What Episodes Should You Play for Your Kids - And Why?

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1:46This is High Performance, and you're listening to one of our regular Friday episodes where myself and Damien, hi Damien, hi Jake, dive into a key theme that, as you can hear, Damien's very excited dive into a key theme that will help you get closer to your own version of high performance than ever before and actually Damien you betrayed your own excitement about this episode because I know that the conversation that we're going to have today is exactly the kind of thing that you love when it comes to creating high performance well one of the things that we when we first started yet we said that we wanted these conversations to be timeless that people could go back to them in 10, 20, 30 years and the messages would still be relevant.

2:25And this episode today almost taps into that idea of what would you hand down to your kids if you could only choose a few episodes and say, listen to that, there's some timeless wisdom in it that you can take and use and apply in your own life, which ones would they be? And I'm also going to reveal the truth to people, I hope you don't mind, that you and I have the same question we ask ourselves after each episode and I will be totally honest with you, we've interviewed hundreds of guests right on this show. Some of them we really like and would love to go for a beer with. Others we're very happy to never see again.

2:56And the question that Tamey and I ask ourselves when the guest has left the room or the recording has finished, we say, if our son or daughter worked for that person or with that person, would we be happy? And often when we said, you know, I'd love that person to coach my kids in sport, or I'd love that person to be the CEO of a business my kids work in, or I'd love that person to be the founder of a business that my kids are part of. that's when we really like a person right so i think this conversation about creating content that we also want young people to hear is very relevant isn't it yeah definitely and i think sometimes it's it can be around the messenger as much as the message as well that if it's somebody for young people that they can see have scaled the heights even if they might not be as topical in the moment as what they were it's more the idea that if you can see that somebody has got to the top of the mountain and they're telling you this is how I did it this is what I learned this is how I would do differently it can be the same messages that we're dispensing as parents or as adults in in a child's life but actually it doesn't carry as much impact.

3:59So come on Damien what would you start with which episode would you like your children George and Rose to listen to right now or if there is a parent listening to this an aunt an uncle a grandparent what episode would you want them to pass down to a young person? Well, I've worked in this sport of rugby league and therefore it was a real privilege to sit down opposite Sam Tompkins. He's a multi-decorated player. He's regarded as one of the greatest of his generation. And yet his story was incredible. He was a greenkeeper at a young age. He was told he was never going to make it. He had to endure quite a few years of real struggle and hardship before he eventually got his breakthrough.

4:36But what he wanted to share with us was something really quite simple. and profound that I think any child can embrace and use in their own world. Let's listen to him talk about doing the 1%. It's the 1%. Things that other people won't notice, do them best. In rugby terms, there'd be people score amazing tries and come up with big tackles. But there's 100 things that the average spectator wouldn't see. someone working when the ball's away working an extra three meters to cover a little bit of space in case the ball comes back these are what we call one percent efforts and we they'd get highlighted after a game and be held in much higher regard than a try right or a tackle okay and we'd we'd do a video review and we'd see the general things like whatever went well or bad in the game and at he'd say right 1 % efforts and then we'd see and it might be someone who doesn't get the accolades that they deserve and they're a player that you need in a team but their name's not in the paper they're not getting paid a fortune but they do the 1 % as right and that amongst the group was more valued and it was the tiny little details because Sean Wayne says it all the time, anything you do is everything you do See I love this as well, Damien, the 1%.

6:02And I'll tell you the reason why is because we often think that high performance is about getting people to do the big grand gestures, the big moments, the big moves, the big plays. But it's not true because those big plays, we might do three or four times a year. How many times a year do we make small 1 % decisions? Well, I'll tell you what, it's not how many times a year, it's how many times a day. It's not in the tens, it's not even the hundreds, it's in the thousands, thousands of times a week. We are making tiny 1 % decisions that we don't even and realise we're making, they seem so insignificant, right?

6:34It's the way we talk to our partners, the way we talk to ourselves, the time we get out of bed, the breakfast that we eat, the phone calls that we make, the small, seemingly imperceptible, not very important things that don't matter until we add them all up. And it's only when you add them all up that they have the most incredible impact in our lives. I suppose this speaks to me deeply because as you I spent a long time working and involved in Formula One, and I'm still quite heavily involved in that world. And that is the world of marginal gains. Formula One is a world where you're not making one change to your car over the course of a season that transforms your season.

7:11You are looking at every single tiny minute detail on that Formula One car, of which there are tens of thousands of nuts and bolts and looms and bits of carbon fibre and whatever. And you're saying, how can we improve the smallest part of that? And I would love people after this to talk to their kids about, it's not just about being on screens less. It's not just about working harder at school. It's the tiny little things that young people are doing, which will totally transform the way their lives are. How you talk to your friends when you see them in the morning. The way that you say hello to your teacher when you walk into school.

7:44What you decide to eat for breakfast rather than breakfast cereal. Whether you find time to walk up the stairs rather than take the lift or the escalator. that these little things I wish we could understand make such a huge difference. And it's not just about sport, it's about life, Damien, isn't it? Yeah, definitely. There's a study that was done where it was seen about what you sort of praise people for. So you praise people for doing big acts of skill or sort of something where real talent has to make the difference. And it finds that it doesn't improve their performance of doing it next time because you almost interfere with the flow process.

8:21but when you praise people for making deliberate conscious effortful activities like taking the stairs rather than the lift or being kind to somebody and when they failed rather than choosing to walk past they ignore them that reinforces it creates a virtuous circle you're more likely to do it next time so i think getting kids to recognize the one percenters and these are not things that rely on talent is rely on your will and your willingness just to engage in that behavior can then reinforce and create a virtuous circle and i think it's a lot easier to do the right thing and to live in a way that sometimes takes a bit of effort right if we feel like we found our purpose if we found something that really makes an impact and i want to talk about this at this point because we were joined um on the podcast by a guy called hector garcia who wrote um a very famous book about ikigai.

9:14So ikigai is a Japanese concept that was first introduced on our show by our fellow podcaster, Rangan Chatterjee. And the concept of ikigai is about living a life with purpose. It's about finding your reason for being. Simon Sinek would talk about it as finding your why. But the reason why I think it's so important is because I think it's never been harder to be ourselves in the modern world. It's never been easier to compare ourselves. It's never been easier to see other people's successes. It's never been easier to see other people getting success quickly and seemingly not deserving that success.

9:46And it derails us from where we are and what we should be doing. And I see other podcasters, I see influencers, I see all over the media, people talking about, doesn't matter whether you love something, it's about putting in maximum effort. It's about doing everything you can to be successful. It's about beating everyone else to the punch. It's about being number one. And I think to myself, when I see this idea of having to be number one, I think, well, what if being number one doesn't make us happy? Why do we need to be number one if it isn't the thing that brings us joy? And that's really the concept of Icky Guy.

10:19I'm going to let Hector explain a bit more for you. Here he is. Do you wake up in the morning looking forward to your day? You jump from bed and like, wow, So today I'm going to be, this is an amazing day. I'm looking forward to it. And we all have bad days. It's okay if you have one, two of these days, bad days in a month that you wake up and say like, oh no, I don't want to do anything. But if that's happening every day to you, that's the wake up call. And one way is to look back and see what happened. Another way is to look at now. we have the tool that we call it the four circles of ikigai it's an exercise that if you do it there's the one of the things every everyone says about the self-help books is that if you actually do something that is in the book you can slightly change your life for better if you actually do this exercise is like the four circles is what you love doing so you write in a paper what you love doing then you write in a paper what you're good at then you write in a paper what you can make money off that that's very obvious if you have a job you can put your job but also i want you to put things that you have a sense that you might be able to make money with or you did in the past or you want to and you can make up like a wish list i can make money i don't know baking good bread because i have don't put limits into what you write in these circles and the last one is what the world needs it sounds very like wow i have to help the world but it means also like you can start small how can i help the people around me how can i help my husband or my wife or my kids or this person in my family who might need my kind words.

12:24How can I help them? You write down all this and you don't need to come up with a solution at the moment, but it will stay in your subconscious. And days later, I'm telling you like everyone, your subconscious will, maybe you take a shower or you're walking and you will say, okay I had this idea maybe I should start doing more of this and start eliminating this from my life because it's not really I didn't even write it in my circles why I'm doing this so this is a tool that will help you like a wake-up call. So if you want to pass on a message to a young person in your life to totally transform their life I think you should be asking them first of all what do you love to do?

13:11What do you really love to do? Okay. If you love it, let's ask whether you're good at it. So you might love 20 or 30 things. Are you good at three or four of those things? Yeah, I am. Great. Okay. So you love something and you're good at it. That's really brilliant. Okay. Do you think maybe the world needs the thing that you love and you're good at? Well, if they find one or two of those things, then suddenly they're close to finding their Ikigai. Because I know that one of the other pillars, Damien of Ikigai, is being paid for that thing. But I actually think that if the world needs it, you'll find a way to make it pay.

13:42And we're not talking here about this kind of Western capitalist concept of having to become a multi-millionaire and getting investment and floating and going on the stock market and making yourself a billionaire. We're talking about can you earn enough money doing this thing to be able to keep doing it. And I see so often people who are earning good money but doing something that they hate. I see so often people doing something that they're not very good at but they feel that they should be doing it because it's other people's expectations. I feel people doing things that I see as making them a lot of money, but I tell you, it's 100 % damaging the world around them and people don't need the kind of thing they're offering.

14:18So if we can get young people finding the thing they love, they're good at, that the world might need and they can earn enough money for, then I think very quickly we will find that that will make you an awful lot happier than winning at anything or being a multi-millionaire. I promise you it will make a difference. That's really powerful stuff, Jake. I think I like it because it's an antidote to, you know, that advice that many people pass on to young people. Find a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life. That's well-intentioned, but I actually don't find it's that helpful. You know, chase your passion rather than profit and things like that.

14:52They're all really good, but they're all quite singular questions that I don't feel are helpful. I think what's better career advice is Hector's icky guy questions. Those four questions sort of make you think about lots of different aspects of your life rather than just think, I don't know what my passion is or I don't know quite what my sense of purpose is. These allow you to recognize that there's a series of questions that can help you discover that sweet spot. I know what you're going to say here because I'm about to say to you, give us one clip that sums up the fact that sometimes it can be brutal trying to be successful.

15:31And I do think, by the way, I do think, by the way, there is space for having these kinds of conversations we're about to have with young people because I do see young people entering the world of work and we're trying to hire them all the time and they don't have resilience. They don't really understand what hard work is. They think that the success has to be given to them. They are too quick to blame other people for the fact that things aren't going their way. And I know the clip that you're going to pick out when I say is there's something that puts the onus on young people to deliver. and to take responsibility for the world.

16:04Yeah, but before I share that clip, I'll just share the context of when I first heard it. We were sat on a sofa. It was late on a Friday night and it was in the TNT Sport buildings. And I remember hearing this bit of wisdom imparted to us and thinking, this is incredible. This is the sort of thing that I wish I'd have been told when I was a kid. I wish that my children could hear it. And so it proved that it's been viewed at over 80 million times when I last checked about it. It's Robin Van Persie's conversation with Shaquille, who at the time was his 14-year-old son. Let's listen to it. And I actually had this chat last week, funny enough, seriously, with my son.

16:53So my son plays at Feyenoord. He played against Ajax under 14. he was on the bench he didn't play so in the car on the way back he was like a bit moody disappointed complaining a little bit about others about the coach etc and then I said yeah I said but Shaquille I said you sound like a loser you know if you talk like this in a way you sound like you lost I said you are blaming him you're blaming her you're blaming this you're blaming everything I said but I don't hear one single thing about yourself. I said, winners, I said, they take control and they blame themselves and they look where they can improve.

17:37This is what you should be thinking about. So I didn't tell him what he should think about. You should ask yourself the question, are you a loser or are you a winner? I said, for me, it doesn't matter. I said, because I'm your dad, I said, the only job I have and your mom has is when you're 20, that you're a good boy, that you're ready for life. you know you can make your mistakes you can do what you want I love you for the same amount it doesn't matter for me if you make it as a football player or not I said but you say that this is your passion so you should take control of your life and stop complaining because it sounds like a loser I said then I don't mind if you want to be a loser be a loser I still love you as much I said I said it doesn't matter for me I said but if you want to be a winner take control of your life and stop complaining about others Damien do you remember the criticism we got after that with people saying that was too harsh he was too harsh on his son asking if he wants to be a winner or a loser but you've always pointed out when people say that to us that actually what Robin said just before he said the bit about being a winner or a loser is he did something really clever didn't he yeah definitely so we hear this term psychological safety a lot of people talk about it the idea of you create an environment where people feel fine to fail because they know that it's a failure of a task rather than a failure for them as a person.

19:01And it's that fact that he said, I will love you regardless. He creates the climate where he says to his son, I'm your dad and I love you and I'll always love you. Whatever pathway you do, whatever you want to do, that love is not dependent on anything you do or achieve in your life. That is baked into the process. So once he's established that climate of love, then it gives him the opportunity to step into what the psychologist Albert Bandura talks about understanding where the locus of control lies. If you're putting the locus of control outside of yourself and pointing the finger of blame at everybody else, you can never improve because you're always dependent on circumstances, events and other people.

19:44If the locus of control lies with you, what can I do? How can I improve? How can I get better? That is the starting point for high performance, however you choose to define it. So good. So good. I think it was brilliant, that conversation. Before we wrap up, Damien, should we just talk through a few other episodes that it might be worth people checking out? Yeah, go on. So I'm going to say, first of all, Mel Robbins, who came on and spoke about the high-five habit. And the reason why I think this is important is that Mel was talking about the power of high-fiving yourself in the mirror at the start of every day.

20:16And I know if I went to my 12-year-old now and said, this is what I want you to do, She might say, Dad, stop being so cringe, right? But I think the important thing is we need to remind young people that they have the power to remind themselves that they are doing great things. And I think if a lot of our young people said out loud to us the critical things they tell themselves in their own heads, we would be really sad, very upset, and want to reach out and help them. I don't think they ever will tell us. But what we can do is get them to put together the tools that remind them that actually they're doing really well.

20:48So they don't have to high-five themselves in the mirror. But if you listen to the conversation we have with Mel Robbins, she's full of great advice and great tips for how we can make young people feel good about themselves. And one of the best things is just to ask our kids every week, what's been brilliant? You know, Damien speaks brilliantly often about ask better questions. So if your son or daughter finishes school, don't ask them what results they got or if they've had a game of football, don't ask them whether they won or lost. Ask them, did you love it? What were you most proud of? What was the moment where you realised that you were improving all the time?

21:17I think that's a really important first episode. What have you got, Damien? Well, I'd pick up on that and I think Vicky Patterson is a really great episode to play where she talks about don't compare your behind the scenes footage to somebody else's highlight reel. I think we're all aware of the comparison culture that is all too easy to get dragged into these days. Social media or just the proliferation of sort of glamorous pictures and shots from other people's lives can often leave us feeling that ours is a little bit grey or dull. And Vicky speaks really powerfully about that because she's somebody that did get caught up in that culture.

21:58You know, she did make some dubious decisions by her own admission. And part of that was because her own self-worth had been eroded by allowing herself to start looking at other people's lives and thinking that they were better than hers. I think that's invaluable. There's also a great conversation with Lewis Morgan, who was the co-founder of Gymshark with Ben Francis. And he talks about just go out there and do something. Like too many young people now are sitting around waiting for other people to make their dreams come true for them. Lewis is a master of going out there and making it happen.

22:30And Damien challenged him. He said, if I give you£100 right now, what would you do to go and turn it into a lot more than£100? Have a listen to what he says and then tell your daughter or your son that they too can go and make their dreams of financial freedom or anything else come true if they just take responsibility. It's a cool conversation with Lewis. Yeah, definitely. That's for anyone that's got children that have got that sort of entrepreneurial zeal that want to sort of take control of their own lives, set up their own business. Lewis is a great example for them. Over the last 12 months, when I've spoken to other parents and they've said, oh, what episode do you think is useful?

23:09I've said to them, listen to the interview that we did with the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, but listen to it with your children. Because Jonathan wrote a series of brilliant books, but his most recent one, The Anxious Generation, talks about what smartphones are doing to this next generation of young people, the damage it can cause, not only psychologically, but emotionally and spiritually as well. And I think sometimes as parents, we might say to Akits, get off your phone, you know, go and play outside and things like that. But we're never a prophet in our own town. Listening to somebody that's actually explored this, investigated it and got real-time data and evidence about what we should be doing alternatively is a must listen for any parent.

23:57But if you can do it in the company of your children, I'd really advise it. And I know that we have mentioned a lot of episodes over the last 20 minutes or so. You can find them all by just going down to the description to the podcast. The links are all going to be right there. So just go to the description, you'll find them there. And then just when you're in the car, instead of putting on some music, just see if you can get your kids to just give us 10 minutes of their time. And I promise you, promise you, that we think it'll be worth it because myself and Damien are parents. We care deeply about the next generation.

24:26We've created a high-performance foundation to help young people to find their own version of high performance and to improve their mental strength and their mental resilience. And we'll continue to fight the good fight for them on your behalf. Thanks a lot, Damo. Thanks, mate. Again, I love this because it taps into... Do you remember the purpose when we set this podcast up was the idea of how do we take the lived experiences of the planet's highest performers and apply them to our own lives. Well, there's nothing more important than how do we get children to apply it to theirs as well. So this has been a really great opportunity just to reflect.

25:02So thanks for making the time, mate. No, it's great. And I think it is important because I think you see other podcasters or other platforms or other TV shows, you know, getting big audiences by doing slightly strange things or things that we shouldn't do or wouldn't do. And sometimes you can get derailed and go, well, we need to copy them and do what they're doing. So actually, to have a conversation like this, to remind ourselves why we're doing all of this in the first place, I think it's important for me as well. So thank you. And that brings us to the end of this episode. Don't forget, pass this to a friend.

25:30Maybe you know someone with some young people in their lives that are struggling at the moment. Please, please send this episode. It might just make a real difference for them. You can also check out the rest of our back catalogue, hundreds of episodes all waiting for you on the High Performance app. and myself and Damien will see you soon for another episode of High Performance. www.agland .com 10 times more vitamin E and 25 % less saturated fat compared to ordinary eggs. Visit egglandsbest.com to learn more. Dr. India Woods here. As a veterinarian, I demand a lot of my scrubs on the job. That's why I show up in figs.

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