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Greetings VARA Community,
As part of VARA's young athlete development programming, Kids Today and What They Need From Us, this email is Topic 2/Part 2 - Working Out Our Own Stuff. This section focuses on you, the coach, or the parent, how to improve your self-awareness, and will help you understand your "why," how to adjust your thinking, and realize how you came to your "why." The series will assist educators, parents, and coaches with their ability to help our student-athletes reach their potential by learning more about yourselves. This email includes a coaches' worksheet for you to do with your staff or on your own. ENJOY!
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Introducing Elle Gilbert
Elle is a former VARA competitor; she grew up in VT and raced in the MVC council system. Elle competed for Suicide Six and Woodstock Ski Runners. A 2012 SMS graduate, Elle went on to compete for Middlebury College. Following a successful alpine racing and academic career at Middlebury, Elle coached for MMSCA. She later earned her Master of Arts in Sport and Performance Psychology from the University of Denver.
As a fully integrated Mental Performance Specialist at SMS, Elle is currently working with all five of the athletic programs on campus.
This topic is at the forefront of athletics and sports performance at all levels. I am super excited for Elle to share her work and experience in youth and sports psychology with the VARA community.
Please enjoy the series, take notes, and save them and discuss with your coaching team. We are planning a zoom follow-up at the end of the series and will include the date and time in one of the next email blasts.
Thank you!
Julie Woodworth
VARA Executive Director
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Understanding Our Young Athletes
Topic 2, Part 2, of the Series
By: Elle Gilbert
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Working Out Our Own Stuff: Part 2
The Magic & Misunderstanding of Self-Awareness
Self-awareness has become a buzzword in all fields and industries where people are striving to be better, and I’m sure you can think of one million reasons why it’s important for you to be self-aware in your role as a coach or a parent. I also bet that you, just like the rest of us, overestimate your levels of self-awareness. That’s okay, join the party – it means we have a huge opportunity to make ourselves better not only for ourselves but for our athletes and for all the people in our lives.
For all of the reasons you are thinking that a robust ability to be introspective and understand yourself would be beneficial to your role, you’re probably right. The ability to see ourselves clearly, accurately see ourselves the way others do, and see how we fit into the context of the world around us gives us power. Research connects self-awareness to increased fulfillment, stronger relationships, heightened creativity and confidence, better communication, improved performance, and more effective leadership. Awesome. Many of us hesitate to acknowledge there is also a dark side here – the pursuit of self-knowledge can leave us trapped in a vicious spiral that can feel like a self-imposed mental hell. We can metaphorically peel the onion so many layers deep that we end up repeating ourselves and generating more anxiety, misery, and self-judgment than we originally had.
Our misguided efforts to develop and practice self-awareness are often based on a misunderstanding of how self-knowledge and insight development. Most of us attempt to get to know ourselves by thinking about ourselves. The reality is, these two things are not related. This mistake leads us to ask “Why?” in the face of a trying situation or difficult emotional experience. We are essentially asking ourselves to unearth unconscious thoughts, feelings, and motives, which, unfortunately, is nearly impossible to do on our own. Instead of this question leading us towards the authentic truth about ourselves, it leads us to answers invented by us that feel true. We pull on “facts” that actually cloud our self-perception. Where “Why?” too often leads us down the path of unintentional self-deception and unproductive rumination about the past, asking “What?” moves us productively towards the future (i.e., “What is happening…?” “What can I do…?” “What about this situation…?” “What patterns are at play…?” “What’s most important…?” etc.). So often the uncovering of various parts of ourselves is accompanied by self-judgment and criticism along with a further wondering that often sounds like, “Why am I the way I am?” This is a dangerous trap to fall into (we’ll explore further in just a moment).
On top of our well-intended, often misguided efforts to develop self-awareness, we now have to contend with the vast misunderstanding nearly all of us hold about our own emotions. We don’t have the space here to delve into all of the most recent research, but we’ll dip our toes in the water. When we experience emotions we don’t like, our go-tos typically consist of some form of numbing or distraction (food, alcohol, video games, social media, incessant scrolling, etc.). When we get to know our vices and develop the ability to step out from under their thumb, we’re left with all of our feelings about all the things in our life we probably haven’t taken the time to really feel or deal with. Yikes. This can be scary, and some people get stuck here, thinking that opening themselves up to all of their feelings and developing comfort with them is the pinnacle of self-awareness. But we’re stopping a few steps too soon. We can work to experience our emotions as data not directives: Which do we need to simply experience and let pass, and which do we need to act on? We can work to understand the emotions we experience that are simply distracting us from other emotions, and what emotions we are creating in the process of analyzing another emotion. Ultimately, we can learn to understand ourselves as the architects of our emotions. We are responsible for the emotions we feel through how we assign meaning to the processes of our bodies (interoception), how we perceive our external world, and how we categorize experiences in our lives. Emotions don’t happen to us; we create them.
If you’re rocked by the insights from the last paragraph, you’re not alone. We have been bestowed with a mind that fundamentally misunderstands itself. Let’s let that information percolate as we explore self-awareness as the foundation for two things at ground zero of what it means to be an effective parent, coach, and overall human.
- The Path from Self-Awareness to Self-Regulation
Intimate knowledge of our mental and physical patterns gives us the capacity to consciously manage our internal processes and our resulting external behaviors. Self-awareness is never enough in and of itself, nor is it ever the end goal. Understanding emotion is the vital threshold that can move us from awareness to regulation. Emotion is physical; it’s born in our bodies. Our bodies and brains are in a constant loop of communication via our nervous system (see below!)
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© 2021 Elle Gilbert
To simplify all of that: Our brain creates a general feeling that we feel as a summary of all of the sensory signals it receives from our body’s innards. Our brain makes meaning of that feeling, and voilà, we experience an emotion whose job is to send signals back to the body to prepare it for some sort of action (or inaction). The step where we hold responsibility is in making meaning of what’s going on in the body, and every single emotion we feel (whether it feels like it or not), originates in the state of the body. Our often unconscious perceptions shuffle through our cognitive circus which then reinforces and influences the state of the body. And so the cycle goes. This sensing of the self (i.e., interoception) is the essence of self-awareness, and it’s something we can improve by paying attention to what’s going on on the inside (think functions of the heart and lungs) and what corresponding emotions we manufacture.
There is a good reason talking about the breath when it comes to self-regulation is a cliché: because it is the most influential lever we have to pull. Our diaphragm is arguably the most direct, powerful link we have to the functioning of our nervous system. It is the secret portal to taking ownership of our physiology in the heat of the moment as well as to establishing a more efficient, productive state of baseline functioning. The science here is extensive, but to keep it as simple as possible, practice slowing down your pace of breathing to approximately 6 breaths per minute and lengthening your exhale (i.e., a 4-in, 6-out count). Breathe through your nose and focus on the expansion and contraction of your diaphragm (belly breathing!). In a real-time heavy emotional experience, practice a double-inhale (to fully inflate the lungs) followed by a long, controlled exhale. Two to three repetitions of this pattern will facilitate the offloading of carbon dioxide from the body (too much build-up will cause sensations typically classified as anxiety), and science has declared it the quickest way to restore calm. While your body is engaged in a self-regulation practice, slow the spinning wheels between your ears by letting your mind come to rest on the action and feeling of the breath. With enough practice of engaging in a self-regulatory activity such as the simple slowing down and deliberateness with the breath, we can train ourselves to develop an automatic regulatory response to feeling stress in our bodies. Once mastered, this is a true superpower.
Our ability to self-regulate as parents and coaches obviously impacts how we show up in our roles, and we all know that modeling is our most powerful teacher. Our athletes arguably learn more from our behaviors, communication, and way of being than they do from our directed instruction. Be what you want to see. End of story. Or is it….
Yes, one of our superpowers is our ability to model the behaviors, responses, and self-regulation we want to see in our athletes. Our other, far less discussed superpower, is our inherent position as a co-regulator in the lives of our athletes. As a human, it is our biological imperative to be connected to others – that’s how mammals were designed to survive. Our nervous systems are co-dependent, meaning the systems of our bodies are designed to rely on other people. When human nervous systems are left to survive on their own (think solitary confinement), we bear the extra burden. This tax accrues over time, depletes our systems quicker, and takes years off our lives. Long story short, how you show up inescapably affects the way your athletes show up. You can be a force for good when your state and way of being, supports your athletes’ efforts to self-regulate, and you can be working against the goals of your athletes when you are carrying frustration, anxiety, fear, anger, etc. in your body and in your voice. To run this in reverse, your athletes are co-regulators of your nervous system as well. It’s our job to be aware of this and make an adjustment if we find ourselves feeding into an unproductive cycle with an individual athlete or with the entire team.
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“The best thing for your nervous system is another human.
The worst thing for your nervous system is also another human.”
– Lisa Feldman Barrett
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When we understand our own emotions and the nature of emotions more generally, we gain the power to help our athletes reshape and restructure their own emotional experiences. By providing experiences where they can try on new perspectives, be guided through new responses, and even learn new emotional responses to similar external stimuli, we can help our athletes redefine their emotional concepts. This looks like the athlete who used to read fear in their bodies who now reads excitement and the athlete who used to experience failure as an utter depletion who now experiences the same objective experience as an energizing and motivating. Our athletes are undoubtedly on the teenage pressure-packed emotional roller coaster, so we need to start seeing ourselves as teachers of meaning making.
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The Path from Self-Awareness to Empathy
Empathy is at the heart of understanding, connecting with, and communicating with the person in front of you. Our young athletes need us to have and exercise this ability. Our world needs more people to have and exercise this ability. The path from self-awareness to empathy runs through self-acceptance. It has to. Knowledge and awareness of the self that’s laden with judgment, loathing, and criticism defeat the magic of the awareness. Again, self-awareness alone is not the point.
The goal of our awareness is acceptance. Refusing to accept ourselves as we are – flaws, vices, and all – returns us right back to a state of chasing whatever numbing, distracting thing will dampen or obscure our emotions. Being unable to accept ourselves as we are, makes it nearly impossible to look at the misguided behavior, bizarre minds, and ugly emotions of others and accept them as they are. We instinctively see someone who deserves to be judged and criticized for everything that makes them a messy human, just like us. If you look hard enough at relationships that are transactional, conditional, or generally unhealthy, more often than not, you’ll find a striking lack of self-acceptance deeply rooted in one or both parties. Compassion for others begins with compassion for yourself, and compassion for yourself begins with the quest for self-awareness. To look at our athletes and have the capacity to understand their situation, their perceptions, and their feelings, demands we take this quest seriously. The equation balances itself: our ability to be empathic towards others = our level of self-acceptance.
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Understanding Your Own Stuff
We’ve finally made it to the uncomfortable part. We’ll keep the section on our insecurities short, but the work we do to understand our tendencies, default behaviors, go-to communication tactics, etc. should be thorough. Everyone reading this is a leader. We have a choice in how we lead, and when we’re not able to show up as the courageous leader our athletes need us to be, it’s because of our armor. Our biggest barrier is not our fear. When we respond to our fear with protective mechanisms rather than embracing the vulnerability, discomfort, and suckiness of the situation, our defenses win and we lose. Our athletes lose too. We all have custom-made (by us) suits of armor that we’ve taken years to build and perfect. Can you see your armor in the following behaviors?
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* Driving perfectionism and fostering fear of failure
* Needing to be right
(vs. wanting to get it right)
* Holding tightly to your expertise
(the expert trap!)
* Rewarding exhaustion as a status symbol
* Hustling to prove your worth
* Using cynicism as a shield
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* Avoiding and passing the buck
* Tolerating a culture of “fitting in”
* Pursuing your own goals above those of your team/athlete/child
* Comfort with compliance and control
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Only when we see it clearly and call it what it is, can we begin to dismantle it. Our call to be the courageous leaders our young people need demands we start shedding our armor. When we do this, we give them permission to do the same.
* Check out the worksheet (below) for an opportunity to work out your own stuff! Do this on your own, with your partner, or with your fellow coaches.
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References (and Resources You Should Also Check Out!)
§ Andrew Huberman – www.hubermanlab.com (Neuroscientist and Tenured Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine)
o The Huberman Lab Podcast
§ Lisa Feldman Barrett – How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
§ Mark Manson – www.markmanson.net (New York Times Bestselling Author – check out his full body of work)
§ Stephen Porges – www.stephenporges.com (Distinguished Scientist and Professor of Psychiatry – check out his full body of work)
o Podcast Interview by Sport Psychologist, Michael Gervais on Finding Mastery- August 18, 2021
§ Susan David – Emotional Agility
§ Tasha Eurich – Insight (also check out her out at www.tashaeurich.com)
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