The importance of opening up with Danny Cipriani, Courtney Black, Mark Cavendish and Gary Barlow

0:02Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the High Performance Podcast. On a Friday, we like to do something a bit different. And we just like to reflect on conversations we've had in the past or lessons that we've learned from the amazing guests who've joined us. And it's UK Mental Health Awareness Week. And we've had so many incredible conversations with people who understand the power of sharing, understand the vital, vital importance of talking. And please, if you're struggling, make sure you do talk to someone, talk to a friend, talk to a professional. but don't keep it bottled up and actually the conversations we've had on this podcast even if myself and Damien are not you know qualified therapists the the freedom that our guests have told us they feel when they've had these conversations and the incredible messages that we get from people who have heard these conversations and have either been inspired to seek help themselves or to talk to a partner or a friend or a colleague about things they've never opened up about before that is the power of these kinds of conversations and we really truly believe that talking can heal so many things so let's bring damien into the conversation what is the science and the research behind the importance of talking in a situation like this well the idea of just externalizing some of our problems it gives us a sense of perspective jake i think it gives us the ability to get a differing viewpoint but more importantly it just allows us to step outside of our own heads.

1:30I thought I'd share a quote that really resonated with me around mental health from the brilliant author Matt Haig who said that mental health problems don't define who you are they're just something you merely experience. You walk in the rain and you feel the rain but you're not the rain is what Matt describes it as and I think that sort of sums up nicely what we're talking about here that we all like think of mental health as a spectrum every one of us has mental health but some of us maybe struggle at times with that and some of us sometimes feel vibrant and feel that it's fine so everybody has mental health it's sometimes when we experience problems we just need the ability to see them for what they are rather than let them define us or define our lives and what are your thoughts on why a platform like high performance can at times be an important place for people to come and share their their problems it's a really good question And I think it goes to the heart of what we try to do on the podcast, Jake, which is about take the lessons from the lived experiences of our brilliant guests and then help people translate them.

2:39And I think every one of us, if we're going to talk about lived experiences, has had times where maybe our confidence has been rocked or we feel vulnerable or we often speak about imposter syndrome. So I think everybody does that. And I think the more people talk about it and see that they're safe to do so in a way where they can share it without feeling judged or belittled or silly for it, it encourages others to do and share equally so. So I think it's a consistent trait of every one of our high performers in nearly 200 episodes that nobody gets through this unscathed without occasionally being rocked.

3:19and hopefully for people that are listening to it that maybe are a similar place it gives them the confidence that they're not alone and i love what you say about not being judged and i think that's the most important thing you know this podcast is not here to judge people we don't judge um why they've come on the podcast what they tell us on the podcast um why they choose to share these thoughts on high performance what we do know from the messages and the conversations that we have with you, our listeners, is that this stuff really helps. So let's share some of the things that we've heard then on the High Performance Podcast.

3:54We're going to start with the former England rugby player, Danny Cipriani, who was one of the most lauded, celebrated, wonderful rugby players of his generation. What people didn't understand was what was going on beneath the surface. And this plays to so many things that we talk about on High Performance. We don't believe in opinion. We believe in empathy. and so often you have an opinion that just because someone's life looks great it must be the truth is that when you scratch beneath the surface and you put empathy not opinion at the heart of your thought process you realize what was really going on here's what danny told us i've been in the paper a lot about you know my personal life with with women and such and mistakes like you know in issues that had just happened and I was on the front page and it was negative stories it was just decision making that it wasn't even decision making I felt like it was who I was in my program and I was just doing it and

4:57and to like face yourself in those moments you push it down you don't you don't you don't sit there and be like what am I doing you just carry on behaving in a certain way you know trying to find an escape, whatever that would have been. And for me, it was, you know, it would have been women or it would have been taking a painkiller or it would have been, you know, whatever it would have been because that would have numbed me enough for that point to feel okay. Escaping what? My thoughts, my feelings, my not feeling good enough, you know, the way people spoke about me, I felt very alone a long time.

5:30But that's also because I wasn't really facing myself and accepting and looking at myself and not taking accountability for my behaviors as well as just the life I was in you know I was speaking to my physio about it the other day about a lot of my experiences and like he's an angel of a human being Kevin Lidlow is a shout out he's just an angel with the type of physio who put his hands on you and he'll know exactly what's up with you but I was speaking to him he was like I don't think you should take so much pressure on yourself because you know you're in a position where women put themselves in front of you but I'm like ultimately I wouldn't want my son or my daughter behaving in that way because I want to bring them up with the right type of love and care and focus for everyone it's not I didn't have that I was just quite entitled confident living my life and not really being guided in how to behave or anything it was such a fascinating conversation wasn't it with Danny Cipriani Damien and I think um one of the key messages from that is that a lot of people have come on this podcast and told us that when they're successful when things feel like they're in flow or when things are great and yet they're still struggling with their mental health challenges that actually just exasperates the problem because then they think to themselves well will I ever be okay if if all of this great stuff's happening and I'm still not happy or I'm still not content or I'm still not free of my mental health challenges well yeah definitely and I think that's what Danny was a great example of it, that he had the world at his feet in a professional sense and yet what he told us was he just wanted somebody to care about him.

7:08He just wanted a coach to put their arm around the shoulder and see him for who he was rather than the player that they thought he could be. And I think that speaks to the heart of where one of the biggest predictors of mental health challenges is often when we feel isolated or alone. You know, I remember Danny speaking really movingly how that he said his father was black his mother was white so he never quite fitted in either world he came from a council estate and yet went to one of britain's best public schools so he never quite fitted in that environment as well and a lot of what people described as his destructive behaviors like going out partying was all just a desire to somehow fit in to be accepted in the dressing in culture where he was just a young boy so i think there's a big message here for anyone that might be struggling is that make sure that you're surrounded by people that have got your back that just accept you for who you are and want the best for you regardless of what they think they can gain from being in your company let's uh let's turn our attention now to courtney black who has created one of the most incredible um health platforms on the internet she is a bundle of energy she's an incredible person to be around she's done amazing things and it was remarkable wasn't it damien for her to sit and explain to us that despite all of those things that society would deem successful and brilliant and amazing she told us that she was crippled with anxiety self-loathing and and just hating herself and it's a very common conversation we've had on this podcast yeah and again i think if we go back into the into understanding why albert ellis one of the sort of modern day so one of the founding fathers of the modern day psychology movement talks about we all get engaged in crooked thinking sometimes our thoughts can often trip us up and one aspect of crooked thinking is perfectionism believing that if it's not perfect it isn't worth anything and courtney was really great and articulate at explaining how she felt that perfectionism was something that eventually blighted her life she thought she had to look perfect she thought everything she did had to be perfect and that ended up creating that self-loathing that when she looked in the mirror she saw somebody that wasn't perfect but couldn't accept herself for who she was so let's have a listen to courtney explaining that very point from when she sat down with us, Jake.

9:40When I was dancing, I was crippled with this like horrible feeling of like self-loathing and hated everything about myself. And I went, I took that into school. I took that into relationships. I took that into obviously getting older and having that eating disorder and being that judgmental person. I remember I rang my mum during the first lockdown and I called her and I said, mum, I cannot believe how happy I am. And I've been so unhappy for so many years and it's because every single morning I woke up and I pinched myself I woke up and I judged myself I woke up and I said everything that I hated about myself I woke up and I thought everything was dependent on looks everyone was judging me I mean I was really really skinny and even then like I got people coming up to me in the gym and saying are you okay like do you need some help but none of my family ever noticed it I mean they used to say to me when I used to go to the family parties and they didn't know that I was taking food in the toilet chewing out spit out and in the absolute depth of it they just thought I was being miserable they thought I was being moody they said to me why is Courtney not interacting why is Courtney like picking up her food and that's the worst thing you can say to someone when they're in the depth of an eating disorder is why are you doing that look if if the things that Courtney says there resonate with you and you find yourself stuck in this perfectionism cycle just look at the things that you do in your everyday life that perhaps are not helpful for you.

11:05I mean, one of the things I've had to do is stop looking at Instagram. And this is the one of the things I really struggle with, Damien, is the perfection that society throws our way. And I worry so much about the young generation growing up in this era of social media, which we didn't, because we have to remind ourselves that people only put stuff on their Instagram and their TikTok and their Facebook and their Twitter when they've nailed it, when they've done it. You know, we no longer see the process anymore. We just see the outcome and the outcome is perfection and there and then we compare our own struggles to other people's perfection and then it just leads to this constant conversation on our heads about not being good enough and you know who do people speak to most in the day it isn't their parents it isn't their cousins or their friends or their colleagues or their children or anyone else it's themselves and if that conversation is not healthy um then it really can lead you down a tricky path Well, definitely.

11:55I mean, just yesterday, two psychologists that I hugely admire, one is our former guest, Adam Grant, he put out a post that was related to research from another psychologist called Jonathan Haidt around the evidence. it's a study done with over 27 000 people jake that says that owning a smartphone at a young age is a great predictor of having lower self-worth motivation and resilience and actually access to that smartphone increases the likelihood of sadness anxiety and aggression especially for young girls so the point is that smartphones and our access to all these kinds of apps actually sets us up to have poor mental health as adults so what you're what you've described about stepping away from um instagram and all those other apps is actually really healthy for you as well as for uh flo and seb as well that are going to follow your lead by the way i'm not great at it i still find myself getting sucked into the rabbit hole it's just it's just a bit less time it's just like if i can be on there for five minutes not five hours and try my best not to get triggered then uh then i think you know you're moving in the right direction but again you can't chase perfection right you know please if you're a parent listening to this because i'm a parent and i'm suddenly thinking oh man my daughter's obsessed with having a mobile phone and she uses one of harriet's old phones it doesn't have a sim card but she loves carrying it around and looking at it and things and she's 10 years old like you know don't feel like just because you haven't got something right that you're a poor parent or you're a bad friend or you're an awful partner or child you know all of us are just doing our best and in almost 200 episodes of the high performance podcast you know we've broken down high performance to doing the best you can where you are with what you've got and in many ways that plays into what mark cavendish came on and spoke to us about damien because he tried to do the best he could where he was with what he had but he still struggled and eventually was diagnosed with clinical depression this is him telling us in his words i got diagnosed with clinical depression and i still adept's environment system and they were like okay maybe you got it you don't know which way it came sure but there's a guy with this kind of bulletproof self-belief that you'd had where you'd use that almost as a weapon to attack others with how did you process that when they gave you that diagnosis it's quite nice to have a answer i knew something's wrong with me but i you don't feel any any way it's not like like i think the word depression people don't think you're just gonna be sad you're not even sad you just don't feel anything do you know and you can be sad and things but it's not a sadness it's like something that gets you it gets you quite irrationally like it doesn't make sense why why something's annoyed you or why you're irritable about it what sort of things that in that period would you react strangely to?

15:01Okay, I know houses are noisy and kids going out, but sometimes I'd hear every individual sound that was going on with the kids. And then even my wife, Peter, her walking would be like, I just want to go out of the house. It's her walking in the house. And she's my best friend, you know? And we never argue. We never do. And stuff like that, her walking annoying me. I think about it now by the time you don't think about it and you don't think that's stupid because you don't know that that whatever's going on you just yeah you either have no no feeling or just the most erratic feelings that don't make sense look Damien after that conversation particularly we got so many messages and I'll never forget the man that the message to say he was struggling for years he heard Mark talk about clinical depression he recognized the signs and the symptoms Mark spoke about he went to the doctor he got diagnosed he got treatment and for the first time in years was able to be a decent husband and a decent dad that is the power of someone like Mark being brave enough to come and speak to us yeah I remember that that message as well he spoke about it was when Mark described the foot the footsteps in his house of his children and his and his wife almost feeling deafening and he said that was exactly the symptoms he's had that that prompted him to go and seek help I think there's another powerful point that Mark shared with us when he came and sat down which was that before he'd suffered with mental health problems he'd always regarded people that used them or cited them as weak you know he was almost dismissive or a little bit um contemptuous of anybody that felt that they had to share them and it was almost the ultimate irony that when he was afflicted with his own challenges it was only then did he come to fully appreciate the power of being able to share them and speak your truth openly so again it goes back to the theme that we said at the start of this discussion jake which is if you feel that you are in a tough moment you're struggling or you do just need a time out find somebody that you can trust that you can open up to and speak to and that can often be the first step of being able to then go on a pathway of recovering your mental health to a place where you feel more productive come on then um let's have one final clip let's hear from one final guest where would you like to take us to Damien well how about we take a sneak preview of a guest that hasn't been on the podcast yet but it will be dropping soon Gary Barlow I was recently watching the coronation concert where him and his bandmates from Take That headlined it and it was really interesting to see a man that was so full of life that was vibrant and just so brilliantly creative uh doing his thing but my mind immediately that went back to the story he told us of his wilderness years when he'd left take that first time and he'd set up on a solo career and then it had crashed and burned spectacularly at the same time that his former bandmate robbie williams was in the ascendancy and he spoke to us really powerfully about the sense of shame that he had that he'd almost failed for the first time and didn't feel he had the skills or the resources to be able to cope with it and again there's a common theme here he chose not to talk about this with anybody especially not the person that was closest to him his wife let's listen to what he had to say about how he handled it badly in those years there was no way i could ever see myself recording or singing i'd stopped singing completely stopped playing on a piano and i hadn't done anything for for like three years i'm going going to say right um and it was driving me crazy what's your day look like at this point in your life so it was an interesting one because as as my sort of career life went down the toilet my personal life was on and up because we'd had two kids right and so um so life was life outside the studio was great and so i'd do this thing where i hear this a lot where i'd say all right i'm going into the studio now everybody and dad would go off to do his day's work and I'd literally sit in there and I'd just be looking around the room thinking what am I going to do what what have a what what could I do that would be useful to anything and I'd sit in there and I'd look at the clock and I'd come out at four and go anyway that was a good day and I'd act this day of being in the studio pretending I was doing so I was doing nothing and some days just sort of watching the piano thinking i used to write big hits on that thing and i just it was it was slowly going insane really really yeah felt that bad oh it was it was really dark so there you go that's garry barlow revealing what life was really like in his darkest times and that's an episode coming soon on the high performance podcast the reason why i think it's important to finish with that Damien is because as someone who's been through my own mental health challenges over the years I always remind people if they're in a dark place or a difficult place that everything passes and Gary is the perfect example of someone who is testament to the fact that life couldn't have got much bleaker for him at that particular moment you know he was really struggling in a variety of different ways but everything passes look at him now he looks great he feels good he takes care of himself and the reason why that's important is because if someone is in a good place at the moment and thinks, oh, this conversation about mental health doesn't apply to me.

20:53Well, remember, everything passes. So if you're in a good place at the moment, you're not necessarily in a good place forever. And maybe the best time to equip yourself for challenge is now. Exactly. And that goes back to so many of our guests that have told us, don't get high on your own supply, but don't get too low in your dark moments that I think just navigating your way through it is a sign of great mental health. I'd like to finish with that. There's a famous letter that a lady wrote to Stephen Fry once around her mental health. And he responded by talking to her about the sun will shine again one day.

21:31And you have to have that hope and belief that things do pass and the sun will shine again for all of us. However dark it might seem a particular moment in time. That's lovely. Damien, thank you so much. Thanks, Jake. I love these conversations. It's nice to go back through the archive, but equally nice to reflect on lessons that we can all take away and apply. And if you're listening to this, please let this be a reminder to you that all around us, there are people that are finding life tough and they may well be people close to you when you have absolutely no idea that life is a challenge for them.

22:06And that's why we always encourage you to ask people twice. How are you? You know, how are you? Ask that to a friend or when they say, yeah I'm fine just follow up with no like how are you and ask them on a scale of one to ten it's a really great question to ask people on a scale of one to ten how you're doing because I think that you can get the truth out of people I always think you can also knock a couple of numbers off so if someone says they're a ten they're perhaps not but if someone equally says I'm a four at the moment you know they may well be a two and really struggling and then that leads to a deeper conversation and if you're struggling and you want more help um please check out jack.org that's j-a-a-q.org we were joined on the podcast by the founder of jack danny gray we spoke to him about the fact that people struggling with mental health are not weak people struggling with mental health are stronger than anybody else because they have to deal with those difficult mental health challenges and get on with their lives there's also great information to be found from both mind and also the mental health foundation there's so much out there please don't suffer in silence please do speak out from myself damien and the entire high performance team thank you so much for being with us and there's plenty more to come from high performance we'll see you soon