Mia Fileman 00:05
Are you tired of marketing jargon and empty promises? Me too. I'm Mia Fileman and this is Got Marketing? On the show I deep dive with marketing insiders to unpack successful campaigns. I didn't earn the nickname, ‘The Campaign Lady’ for nothing. Get actionable tips, learn from winning strategies and avoid falling victim to marketing fads and fakery.
Mia 00:31
Hello friend, and welcome back to Got Marketing? I saw a post come up on Instagram, and I couldn't read it quickly enough. The headline said, pay me like an unqualified life coach. This episode is probably going to polarise, and I'm okay with that. I love robust discussions, and I believe in a marketplace of ideas. The author of that Instagram post was Jocelyn Brewer, a multi-passionate Sydney-based registered psychologist with a special interest in cyberpsychology and digital wellbeing. I've also invited Kate McCready onto today's episode, who is a qualified coach. Welcome to the show, Jocelyn and Kate.
Kate McCready 01:19
Hi there, Mia.
Jocelyn Brewer 01:20
Hey, thanks for having us.
Mia 01:21
Thank you so much for agreeing to do this three-way discussion. And I do think it's going to be quite a juicy but also super valuable one for the listener.
Jocelyn 01:31
Yeah, for a post that I was planning on deleting. I guess I'm not going to be able to delete that post now. It's taken on a life of its own.
Mia 01:39
Yes. Oh, well, let's start with you, Jocelyn. What was the message behind the post ‘Pay me like an unqualified life coach’?
Jocelyn 01:45
I think there's that T-shirt around that says, ‘Pay me like a mediocre white man’. And it really bounced out of that when I was noticing not just the number of people who are going into coaching, but also the price tags that people are putting on some of their packages. And maybe I was having a little bit of a tough week as a, I guess suburban psychologist dealing with what I might call garden variety mental health issues for my $230 on a Saturday morning. I was just like, gosh, what am I doing? Am I doing the right thing? And I had to do a really big values check I guess around that. And look, coaching is a really, really big market and we're talking about a lot of different things. So maybe if people read the post we can, and obviously we're going to have the conversation today to really unpack it and pull apart the pieces that I am trying to get to within that.
Mia 02:35
Of course. So, Kate, you are a certified human potential coach specialising in integrating business, leadership coaching and personal growth. What was your feelings reading Jocelyn's Post?
Kate 02:49
Yeah, some might be surprised, but I was actually very much aligned with Jocelyn's feelings about it. As someone who has done quite a lot of training in coaching as well as I have a mental health first aid, I saw that and I was like, yes. Because as someone who is qualified in the coaching industry, and look, there's people that are far more qualified than me too. It is really frustrating when you find yourself in a bucket that is, there's all kinds in that bucket from everything from super uber qualified coaches with multiple degrees and things like that right through to somebody that's actually not really even coaching is just training. And I see a lot of that out there and it's often those that I think fall into the bucket that Jocelyn was calling out in her post.
Jocelyn 03:39
And I had that big disclaimer on the end too, that I have a lot of people in my community who are people like Kate, who full disclaimer has been my coach in the past, that this is really about those qualifications and the fact that coaches obviously not a regulated term, that anyone can feel like a coach chuck that on the end of their email signature and smash together a whole bunch of different words. People love to chuck a neuro in there that then kind of gets really befuddling for consumers and clients.
Mia 04:12
What kind of prices are we talking? Because you said in your post, ‘I'm all about knowing your worth, but women without formal coaching qualifications charge eye-watering rates for what I can only describe as common sense advice that you could get free from a decent bestie’.
Jocelyn 04:29
So in the life coaching space, and I think it's really important to clarify, I'm talking about life coaching. I'm not talking about people who really coach into specific niches, but in around the 500 and even up to a thousand dollars an hour, it's sometimes really hard to work out what an hourly rate is because there's so much packaging, and you get this download and this all the bits and bobs that are worth apparently or valued at pick a number that usually ends in seven now, not a nine. I dunno why it's really hard to work out what that is. Whereas again, as a psychologist, I've got a whole bunch of strict rules around how I market, including the fact that I can't use testimonials that make it really, really clear. So, exactly how much you're paying. If you want a 50-minute session with me.
Mia 05:18
That's a lot. I mean, my hourly rate is between 500 and a thousand dollars and I've been, I've two degrees and I've been doing this for 21 years. So it's interesting the bravado of being able to charge between 500 to a thousand Australian dollars without those qualifications. But I mean, playing devil's advocate here, if you can get it, why not do it? What's the negative implication of it?
Jocelyn 05:50
Well, first of all, I don't think you have that many clients at that number. And that gets tricky from a sustainability perspective. I think it also has to do with the risk that you're taking on. So I'm looking at, again, usually, I'm doing a whole range of things in a session that's assessing risk and really complex training stuff that I don't think a lot of coaches necessarily look out for. And sometimes folks come to me having had life coaches, and I'm undoing a lot of some of the, I don't want to say damage, that's probably a bit stronger word, but some of the issues that have been created through coaching because of the kind of almost enabling and what I call the ‘uncritical sisterhood’. ‘You've got this; you can do this. Oh, you just need to think more positively’. Those kinds of strategies to actually ground people back into being able to sit with discomfort and a range of emotions rather than just pursuing that toxic positivity.
So, look, the price tag is one thing. It's the strategies that are being used by life coaches. Sometimes that's the trick. I've even had families come to me, and moms come to me saying, ‘Oh, my daughter in her mid-twenties really, really needs some help, but I think she wants to see a life coach. You're a psychologist, aren't you?’ And I'm like, ‘Yes, but if you want me to double my prices and call myself a life coach, I'm more than happy to do that. If you think that's helpful.’ Because they turn away and they go, ‘Oh, psychologist’. And I'm generally registered. I'm not even a clinical psych. So yeah, it's a very interesting kind of market out there where we have lots of people are really aware of mental health, but that stigma around seeing a psychologist, people still think you need to have a psychiatric issue to come and see us that we only counsel that we don't coach.
Mia 07:40
Right. Thank you for clearing that up because I think that that is a common misconception. For you, Kate, who has the qualifications. Have you seen any implications of that? Is it damaging to the industry when unqualified coaches fail to deliver on these over-hyped promises and I guess more seriously aren't trained to spot the signs that they need to refer these customers to medical professionals? And instead of all that bravado that Jocelyn mentioned, they're just like, yeah, I can help her with that. That's fine.
Kate 08:14
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think one of the things that people don't realise about good quality coaching trainings, is that they have ethics built into them. Not all coaching trainings will be under the ICF or one of the coaching bodies, which are also not really, they're not regulatory bodies, they are industry kind of organisations, but they still do provide some form of robustness to people who are doing courses and things. And when you do go through a course that is under one of those bodies, there will generally be some kind of ethics training in it and deep ethics training too. And part of that is knowing when you should refer and knowing what you should and shouldn't do as coach. And people also don't realise that coaching is a real particular skill set and a particular way of working with people. And I think one of the most dangerous things is the fact that there's people calling themselves coaches that aren't actually even coaching at all.
They're offering advice, they're giving training, they're giving you tools and techniques and do what I did. And often what you did is not going to work for somebody else. And it also can be quite harmful. And I see this particularly when I see people coaching around trauma, and I have seen coaches that specifically call themselves out as working in the trauma space with no real psychology experience. They might've even done a life coaching course. But this is the other thing is that not all coaching courses are created equal. So the fact that there's people saying, oh, I've got this coaching course and now I can coach you on your trauma that shows that there is a real lack of ethics within that coaching course, they should know that they shouldn't be doing that.
Mia 09:58
So, tell me, Kate, what is the role of a coach then? If it's not to provide training or advice or it works for me so it's going to work for you, what exactly is the role of a coach then?
Kate 10:09
Yeah, look, it's changed over the years and even the ICF has recently changed how it looks at this a bit. But essentially a coach is there to draw things out of you, draw the answers out of you, and it's generally quite forward-looking rather than backward-looking. So psychology is not always backward looking of course, but a psychologist can look backwards and go into your past and go into why you do the things you do and make the decisions you do. Whereas a coach is really about going, okay, well where do you want to go and what do you think you need to do in order to get there? And helping people see that they are resourced in the sense that they can not necessarily come up with, again, like you were saying, Jocelyn, toxic positivity kind of solutions forward. But they're genuinely well-resourced to think about, okay, well I could do this to move me into my next step or go forward.
And sometimes that might draw on the past in the sense that you might say to someone, well, when did you do this well in the past? And they can go, oh, well, I did it well then. And you can go, great. Well, how would you apply that to this situation to move you forward now? So it's really that forward momentum and using the resourcing of the people that you are coaching already there, but helping draw it out of them. What sometimes people, they don't realise they have the resources there, so you're helping them tap into what they already know.
Mia 11:30
And so, people like me who provide training, who provide the advice, who provide the, ‘Hey, I did this, and it worked really well, you should give it a go too’, what would you call us then?
Kate 11:42
Yeah, I'd call you mentors, strategists, advisors, experts, specialists, any of those terms are fine. And there's coaches. I myself, I dabble in both spaces, but it's because I've also had a background in business. I've got a degree in business entrepreneurship, and I'm very clear with my clients that I can do both and I'll tell them when I'm switching from one to the other or they can ask me to switch into business strategy mode and I will. But I always lead with coaching first. So for you, yeah, strategist, advisor, mentor, specialist, all those kinds of things.
Jocelyn 12:17
And when you kind of say that you're a marketing coach though, that gives the context of, you are coaching somebody, maybe that's a one-on-one thing that it is coaching, it's not, ‘and I'll fix your marriage while I'm there’. And I think that's where it gets a little bit, there's dual roles and then complexity. The other part that I see is lots of friends coaching one another, and again, Kate and I are a kind of example of that to some degree. But then both, I hope you don't mind me saying this, Kate have our own psychologist and have a range of different support team and different people in different aspects of our lives. So yeah, that kind of interwoven, he's my best friend, who's also my coach gets really fascinating to me as well.
Mia 13:05
So, you're not a fan of peer coaching, then?
Jocelyn 13:07
Oh, no. Peer coaching, absolutely. Where it's really clearly, like Kate and I might do peer coaching these days too, but where there's still that dual relationship where you are friends and you're still in a transactional relationship around finance, I think is really fascinating. And again, to come back to some of the very different rules around psychology, that would be a dual relationship. We have lots of complexity around even rocking up to a party where somebody who is a client from five years ago, some people would exit that party very quickly, and other people find a way to manage that. So yeah, horses for courses, I guess.
Mia 13:49
For sure. When I read your post, Jocelyn, the reason why it resonated with me so much from a marketing background is because of something that I felt for a really long time, which is that unfortunately, there's just so much spin, like all the sizzle and none of the stake. And when you take someone, whether they're an underqualified life coach or calling themselves a marketing strategist, even though they did a six-week social media course or any kind of métier, often it is they know how to play the marketing game well. They know how to milk their personal branding and openly sharing their personal traumas or relying on their charisma and good looks and trying to almost cover for the fact that they don't have the qualifications, the experience, the runs on the board. And so, they use other, I guess, weaponised psychology, if you will, to get people to work with them. We see this a lot where people purchase social media followers so that they look like they have that social proof. And so, I think what we really need is a better barometer for judging expertise because unfortunately, the size of someone's social media following is now one of the barometers that we use, which is crazy because, by that barometer, Donald Trump should be the most reputable person on the planet.
Kate 15:25
God help us.
Mia 15:26
Help us. Exactly. Please, America, please. I don’t know if I articulated that well, but the thing that irks me about it is that there are a lot of so-called experts who just know how to use marketing to their advantage, and there's no follow-through. Meanwhile, we all know insanely clever, extremely qualified overqualified if you will, so experienced, and they hesitate to talk about themselves because they understand that there's nuance. I can't possibly attribute a hundred per cent of my customer's revenue to me. So, I really struggled to be like, yes, well, my client increased by $70,000 in the last two months because there were a lot of other factors. So that was one of the things that really spoke to me about your post. And then, also the other thing was that people are lured into coaching under the pretense of handfuls of cash. And then, as you were saying right at the beginning of this chat, Jocelyn, they're told by their coach in inverted comm that if they are going to do this online course in six weeks, they'll be able to charge between 500 and a thousand dollars for a session.
And so they go into online business, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and so excited and then they fail, and spectacularly because they can't find enough customers willing to pay these rates that they've been promised. And that's really, really dangerous, I think, for these entrepreneurs who are essentially go into business with a false sense of pretenses about what this is going to look like for them. And sometimes, they invest tens of thousands of dollars in branding and websites only to discover that they can't get $500 an hour. And so they're left very disappointed. And then running to people like me going, what do I do now?
Jocelyn 17:43
Yeah, look, there's so much to unpack with that, right? Because to go back to what you were saying around metrics, most people are quite vulnerable. I look at a lot of that stuff, and I go into massive scarcity. I go into like, oh, look at all these people coming along. I've been a psychologist for 14 years, I've been doing my work in digital nutrition and the cyberpsychology space for 10. There's a lot of new people with a lot of energy and other resources. Up until recently I had a filmmaker freelance husband. He's finally got a full-time job, and that's going to give me very different freedom. So, when you actually look at the kind of what's going on, you can have a fantastic Joji website and no qualifications and some people with certain media literacy or certain kind of, I guess aspirations are really going to buy into that.
Whereas I look for things very, very differently. Some of the people that I've worked with, I'm all about how are we connecting on our values, and my value isn't necessarily that schmick website. It's like what kind of cute chairs do you have in your office? Or what kind of fun memes do you put on your social media? Not how many people follow you. It's the edgy take and their niche. And I see some really interesting niching happening and I think that needs to happen, but there's a range of things that go into how we then make that decision to consume a product. And when we are connecting with another human, there's even more layers to that, including what I find quite interesting too, that self-disclosure. And again, as a psychologist, we're very much trained not to self-disclose. I'm terrible at it because it is such a great tool for building rapport and connection, but that whole kind of sometimes trauma share to get people to trauma bond with you as a coach is quite fascinating to me as well because, again, that sets up that dual relationship or the confusion around the relationship that really shouldn't be there. Yes, we want to get on, yes, we want to kind of have that connection and feel like we get one another, but we need to keep in mind who's doing the coaching and who's the client.
Mia 20:01
That's such a good point. I saw a Meta-ad from an influencer turned coach, and she made this two-minute video that's running on Facebook ads at the moment. And at four times in the video did she mention high-paying dream clients. So that was obviously what she needed to get across. And at no point in the video did she explain how they are going to attract high-paying dream clients. And so, I have been on a mission for the last three years of trying to improve the survival rate of female entrepreneurs because currently, it sits at about 50% who are going to fail in the first four years. And it seems like some people are fighting directly against me trying to lure people into entrepreneurship just to set them up for failure because they're telling them, well, yeah, if you can book 500 or a thousand dollars an hour clients, then, of course, you should go and spend $20,000 on your branding and a brand new website and all of these things because make that back. You'll make it back in six weeks, eight weeks. And that, of course, is not the reality. So I'd love to hear from you. Do you have a perspective on that?
Kate 21:19
Yeah, I do. And I mean it's just so damaging, and I think if you see a coach having income claims, generally I think are a run-a-mile type thing because you cannot guarantee anybody anything because if I've learned anything from being a coach is that the success of my clients is like there's partially a bit that's to do with me, but a lot of it is to do with them and the work that they put in and what they're prepared to do because people don't realise that coaching is a certain amount you working with someone and the relationship and the time that you have together. But a huge part of it is what they do between those sessions. And if you have somebody that has got other priorities that wasn't really invested, that has other stuff going on in their life, who has big mindset issues, who should be seeing a psychologist who whatever, they might not do the work or they might not put the things in place or that coach might even be coming from a privileged position where yes, they've been able to do it like that they had a network or they had privilege or they had a husband or a wife who was supporting them in the background, or you just cannot look at somebody else's results and say, I'm going to get those just because I follow your system.
Even if you follow someone's system to a T, you don't necessarily get the same results. So yeah, think you've got to run a mile there. And then, yeah, the other factor is, like I said, it's like those mindset things. It's like you can give someone a formula, and if the coach isn't also working on them with them on the other stuff, that might hold them back from achieving those results. And I've had this experience, I'm one of those people that's like Jocelyn's pointing to herself here, too. I know all the stuff, but sometimes I get in my way actually doing it even as a coach, yes, I need a coach myself or a psychologist have both, but I've worked with coaches who try and sell me their system or try and tell me however many steps or just do it this way and it's failed miserably for me because I'm not them and I've got a different brain, I've got different emotions, I've got different background, all the things. I've got different strengths and skills. So anytime you see 10 steps follow my whatever, run the other direction.
Jocelyn 23:37
And can I just say about dream clients? If they were a dream client, that's probably them at the end of your coaching. They don't walk into you being the dreamy client. They walk into you as suckered, chaos and falling apart, not knowing what to do. And my dream client is simply somebody who is dedicated to working on it. I don't care how falling apart or hopeless things feel. So, a lot of that languaging again is this kind of white girl lady boss stuff, which is just like, Hey, we want ease and grace and lots of money, and we want to ignore a whole range of things that are happening on this planet in order just to upscale and aspire and good vibes only. And I think there's a whole other layer of stuff that we could maybe not in this episode dive into around that personal and professional and then our values and how we then put ourselves in context of the planet rather than the very small networks that we're looking to kind of niche, niche, niche and sort of build this almost head in the sand perspectives around.
Mia 24:49
I loved what you said about dream clients, look out, there's probably going to be an Instagram post about that is the perfect example of weaponised psychology. A dream client makes it sound like you're not going to have any challenges. It's all going to be smooth sailing. It's going to be you are going to say X, and they're going to be like, oh, that's the best thing I've ever heard. And that is just simply not the case. I've been in business 22 years and there is no one that you just go, you know what? That was flawless. Not a single thing ever went wrong. That's not real life. That's Goldilocks fairytale land.
Kate 25:24
Yeah, I think one of the other things that these things often miss, too, is that you are starting a business. I think people go into, often you see these coaches almost selling the dream of coaching as well. So, you get into that kind of pyramid thing, but there's also the fact that people go in thinking, oh, I'm going to help people, and I'm going to do this, but they forget that they're running a business and it's the marketing. It's like running a business is probably often, I don't know, 20%, 50% doing the thing. And then the other is doing the marketing. And so many people aren't prepared for that. And also, it's like it's not the dream. It's not what they want to do. And when they find themselves having to put themselves out there and sell themselves, it's like, oh wait, I didn't sign up for this. I thought I was helping people. I thought I was coaching; I thought I was whatever else.
Mia 26:11
I know. And then I meet a lot of those people, and they're like, I don't want to be on social media. I don't want to do discovery calls. I don't want to spend $5,000 on branding. Can I just get away with not having a website? And the answer is no, I'm sorry. It's not. Because you've got underqualified coaches who have all of those things, and this beautiful shiny exterior making it seem so attractive and so appealing. You are competing with them. I don't care how many degrees you have; unfortunately, people, it's so persuasive when someone uses income claims or wealth signals. You see someone flying business class or they're at a spa in Palm Springs, or they're at a retreat with 50 other business owners, and all of your judgement just goes out the window. Because we look at that and we say, oh, I would love to do that. I would love to be able to fly to Palm Springs and go to a spa. It's, it's how our brains are wired. I mean, you guys are the experts in brain matter, but that has been my experience.
Jocelyn 17:21
And I think it really sucks people in, right? I'm that FOMO that I'm not part of the gang and to be part of the gang, I do need to have all of these things. And you need to have a balance of those things. You don't need to spend 20 grand on branding. You need to get some hybrids shots probably out in nature or with some natural sunlight. You do not need to throw confetti in the air. You don't need to sit on a designer chair and kick your stilettos in the air. And they've all, I don't know what kind of factory they've been through, but I'm kind of like, babes, I don't want to see your feet. That's not what I'm looking for in my coaches. And again, look, maybe this is possibly going to come off sour grapes, horses, for courses. There's lots of people who aspire to that.
That is fantastic. You do you, babe. But for those people who are really endeavouring and are in those midpoints, and I've kind of flirted with a whole range of group coaching programs and business like ‘how to do your business thing’, and you come in, and there's some people like, ‘how do I get an ABN and who can help me fix my LinkedIn profile’? Meanwhile, there's people like, I've got 20,000 Instagram followers, and everyone is coming to me at 2:00 AM for advice on their marriage. Help. And that's where I find it really fascinating that people aren't getting the support to step into some of those really important practices that you need. If you're running a business like that, and as Kate was saying, it is a business, and it needs to be viable. You need to have some levels of wraparound things. Yes, maybe you outsource your socials or get people in, or your VA to do a range of different things, but your core business is to make sure that your clients are safe and looked after and you're providing a service that meets their needs and referring on if you can't do that.
Mia 29:17
I agree with all of that. That's great. Thank you.
Mia 29:21
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Mia 30:04
Let's shift gears a little bit now and talk about cyberpsychology. Can you tell me what that is, Jocelyn, for the uninitiated?
Jocelyn 30:13
Yeah, so cyberpsychology is basically the interaction of humans with digital technologies. So, I talk about it really shapes how we live, love and learn. And in an AI anxiety-fueled, always-on-demand, digitally saturated world, it really is shifting a lot. And again, this conversation is really about how social media works as that marketing tool and often group coaching programs or business coaches and join my Master Mindy membership thing really works. There's that part of me where I'm looking at my own mastermind called the intentional Influencer to try and help people who, whether they're accidentally influencing their people in the public eye who have gathered lots of followers or real content creators going for it to give them some training and grounding in the ethics behind how to do this well and to get the balance of online and offline and their own personal time sorted. I started basically as a high school teacher, retraining as a school counsellor looking at boys and video games. And so video game addiction then got into social media and the impacts of that, and I took a lot around; again, my brand is digital nutrition. So keeping a balance between online and offline lives and thinking about the food analogy rather than digitally detoxing. I think we're well past that If we plan to live in the modern world, we just need to think about really kind of nurturing ourselves with good quality content and media literacy.
Mia 31:47
Okay. I'm interested to hear from both of you, since you are also business owners, how have you found AI and the adoption of, are you using it in your business? Have you embraced it?
Kate 31:57
I'm certainly dabbling. I would say that I think it's really good when you already have something to work with and you are helping it build on something you've already generated from your brain or in the other direction of helping you get started and then using your brain. I think the best use of AI is when it's a combined force with stuff that you've already done or with your human brain to help you, and particularly if you've got any kind of neurodiversity, I've heard it's incredibly helpful for people to get started in that space if they're struggling to do that. I'm not very good at finishing things. I'm not a finisher, so I can often get started really well and then use AI to help me get to the end of something and then go back and bring it together. So yeah, I think it can be incredibly valuable, but you've just got to be really careful with how you use it and know how it works as well and just be able to recognise when it's like spitting out dribble.
Jocelyn 32:58
I, two ways that I use it. I have actually won a scholarship to go to a conference in the US about AI using chat GPT to win me that scholarship, so thank you for that. But I also use a really awesome app called Patient Notes, which is created by Sarah Moran from Gee Girl Academy, and that is an audio-to-text transcribed tool. So my phone listens to client sessions obviously with their written permission, and then I use a prompt, and I've trained my prompts, so then it spits out my case notes exactly how I would write them if I had heaps of time. So I'm using that and that has been such a time saver. So what I do now, instead of writing up notes or typing up notes, I basically check over and read what it's generated, train the prompt if it's listened to things wrong or gotten details incorrect, and then upload that to my practise management software. So, my compliance, if Medicare does audit me, is going to be shit hot.
Mia 33:57
I'm so happy to hear that.
Mia 34:00
I would say I am an ‘AI-duck-under-the-covers-and-bury-myself-there-don't-want-to-think-about-it’ type of person, which I'm really struggling to reconcile with because it seems like every marketer on the planet has some sort of offering now about how to use AI to plan out all your social media content or how to use AI to write all your emails. And I just don't want to go there. I use Chat GPT a little bit here and there. Most of it is just utter rubbish. I find it really boring. I find it really uncreative. I know I just sound like I'm a 43-year-old business owner, which I am, but I've just really struggled to see the magic of it where it has been helpful for me. The only area is if I need it to create a survey for me, so like a survey to send to my members to gauge their satisfaction performance after being in my membership. It's really good at writing those market research-type questions. So that's how I've used it.
Jocelyn 35:01
And I don't think you have to get glamoured by it. I think it's really easy to get into that glam space of I need to find a way to make sure AI happens. I think if you have an open mind to it and you're watching where that can really be a time saver, it will pop up when it needs to with patient notes. I was like, no, no, I love my paper notes. And then a friend of mine who's really one of those, I'm not on social media, I don't do tech, was using it. I was like, oh my gosh, she's doing it. I have to be doing it then I am not getting left behind. And it was an eye-opener, and it took me a little while and a bit of resistance, but I think it matched what I needed it for. I've also written really 30-page guides for parents and stuff, and I've put into that this has not been written by AI, which either makes me really clever or really silly, I'm not sure which. So, I put a disclaimer on my work to say I haven't used AI so that people can actually identify the humanness of what I create because as you were saying, it's not very creative, and it does not know my voice. It cannot be a 46-year-old Australian woman with my values. So…
Mia 36:16
It just irks me so bad that you need to put that disclaimer in there, Jocelyn, that now that's the world that we live in, that someone is like, ‘Oh, but PS this was written by a human’.
Jocelyn 36:28
So, it's a nutritional label and that's the basis of digital nutrition is to say we need labels for apps and games and our content. So, I talk about AI-generated content being like the highly processed foods, right? It's the banana bread and Pringles because it's been put through so many prompts, and I mean the total ringer to pop out something that really does sound like a robot wrote it and a robot being all the generally white men who have programmed AI. And that's the biggest issue. If we had better diversity within people who programmed algorithms and AI, and ethics and all of that stuff, then yeah, it would be looking at very different applications and concerns.
Mia 37:15
Yeah, interesting. So Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and an author. He's written several books. The latest one, I believe, is called The Anxious Generation. And he has his research team have looked back at humans, and particularly children and teenagers since the inception of social media. And he has come to the conclusion that smartphones and social media lead to some really, really poor outcomes for our young people. And, so as a result, he has created four rules that he is hoping that on a macro level, on mass that parents adopt. And those four rules are no smart phones before high school, no social media before 16 years old, phone-free schools and more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. I would love to hear from you, Jocelyn. Of course, you too. Kate, what do you think of Jonathan Haidt's work and his rules being an expert in this field as well?
Jocelyn 38:26
Yeah. How long have you got? Look, the short version here is that, yes, those four new norms on the surface make sense. When we talk about parents in this space, we're disproportionately talking about women and mothers, whether that be people in schools who are managing the phones or managing the ed-tech because they're coming for ed-tech, as well. And understandably, I was a teacher in 2009 in the digital education revolution in Australia, where they just handed out laptops to year nine and didn't really bother to tell teachers what to do with those. kids worked out how to game really quickly, and history teachers were still saying, let's make a Sydney Morning Herald. Very not what it was designed for. So, there are big problems with some of what he suggests because he doesn't really in the book go into detail about how to do that.
And that's what's always been missing the book before that, iGen by Dr. Jean Twenge, who they have quite close researchers, again, smashes you over the head with scary stats, but doesn't say, okay, well how do we find that balance with online and offline knowing that this is here to stay, right? You don't magically wake up when you are 16 and know how to use a highly powered computing device that has an incredible sort of not just knowledge but needs a particular literacy and a particular way of reading those spaces and dealing with the other humans who are on the internet as well. So the short version here is we need to teach digital swimming lessons the way that we have water safety lessons. And Australia does that really well. We jump in the pool without the six-month-old; we bounce around and sing Humpy-Dumpty. Eventually, they're in the pool on their own, but we are keeping eagle-eyed.
We can't just build these really high pool fences when the gate to the pool, the latch is totally broken, and the kids who are most at risk are going to find ways into those spaces. We need those lessons. We cannot fence the internet. The pool guards are absolutely petrified of the water. They don't know how to swim; they don't want to swim. They want to ignore that swimming actually exists and just say, please don't do it. And that creates a whole bunch of problems that, again, I don't think Haidt is really addressing in deeper, meaningful ways. He's creating lots of fragmented parent groups who want to create pacts, but in six months or a year, I would love to see where that's actually at.
Mia 40:55
Yeah, the way that I interpreted it when I read the book was that it was really a call to the parents to not give in to the pressure of letting your 10, 11-year-old daughter start watching TikTok and then start making videos on TikTok because someone committed suicide and streamed it on TikTok. And it is a platform where I believe almost 50% of the users of TikTok are under 24 years old. So, it is a youth platform, and there's this pressure, and I feel it, too. I've got an almost 10-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter. And honestly, devices, it's like crack to them. It's so addictive, and their behaviour after using them is terrible, absolutely terrible. The way that they speak is terrible. The way that they interact with me and interact with each other is absolutely terrible. But we are navigating this, and we don't know what's right and what's wrong.
I feel like if every other parent gives in and gives them a smartphone and lets them on TikTok, and they can have Instagram accounts, then my kids are going to get left out if we don't do that. But to your point, also, Jocelyn, I want to try to teach them how to have a healthy relationship with devices. But right now, it just seems like you can have 15 minutes, and then they beg for another 15 minutes, and then they're like, can I have another 15 minutes? And there's this constant, constant argument and battle about how much time that they can have. So if you could help me in any way, that would be great.
Jocelyn 42:36
Sounds like you need my co-design for your family's tech use agreement course.
Because we don't necessarily sit down and have food time, you don't have 15 minutes of food time. You can have a snack, it's 15 minutes. You go, oh, you had chocolate at recess; you probably need to eat an apple now. So we need to really focus on content and the virtual vitamins that is in some of that content. And we know that the longer that you can delay smartphones, the better. But if you occasionally need to give a kid an iPad on a plane or on a long car ride or you need some, please go and watch 15 episodes of Bluey on the big TV while you're doing colouring in and running around. That's a part of modern life. And I think screen time is, I've again posted about this screen time is a tool of the patriarchy. It's created to make women feel like we're not enough and we're not getting it right.
It's just a new version of how can we feel this lack? So, really flipping some of the stuff that we hear because there's lots of really positive ways that you can use the internet and digital devices without becoming addicted to TikTok, which is full of misinformation. But again, they're eventually going to end up on some platforms which are going to give them junk information, and they need to have critical and creative thinking to be able to look at that, appraise that, and then live a line to our values. So you can see lots of influences doing their fitspo morning yoga, green smoothie drinking and go, that's good for you. Again, back to the conversation before, that's good for you, but I know that's probably not going to happen for me. I'm really cool with doing what I do and having my life. So, this needs to start early.
And I think the problem with some of this delay tactic stuff is that we are not giving them the lessons that they actually need to build these healthy habits. You don't wake up at 16 and go, oh, I think I'm going to have some healthy habits with my device today, and I totally don't want to meet my entire peer group where they're hanging out, which is the Digital Town hall steps or Westfield. So I think a lot of people have forgotten very much what being an adolescent was like. And being an adolescent is really no different to me in the early nineties, except I don't have that high-powered device to be able to go, where are you? Or Flake at the last minute. You had to be on town hall steps, and you waited for a long bloody time for people to turn up.
Mia 45:08
Kate, do you want to jump in?
Kate 45:09
Yeah, I do. And look, I think all of this as well, we've got to think about the role that we play as the adults in all of this. It's all very well to say, oh, we're going; kids shouldn't have them until they're 16. But if we even just looked at our own behaviours as adults, and it came into the discussion before when we were talking about how you look out on the internet, and you see all these coaches saying, you're going to do this. It's so easy to get sucked in. And I go down to the park with my two and a half-year old and I see parents standing there on their phones while their kids are playing. And again, not trying to guilt trip people, but we haven't got ourselves figured out, and we're saying to young people, oh, you can't do this, you whatever.
But we haven't worked it out ourselves. We're not in control of our own tech use, either. So I would love to see more about, okay, what are we doing as adults to actually create that healthier relationship with technology ourselves so that we know how to set the right example? I don't think we even know how to set the right example ourselves for a lot of us at the moment. And that's why I think the work that Jocelyn does around digital and nutrition is so important. And it's like if we could get that ourselves, then also we wouldn't be going for these coaches that are promising us the world because we have that sense of, oh, I need that, the envy, the whatever, the comparisonitis of technology and of social media, we need to get on top of that ourselves first.
Mia 46:36
I agree, and I'm probably the worst at it being an online business owner. I'm constantly on my phone my iPad, or my laptop, so I absolutely hear you. But if grown women can get duped and sucked into these gurus and not use critical thinking, how much chance do we have with someone whose brain is not fully developed yet to expect them to be able to look at the fitspo videos on TikTok and be like, you know what? That's just rubbish. That's just junk.
Jocelyn 47:11
Yeah, but we didn't have those lessons. How many of us, maybe we grew up with some of the kind of dove programs and things like that, but the kind of body positivity or even body neutrality was not around. We had Dolly and girlfriend and it was all skinny minis. So we are learning these lessons as young people are learning them. Increasingly, my work is not about teaching young people, and I don't even do student presentations anymore. I don't think kids really learn in a one-hour assembly when their entire cohort is there distracting them. I talk to parents with their young people side by side so that we're having conversations together. And for many of us, what I want to say about the parenting thing is, and I got into a bit of a Barney with people on the internet a little while ago because mom was like, if you are at your kid's swimming practice, you've got to be watching them and give them your attention and get off your phone.
And I was like, my mom went home and came back. She wasn't even sitting there on her phone. She wasn't there. And this idea that moms in the nineties were dotting on our every move is such bullshit. I know that we get into this a nostalgia around in the eighties and nineties when we all had a fight on Thursday night about E Street and whether or not we were allowed to watch it is just like this weirdness where we are longing for our childhood, but we haven't reconciled ourselves as adults. And I was 32 before I got my first iPhone, so I regularly talk about, I had three decades of brain development, and I am regularly teaching myself how to really get that blend of online and offline. And for me at the moment, it's taking Instagram off my phone on Sunday night and putting it back on as a treat on Thursday afternoon. That's how I manage it.
Mia 49:01
That's so good. You're so right. We have romanticised our childhoods, but I grew up in a family where it was like, see you at dinner. See you then don't come back before then.
Jocelyn 49:14
We didn't worry. This surveillance stuff, where are you? Well, I'm at school. What are you doing? Well, I'm playing this idea that we have to know and that everything is an emergency to me is really, really fascinating. And it's where kids initially get their phone or their smartwatch for safety. When we look at the actual crime statistics in New South Wales in the last 20 years, society is far, far safer than it was when we were growing up with, I don’t know if you had where you grew up, safety houses and these little yellow things on people's letterboxes where I had a mental map where I was going to run to if I got kidnapped and no one kidnapped me. And my mom always said they'd probably drop you home because you talk too much. But there's this notion that society is much more dangerous, and you need to track your kid. And what that does or what the problem with that is actually that even if something goes wrong, you might know where your kid is, but you have no way to actually teach your kid how to stand up to a bully or a creep on the bus. And there's some real misguided senses of this surveillance technology when it's used under the pretense of safety.
Mia 50:22
The thing that really does resonate with me about Jonathan Haidt’s work is this idea of risky play. It is something that we've been following for our kids since childcare. Actually, the childcare centre that both my kids went to made it onto the project because they allow kids to light the fire pit using a flint. And of course, the project were like the preschool that lets kids start fires. It's like, oh, goodness gracious. And they came and did a whole segment and my son was in it. He was using a hammer, a real hammer and just about building resilience in our kids by not wrapping them in cotton wool all the time. And also this idea that we let them have an iPad at the gym because we don't want them to get hurt by a weight falling on their foot, but we don't know what they're doing with that iPad. Are they chatting to some creep in Roblox? Yeah.
Jocelyn 51:22
Yeah. Look, he makes a really good point around that, that we've really kind of overemphasised safety in the real world while letting kids into a digital wild West. And again, to use that analogy of us as lifeguards, we do not know how to swim in those waters. Many moms I see go; I don't know what it is Roblox. And I'm like, well, it's 40 million different games. Which type of predation would you like for your child? And I would just go back to, especially with the adults or the adolescent, sorry, we do a really good job of creating opportunities for little ones, but once they're teenagers, if you are taking risks as a teenager, you're probably a juvenile delinquent. If you're hanging out in groups, you're in a gang. If you're at the mall, you're mall rats. We don't actually create many spaces and green spaces for young people to be embodied and to do those things he's talking about. And that really takes structural change. So again, we can ban lots of things, and we can build these huge cities in Sydney, at least. We've got these huge transport-orientated developments of 10 stories across the place. There is no expectation that there's extra green spaces, community spaces, skate ramps, climbing walls, any of that to foster embodiment in young people. So there's a really big gap with don't be on your phone, but we actually don't want you to be anywhere. And that's partly because teenagers don't pay tax. They're a very inconvenient demographic.
Mia 52:49
That is such a good point. I did a post about this on Instagram where I took my kids to F45 during the school holidays and they were with a foam roller. They had a foam roller, and someone came over and said to them, they can't use any of the equipment because health and safety and so forth. And I posted about this, and I had a very polarising response because to your point, Jocelyn, about how the burden then falls back on women. The advice that I was given was work out at home, don't go to the gym and just have your kids at home do an online fitness class. And it's like something my husband has never had to think about whether he could take the kids to the gym or not. Why should I have to work out at home? Why can't the kids come to the gym? I don't understand. And so it almost felt like they were telling me, if you bring your kids, you have to bring an iPad to entertain them because they can't possibly be watching you do something really positive, which is to work out.
Kate 53:53
Such mixed messages. Right? Yeah.
Mia 53:56
Alright. This has been such a fantastic chat. Thank you so much. I just want to give you an opportunity to share any final wisdom or thoughts for the listener. Kate, do you want to hit us off?
Kate 54:09
Yeah, I think just if we bring all the topics today together, it's just be really discerning about the information that people are telling you and take that critical eye on anything, whether that is choosing a coach, deciding to go to a psychologist, being swayed by information online, listening to somebody else's advice about what to do with your children. Always just use your own internal compass and really tune into that. I'm a huge believer in understanding what is right for you and believing in your own wisdom. So yeah, when someone's telling you to follow their external wisdom at the expense of all others or all other wisdom, then yeah, I think that's when you've got to be really careful.
Mia 55:01
I agree completely. I'm a very intuitive person, and I think a lot of the times we override our intuition because somebody is talking louder or they're hammering at home, and then we're like, oh, maybe that's what I should be doing. And we actually stop listening to our inner wisdom, which is just crazy. Jocelyn?
Jocelyn 55:21
That's very much what I would suggest. We have a lot of those tools, and we forget to feel empowered because we are looking for those external sources of better, harder, fast, more. Maybe find, I mean we've talked a lot about this in the past 2K, finding that little peer group, that circle of people that you can contribute to where they create space for you to listen and to bounce those ideas back to you rather than necessarily coming from that perspective of, let me show you, but let me help you mirror it back and reflect back. So yeah, I think one of the critical things that we need as well is just that real ability to spot information and sit with it and practice the critical and creative thinking skills to not believe everything that you think or read on the internet. And just put that lens of like, oh, is this book, for instance, designed to sell lots and lots of copies rather than impact based on who reads the academic journals that do show that the research on kids and screen time is incredibly complex and not based on time spent, but the content that they consume. So…
Mia 56:38
I think that is such a valuable point that I didn't consider, because what you said about watching 15 episodes of Bluey versus playing 15 minutes of Zelda or Roblox, completely different. Same as me eating a donut and eating a bowl of fruit.
Jocelyn 56:56
And There's a space for both of that, right? A donut won't hurt, but it's more the even worse content, like two minutes of really hectic porn that you've accidentally stumbled across that's cut into the middle of a pepper pig episode. That's the kind of cyber trauma and cyber harms that we're talking about, which is really awful to think about. And it does happen. It's not common, but that's why screen time as a metric can be really just blunt. It's obviously really easy to measure because you put the timer on and when the timer goes off, we're going to turn off the thing, but there's a lot more to it than that.
Mia 57:37
I'm so glad that we had this chat. Honestly, it has shifted something for me, so I'm actually very, very grateful. This is something that I'm reconciling with all the time, and I think what I'm going to take out of this, and I hope that the listener does too, is that now it's not going to be about the timer and the minutes. It's going to be about what we're doing and are we all playing Super Smash Brothers together? I think that that could be really positive, right?
Jocelyn 58:05
And how do we talk about when we've played that together, or you played it by yourself, and that's like, what was the best thing that happened? And what we are creating conversation and communication. And I talk about the app of trust, that that's the most important, important app that you're going to use is developing that trust with your kid where they come to you when shit goes down on the internet and says, Hey, can you help? Because there's no problem that a parent can't help a kid with, and we need to keep hammering that message home to them so that when even the best kids with all of the cyber safety training in the world, that doesn't stop that stuff from happening. It's communication that then allows us to solve it. So anyway, sorry, we were wrapping up, and then I started talking again.
Mia 58:47
No, it's great. It's all good. Very, very, very useful. Thank you so much, Kate. Thank you so much, Jocelyn, for your generous wisdom and for just being so open today. It was an absolute pleasure chatting with both of you. I'm going to put in the show notes, all the details for leading Beings and your course, Jocelyn, and so people can find out a little bit more about working with you. Thank you again.
Jocelyn and Kate 59:13
Thanks so much.
Mia 59:16
Thank you. You listened right up until the end, so why not hit that subscribe button and keep the good marketing rolling? Podcast reviews are like warm hugs, and they're also the best way to support a small business. You can connect with me, Mia Fileman, on Instagram or LinkedIn, and feel free to send me a message. I'm super friendly.
