SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hi there! It's another week of lockdown and another weekend for me indoors with the laptop and the coffee machine. Happily tinkering away, editing another episode of Slice of Pie, where the pie is the psychologically informed environment and where I am on a journey to try and understand what it is, whether it's sport, business, the performing arts, education, or any other place where performance and well-being are of importance. In the spirit of discovering pearls of insights and learning that can apply across jobs, occupations, hobbies, and performance areas, it's great to have received messages from those working in business, teaching, psychology, coaching, and many more domains. In all of these environments, everyone has a relationship with stress. It could be an unhelpful one, a functional one, or one where the stress level perfectly matches the support and perceived resources to meet the challenge. And I'm honoured to have been joined by an expert in this area on this episode. Mark Jones is a professor of psychology at the Manchester Metropolitan University, as well as a consultant and researcher in performance settings working in both sport and business. He's done lots of work around the impact of stress on health, well-being, and performance. First of all, Mark's accent kind of makes me want to have been born in Wales. And with these delightful delicate tones, Mark enlightens me on stress, rest and recovery, the importance of meaning in one's job, the challenges in emergency medicine, and many more subjects besides. Now I've had some positive feedback on the structure with half-time and full-time breaks to pause, breathe, and reflect. So we'll continue with that in this episode. We'll go for about 20 minutes, break for a cover, and ponder a couple of points, then crack on with the interview and a full-time reflection. So without further ado, let's get into it with Professor Mark Jones.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Pleasure to be here, Pete.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Thanks for asking me. How are you doing? What's what's happening today?

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Well, very good. Yes, no, um uh it's all um uh it's all it's all go really here. So we've got a few research projects and it's a nice break to to come and talk to you and chat about some of the applied aspects.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Well, I know you're an incredibly busy man across all of your various endeavours and responsibilities and with what's going on in the world at the moment as well. We're very appreciative that you've been able to afford the time to talk to us.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

No problem. The busyness is an illusion.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The busy bragging.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

Well, great. Well, look, what would be lovely to start off with for people who are listening who might not know about you and your your journey in performance and sports psychology, it'd be great to just briefly hear how have you got to this point.

SPEAKER_01 3:13

I suppose the easiest place to start is I was interested in human behaviour, so I did a psychology degree at uh Cardiff University. And as part of that psychology degree, I had a chance to do a year out, and in the very simplistic ways that people make decisions when they're young, and I probably still do uh nowadays. I like psychology and I like sport. I thought, well, I'd I'd heard about something called sports psychology, so I'll um try to marry those two things together. So I was very fortunate to have a year out, a sandwich year, um working with Graham Jones and uh Austin Swain at uh Leftborough University. I was a research assistant there for a year and got to see Graham when he was working with some of his clients and observe him working as a sports psychologist. I went back, finished my degree, and then I thought, well, I'd like to do sports psychology, marrying these two things that I like, sport and psychology. And I was fortunate to get a PhD placement with Dr. Roger Mace, who was at Newman College then, Newman University now, when I did my PhD in cognitive behavioural interventions for the control of emotions in sport. And so it was very applied PhD. It was uh understanding interventions we might use to help people manage stress and manage the range of emotional experiences they might have. And then took my first teaching post at Stafford University and was there for close on 20 years, before in the last couple of years, moving to Manchester Metropolitan University, where I'm a professor of psychology and work across a range of different domains. So, although a large part of my work has been in sport and I've worked as an applied sports psychologist, worked as a researcher in sports psychology, we've had opportunities to merge the two as well. So we had funded PhDs based in a professional football club, and uh, we just had uh a colleague Joe Dixon's finished his PhD and graduated, and that was based in Stoke City. So we've had the chance to merge research and consultancy in that regard. And I suppose, which I think is interesting from the perspective of your podcast, you know, we talk about lots of issues around stress, about performance, about leadership. They both cross-cut and are unique across different environments. And my work now is based in sport, in business, and in other performance environments like military environments, like emergency medicine. Uh, we've just done some really interesting work with Italian colleagues who were interested in looking at stress responses in medical simulation competitions. So we just published a paper in that regard. So I think that's a you know, I I could talk forever, but I guess just my life history wouldn't be much of a podcast. Um, so I'm happy to sort of uh shut up at that point then.

SPEAKER_00 5:50

So, what's taking up most of your time at Manchester Met at the moment? What domains are you looking at at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Yeah, so that's um it's a good question, isn't it? It's a question your your line manager often asks you, which is what are you doing, Mark?

SPEAKER_00 6:03

Yeah, I've looked at your timesheets.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

I looked at your time sheets, I've no idea what you're doing. So uh so I think we've um there's a good group of us. We have a stress, health, and performance cluster, Manchester Metropolitan University. And there's a group of us who are interested in the link between stress and health and stress and performance, and we have some ongoing projects in um hopefully just going to start a funded project in the uh military settings where we're going to be doing some work, particularly in organizational settings, and there's two elements of this that I think are particularly interesting and pertinent at the moment. That's around remote working and the role of technology impacting health and productivity in the workplace. So, firstly, the remote working uh angle, we did a um some work with Nuffield Health and they funded us to do a systematic review of the relationship between remote working, health, and productivity and well-being. And we presented that data back to their corporate clients. That's some really interesting feedback in terms of some of the data that we found there. We're doing some ongoing projects, lots of colleagues involved in um email, in particular, as a dominant technology in the workplace, but the link between engagement with email and health, well-being, and productivity, so performance uh in a workplace setting, and particularly this link with work-home interference. So, what role technology plays, which is fantastic, it gives us that flexibility, it is very useful for people who have you know managing to juggle life and work. Um, but there is a bit of a dark side to it, if you like, and this this idea that we um with technology and that always on, it becomes quite difficult then to sort of switch off. And I remember a colleague of mine, uh Chris Gidlow led some research that I was involved in, it was looking at hair cortisol, so chronic stress, and um some of the data from that suggested actually that you know we're quite used to being sort of stressed in in um in workplace environments, and that's and that's kind of okay for us. But the real problems come that when we saw levels of stress outside of the working environment, and that either reflects that we're unable to switch off or we're going back into home lives that uh that don't let us then relax. And the importance of relaxation and recovery, I think, cross-cuts lots of performance environments, whether that's work, whether that's sport, whether that's academia, whether that's medicine, whether that's military, all of those different environments. I think the importance of rest and recovery is key. We're also doing some work particularly around cardiovascular reactivity to stress, and uh a colleague Martin Turner is leading um some good work in that area. We've spent around sort of 10 years looking at physiological responses to stress, but we've got a couple of lab-based studies that uh that Martin is looking to lead in that regard as well. So those are, I guess, our three main areas. There's there's lots of other different bits of work uh going on that sort of feed into that. But I suppose those would be the three broad areas.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

So much in there that I'd love to dig into in a week.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

There's a ramble is what you're saying, Pete, doesn't it? That wasn't recently it.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Absolutely not. I uh as a enormous rambler myself, I wouldn't have a leg to stand on to accuse anyone else of it. But certainly, certainly the the rest and recovery bit that you you mentioned there in terms of you know how much we're able to switch off with the the technology, the the always-on type stuff, and the kind of the home life or away from work, how how you'd be able to switch off, etc. One thing that popped into my head was a a talk that I went to a few weeks ago at the Barbican. They had this fantastic life lessons festival with a number of different speakers, and one of them was Claudia Hammond, the Radio 4 presenter and psychologist. And she had just written a book on rest and has been doing quite a lot on BBC Radio 4 about rest. And one thing that I wrote down from that talk, which I thought was quite interesting, was sometimes the shape of what we're doing away from work can be scarily familiar to the shape of behaviours that we do in work. And she she did note so yeah, even organizing a drink with friends, if that involves WhatsApp groups and getting people schedules and then finding the date that you can all do, and then emailing the the restaurant or the bar, and sometimes the uh even the the work away from work, which might be revolving around just something as simple as organizing where to meet up, can feel scarily similar to the types of behaviours you're doing in work. There's still an awful lot of admin that we bestow upon ourselves through our phones and technology and emails and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

I think you're that's really interesting. And I thought there's two two things there. One is the merging of mediums that we would use in work and out of work, and so we use similar uh mediums to communicate and uh you get that merging, but also I suppose it reflects the busyness of our life that it uh it becomes quite difficult sometimes to organize and fit in some of those things that we um would ordinarily have sort of taken for granted when we had less less responsibilities and less demands. I think one of the really interesting things about in a business sense is this idea of work-home interference. And I I think it's great to have I'm sure on podcasts, you know, you're going to get different people from different backgrounds to come and speak. And I think sometimes we can overplay the idea that we can learn from one domain to another.

SPEAKER_00 11:14

Interesting.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Because there are very different domains, and even within one domain, sport, for example, you have different sports with different cultures and different standards and so on. But I do think that one thing that I think is quite useful in a sporting context is the emphasis they place on rest and recovery. And of course, you see that in business settings as well. Pilots, for example, have very strict um protocols about when they should or should not fly and getting appropriate rest and so on. But I think this idea about performance and rest and recovery, I think that's something that could translate quite nicely from sport into uh into business environment or the emphasis or the importance of it. There is no benefit, there is no benefit to being consistently on in terms of producing high-level performance and high-level work. And I think being just being able to take that sort of idea and understand the importance of recovery, rest, and transitions out of work. So I think people are comfortable with high-demanding occupations. I think they often enjoy it. There's a great paper that my uh colleague of a friend Andy McCann mentioned, which is about the dangerous alone, the 70-hour working week, and the Harvard Business Review. Uh, it's a really good paper. It talks about, you know, why do people work so hard? And of course, it's positive, um, they get positive feedback for it. It's uh it's important, uh, you know, they get lots of reward, financial, uh, and so on, from being engaged in that. But there are costs and consequences to engaging in that high level of work as well. And I think in terms of our ability to rest and to recover and to switch off, people enjoy stressful life, they enjoy um, they often enjoy the demands of their work and occupation, but being able to rest and recover to be able to perform at your best the following day, I think is an important skill and something that is underemphasized, I think, in some in some settings. And email, which is where we focus some of our research, has been an interesting avenue to explore and to pick up on some of those topics. And just very briefly, we've a colleague Liz Braithwaite, who just finished between us a pilot study, and we're looking to collect substantially more data here with a number of companies that we've got lined up. We collected data from 200 individuals just to uh look at their engagement with email and their psychological health, their physical health, and their productivity. And the data was as you would expect, which is that those individuals who have what they call email overload, worse psychological health, worse physical health, and lower productivity. And in particular, this was greater for those individuals who accessed email frequently or more frequently out of working hours. Now, this is correlational, and so I think it's important to stress that you know it's quite possible that people who are very busy and very stressed are having to pick up some work out of working hours. But we've seen from other intervention studies that when individuals change their working patterns, when, for example, they uh chunk their email and only check it three times a day, that we see subsequent improvements in psychological health and well-being. And productivity, and that's key, I think, that sometimes as psychologists, you know, we we might get asked about just making people feel better. But I think that uh that is of course important in and of itself. But I think it's also important, particularly in what people might consider to be performance settings, that we're saying this has a difference in productivity, there's a difference in outcome as well. So, you know, we're not only helping people psychologically in terms of their health, but also the importance in terms of productivity and performance.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

Yeah, very interesting. One thing that came to mind now in your email study is um some of the stuff Bruce Daisley, the guy from Twitter and the the author of The Joy of Work has been doing recently in some of the panels and discussions he's been on. He's he's talking a lot about the the number of meetings that a lot of people in the business world have to feel like they need to be in. And then when they come out of the meetings, you then have a kind of a window with which to then quickly catch up on those emails before you've got another meeting. Yes. So when your pattern is sit in a meeting, maybe not even control contribute that much, maybe even you know be slightly bored in that meeting, but then you've got a tiny amount of time to cash up on emails, and then the next meeting, just not actually leaving that much time to actually do the work.

SPEAKER_01 15:35

No, that's a very good point. And we and uh that was some of the debate again. You know, um, we've got involved with Northfield Health and links to some of their corporate clients in this regard. We had some good discussions around that, and you know, what is work? And uh, you know, if often you're on email, then you're not getting a chance to do your work. Some people said quite rightly that for them, because they might be engaged in overseeing large teams, that email is work. But for lots of people, you know, who might be involved in producing reports, collecting data, uh making sense of information they're getting, then email in and of itself is not work or less of an important aspect of the work, but can then dominate the working day. So I think you you make a good point there.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

Yeah, interesting. Just looping back to looking at you know how this potentially, you know, this idea of of rest and setting boundaries with things like emails apply across to let's say sport, for example. Another thing that struck me in Claudia's talk was the cultural norms of that particular environment. I think when I hear athletes that I work with in a private environment talk about rest and recovery, it's quite normal within that environment for them to have a nap on the sofa in the middle of the day, and that's almost seen as a positive by their coaches and support staff, etc. etc. So this idea of rest and recovery in in many elite sports settings, obviously some of them will differ, but in many elite sports settings, it's seen as a kind of a really critical ingredient to performance, whereas potentially in other environments, and and again, it's not going to be a catch-all, not all business environments are going to see that as a as something that's necessarily bad, people kind of stealing away to to rest and recover. But certainly when you you read some of the biographies of of business leaders and you see some of the research that's coming out of the city or finance or or services environment, certainly there is a cultural element that's still there around the need to be seen, the need to be seen to be working and you know, sending the the email at 8 pm at night sometimes can make you uh look like you're committed to the cause, if you will.

SPEAKER_01 17:43

I guess you know it's really interesting. And you know, different cultures and different occupations will have different standards and different expectations, and I and I do understand that and sensitive to that. But I think you know, in particular, uh leaders can have a substantial influence on the on the culture. And I think you know, maybe you or I sending an email at eight o'clock at night doesn't matter so much, but if the big boss sends it, then it uh then it sends a clear message. And I think you know, that's part of our research is that we're really interested to understand culture, to understand norms, and you know, when we do talks, and if you ask people, you know, is it normal in your organization to send email out of hours? Almost everyone will put their hands up. And I suspect that people listening to your podcast now, you know, it'll be normal. It it would not be abnormal to send email out, send an email out of working hours, and then just simply, you know, what does that say? Might be working flexible, but it essentially means that people who want to get on will often see that as an opportunity to to show their worth and to say, well, look, I'm really committed. And so in some ways that can send the wrong message sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 18:45

Yeah, that's very interesting. In the study around rest versus busyness, they did a cross-cultural study between Italy and the USA and some Western. So I think it was the USA, USA and UK, and then you had Italy on one side, and they they painted the picture of this this lady, I think she was called Sally Fisher, and they described Sally Fisher and all the behaviours that might signify someone who's very busy checking emails all the time. The people in the USA said that Sally Fisher sounded very, very successful. Very, very successful and someone maybe to aspire to, whereas in Italy, Sally Fisher didn't seem like someone very successful and very to aspire to because potentially the values or what is seen to be valuable in terms of personal characteristics in those those two cultures were slightly different.

SPEAKER_01 19:32

That was interesting.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

The other thing you brought up there was leaders, and I went on the mental health first aid course in London last year, a global initiative about getting people in workplaces more informed about mental health and also giving them the skills and the tools to have open, honest, and sharing conversations within the workplace. And they said on the course the biggest impact is when they get the leaders from the business to go on this course. I can imagine that actually, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. When they have just line managers and lots of people going on the course and they see it as a bit of a tick box exercise. Yes, we've got a few people trained in it. Obviously, it has uh an impact and it's very helpful. But when leaders themselves go on the course and they themselves get that psychoeducation, those those tools to have those conversations, and then they become the role models for mental health first aid within the company, that's when they see a lot more drastic changes.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

As we are seeing currently with the COVID-19 events, there's a complexity to life and to organizations as well. And these things do change over time in terms of events of fast moving. Sometimes we are busy, sometimes we are not, sometimes we have to work late, sometimes we don't have to, sometimes you know, we we do have to work for one or two weeks to get a key project done. And I'm not saying at any point that uh you know we we shouldn't be flexible about how we work, but it's just about recognizing, I think, that the importance of balance and when the opportunity arises to give yourself the best chance of success through appropriate rest and recovery. And some of the work that we do is around awareness and particularly around the role of sleep. So we can take sleep as a I was gonna say a proxy for rest and recovery, but it is in some ways the sort of uh rest and recovery, and thinking about people in terms of a pre-sleep routine and collecting data on on how they actually sleep. And we've had some really useful discussions with individuals around the amount of sleep they have and uh doing some work with them to suggest strategies to uh improve the amount of sleep they have to enable them to uh rest recovery and perform better.

SPEAKER_00 21:34

What are those key strategies for people listening for people listening who are thinking, I'd love to get higher quality sleep? What are those kind of key strategies that have come out some of the research?

SPEAKER_01 21:43

One thing I think was quite helpful in some of the work that we've done with clients is giving yourself a chance to have the right amount of sleep. So often you'll see people say, I don't get enough sleep, but I go to bed at 12 and I'm up at six. And and I know it's a throwaway line, but I mean I'm just saying that's an example of Somebody just not giving them themselves a big enough sleep window. Other helpful things, so we often collect um hardware variability data and look at sleep patterns. And it is useful, for example, to see the effect that it will have for you personally if you're able to collect this data of caffeine on sleep, of alcohol on sleep. Now, this is not an indication, you know, not saying that everybody will have access to this type of measurement data, though many people will through their uh through the technology that's available these days. So you will you will be able to see, for example, caffeine is a half-life of around six to seven hours. So if you're having a cup of coffee at seven o'clock at night, then half of the caffeine will be in your system later on. You can see the effect that has on your ability to get good sleep. Although people often feel as though they're sleeping when they have a glass of wine to relax at uh at night, the quality of that sleep is is usually much less. So you can see that although you might be unconscious and really not getting quality of sleep that you need. And people do, and I'm not saying that people shouldn't drink coffee, I drink coffee. I'm not saying that people shouldn't have a glass of wine at night, I have a glass of wine at night, but it's about recognizing the the effects this might have on your ability to get good sleep and recognizing that sometimes, even if you don't, you know, if you don't want to not have a glass of wine to get a good night, you know, to make sure that you get good good quality sleep and so on. I think it's important to have a good sleep routine. We often talk in sport about pre-performance routines, so a pre-sleep routine, you don't want to make anything too uh uh too formulaic, but certainly, you know, uh you know, shutting down, you know, emails as a good example. We've talked about that, you know, last thing at night, first thing in the morning. You know, a shutdown from from nine o'clock at night, you know, give yourself a chance to read a book, watch TV, just relax into the into

Half time reflection

SPEAKER_01 23:41

sleep uh at night. So those are some of the things that have come up really.

SPEAKER_00 23:46

Right then, time for those half-time oranges and a breather. Pop the kettle on and take a break if you want. Check the WhatsApps, Twitter notifications, emails, but hopefully not work emails, given what we've just heard from Mark. I was really interested in the review on remote working for Nuffield Health, so I've managed to get a copy. And that white paper, which was only published last November 2019, is scarily prescient considering what we are living through at the moment. There's a key section in the exact summary that while celebrates the flexibility of remote working, also warns of the dangers in isolation. And quoting the report, remote workers can experience isolation, lack of personal contact with colleagues, and the inability to switch off in their personal time. All of which I must say on a personal note I can really identify with in the last few weeks. The report also offers a number of suggestions to help with this, and I'll just pull out one of these, which is trust. Now, this refers to the trust between management and staff, helping to alleviate the concern that one has to always be contactable and that you have the autonomy to manage your time as you see fit. So for any managers listening to this, something to think about there. Secondly, I was intrigued by the Harvard Business Review article that Mark mentioned called Extreme Jobs, the Dangerous Allure of the 70-hour work week. Now I've put in the podcast links the link to that article. It focuses a lot around the extreme work culture in corporate America, and there are some sobering statistics in there. More than 69% believe they would be healthier if they worked less extremely. 58% think their work gets in the way of strong relationships with their children, 46% think it gets in the way of good relationships with their spouses, and 50% say their jobs make it impossible to have a satisfying sex life. At the same time, the article recognises that this development is not just systemic pressure. They argue that long work weeks cannot simply be chalked up to the crushing effects of a heartless and unchecked capitalist system. They find that many extreme professionals, as they call them, find their work enormously alluring as well. So that's enough extra reading for now. Let's get back to the conversation with Professor Mark Jones. I'd love to pivot to talking about an environment where rest and sleep must be a very challenging place to access some of those things at some point. In terms of the emergency medicine, when we say emergency medicine, are we talking about paramedics?

SPEAKER_01 26:31

Uh we're sort of talking about uh sort of first responder. So uh one of our co-authors as a uh consultant synetist, Luca Carenzon, he's the first author on this assimilation medicine uh paper that we did. You know, it's been great actually to work with him. He was particularly interested in our approach to stress and our challenge and threat related work. And so we were able to collect data from 124 people at the simulated medical competition in um uh in Italy. While we spend a lot of time looking at people's physiological responses to stress, we in this study looked at the self-report measures and in particular looked at uh demands and resources. So, what they saw as the demands, what they saw as the resources, collected the data as teams and looked at the interaction between those two factors and um and performance over the direction of competition. And you know, not surprisingly, but although it's you know it's interesting to find this, that what we found was that those individuals or those teams that we found there was a good link between resources and performance, but when demands reach the level of resources, we saw a drop-off in performance then. So we get that interaction, if you like. And I think that's that's important. When people feel as though they can manage the demands, the situation that they're placed in, then they tend to be able to deal with even quite demanding difficult scenarios. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

And what would be the the key demands within that environment that would put a pressure on the on the resources?

SPEAKER_01 27:59

That's a good that's a good question. I know you have to forgive my medical terminology. So, for example, you know, he would talk about sort of difficult airways and so on. So you might get unexpected events that happen when you're there to treat a patient. I've probably not given that the do the right medical terminology, but I know that you know he would talk about unexpected or uncertain uh events, and I think that's covers quite a few different situations. You know, uncertainty can be stressful for individuals. And if you think back to some of the work that Baskovich did around challenge and threat, he talked about situations that were uncertain, um, talked about situations where you're required to do a great deal of effort and where there's a potential for harm, and that harm could be psychological or physical. And so we could see how sport is a good example with which to explore some of these factors, as are emergency medicine situations, they're uncertain, you're gonna have to work very hard to achieve it, and there's a potential if you get things wrong, there's a potential for psychological or physical harm. And so for us, we were really keen to understand you know what are the potential resources that people might draw on to be able to uh manage those demands. And we focused on self-efficacy, so confidence, control, which is a big one, and then an approach focus, which is being clear about what you need to do to achieve. And uh, I know Joe Dixon in his work, in his PhD at a football academy, did a lot of work in creating a challenge mindset and challenged culture. So focusing on those confidence, control, and approach focus. And you know, we've done quite a few laboratory studies and uh intervention studies trying to change people's physical responses to stress as well as their psychological responses.

SPEAKER_00 29:36

But Bill Pelichek in the heat of battle, his catchphrase is do your job. As long as people know what their job is and they've got they've got the perceived resources to be able to do it, that's a good area for focus.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Yeah, I think that's uh that's uh excellent, excellent, simple, and I don't mean that derogatorily, uh excellent simple advice.

SPEAKER_00 29:55

Yeah, and you can definitely see how some of this stuff applies across environments. I do like the challenge and that theory applied, particularly in sport. You look at those resources, what have I got to draw on that gives me confidence in my ability to do my job, things that are under my sphere of my control that I can put my energy and my my attention into, and then the demands, what am I expecting to meet in this situation? And and sometimes just just knowing that in advance or or planning out different scenarios that might happen can be can be quite useful and reduces the the feeling of shock or newness if they do happen, I suppose in the in the sports sphere, that we see that quite a lot, don't we, in terms of teams training for different scenarios. You see, in the all or nothing documentary of the the all blacks, you see um Steve Hanson quite often putting them into scenarios where they've had a man uh sin bins and suddenly they have to deal with that situation and creating those hypothetical demand situations in advance so that when it happens, it doesn't feel as much of a shock to the system.

SPEAKER_01 30:57

No, you're you you're you're right. And uh as you were talking there, reminded me of one of my um PhD students just finished Junky Doyle. Uh um, she did a really nice case study with Indian tennis coaches, and she did something, you know, she was it was very good because she did some quite she took the theory and she did some sort of innovative interventions with it. But for her, the intervention was writing down for these coaches what their demands, they would write the demands and then she would ask them to list what resources they had to meet them, so make it a pretty conscious process because often if you don't think about it, we can get a little bit overwhelmed by some of the demands. And so she had this strategy where she would get them to write down the demands and then they would write down what resources they had. If they couldn't think of anything, she would prompt them and get them to think about what they could do to meet them, just to discuss it a bit more detail. And she found that quite an effective strategy. So she collected data with around three tennis coaches there over time, so a longitudinal study and got some really nice and positive data from that. What on the face of it is a simplistic but helpful intervention.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

So all they've done in that scenario is give the coaches and and the players of autonomy over thinking about what what might come up ahead down the road, and then thinking about how they might then respond to those situations if they did arise. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, we've got about five, ten minutes left. I'd love I'd love to just zoom out a wee bit.

SPEAKER_01 32:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:20

Take a bit more of a bird's eye view, uh, some of this stuff. And the name of the podcast, Slice of Pie, one of the questions I've started to ask is what does a psychologically informed environment mean to you?

SPEAKER_01 32:32

I think that's a it's a good question, but it's a very difficult question to answer. One of the things that I think, you know, in terms of a psychologically informed environment, one of the really interesting things, which is why I think in 30 years' time or 50 years' time, there will still be podcasts about psychologically informed environments, is that it is complex. And when I finish all my lectures on stress, Master gave a talk somewhere to say that you know there's a complexity across individuals' life courses and environments just as regards the stress. And I think there's a complexity across psychologically informed environments because that is going to differ depending on the environment and the context and the individuals that are there. That said, I think that there is, I think it's, you know, it's interesting to think about what might be some of the key things that might cut across really good environments. And I think it's difficult to say that without sounding very trite. And I think that's the challenge because that is the beauty, I think, of performance is that what worked five years ago might not work 10 years ago, but you could 10 years and 10 years' time, but you can always look at the one five years ago and pick out some lessons that might be helpful in 10 years' time of trouble is you don't know which ones they are sometimes. You know, that's the uh so this is a bit of a rumble with no no clear answer. One thing I think is interesting, we talk about maybe sometimes being able to learn from different environments. I was always struck by um, and sometimes not always struck by uh ONS survey around meaning in occupations, and that uh 37% of people work in jobs that they don't think have any meaningful contribution to the world. And I think that's really interesting, and that's been spell out into a few uh sort of books and articles. I know meaning is uh you know is uh has been explored in psychology for many. But I always think that's interesting. So purpose and meaning matter. I think awareness matters, and now that's a big question, big statement. So awareness of strengths and uh weaknesses, focus on development is important. So one of the things that we've enjoyed doing is just working with people in high-level occupations and just getting to understand what works for them. And there's an individuality about psychologically informed environments, you have to manage the individuals within that, but they can they can understand about what factors might be having a negative effect on their productivity or performance.

SPEAKER_00 35:05

So I don't think that was a ramble at all. I mean, all good all I heard there was, you know, quite rightly the the purpose of this podcast is to try and try and ex excavate some of those those elements that might be able to apply across different environments. But I think it's a nice sobering reminder that every environment is is different, it's going to involve different individuals, different contexts, and therefore what that environment might need in order to prove improve things like well-being and performance is going to differ across it. But at the same time, I thought your point there on meaning and and purpose was quite interesting because certainly in the in the advertising, marketing and advertising realm, which I'm uh familiar with, you can certainly see in some of the campaigns, the way that brands and companies talk about themselves in the last 10-15 years, there's certainly step changing from product attributes, so why you should buy this product to why does our company exist? And and those communications quite often aren't just necessary for consumers, but also for the people that work within that company as well or that organization to make them feel proud that what they do actually does have a contribution, even if it's in a small way.

SPEAKER_01 36:23

That's very interesting, though.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

There was a part of one of Steve Jobs' biographies, or it might even have been in a book by there's a bloke called John Steele, who's quite a famous ad man, and he wrote a book called Perfect Pitch, where he was being briefed by Steve Jobs on the campaign, which ended up being the think different campaign, the one with Albert Einstein and some of the big inventors. And certainly I remember that that part of the book mentioned that that the campaign was not just about getting consumers to be interested in Apple, but for people in Apple who'd been through a few kind of quite tough years through the 90s to feel inspired and energized about working for that organization again.

SPEAKER_01 37:05

Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 37:07

So right, so we might just end with a couple of quickfire questions. What makes you optimistic and excited about the future of your industry?

SPEAKER_01 37:16

What makes me optimistic? So I think there's greater discussion around or greater engagement with issues that we've discussed. So that's a positive thing from an industry point of view. So if you're interested in health and performance, we get opportunities to discuss and talk about those topics with more people who always feel as though that's the case than it might have been 10, 15, 20 years ago. I think it's also interesting that we can collect data that people can relate to to help them understand and manage their health and performance better. Now, too much data can be confusing and sometimes can be contradictory as well. But certainly we've had good feedback from using questionnaire data, but also psychophysiological data to help people. People are interested in how they respond. They're interested in how they respond before they're asked to perform. They are interested in whether they are resting and recovering at night. And when we are able to give people that data, they engage with it and they are then on the back of that making changes to better look after themselves if they see that something they are doing might not be helpful. It also enables them to reflect and sometimes firm up some of those things that they do do particularly well in terms of their ability to rest and recover. So I think the ability to give people data, the ability to share some of these discussions with larger numbers of people is two reasons for optimism.

SPEAKER_00 38:54

Yeah, I've I've only been practicing in the performance psychology domain for a couple of years now, but I've even noticed within the last two years getting a lot more outreach from athletes and coaches who are really, really excited about engaging with some of the material. It seems like it's starting to pervade the wider consciousness, maybe through the media, maybe through so many resources now that are available online. And certainly the outreaches I've had in the last maybe six months, there's a lot more and excitement about engaging with some of this stuff, which I think is really, really positive. The other the other thing I heard there is data as well. And practitioners, we can't really start to make the case for for certain initiatives or or interventions if we don't have really good data from from different environments that infers that this would be a good thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 39:44

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 39:45

So lovely, lovely little summary there. Thanks, Mark. We'll probably leave it, leave it there. Feels like a really nice place to round off the podcast. And just finally, if people want to follow you on social media or find you on the web and learn a little bit more about what you're doing, where would they go?

SPEAKER_01 40:01

So they can find me on Twitter at at prof Mark Jones. And in terms of the applied work, you can go to sportingbounce.com, which is sort of lists of all sports psychologists there. But I also have my profile up on uh Manchester Metropolitan University on the Department of Psychology website, so I'll be up there as well. And we have our research center there, which is Center for Stress, Health and Performance.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

Great, thanks very much. I'm I myself am on Sporting Bounce, and for anyone listening and looking for a potential practitioner in their area, really good website to go to Sporting Bounce. So definitely check that out. But thanks again, Mark. Really, really appreciative of you spending a bit of your time amongst everything else that's going on in the world at the moment to share some of your insights and experiences. So it's hugely appreciated.

SPEAKER_01 40:51

Great. Thanks very much, Pete. I appreciate the invite and uh enjoy the chance to chat.

Full time reflection

SPEAKER_00 40:56

Right. If you are still there, thanks again for listening to another episode of Slice of Pie. As I always bang on about finding the crossover insights between environments, I have to give Mark credit there for being the ethical and responsible practitioner, warning against jumping too quickly to find those cross-cutting elements. As he says, if you ignore all other domains and just focus on sport, even within sport, different sports, different cultures, different standards create different conditions with which to try and make an environment optimized for well-being and performance. However, I think we did touch on a couple of crossover elements there. The first one was rest, knowing when to switch off, when to recuperate. And it was interesting to hear from Mark's experience that he's yet to find a domain where being constantly on 24-7 is beneficial behaviour. The rest test that I mentioned by Claudia Hammond and funded by the BBC found that two-thirds of people who responded to the rest test said that they needed more rest, and those that didn't had significantly higher well-being scores. The other element which we touched on at the end there was meaning or a sense of purpose, which, according to the ONS survey that Mark mentioned, finds that 37% of people work in jobs that don't feel like they have any meaningful contribution to the world. I was keen to dig in a bit deeper into this, as this idea of wanting to find meaning in one's job is something I'm personally very interested in. One model or theory that I think is worth mentioning is the theory of person environment fit. According to this theory, outcomes are most optimal when personal attributes like one's needs or values and environmental attributes like what is supplied or what is valued by that organization are compatible. So far so obvious, right? Well, for me it gets more interesting, because this value congruence can not just occur between the person and the organization, but a variety of social targets within that environment, including supervisors, line managers, work groups, and co-workers. Think about your own experience to see if this makes sense. Have you ever worked in a job that has an overall purpose that you loved but didn't enjoy the actual work because your immediate boss or team didn't share your values or outlook on life or work? How about the other way around? Have you ever done a job where the end output you were relatively apathetic about, but you worked for an incredible boss who inspired you and supported your development? Or with a team that you got on so well with you are still friends years later. Life, as always, is more complex than the black and white score of an ONS survey. And I look forward to finding out more about this particular topic along the Slice of Pie journey. Maybe you know someone who has an expertise in this area. Who should I get on to talk about this? While you think about that, I'm going to sign off for now, so thanks again for listening and have a great week.