#137 Justin Su'a: Peak Mental Performance
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Because losing is so painful, it's so embarrassing, 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. But when you win, a lot of times you think, all right, yeah, that was supposed to happen. Okay, moving on. Instead of pausing and saying, what did I execute? What was out of my control? Where did I get lucky?

Another question is, what did I learn today? Win or lose? That's a great question to ask yourself. Welcome to the Knowledge Project podcast. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. The goal of this show is to master the best of what other people have already figured out so you can unlock your potential. To that end, I sit down with people at the top of the game to uncover what they've learned along the way.

Every episode is packed with timeless ideas that you can use in life and business. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like special member only episodes access before anyone else, transcripts and other member only content, you can join at fs.blog slash membership. Check out the show notes for a link.

Justin Su is here today. Justin is the head of mental performance for the Tampa Bay Rays, a major league baseball team. Before that, he was a mental performance coach for the Cleveland Browns and a mental skills coordinator for the Boston Red Sox. I wanted to talk to Justin because he helps people be at their best mentally. And this episode is packed with insights that transcend sports.

We talk about mental performance, how he measures the impact of his work, how he connects and builds trust, consistency versus intensity, the fragility of confidence, the difference between success and talent, and how you can raise the bar, and so much more. If you're interested in learning the things that you can do to be at your best mentally, this episode is for you. It's time to listen and learn. ♪

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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 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 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 you said, you're 100% right. And I think a very simple and in some circles and over simplifying physical 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 what knowledge workers learn. It's your ability to zoom in and to zoom out to gain better perspective, your ability to conduct a premortem, 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 to

How do you operationalize that? It's the application of mental models. It's the application of decision sciences and some concepts in behavioral science and some concepts in performance psychology 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 a leader of an organization to try to create an environment where you help people do that for themselves. And so 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 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 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 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 linked

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 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 gonna 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 a movie in the theater or watching a 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 and 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 look at that differently. Let me apply evidence against it. Let me consider the fault of my reasoning, the faulty 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 a 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 a team, just to understand the

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 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. Yeah, David Foster Wallace. David Foster Wallace. And he tells a story in the beginning of the commencement speech where these fish are swimming along. And a wise fish comes by and says, hey, boys, how's the water? And then he swims off. And one fish says to the other, what the hell is water? And so that is just incredible.

That just explains further how sometimes you don't see the nuances and the intricacies of what's going on in 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 for me to go back and and just give them this, give them advice.

knowledge and truth and dispense pithy 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.

Hmm. 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, okay,

I was in education for five years and one of the things they teach you 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 going to do? They're going to go back and reread the paragraph because they're like, oh, I didn't know what to look for. But if I say, all right, class, we're going to read this paragraph. I want you to look for what you think this character was thinking as this interaction is going on. Now they're looking for it. 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 there.

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. Yeah.

First of all, I don't know who you asked, and I'm so grateful for them saying what they said. My follow-up question to them would be, how do you know? What evidence do you have? And so 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 motivational speaker. Oh, so you're an inspirational speaker. Oh, so you're a life coach. No offense to any of those things. Um, however, um,

With the circles that I work with, there's rigor that's involved. There are processes. There's complexities. 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, I, in some circles, can be likable. I could be my friendliness and let's say charisma or whatever it may be, can be perceived as, oh, this guy knows what he's talking about.

Now, and there are studies to show that. There are studies to 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 I better truly respect the experience and the expertise of others. My philosophy is more of...

guide on the side rather than sage on the stage. The athlete who I work with, the group I work, they're the heroes. They already have tools. They already 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 I said, 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?

Do you need to change your result? Do you need to change your focus process? Or in what ways are you not exercising it? Here, let me add another one. Hey, 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, well, 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 don't

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, 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 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 sometimes as a result as well is,

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. It 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 refactoring. Now, refactoring is a mental model that I've learned from computer programming. And essentially what refactoring is, if I understand it correctly, it's basically a system where which you're not necessarily affecting the outcome, but you're making 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 it help them bounce back faster? They're 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. But asking them and to hear them from these anecdotal responses like, hey, that's helping me. And so I'll go by that. But yeah, it's a lot of it. 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 table pound, if you do this, it's going to make you mentally tough. There are no five steps. There are no silver bullets. There are no quick fixes to things. It's 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 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 to this question kind of dawned on me organically. Looking back and just taking inventory on all of my different experiences, whether it be working with NFL players or soldiers in the military or Major League Baseball players, 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 have no say in your bonuses or in your contract or you play or you don't. 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 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 sometimes.

But what's also unique about the position that I'm in, these organizations understand, hey, let's give Justin the ability to...

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 trainers and talk to them and see what their environment is like and how to help a player reconstruct their ACL. Hey, let me go sit with the clubhouse staff to see how they design the environment and the music just to...

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 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 someone

tied to your career but who is 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 hit on this earlier, you have to be open and you have to be honest with you and themselves in your company. 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 think 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. I 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 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're immediately like, 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? You're going to 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.

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 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 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 coach 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 I have a relationship with a 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, that 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 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 day. It's how can I collaborate with incredible people?

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 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 improve our environment, to improve our performance? I think James Clear says,

in his book, Atomic Habits, says it best for me, 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. Here's a simple little example about the power of environment and systems thinking, applying the model of systems thinking. I got a text one time

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 we had been talking about confidence. He's like, oh, it's interesting how you, for some reason, 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 talking yourself instead of thinking yourself, 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 prescribe something, let's give a tactic to pause and consider the environment. And we talk about that often, the music, the spacing, the wording on the walls or not having wording on the walls. Where players are,

are situated in a clubhouse. All these little things, where the food is in a cafeteria, the healthy food is out in the open and the snacks are hidden 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 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 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, well, what is environment? I kind of think of it as 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 unconscious self. The people you hang around, right? So your friends, your family, the people you choose to spend time with, the people you admire in a way too. What you read. So 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 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 this internal environment, this mental environment that you create. An analogy, a metaphor we constantly use is this

Fountains and drains. Now, any metaphor has its limitations. We all know that and we could pick apart any kind of metaphor. But what I like about this is just the mental picture that it creates. Fountains are people who leverage...

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 who are fountains of perspective.

You can have people in your life who are fountains of organization, a fountain of critical thinking. And these are those fountains, these people that you go to, to help you with these problems. You can have a fountain of humor, someone who just, who they're 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, 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 I live with my plants.

to your point, Shane fountains in this social 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 caution with sharing the fountains and the drains is immediately when I share this in public settings, whatever it may be, people will say, yeah, 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 a who who who are these fountains of mine really focusing on the fountains or these people I can surround myself with to identify.

to positively influence my internal environment as you were mentioning. And so that was just a concept that I absolutely loved. I love the notion of fountain and drains. I think there's 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, quote,

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 a 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 we think 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 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 they're

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 going to be

adjustments made in the system whether you intend for that to happen or even unintended 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. It's kind of like meditation. There's somebody I was working with who wanted to implement meditation. And for some reason he or she, she couldn't find 20 minutes to.

to do it. Like she's like, I just can't do 20, 20 minutes. And she's like, let me try 10 minutes. And she couldn't do 10 minutes. Now this woman was very, starting to get frustrated with herself because she was breaking promises to herself and she was going to give it up completely. I'm okay. I guess I can't meditate. And then we started talking about this concept of habit stacking where maybe you could tie meditation to a habit that's already well-established.

And as she combed over her routine in the morning, she said, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to meditate while I brush my teeth. I do it in the morning and I do it at night. And wouldn't you know, she, instead of focusing on her breath, she focuses on the bristles going around her gums and her teeth. She puts her mind where she wants, when she wants. When her mind drifts, she notices it and brings it back. 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's,

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 her 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 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. 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 don't have confidence. There are players who I will not name, but who all of us know would, you would 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 it's,

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 in its ability to fly. And I think where people struggle with confidence is it's obvious, it's often misplaced. 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

that 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 there 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 isn't an accurate predictor of future success. And so what the research also shows is, yeah, 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-efficacy theory, and this is Robert 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 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 focused 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 want to 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 our 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 hear a lot of athletes say that, yeah, there are 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 mentioned the fear. 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 seek 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. But at your level, average sort of like baseball players and the elite baseball players, is there a difference in that drive? You know, there is actually a book called Drive out there that I think there are some physiological components attributed to it. There could be some nature part, some nurture part to it. I think it's very complex.

However, 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. For a lot of them, there's this obsession, 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 results focused to be more process focused. That didn't work out with some of them. They're like, no, don't tell me how to shape and how I should view my goals. That won't work for me. So I learned very quickly that, okay, even though the research says that it'd probably be more ideal to focus on the process itself,

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 goal gradient effect being very prevalent in these athletes. Now, the goal gradient 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 help you create a temporary light at the end of the tunnel? Because you're driven when you see something and the player creates motivation.

A temporary one. What are you going to do this Sunday? Okay, what's your goal for right here, right now? And then applying the, what do you call it? Newton's laws, an object in 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 realize

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 goal 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, 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 this is 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, they probably worked in the other nine. And why can't we just do that monthly? Like, why can't we set up that the short term goals are even weekly in some companies?

That's a great question. And to answer the initial question, our contract set up like that, I have not, I don't know. I don't know. That's a circle of competence that I don't have. And so with that, but to your point, 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 that

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 they're they're they're they're reference level or their set points a little bit their mood a little more agitated a little bit more chippy and then you 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 an action bias as opposed to, Hey, just keep doing what you're doing. Trust what you're doing was right. And trust that the, that your process will yield the results that you're looking for as they had before.

the entire time leading up to this point. I think when you see a bonus around the corner 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? Everyone needs to find their own definition of success. 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 it used to be and I think another thing is one of the reasons for that is is how we view people in organizations that we perceive as successful and

The books are written about the best in the world. The documentaries are made about world champions. The movies are made about these amazing, credible stories. But what we learn 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 came in second place and third place had the same process, and in some cases, an 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 and you're winning, but it just overshadows all of the deficiencies and the problems in the system. And then you look at a losing, a team who quote unquote loses, and losing overshadows the great leadership, the great strategy, the great leadership

the process that they have and so that mental model that I actually learned from you is that the map 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

is take a look at some of those who aren't winners and see what they did. 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 what the winners were doing. That's a good segue sort of 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, the

How do we go about raising that bar?

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, 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, 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, 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 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 a positive culture now. We're a learning culture now. You need to understand that there's going to be a lag. It takes time to be able to create enough inflow to where all of a sudden 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 is they underestimate that.

the process and how long it's going to be. We come in and say, okay, we're just going to put a

This year, our year is going to be no fear. Everything is going to be no fear, no fear anywhere. And it's like, okay, wait, what are we talking about? 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's, I see it all the time and it's such a great question. I think like I came at this just through the outside looking in, right? Like reading about people like Tom Brady and Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. And one of the things that it seems in common, they have different ways of going about it, but they all held themselves to a higher bar than anyone could imagine.

even from the outside looking in. But they also held their teammates to that level of standard, that level of work ethic. You watch that MJ documentary on Netflix and it becomes obvious that they like hated him, but he made them better. Absolutely right. Like you can't show up at practice and give 50% effort and coast for even a day when MJ's on your team. 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 true. And I think it's also true even 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 point, you're

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 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 a beam, 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 someone you might think to yourself, oh, I can't ever 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 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. 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 that

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 going to get bit by the driven bug. But when it comes out, it's a, and it's an, it's an exhilarating feeling. It's amazing. And,

Then you have people 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're passionate about and then they were just driven to do it. And it's like, all right. And they want to surround themselves with people who 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. It might mess 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 the rest of your life so far?

never talk about this on podcast 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 it. 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, I, 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 world, third world country. I don't speak Spanish. I talked 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 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 and

I, from firsthand, could tell him, I know what it's like to be thrown into a different culture. I know what it's like to not be able to order food. I know what 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, like people telling me if I threaten 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 teamwork. I learned how to be a leader. I learned how to navigate difficult situations. I learned how to communicate. How do you, I had to keep it simple there. I had to keep it 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's,

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. One look to a kid, they get the feedback. Okay, got it. Another child, it's just way different. And one thing that I have learned

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 Owen 16 season. They've seen, they've watched me in these different things. And, and one thing I know that I have learned is,

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, dad, 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 in, 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.

This is what I want to do for a living. And so we said, okay, if you want to do this, we're going to 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 has 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-starred 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 was neat to see her walk through that story. And then my son is now interested in music and he's working with some great artists around the world, but what,

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? 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 going to 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, 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 1%, 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.

I remember watching your daughter actually in that movie in the cafeteria at the table. I didn't know it was your daughter until now. And then I was like, oh my God, she's adorable, man. She's awesome. Appreciate it, brother. 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. Yeah.

I was actually inspired by it from a question that you had with Chris, Chris Bosch. 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, dude, we didn't lose. We got beat. No, you lost. An L is an L. 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 a 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 losing

You didn't give your best effort. Losing is you beat yourself. That is truly, truly losing where you didn't do whatever it takes. You lacked preparation. You just beat yourself from mistakes, from maybe it could be mental mistakes that you

For one reason or another, you just felt sorry for yourself. You're making excuses, mental mistake, 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 beaten. The difference between losing and being beaten. I struggle with that sometimes, but I think in some contexts, it's very important to say and very important to distinguish a phrase that people who know me know that I do not like. There's a phrase out there that 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 can learn a lot from winning. Success leaves clues. What it also implies, 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 saying, 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 who,

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 pitcher, pitcher beat him ever, ever. No, that, that picture didn't, he didn't be, I, he got lucky. He got lucky. I'm the one who struck out. I struck myself out. He didn't strike me out. And that's a confidence mechanism. He, and I'm not going to tell him otherwise, but it's in confidence.

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 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. Yeah.

Tell me more about that. Because losing is so painful, it's so embarrassing, 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 did I capitalize 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 a win or after a loss and use this lens, 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 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 to 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 Bosch conversation was that some people sort of accomplish 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 goal gradient effect. We tend, this is the problem with the 30-day cycle.

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 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, like, Oh, that's unsustainable. You can't sustain that amount of effort all the way through. And so what Chris mentions is, is so true is that,

There is a time for rest and 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 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 link win for the long haul. What can listeners do to improve their mental performance? This is always a difficult question because I, 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 that might, you might think, wait, that's, that's going to help my mind. It absolutely helps your mind. It is the fundamental thing.

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, um,

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 information.

personal data. And then you go and you say, okay, try to find some patterns. Oh, in the morning, I have tons of energy. I'm really good. Oh, one six o'clock hits. I noticed I'm a lot more irritable. 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 and 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 our feedback loops, 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 they'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 a scale of one to 10. What, what's your, what's your reference level of, 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 described 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, it's often happens in the playoffs or in the world series, uh, in high leverage, stressful situations, playoff,

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 it is getting outside of my reference level. What do they do? They have been taught diaphragmatic breathing. So they know that, okay, if I'm 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 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, 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 oh for 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 chalking it up as a true success. However, the map is not necessarily the territory.

But conversely, a player can go four for four and say, oh, I broken bat single. I hit a little squibbler away from 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? 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 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. And where freedom comes, creativity comes. I love creativity. I love to feel that I am coming at a problem from a different angle 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 and sleep. I'm trying to gain financial freedom by not just learning the financials and accounting of money and how to use my money, but the psychology of money, Morgan Housel's work, and just understanding what it does and biases. And so right now, success to me is freedom, just trying to have freedom, 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. The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Farnham Street. I'd love to get your advice on how to make this the most valuable podcast you listen to. Email me at shane at fs.blog. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs.blog slash podcast. To get a transcript of this episode, go to fs.blog slash tribe or check out the show notes.

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