Empathy and listening the key to getting children back
Beattie reveals programme to help kids re-adjust
WITH all students returning to school this week, one man has found his diary fully booked until June.
Stephen ‘Archie’ Beattie, a Down senior football selector who was part of the St Mary’s backroom team when they won the Sigerson Cup in 2017, is the man behind AB Coaching, a lifestyle and sports coaching business that has found itself inundated by schools requiring its services as children make the readjustment from months of lockdown back into the classroom.
Beattie has written a mindfulness programme that concentrates on the mental health of the pupils and has been shocked by what he has heard from parents in recent weeks.
“The issues I encounter with parents are apprehension: children are nervous, they have lost their confidence, they are getting carried away with nerves, frustration and anger,” explained Beattie.
His six-week programme to deal with the transition touches on areas such as anger, dealing with worry and frustration, positive thinking and kindness.
In time, experts have claimed that we could be looking at a mental health epidemic due to the toll the coronavirus pandemic created.
Beattie has trained up two members of staff on the course and has found the interest to be huge. As things stand, both he and his two staff members are booked from now until the end of June.
The idea came from his own experiences of working in coaching his whole adult life, as well as a traumatic episode as a young man when he lost his mother
Carol when just 21. A number of formative experiences have occurred in his working life after he started off working for the Ulster Council of the GAA, coaching around the primary schools of the county.
“After four or five years of that, they made me like an overseer, where I was helping to recruit and select new staff, train them up, writing the programmes,” he explained.
“Somewhere in that wee space that I was in with them, I got my first taste for helping people.
“I’m now helping people with their psychological wellbeing. I am talking about P1 to P4. I am talking about a P1 pupil in the schoolyard, I am talking about raising their self-esteem, raising their self-confidence simply by a method of coaching, of praise, reward, have a go.
“It’s okay to make a mistake, and if you make a mistake, together me and you will fix it.
“So I could see week on week these children starting to flourish in terms of their confidence. Confidence, self-esteem, and the amount of teachers that came to me and said the confidence they were building throughout the year, they were bringing that into the classroom.”
A job came up in St Mary’s College within their GAA Academy. Ostensibly, it was working with the athletes within the University who had played for their county and were likely to drive their representative teams.
Overseeing the work was the current Down manager Paddy Tally, who is a senior lecturer in PE. Beattie’s responsibility was to the intake of 40 or so students who played county football, hurling, camogie, ladies’ football and handball.
“Anyone that fell into that GAA field, you had to look after them in a strength and conditioning, health and nutrition, skills development sense,” he explained.
“Not long into that role, I realised that I was so confident at all the sports stuff but I realised that I was in as a mentor to these ‘elite athletes’. And they are just people.
“Although they had everything going on for them in an athletic and sporting sense, I realised these students had issues like
‘It took me to make mistakes to realise it is not a weakness to need any help’
everybody else. Some of these were about finance, relationships, maybe even a specific learning difficulty or an unseen disability.
“Maybe something tied in with an addiction. They would come to me with mental health problems, a lack of motivation, depressed.
“So I had to learn very quickly and I had to learn on my feet.
“I had no qualifications or experience in mentoring young people around these issues, so I had to learn on the job and had to cut my teeth.
“I became very good at it because I am very approachable, I am a good listener. I started to link into other people for advice.”
That holistic side of his nature helped when he progressed to another post of Student Officer. From looking after a few dozen athletes, he was suddenly looking after the wellbeing of every student in the college.
That meant their studies, budgeting and dealing with students who had a disability they might not have been aware of, such as dyslexia.
“It was my job to get them tested and diagnosed and once I got that, link up all the support services they were entitled to internally through the University — extra time with the exams, consideration for spelling and
grammar and so on,” he said. “And the external support from the authorities, maybe helping them buy a laptop, or an assistanttohelpthemtowritetheir assignments.
“Sometimes students would come and say, ‘Look, I am not motivated, I think I am depressed’. Or worse, ‘I am self-harming, I don’twanttobehere,iattempted to take my own life’.
“So I learned on the job and St Mary’s invested heavily in me because I would do courses to get trained up in such as suicide prevention, all these courses to take them and then deliver them.”
He continued: “I would probably still be doing that job only
Iwasexhausted.anearlystart, late finish, all that driving. I just wondered what it was all about.
“All the sporting stuff was still goingalongatthesametime,the training with the Sigerson team, fresher teams and there were only a few of us in there and we worked across every team.
“It was deadly, a great experience and meeting good people. But it was the man hours and the travel.”
While turning 40, Beattie and his wife Marisa took a holiday to the United States with their children Alexandra, Ashton, Anna-rose, Tori and Carly.
After some self-reflection at such a landmark age, he recognised that what he wanted to do wasusetheempatheticsideof his nature to the greatest effect for others.
“I felt I could make a bigger impact with people in general if I couldgettothemwithmyknowledge, the messages I picked up along the way and concentrating on the things I wanted to concentrate on,” he stated.
“Because not only have I that experience, life hasn’t been a rosy garden for me. I was dealing with the death of my mother when I was 21, she was 48. It left two young boys (Christopher and Nathan) at home and I took on a lot of responsibility as a young fella.
“I made lots of mistakes along the way in terms of the decisions I made. I had problems with alcohol and all those sorts of things on the back of taking on too much and having a fixed mindset that I didn’t need help, and that it was a weakness if I needed help.
“I was the one that gave help. One brother was 11 and the other was eight and I felt that it was my job and I wouldn’t let anybody else do anything. I felt it was what mummy would have wanted me to do, but this caused a lot of bad decisions.”
Such as?
“I stopped training, stopped playing football, gained excessive weight, became dependent on alcohol and that all came off the back of taking on too much pressure and responsibility and not being able to come out of that,” he revealed.
“I should have let somebody come in and help in the house, make dinner, clean the house, help with the homework.
“But it took me to make those mistakes to realise that it is not a weakness to need any help or need support and guidance and a co-pilot along the way.
“But those are the messages now that I use along the way, that we do make mistakes and have to learn from them.”