the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others either enable us to fulfill and to have a great life or actually take us in tragic directions and I've seen this over and over again one of the things that you've said in your work is that time only has value in
its intersection with energy talk to me about time and energy so what questions should we be asking ourselves to better understand if the story we're telling ourselves is is empowering or limiting us and so we're trying to help parents understand what
is your inner voice saying to you and if you don't think that's what you want in your son or daughter's head be very careful what you're saying publicly to them because your public voice will one day be their inner voice which controls their Destiny their belief in themselves
their joy and happiness in life that's where it all plays out you've worked with 17 people who are the best in the world what they did unequivocally what would you say you know about the highest performers that other people seem to miss the first thing
[Music] is let's start with how we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves we tell stories around work family health happiness and friendship and the story that we tell ourselves in reality are often different some sometimes our stories Empower us and sometimes they
limit us and I'm wondering if maybe we could explore a little bit about the story you used to tell yourself as a father I have three sons and it wasn't until I became heavily involved in the field of psychology and mental health and performance psychology that I began
to realize that just about everything we say publicly and privately in our head is a story and um we don't have direct contact with the real world we have all this data streaming into to our five sensory portals and then our big neuroprocessor has to make sense out of
that and there's a preference for making sense uh in terms of what's already been loaded in so if you get information that might be somehow contradictory to what's in there you tend to just Purge it you tend not to listen or you tend not to
incorporate it and you know I wish I had understood it much earlier in my life I began to realize that the way I spoke to my three sons um my public voice became a major factor in the way their private voice would speak to them as they grew
older when I realized that I stopped on a dime because I didn't want something that I might have said halfhazard you know I said something off the cuff you know that was actually not aligned with my values or who I really wanted them to think of themselves as and you you kind
of think well they don't really hear it but our brains are always listening and there are some people that get direct access into Command Center and a father at least for a period of time and the mother have direct entry into the Sacred Space where most of the meaning is
created in our storytelling if as a father I say to my sons you know I I don't know what's the matter with you you're always you're always screwing things up I really wonder if ID had your if ID had your opportunities I would have been a star and you say these
things and you don't think they're really going to have much of an effect you're trying to motivate them but the more we have learned about the power of this inner voice in directing traffic your inner voice pretty much as we've learned it determines your destiny so I
am every time I speak to my son every time I speak to my grandsons I'm very careful that is this what I want them to say to themselves when they start maturing in life what questions should we be asking ourselves to better understand if the story we're telling ourselves is
empowering or limiting us again it's there's this a level of awareness and I have tried in my career to raise the curtain so so that people understand that there's something going on that you know maybe was purely automatic and maybe the voice you got you never really
intentionally acquired but suddenly you have this critic inside yourself or this Storyteller that we all have you have to stop and reflect is this I have rules of Storytelling they're not really rules they're guidelines and the first thing is the rule has to be true is this
aligned with reality so the first awareness am I making stuff up here that just is convenient for the moment to maybe make me feel better or is this aligned with really objective reality another one is is this story that I'm telling myself is it aligned with the
best part of me with who I really want to be in life my values my sense of purpose does this story take me where I want to go in life does it does it help me feel more optimistic and hopeful about my future or does it in fact give me a sense that you know I I'm not that
capable world is tough I probably can't make it why am I doing this this is stupid I really want people to have this kind of automatic sensor before you allow these stories to take form that you intentionally purposefully orchestrate them so that these stories are aligned with the best
part of you and if they were made known publicly to all the people that you know or put on a Jumbotron you would be proud of the way you have been coaching yourself talking to yourself about what's uh the storm that you're in or about the future that
you're crafting I'm very hopeful that the more we can bring an awareness to people's lives I have changed so many people's thinking about so many things in sport and outside of it and it's basically the question you ask which is how do we make our stories really really
help us navigate better in life you you work with a lot of worldclass performers is is there a difference between the story they're telling themselves and the story that the rest of us tell ourselves what's so interesting is that when they
started often they just they had a love affair with whatever sport they were involved in they never had any dreams or they just you know they just thought these are people who have become number one in the world I've had 17 people that have become number one in the world and
when they look back they're so astonished that where they ended up because they never dreamed this was ever going to happen they dreamed of being maybe a great tennis player golfer speed skater but they never dreamed they would have this kind of accumulated success
over so many years but as they get more success the possibilities begin to open up in their minds about what they can and can't do and all I can tell you is that the sense of joy in the pursuit and to be able to have parents who enable it not force you but actually give you the
opportunity to explore this in your own way and then be surrounded by great coaches who I had a a great coach in the early part of my athletic career in basketball and he saw something in me that I never saw in myself and uh his name was Coach Guy Gibbs in basketball
and uh he came into my life at a very important time I was kind of struggling with confidence and somehow this guy that I really felt was an extraordinary human being and that's the way we look at most of our coaches I mean coaches have a special place in our lives he
really just took me aside and said listen lar you can be really good and I'm going to push you until you get there and I want you I believe in you more than you believe in yourself and uh and that just I will never forget it I've written many books
I've he's now passed away unfortunately but a lot of my books I credit him for you know coming into my life at an important point and we never know when something that we say or do is going to impact someone in a powerful way but most of the number ones and
really high success athletes that I've worked with never never really dreamed when they they have to pinch themselves when they realize I'm number one in the world now what the world but as they pursued a love affair with their sport it's very hard if you're forced to become number one in
the world with a parent hanging over your head or it just doesn't last it's just it's really unfortunate and I've been there many times it's not like you're starting out saying I want to be number one in the world and you really believe it and you start and you're just
beginning with the sport um there are a few that said they kind of knew I know um Novak jokovic who's probably the greatest tennis player is the greatest tennis player of all time one of his early coaches her name was y Elena said of all the young
athletes that she had trained as a young little boy she told him that he had the the greatest potential that anyone that he had ever seen she had ever seen and I think that kind of changed his perception of himself now what if she had told him that and he really didn't have all that
potential you know he would have continued to push as long as he had a love affair with the sport and really love getting better and learning if he didn't become number one in the world if he never made a professional career out of it if she if she if the the message
is Right use this sport to help you grow up and become a better human being and if you become number one in the world in doing it you know no one loses I don't care how far you go but when you start out it's pretty hard to believe you're going to be number one if it is it's
probably just you're blowing smoke into the world that's all it is but you're trying to lift yourself up and maybe give you a hope that someday you might be inspired to be like Novak jokovic or any of your you know um the greatest athletes of all
time in their Sports um and the you know there are just so many of them that serve as great role models and young kids can get you know connected to that and I never thought I would end up in the character space and I wrote most of my early books
on mental toughness and it was all about how do you get so strong mentally and emotionally that you can act out compete anybody because the muscles between your ears are stronger than they'll ever have and you're going to beat people that might be a lot better than
you but um you have skills that they maybe don't have between their ears and that's what I specialized in for most of my career but then I began to realize something very different and I began to notice that the careers of those who who really developed these incredible um
what I what I call character strengths be they performance or really moral and ethical character strengths I began to realize that more important than what you achieve is who you become is a consequence of the chase that you're becoming a person some kind
of person either brutal warm loving caring focused dedicated and what I began to see is that people who developed these moral and ethical skills from their coaches and parents along with the skills of the sport they were the true winners and they were much more likely
to sustain the success because everyone wanted them to succeed and that's where it led me so I started going there and I'm still a little bit shocked that I ended up in that space but uh is more important to me than what you achieve is the way in which you achieved
it and who you became as a consequence of the chase when we recognize our stories need editing now what how do we how do we change them more important again than what happens to us in life is the story We craft around what happens to us and if we realize that our story is
faulty that we're making stuff up that's literally not helping us really do not the the story elements do not fit what I would say the the principles the guidelines of good storytelling then you've got to edit that story just as you suggested and I
again this will probably surprise many of the folks who are listening but we tried everything and we had a lot of very smart people we had some of the smartest people I mean our faculty was one of the most brilliant faculties I think will ever ever
assemble and we tried visualization we tried um you know all kinds of um very interesting ways of kind of changing the way people actually process thinking and thoughts um over a period of time over and again and what we finally concluded was that your hand your hand writing
probably had the greatest impact on neurological functioning on the way in which these neuron networks formed and were changed than anything else we could do if I were to ask you if you needed to remember something what would be the most likely
thing you would do to remember it you'd probably write it down and this this what we call an executive functioning um uh this area of the brain this prefrontal cortex and cortex there's something that's happening and moving the muscles of your hand that actually create um a greater
imprint and are much more likely to be sustained there's a brilliant researcher by the name of James Panabaker he's at the University of Texas and if you want to see the work he's doing on I mean it's incredible the kind of success on the protocols he's had in
helping people overcome trauma with their hand with writing with writing skills and uh but we found that creating the story that works for you with your hand and rewriting it you know several times from memory and then reading it and even using the voice memo on your phone where
you actually tell your you talk to yourself over the phone your voice memo capability and then you play it back and you listen to yourself coaching you so you you actually it's not having someone from the outside coaching you with their public voice you are taking
your private voice and making it public and now listen listening to it and trying to get a new way of having these neurop Pathways in your brain transfer information and eventually over time the Story begins to change so it might be I hate putting I've never been a good
putter in sport and if I if I could just be a great putter I would be on the PGA tour list one of the top guys or women but and then the story you tell your yourself is I just don't seem to have the ability to be a good putter I've always had trouble putting and I
think this is the my greatest n so I say that you can't get there with that story that story is so limiting here's the story that works for you uh at this point of my life the truth is if you look at my stats I'm one of the poor p you know and one of the
poor uh Putters um on the PJ tour or the LPGA Tour that's true but um I have I'm an athlete and I have to tell you one day I'm going to become one of the best Putters if not the best putter on tour and I'll tell you why because I am going to devote
more energy more effort I'm going to make this the most important part of my game and I'm going to love doing it and every time I see a green I'm I'm going to light up and say ah fantastic I have another chance to practice my putting and to get it right and if I miss a putt
a three-footer for a birdie I'll simply say thank God I got that out of my system now I'm going to get better and so you develop a running kind of narrative with yourself that builds confidence builds belief builds this and you start by crafting the perfect story
with your hand and the more your hand works and it actually what we found James paker hasn't found this though but with our data collection we found that it's more powerful to do it by hand than it is on a computer and so we have everybody do it you can print it or you can put it
you know cursive writing however you want to do it but we prefer that you do it by hand and each new iteration you do from memory and then you compare it with the last one and then those that you're putting new energy into this network where stories are told around putting or
around your marriage or around your intelligence your confidence and that's what we've done over the years we've had so many astonishing successes and I I did I had no idea any of this was going to surface it all took years of practice and data collection to
refine it and I feel very grateful to have had that opportunity what I call a living lab for helping distill a lot of the mysteries of how this miraculous human system is engineered I love the nature of writing we encourage that with sort of decision journals and as the
means by which we can reflect or one of the ways by which we can reflect and one of the ways which we can learn to think as well so not only we do we discover through writing that we don't know what we're talking about always but we discover new ideas and we we come to
a new understanding it's so powerful as a form and if you look throughout history most of the people who would we we would consider the greats of history at one point or another have journaled I I completely agree and it was something that I started
with after learning about this with a lot of our clients and so forth I started journaling and I mean I get up in the morning and I have to do it it's almost like an addiction now and I try to program my day and look at all the things and when anybody ask me a
question about you know how am I feeling today my response is if I'm feeling a little foggy and I have a headache or whatever I'll say you know I have a little I have a few things that are bothering but I got to tell you I'm excited about having another opportunity
to push the needle to learn a little bit more I'm grateful for this day and if you put that down in writing something magical happens it's like it changes the whole kind of template um the the the screen the mindset you have for you know
dealing with all the storms that you are inevitably going to face all day long so it doesn't become a nightmare day and that's it's a wonderful lesson I'm a such a in journaling are there particular questions that you come back to whether it's when you're journaling
or helping people identify or modify their story that they can be asking themselves and reflecting upon we ask people to really describe in their language what is the ultimate Mission they're on in life the mission for which failure is not possible if they're going
to be successful in life and so we try to get them to understand that we're all here for a purpose you had no choice in terms of showing up on planet Earth at this time but you do have a choice as to how you want to spend the energy the precious energy you have and the time
that you have while you're here and what would Define ultimate success of your life so we began to really really dig into that purpose and then we link whatever ever change they want to make to that purpose so in my own life you know my purpose is I laminated
it and put it in my wallet and you know now it has continued to evolve and my probably the most compelling purpose is that I live what I teach and that is that I don't teach to others something I don't do myself or that I think is only for other people and so the question
that I ask myself every day I look back on yesterday and I go did I live what I believe is really the most important Mission I'm on and was I consistent in terms of fulfilling what I believe my ultimate purpose is with my three sons with my grandsons with my with my
colleagues I'm trying to uh hold myself to account in terms of the the purpose for which I believe I am here for and that resonates with me and I'm willing to do anything and everything I can to make sure I don't fail and for me right now I'm in a position where you know I don't
really need to put the metal to the to the floor but I'm more fired up now because I want to make sure that what I'm teaching what I'm delivering on the this podcast if someone were to do an audit of my life it would actually reflect this is how Jim Lair actually
runs his life it's not just something that he speaks about but he applies it first to himself and then hopefully by example people will be interested in hearing more about it I want to come back to something you said earlier about as children and grandchildren we
sort of inherit the stories that were told by the people in our lives and you know you had a great teacher and that's that was a powerful change of your story where he or coach I guess he believed in you before you believed in yourself and the story We Tell as parents becomes the
the inner monologue I guess the inner narrative that our children grow up with what are the things that we can do as parents listening to change that for the positive with our kids when they home with a test that they you know maybe they failed or they're struggling with
something or um H how can we change the story that we're telling them so it becomes a different story that they're growing up with and a different story they're inheriting from us a lot of people are not even that aware of this inner voice until someone makes them
more aware of it and a lot of the athletes that we worked with thought that whatever is going on between their ears is just like like you're pushing air around there's nothing really happening you can think something but it doesn't really doesn't seem to have any
consequence so it's just kind of like nonsense it's like Babble between the ears that is just of no consequence but we have come to an understanding that everyone has an inner voice a private voice everyone has a public voice unless they have a speech
issue and uh it almost looked as if it's cated in the genes because one generation passes on that inner voice to the next your public voice with your children become their inner voice and if you talk to them in certain ways that are very destructive
demeaning critical sarcastic even though your your response is hey I'm not I'm not trying to be anything but a good parent that's going to help them face a tough world I don't want to devel wusses I'm not going to be all kindness and love and all that garbage I'm going to
be a I'm going to be like a drill sergeant because life is tough and their parents before them they say kids today have it way too easy and you have to remember I'm the guy that wrote a lot of the books on mental toughness so I'm not for the wfic of Youth trust me but what's so
interesting is that the voice of your parents unless you became very aware of it and intention Ally changed it you're going to bring that voice particularly under stress to your children so the verse the first issue is I want you to tune in to what kind of Coach are you to
yourself what is your inner voice would you want your inner voice to be somehow incorporated into the head of your children the way you speak to yourself are you proud of it is it helpful or is it a very kind of almost sadistic adversary that's all you're never good
enough you never uh you never live up to what you really should you're always falling short you are a dumbhead and if you look where that probably came from if you came from a very tough culture that may have been the way parents thought for a long time that's how you
raise tough kids you just have a tough language not realizing that that's really you know it's not what the evidence shows you want them to be truthful straight up you may want them to have a voice that's you know at times really tough and you they pull
themselves up by their bootstraps and they they don't they're not wimps they're going to be strong and H handle life's stresses in ways that would make them very proud but it's not this harsh inner critic where they're actually fighting two battles all the time one
with the outside world and one with themselves it's an exhaustive you know twoof front battle and so we're trying to help parents understand what is your inner voice saying to you and be very careful if you don't think that's what you want in your
son or daughter's head be very careful what you're saying publicly to them because your public voice will one day be their inner voice which controls their Destiny their belief in themselves their joy and happiness in life that's where it all plays out that voice no one
hears but them that will be the only voice that's in their head until their death will come likely from you and when you realize that you're probably going to change the tone and the message in many important ways I think that's so important it's sort of like a
realization that you you don't know you're having this impact in a certain way and then when you realize that where you got your internal voice it sort of makes it uh hit home a lot um H how do we help our friends um identify and sort of like edit their stories like I'm thinking you know we
all know when when the story our friends are telling themselves uh is is getting in the way of of them being the best version of themselves and you know when I'm saying this I'm thinking we're so prone to be being victims of circumstance we like to absolve ourself
and this is a common story we all have it in moments I'm sure you've had it I I mean I've had it everybody else has it how how do we become a good friend in that moment and help somebody or is it worth that or can you actually do anything when somebody's sort of blaming
circumstance or I'm thinking also my kids right they they come home and you know they're like I did the best I could and they kind of shrug their shoulders sometimes and you know absolve themselves of responsibility and how can I act in those moments so the the issue
is how do you get through to this inner core of a person to their inner voice this control Central um because your kids can just shut you out they hear you but they don't really it doesn't register and sometimes they hear their peer
much more powerfully than they're going to hear you particularly after they reach a certain point where they're starting to strive for Independence they you know they kind of lock out a lot of adult messaging but what kids don't want to be
is preached to they don't want to be preached to the great wisdom Seekers uh in in our history when they were trying to Let's say in the American Indian tradition they would tell stories they tell stories that actually don't bring defensiveness what defensiveness does it
means I'm locking you out I don't you're threatening me with your bloody preaching and so the more parents can say I'll just give you a quick little anecdote here about my life that I learned and you give them a mindset say you know I I had I was not a good student and
uh one day I had a teacher who took me aside and said listen I don't know what your issue is but you seem to be you know angry every time you come in the classroom and you don't want anyone to call on you there's no joy here and I would just like you to think about this
I've had lots of students like this and you know there is a joy in learning if you if you can dig it out and you provide them with a little different perspective you know Carol DW the brilliant developmental psychologist who developed this notion of mindset you know there's a there's a
way to look at something and they may not really look like they're hearing it the first time you say it but it it may register because even when you're saying it they may not allow it into the inner recesses of this command Center but you're hoping that
over time that mindset will begin to change as opposed to being a victim kids don't like me and what's happening on social media for so many kids is actually it's a tragedy they're getting so beaten up their self-esteem is so fragile and the because they don't
really have to hold you know kids are not held accountable for what they say and they can't see them when this digital criticism comes across they can't shake it that's why so many kids today are struggling their self-esteem is like so fragile they're only as good as the last
post that came up and when someone just you know gives them a chilling um source of feedback no no matter how untrue you can't stop it because it comes from their peers and they're so vulnerable so parents have to be very careful about particularly in the early years how much
time they allow their kids on social media and they have to be able to put some counterbalances in there in ways that they don't get blocked out um because that's what happens parents we're working on I'm working on a a board and a program for young people
it's called the youth performance Institute and we're recruiting kids who've been through all kinds of really challenging moments and really have come through uh on the other side of it and we're using them as mentors for kids who are
struggling and so we believe that the best way to get to kids is through the mentoring of other kids who have been through the wars and have figured out answers and uh you know the more the more you realize that there is such a powerful destructive force there are
some positive benefits from social media but it's like touching a hot stove you can use a stove to cook and to do all kinds of great things with but it can burn the hell out of you and if you don't understand how to protect yourself and your family from that um it can
completely take all these very delicate impulses and stories in your head that actually seal your fate you don't even want to live because you know you have no real meaningful connections to other people particularly your peers after what's just happened to you one of
the examples that you used in your book I thought was really powerful and I I tried to use it this weekend and probably failed but uh it was around video gaming and how parents talk to their kids about video gaming and I think the example in your book was uh
stop you know you're playing too much video games stop the worthless video game playing and how do you go from that all the way to something like I really want what's best for you because I love you and I'm concerned that too much screen time is limiting your creativity
your brain power your academic progress uh and H how do you switch that phrasing so what you just said Shane you were very careful in the way in which you presented the second version and that is the version you want embedded in their heads that's coming from your public voice as a
parent and you want that to somehow be the way in which that young boy or girl now is thinking about it themselves that there might be some good things here and have them talk about how how this might not be a good thing to spend too much time and what might be
a way to ask actually control the way in which this is actually dominating your life um H how could we put some and I'd like for them to be involved in that as opposed to me as a parent just putting the hammer down and then they're sneaking around and they use other kids phones
and I mean it's you've got to you've got to get their brain wrapped around the dangers involved and you have to be so skilled in terms of how you're telling the story and it may not work but you got to keep trying because the risk is real and
the way you present it it there probably is the best way you're going to have as a parent as as opposed to I'm you know you're not I'm I'm taking your phone away that's the end of that as as opposed to Let's yeah have you been hurt by what someone has ever
said to you on on your social media and what why why do you think you spend so much time on social media what is it doing to help you and what is it doing that might hurt you and you bring them into the conversation as opposed to being the know-it-all parent because you
didn't grow up with social media so they don't even think you understand it and you probably don't because you were never there so you have to really be very careful about how you present a potential solution to a crisis that could be really deadly and some of
it like drinking and driving or taking drugs those are even more it's just like some of these have they're really really dangerous areas to talk about and just swinging a sludgehammer probably is not going to get through mission control Central you're going to have to spend
time getting them to think about this what would happen just just hypothetically if you were drinking and driving and you were in an accident and someone got seriously hurt or died what what do you what's the impact that might have on the rest of
your life or if someone is drinking and driving hit you and your best friend was killed how how would you feel about that and getting them to kind of look at it through those eyes as opposed to some mandate if I ever catch you drinking and driving trust me I'm taking your keys
away I I I think you know especially with the drug thing that's really hard I have two teenagers 13 and 14 and you know on the weekend we walked by somebody who had clearly overdosed I think on the sidewalk and it's tragic and and I felt you know compelled to talk to them about
this moment afterwards and the only thing that I could really muster was you know I don't think he thought he was going to be addicted when he started you know no no nobody thinks that that's going to happen to them 100% so that notion there but for the grace of
God go I you know go me you know it's like sometimes you know some of these folks are victims of mental illness sometimes they uh have had a very very severe injury maybe an accident and they started taking painkillers and they got addicted that
we didn't know how addictive this some of these different classes of um you know anesthesia analgesics all this you know that actually the area of the brain called the nule the nucleus of Cubans and the release of dop amine and some people are just far more likely to become addicted
and even a single you know experiment with some of these drugs and but they never intended they never dreamed if they had known this was going to be the consequence they would not have gone there yeah and all of a sudden they have to get their fix and they have no money so now
they're forced into crime and now they're doing things they wouldn't even imagine doing but have to get it to satisfy this incredible uh drive to get another another fix and so it's it really is a it's really challenging so any time you see that that's a great
opportunity with your children to have a conversation that sometimes a single bad event I mean I have some good friends who ended up with in really U uh a difficult painful situation and they ended up taking painkillers and um and they became addicted and it became an absolute
war and their spouses wanted to divorce them no one could understand it they had to go to all kinds of rehab for the third time and one of my one of my close cousins uh ended up in jail um because they had to go and you know um it was it's just a very
very and it's treacherous and it's it seems like it would never happen to anyone in your family or any one of my kids but anytime you can prepare your loved ones to be very careful you can save a lot of very very sad terribly fortunate um consequences in life you've
worked with 17 people who were the best in the world at what they did unequivocally and you've worked with tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of other people who would be considered sort of in the top 1% of their particular domain or or field
whether it's in business or um Athletics what would you say you know about the highest performers that other people seem to mess when we come into the world we just fight to try to get a sense of you know just hey I'm not a complete idiot you know you're you're trying to
just find some confidence you're always put in situations where they be emotional social classroom situations in math or science or you're not a good communicator good writer and you're always pushed you try to get into sport you're not that good at it you can't
find the right thing so most of us don't know what our potential is the thing that's amazing to me is that you know these folks who become such extraordinary examples of Genius most of them had no clue no clue that this is where they're going to end up and they tended to end
up in a situation where they had the opportunity to flourish where something that they a light went on inside them maybe they they had no idea that they would be you know a genius in math but they ended up with a teacher a physics teacher that
they fell in love with and all of a sudden they started realizing I get some talents in this area of Science and I love it and all of a sudden now they're on a whole interesting career path um and others you know we all have you know it's really discover your strength
everybody has strengths but it has to be discovered and it has to be aligned with what your interests are what we' found is that you tend to like doing what you're good at not always but um you know some people say I'm really good at that but I hate it it doesn't happen
that often if it's really that challenging and you find yourself it's almost like easy it's seductive you like doing things that actually bring you great success so most of the people that I have had the opportunity to work with every if I have an opportunity to sit
down and talk with them they have to pinch themselves when they realize where they've ended up they've exceeded by multiples um where they ever thought they could end up whether it' be financially or the prestige or their family or whatever it is and then there
are all those that just never really caught fire never really found that and that's the beauty of a great teacher a great coach try to find out how they can light the fire of a young boy or girl and help them understand that you don't know what
you're good at until you try a lot of things and eventually you're going to you're going to land somewhere and life is so much better when you're in pursuit of something that you really um are excited about and you love to learn if I were to say one thing about
myself I'm a forever learner I just I love to learn and I wasn't that way in school I hated school school I was a product of Jesuit education very rigid very strict no joy not a lot of Happiness um but I mean I'm a reasonably intelligent guy my father was a brilliant mathematician
engineer but I just never found much joy until I found a few teachers who actually brought joy out in the learning process and then all of a sudden I started to get on fire and I am as on fire today about learning if you look at all the things I love to learn
and read and I just have I'm very curious and I will be till my last breath and uh that's the gift teaching people to be excited about what you could become and what you might really find great joy in mastering if you can do that as a as
a teacher or as a parent that is a forever gift that will never stop giving and um it's definitely within the purview of of most of the people we come in contact with on a regular basis give them joy in the learning process they can't read help them to find books that
excite them I had a couple grandkids who were not that excited about reading but their parents got them into Harry Potter and Harry Potter's not an easy book to read and all of a sudden they had so much excitement or Star Wars reading about that stuff and all of a sudden now
they're reading books like crazy because they got them started into things they wanted to do and you know maybe a music teacher wants you to learn all the classical music and you just roll your eyes and go I hate this and then you go well let's learn something you would
like to learn and so they start playing things that really excite them and all of a sudden the learning curve goes off the charts and maybe at some point they're going to go back and want to play the classics but if you start with something they're not that interested in
you may kill the Golden Goose uh real world sort of example of that in in a different way we we used to buy books for class rooms and so uh for for schools that wouldn't buy the kids the books that they want to read Because often the books in the classroom in
grade 2 and three are sort of like hand-me-downs from like a decade but they have no relevance to the kids they're not the books they want to read I realized this with my own son in grade three which is a different story but uh and so we offered to buy classrooms like
all the books the kids wanted to read so they just had a selection of them and uh we did I think we did this for uh 50 or so classrooms per year for like 5 years and I still get emails from those teachers saying how unbelievable the difference in the children was when the
absolutely brilliant that's a brilliant way to intervene in a young child's life when they're so open to uh the possibilities that they could become something that's exactly it and I got this idea from my son who always never wanted to read it
was a huge reader I think he read before he talked basically and still is the most prolific reader I know but he never wanted to read anything the school was telling him to read and I always asked him why because I always thought it was like an authority thing and for him it
was just like no it's really boring like I don't want to read that and I thought that was well what would make it more and why aren't the books that you love to read and that was the that was the stimulus for you to do that for five years to bring all those books of the
schools yeah cuz I was like well if this impacts him that way it's probably and he was lucky cuz he had no problems reading and I was like well all these other kids what if they had what if he couldn't read then you pretty much locked him out yeah if he doesn't have
anything that's interesting he is no motivation to learn exactly and anyway I thought it was so empowering and the results at least you know not scientifically but in the real world I was like why don't schools do this like I don't understand like we spend so much
money later on Downstream sort of like with people who are are literate or struggling to read if we just spend a couple hundred bucks a year in grade two and grade three on books that kids want to read whatever that year that is whatever is whether it's
Ninjago or whatever is culturally relevant in the moment that the kids are into uh you'll save all this money Downstream and I always thought it was such a powerful idea that I love that example that's a real world example where you made a big difference at a
critical time in a young person's life well one of the biggest things that I've taken from your work over you know the last decade or so is the amalgamation of time and energy and one of the things that you've said in your work is that time only has value in its intersection with energy
therefore it becomes Priceless in its intersection with extraordinary energy something you call full engagement talk to me about time and energy so when we set up the human performance Institute um I had come to understand first of all I wanted to set
it on a science foundation and almost all science is about energy whether it's physics or chemistry or yeah everything is fundamentally goes back to energy Dynamics we are reservoirs of potential energy and we're trying to figure out how to convert that into kinetic energy
to have a big life you have to be a big spender but if you're going to be a big spender of energy you have to this is a system that has to be renewed constantly it's not once you have energy you know the all energy comes from the same place from the mitochondri
of the cells and that's basically the union of oxygen and glucose called the kreb cycle and when you're depleted with with glucose or oxygen energy Dynamics start to you know decline pretty quickly and so we decided to set up the whole system of training around energy and the the
impetus one of the big impetus that I found when I was working with athletes prior to setting that up I was at the Nick Boler Tennis Academy and I was there for six years as director of sports science and director of sports psychology and uh i w watch um all of
the players there we had 240 of the best players in the world and they would be completely on time because they were demanded to be on time and I I videotaped everything when they show up on the courts I had all this Telemetry on all these kids because I I wanted to
learn I wanted to figure things out and what I began to realize is that even if you were there on time there no way guaranteed you were going to learn anything in fact we actually saw were some of the kids because they hated it so much they were perfectly on time they
got worse they were worse from all the practice and they were not in the language I began to use later was engaged and engaged for me was the intersection of whatever time you have with the infusion of energy aligned with what the object objective was so if the objective was to
have a better forehand or a backhand or serve or to compete better just the fact that you showed up and were in practice but you never invested extraordinary energy you're not going to get much of a return just kind of going through the motions exactly and
so at that time time management was I mean everyone was crazy about time management as the the ultimate way and I we had Stephen Mr cavy on our board who was step's son and I knew stepen cvy brilliant man and his seven habits and everything else and his
son and I said you know I think you have to I this is how my brain tends to work I said you know the the whole time management industry is flawed it's set on a faulty premise he said no there's this a a billion dooll industry we a lot of smart people I'm sorry Joe I don't know what you're
thinking but that's not true and I said okay I'm going to give you the scenario you tell me if I'm right or wrong is the basic thesis of time management is that the first thing you need to know what your values are what matters most to you in life and once you
do that you have to very courageously begin to invest time in all those things that really make the greatest difference for you that will bring success as you define it and the more you do that the more successful you will be but you must
invest time in the things that matter most to you and that's why time management is so important and I said how close am I to that thesis he that's basically it and I said well I will tell you the investment of time time has no value has no veilance has no Force until energy
intersects until energy intersects until time intersects with energy you really have nothing I mean you're just there you can be present with your family but because you're there is that going to move the needle forward being a loving caring mother or father and the fact is
no you're going to have to invest energy aligned with a mission time doesn't give you anything except the opportunity to make the investment of the one thing that changes the needle that changes everything and that's your energy so we've got to understand that
energy is the whatever you invest your energy and you give life to and it's not time but energy so I developed this notion of full engagement which is investing it's an acquired ability to invest your full invest energy right here right now um regardless of what the situation
is uh aligned with the mission and U it's hard it's difficult but it's a skill set and uh you've got to have you've got to have time but you've really have to make the investment of energy and if your energy reserves are low then people know you
really care because you're adding up your you're you're anting uh up the the resource that you're very low on you're not just you know hanging out because you don't have a lot of energy as a father as a mother with your children they know when you're tired now you're
coming up with the goods you are going to deliver on the one thing that people want because they know you care you can invest time and don't really have much in it if you develop extraordinary energy and invest extraordinary energy people know you care and that's the
whole for me that was a major breakthrough in in the Paradigm I think it's a fantastic insight and when I talk to people about it everybody's like oh you know that's so uh simple that it almost gets ignored but then when I say well if you know that Insight do you
follow that Insight right do you do you think about your sleep and what you eat and how that affects energy that you bring to uh the next day and the you know the meeting after lunch and all of that and people don't seem to have that Downstream ability to think about how
exercise and all these other things contribute to the amount of energy that we bring why is that it's just a different it's a different Paradigm completely than what most people have been exposed to I mean we have this almost this tradition of time management
being everything I was home for four hours with my family I should get some kind of an award with it but when we look at where your energy went you didn't have you know you were watching the game you were irritable cranky on and on and on and you didn't move the
needle positively in fact you got a reverse return on them thinking that you really care deeply about them and for you to pursue that it actually is an indictment it's a little bit uncomfortable after youve been hoodwinked into believing that time time
is everything now you realize it energy is everything and once you land on that on that particular platform you know as you said how much sleep I'm getting the quality and quantity the frequency of my meals um and to really look at how the system was engineered from an energy
perspective we are oscillatory beings and an oscillatory Universe nothing is a flat straight line nothing is linear except death every biop potential in the human physiology is oscillatory everything and so we have to be wav makers we have to understand that if we
want to have a big life we got to be spending a lot of energy which means youve got to be recovering a lot of energy so in our training we put a lot of emphasis on training the mechanisms of recovery um how do we train the body to recover more quickly so when you do
intervals and um in in training uh aerobic an anerobic capacity what you're doing is basically uh training the system to recover more quickly and you know the the fitter you are the faster you recover and so if you want to have a big life and be out there
in the fast L you got to find ways to recover quickly and take care of yourself one of the big big insights that we had at The Institute which was so embarrassing when we finally had all the evidence to support it was that Health ignites performance the healthier you are the
more energy you're going to have and the more energy you have aligned with the with whatever performance Arena you're in you're going to be better so full engagement requires a lot of energy and if you're in an in an environment where it's sucking all your energy up you have
nothing left like nurses who are on 12-hour shifts we worked a lot in medicine or some of these emergency surgeries are very long and very they're brutal well how do you prepare for that how can you oscillate in that 12-hour shift how can a surgeon oscillate
effectively so that their blood sugar levels don't get so low that in an athlete's life when that happens they Bonk they choke well we don't want to choke when it comes to life and death we worked with a lot of military Special Forces and help them understand the
importance of recovery and how can you get recovery in just a few seconds we developed this what is called The 16c Cure in tennis where in 16 seconds between points when you ritualize it you can get complete and total recovery and we validated that um in using uh
Telemetry heart rate Telemetry we looked at levels of cortisol and everything else oscillatory frequencies of the brain but you have to train it we have to actively train those capacities and it's very exciting because the system is infinitely trainable and I wrote a book
called Stress For Success it's like it's not stress that's killing you it's chronic stress it's stress unabated by recovery and if you're in a high stress environment you better start learning how to get the recovery and you'll start thriving in the stress and in fact the
hormones of stress are the hormones of life you take all the stress out of your life you're going to start shriveling up and you if I surround you with marshmallows and pillows eventually all you're going to be able to deal with is marshmallows and
pillows and the pillows eventually won't be soft enough and the marshmallows won't be sweet enough so you got to chase you got to chase old man's stress you got to go after it that's when the life lights up when you're on fire doing something making something happen
expending lots of energy and doing it in a way that doesn't compromise your ability to produce energy eating good food getting your good recovery at night at sleep drinking and hydrating a lot doing all the things that actually enhance energy production so that you can be a
big spender you want to be a big investor just like Wall Street you got to make a lot of deposits and if you don't do that you're going to Bonk and you're going to blame old man's stress it wasn't old man's stress that killed you it was that you didn't honor the
recovery that actually made this the the expenditure of energy manageable and actually very exciting walk me through the 16 seconds between points in tennis again all this data collection I was doing at the Nick Baler Tennis Academy I had them all hooked up to all
this Telemetry looking at heart rate variability and um we did the same thing with voice recorders on they wired them up so we could they were supposed to put verbally um with their public voice everything they were saying to themselves privately and uh we began to realize
that the between point time in tennis which is roughly 20 to 25 points depending upon the tournament or whatever um and the time that we started doing this work um we began to realize that if I just took video of people playing points you couldn't tell how
mentally tough or how effective they were under pressure but if I looked at the between point time only you could tell who were those that were actually extraordinarily good competitors and who who were were not and you didn't even need to see the points and about
70% of a match is not when people are playing points they're it's actually between point time which is Major and anyone that would think that that 70% of what you're doing between points doesn't affect what you're doing during points I mean you have no idea how the system is
integrated so when I started talking about the between point time in tennis people thought I had duly lost my mind no one had ever looked at the between point time and so we began to I took as a lot of the coaches would do if you want to have a great
forehand you look at what are the common elements in the 10 best forehand in the world and you teach those and so and almost never go wrong a lot of it is personality but if they're all doing the same thing you're probably pretty pretty well um assured that
there's those are important elements so we did that between points so we found those who were the best compe we took the best competitors on the men's and women's tour at that time and looked at all those things that they did in common that were not just personality Dynamics
or anything else and we developed a training system between points based Bas on those those um 16 seconds we found that Stephie graph at that time took the shortest amount of time of of anyone on the tour and basically so we said you need at least 16
seconds so some people would just walk right up and serve or just right away jump into it and we said no no no no no the system has to recover you have to make waves and we began to realize that the fitter you were the faster your heart rate would come down and we actually developed a
computer that actually determined what your ideal range of heart rate was um prior to starting a point if your heart it was too high or if it was too low because you kind of gave up and there was no intensity you're not going to likely perform well and anger would send your
heart rate over the top Fury anger frustration all that stuff it would block recovery and so um we began to develop this concept and I made a video of it it became maybe the best most widely watched video in tennis history um and we just did our second version and it's
free to anyone in the world it's there's no charge for it it's h we have all the current best players in the world who are involved in that and uh you can get it it's uh available on G G TTA gotat tennis.com and there's a link there that
says 16c cure it's the 2.0 version and um it's free so uh it was a big it was a big breakthrough in uh in training mental toughness amongst tennis plays we did it then in hockey we did it in a lot of sports and we ritualized all the opportunities for Recovery in Sports and
but the 16-second Cure basically you start out with a positive physical response immediately when the point is over then you go through a relaxation stage then you go into kind of a ritual stage where you bounce the ball then you kind of go purely instinctive into the
point and that will it that video will show you in great detail with all the best players in the world and they all do it and but they learned it by Instinct although now the coaches teach it regularly to everyone but I I felt you know really positive that I may have
made a contribution to the training of tennis players um in their ability to manage the stresses of competitive tennis you mentioned a word there ritualize and ritual repeatedly and I think that word is incredibly important and very intentional why do you use that
word the difference between a habit and a ritual a habit is um something that just you know may or may not help you in life you have a bad habit of eating too much or you just don't hydrate enough or you drink sugary drinks all the time and it destabilizes your blood glucose levels
and but you have a lot of bad habit you sleep too late you don't um you don't have a habit of you know really laying out your day very clearly and so you're kind of floating around most of the day just trying to catch up with yourself could be we just
call those bad habits and then you have good habits or positive habits that you've tried to acquire some of them just show up and you've been around a lot of people with good habits and you kind of acquired them a ritual as we Define it is an intentionally acquired
habit that serves the mission whatever the mission is so to become a better tennis player between points to become uh to stabilize blood glucose during a match what should you be eating maybe a banana drinking lots of water and some specific uh hydration
elements um between uh between games on changeovers so you can have a ritual for getting up in the morning that you intentionally develop it's kind of a tiny habit that you decide is going to help you navigate in life more successfully in the things that matter
to you so it's um we need rituals I will tell you it's called the unbearable automaticity of being we are creatures of habit and some of those habits just destroy us I mean they don't help us at all we don't even know how we got them we just some one
day we woke up and this is how it is we love to sleep late we don't like to get up in the morning and on and on and on and a lot of things just you know they just happen but our days pretty much unfold automatically you're going to do tomorrow pretty much what you've are
wired up habitually to do now the beauty of being human is that we have the ability to pause between the stimulus and response and create a novel response um and that takes a certain amount of time and a lot of energy infusion until we rewire the
circuitry and it is a it's basically a it's a neurological Loop that enables you to continue doing certain things and in the animal kingdom they're completely wired up with instincts and routines that enhance survival but human beings actually can stop and reflect I don't
want to be 40 pounds overweight I don't and then you have to link this Mission which is maybe very difficult to get off of drugs or whatever you have to get a purpose that is so powerful that it just it just grabs you and ushers You Into the Storm and you will not
surrender and most of the time it's these little tiny habits getting up at a certain time setting the alarm um having breakfast always at a certain even if it's a small amount you get yourself started rather than having a big lunch and then a huge dinner and going to bed you start
understanding that you know you don't have to be a victim of your environment you actually can intervene but it takes a lot of heavy duty lifting and it's all made possible by your energy investment intentional and the other thing I wanted
to come back to that you mentioned uh quite a few times is is mental toughness how do we increase our mental toughness and I did develop a construct that based on all the players I interviewed athletes from 21 different sports and asked them to describe what they feel like when
they're playing at their absolute best something that sometimes referred to zoning when what they could do and what they were doing we one and the same it's an exhilarating feeling and everyone has been there and uh I just I asked them for the descriptors that they would
use and I was blown away because they all used it looked like they all copied from each other they they were very calm physically relaxed emotionally confident lots of positive energy um there was a whole constellation there were 12 of them that surfaced and I used that as I refer to
it as their ideal performance State and whether it was a linesman in football or a gymnast uh it was like levels of intensity might change but the feeling that they had when they're performing from inside was similar across all sports so that led me to understand that
there is a there's an internal chemistry that's bubbling up that actually drives those feelings and emot there's a physiology that's allowing there a very delicate balance in the neurophysiology and in the physiology of the whole body this B Mind Body
Connection and so the question is how do we train to actually get all of this chemistry to line up when we want it most if you get a little too much cortisol which is from which is more of a defensive survival based hormone it throws everything out of kilter all
of a sudden the brain waves start going faster you get tighter you get Tunnel Vision on and on and so it's a very delicate balance and you never Master it you get close you get better and you have to do everything right and you have to follow your rituals to do that when I
started I called it mental toughness and I began to realize that mental is only one component emotions also are a huge shoot driver of this chemistry and maybe more important than what you're thinking and what you're analyzing logically emotions probably drive more of the
chemistry than anything and your mindset that you set um obviously the mental side is really important but you can just completely come apart because your Fitness you you haven't really achieved the right Fitness so now your cells are not getting enough oxygen or you're
haven't eaten properly now you're really in a glucose challenge um and maybe you don't even want to play motivationally maybe you know maybe this is something your parents wanted you to do but you don't really have a purpose that's your own
which will unwind so that for this delicate chemistry to rise up you have to really want it you have to really have the system has to bring out this amazing chemistry uh formula which is not easy to to mobilize particularly in the context of pressure so it's not mental
toughness it's mental emotional it's physical it's actually spiritual as well so um we are a fully integrated species and we've got to understand that everything we do affects everything else and even the way you speak to yourself the way you walk the way you carry your
shoulders I flew all the way to Spain because I got a fabulous opport opportunity to interview one of Spain's most famous bull fighters um Martin Vasquez he's now just passed away but he was a superstar and I begged for the opportunity to meet with
him because I wanted to know how a matador um controls fear when they know that there's this massive bull who is going to do everything possible to kill them and to subdue this Potential Threat that the bull is seeing and you know if every time a tennis
player they choke they double falled they got gored it would make a big difference in how we play tennis or golf or any other sport so uh I asked um Martin I said listen he said you've come all the way from America what is it you need to know and I said I just need to
know how a bull fighter controls their nerve NES how do you control fear how do you keep from being paralyzed because when you choke you're very likely going to get gored and can very possibly die and he smiles and he says is it not obvious Jim and I said no I came all
this way it's not that obvious and he said have you ever seen a bull fighter in the ring show anything but Supreme confidence have you ever seen them mope around with ch rounded shoulders saying I'm having a bad day I don't feel like I'm on my game today the
you know being negative or a little bit pessimistic and irrit IR irritated at the bull because the bull is just not cooperating or whatever you see nothing every step every movement he said we start training as a young boy at a very early age on how to walk how to turn how
to carry our shoulders ERS where to put our eyes every single detail is done meticulously and he said the bow can see that and knows that you have no fear and that you dominate the bull by your presence we control fear by our physical presence and uh so he was very
articulate and I was you know I was mesmerized by the whole thing and we looked at videos and it was really quite so I brought it back to the states to the Nick biter Tennis Academy and we showed all this video of bull fighters and we developed what I
call the Matador walk and I would take uh tennis players out on the court and teach them how to walk how to turn how to look how to control their eyes and I will say it had a profound effect they thought it was a little weird in the beginning but they saw the results they
were getting and how they felt much more if you want to be Fearless you look Fearless if you want to control the chemistry you have to look on the outside the way you want to feel on the inside and that was the inside it's powerful it also relates to the stories
that we were talking about earlier it sort of comes full circle right exactly you can control your Chemistry from the inside out or from the outside in you can work with meditation with thoughts with ideas with private voice you know or you can work from um the outside working with
your actual physical muscles and the way in which you carry yourself all of it can either contribute or undermine your ability to achieve your potential that's a really powerful way to take control no matter where you where you are in this particular moment you can always do
something to sort of move forward uh I want to end with the same question I always ask which is uh what is success for you I I just I want to make a difference uh in the lives of other people and I have a very um kind of opport opportunistic
um kind of stage where I can help people if what I am saying is true and um success in my life is helping other people be successful in things that matter to them and that's why for me my mission is to live what I teach so that if I teach it it's not
something I'm just voicing they actually see it in my life and I feel like if I didn't get it right at least I did the best I could and for me success in my life is using the opportunities I've had to learn to help other people be successful in whatever way they define success