When it comes to both sport and traditionally-conceived ideas of masculinity, people often conflate suffering and performance. Suffering can be an element of performance, since gritting it out teaches you how to navigate discomfort. But suffering is about simply enduring, whereas performance is about achieving a specific outcome. If we want to be and perform our best, we need to understand the signals our body is sending us, not just suffer through them.

(For a deeper dive on this topic, listen to our discussion on FAREWELL "Episode #70: What Does Positive Masculinity Look Like?" Apple Link / Spotify Link)

Nurturing Independence: How Autonomy-Supportive Practices Cultivate Success

(Read this on the Growth EQ website here.)

Leading others is one of the toughest tasks we can take on. What kind of leader are we going to be? Do we do our best imitation of a drill sergeant, dictating and demanding power and control, hoping that the rigid environment pushes people to get the job done? Do we act more like a friend, leading with support and nurturing? Do we trust others to do their job, or do we micromanage? At every step along the way, we're faced with the question of how we want to lead. It gets even more complicated when the people we are leading are our own kids.
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The range of parenting styles is vast and unique, from helicopter parenting to becoming a tiger mom to trying to be your kids' best friend. A recent meta-analysis sheds light on what works best, and it has implications well beyond parenting.
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In the analysis, researchers looked at over 200 studies, including over 125,000 participants, to see how parenting styles impact children's well-being. Specifically, the researchers compared styles that were autonomy-supportive versus those that were controlling. The former refers to when you encourage independence and self-exploration, while the latter focuses on punishment, control, and contingent regard. It's when we use guilt, shame, or withdrawal to manipulate a child's behavior.

The researchers found that autonomy-supportive parenting was linked to an increase in well-being, while a more controlling approach was associated with ill-being. What's fascinating is that these results were not culturally specific, meaning the results held in the United States, but also in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. When people hear about this research, they often think that autonomy means letting kids do whatever they want, but that's not the case. It's not permissive parenting; it's combining clear expectations and boundaries with the freedom to explore within those expectations and boundaries. It's about letting your kid be involved in age-appropriate decision-making and providing opportunities to explore.

In other words, autonomy-supportive parenting is teaching our kids the tools to be independent and then giving them opportunities to use those tools. It's about pairing appropriate expectations with warmth, understanding, and respect for a child's perspective. It's recognizing that children thrive when they feel both empowered and nurtured.

It's not surprising that this is exactly what other longstanding research shows works in sports and in the traditional workplace. When we combine appropriate expectations with the necessary support to do our job, without someone micromanaging us, we stoke the intrinsic motivation, and develop self-efficacy.
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Whether as a parent, boss, or coach, we often default towards overly controlling styles because it's simple and straightforward. We tell our child, athlete, or employee to obey simply because we said so. We make them feel guilty or ashamed if they didn't do the job exactly as we prescribed so that they remember that feeling next time. Control is easy. Autonomy support takes more work. It requires finding the right balance between challenge and skill, boundaries and freedom. But in the end, allowing people to explore and occasionally mess up and fail, without feeling overwhelming guilt for doing so, is how we learn and grow.

Unfortunately, much of our modern environment and culture pushes us away from autonomy-supportive leading and parenting. Consider the recent rise of safetyism, one of many factors that has led to only 27% of kids regularly playing outside of their homes, compared to 80% in their grandparents' generation. Yes, there are other factors besides safetyism, but consider that when I was roaming around the neighborhoods as a kid in the 1990s, the violent crime rate was almost double what it is now. It's the perception that the world is dangerous and scary, and that we need to protect, that drives much of our need for control, and subsequent lack of developing independence. Whether it's with our kids or adults we're leading, we often over-control in response to fear or anxiety.

I'm not here to tell you exactly how to parent, coach, or lead, but what I can tell you is that research aligns in all three domains. There's a balance to be struck, and you are more than capable of figuring out where that balance lies.

When I was coaching high school and college athletes, my goal was always to coach towards independence, not dependence. What that looked like varied with each athlete, but the research backs up the general approach: you want to empower autonomy. For my wife working with elementary school kids, that might be offering a simple choice after they've been off task. For adults, it may mean giving people space to experiment, try, and occasionally fail in the workplace. The bottom line is that we want to put people in a position to grow, to let them explore the world and develop the self-reliance to do so again and again in the future. This requires a threading the needle between boundaries and freedom, between leaning in during some circumstances and letting go during others.

-- Steve​

Quite frankly, we are fed up with the health and performance space. It's filled with a never-ending and overwhelming stream of shallow quick fixes, superficial "hacks", and people shamelessly pandering to the algorithm. For all that’s out there, we haven't seen the type of program or community we want in our own lives.

So we created it.

The Academy is a place to learn about performance and health through interactive courses and to connect with us and a community of like-minded people

We've compiled all of our collective knowledge into one place, and added to it with new work and formats that we think is some of our best yet. We guarantee you will be better equipped to get the best out of yourself on the things that matter to you most—whether you're an athlete or business professional, a doctor or coach, just starting your career or already retired. This is the best community in the world dedicated to no-bullshit, sustainable performance.

​Sign up today!​

• A wonderful piece by Olympic decathlon champion Ashton Eaton on how to retire well.
• ​Is baking soda performance enhancing? A look into the latest performance enhancing supplement that might actually make a difference.
• Some more of our writing that is related to today's main post:
  • ​How To Build Motivation (And Not Destroy It)​
  • ​3 Psychological Qualities that Prevent Attachment to External Validation​
  • ​Is Your Boss Causing Your Burnout?​
  • ​Want to Be a Better Leader? Embrace Reality.​
  • ​How to Raise a Champion—Chill Out​

Thank you for reading this week's edition of The Growth Equation newsletter,

Brad, Steve, and Clay

P.S., if someone forwarded this email to you, you can sign up to get our weekly email here.

To learn more and go deeper, check out our books:

• ​Master of Change​
• ​Do Hard Things​
• ​The Practice of Groundedness​
• ​Peak Performance ​

For daily insights, ideas, and practices, be sure to follow us online:

Twitter: @Bstulberg and @Stevemagness​
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