Living in the SF Bay Area, I have had the pleasure of coaching a fairly diverse group of people over the years. Something that brings me a special kind of joy is when we can help people who may not think of themselves as athletic discover that with time and patience, they too are capable of becoming quite physically strong.
As an adolescent I fell in love with reading, first with Goosebumps (hehe), then as a fantasy fiction nerd, reading all of the Dragonlance series, then later as an aspiring astronaut soaking up the sciences throughout school. I’m sure I get my thirst for knowledge from my Dad.
I loved learning about how intricate and counterintuitive a lot of the natural world is, and how we could do really cool things to make the world better with this type of organized thinking: Science and Engineering.
Anyhow, if you’re a fellow nerd too, *awkward high fives.*
One area I recently had some unexpected new growth as a coach and human being is around understanding mental health, and how the brain works according to science. This was largely outside of my engineering education, so I didn’t have strong priors compared to, say, body mechanics.
You might be surprised (or not) to find out that until quite recently there has not been much discussion in the health and fitness space around what science has to say about the brain as it relates to, for example, why people struggle to stick with exercise or nutrition habits. In my experience, it has all largely been anecdotal, “this worked for me,” or “just do this because that’s how I was taught.” I kid you not, in our professional business group full of experts on various subjects, at best there will occasionally be some discussion around “limiting beliefs.”
I suppose it was my own continued confusion as to how, in so many cases, in the gym era I would design this very elaborate and thoughtful multi-step plan for how to guide a person to their health and fitness goals, and it would only work some of the time. Being who I am, I didn’t like that it only worked some of the time. I have a soft spot for helping those who struggle. I’m sure I got that from my Mom, and Dad too. And as a nerd, I wanted it to work all of the time, or at least most of the time. More importantly, I wanted to understand why it did or did not work. Fortunately, I had learned a helpful scientific frame for understanding what to do when a theory didn’t explain all the data: look for a new theory, and test it empirically.
I remember learning Newtonian mechanics in school, which if you are unfamiliar, elegantly explains why an apple falls from the tree the way it does (bonk!), and why cars and planes, and other bodies move the way they do normally at everyday speeds. It was its own revolution at the time (17th century).
I also remember learning Special Relativity, and how at high speeds, Newtonian mechanics no longer works; things would end up in the “wrong” places that the theory did not predict. So this very smart guy named Einstein came up with a modification to Newton’s formulas called the Einstein-Lorentz Transformations, that when used accurately predicted the way all bodies move almost all of the time (i.e. also at very high speeds). And now, among other things, we have satellites flying over your head right at this moment, in some cases transmitting the information of this blog post, thanks to this breakthrough in thinking.
I’m sure that I’m overly optimistic, but I believe we are on the cusp of a similar breakthrough as it relates to mental health, a theory that better explains all peoples’ lived experiences, and therefore how to better help people 1) get healthy, 2) realize their awesome potential, and 3) heal the planet. It’s not as simple and intuitive as Newton’s apple fall-from-tree model, so that’s the challenge.
But the benefit is that we can begin to understand how the brain actually works according to science, what motivates people, and ultimately how to heal an individual and our collective humanity, if we can summon the collective courage to do so.
Look at this picture, from the book “The Body Keeps The Score” by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.:
If you have seen this model or something like it before, yippee! If not, I was right there with you about a year ago, and a lot has changed since then about how I operate myself and how I help others.
What most people think of as their brain, the executive, the ego, the “person in charge” is the Prefrontal Cortex. What the book goes to great lengths to explain is that this part of the brain is at best only partially in control, and a lot of the time really is not. Basically when a human’s emotions are elevated, or we sense a threat, the two much older parts of the brain take over.
We suffer under this illusion of our daily and life choices – whether to eat that cookie, quit that job, go to bed, join that gym, or not – are strictly rational decisions. Science shows this is often not the case. Instead, it turns out things like your attachment style and early childhood adverse experiences play much larger roles in the decisions each of us makes to this day.
Jumping ahead: when you begin to unpack this and what is provably true from a coaching perspective, you come to what is now commonly referred to as the “Trauma-Informed” approach to self and interpersonal development, and coaching/educating if you choose to help others. And it is very different from traditional coaching.
In future posts I’ll delve into more relevant details. As you can see part of the challenge is like with most of science, a new wrinkle requires more time and words to explain.
But for now, the reason we start with mental health, mindfulness, connecting with the body and the breath, and overall practice a trauma-informed approach with our clients is because it is the only model that consistently explains almost all people’s lived experience. And a model for health that can help almost anyone is the only one that feels right to me.
Coach Mauricio