Work: Number 16 of 20 – “How to give your teenager an achievement advantage.”

I've spent about twenty years looking for ways to help others achieve their performance potentials. I began this journey introspectively, the goal being to improve myself. A journey that started at around the age of thirteen. Looking at myself in the mirror. Comparing myself to my siblings and peers, I was mostly ashamed. But more than that, I was angry. At first, I was angry at the world for only dealing me a moderate hand. Why didn't I have all the advantages that others around me had? I viewed my situation like this for quite a while, simply hoping that things would change on their own. Eventually I came to the realisation that it was me who needed to change myself. I was overweight, lazy, and had never read a book that hadn’t been forced upon me. The first item on the list was my physical appearance; so, I taught myself to cook. I didn’t want to rely on anyone else or use them as an excuse for why I had no control over my diet. The next thing I did was change my attitude towards exercise. Instead of viewing it as a chore, as something I was inherently bad at, I chose to reframed it. Diving in headfirst, making sure it became part of my identity, allowing exercise and hard physical training to speak for me. It wasn’t long before I transformed my physical appearance. With this came confidence.

The next problem was my schoolwork. I had always underperformed academically at primary school and in my early years at secondary school. Just like my physical self, I had believed that this was just the way things were. That I wasn’t bright enough, so why bother trying. But after observing the results of my physical adaptation I wondered if the same concept could be applied to my intellectual achievements as well. Just as I had done with my physical appearance, by simply reframing the beliefs I had about myself, I could change my attitude towards more cognitive endeavours. And so, I began to read… and read… and read. I am still no genius by any stretch of the imagination. But by changing the lens I viewed myself through I significantly improved my academic performance. By the time I finished high school I was accepted into one of the UK’s ‘red brick’ Universities (now part of the Russel group), the American equivalent of an IV league school. I went on to receive the highest grade in the year for my final year honours thesis, and continued to complete a postgraduate in education and then a Masters in Performance Management.

This is all very Dweck (growth and fixed mindset), I know. Most of us are to some degree performance managers, as we are always trying to improve our personal situation. After moving away from teaching, I found myself managing a very exclusive personal training studio in a very expensive part of London. All the clients were highly successful individuals in their own rights. We were very expensive, so to be one of our clients you had to have a substantial disposable income. To put this into context, two of my clients appeared in the top ten of the UK two hundred rich list, and several others were only just behind them in the top twenty. I remember one of my clients telling me that he had no idea how many supercars he owned as they were kept in a vacuum sealed aircraft hangar somewhere in the country and looked after by a permanent staff who also did his purchasing for him. He also told me one day that he was tired of owning his multimillion-dollar antique superyacht that he kept in the Mediterranean, as he couldn’t remember the last time he had bothered to spend any time on it. A week later he told me that he had given it away to a charity that took disadvantaged children out on sailing adventures. Not because he was a philanthropist, but because he just couldn’t be bothered to sell it.

These individuals functioned at another level of financial success. However, as their trainer, one often also become their councilor as well. I learnt that money and financial success did not make these people any more secure or in control of any other aspect of their lives than anyone else. As I have said before, success is not a blanket that covers every facet of one’s life. It is a plate spinning operation, where each plate must be constantly evaluated, assessed and attended to in order to prevent them from crashing down around you. To keep all the plates spinning, all of the time, at the same constant rate is pretty much impossible, but that doesn’t mean you should stop trying. Focusing too much attention on one area (one plate), for too long, and other parts of your life will begin to suffer.

As I became more interested in this field, I gradually moved away from the physical elements of performance, gravitating more and more towards the psychological processes that control our lives. Of course, over time I learnt that one cannot separate the two. The physical and psychological components of our performance are two sides of the same coin. Neglect towards one area negatively impacts the other. Once again balance seems to be the key.

Taking a break from the human performance world (by this time I had become an elite strength and conditioning coach and was now lecturing in performance coaching in both physiology and psychology), I moved countries and changed my career path entirely. I began a seven-year stint of working in corporate medical sales. From pharmaceuticals, to joint reconstructions, to open heart surgical sales, it was a very different world. I learnt a great deal in this period about business development, territory management, sales and marketing. But I also learnt that I could apply everything I had learnt from my studies in performance psychology as well as my experiences in the realm of motivational psychology in dealing with clients. 

As time moved on, and three young children entered my world, rushing out to attend surgeries and desperately trying to win contracts and organise new implant trials became harder to manage. My own performance in life was beginning to suffer. Which was more important, my job or my wife and family? I had fallen into the same trap that I had always been helping my old clients try to understand. If you focus all your attention on one plate, the others will eventually come crashing down. Unfortunately, when you are so focused on that one plate, you are often the last person to realise that that is what you are doing. My wife provided the perspective I needed.

Since then I have spent time consulting on human performance for a range of different businesses. Examining and advising how organisations can better understand and adapt to their employees, customers and clients so that everyone wins. But I also went back to teaching. I taught A level Psychology back in the UK for a couple of years. As a teacher, you spend a lot of your windows of free time counselling students through their studies. Which is why I began to construct a tool to help me. This wasn’t something I dreamt up in five minutes. It was the amalgamation of many years of observational experience across different fields, lots of reading, and some trial and error. I wanted to create a ‘go-to’ self-assessment tool that students (but anyone really), could use to help them create a launch pad. I wanted students to change the way they framed their situation. To ask themselves, “what can I control?” “What tools can I use to help me maximise the controllable elements I have available to me?” This was, in-part, based on my own early self-experiments, but also gleaned from my observations that most students (and adults for that matter), find it difficult to move forward because they externalise their reasons for success and failure. We blindfold ourselves before we start our journey. Consequently, we hardly ever get off the ground. I wanted to create a very simple tool that would help people frame their reality and allow them to remove their blindfold.

I call it the “Equaliser Profile.” I gave it this name because, in its simplest form it resembles the old graphic equalisers you used to get on stereos a few years back, but also because it gives us a visual representation of our reality. I also needed to make it as simple and as practical as possible. If students were going to use it, I knew my attention window was going to be very small.

I broke the profile down into three questions that each student (or adult) need to answer. These questions should be primed prior to asking so that one can be as honestly introspective as possible. With students, I would often get them to look around the classroom and judge themselves against the other class members. This gives them a perspective on relativity and an anchor to connect their reality to. 

Question one: On a scale from 1 to 10, how smart am I?

You need the students to answer this question to themselves as honestly as possible. This is obviously not a straightforward question, and neither is it meant to be. These questions are designed to trigger introspection and honest self-appraisal. There are multiple forms or intelligence and a wide range of abilities depending on individual specific talents. Consequently, this profile can also be applied generically, or to any specific area. For example, you might score highly for languages but struggle with sciences, so for this area you score lower.

Question two: On a scale from 1 to 10, how organised am I?

This refers to one’s propensity towards structure, planning and control. Again, these are relative rankings so one’s score is always based against the anchor point.

Finally, question three: On a scale from 1 to 10, how much discretionary effort do I put into my work?

Discretionary effort is the amount of effort above the minimum level required to keep afloat. As I mentioned above, this is likely to vary considerably depending on the task and subject area. If we find a subject interesting, or a specific teacher is highly engaged (and therefore engaging), we are far more likely to be motivated to put effort in ourselves. But discretionary effort can be derived from a multitude of different internal and external drivers, regardless of how much one tries to control it from the outside.

Once you, your student or your teenager has completed this task, you then show these scores as pillars next to each other. This effectively looks like a graphic equaliser on an old stereo. What you now explain is integral to the success of the profile. From the three pillar scales (numbered 1 to 10), only the first is out of your control. How clever you are (as measured by IQ tests), has been shown to largely be a product of your genetic blueprint. Your intelligence is, by and large, inherited. Consequently, it doesn’t change much regardless of what you do. At first, this can be a little depressing. But this is where we do the reframing. Studies have consistently shown that intelligence is a very poor predictor of success, so using it as a frame for how one views themselves isn’t a great idea.

Now you turn to the other two pillars. Both these are entirely in one’s possession to control. And, when it comes to success, they are equally if not, more important. They are like the ‘treble’ and the ‘bass’ pitch on your equaliser, as the ‘middle’ pitch is to the ‘IQ’ balance. If you want to increase your chances of achieving (especially in highly controlled environments like schools and organisations), to compete against those with naturally high IQ’s, you need to turn up the other two gauges on the equaliser. By visualising this and having it explained, especially to young people struggling to improve, I have found it to be transformative. Obviously, you get some who just don’t want to hear it. But repetition of a message is often very effective. If you are a parent, I would also suggest they hear it from another source. The simple fact that they are hearing it coming from someone who has so much authority and shared history often means that good intentions become misconstrued and blocked out in communication.

This is just one tool that I have found to be very useful when dealing with students or adults who have learnt that they aren’t good enough to achieve. I have found that reframing, especially using analogy is a really powerful way of triggering that internal rocket fuel that resides in everyone. I still cook for my family every day. And I try to keep in mind some of the lessons I learnt all the way back when I was a schoolboy. Inspirational teachers are great. But often their hands are tied because of bureaucracy, politics and micromanagement. Don’t depend on the lottery of getting a great teacher, give your child the tools to take control of their own lives. It will be the greatest gift you ever give them.