On Wednesday, @rwalk56 from the NFL & I went to Valley Stream Central HS District on Long Island to speak w their 3 football teams from 3 diff schools: North, South, & Central.
Football players are not ones typically to be open to MH convos. So, we got creative & (as I’ll show in pics➡️). Reggie & I came to a joint, on-the-field practice w all 3 teams on one field. We didn’t need to come up w fancy drills. The coaches all led their own teams. But we were just present. We wanted to show the teams we cared & wanted to learn who they were, their names, their plays.
From there, we came into the gym (partial video here) w the 3 teams surrounding us. I started by telling them to check all the clichés they’d heard abt MH at the door: “1 in 5 are mentally ill”….we need to “Stop the Stigma”…& “Self Care isn’t Selfish.” All that stuff has become white noise, & many of those lines actually move the convo backwards. The coaches & the kids don’t want to hear it any more – you can see it in their body language. I told them we were just going to connect on a human level w our stories & our truth…key takeaways & what’s helped us to go on healing journeys.
In a clip here: Reg told the coaches & the kids that he THOUGHT making it to the NFL, playing 7 yrs, being named a captain, would make him happy…chasing accolades would make him happy…but the truth was, “achieving” all that in the NFL never made him happy.
He had emotional pain from trauma from challenging life events from the past, that football was only covering up. He needed to heal himself so that the emotional pain didn’t keep growing, “like a cancer” as he shares in this speech.
During the Q & A the starting QB of 1 of the 3 teams stood up & asked: “Reggie, cmon be real. You made it to the show, & made that $, & STILL weren’t happy?”
This is how we change the minds of coaches & kids – w stories, w examples, w real talk, & w realizations abt what actually makes us happy & healthy. Happiness comes from within.
If your schools aren’t doing things like this for your kids, for the athletes, the band kids, the choir & drama kids, the traditional students, ask them to start!