SPEAKER_01 0:14

Hello and welcome back to Delighted Pi. The first time I heard about this concept of the Pi, the psychologically informed environment, was on a podcast with Dan Abraham and Elliot Newell from the English Institute of Sport. And I'm pleased to say, after multiple recommendations from listeners of the show, Elliot has agreed to come on and share his experiences. Like the conversations with Matt Slate and Chris Hartley and Jamie Barker, there was so much to talk about and dig into. We're going to have to split the conversation in two episodes again. This first part is an exploration of the zigzag journey Elliot made from growing up in Watford and ending up at EIS via Caster, Loughborough, and now to Angleton. You can follow Elliot on Twitter by searching his handle at Elliot Sports Guy, PSY. The Premier League football season has returned this weekend, and in true title pie form, we continue with the full-time review back in the studio. So the conversation will go for around 35 minutes, then we'll break for a cutter and a debrief. Finally, before we jump into the conversation, I'd like to highlight a couple of brilliant new sport psychology podcasts that have launched recently. The first is 80% mental with Hugh Gilmore and Peter Oliftuga, and the other is the Sporting Failures Club presented by Michael Roberts and Jack Kick Flynn. These are both fantastic additions to Sport Psychology Poder Sphere with some great guests, and I urge you to search for these on your platform of choice. Right, that's enough preamble. It's time to jump into the conversation with Elliot Newell.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

Elliot, how are we? I'm very good, thank you. Very good. You find me at a moment in life uh where I'm feeling pretty happy and and content. And um so yeah, it's uh it's a pretty good pretty good uh place to be at the moment. Um lockdown is peculiar, uh, but I'm I'm noticing um it's got its advantages, uh certainly in in the the fortunate life I'm I'm I'm lucky enough to lead. So uh so yeah, it's uh it's a pretty good time at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 2:25

That is lovely to hear. So could can I assume that there's something in the the context of lockdown that has that has led to you feeling this contentment?

SPEAKER_00 2:35

I imagine there will be people listening to this that might be able to relate to the idea of um how good it feels to not have that 5 a.m. alarm where uh you've got to jump in a car and drive three or four hours or or get on a train to to uh to wherever it might be for work. And um I I really enjoy my job. Uh one of the challenges it presents me is um because I live in Anglesey, which isn't near anything really. Um wherever I've got a job on, this it's usually two to three hours, uh sometimes four hours travel. So um that bit I'm starting to appreciate more is uh how how easy it is to get into a pattern of living where that becomes the norm, and you know, you'd you'd bump into to mates or family and you describe your work life and they look at you like you're you're ever so mildly crazy because they're like, Why would why would anyone ever do that? Why would you get up at those hours or work away? And but it just becomes normal for you. So now this new normal means that I can put that uh degree of travel and time away from home in perspective. So the bits that are keeping me um definitely happy and content is the extra sleep I'm getting, but um probably more so is the uh time I'm able to spend with with my wife and and my two young boys.

SPEAKER_01 3:56

Oh, lovely. Yeah, I I suppose there will be people that can can relate to that. And obviously your your role is got quite a unique job in what you do, but I think the general relation to having that that time back, I think the the pure if you take I'm very biased because I live in London, but if you take the the London context, for example, you quite often see the pure economics of London and housing, meaning that there's so many jobs here, but when people come to have families, they then kind of move quite far out in order to get that space so they can commute in and have that that job that earns the money, but then they're living maybe a bit further outside of London to have that space so they can have their kids run around the garden and stuff like that. Yeah, and but what that does create, it creates that an enormous amount of commuting time. And um, unfortunately, as well, in the UK, we're not particularly amazing with our rail companies, um, which will which will mean a lot to anyone commuting into Victoria on their southern or southeast rail in the last few years. Um but I think like like you said, having that time back to put into even simple things like sleep or to spend time with your your family, it's uh it's a nice silver lining in which in in what otherwise is a quite a devastating context for the country and and the world.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Yeah, yeah. And I think um one of the things that I find in um just in general life is it's it's it's a bit of a it's a bit of a river, and um it takes you along with it, and sometimes you're not always in control of the direction or pace. And through that, one of the things that on reflection I came to do was to perceive my life and the things that I'm fortunate to have as pretty normal. But then you get a situation like we find ourselves in now, and you realize that there are so many people that don't have some of the fundamental things that I had and I imagine other people had taken for granted. Um, so it just puts things in perspective, certainly has done for me. Um, so I think that's been one of the big things that I have experienced through lockdown is just this this sense of um gratitude, which I admit at periods of have felt like guilt in in in some places, particularly when you when I learn of or hear stories of people that are really struggling. Um, but yeah, I think it's been a useful exercise in just gaining perspective and um taking myself too seriously, as perhaps I probably had done when you're in the flows of work and you're running projects and pursuing outcomes and you're trying to have an impact in in a very, very small part of life, but for you it be is it means everything. Um, so yeah, definitely that opportunity to step back has been good for me, I think.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder whether there's there can be quite a fine line between that that gratitude and guilt and and actually whether having that is is probably quite a healthy thing. It's an indicator that you've got a big picture, you're aware that there are other people who are living through this in a different way to yourself, which is uh is clearly a positive thing to have that perspective. The other thing I love there was life is a river. I don't know whether that was created during your time with British uh British canoe. But uh I I like this idea that it is a mixture of direction and pace because you hear a lot of uh you know analogies about what life is like. It's uh going through two different doors, it's a you know, it's a road, it's a um, you know, it's a roller coaster, some some people might say.

SPEAKER_02 7:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Um but particularly with the kind of the sliding doors look at life, you hear about how life can go in different directions and you can look back at in your own life and you can recognise that because you can see different points at which you could have gone one way or the other and you think, God, that life would have looked so different if you'd done that. But I like that mixture of direction and pace. That's so true. Life can go in in different directions, but also the the pace of life can kind of change, it can go through kind of quite intense periods or quite slow periods. Um I really like that. Life is a river.

SPEAKER_00 8:11

Yeah, and I think that probably we was shaped by by canoeing. Yeah, I just find that a useful way of connecting. And one of the things that I've noticed with my current role is that um you get pulled in all kinds of directions, and sometimes those directions are interesting, but they might not necessarily be helpful, or they might not necessarily help you get to the end goal that you're striving for. So I I I kind of use that analogy because I I talk a lot about pace, and there's definitely periods of work where uh I I am out I I am overwhelmed and and I am um running at a pace that or flowing down the river at a pace that just feels too quick. But then there are other times where you're like feels a little bit like a lazy river at the at the water park, and you're like, come on, can we not do something a bit more exciting than this? So uh but the direction bit is uh interesting because quite often you can influence water and your direction in water, but ultimately the water will take you where it wants to take you. And if you what I've noticed is that um if you allow others and you allow the work to direct where you go, if you're not kind of in tune with that and you're not you know sticking your paddle in the right direction, then it can take you places you don't necessarily want to go. And you always have to have that end goal of uh, well, what is it that I'm striving towards? And is this project or are these interactions or is this thing that I'm doing now helpful and in taking me towards that endpoint?

SPEAKER_01 9:44

Yeah, that's interesting. I suppose the when I think of the word pace or speed, I'm also thinking of the word of intensity as well. And when something's quite intense, like you say, you can get drawn into it, and sometimes it's it's hard to pull yourself back out and go, actually, is this thing that I'm being really intense about actually actually helpful in the long run or or contributing to the goal?

SPEAKER_02 10:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

You mentioned Bridge Canoe there, you mentioned your your current role. I think that would be a great segue to talk about what you you're doing now uh and the journey up into this point. So, what were the the key points, the key transitions through your career that have have brought you to the current role that you're doing?

SPEAKER_00 10:22

I, like everyone else, would have experienced a ton of transitions through life. Some um regular or or or normal innerted commas that you would expect, like so when we transition from primary school into secondary school. Uh, but then there's also been a number of other key transitions that have shaped who I am and and how I see the world and how I've learned to cope and how I've learned to thrive. So the key one for me was probably that transition into and through the university. I'd had a pretty stable upbringing. We I grew up in Watford and um and uh spent pretty well yeah, my whole my whole life there up until the point where we'd got to 18 and I can't quite remember why, but I decided that I needed to move right away and and I picked a university up north, uh, went to Chester, and the bit I recall there was just a sense of independence. I went alone. Um, all of my friends went to other universities, and I think that was probably a key transition for me because I had been so reliant on the social group, so reliant on being one of the boys, being part of the footy team, and and and just having that network of friends around me. Um transition into university, the the driving factor for that for me was I'd already decided, I think at that point that I'd wanted to work into sport and I wanted to work in performance sport, and I just wanted to go and explore something else. So from a life transition, um obviously learning to live away, cook for yourself, uh, live by yourself, all of those things that um you know I was lucky that mum used to sort out for me, and then suddenly I was doing it by myself and started with pot noodles and then progressed up to more uh functional foods, you know. Um I think that was the main one. But during but during uni, what I I I came to realise was that I really enjoyed people and I really enjoyed teams in particular and how things moved at a collective pace towards a a shared goal and um had great experiences um just being part of the football culture at at Chester and um I started to coach and I originally went to to uni to learn about physiotherapy and uh I was interested in in pursuing a career in that. And yeah, but coaching really grabbed my attention and I started to uh to coach and I started to um take modules in coaching and you're coaching football. Yes, yeah, and um it struck me that it was all relational and greatest impact I was having on the learning, well-being, and performance of people that I was supporting was with the positive relationships that I'd had. And um it kind of fell into that way of how Chester ran their program that you would you would have modules on pedagogy and coaching in year one and year two, but I don't really remember that much psychology until second end of year two, and then I started taking modules in psychology, and I was like, ah, okay, right, this might be it then this sports psychology thing might be the bit that I'm really enjoying about coaching, um, which then sent me off into a master's, and then um I went and did, I went back to after Chester, I went back to back to Watford and uh did my uh bases training as a sports scientist, specializing in psychology with a Gustaw humanistic psychologist in in London. And um, that was probably the first major transition I had, where my experiences at university had been primarily mental skills training and was driven from a cognitive behavioural view of the world. And the master's was influenced by one of the key researchers there whose specialism was in neuroscience. So I'd kind of left uni with a big kind of um sciencey view of the world, I guess, where you know you take the cognitive behavior approach, you input A and you do B and you get C, and you know, we can take the neuroscience approach and look at everything in the brain. So I kind of left with that, and then I was flung into this phenomenal learning environment, which was about meaning and perception, and yeah, just a whole different view of the world, and and it was all counseling-based. And I was hugely fortunate to do that, have that share that experience with um five other psyches. Um, my experiences of training in the UK is that I think most people's supervision through BPS of ACEs tends to be individual. But my experiences was in a group, which I look back on and think that was phenomenal. I didn't know it at the time, but those psyches have gone on and done some brilliant things. So I was in great company and and I learned a lot from that. And I think transitionally that just fundamentally changed my view of what supporting people pursuing performance actually looks like and and what it could be. So I'd gone from a mental skills training view of the world to then integrating kind of counseling, and and for those that um are aware of the humanist approach, it's it's very much about the whole person and it's very much about the context of the now in the whole journey. And there's a huge emphasis on presence and recognising the moment and connecting with the moment, which I think provided the foundations for when I went into practice with Canoen that um I would bring in quite a lot of mindfulness and acceptance, commitment therapy type approaches. So um, from a transitional moment, that that was key because it it needed me to change the way that I view the world, and it needed me to change the way in which I behaved and interacted with the world, which was um important, I think. I then spent a number of years lecturing. So I spent time at Loughborough College teaching on and then eventually leading on some aspects of the degree program there, and that was a really good experience for um understanding pedagogy and understanding how people learn. And I think my my major transition there was um I think that was a period where I really began to doubt whether I was ever going to find this career that I'd been chasing in high performance sport. I was doing some bits on the side for Loughbury Uni, but okay.

SPEAKER_01 17:00

So this is the Jeopardy part of the story. This is the you're in the in the woods and you're not quite sure where the path is.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

Yeah, I mean, I don't mind saying it. Um I uh by the end, I just bloody hated it. I I hated it. I didn't enjoy the work, I didn't enjoy feeling on the outside, if that made sense. So I would still follow performance, I would still chat to sport sites, I would still pay attention to Olympic and Paralympic sport, which was always my interest outside football. And there was always a sense of like, why these guys like, why can't I have a cool job like that? And and and then that was a period where things were changing from a training point of view. So I had committed to and completed Bases, but then all of a sudden there was this new HCPC thing, and you had to be on the register, and you had to have done BPS, and you know, suddenly all of the knowledges and experiences and qualities that I'd built up felt like they weren't valued anymore because I didn't tick the right box. And there was a period where I felt quite isolated and ostracized from the profession. I felt I'd wasted time and effort and money because I couldn't be part of the gang anymore, because I wasn't, you know, I didn't have the right training route.

SPEAKER_02 18:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:22

Which was strange because at the time when I'd done the training route, it was the right training route, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 18:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

So yeah, there was just a whole load of stuff I was like, oh, this just ain't gonna happen, is it? So I kind of resigned to being an ac an academic. I started a PhD, which um I didn't ever really want to do, but it felt like it was the only way out of my current job. I couldn't get a job at a university without one. And then we had that kind of slide indoors moment where one of the guys who used to work at the college had had come back and I'd never met him before, but he'd said, Oh, I'm gonna pop into Loughborough for a drink if if anyone wants to come. So he was catching up with some old colleagues, and I don't quite know why, because usually I'm a bit shy, but I just went, Yeah, yeah, I'll come. So we went and and and um we'd had a drink in a local pub and he was saying, right, I've moved jobs now and um I've been doing this stuff for Canoe England, but I can't do it anymore. And he offered it to someone else, uh, one of his former colleagues at the table, and she said, Yeah, well, yeah, I'll do it. And uh Elliot, why don't you help me out? So it it it then that was the key moment that changed because I had a bit of work to do. So I did volunteer work for Canoe England for must have been about four years, five years, and then what then happened was I wasn't trying to get in cold, I wasn't trying to get in with a CV that had holes in it. I was already in, and then role a role came up at Canoein, which was to be the psychologist for a new talent transfer group, and uh it was only a six-week contract, they were there for a talent transfer group, yeah. So they'd announced that uh there was going to be gender parity in events across the 2020 Olympics, and there were male canoe sprint events, but there were no female ones. So the IOC announced that there would be events in female canoe sprint, and obviously, if that's never been an event before, it wasn't really a thing. British Canoe didn't really have any female canoe sprint athletes, so they they worked with the EIS to do this national talent transfer or talent ID program, and they'd gone through a process and 15 girls have been picked, and then um they were going to train full-time in Nottingham for six weeks before they made final decisions on whether they would be offered a position in the in the British Canoe team. And um, yeah, they just needed a psych for six weeks to do a bit of education, but primarily to help support the profiling and also just to help the girls settle in quickly and be able to show the best versions of themselves because a full-time six-week trial essentially is quite a quite a big arse. And I think canoe were brilliant to recognize that there's a psychological demand on that, and if you're gonna put the demand on people, then it's only fair you support them appropriately. Yeah, I've definitely seen versions of that that look like sink or swim, but um, I forgot it was just lucky that British canoeing had uh a much better philosophy, so they wanted to support, and then that six weeks we ended up recommending that they pick everyone. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, and they did, and then they said, well, we probably need to carry on with some of the psych support, don't we? So uh I yeah, I came in, came into that, and that was a real transitional experience for me professionally because after six weeks, I'd probably done everything that I could have done that I was equipped. To do and having trained primarily in mental skills training and education. So you run your workshops and goal setting, and what's your why, and what are our values, and how do you use imagery and all of that. You know, there wasn't a huge need for counselling-based approaches. Uh, I'd been lucky that my experiences with counselling had always been people had come and pursued me and said, Can you help me with X? Which made it easy. But then all of a sudden, I was in a full-time environment working with 15 individuals, and they don't all need counseling support. So I was just there thinking, right, I don't quite know what impact looks like. Um, you know, unless people come and pursue me and have they got performance challenges, or so I had to learn on the job around what good applied psychology looked like. And it was, on reflection, a huge gap in my development as a practitioner to be able to work out what to do day to day to help enable a psychologically informed environment, to help enable progression towards shared goals, to make sure that the program was functioning as highly as possible from a planning point of view, from a testing and a curriculum point of view, but also from a relationship point of view and how people navigate the complexities of that. You know, I was kind of just figuring it out. And I was fortunate enough that in the first in that first six weeks period, I British Canoe and the EIS had got some time with a a couple of clinical psychologists who run a company called Change in Minds.

SPEAKER_02 23:39

Oh, right, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

And um I was fortunate enough to be uh supported by those guys, and that was really transitional for me just because what they were saying was stuff that immediately made sense to me, but hadn't necessarily been a formal part of my training or had been part of my experience as a practitioner up to date, and what they were helping me to do would be to create an environment that worked for each of the 15 individuals that we had in our squad, and that was really my first exposure to helping a team of people deliver a psychologically informed environment. So transitionally, that's just been remarkable because I look back at my previous practice and think, geez, I've changed a lot, and that I probably wouldn't really do a lot of the stuff that I used to do. So, yeah, I think uh that took me to canoe, and professionally I was very, very happy. I was doing four days a week, but it's a four-hour drive from Anglesey to Nottingham. Uh and um and I was hanging out with a coach, uh the head paracanoe coach, uh Colin Radmore, and he's a very lovely guy, and uh I'd I'd be able to crash at his house, and um and I just think there's from a personal point of view, I'm kind of like mid-20s. I'm I'm traveling, doing a job that I like, but I'm I'm essentially crashing on someone's couch during the week, and uh it just feels a little bit like I haven't got my life in order. And um Noah, our our firstborn had had arrived, and I was like, I'm spending a lot of time away from home. Um so the job was amazing, but it just didn't fit professionally. I'd I'd I'd transitioned into other areas of my life. I was I would be moved to Anglesey from Loughborough. I was learning to love the environment that I was in. I mean, for a guy that grew up in Watford to find yourself in Anglesey. Big culture change, right? Oh my dude, I don't the silence more than anything, it's just unnerving. Um, you can hear like the sea and you can hear birds, and like normally I can hear traffic and police cars and cranes, cranes. Yeah, yeah. So, like, transitionally, that was huge for me. I was learning to be a dad, I recently married, so then had to uh just find something that worked better. And uh now I find myself in a really cool team in the EIS. I get a far better work-life balance, and I know I was referring to a lot of travel, but I'm probably on the road two, possibly three days a week. Other times I get to work from home and get my head down so I can be here for the boys, you know. Like when I'm working from home, I get to drop Noah off at school, which is just a short walk away. I get to pick him up from school, we get to put the boys to bed. So very, very long-winded answer. That's kind of all the key personal and professional transitions that I can recall and connect with at this point that lead me to where I am now. And like I said, I think the transitions are those periods of change. They're usually externally triggered, but it's not the external change itself that is a transition. I've I've come to understand transitions as the transformational change someone goes through in experiences that change their beliefs, their interactions with the world, their behaviours. So yeah, I think I've I mean I'm getting on a bit now, so I've experienced a few. But yeah, that's been that's been my journey today.

SPEAKER_01 27:12

It's been it's been a winding river, hasn't it? And there's there's a lot clearly that's that's happened. I've just drawn a river through my through my my book there. And there's so much there that I'd I'd love to dig into. But yeah, it's interesting how going off to university, that big first transition, you're leaning into teaching, you're leaning into pedagogy, into coaching, you're then starting to pick up uh sports psychology, which is really new and exciting. And and I suppose the bits of sports psych that you're picking up are the bits that seem to chime with that kind of directive coaching, that pedagogical uh style. And that's taken you down one route there, and then you've uh you've transitioned out, done the masters, and you've got this uh this sage guru in gesalt and uh and humanism, which has just opened up your mind to a completely different side of it, a completely different way of doing it. And then you've got the you've gone into your, I suppose the we're in the rapids now, so kind of the waters in the in the river that are kind of tossing, there's maybe a few rocks, uh, there's a bit of doubt where is actually is this leading? And then I suppose you you mentioned a kind of a sliding doors moment. Uh I've I've written down a kind of fork in the river where um it could have taken you down one way, but you've got you kind of you've you've got an opportunity there with uh with British Canoe. Um and that's led to so many amazing experiences in in the last few years. Uh uh volunteering for Canoe England, working with a transfer group with uh uh women's uh women's operant, and then uh the these other satellites of uh transitional and critical uh moments in terms of uh be able to access people from changing minds, again seeing uh it being done in a completely different way. So I think it's really interesting, and it's you know, I I love this this saying that it's so much easier to connect the dots looking back, right? Yeah. I suppose you must look back on your riff and you go, okay, that kind of kind of makes sense in some way when I look back, but there must have been points on that journey where you look forward and go, where the hell is this taking me?

SPEAKER_00 29:18

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And um, that idea of looking back and connecting the dots and making sense is something that I think was inherent in a lot of the humanistic training, but really came to the fore with change of mind support. And one of the things they taught me was that all behaviour is understandable and meaningful in context, and the context of the person experiencing it and the context of the life story that they've led to to this point in time. And yeah, that a lot of what you said uh echoes that, uh, not just me looking back on myself, but also trying to be an effective practitioner in the field is how do you help people connect their own dots, or how do you help like uh coaches or performance managers, for example, to understand the dots of the athletes that they're trying to support?

SPEAKER_01 30:08

Yeah. Okay, well, let's lean into that. So, your your current role, you mentioned you're now in the current role where you're traveling two two to three days a week. Is this the senior pathway scientist? Yes. So, for people listening and thinking, what is a a senior pathway scientist? What what what is that and what does it look like?

SPEAKER_00 30:30

It's very diverse, it's ambiguous in a lot of senses. So, um, one of the great things about the EIS is that they they drive performance phenomenally, and um, the way in which they found to do that best is to compartmentalize and and separate a lot of the aspects of the organization. So you would have a performance lifestyle team, a team of performance analysts, a team of psychologists, a team of strength and conditioning coaches, etc. The performance pathways team uh are one of a number of teams across the EIS that don't operate vertically down and drill into a specialism, they go across disciplines, so multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary, however people want to uh describe it. But the idea is that you take knowledges and insight from a broad range of variables to then improve practice on the ground. So one of the teams in the EIS that do that are a performance innovation team, for example. Um, so they're the guys that do wicked projects, like um, you know, they'll they'll help British cycling or British skeleton with their suits, and you know, or they'll do uh there's a wicked project that was in boxing over uh the Rio cycle, which was around moisturizing so to reduce the chances of getting cut or or or swelling to the to the eyes, so you would look like you were in more control of the fight than perhaps you were. But our team is around trying to apply those transdisciplinary principles to support sports, to have performance pathways that are evidence-based and data informed and are built on good practice. So the performance pathway is uh anything from the point of first selection into a British performance environment all the way through to the point in which you leave. So it does include people's senior program experiences, but because there's so much activity going on at the top end, we quite often find ourselves trying to fill in the gap slower down. Okay. So we work quite a lot with heads of talent, for example, head talent coaches on how they might best identify gaps in their pathway and how they might go and find the athletes with the attributes that they're looking for, um, how they create phenomenal learning experiences built on really clear ideas of curriculum and development that then best prepare athletes for senior success, but then also provide them with the skills and attributes they're going to need to be successful after sport, which is something that's becoming even more in our awareness as a system, the duty of care, the broader system has to making sure that athletes don't fall off a cliff edge when they get to the end of their career, that they have not just financial stability and employment prospects, but they also have personal skills and personal attributes and characteristics that mean that they're going to be in a decent position to move on post-sport. So we end up working in practical terms, we end up working from very specific projects. So I've just finished a project with a sport where they came to us with a question which was at under 16 level, what are the most appropriate psychosocial and cognitive characteristics we could profile for? And how might we best test that and how might we best make sense of that? So do a sport might come to you with like a really specific question.

SPEAKER_01 34:09

Yeah, and that's a juicy one, Matt. Oh, it's wicked. I love it. It's good how specific it is as well. It's that's not an airy-fairy question. That's quite a quite a defined, narrow question for you to get your teeth set into.

SPEAKER_00 34:22

And because we get to look across all the sports, we we try and influence people to ask those questions. So we looked across the sports, and and our gut feel was that we probably haven't got profiling right, not just psych profiling, but profiling as a holistic process right. So we ended up inviting upwards of a hundred people from talent roles across the system to an event. So we ran a symposium on profiling. We brought in some of the world-leading experts to come and tell us about what the science says. We spoke to coaches and practitioners about what profiling could look like. And then it was off the back of that experience that people were provoked to think what they could do better with profiling. And then shortly after, that kind of request falls in my inbox to say, Oh, you really provoked us to think about this. One of the things we really want to do well is psych profiling. Can you come and help us? So you get those really specific projects, or you get like big, massive strategic ones. So, a big an example of a massive strategic project would be we obviously do a lot on transitions. And um, one of the questions UK Sport had was how do we best support the transitional experiences athletes have when they come into world-class programs? What do we need to do to support transitions as they navigate through a world-class program experience? And critically, how do we provide appropriate and world-leading support to athletes that are transitioning out of world-class programs, whether that's because they've been deselected or they've chosen another career, or just because they're retiring and they're moving on to something else? You know, that that's a bloody massive question. So, and that is a very different type of work. So, yeah, from a pathways team perspective, like we've got people in the team that are coaches, physiologists, SNC coaches, you know, people developers, coach developers, like it's just quite an eclectic mix of people. But what we do is try and solve or support sports to solve complex problems or to try and influence the direction in which the wider high performance system is headed.

Full time reflection

SPEAKER_01 36:41

If you are still listening, thanks for sharing another slice of pie. And if you're listening on iTunes or Apple Podcasts and haven't done so yet, it would be brilliant if you could leave a review, and this would really help the podcast reach more people. For those of you that have already left a review, thank you very, very much. As you can hear in the conversation, I really latched onto Elliot's life metaphor of the river, encapsulating changes in direction, the sliding doors in life that we so often look back on as critical moments, but also encapsulating this sense of speed or intensity, reflecting the surges of intensity that life throws at us from time to time. Within any world of work, where you learn your trade over a lifetime of development, one can recognise this sense of intensity or being in the rapid, to use that same river and canoeing metaphor. It might be learning the ropes and throwing yourself into your first job, or getting that first big promotion, or getting into the team for the first time, or it might be being in a managerial position for the first time as well. In a sports psychology world of trainees and trainee development, McEwen, Todd and Eubank refer to going through these experiences as a concentrated period of learning that creates a sense of rapid growth. I suppose where Elliot's metaphor comes in handy from a well-being perspective is that you don't want to be in the rapids for too long. Working and learning at such an intensity might not be sustainable in the long term, and you might want to spend some time just floating downstream for a bit before the next period of angry white-tipped waves emerges. The other thing that struck me about Elliot's journey is the number of different people he has surrounded himself with and connects with as part of working in a multidisciplinary team. We heard him referring to work with fellow sports psychologists, with coaches, with head talent coaches, and even with innovation specialists during his anecdotes about British boxing and moisturizing. And to do this, he's been taking his expertise on the road, travelling around the country, talking to different athletes, coaches and specialists, sharing knowledge and connecting with different parts of the high performance machine. And I think for me, that is one of the key pieces of learning I've taken from this conversation with Elliot, that all this psychology and high performance stuff sounds absolutely great, but it has to be put into practice. And that means getting in there. It means getting on the road and getting out there, travelling, talking to people, collaborating. It's this effort and these conversations that exist in the gaps between the pretty flow chart boxes on a PowerPoint. Well, there's loads more from Elliot in part two of our conversation. We talk about the pivot to more well-being focus within Olympic sport, significant life setbacks, winning but winning in a meaningful way, and some great sound bites by Ken Ravitsa as well. So look out for part two when it goes out later in the year. That's it from me. Thanks again for listening, and until next time, have a good one.