Build Mental Toughness & Perform Under Pressure | Dr. Lenny Wiersma

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin
Episode: Build Mental Toughness & Perform Under Pressure | Dr. Lenny Wiersma
Date: April 15, 2026
Guest: Dr. Lenny Wiersma, Director of Sports and Performance Psychology for Olympic Sports at UC Berkeley

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the science and practice of building mental toughness, boosting performance under pressure, and harnessing psychological skills for athletes and non-athletes alike. Dr. Galpin is joined by Dr. Lenny Wiersma, a leading sports psychologist, who shares deep insights and actionable tactics drawn from decades working with Olympic teams, elite athletes, and performers across high-pressure environments. They demystify confidence, illuminate the true power of visualization and self-talk, and discuss how these tools can benefit anyone for sport, work, or life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Psychology of Extreme Performance ([00:00]–[12:28])

• Alex Honnold’s Skyscraper Climb as Case Study:
  • Extreme performers like Honnold are not simply “fearless.” They build confidence through relentless, incremental training and obsessive dedication to their craft.
  • “If it’s not a 100% yes, then it’s a 100% no.” (Wiersma, [02:09])
• Risk and Motivation:
  • Motivation isn’t thrill-seeking; it’s about being passionate and prepared. Overconfidence in extreme sports isn’t just dangerous, it’s deadly.
  • “The approach we might take in a traditional sports setting with being ‘in the zone’ is dangerous in this world. Extreme sport athletes have to regulate confidence differently.” (Wiersma, [09:51])
• Risk Management and Preparation:
  • The best prepare rigorously for failure (e.g., wipeouts, falls) so that fear is addressed with detailed plans and visualization.

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2. Visualization: Beyond Just Seeing Success ([12:28]–[31:16])

• Purposeful Visualization:
  • Confidence visualization: Imagine yourself succeeding, executing key skills.
  • Coping visualization: Deliberately visualize adversity and your effective response to it—this reduces anxiety by providing a psychological safety net.
  • Memorable example: Michael Phelps in 2008 Olympics, visualizing swimming blind after his goggles filled with water ([16:49]).
  • “Coping visualization is a really powerful one where we see ourselves in situations where we imagine what might happen. And then you learn and practice coping techniques…” (Wiersma, [16:49])
• Practical Application:
  • Length: As little as 10 minutes per day is highly effective.
  • Timing: Don’t visualize right before sleep, as it arouses the brain. Do use techniques like sleep stories for restful detailed mental imagery instead ([25:00]).
  • Multisensory approach: Use equipment, uniforms, smells (like surfboard wax) to make visualization more real and emotionally resonant.
  • “The emotional piece is maybe more important than the visual piece.” (Wiersma, [22:03])
• For Non-Athletes:
  • Visualization prepares for high-stress performances: exams, presentations, interviews, or even officiating a wedding in sign language.

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3. Effective Self-Talk: Beyond Positive vs. Negative ([36:36]–[48:41])

• Not About Positivity/Negaivity:
  • Self-talk isn’t about being positive or negative but about being effective for you.
  • “It should be whether it’s effective or not effective. That’s the big thing.” (Wiersma, [38:09])
• Psychological Distancing:
  • Second-person or third-person self-talk (“Andy, you got this,” or “Lenny, let’s go!”) creates psychological space and is more potent than “I can do it.”
  • Use names or nicknames with self-talk for authority and emotional detachment.
  • “Most of us are really, really good at talking our friends out of negative states... Practice that with yourself.” (Wiersma, [40:36])
• Notable Book:
  • Chatter by Ethan Kross—recommended for practical exercises in effective self-talk.

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4. Comfort, Discomfort, and the Myth of “Being Comfortable with Uncomfortable” ([48:41]–[54:53])

• Rejecting “Comfort” in Adversity:
  • The goal isn’t to become comfortable being uncomfortable, it’s to “embrace being more uncomfortable and not want to be comfortable. That’s the secret to success.” (Wiersma, [49:40])
• Confidence vs. Belief:
  • Confidence is fleeting and often relies on recency; belief is foundational and robust.
  • Powerful metaphor: fishing in a clear vs. murky lake—the “clear” days are confidence, the “murky” days are belief ([55:03]).
  • “Belief is much more underlying and much more consistent and takes a lot longer to build and to also break down than just the general notion of confidence.” (Wiersma, [54:53])

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5. Building Robust Confidence ([61:14]–[70:01])

• Powerful Practices:
  • Confidence can co-exist with nerves: “I can be confident and I can be nervous at the same time.” (Wiersma, [61:31])
  • Use reflection tools: Confidence jars (write down accomplishments), 3-2-1 technique (3 things done well, 2 things to improve, 1 focus for next time).
  • Confidence should be drawn from many sources: physical prep, mental skill training, self-care, and social support.
  • Verbally and physically anchor confidence—use written reminders and physical cues.

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6. Handling Failure, Overconfidence, and Resilience ([70:01]–[81:12])

• Learning from Failure:
  • Reconstruct the moment of failure, analyze thoughts and reactions, then mentally rehearse a better outcome.
  • Not all negative self-talk is bad; some people benefit from tough self-assessment.
• Overconfidence:
  • When preparation is skipped and corners are cut, overconfidence shows up as lack of discipline and can lead to failure.
• Resilience & Grit:
  • Resilient people keep going out of passion even when not confident. Grit is persistence and passion for long-term goals.

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7. Mental Toughness, Emotion Regulation, and Co-regulation ([81:12]–[94:32])

• Mental Toughness:
  • Defined as performing your best regardless of circumstance.
  • Key is not “emotional control” but “emotional regulation”—acknowledge, label, accept, and then move to effective action.
• Emotion labeling:
  • “Every emotion serves a purpose… When I know why an emotion exists, I can manage my response better.” (Wiersma, [77:16])
• Co-regulation:
  • Emotions are contagious; leaders and coaches must read the emotional climate and adapt their emotional responses to regulate the group.

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8. In-Competition Regulation & Coaching Under Pressure ([94:32]–[101:17])

• Real-Life Example:
  • Coaching a player after making a costly error: “Move on, the game’s not over. What’s next?” ([83:23])
  • Tactics: Downregulate with breathwork, physical reset cues (e.g., George Kittle’s “reset” tattoo), and shared team language (“be right here”).
• Coach’s Emotional Regulation:
  • The best coaching moment: Joe Montana’s famous “Hey, there’s John Candy!” in the Super Bowl [97:53], melting the huddle’s tension and signaling composure.

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9. Integrating Mental Performance in Teams ([101:17]–[110:23])

• The Role of the Mental Performance Consultant:
  • Embedding support staff within the team environment, not as an outsider or as just a “therapist for troubled players.”
  • Trust and buy-in are earned slowly—by suffering and celebrating alongside coaches and athletes.
• Distinction:
  • Mental performance coaching is NOT clinical psychology; it’s ongoing, performance-focused, and embedded in practice and competition.

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10. Biofeedback and Cognitive Tools ([110:23]–[134:23])

• Biofeedback:
  • Using technology (e.g., HeartMath, Inner Balance) to show athletes in real time how breathing and focus can change physiology (heart rate, HRV).
  • Protocols: Typically 4–6 seconds in/out per breath cycle, aim for HRV “coherence”—balance between sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous systems.
• Cognitive Training:
  • Neurotracker (3D attention & focus training)—improves selective & sustained attention; provides quantitative feedback and opens up conversation about focus, fatigue, and performance.
  • Art (Attention Restoration Theory): Take walks in nature, no devices, to restore focus and combat cognitive fatigue.

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11. Choosing the Right Professionals & Learning More ([134:23]–[137:17])

• Credentials & Practice:
  • Seek Certified Mental Performance Consultants (CMPC) for performance-focused coaching (requires masters, supervised hours, examination).
  • Clinical psychologists provide mental health support but need additional sports training for performance roles.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If it’s not a 100% yes, then it’s a 100% no.” (Wiersma, [02:09])
• “The misnomer about Alex Honnold is that he doesn’t feel fear… It’s not academically true.” (Galpin/Wiersma, [05:03])
• “Coping visualization is a really powerful one… When you see yourself doing it the right way.” (Wiersma, [16:49])
• “Self-talk is not about positive versus negative. It’s about whether it’s effective or not.” (Galpin/Wiersma, [38:03])
• “You should be coaching yourself, using your own nickname, in the same way an actual coach would.” (Wiersma, [40:37])
• “Embrace being more uncomfortable and not want to be comfortable. That’s the secret to success.” (Wiersma, [49:40])
• "Belief is much more underlying and much more consistent and takes a lot longer to build and to also break down than just the general notion of confidence." (Wiersma, [54:53])
• “The second-person self-talk is both more forgiving, and sometimes more forceful, but always from a place of positive intent.” (Wiersma, [47:19])
• “You cannot control your performance until you can control yourself. And you can’t do anything with yourself until you can change the simplest thing: your breathing.” (Wiersma, [120:25])

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:00] — Introduction; Honnold case study and the psychology of risk
• [12:28] — Visualization, coping, and the Phelps story
• [31:16] — Self-talk: effective vs. positive/negative; psychological distancing and practical tips
• [48:41] — The comfort/discomfort debate; the confidence-belief distinction
• [61:14] — Building robust confidence; the 3-2-1 technique
• [70:01] — Failure, overconfidence, resilience, and grit
• [81:12] — Emotional regulation and co-regulation
• [94:32] — In-competition coaching, sideline examples, and Joe Montana
• [101:17] — The embedded nature of mental performance coaching
• [110:23] — Biofeedback, protocols, and cognitive training tools
• [134:23] — How to find and vet mental performance professionals
• [137:17] — Final thoughts and closing

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Conclusion & Takeaways

This episode is densely packed with science-backed strategies and illustrative stories for optimizing mental performance. Dr. Wiersma and Dr. Galpin balance actionable advice with deep conceptual understanding—a must-listen for anyone seeking to improve under pressure. Core themes include:

• Mental toughness is built, trained, and maintained—not innate.
• Visualization is your mental practice field: use it to rehearse both success and adversity.
• Self-talk must be effective for YOU—often best achieved by speaking to yourself as you would a trusted friend or coach.
• Confidence is fleeting and momentary; belief is earned and unbreakable.
• Coaches, leaders, and teams all benefit from embedded, collaborative mental performance professionals—this isn’t just therapy, it’s high-stakes, high-impact teamwork for the mind.

For anyone—athlete, coach, leader, or performer—implement even one or two of these tactics, and you’ll significantly upgrade your ability to thrive under pressure.

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Transcript

[A]

The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play and Life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Dr. Andy Galpin. I am a professor and scientist and the executive director of the Human Performance center at Parker University. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Lenny Wiersma. Lenny is a director of sports and performance psychology for the Olympic sports teams at the University of California, Berkeley. And today you're going to learn a number of tactics and tools to help you perform at your best mentally. Lenny does an excellent job of breaking down what we now understand scientifically about confidence and how to better use self talk. You're also going to learn a lot about visualization. What is it, how does it work? And specifically exactly what to do to get the most impact out of it. With all that said, I hope you enjoyed Today's conversation with Dr. Lenny Wiersma. Dr. Lenny Wiersma Andy I actually wanted to start in a place of recency. A few days ago, the whole world watched Alex Honnold climbing up a skyscraper. And this hurts my entire soul to say this, but the entire time watching that I kept thinking this is obviously fairly easy for him physically there was some challenges, but that was by far. And again, this is going to really hurt me saying this. This is a psychological challenge. Just at the very basic start here. What does psychology, what does the brain, how does this even look when someone is doing something as crazy as Alex climbing up a building like that? Where do we even start to think about this?

[B]

I've never worked with Alex. Alex is a special person for so people who aren't him, like you and I. To try to even have a sense of what that's like for him is impossible to do. It's a great example of we're all seeing the same things, but we're all seeing very different things and feeling different things. I've worked with athletes who do extreme things and I have some insight perhaps and maybe what some of that was like for him. I mean the first thing my nephews are reaching out, hey, what do you think? Is it going to be like it's a 10 second delay, is that going to be needed? And like, no. Like one thing I've learned about extreme sport athletes is that if it's not a 100% yes, then it's a 100% no. And like this is important to understand like the risk involved with it because I think at the heart of doing these things is the concept of the psychology of risk for all of us. The consequence of what he had is the same a mistake, him being Overconfident. An earthquake, wind, like things in his control, things out of our control for everybody. The consequence is the same. It's sheer death.

[A]

Yeah. Gone.

[B]

The risk is very different because he's not going to do that. He's not going to go into doing that if he has doubt in his mind about his ability to do it. And actually I think that's pretty phenomenal to know what it took for him to buy that kind of confidence, to build that kind of confidence over time. I remember when he did El Cap, he spent, to my understanding, an entire year doing a stretching routine so that he can do a move with his leg that probably lasts about three seconds. I wish I had something in my life that I'd be willing to dedicate a year for a three second thing. And most humans actually probably have some cat capability of doing great things, but how many of us are really willing to put that kind of like all in investment in. So those little things, those little details in his. The way he's approached doing everything is probably explains a lot to me. What I find fascinating is you see all these, the footage of the people who are inside those windows of that building and he's standing outside there, you know, no safety net, anything. And just his ability to. To focus. And part of me was thinking like, why didn't they shut that building down?

[A]

I thought the same thing.

[B]

I was, people know their cell phones in his face to this window and they're waving and do they know how dangerous that is? They should try to distract him. And yet he has probably a superhuman level of focus to be able to know when he needs to engage and interact and know where he needs to put his focus. So when you look at that performance, that was a performance of a lifetime in my mind.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And how eloquently and how compos supposed he did that. And there were times where it actually looked like he was having fun doing it. Like taking it in, standing at the ledge, looking down. Like that amount of joy that that brought him probably is, I'm guessing, one of the big motivational forces for him to do that. But that, that ability to know 100% that he's going to pull that off and go into it was the deciding factor. Which makes it even more interesting in my mind. I think we might want to know, oh, he might fall. I don't think he ever thought he was ever going to fall on that thing. I think it's interesting to study the extreme sort of sport thing because even though most of us don't aspire to do those things. We can all learn certain aspects about how they approach it and how they're going about it. Piece of it. The misnomer about Alex Honnold is that he doesn't feel fear.

[A]

Please walk the world through this. This seems to be.

[B]

So he goes into FMRI and he's shown pictures of things that would trigger most people. And he has what's referred to as depressed amygdala function, meaning his brain isn't responding with the intensity. Therefore he's not afraid of what he.

[A]

He doesn't feel fear. He biologically has no ability to or a dampened ability to sense feel fear. Therefore these things are not hard for him cognitively.

[B]

Totally minimizes and dehumanizes what he, what he does.

[A]

It's also not academically true.

[B]

No, I know it's. Yeah, it's not true. It's crazy. That was interesting. I've been a little bit out of the extreme sport world in quite a bit of time and to be able to experience that from afar was actually really fun for me to do.

[A]

I mean your academic background as a scientist in this field as well as a clinician, you mentioned it briefly. But in case folks glossed over that you continue to work with some of the world's best athletes.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You've worked with extreme sport athletes. I think it was your first sabbatical where you looked at the surfers, big wave surfers. Again, I can't think of a better person to have this conversation with because while no one can play armchair psychologists, we certainly can. Say, what lessons have you learned again in the research? What have you published? Other scientists? And then again, what have you seen in that extreme? So kind of continuing on this theme, I would love to hear your insights on those folks you have worked with people that have jumped off of helicopters on big mountains and skied the whole thing down. Are they the same as Alex is supposedly true or not? Let's just say it's true. Who cares? Do they not feel fear? Like how does it actually happen when someone can do something as risk tolerant or intolerant as this? What the hell is actually happening to these people? Because I could never do that. There's no chance. I don't think I could. I don't. Can you train that? Maybe this is the question.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Is that a trainable skill or is Alex born that way? Are these people that surf Maverick, is that natural to them or is that something they trained into?

[B]

One of the things that struck me about working with that population is you Know the work that I do, I'm supposed to be an expert in, you know, mental skill and mental performance.

[A]

And it feels good for me to hear you say, an expert. Yeah.

[B]

Virtually none of those individuals who do that work with someone like me. They put hours and hours and hours into building it. I don't believe that anyone's born to be able to do what they do. I think they start small, they make a lot of mistakes, they learn from the best. The commitment to them being experts at what they do. I did a study in which I interviewed people who do these very extreme backcountry skiing and snowboarding, but they stopped taking the helicopters and they climbed. So now they have two aspects of it. They have the ascent, which is dangerous in and of itself, and they have the descent, which is dangerous in and

[A]

of itself as well as now you're really tired doing that descent when you're exhausted already as you climb the mountain.

[B]

They probably know as much about weather and big wave surfers know as much about oceanography as the people who have multiple PhDs who study those things. Like, that's the dedication that they, that they took to get to the level of studying the craft and doing what they do. So not only have they not done any formal training, most of them, and the mental side of it, I think it's just they have a desire to do it. I think one of the big misnomers is the risk piece. I think a lot of people assume that the thrill seeking is a big motivation for doing it. And it's very rarely why someone does these things is for the thrill of it, as a matter of fact. I mean, imagine being in a, in a airplane and having extreme turbulence. Who likes that? Who wants that? Who thinks, oh, this is why I want to fly, so I can experience thoughts that I might die. I don't think any of them have that or they probably wouldn't be doing it in the first place. And when I, when I first started to kind of figure out the motivation behind some of these individuals, I think that was an assumption. I didn't bring that in. But I think a lot of people, oh, they do it for the thrill seeking, they do it for the risk taking piece. And surprisingly, it's not that simple. And that's actually not why most of them do it. I think if you or I have a talent and we have a skill and it's something that we absolutely love to do and we have a passion for it, that's a driving force, not the notion that we may fail doing it and we may suffer these big consequences as a result of it. So that piece of it and being really aware of the confidence piece is a dangerous thing. The confidence piece for a basketball player shooting free throws is a dangerous thing. Imagine the confidence piece of someone who overthinks, links their ability in a moment and takes risks. As a matter of fact, the approach that we might take in a traditional sports setting with like being in the zone, right? Oh, yeah, I can't miss. So then keep going, don't stop.

[A]

Yeah, temperature checks, we call that. Right.

[B]

Ever think that you're in that state in one of those sports, you need to stop and get yourself out of that state because that's when you're going to make a mistake. That's when you're going to, you're going to make that. That one more that you shouldn't have done that might cost you. And so they're really good at regulating that notion of, okay, I'm feeling too confident here. Most athletes don't ever say, I'm feeling too confident right now. I think most athletes are like, they want to get in that state. But extreme sport athletes, actually, that's a very dangerous place for them to be. So the confidence piece is very different in that world than I have seen in most traditional sports that I work with.

[A]

Is there a way to identify are there tells when you're in that spot,

[B]

when you're getting away with things that you shouldn't have gotten away with, so you're cutting corners before you're really ready to do it and you knew, oh, I got away with that one. You're not going to get away with the next one doing it. I think that's a big telltale is they're honest with themselves about that one. Like, okay, I got lucky on that one. It's time for me to pull out. But what it looks like often in big wave surfing is they paddle back to the channel where there is no waves coming. So they can get themselves out of that and they can kind of like, okay, where am I with things? Let me regulate. Let me get back to like feeling the energy of the ocean and stuff. So I'm not just going to jump on the next wave that I can find and see if I can top the last one. I just did.

[A]

It felt like the, the crash was a big. The wipeout was a really big theme.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Why did that matter so much? And what were those elite servers doing to mitigate that issue of the wipeout?

[B]

They actually focused on what it would be like if it were to happen and they prepared for what they were going to do. They had a plan, virtually everything that we have some fear over and we worry about something happening. If we can just say, okay, if that happens, what's my plan going to be? And we believe in the plan. That's like a massive psychological safety net. And then that's what alleviates the fear. The fear will remain, but. And so the amount of time they spent visualizing they spend holding their breath, they spend becoming a lot more flexible and knowing how to position themselves and like visualizing that and getting into like smaller instances of that and that, okay, if this happens to me, this is how I'm going to handle it. This is, this is how I'm going to survive it. Once they have that down, then I think that it becomes less about the wipeout and more about the performance. On the Wave itself, perhaps, but that part absolutely has to happen first.

[A]

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[B]

the duration of the time I've been In this field 30 years, of all the mental skills that have been researched to be effective, visualization seems to be the one that keeps coming out on top. And so I've suggested it, I've worked with athletes on it, but it really actually hasn't been until more recently that I really, really truly understood how powerful it can be. So it starts at the why to your point of like visualizing the things you do well, there's very distinct uses of visualization. So you can visualize for confidence. And in that that's the case, you want to see yourself in moments where you're doing well. And when athletes are going for the first time into the Olympic Games or a world championship or an NCAA championship, I always say to them, like, imagine when you were a kid in your backyard and you were pretending like you were taking the two free throws to win the game, or you were at the baseball field pretending like you were the person at bat when it's bottom of the ninth inning, bases loaded, two outs, like you've always wanted to be in that moment. And so like visualizing yourself so that you can build that confidence, I think is traditionally one of the things that most people have used visualization for. Visualization can be for coping. Actually, some of the best uses of visualization is coping visualization, meaning you imagine what might go wrong and you imagine what you will do in that moment. When I work with teams, I usually I'll say, never reference the Navy SEALs because that's no one's going to be a Navy SEAL. And I don't like reading books where they reference the Navy SEALs.

[A]

It's like a chef cooking with bacon. Like a true chef is like, no, I'm not going to use it, I'm not going to use it.

[B]

It's a gimme nor. And I work with swimmers. I've been working with swimming a long time. Will I use Michael Phelps as an example? Because another, for another reason, like no one's going to be Michael Phelps. So however you have to use Michael Phelps when it comes to visualization, because that moment in the Beijing Olympics where his goggles filled up with water and he had eight gold medals riding on the line before you keep going.

[A]

Can you actually, like, actually tell that story? Because it is. It's remarkable. Yeah, just a little bit of context on that story. I don't want to.

[B]

2008, Michael Phelps is slated to swim eight events. The previous gold medal record was seven, set by Mark Spitz in 1972. And the big question of, could Michael Phelps break that record? His final event was the 200 butterfly, and he dove in the water and his goggles had come off of his face, and they filled with the water when they kind of reset themselves. And so he swam seven out of eight laps blind. And there's some lore about, like, what allowed him to prepare for that moment. There are stories of his coach, Bob Bauman, early in his career where he would remove his goggles and not allow him to swim with his goggles at a big race so that he could, you know, be in that moment where, okay, what if this happens? And he would visualize over and over again and count his strokes. And so we knew exactly what he needed to do. He didn't have to see it. He had done it so many times. He talks about, like, his cap ripping, and he can't wear someone else's cap because it has. It can't use something, so he's got to turn it inside out. And that wherewithal of being able to, like, think through that in the most stressful, he visualizes those things happening. So coping visualization is a really powerful one where we see ourselves in situations where we imagine what might happen. And then you learn and practice coping techniques and tools so that when you're in that situation, you've seen yourself and you've seen yourself doing it the right way. So that's. That's a huge part of visualization, is the coping piece, familiarization. So if you haven't yet done something and you're going to be in that. In that moment, you want to see yourself in advance for that. So if I work with the swimmer, I'll tell them, get to the pool, locate the ready room, which is where they sit, all eight athletes of the final before they get marched out and practice walking. And how long is the walk going to be? And where are the lights going to be? And I'll imagine that if I were to be nervous or afraid of being in a podcast, I would have come to this room without you. Knowing. And I would have looked in here and I would have seen the setup and then I would have went outside for a little bit and I would have imagined myself there without me being there. So it starts at the why with the visualization piece first. And then what you visualize has to be based on what it is that you want to get out of it. Is it to learn something that you haven't done before? Is it to modify something? I work with tennis players. They've literally taken millions of swings before they've come to college. And then they have to make a technical adjustment. And that has to not reverse, but like they're starting over basically as novices. Imagine having something that you do such a habit of and then having to make a technical adjustment. So the visualization with that would be the increase the mental reps of them doing it the right way. And so that would be a different form of visualization. Massive tool. Generally speaking, I don't want people doing visualization before they go to bed. I can't count the number of athletes where they'll be in their hotel room the night before a competition. They want to visualize that before they go to sleep and how they're not sleeping for the next two hours, because if they did it right, they're not going to be able to sleep. Their brain's engaged, two, aroused. They always want to have emotion as part of the visualization. Like that emotional piece is. May be more important than the visual piece of it. And so, like, you don't want to do it there. Visualization does not have to take a long time. The most powerful things to visualize are short, repeatable things that you can see over and over again. You can see it in different ways, and I think that's a big part of it. So, you know, most people, if they're in a good visualize something, they want to sit down for a moment first and say, okay, not just close your eyes and take a couple deep breaths and visualize. You need to know, okay, what do I want to get out of it? Those things I listed before, what do I want the visualization to do? And then based on that, what are a couple things that I want to visualize for this one session alone? Those are some of the big things is feeling what it's going to feel like. Athletes move and so they have to feel. I've been doing a lot more with using equipment or clothing while they visualize. It's going to sound really bizarre, but

[A]

the whole field is. So go ahead.

[B]

A goalkeeper is going to have their goalkeeper gloves when they visualize, or a surfer is going to be lying on their surfboard when they visualize. Because you're smelling wax. Sense of smell is such a powerful scent. And now you smell your wax when you're doing it. And that brings emotions that you get a sense of anxiousness and nervousness and excitement with that. Should you put your wetsuit on first and then lie on your surfboard to do it? Yes, there's some evidence that the closer you can get. And there's also a little bit of evidence, although it's a little bit sketchy, where we associate certain emotions with the clothing or uniforms that we wear. And so like that's another added component where if you can at all. I've mentioned swimming a couple times, have your tech suit on, have your goggles on, have your cap on. When you're doing it, you're feeling what you might feel in the moment.

[A]

I have several follow ups to that. Just real quick, when you say it doesn't have to be long are these 25 minute sessions give me a rough idea of generally how long you're thinking about a visualization session should be in terms of minutes.

[B]

I work with athletes whose time is of the essence and if they can give me full focus, 10 minutes of visualization, I think that's a huge win.

[A]

10 minutes daily, twice a day, once

[B]

a day, depends on how much time they have. I think more is better. But I think we all should also should put in context a little bit the athletes I work with today. Mostly I'm at Cal Berkeley. I work in our athletics department. I work with eight of our teams at Cal. That's my primary full time job. I'm still working with professional athletes on the side. But like my day to day work is with these student athletes.

[A]

Given the fact that you're at Berkeley, not football, that probably means you're dealing with level of athletes that are only Division 1, but they're usually very highly ranked nationally. Right. Your swim teams, your water polos. Like this is a very good sport at Berkeley.

[B]

I work mostly with our Olympic sports,

[A]

which are very good at Berkeley generally most of the time.

[B]

I think in Paris 2024 games, we had 54 current or former Cow Bears. And if you look at their medal totals, they would have been in the top 10 countries.

[A]

That's a better way to frame it.

[B]

This is a high level. And yet they are also attending classes at Cal Berkeley, one the premier academic institutions in the world. And so for me to ask them to take 10 minutes a day is a big ask, and I will not ask them to do it if I didn't believe that it was going to be a good investment for them.

[A]

So is that a general rule you want most of your people doing around, if you can, 10 minutes of visualization, Is that a pretty standard protocol for you guys?

[B]

Yeah. As you get into close to competitive, like NC2 as for our divers, or, you know, NC2A's for tennis or something, then probably want to ramp it up a little bit as you go into that, into the. Maybe a couple weeks out of it. But I mean, if you really do it right and do it well, if you can give yourself 10 minutes of visualization, I think it could change your entire performance.

[A]

Could you give me an example or a little bit of an understanding of how a non athlete could or would want to use visualization like this? If I can say, okay, 10 minutes a day, I'll give you that, but why would I even care about it? Or is this only for those trying

[B]

to win anything that we have to do to perform? You know, the field of sports psychology is more being referred to as performance psychology today because we've morphed into realms that were outside of the traditional sports setting, so performing arts and medicine and military. And so if you're taking an exam and you typically get really nervous before your exams, visualize yourself sitting at your desk before you receive the exam. What are you doing to cope with that? What do you do if you're still doing it in person? What are you doing when the professor comes over and hands out the exams? What kind of breathing are you doing? The first time you read over the first couple questions, what are you saying to yourself? How are you regulating yourself? If you have to do a presentation to a group at work and there's funding on the line for it, then you want to visualize what that performance might look like for you. One of the most nervous, the most nervous time I've ever been in my life. I had to officiate a wedding. Over 200 people in sign language. And the bride was deaf. This is going back 30 years. And there was a young girl on the team who was deaf. And she went from knowing me without knowing sign language one year to me coming home fluent in sign language. And then she reached out some 15 years after she had done, and she asked if I would officiate her wedding in sign language. And that was a massive, like, honor to do that. But I did not want to mess that up. So now I'm nervous. I'm in Long island. It's like 100 degrees outside. I'm wearing my suit. The amount of time I spent visualizing doing that performance in sign language was massive for me because it's like I'd already done it a hundred times before I stood up to do it. So pick a scenario in your life where you have something coming up that there's something on the line for it, and ask yourself, what might happen? What do I not want to happen? And see yourself cope through that. If it happens, what's your plan? Seeing exactly what you want to happen, happen. How are you going to feel when you do that? It's actually super, super powerful and a great way of practicing this. So when you and I were chatting before this, we were talking a little bit about sleep. And one of the sleep tools right now that's a big sleep tool, is sleep stories. And so we ruminate. We're lying in bed, we're thinking about tomorrow's competition, we're thinking about tomorrow's exam, we're thinking about tomorrow's job interview. And so our minds are racing. And so sleep stories are designed so that you can unhook from those thoughts and you can give your mind to something else. And the reason why they're so powerful is they create a lot of detail. So now you're trying to visualize what that story is, and now that leads to cognitive fatigue, which is going to make you fall asleep and you're no longer thinking about those things. And so while I do not think I would visualize a performance before I go to sleep, I would definitely tap into sleep stories as a way of, like, practicing vivid visualization. Because if you can imagine that train ride, by the way, I think those are the most popular sleep stories or train stories. If you can practice imagining that with detail, then you can practice imagining that performance and front of your board of directors or in front of your 8th grade class or something.

[A]

It's really funny you say that, because many years ago, I started writing down sleep tips for the athletes that I was working with. And one of the ones that I would use all the time is if you wake up and you have a racing mind, I would always say, the example I do is I go all the way back to 1995, and I try to remember the entire starting lineup of the Seattle Mariners. Right. Because I'm like, as a huge childhood memory. And one of the mistakes people make here is they try to turn their brain off.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

When this is happening. Right. And it does not work, I actually engage as Hard as I possibly can in a non stressful. When failure doesn't matter.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because you actually induce that cognitive fatigue and you're completely removing yourself from the thing that was probably keeping you awake. And I just started figuring out I go back to sleep immediately. Like when this happens. And you Fast forward probably 10 years and at absolute rest. Now we use these sleep stories and similar tools constantly. And I'm like, I nailed it. Like I was so ahead of the research. Like I figured this thing out. And there's a. It's really interesting how people do not associate the difference between turning your brain off.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And just turning it in a different direction. Right. And so you don't want to. If you lay there the entire time trying to think, turn off brain. Like, well, just expect to lay there for a long time telling your brain to turn. This is not going to work.

[B]

The term that's used for that is unhooking.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

I know some of you are listening to this right now, but imagine a hook in something and it's not going to let go of it. That's what rumination is. That's when we get into something in our mind that we can't let go of until we give it something else to be thinking about. That's what that did for you, is to go and just think about something entirely different or what the sleep stories are designed to do. So anyway, I know we're going to go on a lot of these long, long tangents back to the visualization piece. I just think it's such a powerful tool and trying to play with techniques like using equipment or clothing or uniforms or something to make it a little bit more real.

[A]

I have some questions about that tactic, but before we get there, I want to know if I'm doing some visualization. Do you have a rough sense of how often I should visualize what I'm just going to call the performance itself? So my technique, my strategy, the stuff I'm going to do, Right. I'm going to hit this part of my pitch and then I'm going to hit that part of the pitch and then I'm going to get to that part of the story. Whatever the things I'm trying to do and just remembering my own technique versus I forget how you called it, but the fear part of it, it's like, well, what if, what if goes wrong? How much time should I spend on the front side versus the backside or the performance side versus the failure?

[B]

Going into a session where you're going to be visualizing something very difficult. I would always start with what's easy and what you already have confidence in first. Like if I, if I meet with a team, how many of you visualize you doing something really well? About half the team kind of raises their hand. And what are the rest of you thinking about? Or the things I keep messing up?

[A]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

Definitely don't want to see yourself failing.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Some of this is not even visualizing the performance itself, and some of it's visualizing the lead up to the performance and what's your routine and what are you eating the morning of and what are you doing when you get dressed. And so some of it's not even the performance itself, it's just the lead up to it. Some of it is just a very small aspect of the performance that you just really want to nail. It's like it's all going to come down to this right here. And I really need to see myself doing that the right way and feeling it the right way over and over and over again. And then if you have the time, you can sort of link all those things, maybe start to finish a little bit together.

[A]

Today's episode is sponsored by eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, Sleep tracking, and more. I've personally been sleeping on an eight sleep mattress for more than three years now, and it's absolutely glorious. I love it so much that I hate traveling away from home because I can't sleep on my 8 sleep pod 5, as you'll hear me talk about endlessly on this podcast. There's really nothing you can do that makes more of an impact on your health and performance than getting a great night of sleep. And getting great sleep requires having your body temperature drop a couple of degrees at night, and that's hard to do on your own. The eight sleep has been a game changer for me because I run hot at night, or as my wife calls it, I'm a furnace. If I don't have something like an eight sleep helping me cool down, I'll wake up in the middle of the night overheating and not feeling great. This is something I've also found in many people that I coach, especially those who are really physically active. The Pod 5 is the latest generation of the eight sleep mattress covers, and it can go on any mattress, heats or cools each side of the bed from 55 to 110 degrees Fahrenheit and provides high fidelity sleep tracking. If you'd like to try 8 Sleep, go to 8sleep.com perform and use the code perform to save up to $350 off your pod 5 Ultra. You get 30 days to try it at home and return it. If you don't love it, but I'm confident that you will, I certainly love mine and would never consider returning it. Eight Sleep currently ships to the U.S. canada, the UK and select countries in the EU and even Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com perform and use the code perform to save up to $350. When you talked earlier about thinking about what can go wrong, how do you balance that with putting yourself in too much negative self talk? Right. So if I'm always sitting there thinking about all the things that go wrong, am I actually just harming my own confidence? Am I walking in and anticipating failure? How do I know if I'm there? And what does that process look like?

[B]

A really powerful way of doing it is to go back to something that you just failed at and then kind of recreate it again as soon as you can after, not immediately after, because you're too emotional. But you know somebody who, who dropped a really, really close match that they should have won, for example, or really had a bad performance. So go back and then try as much as possible to think about what you were thinking about when that was happening. What were you trying to do to cope? What was your self talk? What type of thoughts did you have? And now we can get a sense of do those help you or do they hurt you? It's not about it being negative self talk, it's about whether it's helping you or hurting you. So you start with that first, like go back, what was that thought process? What was that like for you? Okay, now let's do it differently. And now so what you're doing is you are not hiding behind the fact that this occurred or that it might happen again, but you're capitalizing on the fact that you've done it one time and now what would you do differently this time around? There's nothing wrong actually with seeing yourself failing something as long long as you're turning that into a better result next time it happens. Okay, so if you've been through it one time, recreate it as closely as possible. Be super aware of what you're doing, what you were saying, what you were thinking, how you were breathing. Try to recreate that. Okay, now let's make adjustments to that. And it almost writes itself. They usually don't need me for that piece of it, although it might help. I do, I do ask athletes a lot, like when you perform your best. Typically. Let's, let's write down a couple performances that you've done fairly recently that you've done really well. Now let's go back, let's go back to the morning of. Let's go back to right before. Let's. What were your behaviors? What were the things that you were thinking? And it's a great learning tool for them to be able to do that. And often they're thinking and doing things very differently than they were in moments in which they had a really poor performance sitting right there in front of them. So we want to tap into that and every single person, performer is different. And so it's like that's one of the first things I do if I work with an athlete or a team is I just always come from the fact that I've done this for a long time and the most successful people I've worked with, I'll do it differently. And if this, this super elite athlete says one negative thing to herself, then she's going to spiral the rest of the time. And this athlete over here, if they try to be positive with themselves and be a little bit of forgiving for themselves, spirals them in the opposite direction. So like we have to really, really study what makes us our best. And it's different for absolutely everybody. The negative thinking part can be a dangerous thing for a lot of people who have been taught that you shouldn't think negatively. And I think most people need to be a little bit more forgiving in performance spaces because the amount of pressure people put on themselves and the perfectionism that comes with elite performance is very, very strong. So yes, if I'm going to err on the side of one or the other, it's like, okay, be a little more forgiving of yourself. However, there are times where negative self talk is actually going to be the thing that's going to get you out of this state of darkness. We can get a lot into the soft talk piece. I think it's one of the another most powerful tools and I think it's more powerful than visualization in the context of in the moment that we're doing it. Because that's what you're thinking of in that moment.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's fair to say visualization is probably something you're going to do pre and post.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That you're not going to stop and think through.

[B]

I mean, firsthand before their shot. Of course, free throw, you know, basketball players can do it before they take this, a self initiated tack. Yet Task. Yes, but.

[A]

Well, you'll see this engulf every single shot. Yeah, you'll. In fact, if you pay attention to caddies, really common thing for a caddy to say is, okay, see it. Okay, feel it. You got the feeling like they won't even ask. Very rarely do they say things like, oh, you're at 97 meters. We gotta, you know, pitch it over. It's usually like, what's a shot? Yeah, we're gonna. You feel it? Do you see it? Nah, like it's not feeling right. And then I have them walk back the ball, readdress it. Okay, now I see the shot, and then they walk away. Caddies are really good about stopping, talking. Once they feel like they have the feeling of it, then they just shut up and walk away. This is one thing that I have seen you talk about a lot as well, is this coaching idea. So you've given us, I think, some great tools on visualization. But I would love to hear more on this self talk right now. And then I would love to get into this difference between literally self talk versus coaching. Right. So I'm either coaching or leading somebody else. How do I communicate with them to put them in the right spot? Well, let's start with the self. What other things should we be paying attention to with that self talk? How do we know if I'm doing too much negative self talk or too much positive? What does that all mean and how do we do it?

[B]

First thing I'm going to say is we should not be distinguishing categories of positive versus negative.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

It should be whether it's.

[A]

That's screwed up right about the gates.

[B]

It should be whether it's effective or not effective. That's the big thing.

[A]

Ah, because it can be negative but effective.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

And positive but ineffective.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Perfect.

[B]

So it's not about negative or positive. We'll take that off the table. It's. Is this effective for you or not effective for you? If you and I were to start, I would ask you to write down the names of two or three people in your life who you really admire, you really trust. You know they've got your back. They can look you in the eye and say anything to you. And you know, it's coming from a place of they want me to do. Well. Two out of those three are people you should know personally. One could be someone you so look up to in a field because of what they've accomplished, that you just have that much admiration and respect for what they've done. So I would start with, okay, let's identify two or three people who would be those individuals for you. I think it's really important first to start with those two or three people and then I'm going to ask you to think about a scenario that you might find yourself in that one of your best friends might be in. So something that you might find yourself in but have someone else in that scenario and they're struggling or they're stressed about it, or they're feeling anxious about it, or they're worried about it. What would you say to them? What would you say to them? So one of the most powerful aspects of self talk is psychological distancing. Psychological distancing is when we're in that moment emotionally and we want to create some distance from that and the place from which we're talking or listening to ourselves in our mind, we can create some distance and that usually comes with it being a lot more effective psychological distancing. So you've got first person self talk, which is I, the second person self talk, which is you, or your name, and then you've got third person self talk, which is a whole other person. And one thing that we found to be super effective is to come out of a place of the first person self talk, at least to a place of talking to yourself. Andy, when you said the difference between self talk and coaching, that's what came to my mind is you actually they're the same thing.

[A]

Interesting.

[B]

You should be coaching yourself. It's the same. That's what your self talk ought to be. Most of us actually are probably really, really good at. Your best friend's dealing with something. We know exactly what to say. Why? Because we're not in the emotion of it. And if we can practice self talk tools that distance ourselves from the I and what I'm feeling to the you, it can be a very, very, very powerful thing. If you go back to the names that you wrote down on the piece of paper and I want listeners to maybe pause for a moment and if you were to write down the list of two or three people who are really, really powerful in your life and then if you're in a situation that's bringing you stress or something, Imagine what one of those individuals would say to you and imagine it in their voice and them using your name to say it, it could be massively, massively powerful as the greatest psychological distance that we can get. Number one, it comes from not in a place of emotion, but number two, it comes from an authority who we trust and who we believe in. That person can be with you up on that building. If it's Alex Honnold or that surfboard, if it's a big wave surfer or that baseball pitcher who just, you know, walk the last three batters and thinks he's about to get pulled like imagine going to that person in your mind. The self talk piece is so, so powerful. There's some evidence that what we're thinking is a bigger predictor of our confidence than anything else. What we're thinking in the moment is a bigger predictor of confidence than any other thing that could have brought us confidence. There's some evidence that what we're thinking in the moment is a bigger predictor of our happiness than any other factor. Money in the bank, who we're with. It's powerful those, those type of thoughts. So do a lot of work first reflecting on when we're in our performance environments what are the type of things that we say to ourself and not as a positive or negative but does that help me, does that hurt me and why? A lot of reflection of that and then learning some of these tools where we can start to separate ourselves from our own voice and bring in either coaching ourselves or talking to ourselves. If you have a nickname for yourself, use that nickname. My nickname has been Lindog since I was a kid. Everywhere I've ever moved to people have called me Lindog without knowing that the other groups of people in my life have said that. So if I'm stressed I'm going to refer to myself as Lundog in my mind because actually really focuses me and it really gets me super like oh yeah, that's right, I'm Lundog.

[A]

That was an incredible, incredible tip. I can tell you right now. I'm going to start using that I am someone and it doesn't matter that it's about me, but I am someone who really enjoys. Well, I'll just call negative feedback at this point. Actually it doesn't really get me emotionally in the wrong spot. It's a very positive thing. I really enjoy breaking down. It's effective feedback, super effective. But I've never thought about using that second person approach which again I'll tell you right now that I'm going to do that. That's incredible. I'm going to start using that coaching wise as well. Is it because it allows you to detach a little bit from the situation and it's no longer about you and you and self worth or anything like that. It is simply an objective assessment of what needs to happen so it isn't as hard to take. Is that a fair kind of Andy way to say that?

[B]

Yeah. The first person is very reactive.

[A]

See, I said Andy right there, by the way.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

See, already working. Yeah.

[B]

Do you have a nickname that would have been even?

[A]

No. Andy would be good. Ask my daughter. You'll get a different answer.

[B]

So part of it is because if we are just letting thoughts come passively, which is what happens, a lot of our thoughts are very passive reactive emotional thoughts. Most of those fall under the category of ineffective. Whether they're positive or negative, they probably do. So bringing that distance perspective, that self talk perspective, reduces some of the emotion associated with. Also, if I'm the person dealing with something and you have an opportunity to say something to me, you're not going to beat me up over it. You're not going to say anything that you think the intention is to make me any worse or feel worse about what. So we're actually really good about doing that. The exercise of writing down the names first, number one, number two. I did this in a class recently at Berkeley. I had a chance to be in the classroom for the first time in a long time.

[A]

Yeah, you're retired. For the record, people retired.

[B]

And it was in a class, not it was an entrepreneur class. And I would ask these students at Cal, think of scenarios that you find yourself in over the course of a semester that are very challenging for you. Now write down the name of a really good friend who you also know are in those scenarios. So a teammate or whatever. And then when they're in it and they shoot you a text and they express the negative emotion they're feeling, what's your response to them? You know exactly what you need to say. So use that with yourself a lot more often. Very, very powerful tool if you're looking for a good reference on it. Ethan Cross, he's at University of Michigan, he's wrote a book called Chatter. And it's one of the books that I loan out to athletes a lot. And I usually don't loan out books for some context at Fullerton, before I retired from Fullerton, I had a floor to ceiling bookshelf full of books. And when I moved, I donated a lot to the lab and I gave a lot away. But I only brought the books I really wanted to keep. And then in my office, I have very little space. I have two small rows of books. So anything in that bookshelf precious real estate? Yeah, Chatter is one of them.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

And I have two copies of the same book. The Inner Game of Tennis, written by Timothy Galway. In 1977 it was the first book I ever read that was anything having to do with sports psych. It's remarkable. I have the original and I have the updated version of it. So anyway, we're getting off a little tangent. No Chatter is one of those books that give really good insight and sort of like exercises on how to hone that craft of self talk.

[A]

Great, that's amazing. Thank you for that resource. Is there any evidence, scientific evidence or have you just seen it from your practical experience on when people use that second person approach, do they tend to be gentler on themselves? Do they tend to be more fair? I'm only saying this because in the sense that when you talk to yourself sometimes there is ineffective and negative self talk. Right? When you switch is that lightened a little bit? Does that tend to be more effective in the sense because we're not making it about ourselves per se as in like you're a bad or person. It's more about the task at hand or is that not been shown?

[B]

It will be a lot more forgiving. It will be a lot more from the place of you're fine, you're making this worse than it really is. It can actually be more forceful in some ways. But like Andy, that's not the Andy I used to know. You're so much tougher than that Andy. Come on dude, I know you. I know you. You're going to get through this. You're going to be fine. So sit up a little straighter and you know that it could be actually a little bit more forceful, very powerful and it again comes from a place of positive intent. There's actually been a lot of research on these different self talk perspectives and that distance self talk perspective virtually always comes out as a more effective way of communicating with ourselves.

[A]

Is that second person talk something one would do before the event or best in the event after or all three?

[B]

It's in the moment. Yeah, it's usually most powerful when you're in the moment of what it is that you're doing. Instead of measuring heart rate, I would have loved to somehow measure what Alex Honnold was saying to himself on that thing. If we're going to refer back to that, that internal dialogue that he had, I don't know if anybody could guess what it would have been like. But it's the most fascinating thing. If I could get a transcript of his thoughts and then could we learn how to use that same tool with ourselves? That to me is just would be amazing.

[A]

Well maybe Lenny, he's just Gotten really comfortable being uncomfortable.

[B]

Is this the time for a break? I think we should break now because I'm going to go break something.

[A]

I warned you I was going to go here, and I had to go here.

[B]

So you and I are so much more on the same page than you ever thought you ever would be.

[A]

Don't you dare accuse me of that.

[B]

The phrase being comfortable, being uncomfortable is. Oh, my goodness. I don't even know where to start with that. And I have to be careful because actually a lot of trusted colleagues of mine use it regularly. And while I might joke with them about, like, it's impossible, semantically, it's impossible, it's impossible. No, be warm when you're cold. No, I'm cold. No, be warm. I'm cold. Be comfortable. And I get the larger sense of it is like, try to be less uncomfortable. That's the thing. Try to be less uncomfortable. That's really what the phrase should be.

[A]

But if you're listening at home, this is what academics do. This is what we do with our time.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Most of research is this.

[B]

But you actually should embrace being more uncomfortable and not want to be comfortable. That's the secret to success. That's just what it comes down to. Forget about being comfortable. It's not going to happen. You don't want it to happen. Let's not make that a thing.

[A]

My friend Ken Rideout has a book coming out, and I think the title of it is everything you want is on the other side of hard. I actually. I just got a copy. I haven't read it yet, but it sounds like a similar kind of approach where very much Ken's, I'll say life philosophy for Ken is just like, get rid of this idea of. Of being comfortable. It works for Ken. But I got a feeling most people are like, what? I'm not doing that right. What's realistic for people to take out of an idea? Like, get rid of the idea of being comfortable. Like, what's realistic of this?

[B]

I work with endurance athletes a lot, and they often bring up how something hurts. And obviously, I mean, that's the nature of what they do and they want to be comfortable or some. And it's like, okay, number one, you can't do that. I think of a 200 breaststroker who's swimming in that last push off the wall. Your lungs are on fire. But that's what you have to feel if you're going to set the world record. Like, you're going to set the world record comfortably. You're going to qualify for NCAA NC2 as comfortably. Take that off the table there. If we have an expectation that we should be something and we're not, that's where it brings us stress. I want to be comfortable and I'm not, therefore I'm stressed. Well, it's not because you're uncomfortable. It's because you have this expectation that's not very real. And we have to let go of some of those things before actually I'd be interested in reading that book. Everything wasn't. Everything we do is on the other side of heart is that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, since you and I both did this last time, we both made pretty big decisions in our life. In my life, stability has always been one of the most important things for me. I love stability. I'm very predictable, I'm very habitual. I know exactly what I'm going to have for breakfast tomorrow morning. I know when I'm going to have it. I know where I'm going. That's how I operate in my life. When I made the decision to leave a tenured position at Fullerton to go into the unknown, it was the scariest thing I've ever freaking done. And yet it got me to a place that I've probably never been happier in my life. It's just a little bit of a kind of. I just reflect on that a lot. Like had I not had gone through that period of time, the absolute discomfort of letting go of a tenured position to go into something unknown. And I found myself, this is a total aside, but I found myself going from a tenured academic position to working in esports.

[A]

Yeah, I forgot that.

[B]

Yeah. 16 year old multimillionaires who don't care about performance psychology, they don't care about warming up before, they just want to grind. So I went from a very traditional structured environment to esports. And then six months after I was in this field, leaving a job of 20 plus years with a tenure position, the whole industry tanks and I found myself looking for a job in six months after I had a job forever. I would have had that job forever. And not one time did I ever regret that decision. Yet another time where I was like, I got to figure out my life now, what the hell is that going to look like for me? But you got to bet on yourself. That's such a cliche thing. But I remember very specifically being in our with our Rocket League team during scrims for world championship. And I knew after that competition was over, I was likely going to be looking for another job and I know what it was going to do. And the phrase I kept saying to myself, just freaking bet on yourself. We mentioned earlier, and I don't know if you want to get into this. The confidence piece. Yeah. And confidence versus belief. Confidence has been considered to be maybe the most important factor of success in performance settings and certainly in sports settings, is the confidence piece. The longer I've been in this field, it's the most complex piece as well. The confidence piece is fleeting. It changes sometimes moment to moment. If we rely on being confident to do well, we're screwed most of the time before, we will all have done the greatest thing that we'll ever do in our life. The moment before, we likely were not that confident in our ability to do it. It's just such a wild thing. And throughout my career, I've been trying to land on like, how do you address the confidence piece with athletes, all of whom have been told their whole lives, gotta be confident. Only the confident athletes win. Well, they don't feel like that most of the time. When you're. When you're at a level where you are one of the best in the world and you gotta go up against the other best in the world, like, nothing about that feels. Feels good. So I differentiate the notion of confidence, which I see as a very fleeting thing, it could change a lot with belief. Belief is a very foundational, structured thing. When I say bet on yourself, that's belief. So with athletes, I spend a lot of time trying to distinguishing, do you believe versus do you feel confident? You're an outdoors person. Did you fish much growing up?

[A]

A little bit.

[B]

Imagine, let's imagine you, you loved to fish, and there was like a lake somewhere that you lived at and your grandfather would take you out.

[A]

All those things are true, by the way.

[B]

Okay, so put yourself back in this boat with your grandfather. And your grandfather not only took you out to fishing, he wanted to teach you the craft of fishing. He wanted to teach you the art. And so this place where he would take you to go fish, he'd explain exactly why and where at certain different times of the day, you'd want to go to this part of the lake, or you wanted to go to place this part of the lake, or you wanted to go to this part of the lake. And there was one part of the lake that he explained to you exactly why this is where is the best chance you're going to get a fish. And some days you go out there and the water is crystal clear and you can actually see the fish. And so you throw your line out and you wait. Well, when you see the fish there those, that's the day that you're confident. Like I see it, I feel it. But some days the water's murky and you can't see the fish, but you throw your line out anyways because you knew exactly why, you knew what your grandfather told you, you knew when it did happen. And even though you couldn't see them, you knew they were there. That's belief. And athletes spend too much time, oh, I can see it or I can't see it. And that dictates their sense of belief for themselves. But belief is much more underlying and much more consistent and takes a lot longer to build and to also break down than just the general notion of confidence. Confidence in big moments and pressure moments. The source of that confidence for most people is the recency. How do I feel right now? How was my last time I was here? Like the recency piece. Momentum is the biggest thing and it's great when the recent stuff has been great and you woke up a full night of sleep and you ate exactly what you wanted to sleep. When you feel great and warm up is great. And then, oh, I see the fish, I'm going to throw my line. But like most performance happens when that water is murky. And so we have to zoom out from just what's our source of confidence or our belief in the moment. Is it just the most recent things that we're feeling or our last performance or the warmup I just had, or how I'm feeling in the moment? Or is it me really, really being very proactive with building all the different sources of confidence that I'm might be able to have for myself? The term in the field right now is called robust confidence. Robust meaning it's very hard to break. It withstands a lot. Robust confidence is you don't take your confidence from a single source. You take your confidence from a variety of sources. For athletes, this is your physical performance. For athletes, this is the mental. The time they put in with the mental side of their performance is a source of confidence. For athletes, it's the hours of self care that they put in away from their sport environment to recover and to prepare. Most elite athletes I've worked with who have been the most successful have nailed the self care piece. They're doing all the check boxes of what they have to do both in recovery and preparation away from their sport environment. If they're a swimmer, it's what they're doing in the training room. It's what they're doing in their dorm room at night, they're rolling out, they're stretching, they're taking the supplements, they're doing the visualization. Like that self care piece for those elite athletes. Well, you can't take that away. No matter how I feel, a warmup does not take all that stuff away. And I tell athletes at the elite level, your job is to build your confidence. That's your job. Spend a lot of time knowing where that confidence come from. And then in competitive moments, your job is, is to fight for it and not allow it to be swayed by one thing that happened more recently to us. So robust confidence and having confidence come from multiple sources. Those that we typically don't consider, the type of feedback we're getting, this type of social support we have are all ways that might enable an athlete to not put so much weight into. This is how I feel right now. This is how my last performance was.

[A]

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[B]

Maybe it's here, maybe it's not.

[A]

And it is a drug beyond all drug. When you have it right, you just

[B]

like it feels great.

[A]

But then when you don't have it, you're toast. If you don't have exactly discipline. Right. This is very similar to what I was going to ask a second ago regarding I believe you. I got to get better at just not expecting comfort. Fine. I have a almost identical question. I think it's going to be the same answer if I believe you. Belief is more effective than confidence here or even robust confidence is more effective. What actual things have you used? Whether this is practices or tools or strategies to help people gain that. I believe you. But now what do I actually do to build this up?

[B]

One of them is to make sure that we know there's a distinction between feeling confident and being nervous. The underlying piece of the performance anxiety and the being nervous. And to have those expectations and pressure.

[A]

If I put a heart rate monitor on you, I couldn't tell.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But you can.

[B]

We have to make sure that we understand those are two very different things. You can be extremely nervous in the moment and you can be extremely confident at the same time. And when I'd like. One of my very first meetings at Cal was with one of our men's rowers and he was on the team the previous year before I got there, that won the national championship and was in the varsity boat that won the national championship race. And he talked about being nervous. And I said, go Back to last June 1st, the morning of the IRA final. Talk me through that. He felt nauseous, he couldn't eat. He super nervous. What happened? Obi Wan? Being able to piece together, you can most certainly feel nervous in the moment. You can most certainly even at times confuse that with the state of readiness, which you really shouldn't do that. But the first piece of it is I can be confident and I can be nervous at the same time. And when you sort of make that an understanding, then the confidence piece is a lot easier to hold onto. When we're feeling those nerves, when we're feeling that discomfort, that that part absolutely has to. Has to be done first. Otherwise, if we include the same, you're going to be nervous beforehand. You're going to be. And you could be nervous and you could be confident at the same time. That's a big thing. I also. And you know, different athletes do it different ways. But if athletes can somehow in some form be really proactive with writing down things that they've done or experienced that lead to confidence and then in moments where they forgot about Those things, they pull that out, right? There was an athlete at Cal, very successful athlete, who kept on her desk a confidence jar. And she'd go home and she'd just write something down on a little piece of paper and put it in something she did well that day in practice or something she accomplished she didn't think she should or something she was disciplined about. When she didn't feel like it, she just. And then when she got these big competitions, she just poured that out and start reading over them. And it's like we forget about those things because the recency effect. I feel stressed right now.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But look at the months and months that you've done with this work. I do have different athletes who sort of are amenable to this kind of journal. Yeah. I'll give a very, very great technique. It's called 3, 2, 1. And you can spread it out however you want to spread it out. But imagine you're a performer here, an athlete, or in your job Sunday night, for example. Three things that you did well or that you are proud of or that built confidence for you over the last week. Two things that you struggle with, fell short on, messed up, you know, failed. And then one, focus moving forward. Three things you did well, two things you messed up on. What's your focus moving forward? But record them. And when you do that long enough, you're going to start to see trends. And if you do long enough of the. I'm going to really think about the things that bring me confidence. What kind of car do you drive?

[A]

Me?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Rivian truck.

[B]

A Rivian?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

If you and I are driving in the Uber, as we did here, and Rivian passes us, you would notice that and I would not notice that. Of course, it's your truck. You're primed to see that. I don't see it at all. But if a Mazda CX5 drives, especially if it's a bright red color, I register for that because that's what I'm looking for. I associate something with that. And athletes who spend a lot of time reflecting on those sources of confidence for themselves throughout a long training cycle, it becomes more like the Rivian. Oh, there it is. There it is. There it is. Now, people who are overly negative and beat themselves up, that practice is not going to turn that away in two weeks. You've got to do that for a long time. You've got to be committed to doing that for a long time because your mindset took a long time. It's not like the settings on a phone where you can just change it. And now all of a sudden, now this message goes to do not disturb our mindset. The settings of our brain take a long time to do so. Another part of building the confidence is putting the time in to find it on a pretty regular basis.

[A]

I would assume you're going to say you prefer, if not require this to be physically written down rather than just say mental exercise. Yeah, yeah, got to write it down. Pretty much a renowned statement for folks on your side of the world. You're not just going to do a mental exercise. It's got to be on a piece

[B]

of paper or on a phone and a note or some, some form. It's got to be, it's got to

[A]

get out of your brain. Yes, the 3, 2, 1 is really I like about what I like about it is many things. But one of them that popped up to me immediately was first of all, you're acknowledging good and bad. Yeah, but you're waiting good. You're doing three, not two. I don't know if that was on purpose or total accident, but that seems even if someone is struggling with confidence, you're going to spend more time thinking about good than you are bad. But you're going to acknowledge both. And then again, I'm sure this is all intentional, but the one is an action. So even after you hit those negatives, you walk from those negatives with a step moving forward, which is great, like so good.

[B]

The first two parts of that three, two are reflective and then the one is the intent. The intent that's moving forward from that.

[A]

And so what your car analogy was for folks that maybe are not self aware, they don't have a lot of reflective innate skills or practices is not natural to them. By doing that, you will start to see those patterns of positive or negative or whatever they happen to be. Some people are already naturally good at that stuff. Some people are very dull in that sense.

[B]

Right.

[A]

It's like no connection to yourself. But by doing this, you'll start to see those patterns and then you'll start to see things that are themes that are popping up over and over again. And so by doing that, that can build that confidence that could find that confidence. Is that how you build the belief? Or is that a different thing? Or how do we get from that confidence to the belief?

[B]

Ultimately that will turn into an underlying belief. Because one thing that tends to happen then is that those confidence pieces that we found also then turn into forms of self talk. We now recite those things to ourselves. We never write those things to ourselves. And what that's going to do then is it's going to be more effective for us in the moment to have that belief. The reflection process, when it comes to belief is super important. I think sometimes athletes feel like Sisyphus pushing the rock up that giant mountain every single day. And they have to kind of, I got to do it again. In that moment, they can, could. They could lose those moments of joy and they can lose those moments of things that are really working well for them. That feedback that coaches often give focus on the things that they need to do differently. I think coaches do reinforce the positive things. But a coach's job is to point out areas that an athlete can get better so they get that kind of source of, oh, I got to focus on doing that better, do that differently. But internally now they can start focusing on some of the more confident things.

[A]

You mentioned a tactic there of writing these things down, filling up a jar. So when you're lost your confidence or you're whatever, you can pull it back up. What about the opposite, folks that are overly confident.

[B]

I've heard people in my field say they've never ever heard of an athlete who's overconfident. They just have never heard of it before.

[A]

They've never heard or they've never really seen it. They don't believe it's something misplaced or.

[B]

Yeah, there's no such thing as too much confidence.

[A]

What is that really then?

[B]

The way that I see it play out is you start cutting corners.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

You start. This is when upsets happen.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

What's the opposite of underdog? When someone is the expected winner of something, they'd also favor like that the favor. They also prepare like that. And that's where I believe overconfidence plays out with. I just thought I had it and I didn't do the things I needed to. That got me here in the first place and that bit me in the ass. And so now that that could be considered in my mind a case of someone being overconfident because they in fact didn't do all the things they needed to do. I think I would want that person to be really self honest. I don't want to necessarily have them be less confident. I don't want to go from a place like that. But you need to be in a place of honesty and you need to have people in your life who are going to be able to tell you what you need to hear. If you're thinking about yourself, you being in that boat of I'm not Gonna, you know, I'm not gonna lack confidence. There are going to be times where you need people who you trust, maybe the people you run on that list to say, you know, you're actually not that good at that as you thought you were.

[A]

Oh, I, trust me, I got someone that my house that does it every

[B]

day and do that. Oh, yeah, that's a necessary thing. Like, I know you think that about yourself. However, we all need that in our lives. For somebody who can point out like that actually is more of a decrement than you think it might be. And if you don't change that, then it's going to come back and potentially bite you. The reason I think it's very rare to have that happen is because I think most of us come from a place of when we perform, we do something that we really care about. And when we care about something, we see the potential of us not doing well as a threat. And that threat is what leads to the anxiousness for us. And that anxiousness is what's going to potentially rattle our confidence. And so I think in most very, very high performance settings, I think it's probably rare to see someone who's overconfident, so to speak.

[A]

Got it. How do you think about confidence, belief versus resilience?

[B]

Well, they're different things, right? I think you can probably be resilient at times and not be terribly confident, but you don't really have much of a choice. I'm going to push through this. I'm going to the piece with the resilience piece that I think we forget about is the passion piece. Like whether we're confident or not. In a moment, if we're dealing with something that we're passionate about, that passion is what's going to make us resilience. That's Angela Duckworth's grit, is that we forget about. It's not just working hard through things. It's that's you have passion for the goals that you're pursuing and the passion's there even when the confidence is not there. So you can be resilient in the presence of pursuing that even when you're experiencing setbacks and even when you don't necessarily feel confident in the moment to be able to do that. That's how I kind of see those mental toughness.

[A]

So when I think about confidence, when I think about belief as you're describing them, I think, okay, my belief is there. I built that. That's a long term system that you put into me. So now that's not going to waver. Confidence is going to go up and down based upon things like if I lack mental toughness, I might lose my confidence. If I'm down in my score, if I screwed something up, if I get physically tired, I feel like this is how a lot of people represent mental toughness. And whether those are actually connected or not or that's the right terminology, I'm not exactly sure. So that. That one be great to hear that clarified. But is that something that is underpinning this wavering confidence, or are those in fact separate things as well?

[B]

Mental toughness generally is framed as a person's ability to perform their best under any circumstance. And so you're getting into a little bit about the resilience piece because I need to be able to be my best when the weather is not favorable or something unexpected happens to me or something happens with the equipment that I've relied on and now I have to use a different tennis racket or. Mental toughness is one's ability to perform at their best regardless of the conditions. Now, confidence is obviously going to be a big piece of that, but coping skills is another big piece of the mental toughness piece. Meaning I wish something was the way it was. It's not. And what do I want to do with that? Part of it is a level of acceptance. Like some. Some of this stuff is just I can't control it, I can't change it. So I'm gonna just accept the circumstance that I'm in. And when I accept it, it takes a lot of the power off of it. That's a form of coping tool. So in those moments when we're dealing with adversity, which is what we typically associate with resilience, some of it could be the confidence piece, but other piece of it can be other coping tools that we've learned when we're experiencing that to be able to perform while those things are happening. You mentioned earlier, I think the emotion piece, and I think when I think of coping strategies and mental toughness, I think the emotional regulation piece is a really, really, really massive part of it. And I think this is maybe where that comes in. So I'm dealing with something and something occurs that registers into me, some emotion. I think from a mental performance perspective, a psychological perspective, the emotional regulation piece in performance environments is you can't get away. If I were to use in the sports that I work with, one word that describes a sport the most, I would say emotional. Tennis is more emotional than anything else. I think it's why people watch sports. I Think it's why people play sports. It's why if you already knew the result of the NFC Championship Game, watching it would mean something entirely different than watching it without knowing.

[A]

I can't watch games ever. Like the recorded games. I can't do it.

[B]

No, it's zero chance. There's nothing for you. There's no what? There's no emotion with that. Why not? Because you know the result of it. So that's going to come with sports is the emotional piece. And in the work that I do with athletes, that has changed a lot from, I think, earlier in my career, the term emotional control and being able to control our emotions was one of the kind of, like, prominent ways of like, oh, well, if you're nervous, then control that. Don't be nervous. Or if you made a mistake and you're frustrated, then just don't be frustrated. Just control that emotion. I think the science behind it right now does not look at it as a form of controlling emotions, so much as regulating ourselves when we experience emotions. Just like I mentioned about self talk, about the danger of distinguishing positive versus negative self talk, I also think what's really helpful when we want to regulate our emotions is also not see an emotion as being a positive or negative thing. We generally, all of us. Well, first of all, most people, if they were asked to name emotions, they could probably list about 10.

[A]

Yeah, sure.

[B]

There's hundreds.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

There's hundreds of emotions. Right.

[A]

Whatever ones were in the movie, I could get that far.

[B]

That's. Or part two, even. And so then when we do that, we tend to distinguish, oh, that's a positive or a negative emotion. And that's where we get into the whole control thing is, well, if it's a negative emotion, we can't have that. Every emotion serves a purpose. And when I'm experiencing an emotion, I have to first be able to label it. The emotion is first. And then I have to understand why that emotion exists. And when I know why an emotion exists, I'm not so worried about fighting it anymore because I know it serves a purpose. Okay, a great example is like, you know, regret. You say something and it hurts somebody and you realize that, and then you experience regret. Regret is not a pleasant emotion to experience, but we have it because the next time we're in that environment, we're less likely to hurt the person that we didn't intend to hurt. So that's why we feel regret. And so when I feel it, I know why I feel it, and I can manage that response a little Bit better. So I think what's really important with emotions. There's a great recent book out called Dealing with Feelings. I hate the title of it. Mark Brackett is the author. Like, I would have went with a different name, but this book about, like, it's never the emotion that we experience that's gonna have any impact on our lives whatsoever. It's how we respond to that. It's what we do next.

[A]

The labeling of it and very powerful thing.

[B]

It's like someone cuts you off and you get upset about it. That's never what's going to change your day. It's you flipping the guy off and he flipping you off. And now the two of you stop and one of you gets out of the car. Next thing you know, someone's in jail. And that was the thing that ruined your life, not the fact that you got angry over happening. So I do a lot of like. Like the labeling piece with athletes is like, when you experience that, what emotion did you feel? And then we kind of get through. Why do you think you experience that? And so the emotional control pieces is pretty huge. You can. You can perform successfully and effectively in the presence of any emotion. The big piece of it after the labeling piece is to just say, all right, that's what it is. And controlling. It's not going to do anything for you. Often it's just, okay, that's why I'm feeling this. What do I want to do with that? What's next? For me, it's that next. What's next piece. So I'm going to have the reaction. It's going to last a few seconds. Then I have to stop. I got to take a breath for a moment. All right, now what? Now what I want to do. And then the emotion has no power whatsoever. Now when you're very emotional environments and your coach is emotional and the fans are emotional and your teammates are emotional, that can be difficult to do, but it actually gives you a massive, massive power. Another piece with the emotional piece has been really, really, I think, pronounced recently is. This notion of how we experience emotions in the presence of other people's emotions is called co regulation.

[A]

This is similar to, like mirror, mirror

[B]

neurons or sort at the neurological level. If you were to drink whiskey or wine, it would taste better. When you did it with someone you liked, it would taste better. Movies are more powerful when you watch them with people you like versus when you're watching them yourself. Music, when you listen to music with other people is far more emotional than when you listen to a song by Yourself. It's a great starting point to understand co regulation, or what's also referred to as emotional contagion, meaning what I'm experiencing emotionally is very easily caught. And when I work in very high pressure situations, which I do, I need to know what emotion is that athlete sitting in my office feeling and then how do I want to co regulate that? Sometimes use the phrase mirror. I think you were referring to mirror neurons.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

Sometimes I want to match that person's emotion because it validates it. And I need to know if they're feeling sad, when should I also have a reaction that's sad. What does that help them to do? I also need to know maybe when I need to exhibit a different emotion for them, they're feeling really, really afraid of something. Maybe I need to bump up the confidence piece or the excitement piece or something. So the co regulation thing is a massive thing when it comes to human relationship. Coaches have a massive responsibility with the COPE regulation piece in competitive sports because, number one, they're the adult in the room. Literally, they've been there, they've done that usually. And they walk into a locker room and locker rooms are very emotional places. And the first thing a coach needs to do is read the room. It's halftime, we're down two goals. Is the team not taking it seriously? Are they too light? If that's the case, they need to up the intensity to bring focus in the players. The players are too low, they're too negative with each other. The coach is going to need to do something that's a lot more positive in that moment to kind of co regulate that environment. It's a massive tool and places of work, like just seeing a coworker, seeing your spouse exhibit some emotion and knowing what you can do in that moment to help them regulate that emotion a little bit better. Whether it be mirroring that emotion with them or trying to counter that emotion with itself. And I think that's the new frontier of emotion regulation because we work, humans work in relationship to each other. That co regulation piece is a very exciting new kind of area that I'm interested in.

[A]

I'm gonna ask you, for you to put your coaching hat on and I'm gonna give you a scenario and I want you to coach me through this. And this scenario is gonna make your stomach turn.

[B]

Awesome.

[A]

Yesterday, the NFC championship game, and there was a play with one of the players, Tariq Wallen, the corner. And the end of the game, the Seahawks, his team got a big stop. Almost surely we're going to win the game because of this. After the play is over, he's basically on the other team's bench, trash talking, gets a flag. So the Rams get to keep the ball. And the game ended up coming out of the wire because of it. Well, right after that flag happened, the very next play, the Rams throw a pass right at him. They score a touchdown on him. So you went from giving the team the ball back to giving them seven points. The entire stadium went from about 115 decibels positive to booing. And the whole planet, I'm sure Enrique Wolin's brain was hating him in that moment. If you were Reek himself, and then I want to ask you if you were a coach or someone on the sidelines, I have no idea what happened. Turns out the Seahawks still won. Great. That's amazing. That's the most important part of the story. Seahawks still won the game. After that flag, you all can hopefully empathize with what he was feeling. You know, one was mad at you. His team's literally yelling at him. You saw images of his team there and you don't know what they're saying. They could have been saying, you're the man, we love you. Like, you don't know that they're saying negative stuff to him.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

But the most predictable thing ever on that next play was like, they're going to go right at this guy. And now, in fairness, the guy that scored a touchdown on him is one of the best players in the whole league. So that could happen on any play. So I don't even know if what I'm trying to walk away from is the assumption that this was all negative. I don't know.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

But what would you have said after that Flag? Knowing something inside is going to be happening right now, you just let the team down on a really bad decision. What are their phrases? Are there sayings? If you were Reek himself in that second person, Reek. What kind of things would you be saying to yourself? And then as a coach, would be my second question.

[B]

Number one, move on, the game's not over. His doing that was a great indication that he was thinking ahead and that he was using his emotional response to predict the future and to rub it in and to do whatever it is that he wanted, wanted to do.

[A]

So after the play, he thought the game basically was over and he. He let. He probably let himself go too far.

[B]

Yes. That he added the emotional reaction of being excited about it. His response then was the future. That's right. And then his response was to do it Led to that occurring. In all fairness, I did not watch that play. I had a very hard time watching most of that game.

[A]

We'll leave out why. We'll leave out why.

[B]

I'm a big Niners fan and yeah, I was still reeling from that.

[A]

You're at a 15 year joke friend.

[B]

In the moment. The most important thing for him because he has gone go back on the, on the field. Yeah.

[A]

Like the very next play.

[B]

Not to judge him, not to shame him, not to do whatever it's move on, we're in the game next play. That's the only thing I could have ever said to that guy in that moment. It's not to try and counsel him out of it. It's not to get him to apologize. Nothing but.

[A]

So his self talk should have been reek. That didn't matter. Like next, what's the next stop?

[B]

We got to make a stop. It's the only thing that I'm trying to do is to get him to come back to the present moment. Now he's going to probably. I don't know what his next step is going to be with the team or I don't know what. But he's going to have to learn from that. But in that particular moment right now, I needed to come back to the now and like you got to go make a stop right now. That's enough.

[A]

Before we go on to the coach on the couch, my brother said he's going to make a mistake trying to make up for that. So you have this one thing of like lack of confidence right there. And then you have the. Probably what many competitors would do would be to go too far, of course. And what they end up doing is they run on what's called a double route. Basically, like fake one way, then go the other because he was being so aggressive. To make the play, move on to the next play would make sense to me that that would stop the negative self talk. How do you make sure you don't press and go too far? Right. How do you stay present in the next play without being like, you have to make up for this right now.

[B]

So he needs to be directed. He's got to regulate his physiology in the moment. Immediately take a deep breath first. Separate yourself from the situation. Walk back to the defensive huddle. When you're doing that, you've got to downregulate as much as you possibly can. Breathe. Come on, come down, come down, come down. Get focused so that he can be engaged and ready to make the stop on the next play. I think it was very smart with the Rams dude to target him because

[A]

that the biggest non surprise ever. You go right at him, right?

[B]

Yep. So just in that moment, we got to get this guy to be quickly down regulated and get back and refocus in the moment. That's the only thing that matters in that moment. We can't change the situation. He can't undo what he did. He can't apologize for that moment. He's got to go back there and perform with it. The problem is, is that that lack of him being able to regulate that spiral for him.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then it turned into him probably doing what you said, which is to then try to now have to prove and do too much and you know,

[A]

do you tell yourself again using your second, like if you hear him you say reek, just do your job, get back here. Don't worry about it, but just do your job.

[B]

It's over. What's next? We gotta make a stop. Yep.

[A]

I don't need to do too much. I don't need to do too little.

[B]

Right here, Right here.

[A]

Besides the down regulation breath.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Are there any physical things they can do? I'm thinking of athletes I know sometimes will have a. They'll wear a piece of jewelry or they'll wear something on their body that is kind of their. Their home base. Are they into things like that that people can try as a way to get back when. I just like can't catch my breath. I can't calm my breath. Like I know what I'm supposed to be doing, Dr. Wyzma, but like it's not working. I'm freaking out.

[B]

Have you ever seen George Kittle's tattoo on his forearm?

[A]

No.

[B]

He has a little reset button.

[A]

No kidding.

[B]

Something like that. That he learned when he was in college that he needed to like push tap his arm and that was his way of resetting. Now I'm coming right back to my present moment, my center.

[A]

So he has a physical thing he'll actually touch himself on and a tattoo of it, huh?

[B]

Yeah. I haven't seen it in person. I've heard him talking about it before.

[A]

Can that be anything? Is there specific stuff that has to be. Does it matter at all what that tactical thing is?

[B]

When I work with tennis players and they have that little. What do they call it?

[A]

A little eye in the racket.

[B]

But they'll either on that piece of it or on the wrap of their handle, they'll write something down. One of the teams I was working with last year, there was a player who Used to emotions go. And he'd get picked on by their team. They would purposely target him to get him out in the red. Right.

[A]

This is a really common thing, by the way, for people. If you don't know pro sports, that is a really highly coached thing. It's like an intentional playbook thing that will be done to go after people like that.

[B]

And we had to figure out a way for him to be able to use what we were. The. The phrases we're using in my office to go out on the field when it was occurring. And so he would put tape around his wrists and I'm not going to say what he wrote, but then he would. He would look at that a lot.

[A]

So it can be a phrase, it can be a reminder, it can be a. It doesn't matter what it is because. Because you could write reset the word reset and it wouldn't matter for any athlete. And it matters for George. Like the word is totally independent for the person. Right.

[B]

And then if I'm one of his teammates and I go over and I put my hand on his shoulders and I say, look me in the eyes. Like that is a grounding thing. That's co regulation at its greatest, I think, is when you look me in the eyes and say, right here, take a breath with me. Let's go. Make a stop. Like, that's a super, super powerful thing.

[A]

So if second part then would have been if you were his coach or teammate, that's what you'd have done in that moment. Yeah.

[B]

In that moment, you know what's happening

[A]

with him, he feels horrible about it.

[B]

Yeah. And he's got to come back out there and he's got to perform.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

When I work with a team, I try to create common language so that it's a very powerful concept. And it's either a visual or some very short term that represents what that concept is so that everybody is on the same page with it. And I try to be careful about using examples that people can gain who I'm talking about. But one of the teams that I work with, our men's soccer team, was in the ACC playoffs last year, and we were in the lead on the road against a much higher ranked team. And towards the end of the game, one of the players in their team took out one of our guys with a very obviously illegal tackle meant to hurt the kid. And we did it for a reason, so that we would respond, we would react. Right. Everybody from the coaches, the bench, the people in the field at the same time said the exact same thing to each other. And it's just like, like we all got it. Like, that's the value of being able to have a unified, powerful messaging that like all of us, we all could look each other eyes and just say one thing and we got it. Not going to affect us. We're right here. Right. So I try to help teams create that sort of communication in that language.

[A]

These would qualify as your differences between emotional control versus emotional regulation.

[B]

I think so. Yeah. Yep.

[A]

I guess is the regulation piece.

[B]

What do we do now?

[A]

Right. Rather than controlling it as a way of thinking about. Don't let it get out of.

[B]

Right, right, right. Yeah.

[A]

Don't let it change or hold it. No, no. Just what do we. What's the next step? How do we bring it back to this right this midline. Today's episode is sponsored by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has an ideal electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium, but no sugar. Hydration is critical to performance, both physical and mental. And countless studies have shown that even a slight degree of dehydration, even as small as 1%, can lead to decreases in physical output and mental performance. We also know that electrolytes are critical to proper hydration, which I've been harping on for years. But you can do that proper hydration by only drinking water, especially if you sweat a lot. You need to get the right amount of electrolytes in the right ratios, and that's why I'm a huge fan of Element. In fact, many of you might remember that I featured element in my YouTube series on hydration nearly six years ago. I featured Element in these videos because their blend of 1000mg of sodium, 200mg of potassium, and 60mg of magnesium really is unique and different than any other electrolyte on the market, and it has great scientific support. I use Element on nearly a daily basis, especially when I'm doing really hard training in the heat and I'm sweating a lot. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinklmnt.com perform to claim a free Elemnt sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinklmnt.com perform to claim a free sample pack. I know you've worked with some UFC fighters. Many of you know we've been fortunate to share some clients in the past. I think this is a really good example because in the UFC, you fight for five minutes and you have one minute in between rounds. You do three or five rounds, you don't have 90 minutes, you don't have two and a half hours. You don't have timeouts. You don't. So as a coach, you can either scream during the fight, which is what they do, or you have realistically 30 to 40 seconds to coach. Yeah, really tough thing. A friend of mine, Sean o', Malley, I've known a long time, his coach, Tim Welch, is one of the best in the world, I think, at the coaching. In between the rounds, he comes in the round, Tim and Brandon, his other coach. The first, I don't know, 10 seconds. It's just, be right here. I actually think that's the phrase they use. I can't remember exactly, but it's like, be right here. Be right here. They don't even actually. Because a lot of coaches say things like, take a deep breath. Take a deep breath. They'll do that. But they actually have, like, almost gone to the second step already, which is just like. Because Sean is so trained on be right here also means exactly, breathe right. He doesn't need to say anything more. Then he has a couple of points. He gets to. And gets to the next. I think we've already covered that with what you just said of why you would do that. My question on this would be, when you see a UFC fight, you'll see a couple of different styles of coaching in the corner. One is a very tactical, hey, he's doing abc. We want to run this play right. This exact thing, or do this move next. And the other is just simply none of that. And it's literally the slap in the face. The. You'll see criticism from fans because you're like, man, he didn't do anything to. He didn't need to. I think the other criticism is, like, he didn't even tell him what to do. He just typed him up. I think it's foolish to say. One of those is there's a time and a place where it's like, you don't need anything technical right now. You just need there. What is the time and the place for either one. How do I know as that corner person? And if you're not coaching UFC fighters, I get it. There's like 12 of you. This is the same thing, though, as if you are. And picture yourself in any situation you're in. Right. How am I leading my children? How am I leading my whatever through really intense situation where pressure's on the line. We got to move quickly. I don't know if you can give us any direct answers here. But how do I even know when I need to just give the rah rah. And I don't worry about technical or the opposite or I need to blend both. You kind of brought this up earlier.

[B]

If you are a coach, you should already know in that moment what that athlete needs. And you could be having 20 athletes you coach and every single one of them might need something different. That's your first job. Whether it be flat out in situations like this, what do you need from me? That conversation is massively important because the athlete will tell you what they need.

[A]

So this is coaching to the athlete rather than coaching to your coaching style.

[B]

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. The best coaches are the ones that can adapt to what that particular athlete needs. So you should know going into it exactly what that athlete needs or wants. And needing and wanting are different. Sometimes an athlete wants something and the conversation well in advance of it is, I think you also need this. The athlete might want to say, just let me breathe for a minute. And the coach might need to say, I'm here to give you one or two things that I want you to think about going into the next round. I'll do that in the best way to help you. So that's gotta be known before the, so that now the coach isn't making a decision. When the coach is emotional, you'll be

[A]

stunned that that conversation never happens.

[B]

It has to happen.

[A]

It never happens.

[B]

The coach is a performer in that moment and the coach is emotional and the coach is on edge. And depending on how the fighter's doing, that coach is feeling the same way. And now if you go in there,

[A]

sometimes worse, I'm telling you right now, coaching those people for sure. Oh, it's horrible. It's horrible.

[B]

That should be something that is known before that moment occurs. You have to take into consideration the fact that in that five minute round, that fighter's mind is racing at all times. They're taking in so much information and in that minute they have, they can't be getting too much more of that. They have to have a place where they can just detach and let that sort of mental fatigue clear out a little bit before the coach is probably going to be able to say anything that they're actually going to register and remember going out there. I think you have to take that into account. Whatever you say needs to be simple and it shouldn't be anything new. And I think, I think going into it, having phrases that you can use that you can, that the athlete already knows what it means. I work with Our tennis teams and our stands at Cal are right over the courts. It's a dream of my role. So I could sit right, literally right over the player and see their routines and are they doing the breathing? And have they gone to the towel? And what is the coach feedback to them? If it's doubles, I get to hear the doubles. I was perfect. I could be in their mind in that moment. I know exactly what it is they're doing. But I can also then hear the coach's feedback. And, man, our head coach is amazing at that piece of it. He knows exactly what that athlete might need to hear in that moment. And he'll say something like, go fishing. This is not the same reference of the fishing example I gave earlier. The coach used to go fishing in his mind when he was a player himself at the elite level, because he was stressed in between points, he would just close his eyes and go to the lake and just, like, for a moment of downregulation is, I'm going fishing for just a moment. So they'll use that as an example, that phrase, go fishing. They know exactly what it means. They've heard it before. It's simple, and it allows them to do whatever they might want with that. That's the approach I think I would take in that situation, in that minute.

[A]

As a coach, are you familiar with the. I think it was Joe Montana with the super bowl story. It was Joe.

[B]

It was Joe Montana.

[A]

Are you talking about John Candy in the stands?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Yeah, tell that.

[B]

Okay, so it's the 1989 Super Bowl. The 49ers are playing against the Bengals. The Niners are down by three points. They have 92 yards to drive. And I believe there was, I don't know, a couple minutes on the clock, maybe less.

[A]

Yeah, very, very end of the game, Super Bowl.

[B]

And so imagine now the quarterback having a conversation with the head coach in the sideline because they didn't have the in ear microphones. And then the team is all huddled up, and everyone in the huddle is tired, as tight as can be. And they're in the end zone because that's where they're starting on that side of the field. And Joe Montana walks out, and he sees the state that those guys sees their eyes like they're in the moment, but they're too much in the moment. And he goes, look, guys. And you point in the stands like, there's John Candy. Can you believe John Candy's here? What the. What the offensive lineman has said is it took their whole tension and it just Melted it in a moment. Like number one, oh, there's John Candy. Number two, that's our quarterback. He's not throttled at all. Let's fucking win this game. Like that moment of him to be able to say something so unexpected and composed like, hey, there's John Candy, guys, let's go win this game. Like that one phrase just changed everything. It's remarkable.

[A]

Yeah. Showing the rest of the team. Yes, this is a big moment, of course, but I'm still able to have peripheral sense in the moment. I'm in the moment. I'm right here.

[B]

I do want to make a comment on that about coaching. When you say that, that's probably not a conversation coaches can have. Coaching is a performance. And I think often coaches think of themselves as at most coaches were athletes themselves. At least the sports I work with and coaches need, need that performance support as well. And for them to be able to know that that conversation needs to exist prior to that moment is something that they can be taught and something they can get a lot better at.

[A]

I feel like in my personal experience, I know more coaches that have hired or utilize sports psychologists or mental performance coaches than I knew players. I've never heard anybody talk about that. I think the general audience and fans do not realize what percentage of coaches. Because this is not different or this is different. Rather than a coach taking a leadership course, taking a coaching course, which is how do I get more out of my athletes? What you're referring to is the coaches themselves wanting to get more out of themselves. So what stuff have you been doing recently? We'll call it coaches, but again, this is leadership. This is. Could also just be you leading your kids. It doesn't matter, Right? How do you make sure your emotional control versus regulation is in the right spot? And is it maybe any different than anything we've said before? The exact same tools apply.

[B]

Every mental skill that I might teach an athlete or skill that you might teach an athlete, a performer, can be utilized by all those examples of the people you just mentioned, Every single one of them visualizing, whether it be visualizing and the self talk piece and the emotion regulation, everything we just talked about

[A]

having a home base and bringing themselves back down and all those things.

[B]

The interesting thing about coaches, and this is coaches, in my experience, particularly working in Olympic sports, there's interesting research on what's referred to as the super elite athlete. What distinguishes between an elite athlete and a non elite athlete? It's so much.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

But what distinguishes between the super elite and the elite? That's A really interesting and there's been a lot of similarities and one of those is, you know, the super elite athlete feels like they need to win more than they want to win. They have to win. Their life is over if they don't win and the perfectionistic tendencies that they have and that's very, very common for the super elite athlete, many of whom become coaches. And I could tell you a number of coaches who I work with or have worked with who came from the super elite and now they're in the coaching role. And all those traits that they took to their performance that were probably traits that could have cost them, they initiate on their athletes. And so they need to really, really be aware of when they're bringing that to athletes who are probably nowhere near as capable and talented and as accomplished as they were. So number one, I think people don't realize that most coaches are under more stress and pressure than most athletes are. And I think we tend to focus on the performer, but it's the man or woman of the sideline who's calling the plays, who probably is feeling a lot more of it. And they have to be clear in those moments and not emotional in those moments. And yet all eyes fall on them and it's expected of them. So working with coaches is such a really, really important piece of what I do and what I like to do. Number one, it's the hardest part of my job and it's also my favorite part of my job. To be quite frank, coaches can be very difficult to work with, but they can also be like super rewarding and fun to work with as well.

[A]

You mentioned earlier being able to come into a room and identify if they need the energy or the tactics. I imagine this is one of the things you spend your time on. How do you help those coaches learn that after the fact that ah, I see reflection.

[B]

So like, you know, if you're going to give a coach advice, you better really be trusted or you better be a total stranger. I think those are the only two people that a coach is going to listen to. Like, oh, you said this. I don't think they're going to listen to anybody in between. And so I think part of my job is to observe, evaluate. I take my notebook and I'm very aware of maybe a coach says something in the locker room that I think I knew the intent of and then, and later I'll say, like you mentioned this in the locker room. I think this is may have how it came off. And they want to hear that I think because often either they didn't intend for it to be that way or they intended it. And I said I don't think it was the right approach. And coaches want to hear that, they need to hear that. But you got to be really careful with how it is that you, that you phrase that. And I'm always going to call out the things that they said that were really, really good because man, coaches put on a masterclass of leadership and very emotional moments. And the things that coaches say in those moments are just brilliant. I'll write them down and I'll make sure afterwards I'll say, man, when you said that, I had to write that down. It was that good. They need that reinforcement of the things that they say that I think really landed well to co regulate the group or to really focus the group or how they gave critical feedback to an athlete. They need to hear the things they said that I think were really, really powerful, were really, really effective for them. Coupled with the things that I don't think they really knew how that probably landed at the time. And I think it's part of my job to mention, look, you said this to the group. I think this is how that was taken. I think maybe think about it differently next time we're in that situation or something.

[A]

How do you personally create, buy in with that? I'll just, just assume head coach. I'm hearing that right now, thinking I'm coaching these people. All the pressure is on me. If I win or lose, I'm getting fired and I'm going to let some guy sit in the corner with a notebook that sounds like every coach saying, hell no.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

How do you get to that spot?

[B]

You put the work in, you show up, you sit in the coach's launch in the middle of a rain and wind and you suffer with them. And you sit there with them when they've experienced their greatest success and you sit with them when they've experienced their greatest failure. And it takes time to build that. We cannot do this work from our offices. I don't know what kind of picture people have in their mind of mental performance people or psychologists who work with teams.

[A]

Can I tell you the picture, please? Here's my picture. I got a guy freaking out in the team, can't handle his shit. I gotta get a sports icon here. The only person that needs it is the person who's exactly tanking in the big game. If I were to picture most of the field, that's what they think sports psychology is.

[B]

And then that person either goes to an office.

[A]

Yep, or sits on a zoom call, super sterile environment.

[B]

They're not in the moment when it happened. They didn't hear the feedback the coach gave them. They're not getting the hail pour down around on them. They're not in the locker room after a loss when everyone's crying, they're crying with them. Like you have to be there and you have to be there through all of it. And you have to admit when you, when something was on you, I mean with the, with the coach last year of a group, I said that was a mental loss and that's on me. That's totally on me. And I'll be the first to say to your advice, your sport admin or anybody else, that was a mental loss and that should not have happened on my watch and it's not going to happen again on my watch because I'll make mistakes. I'll underestimate things as well, of course, and I'll hold onto that for years afterwards if I'm willing to be there with them. And I'm willing to be there for the good and the bad and to make my own mistakes and like learn with them. And I think that that has to be there in order for a coach to be able to let someone sit there with a notebook in the locker room.

[A]

We probably should have started the conversation off with this, but this is the difference between what you guys are now calling mental performance coaches and mental health. This is sports psychology versus psychology or psychiatry. It is this aspect of even you're still dealing with human emotions, but it's an entirely different thing. This is not just, first of all, not disease per se, and it's not just simply, I'm upset because this thing happened. This is as active coaching as we could possibly get. And so when I've had, I'll say ownership and GM groups of major sport teams ask me about this aspect.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

My reaction is it's funny you said earlier, but I always say go all or go out. Because if you're just hiring a consultant

[B]

here and there who's in their office,

[A]

just get out of, like get them out of here. If you, if you're going to do this, they should be a full staff member. Like you would hire a strength conditioning coach who's just like sending programs that would never work. You would never do that with a physical therapist.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You want them in the building for a reason. So if you're going to try to work on this aspect, which, yeah, I don't know, sports like the real thing

[B]

still a little on the Soft side for you.

[A]

Very soft science for me. I don't know how you do this because if not what you're dealing is with, it's just psychologists and fine, you want to send them to an office twice a week and they want to do talk therapy or whatever amazing stuff they're doing. And you do need that plenty of times. Loads of athletes are humans too. They have everything else going on. But this is not that what you're talking about is really improving the quality of as many interactions as you can in practice, in the game, and using what we've learned from clinical and traditional psychology, but in the sense of excellence.

[B]

Performance.

[A]

Performance, I guess is one way to say it.

[B]

It's embedded. My role in what I do in being effective is to be embedded with the team, be part of that team. And then, you know, the services that we provide. At Cal, there's four full time mental performance consultants. No one else in the country is doing this at the collegiate level. Four of them, four full time. Wow.

[A]

That's how bad at your job you are.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. 30 teams.

[A]

30 teams.

[B]

I'm so bad. They need four bathrooms, they need four of you guys. And so we are available for one on ones where the student athletes can come into our offices. That's where that type of work takes place. And then they can. The greatest thing about that is like I'm also at practices. So I'm at practice in the morning, this coach says something to this athlete. The athlete comes in and mentions it. And then I get the context and I could say, and you know the

[A]

truth, I was there.

[B]

Well, it did happen. But here's how I took that. Like it's good to have a different perspective of it. We're traveling, we're on the, we're on the benches with the coaches at games, we're walking with the coach to the locker room to help them process. Okay, a couple things that you might consider or what, what should I say? Or you know, like that's embedded work. That's like fully servicing our, our coaches, our athletes, our support staff, that sort of thing. That's the way this field needs to work.

[A]

Biofeedback. I know you've used this a lot. You're the first person I saw use it many, many, many years ago. I've seen you use it with professional athletes a bunch of different realms. And why I gravitated towards it was because I saw the first connecting piece between psychology and physiology.

[B]

I think sports psychology probably in the beginning focused a lot on just like managing your nerves. You're feeling nervous. What do you want to do about it? What are some techniques that you can use to kind of compose yourself? We might refer to downregulate. Now, biofeedback was probably one of the first ways that people could actually demonstrate. Okay. If I'm going to tell you to breathe a certain way, you need to know why. It's not good enough for me just to say, do this and this what happens.

[A]

I think this is what caught me up. Right?

[B]

Yeah. I want you to see it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay. I use biofeedback in my office and just last week I had a athlete come in there and was just talking about like, I know I'm ready, but I just don't like that feeling before a race. I just, I just don't like that feeling. And I, I feel like my mind's starting to race a little bit and I feel like things are starting to tight, tighten up and had a great warmup. And then that period of time from the warm up to my event, it's just, I got, I needed to do something. I was like, I got something for you. So one of the biofeedback programs that we use is HRV and we do breathing techniques. And so what I'll do is I'll have an athlete and I'll, I'll have them hooked up to the, to the biofeedback and I'll just take a moment to say, okay, now look at, this is your heart rate and this is what you're seeing on the screen and everything. And I'm going to just talk for. We're going to nerd out on this. Athletes at Cal love to nerd out on anything. I love it about these athletes.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Yeah. So, okay, I'm going to let this run now. I'm going to kind of talk about what's happening. I'm going to talk about the sympathetic. I'm going to talk about the parasympathetic. I'm going to talk about why athletes are so good with the, with the sympathetic.

[A]

I know what you're doing right now. You're devious. You're a devious man.

[B]

Right? And then I like to, I've got a whiteboard and I like to kind of show like, all right, what's happening and why is it that we extend our exhale? What happens when we exhale with our heart rate, for example, and what are we looking for between the sympathetic parasympathetic? And then I'll like, I'll say, look at your heart rate pattern. Then I'll look at the whiteboard, and what if we were to be in a state of coherence, balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic? And what if your heart rate pattern did this and I draw it on the whiteboard? And they saw nothing like that on the screen before at all. I was like, all right, so close your eyes for a moment, and we're going to take a few breaths. I'm going to talk you through. They close your eyes, and I record on the timestamp on the biofeedback where this occurred. And I talk them through the breathing technique that I wanted to use right before their competition. I said, open your eyes. And they just freeze. Because what they're seeing on the screen is exactly what I wrote on the whiteboard. And that's a powerful moment for them to understand, okay, this is what's happening, this is what to do when it's happening. And then this is what's going to happen. And then the big thing is, then when this happens, then what? And so now they know all that stuff. They haven't seen anything yet. They open their eyes and then, boom, there it is. And like, it's a. They need that in a competitive moment for that belief. Like, when I'm doing the breathing right now, even if I don't feel it doing anything different, I'm going fishing. You know why? Because I saw it. And then I do a session with them where it's. It's testing if they can do it without getting the immediate feedback. But then you show them what's actually happening later. It's like, there's the fishing. That's where you want to throw your line. That's what's happening. If you just take a moment to compose yourself, to control your breathing, that's all you got to do in that moment. You don't have to change anything else. Everything's going to stay the same. But just right now, when you're feeling that, this is all you got to do. It's simple. Just slow things down. Let's just do this for a moment. And now they know exactly what's going to happen. And that could actually be a super, super powerful tool. It's not just, I'm feeling tight, I want to do something to. I don't like the word relax. It's not. We're getting at. To down regulate or to be more composed. It's why and what's happening when I do it. And that can be a really super powerful thing.

[A]

I covered a lot of details of HRV in A previous episode, in a

[B]

previous season of the whole thing.

[A]

Okay. We can link that in the show notes if you want more details. So we'll skip some of that now. But what you're really saying here is I am showing you how you can have cognitive control over something like your heart rate as a proxy of your overall psychological state. So you're going from psychology to physiology to go right back to psychology. And by showing these athletes this on the screen for people like me, it becomes undeniable now because it's not just like, do you feel more calm, do you feel more alert or whatever we're saying, look at these electrical signals in your heart or your brain and they're unmatched. And so when you said you drew it on the whiteboard, you were drawing what you wanted their heart rate to be, gave them no instructions about that, had them close their eyes, they did this thing and they came back and saw their heart rate was exactly what you wanted to be.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You did not, you were not telling them, hold for three, exhale for two. None of that was occurring. Right. So to be really clear, because I know people are going to hammer us in the questions about this one. What was the breathing protocol you gave them? Is this the same for everybody? Does that part even matter?

[B]

We test different ones, but the foundation for it and the basis for it is roughly a 10 second breath cycle from start to finish. Roughly 5 in, 5 out, 4 and 6 out.

[A]

4 and 6 out. Little bit of extended exhale.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

To help kind of bring back down,

[B]

brings the, brings a heart rate.

[A]

And why 4 to 6? Why 10 seconds? Why not longer? Where that number.

[B]

Well, that's, that's what they found to have the greatest impact on coherence. On HRV coherence. That's what they've, they tested a lot of different ways of doing it.

[A]

Walk me through what, what's HRV coherence and why does that matter? Yeah, what's, what's the rough?

[B]

Coherence is the balance between the sympathetic and this parasympathetic nervous system. And so we can look at two things. We can look at the pattern. Is it consistent in it regulating up and regulating down? And we can also look at the distance between the peak and the valley of that cycle. And that gives us an indication of how strong that is. And I want to make sure that it's not about us or me proving anything to the athletes. It's about, here's a tool. And this is what happens if you use this tool or even attempt to Use this tool. This is what's happening. And if this happens, then this is what's going to happen with respect to performance or how you feel. And that's a really, really important piece of that thing. So that. That four and six out is a way that we found has been the way to regulate that coherence between the sympathetic and nervous system in a most balanced way.

[A]

Somewhere between four and six seconds is probably what you'll find most people's resonance breathing.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Frequency at. I'm generally seven and a half to eight.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Mine's a lot higher. Doesn't mean positive or negative or anything there. Have you seen the same thing most people like between four and six seconds?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Is that lineup?

[B]

Yeah. And we have a. We have a program where we can adjust it and we can see what. And so they could actually follow this dot. And as long as it's going up, they breathe in. And as long as going out, they don't have to breathe. They don't have to count to do it. That's where we can kind of find out. Okay. This seems to be like the pattern that works best for you, but we don't want to rely on them seeing that in the competitive environment. So we turn it into accounting. Right.

[A]

The first time I saw you do it was, I think there was a computer program you used where I think it was just a pulse ox on somebody or a heart rate monitor. And the only instructions you gave this person was there was a screen and it was a picture of some landscape in black and white. And all you said was something like, make the screen get color.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I think. And please fill me in if I was wrong here. What was happening was the software program was interpreting when the. Either the heart rate was lower or the HRV was higher. It would bring more screens on the color or color on the screens. And then if it did the opposite, it would start getting black and white again. So the athlete was just watching it, had no idea. Like, he was like, what am I doing here? He's like, wouldn't tell him anything.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And all of a sudden he's like, oh, the screen. Then he lost focus and then went right back to it and then started to realize. And I don't think he even had any idea what he was doing internally.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

He was just watching the screen and eventually was like, I get it, I get it, I get it. And I was like, oh. Because that to me felt like a transferable skill because he wasn't going like three in whole. Three, which I'M like, you can't do this in the middle of a meeting. And things are. You're freaking out of traffic.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

You have to have that endogenous regulation, which I thought was brilliant. So first of all, did I even get that correct? Is that how that.

[B]

You've got a phenomenal memory.

[A]

So what happens is it's only of traumatizing events. And whenever I was in your lab, it was traumatic for me.

[B]

Traumatic because of my office. But.

[A]

Okay, there you go.

[B]

Yeah. So what was happening is that the heart rate pro or Sorry. The biofeedback was program was measuring the coherence and the balance between sympathetic nervous and sympathetic parasympathetic. And if it was in a state of high coherence, it would lead to the colors changing. And then if it came out of that, it would stop changing the color. Couple things with that. Number one, athletes need to do this because they'll find that the harder they try, the harder it gets. And sometimes.

[A]

Oh, it is the worst.

[B]

Yeah. Sometimes athletes just need to be. And they, they, they can't force it. They just have to allow it.

[A]

Yeah. This is why we pull numbers from people lock. Cause this actually is the worst. They're holding onto number patterns.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And you're like, your heart rate's at 190. What are we doing here? You gotta get off of this. So the hyper competitive ones, we can't do it with.

[B]

It's great for them to see it though. It's great for them to see it. Secondly, with that is the mantra that I use a lot is when you're feeling it in that moment, you cannot control your performance until you can control yourself. And you can't do anything with yourself until you could first just change one thing, the simplest thing, the thing you're already doing, the thing you were never taught. It's the first thing you do when you're alive. It's the last thing you do before you die. Just do something with that. Let's do something thoughtful with it and let's do something to take all that. What's going on around here and just internalize a little bit to a sense of this is what regulation means. So I'm feeling nervous, I'm feeling. Goes back to the. I'm going to have a reaction. But what's next? What I want to do next? Well, in this case, I just want to do some breathing. That's all I want to do. And that can have a major impact, especially when it's coupled with them seeing it. And then hopefully Seeing it again, I always send them the graph. They love the graph and the picture of and everything. Yeah.

[A]

Are there any tools people can use at home that are similar to that? Is that commercially available software? Are there other ones that if they don't have a sports psychologist office to go to, Whether this is technology they can buy or software programs, books, any. If someone wanted to work on biofeedback directly, what do you like to tell people?

[B]

So I'm going to hesitate with that. Number one, I haven't looked into it for the layperson in a long time and I have a feeling if I attempt to do that, I'm going to either be wrong or lead something.

[A]

Okay, just tell us what you use or what your colleagues use maybe.

[B]

So this company is heartmath. Oh yeah.

[A]

HeartMath is the most popular one, right?

[B]

It is, yeah.

[A]

Yeah, HeartMath exactly like it sounds. Yeah.

[B]

They have the more expensive sort of full desktop products. They've got some in the field stuff you can use. There's a program that you can get called Inner Balance and that's where it's very much activated with the phone and a lot less expensive than some of the more lab type equipment that you might get. Inner Balance is something I would look into. They have the in the field stuff you can pair with your phone or your iPad or whatever and you can do stuff. Those are probably the two that I know best right now. I would have needed to take a little bit of time before I made any sort of public recommendations about what other options there are. I just don't look for those things.

[A]

Fair. Neurotracker.

[B]

So Neurotracker. Sometimes it feels weekly. I'll get these cold calls, emails, LinkedIn messages. Hey, we have this brain training thing. Can we test it to you? Can we send you this product? And I turn almost all of them down and for you, years and years and years.

[A]

I haven't knowing you for how long I've known you. That that very funny to me because I'm like, oh, I'm sure you're turning it. I know you are like, I know how that turn down probably looks.

[B]

Neurotracker is a program and I'm not in any way paid by them, affiliated with them at all.

[A]

You buy it at normal prices.

[B]

Neurotracker is a program.

[A]

Maybe you won't have to buy anymore after this podcast, but go ahead.

[B]

That has been a wonderful tool and it in essence helps the brain adapt to two things with respect to our focus and attention. One is selective attention. So in the presence of any number of stimuli in our environment, what do we want to focus on and what do we want to not focus on and ignore? So selective attention is massive. In sports in which you've got officials and stands and rain and all these things you got, you need to be able to be really, really locked in on only the stimuli in your environment that's gonna help you perform. And then in the presence of other ones, learn to ignore it. So selective attention and then sustained attention, the ability to focus over time, those are two massive things in a lot of sports. Neurotracker is a program that an athlete can do to get better at both focusing on only those things in their environment they wanna focus on and ignore the others and do it over time. And what this looks like then is that you'll sit in front of a screen and you have 3D goggles on glasses. And there are eight targets on the screen. They look like tennis balls. They're circles. Four of them. Highlight momentarily and the highlight disappears. And then all eight targets move around the screen in 3D space. They go up, down, side to side, front, back, for eight seconds. And then all the targets stop. And then each target has a different number from 1 to 8. And the performer has to call out the four numbers of the targets that they think were initially highlighted. Is this. Are you familiar with this at all? Have you ever seen this before?

[A]

I've never seen it done. I've seen you use various light tools and tactics and boards different with that.

[B]

We had a Fullerton.

[A]

Yeah. And goggles where you can see that you have cameras shooting back into people's eyes. You can see where they're paying attention to. Remember, all these little tools used to have a lot of fun stuff in your lab. And I used to be so mad because your lab was three times the size of mine.

[B]

You so deserve that lab space.

[A]

God, it was the worst. Literally the perfect spot for me.

[B]

You totally did.

[A]

And you ruined it all.

[B]

But we had decades of yoga sweat in the carpet, so there's a bit of a trade off. Okay, let's get refocus again. So eight targets on the screen, four are highlighted. Highlights disappear for eight seconds. The targets move around, they stop. The performers call out the four numbers of the targets that originally targeted. If they get anyone wrong, the next trial goes slower. If they got all four correct, the next trial goes faster. There's 20 trials in a single session. Takes six minutes, start to finish. And it gives you a very, very specific score. It gives you a number of data that I really love. But it gives you a score called the adaptive speed threshold. And that score indicates the speed at which the targets are going. That you can correctly get four targets half the time. That's what that number is most important thing. So I have athletes who come into my office and who do this and it's phenomenal the improvement they see. Number one, in some sports, I will never propose use this because it's not. Doesn't benefit them. But think about like tennis, think about a goalkeeper in soccer, right? Like processing all that information and having to track information and the ball gets behind three opponents and now they lose their for a moment. And like some of the transferability is massive, number one. Number two, the regularity with which they're in my office opens up the door for all kinds of other conversations that with some athletes would have maybe never happened if we didn't have that first sort of thing. So the Neurotracker is another really great tool, I think. And then Neurotracker claims that any improvements in your score are actual changes in the brain. I suppose that we talk a lot about when you get distracted, when does it occur when you miss a trial? Oh, I. Right at the very beginning. That's when I'll lose it. Tell me about your sleep recently. Or do you have finals or do you have like you can, you can get so much into what's happening in their life when the Neurotracker scores are lower than what you might normally expect. And then you can sort of dive into now, okay, tell me about what's going on here. And it usually indicates, oh, we gotta do something different in our lives to be able to get better sleep or focus better, manage the situation better or you know, midterms are gonna be over next week, so you're gonna be in it right now and you can recover. So I've just found that as another really great tool to be able to give immediate feedback on cognitive processes that are happening and some of the tools and techniques that, that athletes can use to get better at those things.

[A]

We've been tinkering around with this program we call Brain gains for probably a year and a half now. We were doing it and I had a bunch of my friends, my KYU pilot, we're doing like a 10 week pilot study on it and zero of my friends did it. Like no, everyone signed up, everyone got the stuff, they did the baseline testing and then no one would do the training. And I was trying to figure out why won't these people do? And myself, I was just like struggling to get myself to go through it. And I realized because when I do that 15 to 20 minute session and it's not the same setup as one you mentioned, but it's very, very similar where you have to pay tremendous attention. You get a little bit physically fatigued.

[B]

Oh, yeah.

[A]

But you have to pay tremendous attention. And it snapped in my brain very recently. Oh, I'm afraid of being cognitively tired.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I'm like, it has nothing to do with me because I'm like, oh, I just don't have time, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. And my friends, I'm totally projecting on them. But I think it was the same thing because I kept, I started asking, why are you doing it? Oh my God, I'm so excited about it. I want to do it. All these things are coming. I'm like, oh, it's the fact that when you strap into this thing, It's. It's like 15 minutes long.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's. You're going to be so tired. You have to stay so focused. And there's very few times in our lives where you have to. On focus force, cognitive focus. Right now when I'm working, I will land in that spot. But I, I can roll into it if I want. Like, I can break. I can. There's no breaking that thing. And I realized after I'd done it a few times, I'm like, oh, I'm avoiding this fatigue. I'm just avoiding the mental fatigue that comes with this thing that I know is. It's like, it's like saying, I'll do a crossword puzzle, starting a timer and not giving yourself any chance to do anything until you finish it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Once you start, you know you have to finish.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it sucks. And I. That is when this aspect of mental fatigue hit me. And then it also hit me going, oh, I see the tremendous value here. Most of my coaching, of course, is on the physical side. And so thinking how much are we seeing physical fatigue? Just being a manifestation of this person is very tied with paying attention.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Right now. And you've done some stuff on things like that. That. What is film session? What are study sessions look like? How do we make those things more effective, less fatiguing when we know. I'm assuming that the neurotracker tool itself is probably a good way to do that. But are there other maybe quick tips or tools that the average person can use if either they're in a sport where they're doing a lot of film session or like kind of the men, not, you know, actually tactics or those in other settings where you're just like the cognitive fatigue of, of your job, your life is how do we make that training session more effective and less fatiguing.

[B]

I'm going to tell you something that I think is super powerful that is not related to that great team session.

[A]

Well, you're in charge, so you ask a better question and give me a better.

[B]

No, no, no, no. So art. Attention restoration theory. Humans spend most of their day distracted.

[A]

I totally.

[B]

There are attention being pulled in 100 different directions or in a state of cognitive fatigue. Because usually how people take breaks is to just look at their phone and scroll. And more cognitive fatigues. Humans don't do a really good job of restoring their attention. And there's a theory of attention restoration theory where if you just take a very short walk in a natural setting, just that three, five minutes of that doing, not with your phone on, not with music on, just you walking and coming back, you will have had a tremendous restoration of your ability to cognitive focus and your cognitive fatigue goes down significantly. If you are a listener and you're thinking about how that plays out in your day to day job, if you can find, instead of just using that time to go on Instagram, just put your phone and go walk somewhere outside with trees or something and come back. It's a massive way of doing it. So that's a relatively new concept, I think of using outdoor spaces to walk and clear our mind from that cognitive fatigue that most humans have access to when it comes to something like film sessions. Got to break it up. It should not be too long. I know film sessions go anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour.

[A]

I played college football. We were, I would say 60 Minutes would have been on a short side.

[B]

Yeah, it's just way too 60, 90 minutes.

[A]

You gotta do post practice, post shower, post dinner.

[B]

You're all over it.

[A]

It's over.

[B]

It was just do it before. Do it before you're physically tired. Do it in small segments, ask a lot of questions versus just like throwing it all at them. Like engage with them. Do it. Approach it like you would as a professor or teacher.

[A]

Teacher, yeah.

[B]

Have someone come up and explain. Like engage them as much as possible. You don't see that a lot. You see a lot of the coaches just over and over again. And you just sit there and number one, you're going to be a little bit more focused because you're going to be on your toes, knowing the coach is about to ask me a question. That's a brilliant strategy. But number two, it keeps them engaged. You just don't see that you got to build that engagement in somehow and the athletes are capable of doing it right. You, I believe you need to also have footage that's positive and that builds the athlete's confidence. I think most film sessions they walk out of there and it's all the stuff they did bad or all the other team what they're doing good and almost none of the positive stuff. So you've got to build a motivational tool into it and somehow embed in kind of like the 3, 2, 1 approach. Like I would, I would consider that a very similar approach to it. The film session stuff is big. My office at Cal is right across from the film room where a lot of our teams do it. And I just, I hear it, I'm right across the office from them and there's some great sessions, there's some coaches that do it really well and there's also some coaches. I just go, wow, it's twice as long as they're probably capable of. Really?

[A]

What's the time here? Is this 20 minutes? Is this an hour? Like what's the number?

[B]

I would do more frequent, shorter months

[A]

if I could do pre and Post practice for 20 minutes each or something like that. Yeah, if you can.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. That makes some teams do two days a week.

[A]

If someone has listened to all this and thought, wow, this is a really interesting field, whether I am a sport coach, again, it doesn't matter. Right. Because if you are going over game film or if you're teaching someone at your company a workshop, the exact same principles apply here, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What kind of person, what kind of qualifications, what are the right terms? Where can they learn more help people that are, want to tinker in this field, what to avoid what's, what's not real stuff. You get what I'm trying to say here, what organizations were.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

And without being elitist, of course.

[B]

But of course if you're looking for mental health provision and you need to work with a clinical psychologist, then you need to work with somebody who has the licensure in clinical psychology, whether they have sport related training or not. And that's a really important thing. Yeah.

[A]

Because some clinical psychologists will also work with sport.

[B]

That's correct.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Yep. But those people also need to have the training and certifications in sports settings. So the mental performance piece is the, the gold standard certification is the cmpc. It's a certified Mental Performance consultant certification.

[A]

So that is a legitimate certification that is very rigorous. That's not a weekend.

[B]

No, no, no, no, no. You need a master's degree from, from a credit university. You need to be able to get supervised with a certain number of hours. You need to be able to pass the testing to do so.

[A]

This is very akin to being a physical therapist.

[B]

Yeah, you need to attend professional conferences to maintain your certification.

[A]

Say it one more time, just what that one is.

[B]

It's the Certified Mental Performance Consultant certification. It's the association for Applied Sports Psychology. They offer that. I'll say a couple things. Just in the 30 years I've been in the field, I've seen a lot of trends. I think one of the trends I've seen is that in the past people who wanted to get work in this field needed to get clinical licensure and mental health provision because the NC2A, that's all they were really hiring, for example, and professional sport teams were hiring licensed psychologists. And we still need that. And if somebody has an interest in working in mental health and we need good people to do those things and we need that support. But we also have a lot of people who want to do performance based performance, psych mental performance, and those people should be able to do that without having to go and get licensure and mental health training. And. And so I'm seeing the pendulum shift towards that for people who want to go into that, who want to get a master's degree or a PhD in that field, who want to get certification, who want to do the work to get it, we need more positions. I wasn't going to promote Cal, but I think what we're doing at Cal is a phenomenal model for what this could look like. If a student athlete I'm working with needs mental health support, we've got a team of people we can refer him to. We're there for the performance and the sport wellbeing of our student athletes. And if more universities can hire that model, people who want to work with coaches, people who want to be at practice, people who want to be in the rain with our, our men's rowing team, then there should be more opportunities for those things to happen. I'm hoping people hear that.

[A]

I know that people are going to walk away from this with a ton of practical tactical tools as well as, I hope, just a broader understanding of what this field really actually is and the opportunities in front of us. If we look across the landscape of high performance sports are not. There's a couple of areas that to me are really underserved. Sleep is a big one. Of them and this is part and parcel to that. You just do not see enough high performance groups adopting real true specialists in these areas in my opinion. So I thank you for all that information. I know that people are going to get a lot from that. It was great to see you again. It's been a long time. Yeah, and yeah, it's been a true pleasure man. So thank you so much for everything you've done and for the great information and for all the years of friendship.

[B]

I miss you and I'll see you in 10 years.

[A]

Ah my friend.

[B]

Cheers.

[A]

Thank you for joining for today's episode. My goal, as always, is to share exciting scientific insights that help you perform at your best. If the show resonates with you and you want to help ensure this information remains free and accessible to anyone in the world, there are a few ways that you can support. First, you can subscribe to the show on YouTube, Spotify and Apple. And on Apple and Spotify you can leave us up to a five star review. Subscribing and leaving a review really does help us a lot. Also, please check out our sponsors. The show would not exist without them and their exceptional products and services. Finally, you can share today's episode with a friend who you think would enjoy it. If you have any content, questions or suggestions, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I really do try my best to read them all and to see what you have to say. I use my Instagram and X profiles also exclusively for scientific communication, so those are great places to follow along for more learning. My handle is rndygalpin on both platforms. We also have an email newsletter that distills all of our episodes in the most actionable takeaways. We have newsletters on how to improve fitness in VO2 Max, how to build muscle and strength, and much more. To subscribe to the newsletter just go to performpodcast.com and click newsletter. It's completely free and we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you for listening and never forget, in the famous words of Bill Bowerman, if you have a body, you are an athlete.