Member Article

Former Sun journalist Tommy Holgate: "Today's students have forgotten how to have meaningful conversations"

“Returning to university for a Masters degree was interesting: Today’s students don’t know how to talk and listen to each other“

Former Sun showbiz journalist Tommy Holgate, who returned to university aged 33 to study for an MA in Positive Psychology, has spoken out about the need for today’s university students to learn to have more meaningful conversations.

Speaking about student wellbeing at an event run by healthtech company Fika on Wednesday night, Holgate said students “need to learn to have more meaningful conversations with each other”.

Fika is an Emotional Fitness app which provides students with guided packs and exercises to help them build their confidence, focus, emotional resilience, empathy and active listening skills. The app can be used alone, face-to-face with a friend, or in multi-user pods – allowing students to support and motivate each other, and develop more meaningful relationships.

“Going back to university as a 33-year-old was interesting,” said Holgate, who has run for the Peace Party and performed at Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “I can’t think back on a time when I heard someone ask ‘how are you?’ and listen for a response.

“Today’s students come together as a group and tell stories about their day. Then someone gets a phone out of their pocket and shows a video they’ve found on YouTube.

“The Fika app is fantastic – if it encourages young people to use this device to have more meaningful conversations, rather than showing each other videos, it will have a very positive impact on student culture and wellbeing.”

Holgate, who now runs a holistic stress management business, also talked about the importance of emotional intelligence, which starts at home. “Parents should be encouraged to open up more to their kids and tell them more about how they are feeling – this will help young people build emotional intelligence.”

Fika co-founder and CEO Nick Bennett said: “We are on a mission to mainstream emotional fitness across the UK’s universities. But we are stronger together – we can only do it with the support of our partners and everyone who is helping us with this mission.”

Also speaking at the Fika event were Daniel Smyth, founder of Sport & Thought, an organisation which uses sport to help young adolescents perform better at school, and Caleb Jude Packham, a former TV presenter turned ‘Wellness Warrior’ and yoga influencer.

“Sport is a great way of teaching young people to open their minds, to increase their width of vision and perspective,” said Smyth. “The football pitch externalises what’s going on inside so how we behave on the pitch gives us great insight into how we’re feeling. Over time, sport can help young people learn to step back and analyse a situation before acting.”

Caleb Jude Packham shared details of his own emotional fitness journey – from MTV presenter to yoga influencer.

“I spent a lot of my early life and career searching for love and acceptance in the wrong places: dysfunctional relationships, toxic friendships, and eventually the TV industry” said Packham. “15 years ago I wanted to be famous – relinquishing that desire is a marker of how far I have come in my own emotional fitness journey.”

Packham recently hosted a ‘50 Men, 50 Mats’ event in support of Campaign Against Living Miserably – bringing together 50 men who had never tried yoga and “giving them permission to be together and support each other fully”.

The Fika app launched in February, rolling out across UK universities including the University of Lincoln, Exeter, Manchester Metropolitan and CUSU: Coventry University London.

Fika is now in talks with many more universities nationwide, and is lining up two government-backed think tanks, one later this year and one in early 2020, bringing higher education policy advisors and university vice chancellors together to discuss the future of student wellbeing.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Joe Thompson .