Performance psychologist, Charlie Unwin reflects on using his own extraordinary life experience for the benefit of the LWC community.

Charlie Unwin is a thinker. One of those people who experiences something in life and immediately considers what he can take away from it. For someone who has spent time serving in Iraq and representing Great Britain in the modern pentathlon, this has inevitably resulted in a LOT of thinking.

“I was the youngest platoon commander in Iraq at the time, back in 2004,” he explains. “So at the age of 23, I had 30 soldiers under my command and that was daunting, especially in that environment. I learned a lot about myself. In fact, looking back I don’t know how I did it, but it was about the quality of training and the support that I got which made all the difference. It gave me a much more holistic understanding of performance”.

On Monday 14^th October, Charlie will lead LWC’s next Parental Engagement Webinar. He’ll invite all parents and guardians to benefit from the lessons he has learned, in the military and beyond. As a performance psychologist, he has worked with Team GB Olympians, top-level football and rugby players, special forces and members of the Royal Household. At LWC, he wants to concentrate on building resilience in our children in an increasingly results-driven world.

“To work with people effectively to achieve their goals, you need to work with their personality”

—Charlie Unwin

“I think there’s a lot of competition for our attention now,” he states. “Technology is good at being able to command and demand attention, which means it’s more difficult to apply ourselves with the presence that we need for immersive experiences. When you sit down in an exam for several hours, that becomes an immersive experience. It’s something that we need to practice and prepare for and therefore requires us to self-regulate and self-discipline.”

Using the exam analogy, he is quick to point out that his techniques don’t involve trying to dispel nerves. “Pressure can be good for us,” he explains. “When we help pupils to prepare for big exams, we wholly recognise they’re going to feel nervous. But what we do is try to define that in a way that’s helpful. Nerves provide a state of activation, where our energy increases and our heart rate increases. We shouldn’t be scared by that. The first thing to do is recognise those internal sensations and acknowledge that it’s your body doing what it does best; giving you energy. What we’re actually wired to do, is run around in the wild burning off that energy, but in an exam we have to be cleverer about how we use it. We need to be conscious about how we breathe, how we relax, so that the energy doesn’t turn into tension, which then becomes distracting and unhelpful. Channelled well, pressure can sharpen our focus.”

Whilst so much of Charlie’s work involves empowering others to succeed, it’s worth reflecting on what success looks like to him. He smiles… “Helping people to better self-regulate,” he says. “Helping people to just know their own minds, understand their emotions and become more focused on their goals”. He illustrates with two recent experiences, where once again, the learning curve has been as much for him as for those he has been working with. “I’ve been lucky enough to work with the World’s Strongest Man, Tom Stoltman and his brother, Luke.” (also a professional strongman), he explains. “The first thing I asked was what I needed to know about them, that I couldn’t get from their website or YouTube. They immediately said, ‘We’re completely different.’ That was a reminder that to work with people effectively to achieve their goals, you need to work with their personality. Tom is autistic (and very open about that) and so I work with both of them completely differently, in order to achieve the same outcome.”

Charlie also tasted success with Gloucestershire County Cricket Club this year. “They recently won the T20 Blast Title at Edgbaston and they were fascinating to work with; a very young team, very inexperienced. The club doesn’t have as much money as some of the bigger ones and we worked really hard at what’s called Accelerated Learning; the ability to be able to make the most of every experience. We were going to get beaten by some better teams along the way, but what we needed to do was to make sure that with every experience we had, we got a little bit better. Seeing them lift that trophy was an amazing experience.”

And so we return to where we began. In the company of a thinker; intent on learning from every experience and encouraging others to do the same. I ask finally, if he thinks it is possible to pass on lessons learned in his own life experience to those just beginning to assemble their own. He laughs; “That’s a great question and I reflect on that all the time. I want to change people’s worlds,” he admits. “Realistically, you can, if it strikes a real chord with someone and it changes the way they think. I’ve had that experience in my past, which is why I’ve always wanted to offer that to other people. Sometimes you can deliver magic and sometimes it can just help someone go away a little bit more self-aware. To be honest, I’m comfortable with either.”

Charlie Unwin’s Parental Engagement Webinar Building Resilience in a Results-Driven World is open to all LWC parents and guardians. It takes place on Monday, October 14^th on Zoom and you can sign up here.