Human Flourishing in Education || Nick Holton

performance and overall well being. In fulfillment, he works with individuals, teams, businesses, and organizations ranging from professional athletes, NCAA programs, educational institutions, first responders, and Fortune one hundred executives. He is co founder of the Anti Fragile Academy, and he also hosts the podcast Flourish FM, which is sponsored by the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard and the Department of Education at Oxford.

Nick has worked with clients, given talks, and delivered trainings across the US, Europe, India, Australia, Uganda, Singapore, Mexico, and South America. In this episode, I talked to Nick Holton about human flourishing. Our current education system is primarily concerned with teaching academic subjects. While building knowledge is essential, this is not enough to allow students to self actualize. Nick points out that young people's need to matter should be

addressed as well. To facilitate human flourishing, we need to embed the different principles of positive psychology both inside and outside of the classrooms. Nick and I believe that education can transform society for the better, and we exchange ideas on how we can build an ecosystem that fosters holistic development. This is a topic really near and dear to my heart, and it was great to have this chat with someone

who I really admire. Nick's a great guy. He's super smart, super caring, and he has a really amazing go get him attitude. So that further ado I bring you doctor Nick Holton. Hey, buddy, how you doing?

is in educational psychology. I'm traditionally an educator trained as an educator, but have moved sort of into the world of our scientific understanding of human flourishing and the good life.

know you're a big fan of. There were people like that, just not necessarily folks I would qualify as academic researchers. The closest people I would come to are, of course ME High, chicks at ME High, and Richard Ryan and ed dec. So my introduction was basically coming through a master's program teaching for a long time, looking at the

situation around me and saying, this ain't it. This is not as good as it gets, despite being in a context where it could have probably been about as good as it gets if you remove that context from the

educational system. And so so when I entered my PhD program, I really went searching not just for research, but really for examples and understanding of how we could do this better, because I was looking at young people who were, you know, who found their element so to speak, right, who were passionate, who were excited, who weren't just jumping through the hoops and chasing grades and admission to certain schools, and those

sorts of things. And the closest thing I came to, where DC Ryan intrinsic motivation, passion, purpose, flow, those sorts of things, and that eventually opened me up to the world of positive psychology and flourishing more generally awesome.

twenty fifteen. It must have been twenty fifteen. It was the graduating class of twenty fifteen the school I was working at brought in doctor tal Ben Shahar, and so I was mid dissertation writing a lot about sort of the science of well being, daemonia, engagement, intrinsic motivation, flow, and then here comes Tall And if your listeners don't know, Tall Tall started the positive psychology program at Harvard that became wildly popular, and I think in many ways was

sort of on the front line of the development of this field. It was very fortunate I went up and introduced myself. He was incredibly kind. He offered to read my dissertation, He was very supportive, offered to help in any way he could, So that only kind of furthered my dive and enthusiasm into the field as a whole, and it evolved from there.

already by the time I entered my doctoral program. It was my gig in college during undergrad Right, I was a pretty good player myself, and knew I wanted to go into education, knew I wanted to work with young people, and so coaching the sport that I played, seem like a nice natural transition, right, So I have in some way, shape or form been instructing, coaching, teaching, whatever you want to call it, you know, whatever semantic debate you want

to have around those terms. Really since two thousand and three, probably, right, so fifteen years or so in each field, you know, combined thirty years experience across basically every age group in

most I think, probably different demographic populations as well. So there was a lot of coaching, a lot of teaching from two thousand and three to really within the last a few years, handful of years, probably, Like once I've defended my dissertation twenty sixteen, I started my own business, started coaching, started consulting because I basically looked at what I was doing inside a classroom around flourishing, pause, psych wellness, motivation, purpose,

you know, a lot of the stuff that you write about and transcend as well, and said, well, this can apply to anybody, right, Like, it's great to be able to sit here and do this with young people, but I can do more and I want to do more.

So that turned eventually into adult courses. So I was teaching a lot of parents of the school that I worked at, I was teaching a lot of alumni, and then I started kind of as a side gig advising some business leaders, working with athletes here and there, and then it just sort of developed to the point where and then eventually you and I met this way. Eventually I left that school, moved to Philadelphia, your original hood,

and was kind of walking around downtown. In fact, I remember it very specifically, walking around downtown Washington Square Park listening to your episode with Glenn Fox on FRC radio.

Why don't you come coach for us? And that led to I think my sort of official entry into formal coaching, if you will, right, and then you and I met, and I've been doing mostly that work for the last couple of years.

heart lately. Is this idea of I would love to be able to train teachers to be self actualization coaches, you know, And I know that's an idea that really resonated with you too. What do you think are some of the mean sort of principles or things you've learned from your coaching experience you think we can apply in schools to help bring in the best in students. I think that'd be a good way to kind of start kickoff our discussion.

problematic but actually harmful in many cases. But when I'm working with a client, a student, whoever it might be, the educational term is differentiation, and I think you have a very personal experience with this as well, given your time as a kid in school and going through the system, to be able to look at each young person or adult for who they are, what their situation is, what their context is, and then start to work and develop a plan from there. Now, the tricky part there, of course,

is plan for what. There's a larger systemic question involved in that, right, but it starts with I think having the time and the space to be able to get to know each person you're working with on a deeper one to one level, which typically is not the case in a lot of classrooms these days.

And I think that coaching and being that one and one attention signals that in a way. Right, do you see that need for mattering as playing a big role in the work you do?

We both love Lee. She's terrific, and we were talking to her a bit about her Visible well Being program and the different sort of components of it, and myself and my co host for our podcast kind of pressed her a little bit on the purpose and meaning question, said where is it? Where is it in your framework?

Where is it in your model? And she made the argument that in their very large scale studies you often don't see that need or at least have meaning and purpose come to sort of the top of the list

for people at that age. On some level, that makes sense, And I think it actually is a good pushback against what I just said about personalized attention, because I don't want personalized attention to sound like everyone should just do whatever they want, because we need to learn to live in community and groups and ecosystems and all those sorts

of things. So on the one hand, you know, I'm taking that very good research from somebody I deeply respect, right, and at the same time looking at the if you will, anekdata right, this term I keep hearing getting thrown around all people want to matter, But it seems to me that young people especially are really driven to find someone

or something that gives them that sense of mattering. It might not be purpose, but at some level of probably you know the boat, you know, self esteem, connection, relationships, I matter to someone or something right, So I think

there's it's not really an either or. I think there's room for a both and and yeah, one hundred percent young people are looking for that, And I think that's that is the crux of what we're getting into in the world of education is I think a lot of young people feel like they matter to the extent that they can get the grades, get the test scores, get into the schools, and go get the job.

help them matter right? How do we find ways and channels to kind of pull that out of them, to help them become more aware of that and then execute it on a way that creates that sense of mattering for themselves rather than having it kind of just be up to what the system dictates.

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dot org and get twenty percent off today. I look forward to welcoming you in December. Its long occurred to me that we need to do something different about how we handle troublemakers, you know. That's something that occurred to me as you were talking, and not just help the

ones who are already succeeding, succeed more, you know. But we do a terrible job handling the troublemakers, don't we, And we completely neglect the fact that they may have a lot of creative potential, and because you know, they're they're defiant, or let's say they're rebellious. Elliousness is not necessarily a bad characteristic right, if integrated and harnessed in

a good way. So it's so, what role do you see in coaching young kids the idea of being able to kind of see a force spectrum of who they could be than just their bad behavior.

the hoops and those sorts of things. But the ones who don't fit that mold and who really need somebody to lean on, those are the fun ones to work with me. I mean, they're all fun to work with, but those are kind of the special cases. How do you go about doing that in a coaching situation? I think again, it comes back to personalization. It's a lot

of one on one time or small group time. It's helping them see their strengths and their talents, right, not only those things, but certainly those things and having a strengths focus to combat in experience in a system that often makes them feel like they're mostly made up of weaknesses. Right.

I mean that's a really hard thing for anyone to sustain and navigate, let alone a person who's twelve, fifteen, seventeen, those sorts of things helping them to really reflect on and clarify and think about what they want, you know, I'm going to say out of life. That's a big question for a teenager, but at least getting them like, okay, so maybe school isn't your thing right right now, maybe

a particular trajectory isn't your thing. That's okay, Like you should give permission to yourself for that to be okay, But that doesn't mean do nothing, Right, who are you going to be? Or what do you want to be? Or what do you want to do instead of those things? And then once we can start to zero in on that, we can come back to what I said earlier, which is start to develop a plant. Right, Okay, if this is the destination, what's the trajectory right? What's the path right?

And that's not always super clear, but at least it's a starting point for a young person.

optimal performance, optimal functioning. I like Carol Riff's language around environmental mastery right too. Yeah, you know, just developing these competencies that give you a sense of self esteem, self concept, self efficacy, and allow you to, I think, start to access that word we mentioned earlier, which is mattering. Right. What's at the core of mattering? Well, I need to have an entity that I matter too, right, but why

might I matter to them? I don't mean to be overly crass about it, but you serve some sort of utility, right That might be love, affection, companionship, but it might be a skill set, right, sort of a quote unquot traditionally hard skill set, so to speak. Right. So in an educational context, that's where I think you get back into that balance of the individual and the community. It's one thing to know who you are and know what your strengths are, and know what you're motivated by, what

you're passionate about, and what you want to do. But if that doesn't have a context, an ecosystem, a community to exist in, you're not necessarily going to get the pleasant emotion that's associated with it. Right. So I think it's really this kind of nice combination of me and we, right, these me needs and these we needs and finding ways for those to fit together.

Can you even self actualize independent of your environment? Is that even possible? Yeah? Is that possible?

teachers have candidly some really unrealistic expectations. In a lot of cases, they have a ton on their plates and a lot of stuff overflows off of that plate as a consequence. When it comes to good educators, the best educators and the type of educator that I have always wanted to be and to a certain extent, continue to want to be even though I'm working with some other populations.

Now it comes down to contributing having an impact. Now, that could be directly to a young person, or it could be more indirectly to the young person who then is going to go out in impact society or their family, or their community or whatever it might be, whatever nested level you know, you want to think about. Ultimately, I think that's why you're interested in this too. Like, I still believe that education is the way to transform an

entire society. I don't think we're doing that at this moment, but I still believe in the system. And so when I was oh jeez, it must have been sixth grade, I was probably about twelve years old. I distinctly remember taking my sister. I have two younger sisters. Took the

youngest one out into the driveway. She had a soccer game that day, and I remember helping her with a couple of things, and she went out to the game later that day, had a great game, you know, big mile on her face, like really took it to this boy that was, you know, twice her size, that sort of thing. And I remember thinking, oh, I did that right, Like, not not terribly humbly and certainly naively, but I remember thinking, well, the correlation is I worked with her. She went out

and had this great game. She happy about it. That makes me feel good? Yeah, right, And so that feeling I grabbed onto and then it was a three years later. I did a like a day at work sort of thing through my high school with my uncles. An incredible guy,

and he was an athletic director at the time. And I remember leaving a school where I had a bunch of great relationships with my teachers, awesome teachers, you know, but just actually better people, people who looked out for me and felt kind of like friends, right, and going to work with my uncle and seeing him on the other side of that same relationships, right, but he was on the adult side, and I had that same feeling.

It's like, oh, I want more of that. That's the way to get that same feeling I had with my sister time and time and time again. So what do I want to do. I want to go into education. Right. So when you ask about meaning mattering purpose, ultimately it boils down to trying to work with someone more often than not, young people who need a little bit of help, support, guidance,

a friend, whatever it might. It's just adding value. It's just impacting them positively so that they can go be a better version of themselves and ideally impact other people positively.

Do you go to the conferences, do you know the main players in that field, and then what is the current state of the field, because I can't say I've kept up too much with it.

about a decade. I think had some credibility and respect and cloud enough to kind of push that thing forward. And so I within a year or so became kind of the director of that program. That opened me up to the world of, for lack of a better phrase, although we'll talk about this and maybe in a couple

of minutes, positive education. And we started offering student electives, which quickly became intensely popular, probably a variety of reasons for that, and then eventually started teaching the parents and the alumni who were really interested in it as well. That got us to a point where where I was

starting to ask questions more so about the ecosystem around us. So, for instance, you know, kid comes into the elective and we talk about something like grit cause you mentioned Angela or you know, Carol stuff, or on growth and fixed mindset.

But then they go home and they get a completely different message, or they go to the next teacher and they get a completely different message, right, And it felt this might not be a bad thing, but it felt a little like Sisyphis and you know, hey, are we really going to get to the top of this hill like I'd really like to? Right, which remember was the whole reason I went into my PhD program in the first place. Yeah, how do we get the best out

of our young people? Right? And it quickly became apparent to me that that had to be an ecosystemic question on some level. So that led me to get connected with different organizations like IPEN, the International Positive Education Network.

They wanted to get in with our school. We had a variety of different plans, and suffice to say, at some point early on in the pandemic, we went through some transitions and it became clear to me that part of the ecosystemic question has to involve my colleagues, and it became clear that colleague well being might not be of the utmost priority. And to be candidly, Scott, I didn't want to be the jackass walking around talking about positive psyche and well being with a bunch of people

who are miserable. That was of no interest to me. Right So, fortuitously, within the same week of sort of having that insight or at least judgment, I connected with my co director of Human Flourishing at the Shipley School, right which is right down the road from where you're from. And I had reached out to her. Name's doctor Sharon Russell.

Shout out to Sharon, She's awesome. I had reached out to her her because we were seeking essentially a counselor a counseling position at the school in Los Angeles, and she responded to me and said, well, we're seeking an associate director of positive education, which is what it was called at the time. And so I called her the next day and said, hey, how about me. We knew

each other a little bit already. She was a little surprised that I was considering moving, but I knew Shipley I knew its reputation, and it's the long way of answering the question what we're going to get there?

But I think we at Shipley are at least a firing to do things a bit differently, and so coming from my school in Los Angeles, I thought this would be a really great opportunity to get even more embedded

in this field. Right. So to answer your question, Yes, through my work in LA, through my work with the Shipley School, I've had the opportunity to kind of collaborate with or be in meetings with the likes of Angela and Marty Seligman and others who are really really big names in that field, as well as attend some of these conferences get exposed to some of these other leaders like Lee Waters and others, and so to a say yeah to a certain extent embedded in it and at

the same time critical of it. I don't mean to be overly derogatory about it, Yeah, somewhat. I mean, here's why I keep changing language. I'll give you another side note. So, a friend of yours who I told you I met in LA because we had her out for talk, Sonya Leer Burmirski. She came and gave a talk at my school in Los Angeles, and we talked a little bit

about the name positive psychology. I haven't met a person that's a big fan of it, that title, right, and a lot of the reason why you know, we had Todd cash in on our podcast. I know, you know Todd is the shadow side, right, the upside of your dark side, the way unpleasant or so called. You know, negative emotions are actually associated with like different markers of psychological health and well being and keep us safe and keep us motivated and these sorts of things. Oftentimes it

gets confused with toxic positivity. Oftentimes it gets criticized, somewhat fairly so for being a little too individualistic, right, and not having enough of a community focus, and so pretty quickly into my tenure at Shipley, Sharon and I started talking about whether positive psychology or positive of education was really the term that we were going for, not only because we had some concerns about it, but I mean to be crass from a marketing perspective, that sounds a

little hand wavy as well, right when you're trying to essentially recruit families. So you know, there's been an evolution from sort of you know, the kids in front of me are not all becoming their best selves? To oh, is it a motivation question? Is it a flow question? Is it a well being question? Is it a purpose question?

To well, it's all of that. How do we help them like collect this recipe so to speak, right, which you've done really nicely in transcend and then start reorganizing and rethinking systems to make sure that that can happen.

to see what you think of this label. And you can be honest with me. You can shatter my dreams too if you want. But but I'd like to call it toward a human centered education system. And I was wondering what your thoughts on that. I was even thinking about me. We wring a book about that, and we've talked about this before.

and life satisfaction. So this is not going to sound super science y coming from an academic, but I think we're mostly talking about the same stuff, right, I think I actually recently you had a tweet or an IG post or something where you more or less said something along those lines. We're mostly talking about the same stuff, and that stuff is what most human beings really need, I mean truly need. Right, So when you say the phrase human centered education, I completely jive with that, and

that's what I would like to see. I do not think that's anywhere close to what we currently have.

So Sharon is traditionally a counselor by trade right and comes with that sort of background, which is why I think she and I make a good team, and always felt like we'd make a good team because I was coming from the educator pause psych background, right, so there was a nice sort of I think, complementary skill set there. So Sharon has been at Shipley I can't even remember now, at least a couple of decades, with one stint away

in between. But when she came back, she really started to push forward what at that point I think was commonly referred to as social emotional or socio emotional learning, and that led to the development of our curriculum that's

known as Seed Seed Social Emotional and Ethical Development. So at Shipley, every student takes Seed classes I believe K through twelve every year as one of their It's called a quote unquote minor, which is essentially it's not an elective because they can't opt in or out right, but

it's not it's not graded. Let's put it that way, okay, So that gives any Shipley student the opportunity to at least start to get exposed to some of these ideas and concepts and exercises and principles in a way that we hope gives them different capacities as they move on to that next stage in life. Right Now, again that's aspirational. My role in that is really to primarily focus on our adult population alongside that. So some of it is

exactly what you said. Primarily, what I do for Shipley now is work with the teaching population to help them understand where there are organic opportunities to include concepts like flow, emotional agility, gratitude, mindfulness, right, any sort of the different tools and subcomponents you might think of as being highly associated with our field, where the opportunities for them to organically embed those into a classroom experience or out of

classroom experience as well, right, because they're teachers primarily in classroom experience. Because many teachers are looking at the situation and saying, so I need to teach my core curriculum and all the skills associated with it. Now I need to teach well being stuff. And by the way, and this is something Shipley's deeply committed to, but I need to be thinking about concerns of Dee and I as well, and you can see how quickly a teachers play will

start to overflow. Right. That I need to do at this point with Shipley and others is try to help them comprehend quickly and apply efficiently, right, because there's just not a lot of space for teachers to do more.

Because what if teachers focus so much on the students' happiness and self actualization and all that fun stuff and then they bomb and tank their standardized tests, Well, the school system is not going to be happy with that, right school administrators.

in communities. Right. So, for instance, I have student taught and worked in schools that are really at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum, and I've spent most of my career working at schools that are at the top. Now, in both circumstances, I would argue, neither group, neither population of students, is particularly happy or satisfied. I go back to the twenty was it twenty fifteen study Mark Brackett

mentions this in Permission to Feel That noted. I think seventy five percent of the words that students use to describe their school experience are negative. Right. It suggests something about unpleasant emotion, which is telling us something. It's telling us something, right. The more interesting question is why. And in some cases you have communities and environments in which teachers are they're just trying to keep their head above water, right,

They're trying. They're getting students who are years behind in reading levels. They're getting students who have really no emotional awareness or self regulation, no math skills, science skills, writing skills, you know, whatever it might be. And so I'm very hesitant to say that we should ignore those things because there is a practical utility to them, and I and you want to live in a country with an educated populace. Right.

For years I taught a sociology class. My bachelor's degree is in history, so critical thinking and research and being able to analyze whether information is true, untrue, fact check, those sorts of things are important skills. At the same time, my years working in sort of the top end of

the socioeconomic ladder. Right when it comes to schools, a lot of those students are dissatisfied, unhappy, even in part because that's all they're hearing, and that's all they're getting, Right, Take these classes, get the these grades and these test scores to get into these schools. One of the schools I worked at, sixty percent of the population went to about twenty five different schools. Wow, right, that's it. Now, fine, those schools might be great, and they might have a

great experience. But the narrative there is that there's really kind of one path or one trajectory in this case, to success. But the implicit message there is to the good life, right, Like why do we want success? Well because we think it's going to lead to a good life. We're going to be satisfied, happy, whatever it might be. And so what you get into is this kind of vicious cycle of like, well, do the thing to be prepared for the next thing, and then do that thing

to be prepared for the next thing. And I didn't see a ton of investment into who the individual was, making sure they can explore their interests and their curiosities, right, like it was. So I mentioned the elect have I taught. Probably about half of the school took that from year to year, but the other half that didn't, Right, they basically could not once they became juniors or seniors because their perception was I got to do the honors track,

I got to do the ap track. I got to do stuff that gives me a five point grading scale, and positive psychology does not. So even though it might be great for me, it might help my well being, my motivation, my sense of self, whatever it might be, I cannot risk not getting the test score or not getting the grade that's going to get me into this school and supposedly unlock the rest of my future. Right.

So culture, it's a culture, right, And that's why I keep saying system and the culture and the larger ecosystem because both ends of the spectrum are dealing with really different pressures and different challenges. But in both cases it's leading to a lot of underwhelm, unhappiness, apathy, a motivation. You know, you can go on and on. It's sad, It's terribly sad.

with you. This is part of why I've moved in different directions in terms of coaching and consulting and then launching this program for young athletes, because I'm now starting to find ways where i can work outside the system right or around the like, how do you get this to young people in ways that are a little bit more organic, in environments where they actually want it and they crave it, rather than just trying to jam it into an over an already over crowded system that has

different values and different priorities.

in that world at that point. Yeah. And so like when we first met, like I had, I pretty much had a fanboy a moment. Oh shit, Scott Barry Kaufman right in the same virtual room as me. Right. So I had been aware of your work. I had always really enjoyed your work, and at the same time, your book on creativity, Wired to Create and Ungifted were tremendous for me in a variety of ways, but Transcend really

took it home. That was where, especially as an academic in some ways which I sort of fashioned myself to be. There was so much good science, so many good references and citations and talking about trajectories and different nuances because you're a nuanced guy. So we actually, I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but at Shipley, when we started moving beyond this idea of just positive psychology,

you mentioned Peggy Kern. We started we had been using the perma model for flourishing, right, which has a bunch of really wonderful things about it, and there's plenty of people who would maybe push back against it. Right. The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard, who sponsors our podcast, has a different model. We mentioned Carol Riff, different model. You would not call your sailboat metaphor a metaphor for flourishing, but it speaks to a lot of the same things

and it's a different model at the same time. Right, So I mentioned Sharon. This is a credit to her what she did. It was started taking some of these different models, putting them side by side, and then we kind of said, all right, where's the synthesis, Like, where can we pretty confidently say these are the things that

matter to most people across the lifespan? And then how do we start to really deeply embed them not just in classrooms, but in the ecosystem of a school or a community that includes the parent group and includes alumni more holistically. So it's a long way of saying, yeah, your work is literally edited in the work that we do together.

on it. So today we had we released an episode with a professor at San Francisco excuse me, Calsay State San fran who is runs founded in Ronse school in East Oakland called the Roses and Concrete School, and the whole premise, especially in East Oakland, is trying to focus on the material core human needs of young people in an environment where those things are often not present or at least insecure, right. Yeah. Well, it's a focus on

well being from the foundation up. So it's interesting that we're talking about this because I think more and more schools are starting to figure out we got to do it differently. We got to focus on exactly the sort of stuff you and I are talking about here.

diving into the science of human flourishing. I say the as if it's this like tight boundary and kind of settled category, but we treated I think rather broadly it could be a traditional kind of positive psychologist, somebody like Lee Waters, but it was somebody like yourself, right, who

focuses on self actualization humanistic psychology. We have already had educators, we've had philosophers, we've had people who write about critical thinking and technology, and it is supposed to be a deep dive into high quality hard science that helps people understand the components of flourishing life and ideally practically how

to build those different components. Now, the key piece here, and I'm glad you asked about the FM is one of the things that we wanted to do and that Harvard was very much in agreement on, is to get this outside of the podcast space, to get it into other countries, other parts of the world that very often do not have access to these teachings, learnings, these podcasts, but they do have access to radio, right, And so that FM is aspirational and a reminder that eventually, if

we're fortunate enough to grow this thing and really develop it, then eventually what we'd like to do is to get it into some of these parts of the world on

radio so that it's more accessible for more people. And that that's a companied by I think an emphasis on having a diverse set of guests, different cultural influences, maybe different spiritual influences, and really trying to make sure that we represent this in a holistic, diverse way, because you know, let's speak candid about it, John and I are a couple of thirty something white dudes from the US like trying to share this, and so we really are intentional

about bringing in guests who will bring some of those diverse perspectives as long as there's still research based.

Can you talk a little bit about that, And I think that'd be a nice way to kind of end this conversation today.

don't have the skill set. Number two. So then if you offer it as its own course, if it's not rated, the sad reality is it gets deprioritized by the students. Right. The next level is if it is then required. I mean you've been around enough teenagers, right like that drive for autonomy at that age, Anything they are forced to do, more often than not, becomes the enemy, right rationally or irrationally,

it becomes the enemy. So when I say Trojan Horace, what we're trying to do right now is get people the material through avenues and fields that they're already interested in or hooked on. And so what that means for

me traditionally, is athletics. So I've partnered with I think you met him once or twice, a former colleague of mine, doctor Adam Wright, who's the director of mental Performance for the Washington Nationals and a tremendous coach, a lot of clinical background, right, amazing psychologists in a variety of ways. And then I'm bringing in a lot of the educational

piece and we're working hard. Right now, I'm working with a Division one soccer program here in Michigan where I'm currently sitting and trying to figure out how we can create reasonably priced, right concise, effective programming, so asynchronous learning, along with maybe group coaching, individual coaching, to ultimately get this material to as many young athletes as possible. Just in the last few months, five or six, I think D one athletes committed suicide. There's over half of Division

one athletes. And this is just college right, experience some sort of mental illness or just have trouble navigating the you know, kind of general ebbs and flows of life. But it's also the high school athletes, and it's also young professional athletes. I've worked with a few who, frankly, I mean, if I were to be simplistic about it.

They've got all the talent in the world, but they're they're anxious, they're stress, they're in their own head, they have negative self talk, they're unhappy, all the different things that can come with it, right, So, so Adam and I are trying to combat those trends and get this material to people who are asking for it instead of getting it to people who are basically being forced into it.