Fighting the Mental Health Epidemic in Youth, with Jared Scott

Jared Scott, an award-winning motivational speaker and mental health expert, joins us to unpack the state of mental health in our schools. Jared says, “I started speaking at 15 years old, not by choice. I had a tragedy in my hometown. We had 12 students in one school year attempt to take their life.” Rather than dwelling on the problem, Jared is focused on solutions, and he offers actionable strategies for supporting the students in our schools and for changing school cultures to foster positive mental health. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

Transcript

#316 — Fighting the Mental Health Epidemic in Youth, with Jared Scott

AVID Open Access
40 min

Jared Scott  0:00  

I started speaking at 15 years old, not by choice. I had a tragedy happen in my hometown. We had 12 students in one school year attempt to take their life. You could imagine it was catastrophic, but we didn't know what to do about it.

Paul Beckermann  0:17  

The topic of today's podcast is Fighting the Mental Health Epidemic in Youth, with Jared Scott. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes that we can raise the bar for education. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark  0:36  

Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I'm Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann  0:47  

I'm Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin  0:48  

And I'm Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann  0:52  

And we're here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music  0:57  

Education is our passport to the future,

Paul Beckermann  1:00  

Our quote for today is from a video posted on our guest Jared Scott's website. In the video, Jared says, "I believe that if you have the courage and confidence to stand up and tell the truth to the people around you, that even the darkest moment of your life could one day become the light at the end of the tunnel for somebody else." All right, Rena, what are your thoughts about that?

Rena Clark  1:25  

It's so powerful. I think about courage to share your struggles, but sometimes it's hard in the moment. So I don't know if I've shared it yet on this podcast yet, but my my 12 year old son was diagnosed as a type one diabetic this year in February, and that has shaken all our lives, especially his, and to just witness him being the only kid in his school and the struggle, and he's already kind of a shy kid with struggles and media phobia. We could talk about it for hours, but it's just been been a struggle, and I've watched him, and actually, I'm excited today. He's leaving for camp for kids with just type one, and I'm really excited just for him to have that community, and I do see the struggle of his being something that he'll be able to share later. We're not quite there yet, so I'm just excited to talk more about this, and I see it in the students that I've supported, but it's really hitting home for me this year, on a personal level.

Paul Beckermann  2:22  

Appreciate you sharing your story, Rena, and it's that truth, right? Willingness to share your own truth that then can resonate with others, that kind of connects with me. And our guest today is a perfect person to chat about these things. It was his quote, and we'll dig in a little deeper with our guest, Jared Scott. Jared has a degree in behavioral sciences, and has been speaking to audiences all over the U.S. since he was 15 years old. In 2023, he was chosen as the Next Level Speaker of the Year. Congratulations, Jared, and welcome to the show.

Jared Scott  2:53  

Thank you very much. I appreciate that. So, yeah, that quote. I mean, am I cool to go in on that quote, the background? 

Paul Beckermann  3:01  

Oh, yeah, go for it.

Jared Scott  3:02  

I started speaking at 15 years old, not by choice. I had a tragedy happen in my hometown. We had 12 students in one school year attempt to take their life. I don't live in a big town. Midland, Texas is where I grew up. There's about 50,000 people in the town, so you could imagine it was catastrophic, and everybody was impacted. Everybody knows everybody. We're close-knitted community, but we didn't know what to do about it. Like we didn't have the mental health resources that you might have in other states, to be honest with you. Ten years ago, 15 years ago, West Texas, we almost didn't believe in mental health, you know what I'm saying. You would try to talk to people about managing their mind and their emotions, and they would tell you, just go get a job, work two jobs, play every sport that you can, do everything you can, not to think about the way that you're feeling. And so that's just what we did, and it did. It caught up with us. It turned into an epidemic. And when I lost my friend to suicide, my first thought was, she was the happy girl to me. She was the go-lucky girl. She was the cool girl, tough girl, class clown. I mean, she was the one that would always make us smile. So I was thinking, how many other kids are coming to school every day, how many teachers are coming to school every day? How many parents are going to work every day? You know, like with a smile on their face. On the outside, it looks like everything's perfect, but on the inside, they're a completely different person. And I just knew that from my own life, because I was doing the same thing. I had fighting parents at home. My parents were teenagers when they had me, so they were just kids trying to raise a kid. So they're fighting. They didn't know how to manage their mind or their emotions. I didn't know how to talk to them, communicate with them. I came to school every single day feeling like it was all my fault. You know, I was the reason my parents were fighting. On the outside, I kept the smile on. My friends would ask me if I was okay, but I would say that I was fine. I was just tired because I was up all night. Didn't get good sleep, you know. I didn't want to talk about what I was thinking about all night. You know, those were the real problems. I was like, I'm just tired. So I put that smile on my face, and I went on my way until that happened to my friend. And when I thought about it, I was like, if she could feel this way, and nobody noticed. I feel this way, and I feel unnoticed. How many other people are going through their day-to-day lives feeling unnoticed, and how long until it's too late for them, too? 

So with the sense of urgency, me and my friend at the time, we worked in a music studio. We were engineers, and we made people's music, and we rapped, and we sang songs. And so we decided to do what we did best. We put our emotions into our music. We didn't talk about our feelings. I was known as the shy kid, but I could write a song, and so I put my emotions into the music. I made a song for my friend. I had an idea, you know, I'm gonna go to the schools, I'm gonna rap this song, and I'm gonna let everybody know that they're not alone in their feelings. As a shy kid, that was really, really hard to do, and this was probably the darkest moment of my life at this point, especially for my friend. My best friend--it was his girlfriend that passed away, so that's how close we were to her. And so I was scared of what he was going to do. I knew this was the darkest moment of his life, but I remember the night that I made the song. I got a case of what I call the "what-ifs." Like, what if nobody likes this? What if nobody cares? What if nobody listens? And so I quit. I actually quit. I finished the song, then I looked over to my friend. I said, bro, I can't do this. Who am I kidding? You know, I'm the shy kid. Nobody's gonna care, etc, etc. And I saw that look of defeat on his face. I saw that this was the darkest moment of his life, and this idea that we had to make a difference, that was that light at the end of the tunnel. That's what was giving us hope. So when I quit, it was like I just shut off all the lights, and I saw him lose hope. I lost hope, and we're sitting in the studio. We're sitting there in silence, nobody's talking. Ten, fifteen minutes goes by. It starts to get awkward, so I just press play on the song, and I had this song playing on loop. I didn't say anything to him. He didn't say anything to me. Song's just playing, and then out of nowhere, a knock at the studio door. It's late, nine, ten o'clock at night. We didn't invite nobody. Nobody should have been there. I opened the doors. Random lady I'd never met before, she's standing there, and she goes, hey, can I come in and listen to that song? And stranger-danger. I was a kid, so I was just like, I didn't know what to say, but I had this gut feeling. I was like, sure, you know. I let her in. She comes in. She sits at the back of the room. I press play on the song. Song's playing on loop. Maybe halfway through the song, she didn't even finish it. The door closes. So I turn around, and she's gone. She left in the middle of the song. So you can imagine me, the insecure kid at the time, thinking nobody cares. I was like, she couldn't even finish the song. I was like, that's confirmation of all the what-ifs. I quit for reals this time. I turned off the computer, I shut off the lights. I literally gathered my bag, I was walking out the studio door to leave, and there she was, same lady. 

But this time, she had tears running down her face, and she had a ring in her hand. She handed me this ring, and on the side, in big, bold letters, it says "Hope," which, you know, hope's on a lot of jewelry, so, it's not that crazy. But in that moment, to me, we'd lost hope. I mean, we needed hope. So weirdly, this made sense. I didn't know what to say. I remember, I just put my head down, I'm looking at the ground, and she puts her hands on my shoulders, and she breaks down. She starts telling me her story. She told me that her friend that lived next door in the apartments just lost her son to suicide. He was one of those 12 students. She said she came here to comfort him. She was just walking by the studio. She heard the song from outside. She sat out there trying to listen to it while it was on repeat. Finally got the courage to knock on the door and ask if she could come in and listen to the song. She listened to about half the song. She said, "I broke down in tears. I remembered this ring that I had, and I just want to give it to you, because your song right there just gave me hope." And she said, "I believe that that's all we need. All we need is hope." 

And that moment right there inspired that quote, but it changed my life, because before that moment, I thought hope was just a wish. Like, I thought, Hope is what you said to somebody when you didn't really know what to say, like, I hope it gets better. You know, a lot of speakers that came to my school, it felt like they were just saying, I hope you graduate. I hope things get better. I hope, you know, and I didn't want to be that. I was like I want to be something more than hope. And I realized what real hope was. I was like, oh, real hope--actual hope--is you. It's me. It's we. We are hope. It's our stories, it's the truth. It's through the things in life that we go through that make us who we are, and when we have the courage and the confidence to stand up and tell people the full truth, which includes how we're feeling and how we're dealing with life, not just what we're going through. Everybody tells you that--as soon as you ask them if they're okay, they say they're fine. They're just tired. They draw the line at their feelings, and then people relate to each other through their feelings. So if you don't tell me how you feel, then I really can't connect with you fully. You feel alone in your feelings. It feels like you're the only one going through what you're going through. I had friends that lost friends to suicide. I had friends that came from split-parent homes and arguing parents, but I never told them how I felt about this. It felt like it was only happening to me. That's why we're in a world full of billions of people and can still feel alone, because we're alone in our feelings, and all that just clicked to me that night, because I realized that music is a language of emotions. I put my feelings into this song. That's what related to this lady. She told me it gave her hope. Her giving hope to me and me giving hope to her came from these mutual feelings that we were expressing. And I was like, that's what hope is. I didn't have a speech. I didn't have anything written out, but the very next week, I went to the school, and I got up on stage, and I just told everybody in that crowd how I was feeling and how I was dealing with everything that was going on in my life. Afterwards, kids lined up to talk to me and tell me their stories. And that's when I realized, like, hey, we're all connected. We're all part of each other's stories. All it takes is one person to have the courage and the confidence to stand up and face fear first, and then other people will feel safe enough to follow. I was like, I can be that one person. Public speaking was my biggest fear. I was like, if I could conquer this, then life is limitless. I can do it all. And so I set out on that mission to just basically conquer my biggest fear and be the person that was going to be a leader, to stand up first, and face it. 

Rena Clark  11:12  

I appreciate you sharing that face fear first, and then look at all the people that followed and needed that. Well, you've done so much. I would love for you to talk to our listeners and tell them a little bit about your Culture Shift Program and the mission of that program.

Jared Scott  11:27  

Yes, ma'am. I like to say that we at the Culture Shift Tour, because there's a lot of people that work with me, a lot of other speakers as well--we're professional problem solvers. When people come on board and come onto the team, I'm like, look, we're here to solve problems. That's what this is. Creative problem-solving is a business. And so when we come in, we're seeing, like, what is everybody dealing with? Instead of having this cookie cutter speech that we give at every single school, it's like, we have meetings beforehand with the school to understand the challenges from the teacher side, and then we have in-person meetings with the students to understand their challenges in their personal lives and in the classroom, and understand the full culture of the school. Because the culture is like the personality of the school. It's the pattern of behavior of the school that's been there forever. I mean, before these kids were even enrolled in that school, that personality had been there. And so when we try to change the personality, the personality pushes back, and that's why we have a really rough time changing and shifting the cultures in schools. If we're just doing one thing here, and then we don't do it, and we don't follow up with consistency, then we try again with another speaker, another program. That didn't work. We tried another program. I just saw inconsistency. And I was like, if we're really going to change behavior over time, it's just like behavioral health and psychology. If you want to change your brain and rewire your brain, it's going to be consistent, persistent, relentless effort over time. So I was like, what if we came into the schools, we gave a keynote to inspire everybody, change the climate, which is what motivational speakers do. They change the attitude for the moment, but that usually goes back to normal a couple days later because there's no follow up. I said, What if we followed up? What if we did a breakout session? We understood everybody's challenges, and then we went through a series of activities and a program which is basically trauma-focused therapy. We're remembering the traumatic experience, we're feeling the negative emotions. We're detaching them through forgiveness. So we're forgiving the people that hurt us, forgiving ourself for believing whatever lie we told ourselves that came out of this hurtful situation, that it was our fault or we deserved it, or whatever it was, right? And then we replace those lies with the truth, and then we can actually see clear enough because the negative emotions are removed. Then we can come up with a solution for the rest of the school. So I do that with the students. They come up with solutions, and then we take those solutions into staff meetings, and we develop them into movements, and then we take the top movements to community nights, present them to parents, nonprofits in the broader community, to actually get buy in and create them. And some of these movements that we've created have gone on for four, five, six, seven years. Some of them have turned into books. Some of them turn into nonprofits. Some of them turn into programs. And that's just the seed that we planted, and they took it from there. And so the way I saw it is like, that's going to change the culture over time, because it's something that they're doing quarterly, annually. Some of these things are bi-weekly. It's like, this becomes a part of the community, the culture of the school. It took a long time to figure that out. It took a long time to figure out why kids could tell me all their problems and challenges, but could never see the solutions, and it took me going back to school to figure out that they had so many negative emotions attached from these traumatic experiences that when they remember them, their nervous system feels like it's happening right now, and they literally freeze up. They can't see a future version of themselves because they're clouded with anger. You know, they're blind with anger, so sad that they can't see tomorrow. They're turning to instant gratification like drugs and alcohol, and we're trying to plan out the future for these kids, but they can't see a future version of themselves, so they don't take that person in consideration, the decisions that they're making today. That person doesn't exist, so it doesn't matter to them. So I was like, Oh, we got to quit planning the future. We got to help them remove the negative emotions so they could see their future for themselves. So there was a lot that came into this program in the beginning. It was just pretty black and white, like, what are your challenges? All right, let's try to come up with solutions. But over time, once I removed those negative emotions and went through that process with the kids, they started to have their own ideas, and those kids' ideas are next level, to say the least. I have some crazy ideas that kids have come up with that have become nonprofits that have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for mental health.

Paul Beckermann  15:35  

I love that you're empowering kids, because we don't do that enough, right? We don't listen to the kids, we do things to the kids, or they feel like we're doing things to them, even though we have good intentions. So I'm curious, as you've gone around and listened to all these kids, what is the state of mental health as they share it with you? Like the state of mental health of student populations out there?

Jared Scott  15:57  

Yeah, I mean, it's bad, but I don't like to focus on the negative, and the reason why is because it's the way that our brains work. If we focus on the negative, then we're damaging neural pathways that allow us to be creative and allow us to have problem-solving abilities, capabilities. When we focus on the positive, we create new neural structures and pathways that help us think clearer through the problems. So I see a lot of positive and I see a lot of negative, but I shift my perspective, and I choose to pick out the positive. And the positive in this situation is that the kids are open to mental health and mindfulness more than ever before. In my generation, when somebody tried to teach us how to meditate or do mindfulness journaling or anything like that, I mean, most people laughed it off as if it was not real at all. There was no concrete science behind it, and didn't even give it the time of day. But in my experience, 14 years on the road, this last six, seven years, and then after COVID, the importance of mental health has just skyrocketed. The grants and the funds, and the availability of those funds for mental health is growing year after year after year. They're understanding that we use our minds for everything, and I'd rather lose everything that I have than to lose my mind. So if we want to have academics and success in academics and schools and stuff like that, I mean, that's your brain, right? So don't you think better mental health or more mental health resources would help these kids achieve higher goals? Of course it would, right? It doesn't matter if you can pass the test because you're so smart, but you you can't take the test because you have crippling anxiety, you know? And at the end of the day, Are we really getting them ready for the real world, or are we just grading them based on these four answers, A, B, C or D, right? Like, what are we getting them ready for? The stress of doing this in their actual workplace, and actually being a human being in this world today? We're going to have to have some mental resilience, if you ask me. It should be, it should be at the top. I mean, we spend millions of dollars here in Texas on physical health, athletics. No joke. A school down the road here in Prosper, Texas, just built a $50 million school. Fifty. You know what I'm saying? And a huge, like athletic facility, like a big stadium. You'll call that same school, and they won't have a budget for mental health. It's crazy. It's crazy, but, yeah. 

Rena Clark  18:39  

Yeah, it's interesting. And I know things have changed, especially since I was in school, but I still think there is some negative stigma that exists. So I'm just curious how you might encourage our listeners. How might they help break down that negative stigma that still is existing around mental health?

Jared Scott  18:57  

Yeah, I like to explain it to kids like this. If you say something about yourself, say you believe, for some reason, that you're not enough, maybe a traumatic experience happened. Let's just take mine, for example. I had fighting parents every day. So as a human being, I like to reason why that happens. I want to know why my parents fight, but if I wasn't taught to talk to them about my problems or my feelings, and they don't validate those feelings, and every time I open up to them, it turned into another fight, then eventually I'm just gonna have to come up with the answer on my own, and what most kids do is just say, It's all my fault. I'll take all of it. I'm the reason my parents fight. If I wasn't here, maybe my parents would be happy. I'm the problem. Now they have identified themselves as the problem. That's a problem within itself, because if your identity is in a lie, lies multiply, and eventually you're a different person around every group of people you're around. Different person around your friends and your parents, different person on social media than you are in real life. And you believe that you're the problem. So that means most of the time, you're probably going to isolate yourself, because when you're around, you think there's a problem. You might even have a thought. If I need to get rid of the problem, that means I need to get rid of myself. I'm the problem. That could be a suicidal thought, right? So identity is a big part of this. What are you putting in your identity and what you believe about yourself? The lies that you believe you're the problem and you're not enough. So whenever an opportunity arises for you to deem yourself worthy to yourself to take this opportunity, you have this underlining lie that you're not enough. Stopping kids from even trying new things, even stepping outside of their comfort zones. Right? Does that make sense? And so I'm trying to first get them to understand that you're the solution to your problems. I could try to help you, but if you don't help you, you'll still end up helpless. So at the end of the day, you can't put your identity in a problem because you are the solution. Like that's a fallacy, first of all. It's causing cognitive dissonance. You're not who you say you are. You're holding contradictory beliefs about yourself, right? I like to really break down what things mean to kids so they understand why we have these negative emotions. The stigma is attached to everything. It's like, let's break it all the way down from the beginning. What are you saying about you, and what do you believe about you? Because maybe, just maybe, reality is a reflection of your self-perception, who you believe you are. Everybody else can believe these wonderful things about you, but if you don't believe them, then sadly, to you, it's not true. And so that goes. We have collective definitions to everything. That's what these stigmas become, right? If a lot of people live in a collective conscious where nobody takes mental health serious, and they attach all of these words--snowflake and all this stuff that people call people soft--and this and that. That's how it is over here, just so you know. Like if you talk about your mental health or your feelings, you're soft, and men don't cry, and all these things, right? Okay, well, that's a collective definition. And if you believe that, and you believe it long enough, that becomes true to you, and you're going to tell yourself that if you cry, you're weak and you're not supposed to cry. You're a man. These are things I had to remove from my identity, that me being vulnerable doesn't make me weak, that me being vulnerable actually makes me strong, because vulnerability is the key to freedom, right? So I think it's really these collective definitions that we've created, and then if you want to change your definitions, you want to change your mind, you want to change your perspective, your position, all of that's based on your surroundings and your environment, and where you're at, and who you're listening to. What you're consuming will eventually consume you, right? 

So I had to change my environment. I moved from Texas to California for a while. I lived in Los Angeles for a while. I traveled the country. I'm back living in Dallas now. I mean, everywhere I go, I collect perspectives and positions from other people. You know, when we do conferences and stuff like that, when we do career days at school, what is that, really? Well, it's people from different positions in the workplace coming together to share their point of view, so that way kids can see, Oh, I like this point of view. I like this position, I like this position. And as a result of that, we all start shifting our perspective. We can't get the full picture until everybody shares their perspective and their point of view. Eventually we'll see that full picture. And the full picture is that we're all part of each other's stories. We're all connected. Everything you say influences and impacts the people around you, even your absence makes an impact. Even if you didn't show up here tomorrow and make an impact, you can't escape that, right? So we have to start understanding our responsibility and our place in the world, like if everybody's not taking mental health serious in the community for the longest time, it's a saying that my friend has. It's a marine saying, actually. He said, "We save the people that are swimming towards the boat." So he'd tell me that all the time. He'd be like Jared. I'd be like, Man, I'm trying to get into schools in Midland to help people with mental health. He said the effort that you're putting into this town that is not welcoming mental health, if you put that same effort in a town over here that's swimming towards the boat that actually wants help, needs help, man, you could do so much for people. And so when I started to do that, and started to go where I was welcomed, or mental health was a subject and a topic, next thing I noticed that those areas, those sub-cultures, were getting bigger and bigger and bigger, until one day, they take over the entire culture of mental health. We're doing a great job, right? I mean, I think so, in a short period of time. I'm 28 years old, and I've already seen mental health. Just now it's on Super Bowl commercials. Now it's like, there's so much when it wasn't talked about when I was a kid.

Paul Beckermann  24:40  

So let me build on that a little bit. So as you've gone around and you've talked to these schools, what gives you hope and inspiration from what you're picking up in the messages you're getting back?

Jared Scott  24:53  

The kids. I know a lot of people like to talk bad about Gen Z and the younger generations and that I love them. I absolutely love them. I spend so much time with them. They are compassionate. They love each other. They're not racist. Kids are, number one, kids were never born racist. They were learned these things, and hate, and all this stuff. But these kids truly, they love each other. There's always exceptions. I get that. People put whatever they want on the media, but I spend so much time with these kids, and this next generation is so empathetic, compassionate, and my heart goes out to them. They are living in a very tough time. I mean, I couldn't even imagine growing up in the world that they're growing up in right now. The pressure of school, the pressure of pleasing their parents, pleasing to teachers, please their friends, and then they're connected to everything that's going on around the world, and they're still holding together. Like they got all of this stacked against them, and they just need our help. They give me hope, though. They do. 

Paul Beckermann  25:57  

I'm glad that's what you're seeing out there, because that's what I feel, too. Like when I look at my own kids and the kids that I've worked with in schools, I think they're underestimated. I think they've got so much potential. And like you said, they just need, they just need a hand. They need that support, and they can do amazing things.

Rena Clark  26:15  

They really can. So when we're talking about supports, what are some more, maybe some specific or actionable steps that our educators can take to really combat mental health and the health crisis with students.

Jared Scott  26:29  

You know how they always say the first step is to talk about it? Like the first step is to get somebody to open up. I always thought that's kind of the first step. But really, the first step is to build trust so that way they feel like they can even talk about it. I go to a lot of schools where the kids look at the teachers like this perfect professional that they pretend to be. And so I'm like, have you told your principal about this? Have you told your teacher? Have you told your counselor? Who's your favorite teacher? Have you told them about this? No, no, no. And it's really because they just see them in this role. They don't see them as a human being. I mean, you remember seeing your teachers out in public, maybe shopping at Walmart or something that would just blow your mind that they even shopped. Or you saw them at a restaurant eating, and you're like, oh my gosh, they eat? Like, this is crazy, because you just saw them in this one place, in this one position, from one perspective. And so I'm trying to get teachers to be like, hey, look, we got to be vulnerable, because the kids line up to talk to me after programs. Why? Because I'm vulnerable. And teachers are always asking me, how did you get them to do that? Look how honest I was up there. And I'm not saying to go air your dirty laundry out to your kids. That's not what I'm saying, not to put the pressure on them. But to be honest, that you have flaws, and that you're a human being, and we relate to each other through these mutual feelings. Like they're not going to understand the exact same situation that you're coming from. You don't understand their situation. You don't have their family, their friends, or their traumatic experiences, or their reactions to them. We're different. I could put myself in your shoes, have empathy for you, but I can't put myself in your head and have your perspective of life and your brain, the way you operate. But if you told me how it feels to be you and I tell you how it feels to be me, then we can relate to each other through those mutual feelings. Then we get to push back against all these pressures that we feel alone in together, and that's what I think teachers need to do a better job of. Most of them do. That's the hardest job in the world. Teachers have my heart. Just so you know, they're teachers and counselors at the same time, whether they're schooled on that or not, or have an education in that or not. Every teacher has to counsel these kids. Their parents. It's like, these are their kids, too. And so, if they're just open and honest about their flaws from the beginning, their personal struggles, how they felt when they were a kid. 

I use this example all the time. My grandmother basically was like my mom, because I had young parents. My grandmother's never had a cell phone besides a flip phone that she has right now that she loses all the time. She don't use it. She don't use technology. She don't know what it's like to be connected to things across the world. She has no idea what's going on. She stays out of that world, but she knows how it feels to be disconnected. You see what I'm saying? So when I was growing up talking to my grandmother about feeling disconnected online because we're dealing with cyberbullying and stuff like that, the first generation, I was having to deal with that at twelve, thirteen years old, and I'm trying to explain it to my grandmother. Eventually, I got to the point where I was like, Look, grandma, I just feel like I'm more connected, yet more disconnected than ever before. And she told me a story about her childhood. How her mother died when she was eight years old, or when my grandmother was eight years old, her mother died, and she was passed around to family members and living with friends and relatives, and she felt like she could never fit in, and she felt disconnected from everybody, everywhere that she went. And I was like, Oh my gosh, the circumstances will never be the same, but the feelings and the emotions are. So we have this huge gap. Obviously, the things that we were doing when we were kids are not the same things that these kids are doing. It keeps going up on the ladder and it keeps going down, everything's going to change circumstance-wise. But these feelings, man, they're not going anywhere. So let's tell each other how we feel. How does that make you feel?

Paul Beckermann  30:14  

Those are some strong words. We're all different, but we're all the same. And it's kind of like a mindset thing to look at, which is kind of a tool, Rena, so let's hop into our toolkit.

Transition Music  30:27  

Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What's in the toolkit? What is in the toolkit? So, what's in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann  30:37  

All right, Jared, I'm gonna let you be our first contributor to the toolkit, and if people are interested in bringing you in or to have you work with their students and staff, what could they do and what resources and services might you have available for them? 

Jared Scott  30:54  

Absolutely. So JaredScottSpeaks.com. On there, you can go to any social media site, you can fill out an intake form, and we do discovery calls again, because we're not just booking one thing. Get on there. Tell us what you need. We'll help you facilitate that no matter what it is. The culture shift package is a keynote. It's a breakout session with your student leaders to come up with solutions. It's professional development to develop those solutions into movements. And then we do community nights to bring everything together, get community buy-in. So by the end of it, my goal is to create something with the students from the bottom up, not the top down, something that they created. And then we build upon that to create culture, a brand new culture, and we repeat it over time, so that way it lasts. And the main, the main focus that I want people to understand, whether they book me or not, or use me or not, is the process of detaching negative emotions through forgiveness. Is it cool if I just go through that loop? It's four steps. I feel like, if people know these steps in life, no matter what happens to you, you don't have to carry it around with you for the rest of your life. And if you could start doing that at a young age and not have to do it when you're thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years old and it's all piled up, it'll be much, much easier. So the first step is always to remember what happened, which you're doing anyways, but most the time we remember, and then we distract because we don't want to feel it. So we have to remember what happened and feel the emotions, not get on our phones, not do anything else. We just feel it and sit in those emotions. And then we have to understand that after something happens to us, no matter who we are, we come up with a story to justify why it happened, and sometimes we justify people's wrongdoing, and it unknowingly takes away the need for forgiveness. So you say, well, I know why they did that. For example, my dad was fifteen, sixteen when I was born, so I'm like, oh, he was young. I understand why he left. But the reality is he still left, so that means I need to forgive him. It's like, if somebody walked in here right now and made a noise, they're like, oh, sorry. I didn't know you were doing a podcast. It could have been an accident. They didn't know that, but they're still going to say sorry, and if they don't, there might be a little weird feeling between us, right? Why didn't he say sorry? That's kind of weird, right? And so what you have to do, no matter what happened, is forgive the people that hurt you, and then forgive yourself for believing the lies that came out of the hurt. Whatever story it is that you told yourself, if it's not true, then you need to forgive yourself for telling it to you. Because think about it like this. Imagine there was a little kid in this room, and I told her, Hey, you're not good enough. You're not smart enough. It's all your fault. All of y'all would be like, what did you just say to that kid? You need to apologize to that kid. Well, some of us that are thirty, forty, fifty years old have been saying that to the inner child in us for thirty, forty, fifty years, and we never apologized, so we hold resentment and bitterness towards ourselves for believing a lie. So we need to forgive, and forgiveness is the only way to detach negative emotions. But it's also not about saying sorry. It's about letting go of all the parts of you that are untrue so that way you can live in your true identity and be confident in who you are. So once you do that, you detach from these negative emotions. You remember, you feel, and forgive. Remember, feel, forgive. Remember, feel, forgive. Detach for the negative emotions. You're going to be amazed at how much more clearer you can see your future. Then you start taking future you into consideration of all the decisions that you're making today. You start to have delayed gratification, because you're thinking about you and you're thinking about your kids, and you start thinking about your legacy. You start thinking about your your family tree and everybody around you, not as is it a good decision for me? Is it a good decision for my my kids and my family? Is it good for the community? You start thinking so much bigger, because you can see beyond yourself because you're not clouded from all the anger and the negative emotions that you have. That's why people that are really traumatic childhood experiences, they have what's called an orphan mindset, even if they have both their parents, has nothing to do with the name. It's just that, at the end of the day, more for everybody else meant less for me, and that's what they believe. So when other people win, they don't celebrate them. They envy them. It's just negative emotions become the snowball effect. The next thing you know, you were surrounded. You ever seen that movie "Soul" by Disney? You ever seen that? You know that lost soul moment where she's in the middle of that black cloud, it turns into a monster. It starts fighting off her friends. One friend goes in the middle, finds her in the middle. She's there in the fetal position. She's saying, I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. Nobody likes me. She was creating the cloud of negative emotions. She couldn't see that ahe was surrounded by people for thousands of years that were trying to help her. We removed the negative emotions. She forgave herself. They went away. Disney nailed that. I use that all the time with the kids. I'm like, Hey, go watch that and go watch "Inside Out." Like both of those movies are great. Talking about our emotions, it all comes down to how do you feel, and if you feel that way, that becomes true to you over time. Suppressed emotions becomes depression, and then even a longer time, it becomes sickness, illness, and disease because it causes stress. Stress causes inflammations, begins of all sickness ever so when people start having these weird allergies and autoimmune diseases, like, hey, let's see if we can heal mentally to heal physically first. There's a lot that we're holding onto to your nervous system. It's happening right now, so we have to remember so that way we bring ourselves to that moment, and then we change our reaction from distraction to forgiveness. It even actually changes your genes over time. It's called epigenetics. It's crazy how it works, but traumatic experiences make you who you are. I don't know how much time you have, but you know me, I could talk about it all day. 

Paul Beckermann  36:37  

Love it. That's a that's a full toolkit, right there. 

Rena Clark  36:43  

We're gonna move into our next segment, which is called One Thing. 

Transition Music  36:46  

It's time for that one thing. One thing. One thing. It's that one thing. That one thing.

Rena Clark  36:58  

And we're just all gonna share kind of our our one thing, whether it's our takeaway, our last thought. So why don't you start us off, Paul,

Paul Beckermann  37:06  

That's really hard in this episode, because I feel like we have a whole closet full of T-shirt moments. We have T-shirt moments, Jared, where if there's a phrase or something, it just resonates and it should be on a T-shirt. And I feel like you've shared just a ton of those today, like "I thought hope was just a wish. I wanted to be something more than hope. Culture's like the personality of the school." On and on. I just think we have, like, a whole closet full of inspirational quotes to hang on to today.

Winston Benjamin  37:39  

Hey, that's awesome. I love to hear that.

Rena Clark  37:42  

I mean, you missed a few, though. You are the solution to your problems. What you are consuming will consume you. Come on, we had so many.

Paul Beckermann  37:51  

I know it. I know it. 

Rena Clark  37:55  

I don't know. I just appreciate you so much, Jared. Is there any one last nugget you want to share with our audience?

Jared Scott  38:05  

Most of the people that I talk to push back on forgiveness. And so my message at the end of my presentations is that the forgiveness, of course, everybody says it's not for them, it's for you, right? And a lot of people are always like, "No, I can't forgive the people that hurt me." Like, no, not going to do it. Never going to do it. And it just means that you're probably not going to be fully healed, and that's unfortunate, because I believe, as a human being, you deserve freedom. And it may not be that personal prison that you put yourself in and maybe other people's actions that put you in this place, but it's your response to life that has kept you there for so long. So yeah, maybe they don't deserve forgiveness, but do you deserve to carry around the negative emotions for them for the rest of your life? And you're not going to forgive and forget like most people believe. I want you to remember what happened. I think the real saying-- here's a T-shirt moment for you--should be "Forgive and remember peacefully." So that way, you can remember without the negative emotions attached, and then you have a clear vision of why these things happen. You start to see purpose. You start to see the life lessons. And then you're actually able to help people because a lot of people get hurt. They skip healing, go right to helping because it makes them feel good. But then they're just halfway-healed people helping other people halfway heal. That's trauma bonding, right? So we got to go through this process of forgiveness, so that way we see the clear lessons, and we actually come back with the knowledge and wisdom to help people heal fully. And when we do that, life comes full circle. You finally help somebody heal from the very thing that hurt you. Full circle. You're completely healed from that experience, and then you got to use this toolkit. You got to use that for every experience when it occurs, because life keeps happening. So you have to live in continual forgiveness over time.

Paul Beckermann  39:53  

I really appreciate all this that you're sharing, Jared, because I know the teachers that are listening out there care so deeply about their students, and they just want to find pathways to help them, and I think you've opened a few doors for that. And if people want to learn more, you can go to JaredScottSpeaks.com and you can check out more of Jared's resources. We have been so grateful to have you on the show today. Thanks so much for sharing all your stories and insights.

Jared Scott  40:18  

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Rena Clark  40:20  

Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin  40:23  

We invite you to visit us at AvidOpenAccess.org, where you can discover resources to support student agency, equity, and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann  40:38  

We'll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education

Rena Clark  40:43  

And remember, go forth and be awesome. 

Winston Benjamin  40:46  

Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann  40:48  

You make a difference. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai