50% Mind, 50% Body: Changing the Way Young Athletes Are Coached

[00:00:01] Welcome to the The Impact Makers Podcast, where stories become solutions, purpose becomes impact, and the ordinary people discover the extraordinary difference they can make. Here you'll meet inspiring impact makers and authors from our empowered books who found their way off Victim Island and over to Solution City, transforming challenges into purpose and using their experiences to help others.

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[00:01:04] Welcome back to another episode of the Impact Makers Podcast. I am Melissa Deally. And I am Billie Aadmi and this is where one spark can create infinite impact. We're so excited to have our guest today, Miss Denise Holland coming all the way from Kent, England. I met you almost a year and a half ago now. No, two years ago. Two years ago at the 3PRI professional training.

[00:01:32] And yeah, I loved just the environment of that whole group. And we're so excited to have you on our podcast today. It's great. It's lovely to be here, Benny. And I would love to introduce you a little bit to the audience and then have you share your own story, Denise. Denise Holland is a state of mind performance specialist for youth talent and elite sports.

[00:01:55] She supports talent and elite performers to understand the state of mind behind clarity, confidence and flow. A former international netball athlete, national coach for Scotland netball, England Super League coach and author of Play Freely, The Spiritual Key to Athletic Excellence. Denise brings over 35 years of lived experience in high performance sport to her work with talented athletes, coaches and parents.

[00:02:22] And we definitely want to dive into this book today, Denise. Denise, however, before we get there, I know that there's always a story behind the story. And you have all of these accolades and an incredible national athlete and coach and have competed internationally. However, I just want to ask you to share. Was it always just flow?

[00:02:47] no um for sure i mean in short um no i mean i as an athlete i had a very torrid time of being an athlete i really wanted to i wanted to be a shooter i was naturally a defender but i just wanted to put the ball in the basket and for those of you don't don't know netball it's very

[00:03:12] similar to basketball and actually it was derived from basketball in the early 1900s and i just had a real inspiration to be a netball a world-class netball shooter and i was i was fantastic in training but when it came to the match we just could not control the nerves and i would just crumble and it was fascinating to me how that happened and so i would have tried all sorts of things to control

[00:03:37] and manage and manipulate my mind such that i could be free so i could be in that zone state of optimal functioning and sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't work or sometimes it appeared to work and not work so i didn't know any better and i just muddled through i muddled through my international playing career and then i became uh came back to england came became a national

[00:04:03] a super league coach an england super league coach and from the other side watching the athletes i would also see that those skills were there to be if you like expressed but something was stopping them something was um preventing those athletes from being the best they can be and again i was okay

[00:04:27] well you know i tried all sorts of um techniques to help them to get into that flow state and it just felt it felt really substandard compared to everything that we did to prepare the athletes physically and all of the conditioning that they went through the the the mind and how it impacted an effective

[00:04:53] performance was really like secondary and so it wasn't until i left my role as national coach for scotland um prematurely four and a half years dry you know traveling from gatwick to glasgow every week 65 hour weeks you know leading my family and then to not go to a commonwealth games which is what i had

[00:05:16] really spent my whole life dreaming about it wasn't until then when something didn't go the way i wanted it that i was drawing everything that i had used for 30 years and i had nothing i mean there wasn't a single technique that could take me out of that pain and that discomfort and that upset and i was like

[00:05:42] lost i was completely lost and divinely on my way home i came across Jamie Smart's book clarity and i started to read it and it was divinely because i literally said put my hands up in the air and said god can you give me something to keep me occupied for the next six months because this feels horrible and there was jamie's book i mean that was 13 years ago there wasn't there wasn't too much

[00:06:07] around this three principles understanding about and there it was so i just said okay and took it and i read that book and it led me to michael neill's inside out revolution and all the while i was still trying to pick up my life i was trying to get on and be a mother to my children and i was i had a really lovely relationship with my ex-husband and we brought up the kids in separate houses and and it and you know i was

[00:06:36] just really struggling with my life and i remember just one day something was stirring in me and i was just looking in the mirror and i you know as you do looking at your eyes and looking in the mirror and something dawned on me about wow am i really making this all up am i really making up my experience

[00:06:59] moment to moment via this incredible universal power of thought and i saw the truth of that and i saw all my words that is incredible because if that's true i don't have to feel this way and i can feel whatever i want to feel even though the circumstance hasn't changed i'm still no longer the coach that's going to

[00:07:24] the commonwealth games in 18 months and i still have put in four and a half years of my life to do that and it was it was just a revelation to me i i took my power back i you know really felt relieved and i could see oh this is how it works this is how life works this is how experience works

[00:07:50] and it was shocking it was shocking to me like i cried and laughed all weekend and it felt as if i had 48 hours in every day and everybody else only had 24 like everything slowed down i i just i just felt very connected i'm very alive and

[00:08:15] it did feel as if i i had found what i was looking for all my life and yet and i knew i was a seeker i knew i was looking for something i had books and books and books of self-help stuff but nothing would move the needle until that moment and i realized oh it's not about working on my mind and the content of my

[00:08:40] thinking it's about understanding how my experience works the fact that i'm a thinker and it just was transformative it was a complete game changer and was this before you knew anything about the three principles it was i read it was actually in terms

[00:09:05] of i'd read jamie's book it was a bit hardcore i must admit i kind of scanned it through and then i read properly if you like michael neill's inside out revolution so i suppose my insight came as a result of that but back up a couple of months in the december of 2012 i was in the pacific i was actually i took the

[00:09:33] scotland national squad to the pacific and we had we had competed in the cook islands against the cook islands and against wales and i was toying with the idea that shooters could shoot irrespective of their thinking and that they didn't have to control it and it was new to me it was like whoa hold on a second

[00:09:58] and we were we went to samoa after we went to the cook islands and that series would turn out to be a commonwealth games qualifier in 2014 because the top it would it would determine top 12 and if we made it we wouldn't need a pink ticket for being host in glasgow but it was a really key moment and i remember one morning saying okay denise i had five shooters which you wouldn't normally have

[00:10:28] you normally only have four but i was asking myself a very different question and it was which of those shooters can put the ball in the basket irrespective of their thinking and normally i would ask which of those five shooters can shoot under the pressure of their thinking

[00:10:50] and i thought wow it's so different and it was it was if you like something was breaking through and um strangely enough for two or three months later i would be out of the job and then i would come across this understanding of the three principles and then i would make it would make sense to me why i was asking such a different question and just for the audience for people that don't know what

[00:11:19] the three principles are is you know the work of sydney banks and its mind consciousness and thought and the premise is that you know our thoughts create our life and we are you know one thought away from perfect mental health and really the power of our thought and that we have 100 control of it so i love that because i know you know you know that we integrate the three principles teachings at the you know it really is the kind of the core foundation of life right yes we teach nlp and timeline therapy getting

[00:11:45] a therapy and it you know it's kind of stepping stones to getting to that point where it is such a simple concept it's almost too simple i know sydney used to talk about this that it's it's almost like i know george used to tell sydney that it's too simple we need to complicate it a bit more so people can understand it if that makes any sense so you know after all that happened you know and I love that you know they they call it insights for a reason right you get that internally it's not

[00:12:12] called an outside right you get that only from your own mind how now is is now that one moment shifted how you do life now and how you show up in your in your business now because yeah that's the different is it not it's completely different and you don't realize how much you've changed i suppose

[00:12:34] until situations occur and you realize how you show up to that situation and um let's just a few examples i mean first firstly um you know my husband and i we we separated in 2004 we didn't get divorced

[00:12:57] until 2015 and i came back to um the kent full time january 2013 and we we found a way to be really loving and caring to each other because when i knew that if i was in upset one it would be

[00:13:24] temporary and two that i was creating it with my own mind it wasn't coming from the situation it wasn't coming from my ex-husband and that i could really see that you i could think anything so i would choose to follow thoughts that were going to serve me and serve my children and serve my ex-husband

[00:13:48] because i didn't want to live in upset i didn't want to live in hurt i didn't want to live in jealousy i wanted to live in kindness and love and compassion and i wasn't prepared to lose my family when i when when nigel and i our relationship didn't work out and i thought well you know culturally you know we everybody goes in different directions everyone goes in different ways and actually

[00:14:18] culturally there's a lot of fighting and i'm like no i i'm not gonna do that i'm not gonna do that and so i don't know that that would have been possible for me had i not understood the power of the mind to create my moment to moment experience because it really looked like life experience was coming at me from outside it looked like that the way i felt was inevitable given the circumstance like it

[00:14:48] didn't look like it was optional so until i saw in that moment in the mirror that the truth behind the human experience i was a victim of life yeah a victim of circumstance i was going to be the victim of a breakdown in marriage and i was going to have to work it out and i was going to have to get help and i was

[00:15:15] going to get therapy and i was going to have to spend years getting over it and i no no no no no i was gifted this understanding of the mind and in a moment my life path my journey was going to be very different i love that we we actually ended up having a divorce party in vancouver

[00:15:42] nigel and i went to vancouver i know where we first met strangely and we took our two children james and nigel shared a room lydia and i shared a room and we just had a ball we gave thanks for our relationship and we just went over old ground that was stanley park and north vancouver and capilano

[00:16:06] and we went all of those places where nigel and i met you know back in italy in 1987 so um it couldn't have been a better ending to our marriage and i write about that in my book because you don't often hear about divorce parties yeah certainly not in those of ones with the with the ex usually the

[00:16:30] divorce divorce parties with all the girlfriends where you go and you know complain about the whole time and celebrate the the separation versus the opposite of a bachelorette party right yeah i love that and speaking of your book through this journey you have obviously learned so much and

[00:16:54] now part of the impact that you are making in the world is sharing this with others and you've written your book play freely and i absolutely love the name of it because you tie in the spirituality piece of it which is the mind piece of it to athleticism and athletic excellence and you don't often see that

[00:17:16] connection and i love how you bring it together and also when you were asked to coach back in england you made a very specific requirement on coming on as that that youth coach and i would love for you to share that because now you are impacting the youth in such a profound way yeah i just um i have a real i

[00:17:43] mean i have a netball club anyway and when i went to scotland i um didn't run it for a couple of years then i came back and to hook up the uh helm again and you know we doubled the revenue in a year and it was uh you know it was a chance to be one of the best junior clubs in in the county in the region even and i realized that wow this is not in schools this understanding i realized that it's a paradigm shift

[00:18:11] that is probably going to catch on in a you know it's 50 years since sydney banks brought it to the world in terms of the way he explains how life works but i think him wow it's going to be a long time before this becomes mainstream and i just felt that there was a calling for me to help the youth to be their amazing genius to be the person and to be the expression that they're supposed to be

[00:18:38] and i look around in my netball club and i see young girls really struggling with life in terms of identity and you know what they see on the end of their phone on the you know on the end of their arm they're seeing all of this uh social media and if you like inadvertently attaching their well-being to how many likes they're getting and i just thought well okay well there's a lot of work to be done here

[00:19:07] denise and if you can help young people to be who they're supposed to be in this world and to see that they are perfectly designed for life and that there is nothing to fix and there is nothing wrong with them that there is nothing to prove then they're going to have a chance of not only playing sport from a

[00:19:32] from freedom of mind but they're going to have chance to live their life really connected to the truth of how it works and rather than live if you like in an illusion of how it doesn't work and then getting all confused about how well they're doing all the time

[00:19:57] so that's what i do i mean 30 percent i say probably maybe 40 percent of my work is the youth and um i love sport and i love you know i love also performance and high performance so i love helping talented athletes take their game to another level through freedom of mind i love that and i also recall you telling me previously that when you were asked to coach you put in a requirement that

[00:20:27] you would do it however 50 percent of the time spent with the youth had to be focused on the mind and then the other 50 was on the conditioning and the physical development etc etc and and the organization said yes which is incredible because that's probably the first time that anybody's ever put that kind of a a split on the development of 50 percent mind and 50 percent physical for an athlete and

[00:20:57] you're not only allowing these youth to you know perform really well in their sport at some point they're going to stop that sport and you're giving them the gift of being able to perform in every other aspect of their life for the rest of their life and that's massive because we call these life skills right like these tools that we teach where it doesn't matter what the name of it is

[00:21:23] whether it's called the three principles or it's called nlp or whatever it's called they're still it's still wisdom of how your mind works right understanding so we're never taught this at school we're never taught even about the unconscious mind and how it runs programs and strategies and that's where trauma is stored and you know i learned this and just recently you know as i started doing this work that you know it's all internal and really you know the whole inner work that we say is is just

[00:21:51] that like our inner world and the funny thing is it's all out there right that you know your inner world is is you know your outer world is a reflection of your inner world and so can you share just a little bit about some of the teachings that you that you do with your your your athletes and your players that gives them those kinds of skills that now even beyond the sport they can bring it into their their lives for like you said with the you know the young girls with you know we see it all so much like with

[00:22:20] lack of confidence or you know comparison body issues and all this stuff so what's some of the teachings that you give them that now they can actually really take for the rest of their life yeah um i guess for me i see it that if we can help young people to understand two things one how they're designed for life

[00:22:48] so and two before i go into that how experience works so for me it's not a skill for me a skill is something that i i am doing if you like with my mind all right so i teach um athletes to move to move in

[00:23:11] different directions to pass the ball to intercept the ball um i i teach them that for me that's that's the skill part that's the technical that's the tactical that's the physical part of it i also help them with their decision making in terms of their space awareness so really using their mind and seeing plays unfold kids play naturally right you send them out in the playground then they don't need

[00:23:40] they don't need any teaching how to play and they just go off and play it's so funny isn't it um we don't have to teach kids to play therefore we don't have to teach kids to live and they already know that it's in the design it's instinctive it's intuitive and kids know how to be kind right they know how to be kind you have to teach kids how to be kind

[00:24:04] and so there's a there's a certain amount of there's a certain amount of um expression that's just already in there so what i do is i help them to reconnect with that and they get sort of you know sort of 11 12 and they and they're starting to struggle with our identity they've just forgotten

[00:24:27] they've just forgotten who and what they are as human life and how amazing is it that they can breathe and they don't have to be on it how amazing is it that their food digests so they don't have to do that how amazing is it that their hair grows and they don't have to make their hair grow or their nails grow how amazing is it that their muscles develop and get stronger and therefore they

[00:24:54] get faster and they don't have to be on that now sure they have to do some work to do that but they're going to grow anyway right we can't we're not in charge of growing we're not in charge of developing so i help them to see that life is already unfolding through their body and mind and that they

[00:25:14] if they reconnect it can just if you like ride the wave of that and get out the way of the intellect interfering with it so then that's the the psychological piece is just to help them to see well how does the experience work such that you're not going to sabotage what you've already got going

[00:25:41] for you okay so that and that's the exciting bit so it's uncovering it's discovering what you've got going for you as human life and at the same time seeing how easy it is to fall into the trap of believing that your experience is coming from anything other than your thinking in the moment

[00:26:09] love that and it's so true when you say falling into the trap of all of the programming as well that society puts on to us all of those things of not good enough not fast enough not smart enough not etc etc cancel cancel cancel that is coming in and when we can recognize that that has nothing to do with us nothing at all and release all of that then as you say we can be free to be the best version of

[00:26:36] ourselves whether it's on the playing field or any other aspect of our life so you've recently published play freely and it while it does talk about athleticism it's not just a book for athletes right yeah i mean it started out actually play freely started out as a book called u-turn why oh u-turn

[00:27:01] because it was kind of for everybody but there was this huge calling to see if i could document something that sports people could relate to in terms of these spiritual principles and so i wrote it for sports people but of course it's for everybody because um it's actually about the human the human experience the human mind and and how we can leverage this most invisible performance

[00:27:31] variable going i love that and in chapter three you dive into uh sorry the third section you are diving into a broader scope of experiences in life and i would love for you just to share that as as well a little bit about why you went with that and how it's different to what most people are talking about because of the

[00:27:58] insight that you've had yourself in our beautiful melissa um yeah the third section it came about because i could see that athletes have other lives they have lives outside of sports people have lives outside of sport so you know young people have um you know university they have school they have education

[00:28:23] um and there's lots of stresses around that environment it would appear so i wanted to clear that up i clear up the fact that stress is not in the environment it's it's what we uh project out into the world given our use of thought so um and also uncertainty and i wrote a chapter actually during covid and i reached out to professional footballers

[00:28:52] athletes and um um athletes that are in athletics and to find out how to be coping and to find out um what impact the covid world the world of covid was having on them and to get some introductions if you like as well and it was it was very interesting to me during that time so dealing with uncertainty and change

[00:29:18] i would say sports people are really good at that all right i would say that we we never know what the outcome is going to be of a particular competition a particular training schedule you know sports people run the risk of injury all the time so dealing with uncertainty and trying to stay in the moment is i think somewhat intuitive to sports people and when i reached out to the footballers

[00:29:47] sure enough they were getting on and making mini mini gyms in their houses in their gardens um and they were tapping into their innate resilience in a really beautiful way but some people would have sadly missed the cycle of performance so that would have been their time

[00:30:11] and during that covid time there were competitions were cancelled and then there was not going to be another opportunity so and i i wanted to to to really um tap into if you like retirement and early retirement unexpected retirement and that can happen at any age in sport because we have early specialization

[00:30:37] sports sports like gymnastics and you know by the time you're gonna getting in your 20s you know you're done you're cooked so wow um and so if you miss kind of three or four years of a covid cycle that could be your career and i wanted to address the the way in which this understanding would help people to

[00:31:03] see that they're okay and that that inspiration that allowed them that love of that sport that allowed them to come through them in such a beautiful expression the source is the same the source of that inspiration that love can come through with other things too it can develop it can evolve and i help people to get over their

[00:31:30] thinking in terms of disappointment and frustration such that they see it for what it is and they see oh you mean this competition isn't going to happen and i don't have to be disappointed frustrated and you're really out of it i can feel something else

[00:31:59] yeah you do not need to be in victimhood it's not being inflicted it's a an option oh and then people would oh really and it's it wasn't a case of getting them to control their mind it was just helping them to see that that your experience is up for grabs that you can feel anything given any

[00:32:23] situation in any moment and with that you can connect into this deeper part of yourself which is incredibly wise it's incredibly resilient and then i could see athletes coming up with all sorts of new and wonderful ideas as to how to spend their time going forward and I write about that the one

[00:32:47] particular guy um in my book you know that his entire business to create a fantastic gym membership was born out of um being grounded if you like from normal activities in covid it's kind of like what you said earlier is that really it's just teaching people how to get their

[00:33:12] power back that's all it is really is taking your power back because the programming as Alyssa was alluding to like programs us to give it away whether it's to comparing us on social media with the young girls or you know saying that it's because this didn't happen i now my life is this right and it really is no your life is what you want it to be and what you think it to be and then you create it so i love that i love that that and that's what we say with our school too like we're just an

[00:33:41] empowerment school right we're not teaching codependency we're not teaching that you need anything you're not broken and really you are creating your life and as long as you understand how the the machine works the system works then you can then put the output out properly right because sometimes the output is not what we want and it's because you're not really understanding the system so i love that i just i love that like there's you know it all leads to the same thing at the end of the day right and we always say this that no matter what doors are open they all lead to the same message

[00:34:11] that you are perfect the way you are you are you are meant to do great things in the way that you're meant to do it and just tap into that and find what that purpose is so denise i want to ask you what does making an impact mean to you anything i think for me getting an insight having a shift in consciousness

[00:34:40] having a shift in the level of consciousness that i'm operating at that allows me to get different thinking is so impactful so for me i don't know if this answers the question billy but that has been the

[00:35:01] biggest change in my life because i was when i had that inside the sight from within i was i didn't operate on that same um i don't know what other word to call it you know let i didn't off operate on that state of mind anymore so have the thinking that i used to get didn't come anymore so that's interesting

[00:35:30] isn't it like you get a jump in consciousness the thinking you get is different so making an impact for me is helping humanity jump a level of consciousness such that they are coming from a place inside of them that is

[00:35:51] is is wise is resilient is creative is is huge hugely hopeful for for humanity rather than coming from a place of blame and um uh state of mind which is um judgmental and unhelpful to themselves and others which is

[00:36:15] you know you know that i i hear people just moaning all the time and like wow i want to be in their head judging all the time i want to be in their head and yet it's innocent you see they don't mean to but given the level of consciousness that they're working out that makes sense to them it makes total sense and

[00:36:37] i have real heart for that so you know i don't i don't judge that at all but having an impact is helping people to to to raise the level raise the vibration and the frequency at which they're operating in the world and and when we do that life just gets a whole heap better doesn't it i love that i love

[00:37:03] that denise and love how you're sharing that with the youth in particular because it's just going to have such a profound impact on the the rest of their lives and they will teach it to their children it'll have that generational ripple effect which i think is beautiful so if people want to uh get hold of you or get hold of your book if you can please share how you can people can reach out

[00:37:29] yeah they can reach out um i have two two emails info at denise holland org i also have denise at play freely.co.uk and if you can just drop me an email and anybody on the call listening to this can um uh for as long as i have these free coupons available it has plenty which is really good um they can just reach out to me and um you know just drop me a line and say you'd love to have a free

[00:37:56] digital copy of the book and i can send it to you and or just look on my website and switch are www.deniseholland.org or www.playfreely.co.uk beautiful thank you very much and i have all of that in the show notes and i just want to say thank you so so much for joining us today for the work that you're doing in the world for coming and yes

[00:38:23] sharing it so freely here with us we absolutely love and appreciate you your work and to the audience thank you for tuning in each and every week to the impact makers podcast and if you know someone that needs to hear this episode please share it with them because one spark can create infinite impact in the world beautiful thank you thank you so much thank you ladies thank you

[00:38:51] if you want to make more impact click the link in the show notes to learn more about the impact maker alliance no matter where you are at in life we have something for you remember your one spark can create infinite impact