Corey's psychologist gave him a picture for his childhood: wet concrete, and everyone who walked past pressing in a footprint that set hard and stayed. He coaches boys' football now, and he reckons that if he can pull one footprint back out over a six-month season, that is a win.

Sound Bites

• "When you're young, you're like wet concrete, and you had all these people footing footprints in you that were permanent"
• "If I'm a good boy, if I'm well behaved, then I can create safety in my own environment"
• "I really feel like my son has evolved beyond me in a lot of ways."
• "It's not my aspiration to be looked up to."
• "I wish you could see what I see in you."
• "Boys who don't have male role models have to find their own way"
• "My book is unintentionally helping men realise what their emotions are"

Description

Corey Gaidzionis grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney, the oldest son in a house where his parents would not speak to each other. He carried the messages between them. Years later, his psychologist gave him the picture for it — a child is wet concrete, and everyone who walks past leaves a footprint that sets hard.

He coaches boys' football in Western Australia. He wrote a children's book about emotions. It started with a post-it note he put under his pillow every night for a month. He will tell you the football was never really about football.

What We Explore

• Wet concrete and permanent footprints, and whether you can ever pull one back out
• What a boy takes on when there is no man in the house, and the head-butting when the man comes home
• Six months with a boy on a football pitch against four days in the bush, and which one actually changes him

Mentioned in This Episode

• The Little Book of Big Emotions - Corey's children's book. Characters for each emotion, space for the child to write, cognitive behaviour therapy underneath it. It fell out of him in a day after a month of post-it notes.
• Cognitive behaviour therapy - the framework sitting under the book's characters.
• The manosphere - what a boy often finds when there is no man to look up to.

Connect with Corey Gaidzionis

Website: https://bigemotionsacademy.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corey-gaidzionis/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigemotionsacademy/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coreyg76

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@coreygaidzionis

The Little Book of Big Emotions can be ordered through his website.

A little about Hamish Niven

For 25 years, I lived a life that looked successful from the outside. Inside it was falling apart, and I was throwing fuel on the fire — addiction, alcohol. I was on a steep path to self-destruct.

November 2018. I chose life, and had to change everything.

I built The 13th Room because nothing like that existed when I needed it.

The Brave Man Project — this podcast. It is about men, but not just for men. Men who broke under the weight of their own performance. Men who rebuilt and climbed so much higher.

The 13th Room is a space for the successful man who needs to change and knows it. 13 sessions, you and me. No fixing. Pure witnessing. Starts with a free 20-minute conversation.

Podcast website: https://thebravemanproject.com

Hamish's website: https://hamishniven.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBraveManProject

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamishniven/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@hamish.niven

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hamishniven/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hamishniven

I get to provide a space for young men to feel safe,

to express themselves And that's lots of the conversations that I'm having with boys

is around their self belief and self worth

making it around football and like around the

Hmm.

environment and around how they're showing up.

about being in community and about being connected.

And it's about giving young men an opportunity to be the best versions

of themselves.

OK. Corey, where do we start? Where do we start about you and what you do?

Tell me little bit about your background,

about growing up and life as young Corey.

Um, background of young Corey,

I guess I grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney.

I guess my mother had mental health issues and,

and it wasn't, it wasn't a great environment to grow up in.

So mum really struggled with her,

with her mental health and violence was something that showed up in our,

in our relationship, particularly with me being the oldest,

oldest son. My parents got divorced when I was,

I don't I was kind of 10 years old and

ended up kind of stepping into the man of the house type role for a little while.

my dad did the best he could do with the tools that he had,

right? And I guess we grew up in an environment like,

many other kids in the eighties and the nineties where you were seen and not heard.

And that was, and that was praise at the end of the night,

right? Like if we're at a party and we were quiet as children,

then we were deemed to be deemed to be,

to be good children. I've realised that I kind of created these perfectionism

traits.

in my childhood to try and keep myself

safe. If I'm a good boy, if I'm well behaved,

then I can create safety in my own environment,

which unfortunately, perfection doesn't exist.

And my reality and my expectations of that and the expectations of my mother

or my father didn't always align with what perfect was.

you're a kid, so there's no way you can be perfect all the time because you're still

growing and forming and shaping who you are.

Yeah, my psychologist actually had an interesting analogy this week.

She's like, when you're young,

you're like wet concrete and you had all these people footing footprints

in you that were permanent. But really as a young person,

what you should be doing is being curious and pushing back and finding

the edge of boundaries and start to form your own identity without having

all these footprints in there shaping,

shaping who you are. So I guess that's,

you

know, without.

diving into it too deep. That's how I'd best describe my,

my childhood, I guess.

I absolutely love the concrete.

That is spectacular. It is so beautiful because that's what it Stamp of the parent,

stamp of the parent, stamp of society,

stamp of school, stamp of everything.

And by the time you get to an adult,

are concrete, you've set and you've got all those stories,

all those reasons, all those ways of doing things because everyone else

has told you what to do. And then it's a case of

slowly having to either fill them up or dig them out.

I'm not quite sure which but that's that is a really powerful analogy isn't it?

it was really beautiful for me and just,

yeah, I guess just having this realization,

one of the footprints that was in me was like that I need to be in

the middle of relationships, which means I'm not really myself.

I'm kind of like trying to keep the relationship happy rather than just living life

in and around the relationship.

So I think that was one of the biggest takeaways.

I mean, even with my own kids,

my oldest particularly.

He's got the travel bug and he loves traveling and he's like turns 18 next year.

This year he turns 18 actually.

And he's already planning to head off for 12 months overseas.

So, and I see that as an opportunity to like form his own identity and

to create his own concrete

Hmm.

in that period of time away from school,

away from us, away from our society here in Western Australia.

And I think it's a really important step for young men to find out who they

are on their own two feet in a foreign country.

I did a 10 week trip once I left university.

went round the Far East So going from middle class England,

1992, yeah, straight off to Thailand and Malaysia to complete culture shock.

And it was

terrifying for a little bit and then it like this

is absolutely brilliant. It was such an eye-opener and it completely changed

how I saw so much of the world because it wasn't,

going back to your concrete, it wasn't those same size footprints,

it wasn't the same tread, it was completely different.

It was barefoot, it was sandals rather than boots and shoes,

He'll just go and travel. We can get him a Portuguese passport.

So he doesn't kind of need to be in and out over 90 days.

can kind of go and

Mm.

hang and work and whatever that looks like for him.

I don't know. It's just going to be a,

I think it's going to be a bit of a wing adventure.

what skills have you taught him?

What has he picked up from being your son that you didn't get from your family that

are going to help him navigate a completely different life to what you

and I had when we grew up in the 70s and 80s and 90s?

I really feel like my son has evolved beyond me in a lot of ways.

I think my kids, both of my boys have enormous empathy for other people.

that's good character trait. But they also like that this social justice muscle,

guess my youngest particularly has this social justice muscle that

if something's not right.

that he feels like he wants to stand up for it,

for it in the world. And I'd like to think that the safety that I've created

for them at home has created the opportunity and to kind of form their

own identities around what they believe in and what they stand up for in the world.

how did you say, draw a line in the sand to make that decision to bring your kids

up differently to how your parents brought you up?

I guess it started with something really simple,

like we're not going to smack our kids.

And really from there, drawing that line in

the sand shaped how we moved and connected and raised our boys,

I guess. think mums and dads have different roles in raising their kids too.

I like to wrestle with my boys and I like to push them and you know,

it's, it's interesting. My youngest got into a bit of a tiff at school

and ended up getting suspended,

just two weeks ago. it was one of his mates.

So was like, we need to reconnect you with him.

And his parents were away. And by the time it got to Monday,

I had a conversation and he goes,

man, Steve are okay now. And he goes,

actually the day that it happened that.

the fight happened, he goes, I messaged him after school,

I'd heard he'd been getting bullied on some group chat that I wasn't on,

because his punishment was to get off technology for a week.

But he'd heard this other boy had been bullied online about the fight,

and he reached out to him to check that he was okay.

like, that is, I guess that's the kind of young men that I've tried to raise

in the world that we can...

Mm-hmm.

I think as men we can have these moments where we don't necessarily agree

and we might go to fisticuffs and then it can be okay and we can all get along,

you know, but there's a real pressure for society,

for boys to not be like that. But that's probably a whole separate podcast.

Hmm.

That's a big conversation, isn't it?

see how these alpha men pretend they are strong and erudite,

and really they are actually fairly obsequious,

unpleasant creatures who, from what I've read,

had a troubled upbringing. So it's not really their fault,

it's just how they've...

They haven't had that role model

Yeah.

to make sense of life.

Yeah, I think it's, I like to call it the trusted uncle,

you know, like one of my son's mates was hanging out with us at the beach

and his mum said to him before he left,

do not eat with Cory, you're coming over dinner.

And then we went and got fish and chips at the beach and they all ate them

and he's like, my mum said not to eat this,

but you know, I said to her, you know,

Uncle Cory is going to buy me food,

so I'm going to eat it.

And he's just one of my son's mates,

right? But he's like, that's the language that he's using.

So when we kind of get to that space with young men,

all of sudden we've got influence,

we've got respect, and we've got the ability

Yeah.

to kind of nurture healthy, healthy young men.

you've followed in your father's footsteps.

I know you love football. So tell me why that is such an important,

not just sport, but tool in your life.

I think for me, it's funny. I played football growing up and my dad coached

and I guess I remember that as fond times with my,

with my father. And it wasn't always great.

There was times when my dad subbed me cause he had a rule of like,

everyone gets subbed at X time.

And like we had a massive blow up at one game about him subbing me at half time when

I thought I was having a, having a brilliant game and felt unjustly substituted.

But

I think for me, I think that's a part of it is that my dad,

I come from a divorced family and my dad coming and coaching us means that

I wasn't just seeing him every second weekend.

I was seeing him every Tuesday night and every Thursday night and every Sunday

at soccer. So for me, it was about spending,

Hmm.

spending more

time with my father, I guess. I think.

It's funny, I spoke to my psychologist about this the other week.

She said, what do I get out of coaching soccer was the question.

And I said, I get to provide a space for young men to feel safe,

to express themselves and to grow in their competences

as young men. And that's lots of the conversations that I'm having with boys

is around their self belief and self worth and not.

making it airy, but making it around football and like around the

Hmm.

environment and around how they're showing up.

And, you know, for one boy, it's high expectations.

He's so the conversation has started last week with like,

Hey, I'll just call everyone Steve.

we'll keep it anonymous, but Hey Steve,

I, um, I noticed you got high expectations about yourself and football.

Where else does that show up in your life?

Because it shows up everywhere.

And then he knew it was kind of going into a conversation.

It was uncomfortable. So he shifted it to something else,

right? But I don't need, cause I've got six months with him.

I don't need to go

Mm-hmm.

in deep in the first, the first point of the conversation with him.

can over time build on that and help him release some of the expectations

and things that he's built in his concrete,

right? If I can pull out a footprint

me.

out of the concrete over

Yeah.

a six month period, then, then,

then that's a.

that to win for me. So that's really what the football is about for me is about,

it's about being in community and about being connected.

And it's about giving young men an opportunity to be the best versions

of themselves. And often they want to win,

right? But then there's a conversation like when they lose,

like why did we lose? And if they lost because they didn't perform

at

a level that we know they can perform at,

then there's consequences for that at training,

right? Like you guys,

you

you guys dicked around at the game today,

there's going to be consequences at the training

There.

on Tuesday. I'm very transparent about that,

but if they did their best and they lost the game,

then that's a different conversation.

It's like, okay, we applied ourselves.

Where did we fall down? What does the coaching look like?

What have I missed?

What have we missed and how do we improve as a collective?

Mm-hmm.

Like what were the things where we fell down and the conversation isn't just

you did. It's, it's a conversation around,

okay, what, what worked really well in the game?

they're telling me the lessons.

I'm not telling them, I'm giving them the lessons,

but I'm giving them an opportunity to tell me what worked

Hmm.

well and also what didn't work well,

you know?

I'll single out the individuals because I'm the coach,

but I'll do it one-on-one, not as a,

I'm going to embarrass a player in front of everyone.

And I don't want the other players pulling up players individually in

Okay.

the collective. I want them to just talk about the collective.

So I guess that's kind of like how I operate in that space.

There's two things I want to touch on there.

The

Thank

first one is the losing. my nephew,

if he doesn't come first or second when he's doing his park run,

he gets really upset. Sometimes there's 25 blokes who are bigger,

stronger, faster than him, and then he comes 10th or 11th and he's pissed.

Yeah.

Other times it's wet, they're not there and he's first or second and he's delighted.

It's it. Why do people put, you know,

I got beaten comparing to other people rather than themselves?

You know, his best time is always improving,

but I got beaten by 10 people.

Yeah.

You know, I'm rubbish. I'm rubbish.

I'm rubbish.

That's just a, it's a continual coaching conversation,

right? Like you're, you're competing against your,

you're competing against yourself.

and it's in a soccer team, it's different,

right? Cause you're not just competing you against you.

It's you against, it's a team against another team,

right? So

Mm-hmm.

it's about having those conversations and training those skills rather

Hmm.

than beating up on them and then having the conversation around,

hey, this isn't about your self-worth,

this is about skill and building improvement on that.

But yeah, have a, my youngest is really,

he loves to win actually. He, it is really ingrained

in him to be the winner.

I've had a conversation with somebody else about the same kind of thing.

He does ~ mixed martial arts and same kind of thing.

know, there's the sport, but so much of it,

like you're doing, it's life skills,

it's education, it's communication,

it's all these things that...

You get to learn when you do sports,

if you're fortunate. And I think what you're doing is amazing.

do the guys, the boys, the kids look up to you as a role model?

Do they really feel that you are important in their world?

well let me put it this way. I started a new team I switched to a new club.

So I would say, yes, definitely.

There's players who look up to me and want to be around me as a coach.

for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's not my aspiration to be looked up to.

I,

It's really about like getting these guys to lead themselves.

that then gives them such agency to put their hand up as well.

mean, you're an example of, I messed up,

my fault, I'll own it. And you're giving them permission to do the same thing,

which is what they kids, people need in life.

I had moments where I just said to boys like,

I wish you could see what I see in you.

Like you have this magic and this ability and like boys were crying and

I was crying and I had kids like telling me they love me and it was just,

yeah, it's really, it's not what I do it for,

but it was absolutely.

one of the most beautiful experiences of my life,

actually. I'm feeling

Mm-hmm.

teary just talking about it now.

It's all up in my heart.

at the beginning of the conversation,

you said, you your dad wasn't always around and things like that,

but he coached you, but you got to see him.

So there was obviously a tremendous affection between you and him and

the fact that you are doing what he did with more passion,

with more,

your life experience in it. And it's it's helping them change,

isn't it? You're giving these boys something that a lot of boys don't get in life.

don't know, like the stats tell us that there's like divorce rates are at what,

like 49%. And, you know, we all know that boys spend

or kids spend more time with the mother than they do with the father typically.

So we've, we've, we've kind of got a culture in the world where 50

% of families are broken and

Hmm.

which means that 50 % of boys don't have

potentially a male role model

So yeah, that can be really challenging to overcome,

right? Which is why I think this sporting movement is so important.

Let's have a look at that a second about the not having the

man in that relationship, in the family.

So ~ the kids are not having that masculine energy,

that masculine vision and purpose.

How does that?

Impact them growing.

We're young family who live across the road,

right? Dad does FIFO. And I was talking him the other day and I just said,

how the kids go with you being away?

I said something that I've seen and heard from men And what I heard from dads

is that when I come home, my son is very angry.

And they're angry because when the dad's away,

there's an expectation that they step up and be the man of the house.

And then when the dad comes back,

the dad expects that he'll get respected.

And the son's also wants to be respected.

So it ends up being a butting of heads But the same thing happens when

a father leaves or is not in the house.

a boy really has to step up.

to be fantastic.

or they'll get to a point where they rebel against it and go to drugs

and alcohol and, and

Mm-hmm.

the other, the other things, right?

The alpha male,

I think that boys who don't have male role models like have to find their

own way so that their own way could be finding a Tate and following

the real world advice or it could be going to drugs and alcohol for some

of them to be joining the military because

They feel lost and they've got no direction.

So I'm going to go and join the military,

which is what I did. I joined the military when I was 17.

I want to go back to two things that you discussed.

One, you said these

phylo or phyfo men or boys. I don't know what that term is.

It's not something I'm familiar with.

Can you explain that a little bit?

FIFO is,

so FIFO is fly in, fly out. So in Western Australia,

a large portion of our workforce are in mining.

So they might do an eight and six roster.

They might do 14 days on, seven days off.

They might do seven days on, seven days off or eight and six.

So there's always different rosters that men and women do that they fly

up the site and then they fly back.

And lots of people have families that...

are just navigating, navigating what that,

what that looks like. You know,

I've got a mate who'd done it when his kids were young.

And I said, man, how do you do?

Like how do you cope being away from a week?

He goes, I actually think I get to spend more time with my kids.

I go away for a week. come back for a week.

And when I'm here, I'm here for the week.

I drop them off school, I pick them up,

I take them to sport. I'm doing everything with them I guess that's

the different people navigated differently,

right? Some people struggle to do that.

divorce rates are pretty high in that,

in that dynamic.

the other thing I'm really curious about,

you said, because your dad wasn't there,

you had to take on that father role or dad role for your siblings.

Talk to me about that and how that affected you as a child because you

had to become the man or the father of the house.

I think

it's interesting, right? Like my role was like my parents would have information

because they didn't really talk to each other.

So they would give me information to then give to the other parent.

And if the parent didn't like that and got upset,

they would get upset with me because I'm the messenger,

right? So that was more on my mom's side than my dad's But,

and then there was like times where my mom would accuse

me of withholding information,

like.

My dad would give me his phone number if I needed to ring him,

but don't give it to your mother.

And your mother would go, no, you know that number.

You're a smart kid. You're with numbers.

Give me that number. And then because my dad asked me to not say it,

I wouldn't say those things, right?

So it's kind of that aspect. But it was also like,

my mom didn't have good mental health.

So she would give me a shopping list and cash and I would go down to the shop and...

buy the food and bring it home.

And there was a period of time when my mom was dating and wasn't really around.

So we had my grandmother who was kind of in the house looking after us.

And she was, I don't know, she was my grandmother.

So she was old and fragile. yeah,

so you kind of

Yeah.

just learn. I don't know, I didn't look at it as I was looking after

my brothers and sisters, but I kind of just,

I don't know. just, yeah, those just things that you kind of end up doing because...

there's an expectation that

you do those things.

That's really interesting because when I was in rehab in South Africa,

one of the guys in there, he was from an Asian family and he was the oldest

and his father died and he had to take over that father role.

He couldn't do it.

Yeah.

It absolutely destroyed him.

That pressure, that being the oldest son,

all of that kind of thing. I mean,

he ended up destroying the family business.

doing an awful lot of cocaine and ended up in rehab with me.

I know

Yeah.

now he's fine, but that pressure on him as a young man,

as a teenager was just unbearable.

He just couldn't do anything. He couldn't cope,

couldn't get anything right.

not wired, right, to do that. I was watching some video and there was like

a 12 year old kid who said to this entrepreneur,

like one of these Manosphere guys,

what should I be doing about start my business?

like, and he gave me this advice,

whatever it was. And I was just like,

let him be a kid, mate.

your

other passion, the book that you've written and how that...

what that's doing for you and for kids and things like that.

Because I think this is really rather exciting.

Yeah, so I wrote a book during COVID called The Little Book of Big Emotions.

So before that, was actually, I was doing rights passage work with teenagers.

So I'd take boys out into the bush,

a group of 15 with a school teacher.

And we would have conversations around life.

So like we kind of had these like red zones,

green zones and orange zones, right?

Like where you want to take the conversations to keep them safe.

One of the, the first night I would,

I'd blindfold the boys and I'd walk them out into the bush and I'd sit them there

in silence for like 15 to 20 minutes,

you know, like it wouldn't have mattered whether it was two minutes

or whether it was 20 minutes, but it'd be 15 to 20 minutes.

And then we'd bring them back in and then we'd ask them how long they think they'd

been sitting out there. And some of them thought they'd been out there

for five hours and some of them thought they'd been out there for two minutes.

Yeah. Cause they, don't get silent.

Right. And there's no phones on this.

on this adventure that we go on and it's out in nature and they're tenting

and all the things. But one of the things I would ask when they came back in,

there was two activities we do.

One was called scars, where we'd give them post-it notes and they'd put it

on a scar and they'd talk about it.

And some boys would put a post-it note on their heart and then they'd share about,

my mum's got cancer.

It's really challenging. So, and then that led to me just asking all of the group,

like, tell me what your big emotions are.

It was this question that I would ask kids,

teenage boys, and they were like,

and it was, they were angry and they were anxious and they were depressed.

Hmm.

So never happiness, very rarely did they say we're happy.

And so that kind of planted of a seed,

right? When COVID.

COVID happened and I couldn't work,

I wrote on a post-it note, how do I have an impact on young people's lives around

emotions? And I would write it every night before I went to bed and put

it under my pillow. And after like a month of doing that,

write a book called the Little Book of Big Emotions.

So I wrote a book with a bunch of characters and it's basically got CBT in it,

cognitive behaviour therapy.

but the book essentially has got a character and a story.

So it says like, my name's Happy

you

Hoz. I love to dance. I love to sing.

I love to play. It's really simple story,

right? Well, my name's Bray Blake.

One day my dad, this is a true story about my son Blake actually.

So that character is actually named after my son.

Thank you.

And the story is, you know, I was at this water park and I was at the

top of the slide and my dad said,

let's just walk up the stairs and...

and then see what it's like at the top of the slide.

And then my dad sat in the slide and I was still terrified and my dad just pushed

me and I went down the slide and I got to the bottom and then I got up

and I was like, let's go do that again.

and then, so, but there's all these characters,

And it's coming in right here.

they're

Sad Sammy, Worried Wombie, Angry Alex,

motivated Monty, Frustrated Fuzzy,

You

Embarrassed Ezzy.

And all the characters, I interviewed like any kid that I could

get access during COVID, I'd go,

give me a top five emotions. And so I started writing down all these emotions that

kids would give me. And like all

Mm-hmm.

the teenagers said embarrassed.

So I'm like, that's really interesting.

So

you

maybe kids from three to 12 are not embarrassed,

but if they learn about it.

through that window, then they're gonna have the tools to cope with it when

it shows up as a teenager. So there's always characters that kids can identify with.

And then on the next page over,

the kids can write in the book.

So before I got angry, I was. So what was I doing?

I was playing video games. I was arguing with my brother.

I was whatever the thing was, right?

The place in my body where I feel angry is.

and then they identify where they're feeling in their body.

And then, and then the top one,

they might actually say they actually feel sad or anxious,

not actually angry. So they might actually realise there's something sitting

underneath that emotion. And then the last question is,

what was I doing the last time I felt angry that helped me stop feeling this way?

So then all of sudden the kid is like starting to teach himself with

the parent and it's good for parents because

let's face it, parents haven't been taught how to communicate with their kids,

Yeah.

right? Around emotions. So all of sudden,

I got a mate who's got the book and he's like,

the blessing of the book is I don't have to have talk to my son about it.

My son can talk to the book and me.

So the book is like in the middle of the relationship.

But they're building this vocabulary together with each other.

So that has become

you

the power of the book.

The next evolution of it really is creating

an emotional check-in for schools,

basically where teachers in classrooms will get the kids to tap their face

on an iPad and then tap what emotion they're feeling in the morning.

And then if they've got a classroom,

they'll get instant feedback. And it goes,

~ all right, we've got 30 kids and 18 anxious.

Maybe I shouldn't start my science lesson right now.

maybe I should go outside and do some skipping,

Mm-hmm.

or maybe I should do

some breathing, or maybe you should,

and the idea would be to give them,

so when they get their score, they would get some tools to go,

hey, you've got 70 % of your kids are anxious.

So here's some tools that can help reset some anxiety.

And then, so you can either do the activity and then do another emotional checking,

because it only takes two minutes,

or you can do the activity and then just get on with your day.

as a reset. And then the second layer is that it would track patterns of emotions.

So if

Mm-hmm.

Johnny's been sad for seven days or angry for seven days,

before Johnny is angry for seven days,

we can like grab him there and go,

hey, we've noticed this, let's bring in the school counsellor in

and have a conversation with Johnny about the anger and what's happening with that.

So all of a sudden we're catching emotions earlier.

rather than Johnny's angry, Johnny's throwing a pencil at Lucy,

Johnny's picked up a chair and thrown it at Steve,

Johnny's run out of the classroom.

So let's catch it before

Hmm.

they get to that point. Or a kid who's got anxiety,

let's catch it before it becomes a disorder.

That is kind of my next evolution of building out Big Emotions Academy.

That's what I've been working on this week actually.

There's a big grant in the, there's a big grant that I'm applying for to

try and get some government funding to build that out.

you have sat forward, you are telling me something that you are so passionate about.

mean, that is spectacular. And I'm just hanging on every word

and how amazingly powerful that will be for kids,

for schools, for everybody, for,

as you said, just catching them so they don't fall through those holes.

There really is something that is going to impact kids so fundamentally

and help them, and as you said,

back to the schools and the parents.

Are you using it in your local area?

Is the book available? Are you getting it out there?

The book will be on Amazon

shortly. I've just had some issues with formatting.

So I'm just getting somebody to do a formatting on Amazon and then you'll

be able to get it globally through Amazon.

Otherwise you can order it through my website,

which is bigemotionsacademy.com or go through my Instagram or

my name at LinkedIn. You can meet me there.

But yeah, just bigemotionsacademy.com.

You can buy a book online like it'll take you to the Amazon links and the Kindle.

There's a Kindle version of it for people who are a bit tight on money.

The Kindle version is not ideal.

The idea of the book is that it's actually,

I'll just grab a copy of it quickly and show you.

Yeah.

So the idea is that parents can actually just have it with their kids at home.

So I've got a mom who just has it sitting on their son's bedside table

and every morning he puts how he's feeling.

So it's just a flip book. So my initial idea was for schools just to

buy these books and just put them on the desk in the classroom so

the teacher can just say, get a snapshot of what the classroom looks like.

And for the first trial, I've got a bunch of schools that I'm...

I'm emailing at the moment to try and get a trial of this version of

it in the classrooms and see how this works and then get

Hmm.

some feedback and then go, okay,

we've got feedback on this system that works.

But yeah, like they literally for parents,

they can have this and it literally just sits on a desk.

And the Amazon version is just a book that I do spine versions of it,

but this is like kind of the premium version.

but I haven't worked out a good way yet to do direct print overseas with it.

So it's really, it's expensive.

It's even expensive to ship in Australia,

to be honest, like $9 a book to send them around

Thank

Australia, which to me is just,

just wild. How much it was

Yep.

$3 to send it when I first started now it's $9 for the same

I'm blown away by that. just think that is the best thing I've heard for long time.

think there's so much potential for that.

So exciting. Yeah, really good.

Yeah, awesome, thanks. It's exciting.

And that just came

from Covid and conversations.

It literally just came from like talking to those boys in the bush sitting around

a fire and then

Mm.

not being able to do that and then going,

well, I can't do that.

Hmm.

How else can I help? And

Yeah.

then the question was, how could I do it on scale?

then this idea for the, and then once the book,

once I had the idea for the book,

fell out of me. I wrote that in a day basically.

And then it took me probably four months to find the artist.

Mm-hmm.

Um,

which was really interesting because it's like all these artists online,

they're like all struggling artists,

but I started following all these artists on Instagram and I'd reach out

to them and I really like your style.

Can I get a quote? And they're like,

I'm sorry, we don't do commission work.

We just create our own, create our own stuff.

And I come across that over and over.

And then ultimately I ended up just putting a thing in my local group chat,

like like Coburn group chat.

I just put in there, hey, does anyone know an artist that would be willing

to like draw some characters for a book?

And ironically, my goddaughter's mother put a person's name up and said,

oh, I'll reach out to this person,

Alicia. And she was like north of the river.

But I just, we went and had a coffee and I rocked up and had this A3 book with

all these characters and notes and all these ideas that I'd had while

I was writing the book about what a character would look like.

And, you know, she just did an amazing job,

you know,

Mm.

like they're just absolutely brilliant,

you know, the characters are just,

she just nailed it. You know, but it was things like when she made Alex,

he like had all these spikes and he had this six pack of abs and I'm like,

I want him to be angry, but also I want him to be like a teddy bear.

And she's like,

Hehehehehe

you know, I want girls to resonate with him as well,

right? I don't just want it to be like.

Like if he's got a six pack, it's like,

boy's angry, you know, but if he's just a soft teddy bear,

then maybe girls will resonate with him

Hmm.

as well. So it was like really,

really spent a lot of time thinking about what would work best

for like connecting all things.

And there may be a time where I build a version of the books where it's

got like girl characters and boy characters and whatnot.

Like that could be an evolution of it,

Yeah.

you know, like,

Love it, love it, love it. think it's super.

Now, briefly, the initiation,

why did you start taking boys out into the...

Was it boys or just... Was it just boys or girls?

No, it was boys and girls, but I just did boys because

~ Yeah.

that's kind of how it works. So we would split into groups.

The girls would do their thing,

the boys would do their thing.

Yep.

And then if

there was a mixed cohort, we would come together on the last day and we'd

let the boys and girls have conversations about what they need from each other

as a collective to create some cohesion within the groups.

Sometimes it would be bringing the boys or bringing the parents down and saying,

hey,

And we, we, we've got the boys here.

What we want to do is we want to facilitate this thing.

So I'd have a conversation with the parents and go,

Hey, we're going to connect you back with your sons.

What we want you to do is give them five to 10 minutes to speak with you.

Just listening to what they have to say.

And the sons had written letters to the parents.

Um, yeah, I had this Singaporean lady come up and give me a massive hug.

She's like, I never knew why my son was angry.

like gave me a massive hug and it was just crying and crying and crying.

because she'd lost her son, you know,

like in her mind, she didn't

Mm-hmm.

know how to connect with him because he was so angry with the world

and over four days or five days,

we'd unpacked, we saw all of it,

right? So I an opportunity to have a conversation about where else does that show

up?

So yeah, I got into it because I don't know,

that's where the universe wanted me,

is the honest answer.

Mm-hmm.

I was curious about Rides of Passage.

So I went on the Rides of Passage Institute.

I went and did a four day camp with them where I did my own Rite of Passage

and that was to become a facilitator of their work.

So to become a facilitator, you have to go and do a Rite of Passage camp with them.

Mm-hmm.

So I went and did that and a week later,

I got a phone call from a company going,

hey, I heard you're an amazing facilitator.

did this training. you want to come work for us?

I didn't even look for work. just got a phone

Mm-hmm.

call saying, hey, come and work for us.

So yeah, just that's where the universe kind of wanted me at that time,

think. Oh God, I would say God,

but universe, same thing.

Yeah, absolutely. So do you still do that work?

I haven't really done it since COVID.

I know lots of different reasons.

I was doing mining work, so I was like away and having

Yeah.

trouble to get back to do it. And then I found football coaching and I'm like,

oh, this is actually a lot of passage work,

but I get to work with kids for six months instead of four days,

which is much more rewarding and influential for me to put air time

and effort into rather than.

than four days. Yeah,

so that's the short answer.

I can just see that. Just reflecting back,

you loved that, the four days,

but the six months, you can do so much more.

You can sow many more seeds and watch them grow and prune them and

all sorts of things. And as you said,

it's football and you love football as well.

Yeah, I don't know. It's not even about the football for me.

could be cricket. Well, probably not cricket because I don't love cricket,

but it could be AFL, could be rugby league.

It could be any sport really. Yeah,

I think once my boys are grown up and out the door,

I'll probably look for a summer sport to coach like baseball,

softball or something.

So then I've got a full year of like wholeness.

of Corey, because it makes me feel really old,

So yeah, I think it's just the being around young men is,

being around young men is a, I don't know,

it's just a gift, right? It's a gift to me,

because I grow so much when I'm around them,

and I learn so much about myself.

and I get as much from them as they get from me.

It's quite funny. I've got a little cohort that I pick up like,

because it's 20 minutes away, there's a few kids that I pick up on the way through.

And it's hilarious the experience in the car,

right? Like this young guy is so funny and quick witted.

So like him and I kind of go back and forth and as a kid I coached last year.

So we have a bit of a relationship.

Yeah, you just, it's funny, right?

I've been writing down who I'm going to invite to my 50th birthday this year

in September, you know, and there's like three or four kids that my son's mates

or kids that I've coached as soccer that are on the list of people

Thanks

that I want to come along to my 50th birthday.

So that kind of says something about the dynamic of the mutual respect

Mm-hmm.

and the relationships

that I'm building in that space.

Yeah. ~

Yeah, it's not necessary about the football.

The football is just a vehicle.

vehicle. Yeah, there's a theme there,

isn't there?

Yeah.

Corey, you're an amazing human.

I've really enjoyed this conversation.

I think it's illuminating and just seeing how you've joined

the dots through your journey and yeah,

helping boys, so important, so,

so, so important. So really thank you ever so much for this chat.

You've mentioned

the Big Emotions Academy. Just give me your details how people can find

out more about you and find this book and things like that.

yeah, it's Big Emotions Academy on Instagram or Corey and then my surname,

is G-A-I-D-Z-I-O-N-I-S,

on LinkedIn or Facebook. They can find me there and my website's just

big emotions academy.com. there's a contact form on the,

on the website. they can buy books there or they can reach out to me

Hmm.

to have a conversation.

Yeah, it's always fascinating.

I get dads often and reach out and go,

this book for my kid and I didn't realise I had an anger problem.

until they read the book with their kid.

So yeah, the book is unintentionally helping men realise what their emotions

are and giving them some tools to unpack what's going on for them through their kids

teaching them and them

Thank you.

teaching their kids.

Absolutely. I've got a marketing plan for you.

I won't charge you for this, but sell family packs.

There's three, one for mum, one for dad,

and one for the child. See how you do there.

Corey, thank you ever so much.

This has been a great conversation.

Thanks mate, appreciate it.

So there we are, another great conversation in the Brave Man Project

I hope you've enjoyed what you've listened to.

I hope you got some enthusiasm and some joy for this.

It's been a really good chat. If you like what you heard,

if you like what you see, please share this with other people,

especially men who've got kids growing up,

because this is a great conversation and yeah,

something really special.