Real World Research: Challenge/Threat, Process Thinking & much more

Brad Cooper

Welcome to the latest episode of the Catalyst Health and wellness coaching podcast. My name is Brad Cooper and I’ll be your host and if you’ve come to this episode expecting one of those boring researchers to lecture you for Awhile, I think you’re going to be disappointed. Dr Carla, Meijen is our guest today and she crushed it. I mean knocked it out of the park. I was the whole time. I’m just like, oh my gosh, that’s so inch. Oh Wow. Her specialty is in endurance sports and the psychology of that, but the way she presents this is so applicable to what we’re doing as health and wellness coaches. I think you’re going to find it fascinating. Let me share a little bit about her background. Dr Carla Man is a chartered sport and exercise psychologists and senior lecturer in applied sport psychology at St Mary’s in the UK. She holds a phd in sport psychology where she looked at challenge and threat states and athletes and we’re going to talk a little bit about that during the conversation.

Brad Cooper

Fascinating stuff. Carla is published on the topic of psychology and endurance performance in an international journals and she’s edited a book titled Endurance Performance in Sport Psychological theory and interventions which is being released this May. She has a keen interest in endurance performance, inspired by her work, providing brief mental support at various running events which are called psyching teams and it’s something it’s really interesting and they’re seeing some good growth at this, so you may want to take a look at that when you get a chance as well. Just a reminder that you can pull up all kinds of resources that catalyst coaching institute.com, whether you’re thinking about this coaching thing and then you’re kind of curious about it. Go on there and you’ll see all types of special reports and in resources you can access. If you’re already coaching, you’ve got access to continuing education book lists, you name it, it’s probably on there, so catalystcoachinginstitute.com and we’re always happy to answer questions. Anything you’ve got. That’s what we’re here for and that’s results@catalystcoachinginstitute.com. Now on with the latest episode of the Catalyst Health and wellness coaching podcast. All right, so Carla, thank you so much for joining us. I’m, I’m excited about this. I got a chance to hear you at the British psychological society conference. You and I have traded some emails along the way now that the audience knows your bile from the introduction, but tell us a little bit more about your journey, how. How’d you end up doing what you’re doing today?

Dr. Carla Meijen

It’s, it’s pretty unique and I think they’ll find it pretty fascinating from the Netherlands. When I was about 17 I wanted to speak on a sport psychology, which back in the day, so I guess in the Netherlands wasn’t really a profession that had a clear path to get to. So I ended up studying social psychology in Amsterdam and as part of that, ellison spent some time in Sweden where actually got some opportunities to work with store team. So that Kinda really fueled my passion to become a sports psychologist even farther. And although I never initially thought that, you know, are, do phds, that would be an option. I did end up doing that, so I did a phd in the Midlands in England, Stephen to university where I looked at how athletes approach competition and uh, that’s kind of really put me in a position where I’m very passionate about combining research with the con of the applied nature of sports psychology, so acquire, I feel quite privileged that at the moment I can actually work as kind of a, someone who school time in sports psychology. I never thought as a 17 year old that that was something that I was, was able to end up doing, but at the moment I’m quite happy with the idea that my research very much informs my practice.

Brad Cooper

Let’s take a dive in now. We’ll talk about the connection with health and wellness coaches as we move through here, but just initially you’ve been spending a lot of time on this resist project and personally I find it fascinating just because of my personal interest, but I think a lot of our audience will find it very interesting as well. Can you give us just an overview and and frankly why it’s become a focus area for you?

Dr. Carla Meijen

Yeah, so you as an endurance athlete, and I guess the listeners as well, question, if you’ve ever had that urge to stop slow down or even quit during an event and a lot of people have experienced with 700 plus people and 95 percent of people responded to the survey runners set that they’ve actually experienced that urge to, you know, wanting to stop slow down or quit beyond where they’ve actually planned and 90 percent. That’s an overwhelming majority of people who have thoughts. That’s one state actually said that they’ve given into that. So they actually slow down beyond what they planned to do or even quit. And so what we’re trying to do with the resist working group, which stands for research, evaluated and during strategies intending to support training is to understand what some of the reasons are for those thoughts around that urge. But also what can you actually do to deal with that.

Dr. Carla Meijen

So it’s the idea that we wanted to put forward brief psychological educational type intervention to those who do not normally have access to kind of sports psychology support. So it’s really important that we kind of translate things to to to the wider audience and this whole idea is, is based on we call planning, which is the idea that you want to kind of identify critical situation, so when you think about that or to slow down and that might be fueled by and health that you didn’t expect. Come up a hill Rhanda and you think, oh, what’s going on there? I might as well pack up and go home. Or maybe people are nervous about the pain that are going to feel that I kind of anticipated pain or maybe it’s the pacing. So they started out and that would result in them not getting that personal best that they were trying to really go for it.

Dr. Carla Meijen

So those are what we kind of call a situation, but it’s kind of critical situation. But what you can do is you can think about an action plan that you put in place when that situation arises. And that’s where those brief interventions come in. So with the resist working group, we have a group of seven experts who all work on insurance research. So they’re all over the UK and Northern Ireland in different, different areas of England and focusing on things like pacing, do you use a self talk, attentional focus, goal setting, how to cue your forum, also, how to change your perception of emotion and how you could use relaxation strategy or even use caffeine to help you overcome some of those critical situations. That’s in a nutshell kind of what we’re trying to do as part of the project. So I guess it’d be helpful to give you an example, but I can plan.

Dr. Carla Meijen

So when you think about critical situation, what kind of influence that salt is telling yourself, you’re not good enough. Excuse I ever experienced that? So that could influence what people might want to slow down what you instead of kind of giving into it or it’s what you can do as a den. So as a, as an action plan is to then tell yourself that I will focus on my stride in the process of running. So what we often find is that people are so outcome driven that during events that’s not particularly helpful. That can cause a lot of those thoughts around that urge to to stop and slow down, so trying to help people to use those strategies to focus more on the process will help to kind of reduce that gap that people tend to have between a good intention and actually doing that behavior. You tend to have those good intentions, but that doesn’t always translate to behavior and that’s I guess with that planning what we’re trying to help kind of reduce that gap by understanding the reasons for that, but also what can you do about it? They have that response already in place rather than on the day itself. You’re kind of overwhelmed by, Oh, I tell myself I’m not good enough. What am I going to do about this now?

Brad Cooper

Such great application. I don’t know if you’re planning a year, two years from now to take this next level, but my next question is how? How, how have you looked at your results or some of your initial feedback on the resist project? How do you think that might apply? And again, I’m thinking about these health and wellness coaches that are. I’m guessing in the back of their mind sand, oh well that’s Kinda what I do in coaching this stuff. Can you see some application, what you’re learning with the runners in areas like nutrition or stress or life balance or sleep habits are, you know, choosing the right foods because it’s the same concept. It’s just a different activity.

Dr. Carla Meijen

Yeah. I think a lot of the things that we’re doing do translate, so it definitely encouraged in the audience have a look at a website where we share some of these strategies because what we’re trying to do is to capture all these strategies in 45 second videos, a very brief and short and to the point when you asked about what kind of lessons that people can learn. Obviously the early stages. So what we’re trying to do is to kind of map and match the reasons with the strategy, but at the moment I would suggest that some of the lessons learned is the idea that we tend to focus a lot on outcome goals. So especially when you think about running, a lot of runners have a do or die and it’s often very time based

Dr. Carla Meijen

friends from a lot of other settings, you know we have this kind of time based goal and that’s what we’re going to go for. It’s kind of that outcome and actually what that does is that removes us very far away from the and actually when we’re in the moment, it’s not helpful to focus too much on the outcome when we’re in the moment. Do you want to focus on the process and what we’re doing and I guess that’s one of the very important lessons to learn from this project is how can we use some of those strategies, help us focus a lot more on being in the moment and have those outcome goals pushed to the background. I guess because they’re obviously quite regularly a primary focus for fueling some of those stops to slow down or stop. I don’t know if you recognize that

Brad Cooper

I’m guilty like crazy, but the outcome focused individual and obviously a lot of runners, triathletes, et Cetera, are very high type A and that’s their way of living. How do you, how do you move them in that direction? How do you help them see that if you’ll do this, your outcome will more than likely take care of itself. Is there some precursor conversation that you can use to guide them in that thought process?

Dr. Carla Meijen

Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things that you can do, and that’s kind of another thing that we want to think about, is self regulation. So often when think about self regulation, it’s about human beings. We tend to engage ourselves in processes that moves away or towards that we desire, and this might be a state that you desire, one of those that’s kind of outcome goals, right? So maybe time based, but in fact what we want to do is we want to not just engage in the process that prepares for that, but we also want to engage a process to help us reflect on why something worked or didn’t work and what you can do is by using reflection as way to identify some of those critical situations that might help make people more aware that someone’s outcome are not actually that helpful during the moment.

Dr. Carla Meijen

So that’s the first important step. So when you are having that kind of do or die or outcome based goal, that might be helpful in your training, right? Because it can kind of track progress. But when you’re in an event and there’s not that much at that moment in time, you can change about the training that you’ve done. So what’s really important there is to focus on the moment and if you have those thoughts, what can you do to deal with us? So it might be that you using different types of cells talk to focus on pushing yourself up a hill that you didn’t expect this random coordinator or it might be that you’re focusing on actually, so if you are having that goal or say, okay, what I’m going to do now is I’m got to engage in flexibility in my goal so I might have a dream goal, so everything’s going very well in the day. That’s the goal. I’m going to go for it, but actually maybe it’s much hotter than expected, so the weather conditions are a little more challenging, so I’ll go to my pepe gold golden, I’ll be okay with and then, okay, well I’ve got my fueling wrong. A lot of things that happened today didn’t work out, so I’m going to go to my bare minimum goals. So what it does, it helps to I guess remove some of the pressure and then helps to kind of go back to the process of running,ultimately.

Brad Cooper

And again, this is incredibly applicable to what these coaches are working with. I mean that’s what they’re doing with their clients every day is helping them reflect on. The coaches aren’t telling them what to do. They’re helping them reflect on how does this impact your life, what do you see happening? So outstanding in terms of the overlap with this, but my natural question, and maybe this is telling you way too much about me, is will how that, having that happy goal seems like an easy bail out. How, how do you keep from letting. And maybe that’s what needs to happen while you’re giving me a counseling session here. Um, so I guess my question is how do you talk them through, okay, you have your dream goal, you have your happy goal. How soon do you let the dream goal go versus pushing through that tough phase of the race. Is it too easy to just go, okay, yeah, I’m fine, let’s just do this other thing.

Dr. Carla Meijen

I think what you’re tapping the reasons why people might engage in those events, right? So for you, if it’s really important to get to that kind of optimal level of performance, then there’s a reason why you might be letting go. But when you think about the flexibility of the goal, you’re not necessarily letting goals a goal, you’re adapting a goal. So it might even be that from your dream goal, you go to your happy, going back to the dream goal again, but still what a thought. You’re still really much focused on the outcome and what we’re trying to do with especially the there is this work is to focus back on the process so you can kind of think, okay, how is this going? Okay, well maybe today is the day where the weather condition are going to help me getting to that site, to that goal.

Dr. Carla Meijen

You know, especially when you think about love injures events as love, uncontrollable section. So it’s about accepting that there are. There’s a level of factors that you cannot control because that’s an important lesson as well. And that can be incorporated in some of those plan where if I feel that an uncontrollable factors coming up and this is how I’m gonna deal with it, maybe it’s about acceptance or relaxation. And kind of going back to your story is I’m very outcome oriented. I really want to kind of go for that goal. But do you feel that on the day, if you are always thinking about in your brain, is that goal, what does that do in terms of kind of your pacing strategy or possibly you know, you’re, you’re running technique and so on. So if you let that kind of goal take over, you tend to get kind of out broad the process of running and what can then happen as well as if you didn’t have those thoughts around that urge to stop or slow down.

Dr. Carla Meijen

That can have emotional consequences. So what we know is that when people give in to that urge to stop or slow down beyond what they kind of planned is they feel very kind of negative. So things like, uh, to feel quite distressed, they feel guilty. Exactly, exactly. Those are exactly the kind of answers that we get to, you know, what happens when you give into that and that has those emotional consequences and effects each of behavior. And that’s not really helpful. And I’m also kind of works on online courses where people engaged in discussion and sometimes some people don’t achieve a particular outcome goal or personal bests. Just still haunts them for years. That’s not very helpful, so I guess the reason why we have transportation march towards, you know, during the event, try to really focus on the process because that helps you to enjoy within reason, I mean is a painful event, insurance running, but enjoy that process and really understand how far you can push yourself, so maybe understanding the efforts you’re putting into that and that helps again with that kind of reflection at the end and kind of understand your limits.

Brad Cooper

So if we pull it back to the wellness coaches, let’s say they’ve got a client that’s committed to eating nutrient dense foods, they are going to avoid the, the junk in the afternoon, that kind of stuff. It seems like the same concept applies. Any little tips, and I know this isn’t your specific area of study, but just things that come off the top of your head that they could pull from what you’re finding with the runners for that person that is again, trying to enhance their, their eating patterns and they’re, they’re starting to give in a little bit more. Any any thoughts along those lines?

Dr. Carla Meijen

Yeah, uh, to consider is the kind of deceiving come up afterwards, isn’t it? So if you trying to resist maybe the urge to take that snack and you’re giving in to that and you’re feeling guilty about that, then it’s, I guess you tend to remember lots of guilt. So even that fault will buy the effect. And so what’s really important to remember is that when we think about those thoughts around years to stop and slow down, what we’re not trying to do is to say you can’t have those thoughts because, you know, in our survey of 700 people, Ninety five percent have experienced assault. So this is very common and suppressing that isn’t particularly going to help anyone. So it’s more about, okay, what can you do to deal with that? So if they have those thoughts around, Oh, you know, I really want to have that snack, what paid into.

Dr. Carla Meijen

So it might be that they say, oh, actually what I’m going to do if I really want to have that snack in, you know, maybe you can think about, uh, using a self-talk strategy. You say, okay, well I remember why I wanted to change my eating patterns and therefore what I’m going to do now is I’m going to think about maybe I’m doing an activity with their children, so maybe what they want to do is kind of disengaged assaults from better so they’re not trying to suppress it, but they’re trying to maybe shift our focus or they can consider the reason for changing that pattern in terms of diet and then my kind of think about their goals. So it might be that the goals they set themselves in terms of their diet or too challenging. So it has to. Obviously I’m not a nutritionist, not necessarily religious, but I think it is really important for them to to think about how realistic is this kind of goal. So I guess what very often happens is that people go going to challenging. So they kind of aim for, I’m kind of a perfect, like a perfect nutritional pattern which when you’re starting out, behavior change isn’t particularly helpful. So again, I guess it’s about for the people to understand what triggers those and be aware of that. And then trying to reduce that gap between the good intentions because no doubts that have good intentions, but it’s more just that food intention and translate the behavior.

Brad Cooper

Outstanding. What is the website for your resist project? You mentioned that earlier and I meant to get that so the folks would know what that is to reference some of the videos. What’s the best way to find that?

Dr. Carla Meijen

Resist-stopping.com

Brad Cooper

Okay. Resist stopping. Not An underscore but a dash stopping. Perfect. Perfect. Okay. So when we’re out in Belfast, Northern Ireland a couple months ago for the conference, we got sneak in a run. So I know you’re, you enjoy running, you, you apply this stuff to your life. How has on a, on a personal side, and we’re going to dig in a little bit deeper that in a, in a later question, but how has your research influenced your other pursuits in life? The nonacademic stuff in your, in your own life in terms of how you’ve applied these things.

Dr. Carla Meijen

So yeah, I enjoy kind of going out for a run and it’s something that, believe it or not. So, you know, as a ballplayer, I loved the kind of short sprints of longer stuff. I just did not see the point of going out for a run and with no kind of points to be scored at the end of it, you know, a winner a lot. But that’s changed over time and I think one of the things that I’ve researched as well as a theory called self determination theory, which is a lot of motivation for me, how this kind of interests me is that I’ve really tried to understand the reasons why I’m doing things and trying to understand how I can move myself from less of an outcome driven person to more of kind of doing things for sheer enjoyment of it. So for me, when I go out for a run now, I prefer to go somewhere where there’s a nice scenery. So it’s, for me, running is really important to be outside. I live close to the river, so the river runs are fantastic and I guess knowing the research, being involved in research in relation to motivation has really helped me to understand the impact of the quality of motivation on kind of my own wellbeing, if that makes sense.

Brad Cooper

Excellent. Excellent. So we’re going to go down, uh, another one of your past here that I think will be incredibly interesting to the wellness coaches. You studied the concept of challenge and threat quite a bit and the overlap with what the coaches are doing is, I think tremendous. Can you walk us through that as well as some of the potential application opportunities that you might see for the broader health and wellness coach setting?

Dr. Carla Meijen

Yes. Yes. So when you think about a challenging challenge, something that I did as part of my phd research to challenge and when we think about challenge and at the core of it is that there’s something at stake. So people when they, when you think about challenges and barriers as what we call a performance setting. So it’s, you know, when you take us to a sporting context, there’s something at stake. So quite often it’s winning or losing and so how do people kind of approach a demanding set thing like that and the notion is, you know, what we suggest is that people have those kinds of demands of that competition, but they also have set resources of how they feel they can with that. So things like self beneath their perceptions of control and possibly overcome the social support systems around that and when people feel that those demands of the situation.

Dr. Carla Meijen

So it might be that they’re um, you know, running a very important event and they feel kind of prepared enough for it amongst, you know, pressurized situation and they feel that way. They’re kind of resources to help him deal with that situation. They tend to experience that we call effect thing. If they feel like got more resources than the, the scale tips the other way, then they tend to experience at challenge day. And I guess what’s really unique about those kind of challenges to date is there kind of accompanying and cardiovascular responses. So how we respond in terms of kind of our cardiovascular system and what a challenge that would have been challenged side is that we have an increased. We called cardiac outputs of block flow in our body, but at the same time our vascular resistance, blood pressures linked to it reduces. So our buddy tends to kind of get that flip slow going quite well.

Dr. Carla Meijen

Very simplistically set in a fit state. On the other hand, what happens is we still have quite a bit of fluff slumps or a buddy, but at the same time it kind of vascular resistance increases. So our body has to work and also a little harder to function if you like. So you can see that as kind of a bit of a difference in the kind of what happens to the body from a logical perspective. And so when we think about challenge and fifth days, what we try to do is to identify ways how people can get themselves into a challenge. Because what some of the research suggests is to make better decisions when we are in challenge site, best performance outcomes. But also I’m thinking about the emotional consequences for how we feel is more efficient and more positive if you like, in in a challenge.

Brad Cooper

Let me restate that and make sure that I’m saying this correctly. You’re saying that if Brad version a sees it as a challenge, I’ll actually see a difference in my cardiovascular response with no other changes from Brad version B, but Brad version vcs is a threat. Just that perspective. All the things and there’s a lot behind that, but if I see it as a threat versus a challenge, my not comparing me to somebody else, but within person, everything else being equal, I’ll have a difference. You’re able to measure that in a cardiovascular lab based manner. Is that, is that what you’re saying?

Dr. Carla Meijen

And resource ratio can make a difference to what actually happened.

Dr. Carla Meijen

Read about the Rpe rating of perceived exertion, but again, similar type of concept coaches. Think about this. If your clients are seeing something as a challenge versus a threat, they’re going to then see the difficulty of it. Even though it’s the same thing, the difficulty of it will rise a certain percentage and they can actually measure that in the lab. I mean that is. That is so fascinating. Huh? Man, you are really bringing it home here. Carla. Let’s see what. What. What are some of the other research topics you steady over the last few years that just kind of quick version that might be something that not just in the sports performance but in overall living and again the kind of the wellbeing concept that the coaches might need to tune into and what. We won’t take a deep dive here because you’re giving us a lot already, but just some other things for them to be aware of that come off top of your head.

Dr. Carla Meijen

I guess one of the studies published in a few years ago was more in the educational setting, so I’ve also done some research in secondary, so high school settings and what we’re looking at with the quality of motivation and what types of things that influenced that they call a psychological need. So things that relate to that or a sense of autonomy. So do you feel you’ve got any choice over your activity that you’re doing? You still, you’re competent, you can do it. And do you feel some sense of relatedness? So do you feel that you kind of relate to the people around you? For example, in the classroom, do you feel connected to your peers, which they call psychological needs? And when we actually found one of the studies where we asked a lot of high school students, um, those psychological needs the day feel that those psychological needs were fulfilled in the classroom or possibly even a frustrated.

Dr. Carla Meijen

So you can see that as kind of like, okay, well we can do a lot of things to fulfill those needs. But on the other hand, what might happen is that people frustrated. So they actually, you know, it might be that someone’s telling you not to do something and therefore that kind of sense of autonomy is still but maybe even completely undermined. And what we found in this study, which is quite interesting, is that that means to how people engage. And I guess that might be quite helpful for wellbeing coaches to be aware of. So if someone feels that that is being undermined, they tend to kind of disengage in a very passive way. So they might sit in a corner or they might not put up their hands because they definitely need to do that. And on the other hand, if people feel that their autonomies that are kind of sense of choice, I simplistically said is being undermined, what they feel might happen, what would they do if they actually actively disengaged?

Dr. Carla Meijen

So it might be that they start to when other people are talking, it might be that they’re quite disruptive or playing games kind of activity, disrupt a lesson or something like that happened. So we can see that this kind of two different. How people might disengage. And I guess the lesson there that I find it’s quite helpful. I’ll say my kind of day to day work when I. When I teach students if you need to couch for that, so you need to understand why someone’s disengaging because actually, but we tend to do quite often is we put the blame on the person you’re engaging, right? We need to look at ourselves as well because maybe we are part of that process where we are undermining our competence or we’re undermining their, you know, sense of choice by telling them they must do this and they can’t do that and actually engaging conversations with them to understand that kind of satisfaction as we call it can be quite helpful. Um, in terms of, you know, maybe engaging people betting processes.

Brad Cooper

Okay. So one of the things we hear consistently is, and the reason for his wellness coaches tend to have a lot of different voices around them looking at headlines here in about weird diets and weird exercise plans and all that. So we try to bring it back to the evidence base coach and not just the headline based coach. Any misconceptions that you’d like to just get some highlights on and say, you know, what? Just be aware of this be where there’s things that you’ve noticed in your reading and in some of your a marginal stuff that you’re involved with deceptive headlines, for example, that you see in the popular press that you think you know the clients of the coaches or maybe even the coaches have seen these and you just want to make sure they’re not falling prey to the ridiculous nature of some of that stuff. So much.

Dr. Carla Meijen

One of the things that sometimes researchers portrayed portrayed as being a quick fix and I think when we think about behavior change, obviously a lot what the wellness coaches are working with is if anything, and it takes time to implement some of those changes. So when we think about those plans that I talked about earlier, there’s not just suddenly going to happen. You need to practice though and it does take time to make those changes, but I think that’s something I think it’s quite important to be aware of because more and more people are talking about all we’ve got. We don’t have a lot of time to do all these things. Then at the same time, you cannot cheat on behind on time in relation to behavior change. I think for me that’s an important point to make and the other thing is that when we, when they look at kind of behavior change and kind of health and wellbeing, we need to really work harder in putting it altogether in terms of the psychology, sociology to strengthen conditioning, nutrition, sleep recovery.

Dr. Carla Meijen

I’d rather than look at those as much in isolation I guess as we tend to today and for me that is really important because what we tend to do, we might tend to take a new diet because that has seemed to work on this particular group of people, but actually we then don’t lose all these other aspects of you know, a person and don’t really understand why a particular maybe diet or even a mental strategy might work. So to me that’s really important to see people not just like, I’m going to change one part, but you need to understand how to effect that. All those different aspects like planes and so on.

Brad Cooper

Excellent. Want to focus their practice on evidence based literature, research practices in general. You spend your life taking a deep dive into this stuff for the health and wellness coach to base it on that, but they don’t have three, six, 20 hours a day to study the literature. Any suggestions on how they can at least in part stay up to date on the key elements?

Dr. Carla Meijen

Yeah, definitely quite close to my heart. Research available to the public. That kind of using that evidence base is really important and I’m very much aware that we as researchers probably not as good as we’d like to be.

Dr. Carla Meijen

What would you do? Something that we trying to do with this project I’m doing with other projects like psyching team, but it’s not necessarily that easy so I guess my kids, if they are close to an institution like a university or college, find out who’s there. Is there anyone there who has an interest that aligns that yours? Is there someone who focuses on health and wellbeing and k connect with them because quite often people who work in institutions doing research there also looking for participants. So there’s kind of a win win situation potentially there and that will help. It’s often questions like what do some of these terms are theories actually mean in a practical context. So I guess that’s my first tip is perceived as anyone and locally institution so you can connect with social media as big obviously think about power, maybe twitter, instagram and so on. Can you find researchers on those social media? Can you follow them? And quite often they might have papers that they find important that I posted online and you can possibly, you know, tries to start reading them or ask questions about this if you struggle with some of the contents of it. So to make it accessible to you, the thing that’s really important and it’s Stephanie agenda is really important for researchers to make their content available to the wide public miles.

Brad Cooper

Are we doing research well?

Dr. Carla Meijen

So see if there’s any online courses. So last year, um, I’ve been part of a, an online, but they called massive open online course as teacher learn is that is a website that offers these types of things is a lot of online delivers. I think you, you have them on your website as well. I just think that that’s really important to kind of engage in that because quite often researchers are involved in developmental courses so you get access to that material, but usually in a bit of a more user friendly way so you don’t have to read six hours a day to understand it or to get your head around it and I guess to plug a book that I’ve edited, what I’ve tried to do is I ended up on the psychology of endurance performance where we combined kind of psychological theory and interventions and what we’re trying to do is to make that accessible to a wider public and not just academic students at universities but also for coaches and for those types of sources, so like popular science space.

Brad Cooper

Let’s repeat that book. Tells the psychology of endurance performance. Is that correct?

Dr. Carla Meijen

And performance in sports, psychological theory and interventions.

Brad Cooper

Perfect. Very good. Great tips. Great chefs. Okay, so now we’re gonna. Turn the mirror around a little bit. We’d like to give our listeners a chance to get to know the guests on a little bit more of a personal level, so if you’re willing any area of wellbeing in your own life that you’re currently working on, you don’t have it dialed in. You haven’t completely figured it out, that you’d be willing to share anything from life balance to exercise, nutrition, sleep, whatever struggles, successes, kind of just sharing your journey with us and, and how you’re going about it.

Dr. Carla Meijen

Yeah, very interesting question. I think from a very little girl already been haunting me I guess is my lack of patience. So I’ve, I’ve always been very outcomes driven, but even when I was very young I wanted to beat everyone else in what I was doing and that’s something that’s helped me on my journey because I’ve been, you know, very kind of driven in terms of, you know, I knew what I wanted to do from the age of 17 and I would just make sure I’ll get there. And so it’s been helpful. But on the other hand, well it prevented me from doing is actually focusing a little bit more on the journey. And what I’ve done a few years ago is I kind of made a conscious decision to try to be more, kind of in the, in the present moment and I invested in a mindfulness come to behavioral therapy course where I learned to do that with a group of other people. So actually immerse myself in that rather than relying on, oh, I tend to do is like reading books or using online resources. I kind of made a conscious effort to go out with other people and to kind of get that instant feedback. So one of the things that we did as part of this course was looking outside of the window and focus on one particular point for three minutes. So no, my lack of patience,

Dr. Carla Meijen

I hope I probably wouldn’t have managed to kind of look at that for three minutes. But I did it and I found it was really calming down and I tended to notice all sorts of things. I think I was focusing on the brake. And normally when you look at a brick, you don’t necessarily seem to notice the different colors and maybe some of the plants that grow out because he just normally walk past it and look at the building as a whole. So for me that was a very small thing that made a big difference and as a result I’ve actually been a lot more patients over it. It’s a process like, you know, I’m working on it, but it’s helped me to be a lot calmer and also the kind of outcome driven and making more of an effort to really focus on the process, um, has really helped make and within that don’t feel bad if you’re missing out an opportunity that’s okay. You’re still focusing on a journey somewhere and that’s okay. But I guess they have a personal insight as to what kind of changes I’ve tried to make and in the last couple of years.

Brad Cooper

Wonderful example. I’m sure that definitely hits home and I’m sure a lot of the listeners are the same boat. So outstanding example. Thank you. Carlos has been so good. The last question, just kind of your chance to wrap anything up, any final words of wisdom either for current wellness coaches that are there they’ve got their clients to work with or people that are maybe thinking about it and getting into that realm. Just any final thoughts, advice, anything else you’d like to share that you didn’t get a chance to share up to this point?

Dr. Carla Meijen

I think for people working in the environment, what I find is quite important to listen to your client and yourself in their shoes, to give them ownership over what they’re doing and be okay with not necessarily understanding their experiences because everyone comes from a different background. So if that’s the case you can ask them to explain that and one of the things that from a practical perspective as a, as a sports psychologist I sometimes do is using drawing pictures to do that. So that’s maybe something for you for your wellness coaches to consider. Another thing that I kind of wanted to mention the previous one over lift is the power of smiling is quite important as well. Thank. You know, Kip tolkien talks about that in his world record attempt and I think generally that’s quite an important thing and something to consider implementing in their practice when they’re working with with clients.

Brad Cooper

For those of you not familiar with, he’s the gentleman who was part of the two hour marathon and then turned around, I believe it was Berlin did. He turned around and knocked what a minute and a half off typically takes 15 to 20 years to happen and he did it over two year period. So folks, if you’ve not seen the documentary on the Nikkei two hour marathon project, you can see exactly what Carl was talking about as he comes into even the final. I think it’s up until the final mile. He’s smiling. This is a guy running for 35, approximately per mile for 26 point two miles far ahead of anyone in the history of the world has done and yet he’s smiling up until the last and I can’t remember. It’s like the last 800 meters or mile. He holds that and it’s. It’s incredible when you see that happening. So great example. Thank you so much. This was so good. I know people are going to dive into this and I probably listened to it a couple times to to pull the nuggets out of here, but thank you for spending the time with us today and look forward to staying in touch. Thank you for having me.

Brad Cooper

So that brings us to the close of another episode of the Catalyst Health and wellness coaching podcast. I have a feeling at least a handful of you’re out there thinking why were my professors never that interesting when that awesome. Couple of key takeaways, just some things that I wrote down as I was going through it, the if then planning, she talked about the power of doing that, where you think through if this happens, then that’s what I’ll do. Obviously it applies to racing training, but it applies so much to what we’re doing as well as coaches as well. She talked a lot about being in the moment and you’re hearing a lot about that in general, but this whole focus on process versus outcome. Very, very powerful and I’m saying that as a guy who is not good at applying that, but the concept very, very powerful.

Brad Cooper

We talked about staying up to date on the research so you can get beyond the fads, the headlines of things that are are in your face all the time and and she mentioned a few different ideas, but one of the simple ones you can apply is to access twitter and access it in the right way. There are so many ridiculous things on twitter. You’ve got to be careful, but she talked about follow some researchers that you respect. Follow some research that are covering topics that that you believe in that you’re. You’re wanting to learn more about. If you’d like to follow Carla, she is at Carla Man, so c a r l a, m e I, J e n if you’d like to follow me. I’m at catalysts, the number to thrive, so catalysts to thrive. Him and both of us. Our focus is very similar backgrounds, much more research intense, but the focus is the same.

Brad Cooper

We’re trying to post information, human performance ideas, concepts, tips, research, study links. Those kinds of things, so and and one of the nice things about twitter is you can literally go to, for example, Carla’s accounts, you can pull her up and then look and see who she’s following and then maybe you want to follow the same people, so nice route to go if you do it correctly. Otherwise it can just become another disaster aspect in terms of, of uh, too many fads that are thrown in your face. Again, a couple of announcements we’ve got, obviously the retreat is in hot pursuit right now. We just finalize the schedule and who’s going to be speaking there. So real excited about that. We also have an upcoming coaching certification on the same website, catalyst coaching institute dot Com. And one thing I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned before is if you’d like to bring the fast track to you, so your city, your town, your state, let us know.

Brad Cooper

We are scheduling a few of those in. Happy to talk to you about the details there. As always, thanks for spreading the news. Thanks for subscribing. I understand that makes a big difference in terms of of how itunes treats all this and thanks for making a difference. Thanks for doing what you do, so until next time, let’s all keep working towards better than yesterday, not only for ourselves, but also for our clients, our families, our communities. Make it a great day and I’ll look forward to speaking with you soon. On the next episode of of the Catalyst Health and Wellness coaching podcast.