today is grounded in all of my nerdy research. I read the research, and then everything I do in the book, all of the strategies I offer, all of the information about how we have to change how we do things, it's all evidence-based. So I don't have time to get into the research right now, but just trust me in that it's backed by that. So with resilience, one of the things that I found fascinating, and it goes back to what you just said, um, it's about environment. So if you are raising a child or the child is doing sports or the child is in a classroom where they have um, they have to put a lot of energy into threat. So for example, they don't know if the teacher is going to get angry when they make a mistake, or they don't know if the coach might put them down in front of their peers if they do something ridiculous. They don't know if their mom or dad, you know, has a short fuse and has a tendency to use mockery as their way of like coping with, you know, kids, teenagers. Um, if a child is having to put a lot of brain energy into what's called hypervigilance, so that means watching the environment for threat, then they can't take that same energy and pour it into things like resilience, creativity, problem solving, learning new skills. So the brain has limited cortical real estate. That means it can't do everything. So the more a child is channeling energy, brain energy, into how safe am I? And we see kids with lots of anxiety these days. We see kids that are really suffering from depression. And we have to ask ourselves, just a second, what kind of environments are we creating that are making our kids react this way? And so one of the things that I really work hard on is trying to get people to recognize that when we talk about mental health, we're actually talking about brain health. Just like if I have a problem with my heart because I'm not exercising and let's say I eat the wrong diet or whatever, then then there are people are gonna measure my heart. The cardiologist is gonna look at my heart. But when we talk about mental health, you you don't have a guarantee that anyone's gonna look at your brain. And that's a mistake. We need to start getting way more accustomed to saying about our children, hey, we go to the dentist every year, we get their teeth checked, twice a year, maybe, same with their eyes, same with their ears. Really, we should be having a bit of a check on how their brain is functioning. So if we want to enhance all of these qualities that create the resilient brain, a really great way to think about it is comparable to a fitness program or a sport. So when you're doing a sport, it's stressful on your body. You know, you might be sore after your practice or the next day because you've been stressing your muscles and you've been pushing them. And, you know, when you're running and your lungs are burning, it's because you're pushing them. And you might push through a little bit, listening to your body and knowing when it's time to stop, but nonetheless you're stressing. That's the same thing we do with the brain. When we push the brain to work hard at something and to believe that the hard work's going to pay off. So if we're doing our brain training or we're doing our mindfulness, or we're giving ourselves with some really difficult intellectual critical thinking issues, like, oh, take somebody else's side of the argument and make an argument for it. Don't just keep listening to your own confirmation bias. Those are all things that stress the brain. So I think the concept of resilience, we want to think about it as a brain and a body quality. And so if we want to encourage our children to develop that, then we have to find ways to make them believe that the hard work will pay off, believe that they're getting stronger every day. And for them to understand that their brain has the capacity to be as strong as they want it to be, they can't see it, they can't um notice it like they can their physicality. You can notice when your muscles get stronger. You can notice when you get more agile and lean and nimble. Same thing happens on the inside of your skull. And if kids understand that, if they start to become aware of, hey, I'm gonna really work the resilience neural network in my brain today, I'm gonna come up against challenges and I'm gonna trust myself, maybe I won't succeed. That doesn't matter. I'm gonna trust myself to do my very best and to push myself and to get outside of my comfort zone. Every time you fire up that neural network, you're wiring it into the brain. And so I think for parents to understand and create opportunities for children to actually see their brains and know their brain's capacity for strengthening, that's really helpful.

Speaker 14:22

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, it's fascinating stuff. I think parents also, when they've seen the children, children work hard, give it their best shot, show those levels of determination that they seek value in that process as opposed to what what the actual outcome was. Because we can all challenge things and and we can we can seek to challenge, but then if we don't quite achieve, which which happens a lot of the time, in uh you know, particularly in sport, I guess then the the negative side of that is if we come back to parents who then basically say, Well, oh well, you you didn't win. So you've lost the value in the in the challenge, haven't you? Or trying to develop those traits um almost can almost is that a threat, or is it more it's just sort of pushing that, it's pushing that importance away, isn't it? It's becoming very outcome-driven.

Speaker 1 15:17

Yeah, one of the things that I found so interesting in researching and then writing the book was to learn that, and I think this has seeped into culture in really interesting ways that we need to change. Because if you have a narcissistic mindset, if you actually suffer as a person from narcissism, and just to remind everybody, let's just go back to the ancient Greek mythology, narcissist narcissist was a man who was cursed to fall in love with himself. And the only thing that he could do was gaze at the reflection of himself in a pool of water until he wasted away or until he drowned. So if we keep in mind that ancient idea behind the quality of narcissism, it's really interesting to understand the mindset because a narcissist only feels that they've won if they've made somebody else lose. They can't just win for themselves. So this, I think, it's seeped into politics, certainly. You know, there's a need to put someone else down. There's a need to humiliate someone, there's a need to make someone be a loser. We've really seen this massively in the US. And it's become part of uh political discourse in a way that we hadn't seen before. That's narcissism. So what we want with our kids to understand is that winner-lose is irrelevant. They are a whole being that needs nothing else to complete their identity ever. They don't need to put someone down to complete their identity, they don't need to win a game to complete their identity. They are a holistic being at all times. And for parents to understand that the brain learns by making mistakes. That every single time a kid makes a mistake on the field or on the court or in the baseball diamond, they are learning. And that's all you can hope for. You know, we want our kids to be, you know, athletes for life. We want our kids to be learners for life. Just like you and I were talking about as educators, as coaches, you have to evolve and change because learning is the key. You don't know what you're going to achieve. And so if parents really celebrated with their children the errors that they made as opposed to seeing it as a negative, then you will take a child back to their one-year-old self. And if you sit back and watch a one-year-old learning how to walk, it's it's a miraculous thing. They, you have never seen anyone fall down more in your life. Note that they are. They use anything in their in their vicinity to achieve their goals. They're grabbing couches, they're holding on to tables, they'll grab the dog if they need to. They will do anything to change from somebody who is, you know, stuck on the ground to somebody who is walking, then running, then jumping. But parents aren't and coaches aren't there. They're not advising, they're not telling them how they're doing it wrong. They're not saying, look, you fell over again, and that's the fifth time today, and I'm really not impressed. They're doing it because they're driven from their own desire to learn. And that's what we want to see our teenagers doing. That's what we want to see our 20-somethings doing. They don't need adults to complete them or tell them who they are or what they've achieved. They're pretty good at knowing themselves. All they need the adults to do is encourage the growth mindset. Saw you working hard today. That was amazing. You gave it full effort today. That was impressive. Or I saw you were really lacking in energy today. I think you need a break. I think we need to pull back and let you rest and restore. Certainly when I have low energy, that's what I need to do. That kind of thing. That's growth mindset.

Speaker 18:44

Yeah, and I think I mean it's fascinating how what I'm trying to keep thinking back to sports contexts and coaching and parenting and all the things that we're talking about here. And again, there's a couple of things that within what you've said that you know, ultimately children continue to do things um when they're intrinsically motivated. Like you say with the one-year-old, when it's coming from them and it's driven by them, and they've got a well, let's say, a choice and a voice in the process and the things that they're doing, it's the things that will keep them progressing along that that route. The moment it's driven by external forces, particularly when our children hit those teenage years. If it isn't coming internally, that that can often be when we see children drop drop out of things, whether it's sports or other areas of interest.

Speaker 1 19:35

Yep. And that, you know, one of the things that's so important in this is if we understood our teenagers and our 20-somethings from an adolescent brain development point of view, we'd have a totally different uh relationship with them. Because driven by evolution, the adolescent brain, and it starts at around 13 and it continues till about 24, 25, the adolescent brain is undergoing massive change. And you can imagine how they're having to manage not only the hormonal change, but the brain change. And in their brains, evolution has primed them to leave the family cave. They are primed to go out and find a mate. And that means the brain is driven to be risk-taking. They have to get out into the serengeti and look around the corner and pass the tree that they know and take the risk of being under an open sky and they could be attacked at any moment. That's how evolution sees them. So it's pushing them to seek rewards, to take risks, and to find their peer group. So the one thing we adults want to really facilitate is the relationship our teenagers and our 20-somethings have to their peers. And if that's a team and the basis of their relationship is fitness and sport, you couldn't come up with a better combination. So the fact that we've got 70% of kids in North America, anyway, I hope it's better in England, we have 70% of children dropping out of sport at exactly the moment their adolescent brain development starts. And the worst thing you can do to a teenager is make them embarrassed in front of their peers. So adults who want to see them reach their top performance and fulfill their potential and be, you know, athletes for life or perhaps even higher performance than that, we need to create the conditions so that they feel really connected to their peers. They're never embarrassed, never humiliated, and they have that intrinsic motivation. And you know, the sad thing is what happens to 70% of kids, a lot of the male ones anyway, is they go and play video games. Well, what's the difference between playing a video game and playing a sport? There's no adults that stand over you while you're playing a video game. You die over and over and over again. You fail to reach up your next level, you can't find the right object, you get ruined by someone else. And so you start over again and you try again. That's growth mindset, that's intrinsic, you know, drive. And really, if we want to get our kids out of the video game room and back onto the field in the court, then we've got to really better understand adolescent brains.

Speaker 22:08

Yeah, and and children who who we know, you know, and we look at self-determination theory, particularly in sport, is they want some autonomy, they need to feel connected to an environment, and they need to feel um some degree of competence, which brings me back to something you said earlier about how if the brain is spending most of its time dealing with perceived threat, it then doesn't have the the remaining space to enhance some of those other skills. So I guess when we're talking about coaching environments and an understanding that that children do need to feel some form of connection, that competence, feel like they have got a choice, those environments we're creating are allowed to present challenge, and they are allowed to be hard because that's that's not what we're saying here. We're not saying you can't have things, but the environment about how we set that challenge and how we pick up the bits after the challenge and how we manage the challenges as they're going on is ultimately the key, isn't it? Because I always worry that I was talking to somebody this morning about you know looking at uh well-being, being hand in hand with performance, and I think the vast majority of people think that perhaps some of the things we're talking about today that it means you can't be elite or you can't be challenged or you can't be tough, and it's all very fluffy, and that means we're not going to get outcomes and we're not gonna get results, but that's not what we're saying at all, is it? It's the it's the difference in the in the language that we're using and how we manage the environment around those.

Speaker 1 23:52

Is it I remember one of the one of the things that you and I talked about back in the day, um you were telling me about some of the exercises you do with parents. And I was really struck by one of them, which was you would have a group of parents together and they'd be playing a game, a board game. And you had other parents, I think, that had to take the role of creating the environment around them while we played the board game. So one of the group of parents was constantly yelling at the people playing the board game. And even if it was kind of encouraging yelling or negative yelling, um, the people playing the board game couldn't concentrate. It's like if someone's yelling at you, your brain is not focused on the game, being a problem solver or being a little bit, you know, uh wily or um trying to be empathically figuring out what other people are doing. You're not doing any of that. Your brain is going, oh my God, somebody is yelling at me and I can't think straight. Right? So if yelling in the face or at someone when they're trying to achieve something was a positive, then we would see it with uh in the workplace. You know, CEOs would be up in the face of their employees, yelling at them at the top of their lungs, um, advising them what to do. Um, and you know, it goes back and it doesn't work. My point being that doesn't work. And um, in the book, I devote a chapter to debunking that myth. And the problem is for all of us, it's like going back to you grow up in a certain way believing certain things, but it's not really just a belief. It's actually sculpted into your brain. Your brain is shaped by what you were taught, by what you practice, by what your parents said to you, by what your coaches did with you. And in order to survive in the world, you have to believe that it was the making of you. Because if you don't, it's really challenging. To try and recreate a different mindset is one of the hardest things to do. It's as hard as sitting on the couch and watching Netflix to suddenly decide you're gonna get in shape. That's really hard. We all know it, we've all been there. You know, you've had a setback from something and you know, whatever, and you have to get back in shape. Well, you don't want to do it. And in positive psychology, they call it you need activation energy. You need something that gets you up off the couch and willing to get yourself in shape. And it could take six months to a year, and you have to start really small, so your competence is very low, which is demoralizing, and you don't get good until cut to maybe three months or six months. It's a process and it takes time. Well, it's the same thing with the brain. The brain can change at any age, all the way until the last moment we're alive on the planet. We can change our neural networks. We can take a neural network that doesn't serve us well anymore. So let's say you and me, early teaching practices that we thought were effective. And then as we got more sophisticated as teachers and more confident and more independent, we started to try different strategies. When we were doing that, we were changing neural networks and we were myelinating those neural networks, giving them more insulation so that we defaulted to them. So we started to default maybe more to compassion and less to humiliation, let's say. We might have grown up humiliated, but we we decided, you know what, it doesn't work. It's not getting the performance or the joy or the connection that I'm seeking with athletes or my own children at home. It's not working. My parents might have done it, my coaches might have done it, but I'm going to try something different. So as we start to default to compassion, the brain has limited cortical real estate. So the humiliation neural network is starting to fade away. The compassion one, the empathy one, is becoming like a super highway in the brain. It's fast, it's efficient, it's effective. Whereas the other one, the humiliation track, is starting to look a little bit more like an overgrown path and the brain resists going down it because it's not comfortable. So, yes, it's a process, yes, it's hard work, but when it gets right down to it, I think it's pretty important to understand that the early adopters of brain science are people like Tom Brady. There are people like Harry Kane. Harry Kane has come out publicly to say that he uses Michael Merzenick's brain training daily in order to have incredibly good decision-making skills, in order to have really good communication skills with other players constructed on empathy, in order to learn how to read facial expressions, in order to have peripheral vision at a super high level. The other group that's an early adopter of doing brain training is the armed forces in the US. And the reason they do it is not only because it's going to help them survive in a war environment, a military environment, it's all paid for. U.S. Armed Forces pays for everyone in the military in the US to have Michael Merzenik's brain training. And so it's not about fluffiness. If anything, it's about resilience. It's about toughness, it's about brain performance at a high level when it's going to save your life and save your comrade's life. Well, comrade, that's not the right word, your colleague's life, I guess. Um and uh it also the else, the other beautiful thing about it is it also helps you repair when you've been traumatized. If your brain has suffered a horrendous shock of some kind, and that can be a physical one, like a concussion, all the way up to um heartbreak of some kind or uh a loss or um, you know, being hurt emotionally, these kinds of things, just as our body is miraculous at repair, so is our brain. Our brain is amazing at repair. And so that's why I spend so much time in the book. I present the difficult material and it's not fluffy, it's actually kind of disturbing how vulnerable our brains are to all forms of abuse. I actually lay that all out. But every single chapter is about, okay, so now that we know that, what can we do? And our brains are so adept at healing, there's a lot we can do.

Speaker 29:55

Yeah, which it which obviously gives us all hope, doesn't it? And anybody listening to this who works, let's say, within sport or runs organizations or coaches or parents to be aware of of what really healthy environments may look like, both on and on and off the field. Um, in a sporting context, then, if we take it back to sport, what are what do you think organizations need to think of? So we we've got the science now, we've got lots of things we've learned around education, about coaching, society's changing. Admittedly, it's changing slowly with how perhaps we can lead with empathy and still get some of the same results that that we did in the past by leading with it with a bit more of the stern stuff. What do you think sports organizations need to think of?

Speaker 1 30:42

Well, again, you know, I love this notion of myths that we live by. And we've lived by the myth that um once we attain success, once we win the game, once we win the championship, once we become the organization that has the most um ribbons, then we're gonna all feel really happy. Well, in research, that's the absolute opposite. If an organization chooses happiness, happy children, happy athletes, happy coaches, and happy parents, they're gonna have success. And that's documented extensively in neuroscientific research. So, I mean, if we want kids to stay in sport and not lose 70% of them when they have the vulnerability of adolescent brain development going on, then we need to create an organization where the measuring stick is happiness. If we see children that are crying or that are eyes cast down on the floor in shame, and adults who are really, really unhappy, like they're angry and they're um they're just you know frustrated and all of those kinds of qualities that we can all relate to, um, then organizations are not going to attain the success that they want. So if I was running a sport organization, first of all, I would become neuroscience informed. Um, and what I call it in the book is a new paradigm. I call it the neuroparadigm. And paradigm is just a big word for uh framework. And a neuro is neuron, it's the brain cell. And so I think that if we want to shift our culture and we want to be successful and we want to have healthier, happier kids, then and reduce the mental illness levels, which are just really appalling in our child populations and youth populations, then what we need to know is that happiness comes first. That's our measuring stick, successful follow. We don't need to worry about it. So that's that's I think the key mental change that needs to happen.

Speaker 32:38

Yeah, and and then obviously that that philosophy, that culture then needs to be aligned. It's all very well saying we've got values, this is what we do. But then if we've got coaches working under that umbrella who are potentially doing the opposite of that, it can be very confusing for everybody. So obviously, there's got to be that that coach, coach education piece again. So I'm guessing, you know, neuroscience informed again. Um, what about them thinking about how they work with their athletes, their environments? Again, just the awareness piece, or could you think can you think of any specific examples of of good practice and bad practice, maybe?

Speaker 1 33:18

Well, you know, for coaches, this goes back to something that you were talking about before, where um, you know, it doesn't mean that it isn't hard, and it doesn't mean that you aren't um you don't have high expectations. Um, in the neuroscience, what they find is the high expectations actually are one of the keys to um brain health. You you want athletes and you want coaches and you want parents who sky's the limit. It's just how you go about um helping an athlete reach that goal. And the key word in that for the brain, anyways, is scaffolding. So scaffolding is when you never make the goal out of reach. If the athlete loses belief in themselves, if they lose faith that they can actually attain their goals because their goals are realistic for where they're at in terms of their development, then you're gonna lose their faith in themselves. It's very rare that you have a Tom Brady who's repeatedly told he's not good enough, he's not the right physicality, he's not the right anything, he doesn't have a chance, he's way too tall, he's never gonna be a quarterback. Really, really rare that the person can resist that labeling and still attain what it is they want to attain. He's very unusual in that. But imagine the number of Tom Brady's out there who were told they didn't have a chance, they couldn't do it, no one was gonna help them, no one was gonna design a specific program that enhanced their particular gifts. Nope, not no scaffolding, nothing's gonna happen, you're done, you're you're just not good enough. We're cutting you from the team. Those people usually just go and play video games. They don't keep trying. So if we want to um help young people through the adolescent brain development era when we really don't know who they will become, what they will become, what they can achieve, all we can do is be the empathic coach. And as the empathic coach is described in the research, they're called talent whisperers. And they are the people that bring out the best in every single athlete on the field. And that's the only thing that you can really do as a coach is strive to adapt your way of thinking and speaking and coaching to every single different individual. It's a huge challenge, but we know that the one size fits all model doesn't work, or we would have we would have uh understood that Tom Brady maybe needed a totally tweaked program because of the way he was. And um I think that's the key is that that idea of empathy, and it goes back to narcissism. In narcissism, you're always projecting onto someone else who they are to complete yourself. You're incomplete, and it's usually due to your own traumatic past. You're an incomplete person. So the only way you can build yourself up is by projecting onto someone else and calling them labels and putting them down and so on. Empathy is the opposite. Empathy is when you actually open yourself up to reflect someone else. You're you're not um, it's not fluffy, it's actually the neuroscience on it is fascinating. It's the capacity our brains have in order to really understand someone else's feelings and their thoughts, and most interesting, their intentions. And we're born with it. It's wired into our brains, this capacity to read the room and to read individuals. So coaches that enhance their empathy are going to have success for sure.

Speaker 36:37

Yeah, absolutely. And as I say, it that those sort of thinkings have certainly evolved or become more widespread, which which is encouraging to see. So, parents, I mean, we're it's funny actually talking about the teenage brain. We've got a new workshop series coming out. One of the workshops is Fast Cars No Brakes, um, which does which does look at a little bit at the teenage brain and what that means for sporting parents, where we ask our children to do more than one task and they're incapable of it and we lose our temper when actually they're not deliberately getting it wrong. Um, what what what do parents need to be aware of with the with the neuroscience, what we're learning?

Speaker 1 37:16

Um, I actually was so distraught about the adolescent brain that I developed a course on it for adolescents and it's it's videos, I mean it's text, but it's also videos. And it's basically teaching them, and I use the car metaphor too, because that's what the neuroscientists use. I teach them how to manage their brain. And the best thing that you can do as a teenager is use mindfulness and visualization to handle your adolescent brain. So I tell them when you're driving the car, you've got to remember that your brain is the engine. It's what powers the car. And that's great because you you've got such a creative, fast learning, uh risk-taking brain that you can go from zero to 60 like a like a race car. You're a Porsche when it comes to that. Problem is you got the brakes of a bicycle. So what you have to do is when you get into the car, it's always your mind. You have to consciously put your mind in the driver's seat. And, you know, for parents, just to give them some hope, um, we have to remember that the brain learns by timed intervals. So when you tell your teenager, could you please take out the garbage, your teenager is not going to remember that and you're gonna have to repeat it seven times. And it's not that your teenager disrespects you, it's just that the brain, especially the adolescent brain, it learns by timed repetition at timed intervals. And so um, one of the neuroscientists, their mantra, and you can use it to try and stay sane when you have teenagers, is repeat to remember and remember to repeat. And if you just keep that kind of circular logic going on while you have your teens in the house or your 20-somethings, you will hopefully survive that era of your life. Um, but um, the key thing is mindfulness. So I tell, I tell young people when you get into the car before you turn the ignition, you've got to sit back, you've got to close your eyes, and you have to visualize the people that you love. Just take you need three minutes. You have to do deep breathing, it has to be purposeful. And the only thing that you can see your mind is the people that you love. And then just so it's not boring, I shake it up and say, you know, you need to see yourself arriving safely at the place that you're going to. And then you have to have the courage to look at the alternatives because the statistics are terrible. You have to think of yourself having an accident, hurting somebody, hurting a creature, or hurting yourself or your friends who are in the car. And if you do these kinds of deep breathing visualization exercises before what's called in the science, hot cognition, i.e., you're driving in your car and it's feeling really great and you're a risk taker because you can't help it from evolution. So you're gonna run that orange light or the red light, even, you know, you need to be the one in charge. It's your mind that controls and manages your brain. And it should, you know, I was gonna say it should never happen to be the other way around, but I'm the sort of person that when I lose my temper, it's like it's very rare, but it's a horrible, like volcano type lose my temper. And um, that's when the that's when the mind is offline. That's when the brain takes control and it roars out because it feels threatened. And um, yeah, you don't want that to happen ever in a car.

Speaker 40:16

No, absolutely. And I I think for parents, I th I think that what you're describing there is obviously what the the journey we all want our children to go on through those teenage years and have those thoughts um a little hopefully a little bit more than they they actually do. But we we've all got to go through it. I guess for parents who feel when they're talking, you know, with their children or their sporting children, that sometimes they feel that the children aren't really listening to them, and we have lots of those moments where they're rolling their eyes at us and they're they they don't look like they're engaged at at all that that we need to hang in there. And I think the the science again shows, doesn't it, that if we can show some form of empathy and understanding as to what's going on rather than being judgmental, which is massively difficult, by the way. It's all very well us sat here saying, well, actually, with our teenage children, we're gonna always lead with empathy and we're never gonna judge and we're never gonna have an opinion. Because that is important, that's I mean, I've tried it and I've I've lasted a few days, and then I maybe try it again. But it you you can't keep it going on in the real world, but that is the way to go, isn't it? It's it's empathy, conversation, understanding, and hope that you all come out of the other end of it, isn't it?

Speaker 1 41:36

Yeah. No, you know, it's a really you just reminded me of one of the most important things is if we can try and do empathic listening. So it's really hard to do. However, it's worth its weight in gold. It's worth the time it takes. So let's pretend you sit down with your teenager and your teenager wants to stay up until midnight and you want your teenager home at nine o'clock. And that's your disagreement. It could be anything. The kid, your kid wants to borrow the car, you don't feel safe or comfortable with that, and you don't want anything to happen to your car. You got a big meeting tomorrow. So you've got this disagreement. So with empathic listening, you have to let your kid explain to you, your teenager or whatever, why it is that they want to stay up till midnight. And you can't interrupt, you can't roll your eyes, you can't sigh, you can't do anything but listen to every single word they say for a reasonable stretch. So let's say it's a minute, and then your job is to repeat back to them what they said. So your concentration, it's really quite an interesting exercise. Your brain has to focus on what they're saying, not what you think. And you notice instantly that how much in our conversations with one another and with our children are really we're listening to ourselves and we want to argue and we want to rebut and we want to tell them they're wrong and so on. But in empathic listening, you're not allowed to. So they talk for a minute, you have to repeat back. They talk for another minute, you have to repeat back, you can't say anything. They talk for, let's say, three more sets, and you have to repeat back. And then at the end, they'll say to you, I feel heard. And then it's your turn. And you get to say, the reason I don't want you out till midnight is because when I was a kid, I lost my best friend and it was because it was late at night, and they have to repeat back. They're not allowed to roll their eyes, they're not allowed to not hear you, they're not allowed to, you know, look at the TV or be disengaged. And when you have a real meeting of minds like that, when it's a hill to die on, when it actually really matters, you don't do it for all the ridiculous things in life, but when it matters, you really do that empathy exercise, it's it can make a world of difference. So that's one thing. Another key thing, I think, for parents to remember in order to stay connected and strong during these years, the research is clear that regardless of what happens, the more parents stay connected to their kids and responsive to their kids, the less likely, for example, their kids will get involved in substance abuse. Why? Because the big thing for kids is they Don't want to disappoint their parents. Even when they don't have the most ideal, perfect relationship in the world, that is one of the biggest barriers to kids slipping into very destructive behavior. So even if your kid is not reflecting to you that you are the world to them, you are. And it's just trying to stay true to that as best as you can through the frustration of that era.

Speaker 44:22

Yeah, and it's uh it's a huge challenge, isn't it? And there'll be loads of times, maybe one for another day, where you can talk about all the examples in sport where that where that crops up and it's uh it's a real nightmare, even thinking about the car journey home, where you know you really should be leading with empathy and letting them speak and reflect on those as opposed to projecting your opinions about what you've just watched. I mean, well, a very good friend of mine, Sarah Murray, who you would get on very well with, who who I'm doing some work with at the moment over here in the UK, she said to me today, we were talking about watching and observing your children. And I suddenly realized when she was talking to me that I've never watched my children play sport. I have just simply observed them every time. Because at no point have I actually just sat back and watched for the sheer joy of, let's say, like I do when I go and watch Liverpool, where I watch the ball, I watch the game, and I enjoy it for what it is. Because every time our children are involved, yes, I'm looking at a pattern of play, you're looking at bits of behavior, I'm focusing on them all the time rather than the ball some of the time, and all those bits that go with it. And it was like, oh my goodness, this is really bizarre. So I've never actually sat back and watched, all I've ever done is observed, and it it is, and there'll be lots of people. It was a real reality check that today.

Speaker 1 45:42

Yeah, and it's so interesting because you know it goes back to something we talked about earlier. That's a hyper-vigilant brain. And the reason you're doing that is because you're a good dad and you're a good coach, and you're trying to find all of the negatives that happen so that you can tell your child to protect them. You don't want your child to make negatives, you don't want them to be embarrassed, you don't want them to not fulfill their potential. So your hyper-vigilant brain is like, I'm gonna notice every single negative thing. And then on the drive home, I'm gonna remember to tell them, which is the worst thing you can do, of course. Not that it stops any of us, but it is the worst. And um, what I love in this particular context is to remember um the work of a neuroscientist named Rick Hansen. And Rick Hansen says the brain is like velcro for negatives. And the reason is it's designed to survive. So we notice mistakes. And so the most obvious example of this is you go over to the stove and you burn your hand, your brain never forgets that. Your brain makes you anxious every single time you come near a stove, whether it's on or off, whether it's any type of different stove, your brain never forgets that. It is velcro for negatives because that's how it keeps us alive. On the flip side, the brain is like Teflon for good things. Any good thing happens, your brain's like, well, we don't have to remember that. It's it doesn't, it's not going to keep you alive to remember those good things about yourself. And so, as parents, what we have to learn is though, we can, and this is a Rick Hansen phrase, we can hardwire in happiness or we can let it go. So every single time, you know how we say this in the workplace, and we have to remember it with our kids. If you want to tell somebody some constructive criticism, let's say you're the manager, the boss, or whatever, or a colleague, and you have to say something negative. You never just cut to the negative, never. You always buttress it with positives. I noticed you were doing X, Y, and Z. That was amazing. Just one little tweak that I want you to try and factor in is blah, blah, blah. You know, we need to use that same approach with kids because we want to hardwire in happiness. Why? Because happiness leads to success. We don't have to protect them, especially as they get older. We don't have to stop them from having every little mistake or error or fall or whatever, or failure. It's okay. That's how the brain learns.

Speaker 48:02

I think that's a lovely uh sort of final phrase for this episode. Happiness um leads to success. Um, Jen, um, can you tell our listeners where they can get hold of your book? Obviously, we'll promote that as part of this podcast episode when we when we do the show notes and we'll be getting this out um in the near future. But if you could tell people where they can find you, where they can find out more about your book, that would be brilliant.

Speaker 1 48:26

Um so the best place is my website, which is bullied brain. So it's www.bulliedbrain.com. And on on the website is a click on the menu, there's a buy the book, and there it's available all over the place, but it's just a fast, easy way to figure out where you want to order it from. And um, you can reach me through that website, and it's got all my presentations and courses that I online courses and stuff like that. Happy to talk to anybody. I do lots of workshops, I do lots of consulting. So um, yeah, don't hesitate to reach out if you'd like to further this conversation or whatever. I'd love to hear from you.

Speaker 49:04

Fantastic. Thanks, Jen, and thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure uh having you on the show after this, after this sort of long absence. And hopefully uh we'll get to do it again a little bit sooner than than maybe the gap we've had these last few years. But thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1 49:20

Well, thank you for having me. I was very uh delighted to chat with you as always, Gordon.

Speaker 49:26

Thank you for listening. Check us out at parentinsports.co.uk.