because losing is so painful it's so embarrassing it's so it's attached with negative emotions you remember them more you think about them you can't sleep you can't eat especially if they're compounding over and over again and so when you're losing you're always thinking what can i do to
improve it what can i do to get better but when you win a lot of times you think i was supposed to win yeah all right yeah that was supposed to happen okay moving on moving on instead of pausing and saying what did i learn what did i execute what was out of my control where did i get lucky what did i what did the opponent what
mistakes that i capitalized from the opponent what is something that i could take into my next performance and that's why i think this self-reflection piece is so important to take this same set of questions after when or after a loss and use this lens this quite this self-reflection questioning process to
ask yourself no matter if it's a success or a failure so if you lose if you ask yourself okay what did i what did i do well today okay what went well today win or lose that's a great question ask yourself another question is what did i learn today win or lose that's a great question ask yourself and then last question
what am i going to do better tomorrow win or lose that's a great question to ask yourself [Music] what are you obsessed with right now oh starting off hot what am i obsessed with right now i what's interesting i was just talking to my wife about this and i wasn't aware that i was obsessed with it but
it's it literally is reading and learning like literally i will have my wife and my kids will constantly catch me or they'll tell me hey what are you reading or or what are you watching and i find myself just constantly just with this insatiable desire to learn and i don't know where it's where it stems from or why
um maybe because i wasn't a great student in high school maybe because i wasn't a learner early up until like my mid-20s and just now i'm learning concepts and in systems and and i'm just fascinated and very curious and i'm excited about it so i think that's what i'm currently obsessed with let's dive into a little bit about what
you do in sports we sort of spend so much time on the physical stuff training and working out and eating right rarely do we give much thought to sort of mental performance and yet you can't really train your body unless you train your mind a strong body can't make a strong mind but a strong mind can make a
strong body you're a mental performance coach let's explore that for a bit starting with what is a mental performance coach that's such a great question and and depending on who i talk to i will change my answer or articulate it in a different way i think just for the sake of this podcast i have a i could explore a little bit more and
explain a little bit deeper i think it's a very convoluted term sometimes you have these buzzwords high performance mental performance mental skills and i think one of the best ways to explain mental performance is to look at physical performance like like you said you're 100 right and i think a very
simple and in some circles and over over simplifying performance is the activation of motor skills to achieve a task now if we look at mental performance it's the activation of mental skills to achieve a task and then the second question is okay so what are mental skills now mental skills are what your
guests speak about on this podcast all the time it's it's what knowledge workers learn it's your ability to zoom in and to zoom out to gain better perspective your ability to conduct a pre-mortem your ability to deploy gratitude in a difficult situation it's your ability to talk to yourself instead of listen to yourself and so
my job is helping individuals and organizations or teams how do you how do you operationalize that it's the application of mental models it's the application of of decision sciences and some concepts in behavioral science and some concepts in performance psychology and and some mental models from physics or
chemistry whatever it may be to help people essentially become better decision makers and also to streamline their mental process how do they approach a game how do they approach failure how do they approach success and so i'm involved in a lot of those different types of conversation both in the micro with an individual
person and then talking with a coach or or a leader of an organization to to try to create an environment where you help people do that for themselves and so that's uh that's kind of my best definition of it right now my current working definition you said something that i thought was quite profound when you were talking
there about it was about talking to yourself not listening to yourself can you dive in on that yeah i think what happens to a lot of us is as humans we have this constant chatter going in on our in our minds constantly thinking constantly ruminating it's just we're getting inputs from our
own thoughts from our interpretations from what we're reading from what we think other people are thinking and we it's easy to get caught into these traps to get caught into believing some of these biases that we have believing some of these thoughts and we'll take these thoughts and these thoughts are closely
coupled and tied to our emotions and which will and our emotions will ultimately impact our body and our physiology which will ultimately impact our behaviors and so as humans we need to learn how to look at our thoughts and to develop a relationship with them understand what is signal and what is noise and it will
change from time to time depending on what context depending on what environment you're in but basically what talk what listening to yourself is is looking at your thoughts and attaching truth to all of them and saying yep that's true that's true that's true as opposed to pausing and debating your
thoughts an example that we do quite often is i'll have a room full of people let's say it's a team and i will tell every player to pick a teammate okay this is your teammate and what you're going to do is you are going to do something that you do all the time and this is something that is found in
locker rooms around the world debates people will debate best food they will debate best movies they'll debate who's better what sports are the best and they're really good at it and so what i have them do i say okay you're going to debate and i give them the topics you're going to debate hot weather versus cold weather and you hear
them go at it you're going to debate watching the movie in the theater or watching the movie at home and they go at it and then i ask the question okay who won the debate and in a room full of highly competitive individuals they all raise their hand and they laugh at each other and then i ask okay how did you
win the debate what did you do to win and they say techniques like i didn't let my opponent talk or i listened to what they said and then i poked holes in their reasoning or i applied logic and i provided evidence and data against what they were saying and then i come with the point the point is
it's interesting how you can sit here and debate a topic like weather in sport and food but you don't pause to apply those same principles to debate yourself when you start doubting yourself a lot of times we say oh that is true i'm not smart oh that is true i'm never going to accomplish that oh that is true he or
she is better than me as opposed to stopping and saying no let me let me look at that differently let me apply evidence against it let me let me consider the fault of my reasoning the faulty uh judgment that i might be having so that's what it means to talk to yourself instead of listen to yourself
i think that's really interesting you mentioned sort of your emotions dictating your body and your body dictating your behavior and all of that seems to happen at this unconscious level so this this internal monologue it sounds like that's when we do bring it back up to the conscious level but we're so often operating at the unconscious
level talk to me a little bit about that that is so true and that model that you just described how your thoughts affect your emotions your emotions affect your physiology your physiology affects your performance and then it loops back around this reinforcing loop is called the thought performance interaction and this is one
of the fundamental things that we discuss when you're working with an athlete or you're working with the team just to understand how this chain works it's very complicated very complex but when you're working with professional athletes in particular it's got to be simple it's got to be direct
it's got to be tangible so they could refer back to it fluid for them now to your point there are a lot of things that are happening unconsciously and sometimes you don't even notice it it's hard to it's hard to change a system when you're part of the system it's hard to see what needs to be adjusted when
you can't tell it reminds me of the commencement speech and i can't remember this is water i believe it is um yeah david foster wallace david foster wallace and he tells a story in the beginning of the commencement speech where this pull these fish are swimming along and a wise fish comes by and says hey boys how's
the water ebony swims off and one fish says the other what the hell is water and so that is just that just explains further how sometimes you don't see the nuances and the intricacies of what's going on our mind and so what my job is or one of my job what i try to do is to provide an outside view to people
provide an environment where our relationship is so strong it could bear the weight of truth and they are comfortable enough to share what they're going through to share their struggles to share their internal dialogue with me and not for me to diagnose i'm not a clinical psychologist not to for me to go back and and just
give them just give them knowledge and truth and dispense uh pithy conversate motivational quotes but to help them look at their thoughts instead of through their thoughts and i think if you have someone or something to serve as an awareness mechanism for you to be able whether it be going back and reflecting and saying
what am i learning from this or to notice behaviors you can't change what you're not aware of so if you stop and say oh i keep noticing that i get angry in this situation huh i wonder what's in there oh hey i noticed that when i'm in this environment i seem to be the best version of myself i wonder
i wonder what i can uncover there and so my job is to ask questions to people and say hey what are you noticing what are you noticing with your emotions what are you noticing with your habits what are you noticing with your relationships not for me to tell them but for them to look out for it and a lot of times
it's priming them with a question sometimes you can ask a person afterward i was in education for five years and one of the things they teach you in in in school is the importance of priming so i can have the class read a sentence or read a paragraph rather go read a paragraph and then i'll say okay class
what did you learn from that and what are the kids gonna do they're gonna go back and re-read the paragraph because they're like oh i was i didn't know what to look for but if i say all right class we're gonna read this paragraph i want you to look for how the what you think this character character was thinking
as this interaction is going on now they're looking for it they're cert their minds are primed to look for the answer in the moment what i have found is when i go back to an athlete at the end of a game or a season and say so what were you thinking what was going on there they have no clue they didn't even know
what they were looking for to be quite honest but if you give if you prime them beforehand and say hey we're going into this season or you're going into this game i want you to look for moments where you feel your heart rate really speeding up and let's talk about it at the end of this series and see if you
notice any patterns come back sit down and now they're looking for it and so those are just some ideas some ways that i look about think about how to shine a light on things that people do unconsciously so before asking you on the show somebody recommended you and i was a little skeptical i was like a mental
performance coach like that sounds a bit hocus pocus and i ran your name by two major league baseball gms and they both came back saying you're entirely legit but how do you overcome and maybe it's just my stereotype but like the the notion that a lot of people in the trade are sort of snake oils people or it's really
hard to differentiate between good and great mental performance coaches first of all i don't know who you asked and i'm so grateful for for them saying what they said um my follow-up question to them would be how do you know what evidence do you have and so that's how that's my initial
knee-jerk reaction to be quite honest i think to your point a mental performance coach when you say that a lot of people say oh so you're a motivational speaker oh so you're an inspirational speaker oh so you're a life coach no offense to any of those things however with the circles that i i work with there is a
there's rigor that's involved there are processes there's complexities i the athletes that i work with they don't need a motivational speaker they don't need an inspirational speaker it comes from within another part of this is just naturally i'm an excitable person naturally i have a lot of energy that flows through me and
naturally from what i have been told just my personality um i in some circles can be likable i could be my my friendliness and and let's say charisma or whatever it may be can be perceived as oh this guy knows what he's he knows what he's talking about now and there's studies to show that their
studies show that now it's my job to be a true professional if people are going to get trapped in those biases and think okay this person knows what he's talking about i need to do my due diligence to say okay i better know what i'm talking about and and i better truly respect the experience and the expertise of others my philosophy
is is more of guide on the side rather than stage on the stage the the athlete who you i work with the group i work they're the heroes they already have tools they already have have values and tools and strategies that they've used to get where they are these are some of the best athletes in the world
and so a question i always get is how do you help athletes what do you say to them and i come back and say i don't say anything what i do is i ask questions i if athlete comes to me and says hey how do i tighten up my focus i immediately come back with a question how have you tightened up your focus focus up to this point oh well i do this
i do this oh okay well have you been doing that has do you need to change your result do you need to change your focus process or in what ways are you not exercising now here let me add another one they try this off and so a lot of times it's taking the tools they already have and polishing them up
and handing them right back to them and i think that's really beneficial i asked a general manager of a sport one time early in my career how do you measure my effectiveness i asked him right to his face how will you measure how will you know that i'm good at my job and his answer was interesting he said i'll watch how the players and the
coaches respond to you when you walk into the clubhouse and i thought that was intriguing to me and i said what do you mean he goes that tells me everything i need to know if they run from you that tells me what i need to know if they come up and they approach you that tells me everything i
need to know now i don't want to mistake likability for competence because sometimes people think oh he's really good and the only reason that person is good at what they do is because they're likable and so i will ask players so i'll say okay you like me but in what ways has this helped you what are you doing as a result of it
and so another thing that we try to capture as well or i try to capture is is quantifying the unquantifiable and that's difficult i think one of the best organizations in the world who does this is google and i have some friends over at google and in their people analytics department okay how do you quantify that how do you
measure this and a lot of times it comes down to asking it comes down to surveys it comes down to measuring certain behaviors and and sometimes in the as a result as well as causation and correlation just because a player is meditating that doesn't mean he's going to go out there and hit well
just because a player is now visualizing and picturing it perfectly that doesn't mean he's going to go pitch great or have a great game doesn't mean she's going to run a great race and i've learned over time that a lot of what i do is is refactoring now refactoring is a mental model that i've learned from
computer programming and essentially what refactoring is if if i understand it correctly it's it's basically a system where which you're not necessarily affecting the outcome but you're making the the system more efficient and faster the people who i work with are already resilient but can these tools that they work with or
this perspective they have can they can help them bounce back faster they're already already really good at refocusing but does teaching them diaphragmatic breathing and some locus of control strategies can help them bounce back faster now how to measure that we don't know um but asking them and to hear them from from these
anecdotal responses like hey that's helping me and so i'll go by that um but yeah it's it's a lot of it's i really enjoy it but to your point i'm always mindful that don't manipulate people's emotions don't make promises that you can't keep don't over promise things and say and and table pound if you do this it's
gonna make you mentally tough there are no five steps there are no silver bullets there are no um quick fixes to things this is trying to help them just comb out their own process and i think that's been something that's helped me along the way so one of the things you said there that
i thought was really interesting and you sort of alluded to this earlier too is that you help people see their blind spots because it's really hard to understand a system that we're a part of it's really hard for me to understand what i can't see even if i have the tools to see it and so pointing that out helps me perform
when it comes to somebody like me you know who's below average it's probably easy to get that incremental sort of burst of improvement anyone can really do that job but when when it comes to sort of elite athletes or business executives at the top of the game or special forces when you work with people who are
you know the 99.99 percentile that edge becomes harder and it becomes a lot more internal how do people respond when you start pointing out areas that they might be blind to that's a great question and i don't think i would have been able to answer this question a while ago and i think the answer this question kind of
dawned on me organically looking back and just taking just taking inventory on all my different experiences whether it be working with nfl players or soldiers in the military or any major league baseball players you i've had a number of different multiple iterations doing this with different populations
who are all high performers and a common theme that i've seen is that my role or anyone even a coach's role is to steal from tim elmore and i've said it earlier is to build a relationship so strong it could bear the weight of truth and that's number one to build a place where players feel safe
i think they understand whoever truly knows me they know that i'm in a position to provide a safe space for them to help them realize that i'm not going to judge you i i have no i have no say in in your bonuses or in your contract or whether you play or you don't it's it's i want to provide a place for you where
you have the freedom to speak out loud you have the freedom to say something out loud and say you know what i always thought that but now hearing me say that i don't believe that and for me to say oh okay yeah that's fine you're okay yeah and for to let them literally walk through it and walk themselves through this process
and when i hear something i'll be able to tug on it and say oh you just said that this stresses you out why do you think that stresses you out what about it stresses you out oh what has ever been a moment you've experienced something similar to this what did you do there and if you were to have a tape recording
of some of our conversations you would see a large percentage of it has the other person talking and a very small percentage of it has me talking and when i am talking it's more questions than anything because their answers aren't for me but it's for them and so rather than me pointing out their blind spots or
pointing out what what i think they need to do i've never been a professional athlete i've never had to manage a major league baseball team i've never ran a professional sports organization and so i get to ask really naive questions i but what's also unique about the position that i'm in these organizations
understand hey let's give justin the ability to have be able to go around let me go sit with the analysts and talk to them about how they build models i want to go and sit with athletic athletic trainers and talk to them and see what their environment is like and and how to help a player uh reconstruct their acl hey
let me go sit with the the clubhouse staff to see how they design the environment and the music just to to to nudge certain emotions in the clubhouse and so it's going around and understanding how systems work and then asking questions to help players and people understand or to answer
questions that they've never even really thought of and what's really fascinating too is afterward they'll say oh that was amazing thank you and then i'll say okay what was your takeaway and they'll say what their takeaway is and i will remind them just so you know who did who said that they're like i did i said you're
absolutely right i didn't say a word here just to help them realize that you're the one with the answers you're the one with the experience and all i provided was a space for you to speak to think about it out loud to another human being who is not a family member who is not a coach who is not tied to your career but who's in the
system who sees who's in the trenches in the arena with you who sees how things go and how things are are how the system is navigated how you navigate the system to ask questions that other people might not ask you or take into consideration so i think that's how i do it it's a very soft gentle subtle way of helping people
through the use of hopefully effective questions it sounds like you're really getting them to reflect upon themselves and to do that you you hit on this earlier you have to be open and you have to be honest with you and themselves in your company what what are the ins and outs sort of like about how
you go about connecting with people and earning their trust so that they can be open with you and open with themselves around you i think that is the hallmark of the ability to build relationships i think number one is organic i i think it it wasn't from a book i read it wasn't from a podcast i think it stemmed from
watching and copying my parents and how they were number one and then number two it's the double helix it's in my dna it's just how it is and so i think uh at first it was an unconscious competence that i had was like oh i just have an ability to make friends and i think one of those reasons i can build
connections is i first let's talk about the the population i work with everyone's clamoring for their attention they're incredibly competent at what they do and their bs radar is very high they they're immediately like what are you what are you trying to put your fingerprints on me so you can
put my face on a website and say oh you helped me with my mental toughness are you trying to sell something uh you're gonna use me a lot of professional athletes that's where it goes and so at first you can't shove anything you are not shoving mental skills or tools down their throat and so i can say all i want but they're going
to watch behavior they're going to see how i go around what i do and so i think number one it starts by being there being if it's hot outside you're out there sweating with them if it's cold outside you're out there freezing cold with them if it's a tough stretch it's it's your it's a tough stretch together
and i think that's number one is they see you just the ability for them to see you i think number two is is how are you used in your organization so another thing that people struggle to give up now is time time attention and energy are finite resources nobody wants somebody i don't want to go
to the coaches and say all right coaches can you give me 20 minutes for me to do a mental performance session with the players of course not no i'm not going to give up this precious time to have them go sit in a room so they can do some mindfulness meditation as good as it is it's important it's very important and
so i need to adapt and adjust and apply micro learning and nudge theory to their environment so instead of doing focus on a one session 30 minute long intensity session it's focusing on consistency over intensity the players have meetings all the time and it's me collaborating with a coach and say hey can i have a minute in the
beginning to do a mental minute talk about a simple concept about how to refocus as they go about 60 seconds they're already part of that meeting and this i have a relationship with the staff member like yeah of course that'd be great now it's working instead of doing a session on habit formation with all
players hey let me connect with the nutritionist and let's build like a little habit formation program that you could deploy the nutritionist can deploy and i'm not even involved and so i was able to collaborate with them it's diaphragmatic breathing with the strength and conditioning coaches we talk with them and say okay how can we
do how can we help the players do diaphragmatic breathing pregame oh let's incorporate it before stretch we're going to do it this way i'm nowhere to be found and so i think the key is collaboration so that the players and the staff and the organization realizes that this isn't the justin sua show i'm
not going to come and mental skill everybody all all day it's how can i collaborate with incredible with different departments how do i collaborate with individuals so that it can be baked into the system as opposed to okay now we have to have mental performance time and so now they just get it in different ways and
it's just part of the environment and don't even realize that it's uh it's it's embedded in there already there's two things that you said in that answer that really stand out to me and i want to explore a little deeper what is the relationship between environment and our subconscious and
performance and what are the things that we can do to to improve our environment to improve our performance i think james clear in his book atomic habits says it best for me and i and i always talk about it the environment is the invisible hand that shapes behavior if you want to take a look at someone's
behavior take a look at the system in which they function in take a look at their morning routine take a look at their home take a look at everything i here's here's a simple little example about the power of environment is systems thinking uh applying the model systems thinking i got a text one time
i got a i got a call it was a call from a player one time and he said oh i lack confidence i'm lacking confidence right now and and we had been talking about confidence he's like it was interesting how you i for some reason i i don't have confidence right now and early in my career i would have said okay let's do self-talk okay let's
talk about um talking yourself instead of thinking yourself or whatever it may be and instead of going there environment design popped in my mind systems thinking popped into my mind i thought who did you talk to today and he goes oh i went to visit my old school i ran into an old coach i had a conversation
with my dad and then as he was describing his day it dawned on him oh my goodness i hadn't been to that school until since some of my worst days and that was a terrible experience for me oh wow my dad was harping on me about doing this i need to improve on this i need to do this better and it was in this moment where he
realized oh i don't like confidence it was just i was in a bad environment today and now it's all in my head and so again not every situation or scenario is like that it's not as clean but it opened my eyes to instead of saying okay let's just prescribe something let's give a tactic to pause
and consider the environment we talk about that often the music the spacing the the wording on the walls or not having wording on the walls where where players are situated in the clubhouse all these little things where the food is in a cafeteria the healthy food is out in the open and the the snacks are
hidden under in their drawers to create a little extra friction in order to get to it and so it's incredibly incredibly important if anyone is trying to improve i think he james clear goes on to say you want to make good habits easy to do and bad habits hard to do and that comes down to that environmental design take a look at
your system that you're living in that you've created for yourself and where could you create friction to to avoid doing bad things and where could you avoid friction or diminish friction in order to to do those things that you know you should be doing i think one of the reasons the environment is so powerful because let's
go deep on this for a second i i think one of the reasons the environment is so powerful is that it communicates with your subconscious and has a conversation that you're not privy to in your conscious mind and if we break environment down because people are like what what is environment i kind of think
of it as four four main things there's probably more but the way that i think about it is you have a physical environment like if i'm trying not to eat potato chips and i see potato chips it's easy for me to eat them and so nudging your physical environment can shape your behavior because it's having a conversation with your your
unconscious uh self you're the people you hang around right so your friends your family the people you choose to spend time with the people you you admire in a way too uh what you read so what what environment is going on in your mind so what you're consuming and putting in your head because that
becomes the thoughts that you draw on for what you build upon in the future and then the other one is sort of organizational culture what are the standards that are acceptable what what are the what are the norms what are the routines what are the patterns because that's going to speak to my subconscious
as well oh you hit on so many incredible things there one in particular that lit me up is is this internal environment this car this this mental environment that you create a an analogy a metaphor we we constantly use is this this fountains and drains now any metaphor has its limitations we all we all know that and we could pick
apart any kind of metaphor but what i like about this is just the the mental picture that it creates fountains are people who [Music] who leveraged their values they they lean into what they're really good at doing i think we all have people who are fountains in our lives and it's when initially you think fountain you
think zest a lot of times they think oh energy and positivity and extroversion is no you can have a family you can have people in your life or fountains of perspective you can have people in your life or fountains of organization a fountain of critical thinking and these are those fountains these people
that you go to to to help you with these problems now you can have a fountain of humor someone who just who they're then a knack for levity they have an ability to lighten the mood and you call this person and you go around that person they just you they're there when you need them it's amazing
now there are some people who are like oh well i don't have fountains in my life i live by myself or or i live with my plants to your point shane fountains in this 2022 social media world you could find fountains in the form of poets writers scientists artists musicians teachers you name it they're out there now the
opposite of that are are drains now these are people or or concepts or ideas where it kind of it's a problem for every solution it's making excuses people who who always are always complaining now the the the caution with sharing the fountains and the drains immediately when i share this in public settings
that whatever it may be people will say yeah i i know a drain this person's a drain that person's a drain i say wait a minute we all have fountain and drain tendencies i could bring my wife and kids in here right now and they could tell you when i have had my drain moments when i was not a fun person to
be around and so instead of labeling people as fountains or drains it's identifying hey who who who are these fountains of mine really focusing on the fountains who are these people i can surround myself with to to positively influence my internal environment as you were mentioning and so that was just a concept that i that i
absolutely loved i i love the notion of fountain and drains i think this is a great way to conceptualize it and i said i wanted to follow up on two parts to your answer a couple questions ago and the second part i want to follow up on is consistency and intensity talk to me about that relationship between the two
yes bruce lee has the quote um consistency over intensity and i forgot i'm cutting off part of it but i think this is an often misunderstood concept i think especially in the new year we have these desires to set goals and achieve these huge goals and to change our lives to work out more to play the guitar to learn another
language and and we think and we have to overhaul everything now that takes a lot of energy that takes a lot of attention and when you set out to do that the moment you set out to achieve something like that you also sign up for the process that's going to get you there you also sign up for
the the effort that's going to get you there and what happens to a lot of people they try to make these huge overhauls of time of energy and introduce very difficult habits where where at first you're like oh i could do this every day but if you're not used to working out an hour every single day or two hours every day or whatever it
may be that's going to be a shock to the system at first because it's going to have a domino effect on everything else you can't just insert something there's there's there's going to be adjustments made in the system whether you intend for that to happen or even unintended like unintended consequences
of this new habit you're trying to create now what you can do instead is what jim collins does is fire bullets before cannonballs maybe start implementing something small and just be consistent in the example that i gave early on this podcast we were talking about instead of having an hour long or 30
minute long mental performance session with the players which is oh that's what they did back in the days that's how mental what mental skills coaches did now it's no we're not going to have a long session we're going to have 60 second sessions more consistency more consistently throughout the week
monday wednesday friday and you do it the next week and the next week where it's embedded in and mental performance training is built into the system an example that i remember is working with an elite female athlete and she wanted to meditate more and so she decided i'm going to meditate
for 20 minutes she tried it she tried to implement it and it disrupted her entire process she couldn't do it so she knocked it down to 10 minutes she tried to put it into her system it didn't work and this was frustrating her because she was breaking promises to herself she's a woman who does what she says she's going
to do and that wasn't the case she understands the science of meditation she understands is beneficial and for some reason she can't figure it out so what she decided to do is she learned about habit stacking and she ended up tying meditation to brushing her teeth to something that she know she's going to do every single day
and so wouldn't you know it it worked she instead of brushing her teeth unconsciously just kind of going through the motions she would start to meditate as she was brushing her teeth and it was really neat to see her go through this process and to this day she still does it i actually asked her about it
it's just part of the process and so she focused on consistency over intensity she didn't need to sit there for 20 minutes every single day just two minutes four minutes a day the two minutes of brushing your teeth in the morning and night and she's just consistent with it and she sees how it helps her in every aspect of her life so
that's that's a little example of how to apply the mental model of consistency over intensity i think about this in sort of like in the short term you're as good as your intensity but in the long term you're only as good as your consistency i really like that let's explore confidence a little bit uh
where does it come from how fragile is it how do you build it back up when you lose it this is a topic that is discussed all the time and i think it is often misunderstood in terms of people over index its importance and what i mean by that is they overestimate how important confidence is i have learned through
talking to professional athletes how many of them lack confidence they will tell it to my face they'll say i i don't have confidence there are players who i will not name but who all of us know would you be surprised to hear how they would not consider themselves very confident then you ask them okay so how do you do it so
how are you successful and they say i don't focus on how i feel i focus on my actions i focus on actions not feelings and so i think a russian proverb explains this very well a bird can rest peacefully on a branch not because of its trust in the branch but because of its trust and its ability to fly and i think where people
struggle with confidence is it's obvious is often misplaced um it's it's instead of being placed on their ability to bounce back their ability to learn from failure their confidence based on something that's might not be there when they need it the example i always give is have there ever been moments in your
life we'll say school a lot of people listening to this have experienced school has ever been a moment where you've gone in to take a test and you're extremely confident only to get your results back and you perform poorly yeah that's happened to us has there been a moment where you've
gone into something gone and take a test and you didn't feel very confident about it but you got an a you did very well yes that's happened so what does that teach us about confidence that confidence is an accurate predictor of future success and so what the research also shows is yeah we'd like to we'd like to have more of
it you'd like to have more of it than not have it and the research is called self um not self self it's uh the research is called self efficacy theory and this is bandura now to apply the research there are some things that you can do to increase confidence and some of those things could be your
level of preparation it could be your current experience success that you're having it could be your past success that you've had it could be the positive thoughts you have it could be establishing a purpose having a why behind what you do can give you confidence to lean into difficulty and lean into obstacles now
what also happens is you want to be careful is that poor performance derailing your confidence and and these professional athletes who i work with there are constant flows of input that lead to confidence and there are constant flows of outflows that derail confidence and so what these players are focus on is they say okay
i might not have a lot of confidence right now i might not have a lot of but you know what i'm going to trust my training i'm going to trust that i know what to do in this situation and i go out there and give it the best i can regardless of how i feel and i think that is one of the hallmarks of anybody who's really
good at what they do they still have moments of fear they still get really nervous they still have are self-conscious and lack confidence and lack focus but they're able to put it together and to go out there and execute to the best of their ability in that moment and i think you'll you'll hear a lot of athletes say
that yeah they're moments where i lack confidence but i go out there and do it anyway because i focus on my actions and not how i feel talk to me a little bit about that drive that goes into people you sort of mention the fear uh there's also the you know from the outside looking in and
i'm definitely not a mental performance coach by any stretch but like yeah you have like the tom brady's of the world who have this chip on his shoulder and it carries them it fuels them and then you have people who who you know see glory we all have these different motivations i'm curious as to what you
see with athletes is there a difference in the motivation between average athletes which are you know way above average in the world um but at your level average sort of like baseball players and the elite baseball players is there different in that drive you know that's a there there is actually a book called
drive out there that i think there are some physiological uh components that attributed to it either could be some some nature part some nurture part two i think it's very complex however uh just some patterns that i've noticed is the hall of famers who i've talked to or who i've seen or the best of the best
there's for a lot of them there's this obsession this all this point to where they are almost obsessed with whatever thing they are trying to pursue now some of them are very process driven and they're obsessed with the process and the results are a byproduct of the process there are some who are obsessed
with results and they're driven by results and i will never i've tried it a few times to nudge a professional athlete who are who are results focused to be more process focused i didn't work out with some of them they're like no don't tell me how to shape and what how i should view my goals that that won't work for me so i
learned very quickly that okay even though the research says that there it'd probably be more ideal to focus on the process it's the drive for the next contract to win the super bowl to win the world series to be a hall of famer that is what lights their fire now what i have also noticed is the gold gradient effect being very
prevalent in these athletes now the gold grading effect is essentially states that a person will increase their effort the closer they get to the goal and one of the things is these people who are truly truly driven they have a vivid bright image of what they want it is clear as day and they
are driven every single day as it's the purpose behind everything that they do now there are moments where you start to struggle there are moments where you go through slumps there are moments when you don't win a game i have been a part of that where you do not win a game the entire season and it's devastating
and your why and your purpose starts to get clouded and so in those cases when you start to struggle individually or as a team it's somehow creating a temporary light at the end of the tunnel because sometimes you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel you can't see the finish line and so your motivation dips your behavior dips
your drive dips and so it's like okay how do we how do we help you create a temporary light at the end of the tunnel because you're driven when you see something and the player creates a temporary one what are you gonna do this sunday okay what's your goal for right here right now and then applying
applying the the what do you call it newton's laws an object of motion tends to stay in motion they're building a little energy a little momentum and once you know it they're back on track and they're rolling and again this isn't a clean fix and it's a clean trick necessarily but these are some of the
things that we try to implement to help players not only pursue their goals but to stick with them and to keep the energy up when times get tough talk to me a little bit about the gold gradient effect and how it works its way into does it work its way into contracts like instead of a performance bonus at the
end of the year is there like monthly performance bonuses where people can achieve it and that way you're always closer to your goal right like there's always that one thing right there and then you're immediately incentivizing and rewarding it versus a yearly sort of like once a year i think that's one of the reasons bonuses are largely
ineffective a they're they're not material for the vast majority of people and they happen once a year and so you tend to get feedback once a year and you know in those three months before you get your bonus check everybody's running around trying to make it look like they're doing a whole bunch of stuff and
and they probably are doing a whole bunch of cool stuff but they're working harder in that three months and they probably worked in the other nine and why can't we just do that monthly like why can't we we set up the short term goals or even weekly in some companies that's a great that's a great question
and to answer the initial question are our contracts set up like that i have not i don't i don't know i don't know i'm that's that's a a circle of competence that i have i don't have um and so with that but to your point your abs that's so true because a lot of times with incentives and bonuses like
that in the professional sports world there are so many uncontrollable factors and when you are trying to control something that's uncontrollable there are some unintended things that pop up you may be perceived as more selfish you may be perceived as a little more panic when the things that you try to control but can't
end up controlling you and i have seen firsthand where i see players a little bit more stressed out than normal their their their their reference level or their set points a little bit their mood a little more agitated a little bit more chippy and then they say hey what's going on oh i'm one stolen base away i'm 10 hits
away i'm and i'm like oh okay all right and so it's okay how do i keep things in perspective just trust my ability and so these are conversations that are had not just with professional athletes but even with people who are about to professionals about to close a quarter or whatever it may be as they're getting
closer it's like okay let me keep doing what i've been doing instead of trying to do a little more just stick with the process i think we have a bias towards action i think they're really really an action bias as opposed to hey just keep doing what you're doing trust what you're doing is right and trust
that that your process will yield the results that you're looking for as they had the entire time leading up to this point i think when you see a bonus around the corner or or whatever it may be you have this propensity to do something different and it might end up hurting you in the long run the world is full of talented people who
never seem to succeed what's the difference between success and talent i think success comes down to the person's the o everyone needs to find their own definition of success what does def what does success look like to you i think people struggle when they allow the world or society to dictate what success looks
like that's where i have seen people including myself become the worst version of themselves pursuing a goal pursuing a definition of success that really doesn't matter to you i can think in my own life my definition of success has been has evolved over time completely different now than than it used to be
and i think another thing is one of the reasons for that is is how we view people and organizations that we perceive as successful the books are written about the the best in the world the documentaries are made about uh world champions the movies are made about these amazing credible stories but what we learned from
survivorship bias is that a lot of these people who didn't win a lot of them were doing the exact same thing a lot of these guys and these men and women who were came in second place in third place had the same process and in some cases even better process what i have learned in pro sports is that winning
masks so many things you could win but what's talked about is how great your culture is in your winning but it over it just overshadows all of the the deficiencies and the the the problems in the system and then you look at a losing a team who quote unquote loses and what it over losing overshadows the
great leadership the great strategy the great the great the process that they have and so that mental model that i actually learned from you is that the map uh the map is not the territory is we can get enamored by the end results and say oh that's so successful but if you take a look under the hood
you might find a different story so i think a lot of it comes down to society we love the win we love a winner we love stories of winners we want to hear about how they did what they did and so i think if you really want to gain even better insight is take a look at some of those who aren't winners and see what they did and
see and you'll notice that a lot of them are doing some of the exact same things that the winners are doing and in some cases in some cases they might be doing some things even better than than what the winners were doing i i think that's a good segue sort of in into a broader question about standards so often we sort of we
settle for good enough you know people get good enough at something and then they stop i believe that part of the difference between good enough and great is explained by pushing through good enough and going beyond what you think is possible beyond what other people when other people give up you need to
find an extra gear i think of this in terms of standards the standards you have for yourself the standards that come from the organizational culture the standards that come from the people you're around how do we go about raising that bar i think in order to whatever bar you have or whatever norms you want to
create or standards in your term that what you said that you want to create it needs to be supported by the system you create i think a lot of and we've been talking a lot about systems and environments in this conversation i have seen organizations not necessarily a professional sports organization but
just different organizations where the leadership wants to have certain norms certain standards however the their modeling they don't signal those norms themselves and the system isn't built to satisfy those norms how can you say we're gonna we're gonna create the standard is gonna be psychological
safety where everyone feels safe to be creative and fail but in a meeting when someone comes up with this idea that might not work you cut their head off and say that's a dumb idea it's like okay we're the what we're modeling and signaling is not in alignment with what the standards and the norms are so i think number one is
to okay what standards do you want and what are the behaviors that will model or signal this standard and then you look at the system where in our system does our system can it support this when you talk about the extra gear when you talk about someone who wants to write a book someone who wants to enter a fitness
competition someone who wants to start a business if that's this there's going to be a the standard is going to be very difficult those are very difficult things to do that are going to take a lot of time and a lot of times people will underestimate how hard it's going to take and how long it's how hard it's going to be and how long
it's going to take and so if you set out to set a standard you can't just put it on a shirt and say okay we're positive culture now we're a learning culture now you need to understand that there's going to be a lag there's there's it takes time to be able to create enough inflow to where all of a sudden
the the stock of whatever you're looking for whether it be psychological safety it's going to take a little while for that to be embedded for that to be the norm and i think that's where people struggle as they underestimate the process and how long it's going to be we we come in and say okay we're just going
to put um this year our our our our year is going to be no fear everything's going to be no fear no fear anywhere and it's like okay wait what are we talking about like how and and you got to define it you got to create a system you got to have behaviors what does it look like what does it not look like
and really create systems and norms that are low-hanging fruit for you and then slowly build from that and i think kind of all over the place with this answer but it's it i see it all the time and it's such a great question so i think of this in terms of like michael jordan right like you couldn't be on a team with mj and
show up and give 50 effort at practice or coast for even a play at practice let alone in a game and i think that that level of standard whether you know people probably didn't always love them but it raised it raised the bar for performance it raised what was acceptable and and i think that that you know
for a lot of people if you get to work with somebody who's really exceptional one of the reasons that that works one of the reasons that you you your performance gets driven is the bar for what's acceptable the standard for the work becomes so much higher than you even thought possible you don't know
what average looks like you only know what exceptional looks like when i hear stories of jordan and tom brady and kobe bryant and just these elite athletes in their sport simone biles who just dominate you see their habits you see their desire this insatiable desire to be the best in the world and to your point
it's contagious and if you're not with them you better step up or you're out and it's it's true and i think it's also true even in in the workforce you get around these people who have a higher motor a higher cadence a higher passion and drive to be the best in the world and they're very unique you don't see them
all the time but when you're around this kind of individual this person to your to your point it does cause you to look at yourself and say okay i better step up i better step up there's another gear there's another level there's another there's another level inside of me that i can get to and
that's why i love team sports so much or that's why i love being surrounded by fountains there's another example of being a fountain in some way of another it's you have no idea when you are pursuing something when your heart is on fire and you can't study it enough you can't learn about it enough and
and some of you might think to yourself oh i can never be like that i can't be like michael jordan i can't be like tom brady chances are there's been a moment in your life where you were so driven by something so you that you wouldn't take no for an answer and you couldn't stop thinking about it you couldn't stop
researching it and that's a form of being driven that's in that moment you're experiencing what it looks like and your family might be saying hey relax you're obsessed what are you doing no i need to get this done no i need to study this i need to write this there might be someone listening to this who has done things
and put so much time into a podcast into a book into something and your family members or your friends are like why are you doing this like no one else knows about it but you know about it and you're driven and that's what it feels like it's when you are so set heart set on something that you want to
do it the best you can and it's i don't think it's something you could force it's something that's organic that bubbles up and you don't know when you're gonna get bit by the driven bug but when it comes out it's a and it's it's an exhilarating feeling it's amazing and then you have people who like these elite performers
and even business professionals maybe elon musk has it maybe sarah blakely with spanx has it these people who found what they were passionate about and then they were just driven to do it and it's like all right if and they want to surround themselves with people who are at extremely work at
an extremely high cadence as well my kids are definitely passionate about minecraft so i don't know if i want to let them listen to this around on me switching gears a little bit here at 19 you were an all-american baseball player and you dropped everything to go become a missionary can you explore that with me and how it
shaped uh the rest of your life so far i never talk about this on podcasts no one really asks about this it was a very difficult decision and it was a decision i wasn't forced i didn't wasn't told i had to do it i didn't get paid to do i actually had to pay money to go do it and it was just something that i knew i
wanted to do i knew not even that i had to do i was excited to do it now i remember being told by a major league baseball scout you're about to make the worst decision in your baseball career if you go do this and i thought about it and i said you know what he's probably right and i went and it was it was it was torn
i was torn so for two years i'm dropped in nicaragua and at the time it was a third war third world country i don't speak spanish i talk to my family twice a year no tv no baseball no going out to parties no movie no music you just go every single day and in many cases i have no electricity no running water
with a companion with somebody who is from another country doesn't even speak english some admit in some cases and you go and it was an unbelievable experience that i learned so much from how to speak another language like i'd learned how to speak spanish and now when i work with athletes from
korea or venezuela or cuba who are here i from firsthand could tell them i know what it's like to be thrown into a different culture i know it's like to not be able to order food i know it's like to cry yourself to sleep because you're thinking i don't have anyone around here i don't have my family and
friends here to support me through this difficult time another thing it taught me is that people have these preconceived notions about you like i've never been so loved and never been so hated in my life i've had machetes pulled on me rocks thrown at me um like people telling me if i threatened my threatening my life no clue who i was but
that was just how i was viewed and i thought wow that's interesting they don't even know me and it was just it was incredible i learned the teamwork i learned how to be a leader um i learned how to navigate difficult situations i learned how to communicate how do you i had to keep it simple there
i i had to let it keep incredibly simple not only because you want to keep things of the spiritual things simple but i had i didn't have a robust vocabulary so i had to keep it really simple and so it was trying to take something that in your heart and you want to share it with somebody but you don't you literally
don't have the words for it and so i had to learn how to navigate that and build relationships in a language with people of a culture that i was unfamiliar with and so i utilize a lot of the things that lessons i learned there in everything really everything i do today from being a parent to my professional life it was it
was the best not it was not just the best two years of my life it was the best two years for my life you mentioned being a parent talk to me a little bit about how your experiences have shaped your approach to raising your children raising kids is so difficult it blows my mind how we have three we have three teenagers
how your kids with the same parents in the same home eating the same food could be starkly different it one look to a kid they get the feedback okay got it another child it's it's just way different and and one thing that i have noticed is they've met these professional athletes
they've seen they've been in clubhouses they've seen me in these stories they've seen world series they've seen me come home from an 0-16 season they've see they've watched me in these different things and and one thing i know that i have learned from these pro athletes is the role their parents played in what they do
and i would hear it for the better or for the worse i worked at the img academy for a long time worked with hundreds thousands of youth athletes and i would hear stories of mom and dad for the better or for the worst and i would learn these lessons and say okay let me let me allow my kids to fail let me allow my kids to
practice some form of autonomy in the house let me allow let me choose which battles i want let me let me really let me share with my kids my own failures let me push back on my own beliefs and have my kids when they say dead why do you believe that to be able to say you know what you're right i don't that's not
necessarily true but that was that's what i was taught and so they have really kept me honest and my wife both of us honest and in in how we go about it's a very organic way and so um just kind of a proud father moment so my daughter one day she's like i want to be an actor i this is what i want to do for a living
and so we said okay if you want to do this you gotta we're gonna get you acting lessons and so forth and she did it for a long time passionate about it we take her to los angeles put her in front of an agent to have an agent agent says no you're out i mean no like you're not going to cut it
i'm walking her to the car she's these big crocodile tears coming down i said what do you think sweetheart she goes i think i need a better acting coach and i said okay we'll get you a better acting coach and so she works on it long story short she gets an agent moved to los angeles she auditions hundreds of times
doesn't get any jobs until she gets a phone call from dwayne johnson's people she becomes dwayne she co-acts co-stars with dwayne johnson on a movie called hobbs and shaw and she plays his daughter in that movie and it was neat to see her story and as she talks about it just like she's gotten one role she's had a number of
roles after that but it it it was neat to see her walk through that story and then my son is now in interested in music and he's working with some great artists around the world but what we do is we always talk about probabilistic reasoning and it might sound weird to talk about that but that was a framework
and model that we always talk about and i always tell them do you know what the odds of you getting this role is five you they used to be 95 99 now they've learned that oh 5 and it's probably lower than that but does that mean don't do it no daddy i'm still gonna do it why because i love it and i learned that from these
athletes the athletes are the ones who tell me that the odds were against them they shared with me everything that they did but and they always had coaches and parents telling them you should go do something else you should go do this you should have a backup plan but none of them did and i'm working exclusively
with this top one percent half a percent with people who overcame all these odds and what they tell me is that what propelled them is their drive like we talked about their love for doing what they do and what would have been more rational is to pick something else because the odds of making it the highest level were
not was not there go do something else but if you're but they're they know hey the odds are against me but i love it so i'm not going to stop doing it and so that's what we're trying to teach our kids many times unsuccessfully we're fumbling bumbling along but it's been a fun process that's i remember watching your daughter
actually in that movie in the cafeteria at the table now that you i didn't know it was your daughter until now and then i was like oh my god that's she's adorable man that's she's awesome appreciate it brother uh i'm curious like you've talked before about sort of the difference between losing and being
beaten i'm wondering if you can explore that a little bit for me yeah i was actually inspired by it from a question that you had with chris chris bosh and for those who did not see that episode i i completely agree with him in pro sports at the highest level there is no tiptoeing around like oh did
we we didn't lose we got beat no you lost an l is an l uh and and a win is a win sometimes you win in dominating fashion and sometimes you win ugly but you win at the end of the day we're trying to win the super bowl a world series a championship whatever it may be however context is huge and when you're working with amateur
athletes and even sometimes in the professional realm it's important to understand this dynamic between losing and being beat now losing you can frame it as you didn't give your best effort losing is you beat yourself that is truly truly losing where you didn't do whatever it take you lacked preparation you
you just beat yourself from mistakes from maybe it could be mental mistakes that for one reason or another you just felt sorry for yourself you're making excuses mental mistakes whatever it may be being beaten on the other hand could be seen as you did everything that you possibly could you checked every single box you gave
your absolute best the other team was just better than you that day and that is being beat the difference between losing and being beaten i struggle with that sometimes but i think in some context it's very important to to say and very important to just to distinguish a phrase that people who know me
know that i do not like there's a phrase out there says sometimes you win sometimes you learn i can't stand that phrase and the reason i can't stand that phrase is because it implies two things it implies that you can't learn from winning like you win or you learn no you you can learn a lot from winning success leaves
clues what it also implies is that is that losing like it imply like you win or you learn this no you learn you win or you lose and you learn from both it also implies that losing is some word that no one says of oh i didn't lose i learned no you lost own it you lost you got beat today and that's life you're going to lose
sometimes and instead of flowering it up and say no no i didn't lose i just ran out of time i didn't lose i just no like you lost now i will say this there are some individuals i know an individual who's a major league baseball player he never likes to say that the pitcher beat me he'll never
say the peach picture beat him ever ever no that that picture then he didn't be i he got lucky he got lucky i'm the one who struck out i i struck myself out he didn't strike me out and that's a confidence mechanism he and i'm not gonna tell him otherwise but it's in all i'm saying is to identify what works
best for you how do you need to frame winning and losing to help you learn lessons and come back a better version of yourself next time is it how chris bosh views it then great that works for you great is it how larry gelwix views it who is the coach of the highland rugby team who you don't win or you either lose or get beaten
whatever works best for you so that's why frameworks and framing is very important and also be aware that your framing might change as you change as you evolve it could change over time one thing you said there that struck out to me was success leaves clues tell me more about that because losing is so painful
it's so embarrassing it's so it's attached with negative emotions you remember them more you think about them you can't sleep you can't eat especially if they're compounding over and over again and so when you're losing you're always thinking what can i do to improve it what can i do to get better
but when you win a lot of times you think i was supposed to win yeah all right yeah that was supposed to happen okay moving on moving on instead of pausing and saying what did i learn what did i execute what was out of my control where did i get lucky what did i what did the opponent what mistakes that i capitalized from the
opponent what is something that i could take into my next performance and that's why i think the self-reflection piece is so important to take this same set of questions after when or after a loss and use this lens these quite this self-reflection questioning process to ask yourself no matter
if it's a success or a failure so if you lose if you ask yourself okay what did i what did i do well today okay what went well today win or lose that's a great question to ask yourself another question is what did i learn today win or lose that's a great question ask yourself and then last question
what am i going to do better tomorrow win or lose that's a great question to ask yourself and i think sometimes because going back to what we said earlier winning masks a lot of things there's a lot of positive emotions triggered to it kind of brush the lessons of winning right under the rug and move on instead of pausing and
saying hey let me collect some of these lessons so i can use them moving forward one of the things i got out of that chris bosh conversation was that some people sort of accomplished their goals they set for themselves whether it's you know winning a championship or saving a million dollars or getting a promotion
and then something changes they take their foot off their gas and they slow down what's happening there this is another part of that gold gradient effect we tend this the problem with the 30-day the 30-day weight loss programs this is the problem with having finite destinations or finish lines
to whatever you're trying to achieve because what happens a lot of times is you once you achieve it once you sprint past the finish line what do we tend to do we take our foot off the gas and so and a lot of times because you exert so much effort and so much power to sprint your way towards the end you're like ugh
that's unsustainable you can't sustain that amount of effort all the way through and so what chris mentions is so true is there is a time for rest in recovery there is a time where you need to okay work like a lion and attack and then rest attack and then rest how can you set your goal pursuits up just like that
it's not i'm going to be happy when it's creating this longevity these systems where you can keep going further and further and further because as the haitian proverb says behind mountains are more mountains behind goals are more goals and if you prime yourself for that and say okay i need to be ready for the long haul and a lot of
times it's just a priming yourself a mental just mentally being ready for to say hey this i'm not just trying to win today i'm trying to win for the long haul i'm not just trying to build this relationship right here to be a transactional relationship how how much can i get out of this person is like no
what can listeners do to improve their mental performance this is always a difficult question because i my initial question to myself is what's the context so speaking to a global general audience i have more questions to consider some more considerations than prescriptions so to improve your mental performance is
the first thing you need to do and we talked to you actually mentioned this earlier on and i completely agree is the connection between your physical performance and mental performance and one of the best ways to enhance mental performance is to make sure you have the physio fundamental mentals established make sure
you're getting quality sleep make sure you are getting quality nutrition fueling and exercise and and strong relationships i that might you might think wait that's that's gonna help my mind it absolutely helps your mind it is the fundamental pillars of mental performance and cognitive performance is sleep nutrition
exercise and deep relationships strong relationships number one so establish that how are those quality of those i think number two is then start to start to do some exploration pay attention start to collect some data on yourself just go about your day and notice notice your energy notice your focus ask questions
about your confidence ask questions about your environment you can't change what you're not aware of so pay attention pick some aspects of your life and say okay let me look at my focus my confidence and my mood let's just pick those three things or my response to stress my stress levels and then you just
pay attention as you go throughout the day notice when your confidence is up notice when it's down notice when your stress levels are up and what you do about it when it's down start with collecting some personal data and then you go and you say okay try find some patterns oh in the morning i have tons of energy i'm
really good oh one six o'clock heads i notice i'm a lot more irritable i'm i'm a lot more impulsive and then what you do is you go online and you start googling things grab a book listen to a podcast okay how to improve confidence and listen find these experts out there i love this because you can
learn about yourself but it starts by asking the questions if you want better answers start asking better questions and that's what i love about this journey in mental performance and is that it's tied to so many things and you could start learning about it right now what are some of the best mental models
for athletic performance i think the ones that we organically talk about don't explicitly talk about are feedback loops uh systems thinking and one in particular i'll give you a specific example we'll take arousal control so an athlete has a certain arousal control reference point they have their set points it's a
probably at a higher level than your average person because of you're playing under the bright lights in front of fans like their heart rates up all the time a lot of pressure is going on now they're used to that they have a certain reference point and we even call it a number of intensity on the scale of one
to ten what what's your what's your reference level of of where you play at your best a lot of players will say i'm at my best from five to seven from six to eight they describe what it feels like and so forth anything higher is too much anything lower is too small and then what they create are these balancing
loops if they're too low okay what do you do to get your number up and if you're too high what do you do to slow it down now what often happens in the playoffs or in the world series uh in high leverage stressful situations players will recognize that their heart rate is up oh there's a signal i need to
activate a balancing loop i need to bring my heart rate down because my it is getting outside of my my reference level what do they do they have been taught diaphragmatic breathing so they know that okay if i focusing on the exhale if i inhale what's going to happen is my heart is going to expand and it's going to signal
to my brain to get the blood pumped get my heart rate blunt pumping if i exhale my diaphragm goes up my heart starts to shrink brain sends a signal to my heart slow your heart down and so the players know focus on the exhale let me get some good long deep exhales and that serves as a balancing loop so there's one so we
we and i don't use this language with the players by the way like it's a lot more simple than that we do not talk like that but that's what's going on in my mind to help the players and then i think another one common one is we spoke about this earlier as the map is not the territory a player can have let's say baseball
it's such an easy one to talk about a player can go over four with four strikeouts on paper that's a very bad day very that's a rough day and in some cases an embarrassing day but the map is not the territory maybe they had a plan maybe they're right on those pitches maybe an umpire made a bad call
maybe a player can have an 0-4 day with four strikeouts and still pull some very good things they did in those at-bats not ideal obviously we're not saying it's great we're not we're not chalking it up as a true success however the map is not the terror necessarily the territory conversely a player can go four for four
and say oh i broken bat single hit a little squibbler away from the the shift and they can say hey even though i have four hits on paper there are some things i need to do better next time so those are two off the top of my head mental models that i use personally as i'm working with people on an individual
scale that's excellent thank you i want to end with a question that we ask a lot of people but what is success for you now success for me for me is is freedom and not freedom that has to be given to me but freedom that is earned through mastery i think playing piano for example if you were to tell me to play mary had
a little lamb i would have no clue what to do but if you would show me i can pluck away mary had a little lamb and i could do the best i could given my level of expertise which is nothing very low but then you bring a concert pianist in and have her play mary have a little man had a little lamb
she has all the freedom in the world because she understands the fundamentals she's a master of her domain and so her freedom is a byproduct of mastering the fundamentals i'm in the point of my life right now where i'm trying to master different aspects of my life so i can experience the freedom
that comes with it uh and where freedom comes creativity comes i love creativity i love to feel that i am coming at a problem from a different angle uh and i feel safe to do so and i have substantiated research and principles and models to support where i'm coming from so i'm trying to leverage and find freedom of learning
how to leverage my time in a very demanding job to be able to be home more with my family i'm trying to master and have more freedom over my energy by learning about nutrition in sleep i'm trying to gain financial freedom by not learning not just learning the financials and accounting of money and how to use my money but the
psychology of money uh morgan housel's work and just understanding what it does and biases and so right now success to me is is is freedom just trying to have freedom as a which is a function of mastery that's a beautiful answer man thank you so much for a wonderful conversation thanks so much shane it was a pleasure you