Business Innovators Radio - Munur Shah – Rebel Therapies – Mark Stephen Pooler

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Munur Shah Munur was born in London to immigrant parents and grew up there during the 1970’s and 80’s. From the age of 11 he travelled independently across the city by bus to help his parents in their dry-cleaning business. During his teens, whilst working part-time, he was involved in theatre and film production in various roles from runner, driver and actor to producer, and even stuntman. As an avid sportsman he particularly loved baseball and football (soccer). He moved up to Hull in the Northeast of England, to attend University in 1990, and graduated with a BA Honours in Business Management and Psychology in 1994. In the subsequent year, Munur successfully ran a positive, non-political campaign to be elected as President of Humberside’s Students’ Union and sit as one of the University’s Governors. He restructured and reinvigorated the Students’ Union to become a profitable and vibrant flagship for the University. https://www.linkedin.com/in/munurshah/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/munur-shah-rebel-therapies-mark-stephen-pooler

Welcome to Business Innovators Radio, featuring industry influencers and trendsetters, sharing proven strategies to help you build a better life right now. Welcome to Brilliant Business TV, conversations with leading experts in business. I am your host, Mark Stephen Pula. We have a wonderful guest on the show today, Miner Shah, all about screen addiction, a great topic that I'm sure we're all guilty of at some point. We are streaming live on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube. We're also on the E360 TV network going out to Apple TV, Fire, Android, Roku and many more. We're also on business innovators radio network. We're also on USA Global Radio Television and TV network.

And we're also on MSPNewsGlobal.com. I have so many to remember there. That's why I'm getting mixed up with my words. Let's bring in our incredible guest, Miner Shah. Manor, welcome to Brilliant Business TV. Hi, Mark. Thanks for having me on. I'm looking forward to a conversation with you.

Yeah, absolutely. And we all are absolutely what you said earlier, guilty of looking at our screens far too much. We certainly are. So let's get started with our first question. What led you to create rebel therapies and specifically the combat screen addiction course. I think that it came sort of many years ago

when probably around 2016. I saw myself being very much addicted to screens, especially to my phone, and spent a lot of time, I suppose, away from my family, looking at my phone, you know, looking at the screens, scrolling, doing scrolling just constantly and constantly looking at. at stuff. And then when I came off, I felt really annoyed with myself. I'd lost so many hours

and it impacted every moment of my day, whether it was morning or night. And at night, it was worse where I'd just sit there and scroll and scroll and it would be sort of two or three hours would go by and then realize it's nearly two or three a.m. in the morning and I have to get up and go to work. So I just really wanted to understand. why I was being pulled. What was the reason for me to go and spend that much time in my phone? And the other side of it was my children, they were also very much addicted. So they had their smartphones and my son was addicted to gaming and it was just, I felt like the whole family unit was breaking down. And that to me was just concerning. And so I really wanted to understand

the science. So why was I? I've been drawn to my screen? Why are our children being drawn to their screens? What's the underlying nature of it over and above how we feel and what makes us look at our screens? But really the science, was there something sort of more sinister, I suppose, in the background that was pulling us towards our screens? And so I went on this sort of rampage of research and to see if I could, one, help my and then also how I could help my children. And that was amazing, sort of over the last eight years, what I've learned,

what I've understood around screens and screen addiction, and how it almost compels us to want to pick up the phone and how we've been conditioned to pick up a phone or an iPad or a tablet. But also, you know, on the gaming side, shopping, gambling, all of it, it all sort of is encompassed by behavioral change that's happening to us. So once I understood all of that, I then decided to try different techniques and I'm a coach and an NLP practitioner. So I thought, well, actually, surely I can help myself. Surely I can break free of the addictive nature that comes from the screens.

And so what happened there was I started to trial some of these techniques on myself and on my children. Not intrusively, very much in a safe space. But what I realized is that once I became aware of my time and how I interacted with the screen, I was able to then change my behaviour so that I was in control. And what I've found since then in running this programme and working with multiple sets of parents and children is that we can all change our behaviour. But by using the certain tools and techniques,

we can actually understand and be in control of those screens and be in control of how we want to interact with them rather than them pulling us towards them. So they're very good at pulling us towards them and being locked in. So the idea of the course was to help parents make them aware of what was happening so that they could then adopt those techniques themselves, but also then help introduce them to their children. So really at the end of it, kind of what we've done is we've created parent coaches

at the end of our course, and they have some fabulous sort of NLP, what I call it, sort of Jedi mind-trick techniques that they can use. And they do it in a sort of non-confrontational, non-aggressive. It's a really lovely way to introduce a different mindset, a different way of thinking for our children. It can be a real big problem for so, so many people.

And I like what you said about changing behaviour as well. It does take consistency and being persistently. and repetition, but we can definitely all change our behaviour. What do you consider are the main issues concerning parents and children with screen addiction today? I really think it's a breakdown, the entire breakdown of the family unit, and that's what majority of the parents sort of arrive or come to us at what we do at ribald therapies. So the parents come to us with the whole concept of I'm losing my child or I've lost my child in terms of they've lost that interaction and connectivity with their child. The relationship is broken.

Children tend to then become so absorbed by looking at their screens. The levels of empathy drop, like sort of move away from the children, sort of get, get sucked out of them. So there is this sort of this tunnel vision where they're only focused on looking at a screen and their whole ability to interact to have that sort of that child sort of play-based lifestyle is being lost. And I think parents are beginning to really understand and see that now. But I think more so is the breakup of the family.

unit and what was quite tight or could have been quite tight is now sort of fractured and so people come to me regarding that as the underlying problem over and above what you know kids are doing which is just scrolling mindlessly looking at screens and so their level of interaction with other people is also decreasing that causes us a lot of problems later on in life. to be able to have a proper conversation, sit and talk to people, being able to empathize, being able to understand, being able to negotiate, being able to solve, rationally solve problems. So there's a whole host of issues that are coming up from not just our children,

but our parents. I mean, it's not just the children that I'm talking about that are having issues. It's the parents themselves. Definitely. I think it's so, so important what we're doing because so much technology now, and it's brilliant having all of this technology, but it's about moderation as well. I think it's so, so important because it can affect mental health as well. How does your combat screen addiction course help these people? So what we do in the course is it's really making them very much aware of what is actually happening to them.

So we show you the impacts. We show you through the levels of behavioral science that is being used to create your levels of addiction. So it's the science that's used in the technology, which is trickled down actually from the gambling industry. So we have, you know, the slot machines that you go to and you play at a casino, that is pretty much your phone. It encompasses all of that technology. And it's been tested and it's been tried and it works. And so the tech industry have utilized the underline. the lying concepts around the gambling industry and have pushed that through to our phones.

What our course does is it allows you to understand that so much so that you become so aware of it that you can then make the conscious decision to how you want to utilise your screen, when you want to utilize your screen. We're very much, I love tech. I think tech's brilliant. but again you mentioned about moderation. We need to understand how to moderate that, but we need to be in control.

And what our course teaches you is to, one, be in control, and two, to be able to utilize the techniques and the concepts and the ideas that we show you in the course to be able to coach other people, specifically your children. And this works whether you're a teacher, a social worker, a guardian, a grandparent, an uncle and auntie.

So we've had multiple sets of people that have come to us and we've run through the program and it's worked every single time. So it's been a real powerful awakening for people that have come onto it, that have been really stuck in a certain place and to be able to help themselves, but also help their children. and the changing in relationship between the guardian, the parent and the child has become so much stronger. It's been quite wonderful to see that. Really, really, really, really powerful course.

Could you give me an example of how you've helped someone on the course and how they are getting on now? Yeah. Okay, so on that really stands. out for me is a lady came onto the course and she has two daughters. One at the time was 11 and the other one was 13. One was hooked on social media. One was hooked on gaming. Both have been diagnosed as ADHD and she just was lost. The lady, the mother was lost. She just wanted help and she came on the course saying, I'm on this course. I'm not sure you're going to be able to help me, but I need to do something. I've tried everything. By the fourth session, so our course

has split into five sessions over five weeks and they're sort of two hours at each session. On the fourth session, that's when we introduced some real powerful techniques. So there's sort of NLP techniques that work really well. And what happened was that she was explaining that she didn't have a relationship with her daughters. Her daughters would just ignore her. Her 11-year-old was the worst, the worst in terms of screen addiction was just on her game. She would not come off her computer, would be playing her game all the time. And it was causing real, real distress in the house, real problems, arguments, frustration, just not understanding each other. But we ran through a technique on the session live, and there are about 20 or people on this

particular course, and the others were watching. So I said, well, you be my test example? Let's run through this technique, and we did. And at the end of the technique, when we went through this process, she was crying. The rest of the 19 people, the 20 people that were on the screen, they were crying. I was crying.

And it was just, it was so emotional what she explained and what she went through. But the technique takes us through an entire, looking at the situation in multiple ways to be able to change an outcome. So anyway, the course, that, that session finished and everyone, you know, sort of went off, offline. and this was in the evening, about two hours later, I get a call from her and she's crying. So I've answered the phone and she's crying on the phone to me.

And she said, these are happy tears. I just wanted to let you know that the technique that you just taught me has allowed my daughter and I to sit and we sat on the stairs for an hour and a half and they just, for the first time they'd come up, in 18 months. And she said they both sat there crying. They both sat there having the time, the space, the safe space to be able to talk

and explain the importance. So the mother was telling her how much she cared about her and how much she wanted to re-engage with her. And the daughter was telling her about how important the game and being, playing the game was to her and how it calmed her down. So what it was is they got to a place where they were like this, but by, with that conversation, they got to a place where they could talk to each other. And it's the first actual real conversation they had had in 18 months. That was last year. Since then, their relationship has gone from strength to strength.

And the level of gaming has dropped. They spend more time together. They do more. more things outdoors, you know, they've got things planned. And life has just become so very much more different for them. And that's one that sort of sticks in my mind. It's just that the emotion that came out from it before, the emotion from her phone call. And then afterwards, you know, working with her afterwards and seeing what's happened with her and her daughter has just been amazing. I do love a success story. Why do you know, why do you know, just work with the child directly, why include the parents? I include the parents because the parents are the role models. We're the people that they actually look up to. And if we don't look

at ourselves and adapt and change our own behaviour to screens, how do we expect our children to? So we need to adopt the same mentality around how we connect with our tech and what's that looks like. And we need to show our children what good looks like. And we need to sort of almost course correct, pull the right levers and course correct so that we're in a good space. And our children see that. They actually, you know, they see it, right? We are their role models. And that's really important. So the parents themselves, most nearly, nearly every single parent or every single person that's come on our course or on one of our classes. at the end of the first session has said, that's actually, you've just described me.

And it is that we are so intertwined with our tech. It's frightening. So we work with the parents. We get the parents up to speed and we create them as coaches. We give them these fabulous abilities that they can take away and they can, utilize that in the way that they live their lives and how they then interact with their children and the change is fantastic. Well done. Brilliant stuff. And what do you think about the current conversations about banning smartphones for under 16 year olds? Yeah. So there's a big conversation

here in the UK about that. I know that it's sort of worldwide. There's lots going on. And I think by I think banning is a really tough thing to do. It has so many other implications around it. I think banning, I don't personally agree with it. I think there are other ways that we can educate, show what good looks like, help our young kids and teenagers understand how to interact with tech, but also for us,

that technology is not going away. It's becoming even more ever present in all of our lives and especially in young people's lives. So I think by banning it, I think we're pushing the problem. I think we're taking away a whole host of amazing capabilities that people can use, especially with tech. But by banning it, I think it's wrong.

I think we need to look at how we restrict things. I think we can look at putting sort of age restrictions, but there are so much more that these organisations, a tech organisations can do, and the phone companies can do, to be able to restrict what is allowed on a smartphone, especially for young people. And it's something that I'm actually working on at the moment

in creating a, a device that our children will be able to utilize that also protects them from putting social media on there at an age where it's not appropriate. So there's so much we can do, but by clearly just purely banning it, the impact is big. I mean, I asked my daughter what she thought of banning it, and she's 19 now. But she said, well, actually, there's a lot of kids that go to school that use the train system, use the bus system. And those apps, you know, the real time when the bus is actually turning up, it's all on their phones.

Yes. So there are certain things that for the benefit of our children, there are, and there are other things. There are real educational benefits as well to tech and utilising it well. Definitely. So I just think by banning, for me as a no, I don't buy into that at all. I agree. Mono, I thoroughly have enjoyed. having a conversation with you. Now, I know you have some amazing courses and a great website for people

to connect with you. Just share a little bit who should connect with you and what's available there for people. Yeah, so anyone that really wants to think about what does change look like, how screens are impacting them and their families, whether you're a teacher, a head teacher or a social worker or a foster carer or a grandparent, auntie and or whoever you are, there are, by coming on our course and being an understanding what is available to you, what you can do, how you can help change your behaviour to be in control. And that's in control firstly and foremostly for yourself, but then how you then you can help your teenagers and your younger children in showing them what good looks like with

technology. And learning to do that and then to also reclaim your family environment and your relationships with your children, that's kind of what we aspire to. We want to create more parent coaches and teacher coaches and, you know, and grandparent coaches, whoever you are, we want to give you as much as we possibly can so that you have all the tools and techniques and strategies that you can help any of the people around you that you feel and that are being sort of impacted by the addictive nature of screens and how they pull you towards them. We want to break free of that, break free of those chains and be fully in control yourself and learn to use tech in a, I suppose in a very much a humane way.

I would encourage everyone go to www. www.rebeltherapies.com. That's rebeltherapies.com. Rebeltherapies.com. Miner, I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed having a conversation with you today. Thank you so much for being my guest. Thank you very much, Mark. I really appreciate coming on with you and listening to me

and about everything around screens. That I really appreciate it. The pleasure's being all mine. Thank you, everyone for joining. for brilliant business. Thanks for listening to Business Innovators Radio. To hear all episodes featuring leading industry influencers and trendsetters, visit us online at businessinnovators.com today.