33 | Insights with Dr Megan Matthews-Buning: Navigating Mental Health in Sports (Part 2)

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Catching You podcast. As you have noticed, there's a link in the show notes to send us a message. Lacie and I are taking questions to answer for future episodes.

[00:00:12] Send us your questions or simply drop us a message and let us know what you think of our show. Thank you and catch you guys on the other side. Take care. Welcome back everybody to Catching You. This is part two with Dr. Megan Matthews-Buning. Enjoy.

[00:00:31] I told him, I'm like, I'm not trying to throw balls. I'm trying to throw strikes. It's just not working right now. I'm not trying to walk the first batter of every inning. It's just not, I'm not trying to do that.

[00:00:44] But yeah, enough misconception. That's not just between daughters and dads, right? That's between athletes and the entire crowd. Or sometimes even coaches. And when I work with the others, it's having a conversation with understanding that

[00:01:03] this athlete is putting more pressure on themselves than you can imagine. You're not even seeing half of it. And so thanking moral on the lines of, do you really think, do you really think she's out there trying to throw balls? Welcome back everybody to Catching You.

[00:01:22] I'm your co-host Rusty Ham with me and my beautiful daughter Lacey. Lacey say hi. Hello. And we have another special guest, Dr. Megan Matthews-Buning. I'm glad you brought that out because Lacey and I talked about the other day actually about mental health and there should be categories.

[00:01:42] A lot of people talk about mental health and it's an umbrella. There's so many factors that go along with mental health and somebody who just broke up with their boyfriend or girlfriend and they're super depressed about that is way different from maybe something that happened on

[00:01:58] the Sao Paulo field or in the locker room and so there's different variations of mental health. And I'm glad you brought that up. There's people out there that can help you. You need to find

[00:02:10] the right person, right? Yeah exactly. And so when you look at the performance fields, the mental performance being taken to psychology, sports psychology stopped using that term because of the stigma that comes with psychology and there's also some of the protection there with

[00:02:24] that term. But yeah when you look at the mental performance field, it's athlete maybe more willing to go speak to somebody about why they can't focus in an at bat versus what's going on with

[00:02:38] mom and dad. But then here's what happened. If Lacey, you come to me and you were talking mental performance-wise and I have the training that I have and you start talking about some other stuff

[00:02:51] going on outside of Sao Paulo, I can then recognize that and say you know what? You may want to go talk to so-and-so, license, counselor or whatever about that. And so I have clients that do both.

[00:03:05] They work on their personal situations that need that clinical help with a licensed professional and then they work with me on the performance side. And we're able to build a really nice dynamic.

[00:03:16] And so you can help bridge that. That's great. Let's pivot to that. I want to because this is a father-daughter podcast, right? We've had our issues right, Lace. And I see it all the time.

[00:03:28] I've coached high school basketball for 30 years. Softball coach, I've seen fathers out there ruin their daughter's experience in softball. I guess you could fit it into mental health. And I'm not sure how comfortable you are with talking about your relationship with your dad

[00:03:45] and maybe and then talk about are there techniques that fathers can use? Because right now you're talking about coaches, athletes. Yeah, I think you're doing no pyres as well, which is really cool. But there's no, there's nothing out there for fathers, right? Because

[00:04:03] maybe they're too macho to look for help or your daughters. Is there a way that daughters could seek help and ask for help as far as my dad is like driving me nuts and dive into that a little bit?

[00:04:19] Yeah, absolutely. So I'll tell you that many of my clients that are in that high school college age, we spend time talking about parents and what's going on that side. And I actually do some

[00:04:31] work with parents. I just, if they ask, just finished up with a mom. She just wanted some work for her. And sometimes I'll have clients where they're minors and we'll do a session with mom and dad

[00:04:46] or we'll do a special call. And so that is something that is very much a part of the dynamic and looking at the whole view. In terms of working with my dad, I actually have a unique

[00:04:59] situation in that my parents were divorced when I was young. My biological dad, he was a baseball athlete. He played at Campbell and went on to go to the minor league for a little bit. And then

[00:05:14] when he found out my mom was pregnant, my granddad strongly encouraged him to go to the airport. And so that's what he did. But I have also my stepdad who I call my father and I grew up

[00:05:28] with him, lived in the same house and he's really the one that put in the time and the sacrifice to catch for me. Now my mom did some too, but my stepdad was there day in and day out. And then

[00:05:39] when I would go visit with my biological dad, he did some too, right? With my biological dad that had played baseball, he's pretty laid back. So it was usually pretty easy. We're just going to go

[00:05:50] for some pitches when he let me do my thing. But then you have my father. He's in the pitching lesson. He's driving me there and he's the one getting me up and going out

[00:06:04] at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning or before I could go to all games on Friday afternoon. We go on vacation to the beach. We're out there pitching on the sand or we're finding somewhere

[00:06:16] without the pitch. I remember those days and for a little bit it got really testy. And so what we did, and this is something I actually encourage my clients to do if they run across these situations, is dads, if we're with our daughter or you're with your daughters

[00:06:36] and you're hearing lessons and maybe you know a little bit about the skill they're trying to do, so we'll just say pitching for me. The problem that we would run into is he would get so

[00:06:47] frustrated when I wouldn't throw what I'm supposed to throw. And I'm sitting there going, I'm trying. You should thought like I'm not trying. And it was funny when I first started

[00:07:01] out. It was really, really wild more so than usual and it just seemed like I wasn't getting better. And so what we found out is that I needed glasses. I was severely, I was legally blind,

[00:07:13] like I couldn't see either. I was just throwing to a blur of a spot. So that helped. So maybe after questions, I'm down. But the other part is that kind of after that got settled

[00:07:25] is we came to a deal. And so I said, look, what if you give me 10 pitches? I'm supposed to be working on screwball. You give me 10 pitches. And if I can't figure out, give me, I'll ask for

[00:07:39] some feedback. How was that or whatever. If I'm not figuring it out within 10 pitches, then you tell me what you're noticing. And then let me guess, we went in increments of 10.

[00:07:53] And what that did is it really took the pressure off a little bit. He got to relax and just observe and critique a little bit. And then when it was the time, he would jump in and we would have a

[00:08:05] discussion. And I would either state my case or I would try whatever. And we'd go for another 10 pitches and try to figure it out. And that helped tremendously. Whatever it is, I would tell athletes working with dads, y'all come to some sort of agreement. Come to, and it

[00:08:24] has to be doable for both you and dad. What is that? What does that look like for you? For me, it was 10 pitches to figure it out. And that might be something different for you. But that's

[00:08:34] something that the other thing that I tell clients to talk, let's talk to our parent, let's have a conversation, especially these athletes coming up, they've got to have difficult conversations sometimes. And so we'll role play on how they want to approach

[00:08:51] dad and what they want to say and why, and we'll think through that. And that helps too. Yeah, the whole I'm trying thing, that was our issue when I was younger. I told them,

[00:09:04] I'm like, I'm not trying to throw balls. I'm trying to throw stuff. It's just not working right now. I'm not trying to walk the first batter in every inning. It's just not, I'm not trying to do that. But yeah, and not misconception. That's not just between daughters

[00:09:21] and dads, right? That's between athletes and the entire crowd. Or sometimes even coaches. And when I work with the others, it's having a conversation with understanding that this athlete is putting more pressure on themselves than you can imagine. You're not even seeing half of it.

[00:09:43] And so thinking more along the lines of, do you really think, you really think she's out there trying to throw balls? Let's think through that and let's be a little bit more rational.

[00:09:54] And what can we say then? Because what you're saying is not helping. It's not useful. It's not productive. So how then can we reframe that to something that is productive? And if you, as the coach or the dad need to confront the athlete about something, that's okay too.

[00:10:12] But because maybe you need some answer. Maybe you really don't know what's going on. You see the better understanding. And so working with dad and athlete, her dad and Lacey about how to have

[00:10:23] those conversations is absolutely something that I work with various people. Yeah. A lot of things you talked about triggered me, right? And I talked about this. I had an aha moment

[00:10:35] during the podcast when we were talking about it. She came to me when she was 14. No, this is like 12, 11 or 12, she came in the kitchen, bowling her head off and questioning me like, why are you,

[00:10:49] why aren't you talking to me? Why are you treating me this way? And that was an aha moment. And what I realized was for me, I was putting pressure on her because she was a part of the Bat Buster organization. She played for Mark Campbell and Mike Stith.

[00:11:05] And so I was putting, I wanted her to perform because as a father, I was projecting. I wanted her to perform because if she did well, then I look good as a dad, right? And so she would have

[00:11:18] a terrible session and I would go into ignore mode. I would ignore her. I wouldn't pay attention to her and she's 11 years old. And she's like, why isn't my dad talking to me? So she came in the

[00:11:31] kitchen just bawling her head off. And so we had a good conversation. I backed off. Then I started asking her, how did that feel? How did the session feel? And then we started communicating a

[00:11:42] lot better and our relationship definitely got more better. But I realized, and I'm sure I'm not the only father out there, that the pressure for their kid to perform in front of coaches, in front of, because she was entering and recruiting because recruiting back in, I don't

[00:12:00] know if you remember, they were starting to recruit sixth graders and seventh graders and eighth graders. So all of a sudden as a parent, I'm like, oh my God, you need to be like

[00:12:08] performing so that these colleges could be looking at you. And so as a father, I had to step back because I don't know if you want to touch on that a little bit or if you have anything

[00:12:17] else you want to. Yeah, I've talked about it with my lessons as well. I see some parents that are very involved with the lesson. I'm like, let me teach first and then we can communicate

[00:12:31] afterward. But I wanted to go into like how back to the mental health aspect of everything and how you yourself take care of your mental health and kind of what advice you would give to others, just like general things that people could do on a day-to-day basis monthly.

[00:12:54] Yeah, so it's about the self-care right? Sometimes people hate when or I'm getting it proved that's on me. We're gonna hear it out. You just muted yourself though. Did you do the echo preparation? No, I didn't know. Okay. Are you good now?

[00:13:21] No, I'm so weird. Do you can't hear it? No. Okay. I'll just go. What you're talking about is the self-care and that is something that acts to be very difficult for people to understand

[00:13:39] what that really means because if I tell you, Rusty, maybe you need to practice about hair. I'm going to give you some advice. I'm not sure what fun it may not be because I guess somewhere along the line, we are appreciated.

[00:13:58] Or thanks, don't really worry. I'll tell you the same thing here. I'm not going to include boss-type stuff, but self-care really is about doing what you need to do to step back, take a breather, change your focus on whatever you're doing and that doesn't have to

[00:14:18] be days and days for stuff. It can be a minute. It could be self-care, it could be me walking outside and going for a five-minute walk. They're giving that brain-brain type thing.

[00:14:29] Now, my big thing that I like to do for my mental health is we bought a horse in April. It was one of these childhood dreams that I've had. I used to ride when I was little,

[00:14:48] when I was figuring it out what I was going to do with my life or I placed off or whatever. And my daughters, I truly love taking them out to the barn, grooming that horse,

[00:15:00] training that horse and just doing all the things with them. And being with my daughter, that have a 15-year-old and a 13-year-old. So that's my big, my new one, but that's huge.

[00:15:12] And so some of the other things that I do take care of myself and make sure I'm recharged and refreshed is, yeah, I'll go get my toe. Sure. I had cleat feet. I was in cleats for a year.

[00:15:24] Feels good. So I'll do things like that, but I'll also just, has rolling brakes. I may not have to go anywhere, but I'm not going to work. I'm going to create boundaries and say, at this time,

[00:15:38] I'm shutting the computer down. I work online a lot. So I need to stay away from the computer. I need to stay offline. I need to go outside and do some things in the yard.

[00:15:48] I need to take my girls to the movies and just be. So those are probably the typical things that I do, the whole body. So these days, if you're going to find me, it's going to be either in this

[00:16:01] office, it's going to be somewhere out in the other part of the house or it's going to be at the barn. So yeah, that's what I do. I laugh a lot, try to. My husband's pretty funny and hopefully he

[00:16:13] won't hear this because I don't want his head to get too big. I do things like that. I would say self-care is my consulting with consulting and working with others in that capacity. That's

[00:16:23] not my full-time job, but being able to work with people, see progress and just to help them through some of the difficult situation, that is self-care to me because it lights my fire.

[00:16:37] Broadcasting, I go up to South Carolina and I'll do some of the digital SEC network stuff. That's self-care for me. I enjoy the people I've worked with and truly have a good time with them. And so those are the types of things that you can do. Love it.

[00:16:55] Yeah, because you've talked about coaching and talked about clients. So let's dive deep into that. We have a couple more minutes here. You did coach for a little bit, right? I did. I trained occasionally seven years and then I did some other.

[00:17:11] Yeah, you mentioned it was on the educational AD podcast. There you go. You mentioned like that was, you thought that was a natural path for you, right? You just thought that if I want to continue being in softball, I'm just going to start coaching.

[00:17:26] When you just necessarily didn't, I don't know if you said you didn't like it or I don't know, Lacey, you wanted to talk about why she got into it, what she was going to do or what she's doing now.

[00:17:40] Yeah, because we already talked about that with her sitting down and you sitting down and talking about the freedom and everything. What I meant was, okay, so you went from coaching to what you're doing now. What kind of triggered that? Number one.

[00:17:56] Yeah, I can tell you my, so they answer your question about coaching. The reason I got into coaching, actually, you'll recall earlier, I told you when I walked off the field, I said,

[00:18:07] I'm not coming back on the field. I don't want to coach. I don't want to do any of that. I thought I was going to go to physical therapy school, but I have an undergrad in kinesiology that motor developed and I married a physical therapist.

[00:18:22] But got wind that we had to do a cadaver lab and I was out. So at that point, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do and somebody, I think my college coach encouraged me to apply for

[00:18:37] to stay. They had a pitching coach position come open and so I thought, okay. So I did and coaching with one of those things where you feel like you're in the right direction, but not necessarily the right pocket. Okay, so I'm on the road, but I didn't necessarily,

[00:18:56] I'm not driving the right vehicle. And part of that was me because I was so young and still just very hard-poured the way that I was in my approach. As I was coaching at Florida State,

[00:19:10] what I came to find out is that a lot of your larger institutions have employee tuition assistance. And so when I found out that the university would pay for me to get a master's degree at the time,

[00:19:22] I was like, wow, yes. Now, what do I want to get an M? And I thought at that time, I'm not super, I'm not super excited about coaching, but I feel like this is probably what

[00:19:34] I'm going to do. So I want to make sure I'm the best coach I could be. What kind of degree would help with that? And Florida State really the only offering they had knew I didn't want to support

[00:19:42] management. So sports psychology was the other option. And so I did it and I'm so thankful I did because that really started unlocking different parts of my brain and started helping me make connections with some of the stuff that I had been wrestling with.

[00:19:58] And I started to do about a 90 degree shift in the way I thought about the game and thing. With a master's degree, you get it was thesis track. So you do research, you have to present that kind of stuff. I finished my master's degree and was still coaching.

[00:20:13] And South forward five years, four years, I end up at the University of Mississippi. Same deal, employee tuition. At this point, I realized I was going to get out of it because I had my first daughter and I was the recruiting coordinator. It would be called a Y.

[00:20:33] But didn't really know what I was going to get into. So I started my doctorate, continued my research in the sports psychology kind of area thinking that I was going to go into higher

[00:20:45] ed administration because that's what my PhD were. Well, funny story, didn't get any of those jobs that I applied for. And at the time I had gotten out of coaching in 2011,

[00:20:59] and was still finishing up my doctorate. So I was a grad at the time and my advisor had me teaching statistics to other doctorate students and master students. I'm math person, but I got statistics and she's making you can teach. You're really good at teaching. You should

[00:21:19] apply to some faculty. Then I go last and then I started thinking, all right, so I did. I started applying to faculty position. Then Augusta University gave me a chance. I'd not had any

[00:21:33] higher ed teaching outside of being a grad assistant. And I went in there and was a research faculty and taught graduate level research statistics, research method, how to do it.

[00:21:46] And my brain just shifted again. Did a 180 turn and it had to do with what I was learning and how I was applying. Took me about a year in the classroom, figure out I need to bring my

[00:21:59] coping mentality into the classroom. And once I did that, I have just taken off and loved every minute of it and been able to merge at the time as a researcher what I was doing in the classroom and mental performance wise, but also in how I develop courses

[00:22:15] and along the way, I discovered I'm a builder. I like to build courses and programs and I like to try different things with the mental performance stuff and the umpiring and working at Gama

[00:22:27] Fishtold. And that's really where it's a weird little path, not one that I ever thought would happen. And if you'd told me when I walked off the field in 2002 that I was going to be a

[00:22:38] professor one day, I would laugh right in your face. But here we are. And I went on at Augusta, I got tenure and then I left it and came back to Florida State just to teach and I could not have made a better decision. It's been amazing.

[00:22:55] That's cool you do it with umpires. Because umpires get a bad rap. Yes. That's great. You did that. Yeah, you wouldn't consider somebody coaching umpires but I think some do need some coaching because they're horrible. But uh, all right. Let's end on that. Let's how could,

[00:23:16] so you've talked about a couple of different things. You're obviously at FSU with the coaching there and then you have, you mentioned clients. So what is the difference between those two? And you said you'd have some clients. So what do you do at FSU? Yeah.

[00:23:34] What are their crafts? Is this a masters and then also you do consulting or you have clients and study too as well. Yeah, I do a variety of things. That's part of my personality and I need that self-care.

[00:23:47] I'm going to have different things. So my primary job is I am a clinical faculty. He's teaching. I teach teaching faculty and we have a master's degree and it's fully online. So if any of our listeners, if you're interested in getting a master's degree

[00:24:02] in coaching athletic coaching from Florida State, I would highly recommend you check that out. We're FSU coach and it's a, you can get through it in about two years. And so I, if you're going to take two classes this semester. So that's what I do full time.

[00:24:18] And then part time I have client, a variety of clients. I work with some collegiate teams of various sports, you know, women's basketball, softball. I have individual clients ranging from usually I stay around that 12 year old, 12 and up from a variety of sport.

[00:24:39] I have senior age client, there's some golfers, that kind of thing. I, most of my clients stay in that area because that's typically what you think of as people wanting performance work. In 2017, I reached out on my own. I was doing the broadcasting

[00:24:58] on the side and wanted to, they wanted us on air, talking about rules. And I realized, huh, even though I was a coach, I'm not really sure I grasped all the rules. I want to hear from an

[00:25:10] umpire. What's their perspective? What are they going through? And so I was connected with Chrissy Cornwell, who's the SEC coordinator of umpire. And through our conversations, now Chrissy is a clinical mental health counselor and she worked in the prison system.

[00:25:24] So she doesn't do what I do, but she is in mental health. And so we started talking and I said, do, she started talking about the issues that umpires faced with fans and just getting

[00:25:36] railed on and you know, all that kind of stuff. And I said, do y'all any kind of performance assistance? Because I know the schools you're calling for dude, they have access. And she said, no, we're, we are independent contractors. So we have to just figure things out.

[00:25:51] And that's when my, I really thought my dad, my biological dad and my granddad, they were longtime Ford officials. And if I had an understanding of that, I've always respected them. And I didn't think that was really fair. If you're going to call, if you're going to

[00:26:07] expect these umpires to be on their top performance in the SEC, then why are you not providing them resources? So I wanted to become a resource for them. And so since 2017,

[00:26:17] I've been working with her and since then expanded some other coordinators. And so I go in and provide training at their clinics that they do training plant. I have some private individual umpires

[00:26:29] that'll seek my assistance as they need. Yeah. So that's what I, a lot of I do, what I do, I just got back from the Vera beach area at major league baseball. They have an elite development

[00:26:44] league where they bring in elite high school female softball and baseball athletes. And they asked me to come in and do some mental training for them. I've done some with USA Polo referee. It's just been really cool to see how the performance work with the vehicle

[00:27:04] being softball. It all comes down to softball and how many doors that this sport has opened for me. So yeah, that's what I do. Dad, you're on mute. Sorry. I know you need to go, but you said

[00:27:23] in that last podcast, that AD podcast that you said yes a lot and that sounds like that's what you did. You just said yes to a lot of things. And then now you're thinking of choosing

[00:27:32] what's worked for you, but that's really cool. How could one of our listeners wants to maybe do the master's program or reach out to you privately? How could they get a hold of you?

[00:27:43] Door. So if you want either, I'll just give you my FSU email because it's the easiest to remember. And it's m.bunning. You can also message me through LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn and then at

[00:28:02] Twitter at Dr. Bunny. So people get the ends mixed up. It's just one in BUN, ING. Okay. Cool. We'll put that in the show notes as well so that they can connect with you. Appreciate

[00:28:16] you coming on. This is a really cool conversation. And I know Lace probably got some good nuggets out of it. I don't know if you have anything to say at the end here. No, yeah, I'm just, I'm

[00:28:28] because I want to do a gratis this year. And so I want to do, I get my master's in sports psychology and all that stuff. Just been thinking about doing that. It's more and more every day. I'm like, that's definitely what I wanted to do.

[00:28:42] Definitely. Like I said, I would encourage you to stay in the sport arena as long as you can. And even if you coat just on the outside, like with your lessons or jump on a little league

[00:28:55] team or whatever, travel team, whatever you're doing with that, I would highly encourage you to do that. Your master's degree in sport, like, is definitely going to help when you do. And I would encourage you, I think for financial reasons and longevity,

[00:29:10] having that clinical background, you are going to have more options for a long term career. So when you get into that space, if you decide to go psychologist, just know you're going to

[00:29:24] be in it for a long haul. It's going to be very difficult. But you do want to make sure if you want to go the sport route that you are setting up your experiences and asking to be put in

[00:29:35] sport, otherwise you're going to be in these general pockets. The other option to consider is the clinical mental health counseling. It's a shorter time period. You can still build athletic departments and those sorts of things will hire you with the health count, with

[00:29:53] the counseling degree. And they're actually looking for a lot of folks with that. It's a little bit more person-centered. The psychology approach is a little more what is clinical, but very much so in how your approach... If you have more questions, I've got

[00:30:10] part of my work in the sports psych work field with that CNPC as I mentor others that are trying to get their hours, I supervise them to get that certificate. And one of my new mentees is

[00:30:22] actually a psychologist already. And she works in the Jacksonville area and they... It's for Baptist Hospital and they do some work with the Jacksonville Jaguars, but I know she's trying to get this CNPC to have that sport kind of designation. So if you have any questions,

[00:30:37] I know she'd be very happy to connect with you. Very cool. Can you? Yeah. Having me, this has been fun. I really appreciate you taking the interest. Yeah, thanks for joining us and we'll catch everybody else on the other side. Lace, love you.

[00:30:52] Love you. Megan, thank you again. You're welcome. Thank you.