How to best support my child in sport and school with performance psychologist - Jonah Oliver

The Shaun McCambridge Podcast

Jonah Oliver is a world-leading performance psychologist he combines sports psychology and neuroscience to facilitate peak performance.

He has nearly 20 years of working in high performance from Olympians, executives, and professional codes (Brisbane Roar, Gold Coast Suns, Essendon), to car racing teams (Porsche – Le Mans World Champion, V8s), indigenous performing artists and surgeons.

Executive coach, author, speaker, and consultant on talent identification, leadership, and organisational performance around the world. Husband, father, entrepreneur.

2.30 - How do you navigate the car trip home after a sports game when your kid has strong emotions?

"Emotions tell us something, it's not ambivalence. They're not just sitting there. If there are emotions, it means they care. So they care about something like the performance, their teammates, your approval, their own standards, feeling competent or feeling incompetent, whatever it is, there's something there to listen to."

4.50 What is our role?

• Our role is to provide a cushioned landing so that they can feel and experience whatever's showing up and you're a safe pair of hands to allow them to just sit with that.
• Let them dictate what the car ride home looks like
• Self-reflection is important
• Sometimes kids need an object to discharge/vent to (often the parents)

08.44 - Our fears as a parent. I don't want them to …

"Sport can be the greatest vehicle for learning about life in a safe way. Life is hard and how do you survive in the jungle if you're raised in the zoo? It's like sport needs to allow you to be exposed to failure to set back to I'm not as good as other people at some things that I need to solve this puzzle myself. "

11.15 - How do you get your kids to see your intentions for what they are?

• You need to be clear on what your intentions truly are
• Typically when we want to step in and help it kicks us into command and control style of parenting
• When you teach a child something, you deprive them of the opportunity to discover it for themselves (Piaget quote)
• The consequence is our kids learn there's always something about me they need to fix, I'm not good enough.

15.40 - "What does success look like? And what is the intention behind it? If it's trying to protect them from failure because of your fears of them and what their life might be, if they don't succeed in that domain, then that's you. And you got to get the heck out of the way. It is a fun first mentality, just let them have fun."

• Your job is to, to remove all the weeds and maybe throw some manure and some lattice and a few things, but then let the plant grow in the direction it wants to go.
• When you take the plant and you wire it to the lattice and tell it which way to grow you don't have an independent, self-governed, self-determined human being.

20.00 - How do you help children identify and navigate self-doubt as a roadblock to them reaching their potential?

• We need to stop seeing self-doubt as a problem
• Self-doubt is just the price of entry into life
• Take the time to listen to what is happening to the kid, what are the themes? Listen and learn what your kid is actually worried about
• The most powerful thing you can say when they are feeling nervous is just to sit there and say "Yeh that makes sense". Meet them and see them
• Identify self-doubt as a gift and reframe it

27.00 - How to motivate kids to do something they may not love but may be important?

• Stop trying to make them love everything
• If our kids only do the things they enjoy and are motivated by then they learn a relationship that they only want to do tasks they are competent at/enjoy they will avoid the things they don't like. It sets up bad patterns.
• Boredom tolerance is critical for success
• Motivation comes and goes for everyone, be aware of the ebbs and flows of that
• "I don't enjoy doing X but I do it because of Y"

36.00 - How do you deal with the "I want to give up"? How do you unpack and deal with that?

• Is there some form of avoidance? Is there still something they want to do but they are quitting because of another reason?
• If it's just part of the developmental phase of not wanting to do something then you need to unpack it and they might open up.
• Understand before you start commanding or clambering for leverage to coerce them

41.00 - How do we get our kids to recognise that effort and attitude matter?

• Role modelling matters
• Watch the version of us that shows up, especially at home
• Try not to step into the command and control version. What is your definition of success? What are you trying to build?
• What about the relationship you have with them?

"We want to build people with self-determination, a sense of competence, a sense of autonomy that they can do things of their own. They can build meaningful relationships with the world around them. They can take on the world and that they are enough in their current form."

"Our job is to create conditions for a fire"

47.00 - "Our kids are enough already, they don't need to win first place."

Let them grow into the version that they are and the different phases, we are there to nurture and support them.

Does my child look forward to/promote me being there?

54.00 - What's the world of social media, the dominance of that, the prevalence of that mental health struggles, and how do we help our kids?

"Do they have the skills to make good decisions around their own safety and, or advocating for the safety of others? Do they have the ability to understand morals and mores and all those things? And if the answer is no, they're probably still underdeveloped in that space then you absolutely have to withhold their exposure to it because any weakness or vulnerability your child has in normal life in those spaces is magnified on social media."

Limit the exposure as much as you can. It can set them up for long-term mental health issues.

"We look at the rapid increase and not just through overdiagnosis and misdiagnosis all that and remove all that from the science and I've done it well, there's been a massive uptick in the prevalence of mood disturbances in our children and it correlates almost identically with the introduction of the big social media brands."

1.01.00 - Final comments

• Help our children understand who they are and certain personality traits are fine vs trying to enforce an idealised version at the end.
• Our job as a parent is to connect who they are and bring it to life by championing it
• When we experience tough emotions (anxiety/fear etc) that is okay and it is part of life

Links -

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