Mastery is an Infinite Game with performance psychologist Mike Gervais | A Bit of Optimism Podcast

confidence is super interesting like it only comes from one place and one place only go on what you say to yourself but how on Earth do I actually stop caring about what people think about me when as social animals I want to be included I want to feel like I belong I want to be trusted I want to be a member of the tribe I want to be welcomed and invited because not to be is to feel alone to feel ostracized to feel brushed aside know your purpose so it's no longer about identity it's about

something far larger so your identity Fades away it just allows your identity of like I have to perform to start to evaporate and I'm performing because I want to contribute to something that's really meaningful and it's not Wall Street bottom line Mike I'm so glad you came on the show uh I'm such a fan and I I so enjoyed coming on your podcast finding Mastery and I thought you know for those who don't know fing Mastery a you're missing out but B how selfish am I to go and enjoy your company and not share you

with everybody else so thanks for thanks for joining our little podcast for those who don't know you um you're a psychologist by training and in particular what I would I guess high performance right that's your specialty correct um and you worked with the Seahawks and other football teams you come from Sports um what I let's start let's start for you you talk about Mastery over for performance and I find this this is an important Nuance because every CEO you talk to CEOs and like you know so what kind of we're a high performance culture we're

a high performance everything is performance performance even when it's not why doesn't anybody talk about Mastery why are people so obsessed about performance and even you you come from Sports where performance is the thing that they talk about why does everybody talk about performance and nobody thinks about or talks about Mastery there's kind of like this high performance treadmill in just about every industry that you can get your kids on you you know like there's a some sort of track in the corporate world that you can get on that you know you do a b

and c things you give yourself a pretty good chance of being a high performer whether it's technical skill development in sport it's physical and for all of us it's mental and there's like a a little bit of a track for it and the track for Mastery is really Los when I think about the difference between high performance and Mastery e high performance is about executing on demand but with Mastery there's a bit of a contour to it there's something that just has an organic authentic artistic expression on demand certainly but there's a different Contour to

the path of Mastery um what do you mean by Contour the way that you see the world around you is there's a difference between people that are committed to Mastery and those that are committed to high performance so I don't have a better word I've been studying this thing for 25 years and so the I wish there was a way to express the space that happens for people that are committed to Mastery versus like the execution got to go drive drive drive drive get it done you know execute on command be great be great recover

be great recover that's like the high performance kind of process Mill if you will nothing wrong with that but there's a difference between the commitment to Mastery and then let me open it up two ways Mastery really is about Mastery of craft and Mastery of self so you're you're really using the craft to go deeper to understand The Human Condition yourself first and then in return other people as well I need I need to go deeper than this because we get judged mostly by our results right our bonus structures are large largely tied to our

results a lot of people unfortunately tie their self worth to their results that's right um uh we are a uh for better more likely For Worse results oriented Society we grade children we grade their art from very young very early Ag and it's usually individually motivated you know what is your grade relative to other relative to other people you know etc etc etc and as we talk about this and I'm sort of like thinking about the people I admire performance is an output it it it literally comes at the end of something that's right Mastery

is an input yeah Mastery is a commitment like the Mastery comes before that's right and so that's one difference which is somebody who is you know you actors always talk about the craft you know you say how do you know that person's a good actor like they they study the craft yes you you I was with the Seattle Seahawks for nine seasons and just about every game we won a lot it was a it was a high performing team and just about every game we're on the 50 yard line pregame there's like the stadium holds

uh let's call it 70 I think it was like 78,000 people so it's about half full at this point there's good energy players are out there moving around doing their thing and for sure coach would always come up to me and say so mik what do you think what do you think what do you think about today and at first I thought that I needed to answer that like I am the high performance psychologist I need to answer what I think about their their mindsets or their commitment to winning or or their ability to win

today which and then I realized like no this is about the coaches really asking what do you think of their framework what do you think of the quarterback's framework is it sturdy or is it flimsy is are is the offense going to get knocked around or they grounded and really sturdy and how they're going to go about being their very best and to your point about input output there is another output winning whatever that means right and when you Cobble together a bunch of performance outputs you get to the outcome right whatever winning means for

people and in that process if you have a sturdy Nimble strong agile the antifragile type of stuff if if that is the way that your psychology is built you can go weather some really incredible hostile rugged challenging environments psychologically so it when you say it's an input it's a fundamental decision that you make that I'm moving towards um Mastery as opposed to high performance I went to Japan and we went to visit um a samurai sword maker there you go and he's one of the last like hundred guys left making samurai swords in the traditional

method where he folds the steel himself and does all this and his story was quite remarkable which is he had a desk job um and was like I can't this can't be my life and he quit and decided to become an apprentice sword maker and has now been on his own and uh he says we we talk you know we're we're talking to him and he's like you know I'm still I'm still learning um I'm one day I I hope to be good at this and we're like how long have you been doing this he

said 30 years that's that that's it you know yeah you're lighting up when you say it cuz like that appreciation truly for being being a beginner in your approach to like how things really work and as you get further down the path even at 25 30 years and you're further down the path of really understanding something yeah um the Mastery of self is what drives that Curiosity yeah like wait how does this man if I could just figure out how to really dial this thing in in the way that I see it could be yeah

how do I match my skills with the the challenge ahead of me or in front of me he doesn't think he's bad at it he just knows he can be better that's exactly it and there's there was an incredible lack of ego you know at the same time an incredible self-confidence yeah because otherwise you wouldn't have the grit to stick with it and realize them because I think you have confidence if you see yourself improving confidence is super interesting like it only comes from one place and one place only go on what you say to

yourself that's it and so now that has to be credible yeah you have to speak to yourself in a credible way and there's there's a calculus there's a math it's a math problemy ol logically if you will is that what's happening for confidence and I'm going to tie it to your point in a second is that there's this constant calculus which is I'm interpreting the challenge ahead of me or in front of me the demands of a challenge okay whatever it is playing one-on-one basketball against Michael Jordan or having a conversation with you or whatever

it might be I put you and Jordan in the same category and so um no for real like it's a it's a perception of the challenge mapped against my perception of my internal skills let's say that again a perception of the challenge mapped against my perception of my SK skills right and so if I can see the challenge is high and wonderful and big and whatever and then I can also know how to back myself that I've got skills to navigate this challenge right now I've got like the I've now I've got the ability to

speak to myself in a way that builds confidence so confidence is State specific meaning it changes from moment to moment from environment but that's the math that sits underneath of it and you were probably really smart when you were young you're smart now um it's like the same as a young athlete they're probably pretty talented when they were young certainly the exceptional ones are and like they they or you didn't maybe really learn how confidence worked because when you walked into a room you were always one of the smarter ones that got it quickly so

you didn't know that it had to come from this calculus it just was a thing that happen based on how well things go now here's the Trap my confidence comes when something goes well I feel confident yeah when I get two buckets in a row now I'm confident when I walk on stage and people smile and I say a couple funny things and something smart and I get that look from the audience then then you nod your head like nah now I'm in my pocket yeah so that's dangerous because you're waiting for your external world

to give you the information that your internal world is solid and when it goes directionally in that way is a problem now you're constantly getting whipped around the external world so if you get the direction of this right and you build it on the math that we just spoke about okay so here's the reality the real story yeah I was a solid be student okay cool right yeah uh I think my brain worked quickly but there's some subjects I just didn't grasp and to this day I still struggle with right you know my friends were

the Smart Ones like my friends were the one who is the straight A student in math or the straight A student in English or the straight A student in history and they all had a subject or a couple of my friends were jocks who were like the star football player I jogged around the track occasionally you know so what was going on so uh so for me the challenge was I was always the dumb one or the not athletic one around my friends I mean I was athletic but I was never an athlete yeah right

there might be something really healthy going on there that you didn't over identify your identity was R not wrapped up in what you were doing and and so and so this the the the stress that I had was what's my subject everybody has a subject like that one's good at math that one's good at English that one's a great writer that one's great at physics that one you know and I had no subject and so I had to go on a journey to be like I'm fine at at everything but I'm great at nothing and

I the lesson that I started to learn was I I looked outside of the subjects that were written on my school schedule and thought what is the stuff that I'm good at that my friend that I'm I mean that I'm better than my friends at and I was better at asking questions I was better at talking cuz I had to be cuz it was a survival Instinct for ADHD CU I couldn't study so I had to get good at asking good questions and listening to the answers and I didn't know what to do with that

but it gave me confidence to know that I had a thing it just wasn't written down on my high school schedule or my College schedule I've got a story for you I've got a story for you to uh to relate to what you just shared is that um in high school and college I didn't have a thing either and so I'm I'm a psychologist in high school I got an F in psychology so I keep my high school report card in mind as a reminder you know it's great when you can find your thing at

a young age I was I was a bit of a wreck yeah so um love my parents dad was a functioning alcoholic mom was codependent and I knew that I wasn't I didn't have a thing either I was athletic but I was not the athlete I was clever and smart but I was definitely not the student and so I didn't have a thing either and I think that there's a case to be built that when you over identify early on your identity with a thing that you're good at it can get you really good because

you have to go all inh so when you stand at the pitcher box or or the Batters box or you're on the pitcher Mount or whatever sport it is and your entire identity rests on you striking people out or hitting home runs you practice hard mhm you practice probably practice harder than just about everyone else so at a young age that get you really good now you're this is a dead end full stop dead end approach because you are so much more than the thing that you do so you and I accidentally were afforded this

luxury of kind of the flounder floundering years where it's like your identity was not wrapped up in it and you didn't know the thing that you were that was going to spark you there's so many thoughts going through my head which is um this goes to and you and I have talked about this which is the concept of finite and infinite thinking right and the finite there's a great iry in this which is to say I have a subject or I'm a basketball player or I'm a pitcher or whatever it is and I'm going to

be the best I'm going to work hard and I've got that work ethic and I've got that discipline the problem is there is a date that that stops that's right you either get injured get fired or it's just time to retire just about everyone gets pushed out of the pros and the same can be is true in life I'm the best lawyer I'm the best Banker I'm the best blah blah blah and at some point you're going to have to leave they'll either push you out or you just age out right there's the number of

CEOs or high performing Executives that I meet that leave their careers or or you know sell their companies whatever it is and they have massive identity crisis because their entire lives they would Define themselves by this one thing that's exactly and I here's the analogy I have a friend who grew up in Fargo North Dakota Fargo North Dakota who dreamed of being a New York City rocket and making it to Broadway no kid from Fargo North Dakota parents did the sacrifice you know all of this stuff and she made it she be she went she

made it to Broadway she became a New York City raet right all of her dreams came true yeah and then what she spent her entire life committed to achieving this thing did it for a few years and then she chased the dream and accomplished the dream yeah and then literally didn't know what to do next if you knew what I knew about what it takes for a kid to be one of the best in the world to be a high performing athlete or whatever fill-in the blank artist you we would not be pushing our kids

yeah the wash out is incredible yeah and I think most of us so what you're describing you're you're framing it as the um infinite in finite game and I when I hear you speak that that to me is a performance-based identity right because it's goal-based right yeah like I'm going to be the right that's exact that framing is and the opposite Mastery 100% that is they they're high performers and they and they have the the resume to prove their high performance but then when you peel the onion and the day after the career the day

after the dream accomplished nothing scare fear I actually uncertainty doubt for who for for the high performer for the high performer and even if they don't achieve the the dream which is more likely most people will not become super mod or you know Prof high profile you know athletes Etc but I've defined myself by thing that I actually didn't accomplish then I think it's even worse oh this is a tough this is one of the reasons I think when I speak to folks in the you know corporate spaces is like purpose is a big deal

yeah like what am I doing like what am I really doing I mean we're on this radical Rock spinning around I don't even know how I got into this body we're using this madeup language right now to try to connect yeah to try to think about our experience together to try to be just a little bit better and I think that the common the commonality amongst people that I can see that that binds us is we all want a great life yeah not just a high performing life what is that but we want the a

great life with this short amount of time that we're here and that's where that conversation about purpose what am I doing here and I think it's a bit of a right of passage to adulthood to have a sense of what am I doing with my time here and it does not need to be this Grand thing it can be to be a great part partner to my spouse it can be to you know to be a great dad it can be to you know have fun and bring joy to other people in my neighborhood it

does not need to be like serial entrepreneurship like whomever fill in the blanks it doesn't have to be that but to have a sense of purpose is huge I want to go back to that confidence thing at some point in life we all struggle with it nobody is immune no it's state specific meaning that it's it's it's like moment to moment confidence in one moment and nothing the next that's right depending on what I'm doing or who I'm talking to depending on what you're saying to yourself about that chall yeah that's such a good one

it's the way you're framing the conversation and if you if you think if you entertain what are they thinking about me then we're on a slide for confidence like a downward slide if you start like what is Simon thinking about what I'm saying right now is getting in the way of that calculus which is is like no this is a I love this conversation it's really challenging to find the right words to describe things that are hard to talk about and this is what I really enjoy doing that's how confidence will be built for me

you're bringing up something that look what did what did Teddy Roosevelt say you know comparison is the thief of Joy that's right yeah you know and you're bringing up something which I think is so easily understood and so difficult to Doh it is well and good to say don't care what other people think about you we all know that grandma told me that right Grandma told me that yeah uh but how on Earth do I actually stop caring about what people think about me when as social animals I want to be included I want to

feel like I belong I want to be trusted I want to be a member of the tribe I want to be welcomed and invited because not to be is to feel alone to feel ostracized to feel brushed aside we know what happens a social animal left to their own devices is destructive to others are destructive to themselves and that's a whole different topic you know I think it's right people who hurt themselves and hurt others you know yeah and that we thrash when we're not connected and the thrashing makes sense because our brains are wired

for safety yeah and belonging is safety yeah you know the think about like the sheep and the Wolves the sheep in the that are in the middle of the pack are way safer than the Sheep on the outside and way safer than the Sheep that's kind of wandered off so so being rejected by the tribe is a form of a uh 200,000 years ago a death sentence and yeah the mamalian brain still freaks out yes now and then so if you think about that mechanism is still ancient brain modern times it's still happening for us

and then you wrap the modern kind of identity with what you do so when you go out and do something I'm an executive I'm a manager I'm a salesperson I'm a CMO whatever it might be and and you're getting data back that it's it's not good and that can either be objective numbers or a lift from an eyebrow from your supervisor or whomever or a iroll in a meeting that that is so triggering to the survival brain that we do something very predictable we'll conform we will contort we will confront and and sometimes sometimes we

just cut off the relationship because it's too much but think about the conforming and confronting which are they're all which is kind of fun no science here just a nice alliteration way for me to remember it but the conforming is I might laugh at a joke or go along with something that's slightly offensive to my moral code to what I think is right but that person has power so I slightly conform we've all done it yeah the contorting is where it becomes we do it on dates yeah right to to be liked to be liked

yeah and then they find out like wait you know you don't think I'm funny what just happened here the contorting is when it's really problematic when we when we really do so contortion is a an extreme full of of con of conforming conforming yeah like I might really you're literally abandoning your moral code to be like to be in to not get pushed out got it and that's it's a form of loneliness right oh yeah it's a fear and loneliness that you know that if if they kick me out yeah I'm kind of screwed yeah

like I don't I don't have a back stop here uh okay okay so I'll tell you a quick story and then I have to go back to this question so I watched this documentary um about flat earthers M it's an okay documentary but the thing that I loved about it was there's this guy who who was the leader of one of the the Flat Earth um organizations and they consider themselves people of Science and they have scientific explanations for you know why the Earth is flat and they conduct an experiment to prove that the Earth

is flat um spoil alert they accidentally prove that it's ruined um and they look at this science they look at this experiment and they go huh H and you know maybe we did the experiment wrong you know but the leader of the group he recognizes what's going on here he's a smart guy and he's because he's such an Ardent flat earther he's been rejected by his friends and family growing up his only Community are other flat earthers in this group and now he recognizes that gig is up but he actually doesn't come clean because if

he leaves that group he's got no one yeah you know yeah that it's the same with like some of the divide that we're seeing politically you know they formed such tight belonging ship that if cost is so high the and they and they've cost relationships getting into those groups that's right that if I leave this group I literally will have no one and that fear is so real that as you said I do I do worse than conform I contort yeah for belonging yeah that's right yeah it it And so there's this pervasive worry am

I going to be accepted or rejected by others that is a very healthy um pervasive survival tactic am I going to get rejected or accepted by the tribe when it when it bleeds into the words you choose the clothes that you wear the the conforming or contorting that you're going to accept or not it becomes almost a clinical condition huh how would you diagnose that um just it's not it doesn't meet the clinical criteria for social anxiety disorder it does not meet that um allodoxaphobia is like the kind of the fear of being out with

other people it's not that either but it's on that path it's on that path well for fun I I na if we were diagnosing our nation oh yeah so we're a nation of allodoxaphobia of people's opinions and I think that we're on the Glide path like the fear of people's opinions is really quite High and the it's it makes sense to me though because we live in a performance-based culture yeah and in a performance-based culture would make sense that I would organically developed a performance-based identity right and then underneath that it would make sense that

I would St uh be anxious and hustle hard and all that kind of stuff about being my very best or being the best which is now like my identity is wrapped up in how well I do whatever I do and I'm constantly scanning the world to see if I'm okay are my numbers good are people looking at me okay are they laughing behind my back or with me like what's happening so that it's it's an exhaustive approach to see if I'm okay is the problem and how do you get around it I I this it's

going to sound too simple but because nothing's quite this simple be very clear about your purpose and you say why do you say purpose a purpose-based identity if think about any who inspires you Simon like like Global Changers his with us or you know no longer with us the people who inspire me are not household names the ones that are living anyway yeah they're certainly not do do one that's a household name that we can we can Vibe okay uh Martin Luther King okay so Dr King Jr if he was sitting in this conversation with

us he would probably be talking about Equity he'd probably be talking about like freedom of Rights the dream that he has so this is all wrapped into his purpose so when your purpose is clear and and it's bigger than you and it is inspiring and it matters to you you're trying to get help mhm so you're want to pull people in you can't solve it alone Mike Simon can you guys help me like I there's you know there's something here that's bigger than all three of us and I want to see if you know we

can do something special and so it's no longer about identity it's about something far larger so you your identity Fades away and the thing that you're trying to solve together um comes forward and we're no longer managing identity and ego but we're we're committing together to a shared purpose it's that invitation which is Go Go full circle back to mastery it it is an invitation to explore potential that's really what Mastery is and the invitation is always available to everybody each one of your listeners the invitation is available right now to fundamentally commit to a

life that um you are going to explore what what is possible for you and it feels overwhelming and you say where do I start with this first just snap into like in this brief amount of time that I might be on this planet when I look back what do I want to contribute to so start with purpose but I think so how do you help an athlete find their purpose yeah well because they were raised to perform yeah that's exactly right and while they're in the league that they're in whether it's the Olympics or the

NFL or NBA whatever it might be the purpose is quite clear you know so the purpose is given to them you know win championships yeah and that wears out at some point that's not really a purpose though is it no that's more of an outcome a goal but it's like a binding thing for us together you know but it falls it it it has the appearance of purpose and it works for a period that's right and again it's finite you know in all all the ways that you would articulate that and so um what it

does though it serves a bit of a placeholder for them to know what it's like to be part of something bigger where they can't solve it on their own even individual athletes whether it's a golfer or singles tennis player they're part of a team too yeah yeah and so um so I think the question was more tactical like how do I help people yeah like yeah like like what it's because I think look everybody's looking like the rise of spirituality everybody's looking for their sense of purpose you know I mean I mean I wrote a

book about it you know uh uh what do you do how do you take people on the journey to actually help them answer the question first is help them sit with the pain that they feel I think one of the greatest gifts we can give people is to Hold Steady while they are exploring the hardest parts of themselves and so without judgment without critique so a container yeah a safe space a safe space not trying to fix not trying to coach not trying to solve anything but just hold the space for them to explore the

harder parts of themselves to put words to the emotionally charged parts of themselves we all have pain suffering we all have trauma micro massive traumas and it is important to at least index and understand those and most of us if you stay with that first assumption that I have is that we all got something we're working through that the response to unexamined trauma is to protect ourselves from around a a corner that was like a hairpin corner and whatever and there's smells and sounds all the kind of classic examples of a PTSD moment well it

would make sense that maybe you don't go around hair pin turns anymore or you slow down or you're very cautious or you grip your nails into the side of the if somebody else is driving like we're trying to protect ourselves from being ret traumatized so we have to what we do this I need to I need to I need to underscore this we're not trying to protect ourselves from dying we're trying to protect our from being ret traumatized because if you ask people why are you freaking out you know it's you're like they say cuz

I don't want to die but that's not true I don't want to be ret traumatized they didn't die from the thing they didn't die from the thing yeah but it was so but it was traumatizing it was so jaring that they don't want that feeling for an extended period of time again that's exactly it it's not post-traumatic it's not a revisiting of the original trauma it's a fear of of that trauma recurring correct that's really important that's a huge Insight yeah I was just going to say it was for me that Insight was like cuz

I saw it I see it in sport as well so let me be less dramatic than somebody almost dying or fill in the blanks whatever trauma The Listener is working through you can also have it in sport so Seattle Seahawks just for a moment we won the Super Bowl in dramatic fashion it was like wow like Super Bowl 48 uh 2013 okay a lot to a little a lot to a little okay that's all that matters yeah and it's really hard to go back the next year and we got back the next year and back

to the Super Bowl yeah the reason it's so hard is because your coaches get plucked your teammates or your your players um they get bigger contracts from other teams so like and there's like a 40 to 50% turnover on the team so you got to recapture the culture it is not a Glide path it's a hard thing to do and we got back and we ended up losing in the dramatic fashion as you well remember it was like the half goal line yeah and it was a sure thing that the best running back in the

in the league was going to kind of walk it in on Tom Brady's offensive our defensive line and we're going to win back toback which is really rare to do and we we we made some mistakes and the ball was turned over and we lost the game with seconds to go on on the goal line right okay um it was so traumatizing nobody lost their life right okay but that there's no redundancy in the brain like this part of the brain is for like hair ping Cur Corners all death experiences and losing games and this

yeah it's the same network right right like this highly emotional oh my God what just happened this is heavy I don't have a way to deal with this right um and it was so traumatizing for so many of the team that um all of these mechanisms the next year were were all of a sudden erecting in our culture and it was really about people not not putting them themselves in a vulnerable position which is required to be great so that they wouldn't have that feeling again playing not to lose yeah versus to win playing that

it wasn't my fault it's your fault right you better be right and I'm not going to put myself in a vulnerable spot unless I know that you've figured out why we're in this situation in the first place right so now we were never so everybody's a victim now yeah and so we never got our noses pointed in the same direction which is a very hard thing to do and so trauma doesn't happen just from the classic word of trauma it also has all these other things that you know are so emotionally volatile that they can

shape our psychology this is such a big like the I love that you love this yeah the bells are ringing uh you know you look at our society right now where you know Mass layoffs as a mechanism to balance the books did not exist in the United States prior to the 1980s wow it did not exist right layoffs were used when your company faced an existential crisis you were going bankrupt and the only means we had was to sacrifice our people just to keep the company afloat but just missing the quarter or missing the year

like we're profitable not as profitable as we had hoped so you lose your job right literally didn't exist wow yeah and the the that's why people had one career that's why it's why you had one career they weathered the the Wall Street and seite weathered and true loyalty existed which is we'll take care of you and you're going to give us your all for your whole career and it was Mutual you're going we're going to you're going to give what you're going to we're going to protect you company's going to Pro give you offer you

employment for your whole life and in return you're going to be super loyal and offer us your best work you know you know what actually Mutual yeah and you know what happened okay so and then it became like a mafia da thing which is I expect you to give me the company loyalty but I'm going to offer you nothing in return and so that we I call that the extraction model I'm you're going to give me everything and I offer you nothing right and you're going to like lose your relationship with your kids and you

should just be grateful that I pay you yeah and by the way work harder cuz someone else is going to take your job that that extraction model was a real thing for whatever reasons that we could opine about and it's flipped now though the workforce workers or um people that are you know being employed by large companies are saying yeah you need to help me unlock I I think I think what we're facing is more complicated right and I think you're right but I think the reasons how we got there are not ideological that though

it's tempting to think it is I think it it's it's it's traumatic right cool yeah which is we've gone through you a a generation lived through having no job security it used to be believed that a corporate job was stable and an entrepreneurial venture was Insanity like it was in it was insane because you could lose you could lose everything right but now we've created a corporate culture where you can come in one day thinking you're stably employed and you've lost your job through no fault of your own it's not a meritocracy it is definitely

not a so that's the the F the the the fallacy and Folly is that a corporate job these days is actually more unstable than an entrepreneurial venture which is considered extremely high risk with an over 90% chance of failure that's insane right that it's been flipped on it head that's a cool insight to and so and I think now you look at the younger generation which is everybody in the younger generation is one degree away from a layoff my parents got laid off no meritocracy no fault of their own or my friend's parents or my

friends you know got laid off through no fault of their own we're all one degree away whether it's ourselves or somebody else who got laid off again not a meritocracy and so so the trauma of you asked me to give you everything and be and be loyal and I did and it got me nothing or I watched other people my friends family losed everything or my parents lose everything I saw how it affected my home [ __ ] you like how dare you just demand and I don't think it's ideological although I think people use

the language of ideology I think it's your I think it's your Insight the fear of being ret traumatized complet I completely agree to add one one more layer of complexity um our kids if our kids were you know High School College age and that um it used to make sense that the loneliest population or segment of the population was 65 and above yeah the loneliest segment in the United States right now is 14 to 21 yeah so so that type of like avoiding be being ret traumatized and our kids are incredibly lonely it's a pressure

cooker and so when I'm when I when I spend time with uh of the corporate world we are we are not talking about working harder the hustle hard thing is um I can't ascribe to it cuz I'm looking at people that are exhausted and anxious and the message is like from Elite Sport I want to show you how we recover what happens behind the Velvet Rope at Elite Sport is that we spend way more time talking about daily recovery then we talk about working hard the environment is stimulating it's it's great in so many ways

it's on the pressure is on in Elite Sport the required vulnerability and risk-taking in practice every day is unbelievable way more than game day in practice you've got um your peers that are almost as good as you or in some respects as good as you waiting for you to make a mistake in front of the coaches so that they can get a shot and in particularly bad in football that exactly and to be great you have to you have to take a risk so you've got to get to that messy Edge where you don't know

if you're going to be successful or not because that's require that vulnerability is required to take the step to stay progressively on a growth Arc it's really hard so day in stress is on pressure is on day in we need to recover in an intelligent way and I just think that you know if we could do a little bit better on how we think about our future so that's anxiety or purpose based um so when you say future meaning not goal oriented but rather what's the soul for yeah so what what's the I'm I want

to win a game why I want a game so that I become a champ why do you want to be aamp and you keep going and going and going until get to purpose that's not a that's that's bigger that's bigger yeah and you can also like I've got another way to do that as well that is absolutely a great exercise to do but if we did some of that work and then um we learned how to speak to ourselves to back ourselves and to coach ourselves and we're just a little bit better at how we

we worked with our own self selft talk if you will um we figured out a really thoughtful daily recovery program because the stress is real we need equal units of recovery every day and we could start to migrate from that first pillar of purpose we could start to just dissolve our performance-based identity and and be more aligned with purpose so there's a twofold on that first one yes no your purpose and what that does is it it it it just allows your your identity of like I have to perform to start to evaporate I have

to perform to matter it starts to evaporate and I'm performing because I want to contribute to something that's really meaningful and it's not Wall Street bottom line yeah yeah yeah yeah it's maybe to F the what are things that you've learned over the course of your life and career that you have adopted yourself to Aid in your own recovery if recovery is more important as important if not more important than than than yeah I can give you a ton of tactics and I'm happy to do that right now um the first is is like if

you think about the energy system that we have I want to be this is going to this will make sense for Gen xers and above but maybe not below I want to be a really efficient carburetor so I go to sleep at night and I fill up all these fuel reserves and a carburetor is this thing that sits on top of the engine and it decides based on how much you accelerate or put your foot on the pedal how much fuel goes into the engine and if I am really nervous and anxious and quick to

frustration or int tolerance and I'm kind of edgy and snappy the carburetor is wide open and energy is just coursing through the system needlessly so because I haven't I haven't modulated the way that I'm seeing the world around me so the first order of business is that I want to be able to figure out how to see things as opportunities rather than threats give me an example let's say um let's say you've got an opportunity to pitch an idea to a board or VC firm or somebody and this is the last this feels like the

last one you deny deny deny deny you know you're kind of on your the end of your your bu actor or whatever it doesn't matter yeah and how do you walk in staying hopeful and seeing as an opportunity as opposed to like if this doesn't go well I don't know how I'm going to eat yeah I don't know what I'm going to do there's a discipline required there's a mental discipline to speak to yourself about yourself about the opportunity that you're working towards that is just required and so opportunity versus threat is kind of a

big deal in the way you frame just about anything I love it when they mic athletes yeah and you hear that football player going you got this you got to do it you got this right you got this you can do it and that's not everybody that's just that's just some Savages if you will yeah but I love the fact that it's that the at the most elite levels they still need the self pep we all did we all do whether it's sounds like that so here's here here's a fun way to so I don't

want to go away from recovery but on this thread is that one of the things that I help um Executives and athletes alike is to know your ideal performance mindset so in athletes we call it ICM ideal competitive mindset so it's the center of the bullseye all when when all cylinders are firing what does that feel like what's going on inside know that feeling that's right what does that feel like and what are the what's the so so it's like a bang bang experience thoughts and feelings right thoughts and emotions if you will so know

it name it put some sort of name on it you could name it I don't know tiger lies you could name it Kenny Kenny whatever that means right yeah name it any that's funny that's really funny so you name it anything I wasn't actually thinking of a name but like so like some athletes like these two Olympians I'm working with right now she calls hers free flow and so that's nice it's like this free openness but there's a there's um a flow to the way that she's you know that's her ideal competitive mindset that being

said is that now now everything that you do prior to the performance is really to get to the crescendo of the ICM or the IPM ideal performance mindset if you're not in sport so the way that you physically warm up but the way that you brush your teeth the way you get into your car get out of your car the way that you walk into a threshold the way you tie your tie the way all of those things that you do you there little threshold moments to back yourself to build yourself to be close just

a little closer to the ICM and if you when you do that over time before you know it that ICM feels real familiar huh so you can practice putting yourself in an ideal State and so you you so you're just more likely to get there more often that's the point yeah like all the really good stuff is right underneath the surface this is good yeah so when you get knocked away knocked down knocked sideways you that the good stuff is still under there when I say good stuff I mean the way that you speak to

yourself it's positive productive it's like building you as opposed to being critical or frustrated or like pulling you you know scraping at your core in general if you thought about types of thoughts there's one bucket of thoughts which is they they create space and another bucket of thoughts that create constriction so when I say uh to myself like I'm really agile I'm really good on my feet um I can do hard things those are two things that to me create space and on the constriction side when I say things to myself like um don't [

__ ] this one up now or um make sure you're crisp or there's a lot riding on this thing now that creates tension for me so I don't want to be naive that there's maybe something not riding on a moment but I need to create space because my brain is already trying to help me activate towards this thing to to get me up for this thing that I've I've deemed to be important this is the threat response in our brains so I have my sophisticated approach is to try to be able to back all that

intensity down so I need thinking patterns that create space so I can smile a little bit so I can be more fluid in the way that I'm adjusting to an unfolding unpredictable moment I learned something pretty early in my career I thank goodness I learned it that I think is what you're talking about and I learned to reframe a tense moment to from two from two yeah so for example um just as my career was sort of getting to go like I find myself sharing stages with people who are way better than me like they're

famous they're powerhouses and I'm like what the hell am I doing here right and now my fear that my performance is going to be substandard I won't live up to the reason they invited me all of that self talk all of that stuff just like I'm the weakest one here you know and I learned to reframe it like this is the most exciting thing in the world that they let me share the stage with these amazing people and what ended up happening was I let go of the competitive nature like I didn't have to be

better than them I didn't even have to be as good as them I just got to share the stage with them regard of how I did and how cool is it for me that's it yeah and I started to have my nerves became excitement yeah that's it so the way you frame anything is materially important public speaking is one of the hardest things for people and it's because there's no physical risk it's all identity risk it's all ego risk eyeballs are the danger in in these moments is that if you are clear about the purpose

MH not about the performance the whole thing Chang es and you can walk on stage and like help to get people enrolled or engaged or interested or create an invitation for something that you are passionate about it totally changes everything did I ever share with you the little insight I had between nerves and excitement that I learned from the Olympics so I was watching one of the Olympics yeah and I I realized that all of the journalists asked all of the athletes the same question are you nervous or were you nervous right right and every

athlete gave the exact same answer no I'm excited or no I was excited right and it's I started to realize that if you think about what the characteristics of nervousness are like your heart starts pounding your hands get clam you start envisioning the future what are the characteristics of excitement your heart starts pounding your hands get claim you start envisioning the future right and these Elite athletes had learned to interpret that data as excitement and the reason the journalists said were you nervous it's because they would be nervous that's exactly right right because that's why

they all ask the same question cuz they're not Elite athletes yeah and they're not practic deal with all of that emotion and so I did a little experiment on myself I was sitting on a plane and we hit some really bad turbulence I gripped the seat nerves and I literally said to myself this is exciting and I immediately relaxed yeah I mean and I reframed my own data yeah that's exactly how this works into a different interpretation of a different feeling and so there so when I get nervous always say this is exciting and it

works it works that quickly if you catch it early and you're aware if if you catch it really like you know we talk about trains of thought yeah you know and so if you're if you're unaware and that train of thought that thought train has been running for a while and then you're like wait a minute my heart's pounding I feel like I just threw up in my mouth wait this is excitement you're way past too late so if you can catch it really early that you know like you can get on the nervous train

like you were just talking about and if you get off on stop one and you get onto the excitement train which is what you're doing like no problems it's easy most people like don't are are struggle with the awareness piece first and then struggle with the mental tool to adjust so it's a awareness is step one and then psychological tools are step two there's I mean this is the problem of having you on this podcast which is I want to keep going for about like another three hours I feel the same both times I'm really

frustrated because I haven't finished all my questions yet such a joy such a joy I could literally talk to you forever we have so many unanswered questions that we you know started to pull some strings on um I hope we can do this again I'd like to do it a lot more and I'd like to have you back on the fining Mastery any day yeah so like maybe we'll just figure out a way to is an excuse to have each other in our lives a little B let's just do it yeah let's just do it

regularly all right cool so good to see you good stuff so good thank you mate if you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts and if you'd like even more optimism check out my website simon.com for classes videos and more until then take care of yourself take care of each other