“10,000 Hours is a Myth”

At the highest level of performance, whether it's in sports, business, or life, the difference between good and great, often comes down to one thing, the mind. >> Focus, uh, under intense pressure. How do you, you know, perform well when the lights are brightest? How do you hit that game-winning free throw or get yourself ready to play in a big game? >> My guest today, Dr. Alex Hourback, works with NBA and NFL teams, Olympians, elite military operators, and top executives. He's one of the leading voices in performance psychology and his work is all about teaching people to thrive under pressure, align with purpose, and sustain excellence over the long haul.

The reality is is stress is neither good nor bad. Stress is just your brain and body preparing you to do something effortful. When we see things as a challenge, we tend to kind of push, persist, be gritty, try new things, and encourage ourselves. The skills he teaches, from building focus to regulating your energy, are exactly what separates the best from everyone else. >> There's so many ways that you can access brain training, right? Like you can do mindfulness or you can do breath work or you can do selft talk or you can do visualization or you can do goal setting, but like just do one. >> This episode is packed with insights for anyone who wants to perform at their best in the game, in the boardroom, or in life.

Let's dive in with Dr. Alex. >> I I think that the message I'd leave you with is >> the Nick Stanley Show. >> Alex, welcome to the show. >> Thank you so much for having me, Nick. It's a pleasure to be here. Sorry it took us so long to finally line it up, but I'm I'm glad we did. >> Yeah. Um scheduling can be tough sometimes, but it's it's all good. I'm just glad we're here. And I really enjoyed the presentation. you and Scott, Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman gave you were doing a coaching seminar uh and I got to catch a little of it. I couldn't go to the actual seminar because I was out of town at the time.

Um but it sounds like it was an incredible event and you guys had a amazing lineup of speakers and you're just doing great work and so I'm really excited to have you on today. >> I'm excited to be here and funny enough you didn't miss anything because Scott and I actually punted that seminar itself. so we could get even more people coming. So, we were happy with the lineup that we had, but what we found was we just didn't give people enough runway and then we were missing out on a couple folks we really wanted and the thought turned to let's figure out how we make this if we're if we're going to do this, let's figure out how we do this at the highest level we can.

And so, stay tuned. There's there's going to be more there. >> Oh, absolutely. That's great news. Well, um I I will do my best to get involved then um because yeah, it was really interesting and I uh as my my other part-time gig um is is coaching a a high level uh youth club soccer team and so I'm really interested in the work you guys are doing for coaches. >> That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, we're excited about it. So looking forward to it. >> Great. Well, let's let's start at the beginning. Where did you grow up? Where did Alex Hourbach Hourbach get his uh where did he where did he start off at?

>> Man, [snorts] you're really making me go going to the archives here. I like it. Yeah. >> So, I was I was born in Phoenix, Arizona and grew up in Phoenix and Tucson really until I was about 16 years old. Uh I come from a family of two very highly educated parents. So education has always been a core part of the way my family has thought about what it means to be successful and what it looks like to set yourself up for the life that you want to live. Um there was a period of time as you mentioned in the intro and we can get into it where I sort of took a different path and explored coaching and a couple other things uh but ultimately ended coming up uh ended up coming back to kind of that more educational path.

So I like I said born in Phoenix, grew up in Tucson, soccer was my primary sport. um was a pretty competitive soccer player. U made you know Arizona's first all state select team at a pretty young age. Was invited to participate in Olympic development at a pretty young age and then just kind of burned out. Um you know was playing at one point on three soccer teams uh which is way too much for any young person to be doing no matter how good you are or where you want to take it to. Um, and so just ended up experimenting with a bunch of different sports and, you know, played American football and played basketball and played Australian rules football.

Um, and then about halfway through high school, my family moved from Tucson to New England for my mom's job. And, uh, that was the end of my athletic playing career and I started getting into coaching right then and did my senior project in high school on coaching football. Um, and was really interested in, you know, what it looks like to teach people to perform effectively even at that stage. um and then went to undergrad at University of Arizona where I kind of stayed on that path. Uh probably should have paid more attention in school than I did, but was sort of maniacally focused on um becoming a coach and so graduated, took a full-time coaching job and then uh burned out pretty hard from that.

It's a it's a pretty um intense lifestyle. Uh and the way that the time was spent >> just didn't align with the way that I thought I wanted to spend my time. It was really hard for me to imagine spending the next 10, 15, 20 years working for a specific job and then to get to that job and not get to do any of the things that I like doing on the way up there anyway. Um, and so went back to school um got my PhD. >> And where where were you coaching at before we jumped to the to the education? Where where were you coaching at? >> Yeah, so I um did some work as an undergrad assistant at University of Arizona.

I spent a year on recruiting and then a year on defense and a year on offense. While I was at Arizona, I did my first internship in the NFL. So, I actually did an internship with the Rams when they were still in St. Louis. So, I'm dating myself a little bit there now. Um, and then my first full-time [clears throat] coaching job was at University of Rhode Island, a small uh FCS school up in New England. >> Okay. Okay. And then you go back to school to do the PhD. >> Yeah, that's the Cliffnotes version. So, I actually go and work for the Kansas City Chiefs one more time to sort of see like, is this really what I want to do?

I had started working toward, you know, getting I didn't major in psychology as an undergrad, so I had to go back to school and take some prerequisite courses to get in. Um, and so I was doing that. I was interning with the sports psychologist at the local university, learning a little bit more about it. And then went to Kansas City to sort of figure out like, do I really want to be a sports psychologist or do I really want to try this football thing, but maybe in a different environment? And it turned out I really wanted to be a sports psychologist. So I went to get my doctorate at University of North Texas which is one of the kind of premier academic institutions for turning out sports psychologists and at this point has turned out a number of the the people who served in high level roles.

Um did my internship which is kind of like the equivalent of medical residency at University of North Carolina and then came back to University of Arizona for a couple years before I joined the Toronto Raptors right before COVID started. um was with the Raptors for 4 years, had the opportunity to serve on executive team, build a pretty incredible program. I'm really proud of the work we did. Um and I was super lucky to have a tremendous amount of support from really everybody in the organization to promote both mental health and mental performance and even think about how we develop players, you know, character and leadership skills.

Uh which is a cool kind of adjunct to the work that we do. Um, and then left the Raptors when I had my first kid. Uh, and then most recently joined the Jacksonville Jaguars and have been doing that, flying back and forth to Florida, uh, for a few months now. >> Now, I have to ask, so how do you make these inroads with the the Rams and then Kansas City and then the Raptors? Like, how did how did that ball get rolling? >> Honestly, it's a a bit of luck. Like, probably a fair fair bit of luck. But when I was in undergrad, um, this may give you some insight into my psychology. As I started to look for opportunities to work in pro sports or in high level college sports, I literally sent a handwritten letter to every NFL owner, president, GM, head coach, offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator.

Same thing for every division one institution. So it was like a thousand plus letters. And at one point, the personal assistant to the owner of the St. Louis Rams opened my letter apparently and uh he happens to live in Tucson where I was going to school and I'm in the middle of class and I get a call from a St. Louis number and at that point you know people weren't screening calls as frantically as they are now cuz the spam call wasn't so big. Um and I answer the phone and he says, "Hi, this is Marshall. I'm the personal assistant to the owner of the Rams. I'm having brunch up at this restaurant called Schlommo and Vetos, which is no longer here.

Uh, and I'm going to be here for the next 20 or so minutes. If you can make it here before I leave, I'll have a conversation with you and if you can't, the Rams won't be an option for you. And I turned to my friend [laughter] in school and I said, "Hey, man, you know, can you take my bag? I've got to go." And I left class, uh, ran to the car. Thankfully, it's like a 15-minute drive. So, made it safely and ended up having lunch with with Marshall for about 2 and 1/2 hours. Um, and that led to the introduction to, you know, the other people in the Rams who ended up hiring me. Um, and the rest, the rest is really history, as they say.

I think once you have one of those opportunities, um, I won't say it's easy to get the next ones, but, you know, it's like any job, right? You've got some credibility, you've you've had the opportunity to do it, and it's a little bit less of a leap to the second one. And, uh, honestly, the role with the Chiefs was was quite similar. So, it was my first role with University of Rhode Island. It was really only after I graduated that I started to find like more traditional ways of finding jobs in sports. Once I finished my PhD, the Raptors were, you know, a little bit of a different process. And same thing with Jacksonville, >> right?

And with all of these teams, it's mental skills and performance psychology. >> Well, with the with the Rams and with the Chiefs, I was still on my coaching journey, so I was doing, you know, a bunch of grunt work basically. Uh but with with the Raptors and with the Jaguars, yes, it's it's all mental performance, uh mental health, you know, helping executives, front office folks, and coaches optimize their performance, make better decisions, um figure out how to work more effectively with players. So, we deal with things like communication and interpersonal conflict and, you know, leadership. Um and and then we also deal with the stuff that shows up on the field or on the court, right?

How do you focus uh under intense pressure? How do you you know, perform well when the lights are brightest? How do you hit that game-winning free throw or get yourself ready to play in a big game? You know, those are the kinds of things we're dealing with. >> Yeah. And so now you're continuing to work with the Jacksonville Jaguars in a similar capacity. >> That's right. Yeah, I joined Jacksonville at the end of April, early May, and and have been there ever since. >> Okay. And what does that look like? What are what's some of the daytoday like in teaching the highest level athletes how to perform at an even higher level uh through these mental skills?

>> I mean what's really amazing about the the work that I do is even when you get to the highest level athletes, you'd be surprised at the number of them who have never met of or heard of sports psychology at all. Um it's still relatively new as a field. I mean, certainly not as new as when I started, obviously, but like it's it's not all that common for players to work with someone. And it's sort of like the the newest wave coupled with analytics, I think, where people are starting to think about how the mind impacts sport performance. And it's funny because, you know, we've always known that and you think of like some of the all-time famous great coaches, you know, they'll talk about the importance of the mental side of the game or you think about like, you know, Yo, Yogi Bear's 90% of the game is half mental, right?

like we we've known that it's there, but people just don't train it. And so, uh, in many ways, it's kind of still skill building and foundational learning even at the highest level. And the way I think about the work that I do is is really like a bottomup process. So, we're teaching athletes first how to just take care of themselves and put themselves in a position to be successful. So, these are kind of the basic foundations of well-being, right? good sleep, good nutrition, healthy relationships, uh solid self-care, you know, understanding your own values, having clarity on your goals, being able to visualize yourself, you know, being successful, knowing how to relax.

Then you move up a level and you kind of get to nervous system regulation, right? So, we're thinking about getting ready for a game and you're a little bit too hot or a little bit too cold, right? How do you get yourself to that sweet spot where you can really perform well? And so this is where we might leverage tools like deep breathing or other forms of structured breath work or progressive muscle relaxation or um you know grounding any other kind of techniques that help people kind of come back into the present moment, come back into their body. At the third level, we're teaching athletes how to direct their attention.

And the easiest way to think of this is like kind of channels on a TV screen, right? You've got different ways and places you can put your attention and at different points, say in a football game, uh you might have to put your attention here or there to be most successful. So before a snap, you know, we might be wanting you to pay attention to the play call, right? Otherwise, you're not going to know what you're going to do. And then when you get set up, you might want to be internally focused for a minute to make sure you're in the right position and your feet are lined up correctly. And then you want to shift your attention back to the external world.

So you can think about, well, where's that guy going to be? Or what what read should I be making? Or how do I play off of this defender? And then, you know, ultimately the play starts and you just kind of execute, right? You hope that that it comes to you uh based on all your training and you kind of trust the work that you put in. And then the final step is what we think about kind of traditional sports psychology services, right? Like how do you have great selft talk or you know imagine yourself winning a game or um you know regulating your energy and like those things are obviously highly valuable but it's really hard to control your selft talk if you're just like completely emotionally out of control.

Um and so we really are teaching athletes even at this level this kind of bottomup process for making sense of their experience and learning to manage themselves most effectively. And ultimately, you know, what the data points to is this concept of self-regulation. It's this idea that I can control, direct, modify my own thinking, my feelings, my physiology, my behavior in service of the goals that I have. And ultimately, this whole process is giving athletes the tools they need to self-regulate so that they can be as successful as they can be on and off the field. Frankly, >> there's so many things there I want to learn more about.

Um, and I'm just going to stick this in here uh right now for anybody who is is listening. The book again is called Called to Greatness. It's an excellent handbook for all of these mental skills. I read it cover to cover. Really enjoyed the book. Uh there's a lot of just it's a it's it's a toolbox that anybody who is involved really in performance, I wouldn't just say athletics. I mean it crosses over uh certainly it works for athletics. Um but a lot of those self-regulation skills and a lot of the things you just mentioned I mean anytime somebody has to perform it all comes into play whether that's your job if you have to speak in front of a group of people.

Anytime you want to be at your best all of this comes into play. And so I really think these are skills that are hugely useful to people from a just every spectrum of of life. Um to get into some of the things you just mentioned there. So if somebody is cuz you mentioned the the regulating if you're running a little too hot breathing exercises to bring bring yourself back down. What about the guy who is running a little low, right? It's it's game day. I know I need to be up for this and for whatever reason I'm just mentally a little sluggish or just not I know on some level I'm not ready to perform right now.

What What are some techniques you recommend for that guy? >> Sure. Well, you might be surprised to know breathing is also an answer for this. But before I get into that, I just want to say I appreciate the kind words very much about the book and that was that was the goal. So I'm glad I'm glad to hear the mission was accomplished there. uh when you have people who run say a little cold um really what we're trying to do is activate the physiology a little bit more so we can kind of get the energy up and then create kind of like dissonance right it's this idea that like well my body's really ramped up so I guess my brain needs to kind of get there too and you have this experience regularly if you ever go to the gym like early in the morning or you're a person who doesn't feel motivated to work out and you force yourself to go anyway you as you start moving your body the rest of you follow suit you know most people don't go through a 45minut working uh workout thinking gosh I really don't want to be here.

That might happen for the first minute or two. Uh but as you get moving and all the physiology and everything else changes, right? That's sending all these good signals to your brain that like this is the place I'm supposed to be and now my brain's getting ready to do this thing as well as I need to do it. So a few tools we might use, right? First would be breathing to change our physiology. So this might be just really simple uh short inhale, short quick exhale super forcefully. Um, if you Google chicken breathing, you can see a good example of this, but you can kind of like cluck your arms really and like and what you'll find is your heart rate increases, you'll start to get a little bit sweaty, even if that's not what you're intending, and all of a sudden the physiology is ramped up.

So, that's one tool we might use. A second tool we might use is just music, right? You know, there's a reason that locker rooms have so much uh high energy, high tempmpo music going before the game. Uh, but if you're a person who runs a little cold, maybe you want faster, higher tempo, more intensity music to do that. Third tool we might use is some movement like I just mentioned. So maybe we have you, and again, this is part of the reason why athletes stretch or go out and do warm-ups, right? Like uh we might have you maybe do a little bit of an extra weightlifting session or we might have you run around a little bit more um and get your energy flowing or, you know, go run with a teammate or talk to a coach or do some kind of physical movement where you're just not sitting there um staying cool.

So those would be some of the things that you might do to sort of bring the physiology to the place you need it to be so that the brain can get to the place you need it to be to perform. >> And I imagine this varies from player to player, right? I mean, some players are going to need to bring themselves up before the game, some are going to need to bring themselves down. Different techniques work for different players experiencing the same sensations. Is that accurate? >> That's exactly right. I mean, the reality is, you know, most people run hot before a competition. is is pretty rare to have an athlete getting ready for an NFL game who's like not ready to go at all.

It can happen, but it's it's quite rare. So, a lot of the times what you're working on is bringing people back into a more centered place where you can use that energy effectively versus being out of control. And um you know, there's lots of ways that you see this in sports, right? From the team who, you know, makes early mistakes and starts kind of frantically to the individual player who, you know, loses track of what he's supposed to do because he's just so ramped up. Um, but yes, everything's individualized and you know, you kind of like you mentioned with the book, right? Everything is about giving these athletes a variety of tools that they can use.

I'm not a big believer in uh well, there's this one school of thought that says these are where the tools should come from. Uh, especially at the highest level of performance broadly, whether it's sports or military units or in business, it's really about figuring out what works for you personally and then mastering that tool so that you can use it when you need it. Um and so with athletes we might teach them you know five different breathing techniques and they can pick the one that helps them feel most centered. Uh we might teach them you know different ways that they can engage in selft talk but some athletes really love to be self-critical for example even if we don't think as psychologists that that's the most helpful ways to do it you know if that works for them I'm not trying to take that tool away from you what I want you to do is build your individualized plan so that you can be as successful as you can be.

Yeah. And I'm wondering if sometimes when athletes aren't there there are early mistakes and it can seem like they're not fully dialed in, it's that they're actually a little too amped up, running a little too hot, and it it presents as moving a little slower, being a little hesitant because you're almost in fight orflight mode. uh prior to that competition. >> Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, again, it's all individualized, but you will see that. And what you'll find is that, >> you know, even again at the highest levels of sports, right, when you're just getting started and you're just coming back to an NFL season, it's normal for the energy to be really high.

Um, and so you may see, you know, some overfunctioning, right? Whether that's overthinking or you're too ramped up or you can't control your body in the way that you're used to. And as you get playing, right, you'll settle in, which is what happens to everyone. you know, use some of that excess energy and you'll be ready to go. Um, but you know, it's not uncommon to see some of those mistakes, especially early on as people are kind of getting back into it and figuring it out. Um, but it, you know, it's it's an intense experience um to compete at that level. It's an intense experience for founders to pitch to investors.

It's an intense experience for CEOs to meet their board or give a speech to the company, right? Like all of those things are recipes for potentially being a little bit overaroused and needing to figure out how you get yourself back to the right place so you can perform at your best >> right now. If we were looking at the youth sports, I mean, you've got some experience in being run to the ground as a player. um too much intensity probably which led to some of the the burnout which is really common these days in youth sports. And having been around the soccer scene in Southern California for a number of years now, it breaks my heart to see some of these kids who are super talented, love the game, love competing, and then suddenly, and they're not necessarily players on on my team, but I the community is a lot bigger, and I see certain kids, get to know them just just a little bit.

Um, and it it's heartbreaking when I see them, they're just not around anymore. And I ask what happened. Uh, he, she, they just they they just stopped. They just had enough. They they they just quit. Um, and two-part question there. One, I wanted to ask, what do we do to avoid that burnout? And then the other one um was just to dubtail onto that that last thing when when you've got especially with kids, right, where they are running too hot and you can see it during a competition, they're not performing at their best cuz they're a little too amped up. What is the best thing for a coach to do in that moment?

Cuz usually the impulse is to start shouting directions to get after them, to get them going. And I'm wondering if you're going to tell me that we should actually be doing the opposite. >> Well, well, Nick, when you're having a tough time, do you want to be yelled at? [laughter] >> You know, like it it's it's, you know, pretty intuitive when you lay it out that way. But I I'll answer the the second question first since that's that's where we ended. But yeah, I mean, look, it it is hard, especially, you know, kids don't always know exactly how they're feeling and they can't always articulate why their energy is off.

And, you know, there may be any number of reasons. And so the first thing I'd encourage for coaches is to try to lead with some compassion and some curiosity. Now I get that there's a time and a place, but you know, I mean, I've worked with athletes who, you know, if they made a mistake in practice, their dad or their mom would berate them. And so you can imagine the pressure these kids feel when they go out there in a game and they make a mistake. All the internal dialogue has nothing to do with you as a coach. It's all about, oh my gosh, you know, what's my dad going to say to me now that this is over?

Oh, I really don't want to get in the car with mom after that. And yeah, you know, there's lots we could talk about about how parents can manage that more effectively. But as the coach, you just don't know. It's kind of like everyone's going through something you don't know about. You really don't know. Even if it's a six-year-old kid or a 5-year-old kid or a three-year-old kid, like you just don't know. And as you go younger, they really can't tell you very much. And so, you've got to be curious, patient, cautious. So, there's lots that you can do to help kids in those situations, right? First might be sub them out of the game and give them a minute to just cool down, right?

Everyone benefits from a little bit of a reset. And you think about it in the school context, right? When a kid's having a temper tantrum or is a little too ramped up, we ask them to just go sit in a corner, make sure that they're safe, and then when they're ready to come back, they come back, right? It's not about like punishing them. It's about giving them the resources and the tools that they need to self-regulate. And so we say, "Okay, you're not able to self-regulate in the context of the game right now. Let's bring you out of the game. Let's give you a chance to rest, recover, reset, and when you're ready, we'll go back in." And that's and like I'm here and I'm here to help you, right?

So that might be one thing that you can do. The second thing you could do is leverage some tools pregame for example like breathing techniques. I mean kids as young as five can do some form of mindfulness activity, right? Or learn to do deep diaphragmatic breathing. And the more you give them those tools, right, the more effectively they're going to deploy them on their own when they need them. And then third, and you know, you got to be careful with this one, I guess, but like physical touch is a really good thing also. Um, you know, there's some really interesting data that shows how important human connection is for regulating one another, right?

Like we have evolved to regulate each other's nervous systems. And so, you know, if you've got a young athlete who's really struggling, you know, having a teammate give them a hug or a high five or some kind of like physical connection can help them just calm down and reset. Uh, so those might be some tools that you could use. Uh, and yes, I I would caution against the escalating of the the conflict or the the challenge by yelling. And I mean, anyone who's married or been married or been in a significant relationship knows that this doesn't work, right? If you are upset or your spouse is aggravated and then you yell at your spouse or you tell them to calm down, like those things do not work.

And the same is true for kids, right? So giving them some alternative tools that they can use can be really important. As far as the the burnout piece of this goes, there's so many factors that play into it, but I think probably the main one is this really intense focus on early specialization. And I think that this comes from a couple places. One is I think um as sports have gotten to be more and more significant in our culture, people have started to think about sport as a lot more than just a thing my kid does on the weekend. And so it becomes this competitive space where parents are trying to make their kid the best soccer player.

And we have this um fallacy in our thinking that more is always better. Kind of broadly in American culture, more work is better and leads to better outcomes. More soccer leads to better soccer players. And for better or worse, >> I've got to get to 10,000 hours before they do, >> right? And 10,000 hours is a myth, too. But we could we could talk about that also, [laughter] you know. But you know, we do have some stories that kind of like affirm this view, right? So you think of Tiger Woods and oh, his dad handed him a golf club when he was one and he was driving 100 yards when he was four. And it's like, okay, but the odds that your kid is Tiger Woods are like incredibly small.

Um, and so approaching it that way is unrealistic. And for every Tiger Woods you can find, you can also find like a Roger Federer, right? So Roger Federer played multiple sports really until he was in his early teenage years and only then did he start to really focus on tennis and actually he'll talk about how these other sports led to transferable skill in tennis like hand eye coordination, ball coordination is ball coordination. So if you're playing say basketball, you're going to learn some stuff that's relevant for your career in tennis or soccer relevant for your career in tennis. Um, and so I think it's important to give athletes the opportunity to experiment widely.

So I think that's one sort of piece, right, is this pressure that parents have and the sort of evolved sport culture. And I think that's really pushed to this specialization as the way that kids get to where they want to be. Um, but we know that specialization does lead to burnout. We also know specialization leads to higher risk, like a much higher risk of injury um, for athletes and even a higher risk of mental health concerns for athletes. And the easiest way that you fix that is you just let them play multiple sports. Um, and you can think about it again kind of intuitively, right? Like if you have an athlete, let's say, who plays football in the fall and runs track in the winter and plays basketball in the spring, it's pretty hard for me to imagine that this kid learning how to run faster and track isn't helping football and basketball or learning to play basketball with a different group of teammates isn't helping football.

And if you've seen basketball and football at the highest level, which I'm I'm very fortunate to have done, a lot of the concepts are super similar. Like what you see happen on a basketball court looks a lot like what happens on a football field and vice versa. So there is some transfer there, but people just don't appreciate that kind of naturally. Again, I think because of that assumption that more is always better. And if you're really interested in like getting deeper into this space, there was a great paper written in the '8s called um the mundanity mundanity, I'm not sure the right way to pronounce that word, of excellence.

Um, and it's about a series of Olympic swimmers compared to their, you know, less competitive counterparts. And basically what they find is, you know, swimming has a huge range of possible ways that you could participate from, I think it's like quadruple D, right? Like the lowest level recreational kind of swimming all the way to I'm a world-class Olympian. And they specifically talk about how do athletes make the jump from, you know, quadruple D to C to B to A to Olympian. And what they find is that the answer is not more time. It's not more time. It's really different techniques, more sophisticated use of skills, more efficient movement, right?

And so those things don't come from just playing soccer for 40 hours a week, right? They come from experimenting with different things, learning new ways to move your body, trying new techniques, failing a lot. Um, now some of that's a function of time, but a lot of that's not really a function of time on task. It's about having good coaching, other resources, and being willing to push yourself in ways that we just don't typically think about. So, that would be what I'd encourage parents to read if they're if they're interested in thinking about how they helped their kid become the best they can be.

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So, if you're ready to stop wasting time on busy work, join the AI revolution and make a little automation magic of your own. Try the Zapier Chat GPT integration using the link below. Great advice right there. And something that popped into my head when you mentioned Tiger Woods there is that that is a sample of one. So we don't actually know if him having the golf club when he was 2 years old is what made the difference. Tiger could have taken the Roger Federer path and been just as good because he had an insane amount of natural talent and the work ethic would have come into play at some point.

It maybe didn't need to start when he was five and he still ends up having the same success that he had and maybe even doesn't have some of the paying the price later in life with some of the uh personal things that he went through because he had spent so much time in this one lane that maybe some other parts of his personality hadn't had a chance to develop and that caught up with him at some point. Tell me about that myth of the 10,000 hour rule because everybody since Malcolm Gladwell's book holds that as a truth. Why is it a myth? >> Well, it's a cute guide, I suppose, but [laughter] but 10,000 hours is an arbitrary number that Malcolm Gladwell selected when he wrote the book.

And he's a super smart guy, and he obviously had good reason for doing it. But I think the reason for doing it was like it's catchy, right? Like it's a sticky idea, and it makes sense to people. was like, "Oh, if I just put in enough time, I'll eventually become an expert." But there's so so many layers to that discussion. The first and probably most important layer is Gladwell based that statement on the work of Anders Ericson, who's this really uh all-time famous psychologist who studied the development of expertise. And nowhere anywhere does he mention 10,000 hours. And in fact in his sort of like not rebuttal but his sort of commentary on Gladwell's work he says like actually we find experts at 1500 hours and 2500 hours and 7,000 and 37 hours you know so there there is no one number and having it's good to have goals right so a goal to practice more might be useful but aiming for 10,000 hours and assuming that you're not an expert before then um is probably not the solution um and expertise is really it's complicated right so and it it's not always linear in the way that it's developed.

Um, and so just thinking again that more is going to get you to the place that you want to be is re not the solution. And we can all kind of think of people in our lives who, you know, put a ton of time into something and never quite got to where they wanted to be. Uh, it doesn't mean that they didn't work hard, but hard work alone is not going to get you to the peak of whatever it is that you want to achieve. You're going to need coaching. You're going to need to experiment. You're going to need to fail. you're going to need to uh figure out how to leverage tools outside of your immediate sphere to figure out what else you can borrow to make something unique and innovative and you know contribute and move yourself forward in a real way.

And the same is true even in sports, right? So um again to use Federer as an example, there's a really cool article written on uh what they called sporting genius which was like what makes someone as an athlete, you know, that level of superstar and that that excellent at what they do. And it really boiled down to confidence and creativity um and innovation in the way that they perform. And that comes from being willing to risk failing, right? Which is has nothing to do with how many hours you put in. Um and so I think it's just a different way of thinking about what it really means. And I I think people like 10,000 hours because it feels easy, right?

Like if I just put in enough time, I'll be as good as I want to be. But that's not that's just not how anything works. And you can look outside of sport to find other really interesting examples. So in my field, for example, at psychology, um there's some really interesting data that shows that practitioners earlier in their career make fewer mistakes than people who have been practicing for a really long time. Um and if your [clears throat] expertise is supposed to come as a function of amount of time, like well why why would that be the case? Um and you can see that some of it is vigilance about you know not wanting to make a mistake and treating it differently.

Some of it is not assuming that they know things just because they've seen it a million times before. And so it's not again it's not this really easy like oh you just put in this time and eventually you're an expert and then when you're an expert everything goes well. You know there are benefits to being new. There are benefits to less time. There are benefits to different approaches that you can find at the highest levels of really anything that you're doing um that would support something other than 10,000 hours let's say. >> Yeah. And I am a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell. I want to put that out there.

[laughter] But one, when I am in conversation sometimes with friends who really love him, they're almost [snorts] >> offended sometimes because I've gone down the Ericson rabbit hole on the 10,000 hours myself and discovered all this information and came away with the conclusion that the 10,000 hours is true as a story. It's not literally true, though. And that that I find is a great framework to bring to Gladwell's work because his gift is taking complicated concepts and turning it into a simple story. And that's what makes him so easy to read and that's why I think a lot of people connect with his work.

That's why I connect with his work. I think it's an incredible >> gift that he has for that. >> But it's good to remember that it's like any story. It's not all literally true. It's not just a handbook for step by step. Oh, I put in the 10,000 hours. I can be an expert. I I could go be a NBA basketball player. No problem. I'm just 10,000 hours away from it. Doesn't matter that I'm only 61 and my vertical's uh not 45 or 50 in or whatever your typical NBA um basketball player's vertical jump is. And that Yeah, that's that's that's what I have to say on that. [snorts] Gosh. Um, you bring up so many interesting things.

Um, how about the idea of nervousness, those nerves and cuz you mentioned something when you tell somebody to calm down, it is not helpful to actually achieving the goal of calming them down, right? And the more forcefully you assert calm down right now, the less likely they're going to be able to do that. And I wanted to talk about this idea of take instead of taking nervousness and trying to calm down, which is running against your biology, trying to take that nervousness and turn it into excitement, which is more performanceoriented. >> Yeah, this is one of my favorite things to talk about, Nick.

So, I'm glad I'm glad you picked this. So, I guess to back up one step and sort of set the scene here around nervousness, right? the the idea that drives a lot of the way I think about how you get people to move from say nervousness to excitement is built on the concept of mindsets. And mindset was really popularized by Carol Dwek, right? She wrote a great book about growth versus fixed mindset. And that's sort of what people think of when they think of mindset, right? It's like, oh, you have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. And that that's true, but really people have mindsets about everything.

People have mindsets about food, about sleep, about stress, about values, about relationships. And mindsets are really just a set of beliefs that guide your perception and action. And so we have those mindsets about everything. And one of the things we have mindsets about is is stress, right? Or nervousness. And I think a lot of this developed, you know, when I was younger where people started to talk about stress as like the next chronic killer after smoking, right? It was like it's it's just terrible for you. Like if you're stressed out all the time, it's like you smoked 50 pack of cigarettes in a day.

And it's just like these extreme takes about what stress is. But the reality is is stress is neither good nor bad. Stress is just your brain and body preparing you to do something effortful. Cortisol gets a super bad rap as the stress hormone. But cortisol is just an energy hormone. You have cortisol as soon as you wake up in the morning. Cortisol is what gets you out of bed. It's just an energy hormone designed to mobilize you. Now stress over a prolonged period of time with no recovery is bad, but short bouts of stress with recovery is actually quite important and very good for you. And you can take this parallel to the gym, right?

So, you know, if you go to the gym and you get on a bench press, right? If you bench press and then you rest, probably in a few times of doing that, you'll be a little bit stronger, right? If you go to the gym and you bench press every day and you never rest and recover, you're going to tear a pack, right? So, the same principle applies for stress wellbeing, broadly speaking, right? Like, if you >> and thinking about that workout as you're stressing your body and then recovering is how you get stronger and that metaphor can be applied to mental stress as well. 100%. >> It's a good form of stress.

Yeah. >> Abs. Absolutely. Yeah. There's ust stress and distress, but without recovery, right, stress can be harmful over the long term, but in short bouts, stress is actually we we need it, right? Without stress, you'd also you'd also die. So, we need some stress. But we've pathized stress a lot. And so, I think what you've seen as an evolution of that is this idea that all stress is bad and that the goal is just to be happy all the time. It's to get rid of stress. And if we're feeling stressed, something might be wrong. But if you can frame stress and see it for what it is, right? This brain and body getting you ready to do something effortful.

You have a lot a lot of other opportunities. And my f uh my favorite kind of way that this has been explored was through some really cool research done by Dr. Ali Crumb. She's up at Stanford. She researched what are called stress mindsets. And she did this really cool study with a group of seals going through buds training. And Buds training is basically this like very intense period of the seal training sort of people think of it as like make or break if you're a David Gogggins fan. Like I think he failed Buds like three or four times, right? It's like an extremely challenging set of circumstances to navigate because we're sort of testing your limits as a as a human being to see if you're you're ready to also be involved in the things that we're going to ask you to do.

And what she found was that seals who went through Buds training had three distinct mindsets that determined their performance. The first was the one that we've all been socialized into, which is this like stress is bad. What she called a stress is debilitating mindset. And it's basically this idea that like nervousness is a problem, right? When I feel nervous, what I should do is get rid of stress as quickly as possible. I should get rid of these nerves as quickly as possible. And what she found was seals who had this mindset were really effective at getting rid of their stress quickly because they just quit.

Right? So if you're stressed out and you don't want to be stressed out anymore, the easiest thing to do is just leave. Right? But that does not often get you to your goal. Especially if you're working on something that's challenging and hard and that's going to require a bit of grit and persistence. You're probably not going to get there if you see all of your stress as debilitating. The second mindset she found, which I see a lot actually in coaches and and leaders, is what she called the will your way through it mindset. And it's this idea that when things get hard, we just put our heads down and we focus on whatever it is that's right in front of us.

Now, what was really interesting about this for the Seals was that Seals who had this mindset, their individual performance was okay, but their team performance suffered because they stopped doing the things they needed to do as a teammate to be successful. And again, you've seen this with people you've worked with, right? You know, Johnny's really stressed out. Like, let's leave him alone. He's just doing his own thing. >> That works for Johnny to be okay and get his work done, but if anybody else has to collaborate with Johnny, that's a problem. And being a Navy Seal is a team game. Being an NFL player is a team game, right?

So having that mentality is not going to allow your team to reach the full potential of the highest level. And then the third mindset was this idea that stress is enhancing. And this will get to your sort of like how do we treat nervousness to make it seem better, right? And what they found was that seals who had this mindset that stress is enhancing really looked at stress in an adaptive way. And two really cool things happened. their individual performance improved and their team performance improved because they started to talk to and interact with their teammates in ways that promoted them having a similar mindset.

And this is some of the really cool stuff that comes from mindset research is we know that peers, coaches, parents, other significant others in our life can shape the mindset that we have by the feedback that they give. So, if you're in Buds training and your teammate next to you is like, "How awesome is this?" that we're holding our breath underwater for a minute and then we get to come up and like scream with each other and be, you know, that's going to change the way you think about that experience. Right? If you're carrying a giant log 5 miles and 5 miles in, your teammate is like, "How blessed are we to be here, man?

This is such a treat." That's going to change the way that you think and feel about what's going on, even if that's not what your mindset is yet. And so it turns out that if you want to make that kind of shift, right, from nervousness to excitement or anxiety to something more helpful, it's kind of like four or five different ways that you could think about it. The first is to see it as a challenge, right? So, hey, this is an opportunity to show what I'm made of. This is a challenge I've trained for, right? This is something I can push myself in. And when you see things as a challenge, what you're doing is kind of choosing between challenge versus threat, right?

Which is the foundation of this research generally. When we see things as a threat, we get to like fight or flight. When we see things as a challenge, we tend to kind of push, persist, be gritty, try new things, and encourage ourselves. The second is to see it as an opportunity to show what you're made of or demonstrate kind of a signature strength, right? It's like this is a chance to show what all that training is for, right? This is a chance to show what our edge as a team is. Third is to see it as a sign of determination, right? Like, oh man, my body is getting me really ready to go. like these these things that I feel this physiological response I feel is my body helping me be as ready as I can be and then fourth is to call it excitement right what's really cool about like nerves for example or nervousness is the physiological signature right like increased heart rate sweaty brow sweaty palms this is the same thing that happens when you're excited about something it's just what you choose to call it or how you categorize it and so just choosing something like more adaptive like excitement or energized or happy or you know liberated, locked in, whatever it is like categorizing it as something effectively will also help you use that physiology more effectively and perform better.

>> Yeah. To bring a real world example to some of the stuff you just talked about the uh team that I currently coach. I mean, it was maybe two years ago they had heartbreak in PK's in the end of a very long tournament. And anybody who knows the game of soccer knows that penalty kicks at the end of the game is an extreme stress situation. And they have new rules now that the coaches are not allowed to stay there with the players on the field while they huddle up before the PKs. They have to be off to the side. And the boys on my team really tightened up. Uh froze up, missed four out of five and uh and lost in a competition that they really were passionate about and and wanted and deserved to continue to go on.

Um but it didn't it didn't work out in this one situation. And we had a good conversation maybe 2 weeks afterwards about it on what they were going through mentally when it was happening. And it was all about thinking about feeling those nerves and then not knowing what to do with them, being afraid of failure, which led to failure uh for for most of them. Um because it was like fixating on like what happens if I miss [snorts] and we talked about how can we make this fun? How can we get excited about the extreme challenge of this the extreme nerves of this and seeing it as a game within a game and and taking taking the pressure off.

Hey, this isn't it's not all writing on this one thing. This is just a little This is just a little game we're playing to just see who Well, we're not even going to worry about consequences. We're It's just a little game we're playing. And man, it has made all the difference in the ensuing two years. I mean, it's like a it's like a cheat code um for these kids when they just see it as something to get excited about rather than something because they're going to feel nervous, of course, but man, that transition has been incredible. Um, and the other one, uh, we mentioned this a while ago, but you said touch with kids and that has a a calming effect.

And obviously, um, I'm an adult and they're I mean they're teenagers, they're 13 years old, but I'm I'm not going to get in the habit of of touching a lot of, um, a lot of kids, but there is a way to incorporate it. And and one thing is before say a a tournament final or just a big match is I will have them just circle up touching each other and then engaged in group breathing. And it's really simple. I mean it might be three to five deep breaths all in unison. And wow, does it just take the edge off and then somehow puts them on the same wavelength right before this situation where there's a tendency to be over anxious.

[snorts] >> That's awesome. There's so many uh cool things that you're doing in there and lots of really cool science to to kind of back you up, which I think is is neat. I I'll point out a couple other things that that you've done that I think are quite effective. The the first is you kind of changed the framing of it a little bit. So, you played with the perspective on the penalty kicks. Uh, one of my favorite examples of this that most people can relate to is like test taking. You know, when I was a a freshman in college, I overslept my first final ever and like ran and had half the time to finish it.

And I remember calling my mom after being like, "Oh my god, I'm going to lose my scholarship." Blah, blah, blah. And, you know, she was just cool as a cucumber. I was like, "Don't worry about it. I'll be fine." You know, and of course it all turned out okay. Like, no one's ever asked me what I got on that test. And no one's ever asked you, I'm sure, why you ever got on a test, right? And you know, it's always really important in these moments like the penalty kicks, right? Like of course it feels significant now, but in like 30 years, you know, what you're going to remember is the fun you had with your friends, right?

And that, you know, it maybe is painful, but it it's still like a positive experience to have had. And so by shifting it into like, oh, let's bring some joy or like it's a game within a game, you're also changing a little bit of like how intensely this is experienced. So I love that. I like that you're doing the breathing in in the circle. I think that's really cool. There's some really neat research on this phenomenon called biobehavioral synchrony, which is the idea that, you know, at different times we're moving in unison or out of sync uh with each other. And there's some really interesting data that shows that athletes who play longer together tend to have more biobehavioral synchrony, for example.

So, their heart rate sync up where they link uh where they look on the court kind of syns up or on the field syncs up and they better predict each other's movements. um which I think is also super neat. Um so there's just a lot of really positive things that come out of it. And then um a good friend of mine, his name is Gear Jord. he's a researcher over in Norway um has done a ton of work on penalty kicks um in in particular and he you know talks about some of the things that you've talked about and there's some really cool data he has that shows that when teams leave an athlete by themselves for example they're more likely to miss a penalty kick versus if they circle up and touch each other and kind of hang out because you feel like you're in a community right and you know people don't think a lot about kind of the the other consequences of of these kinds of things but I mean imagine you know, being a pro soccer player, you know, kicking a penalty kick, right?

The way that that looks is your team stands on the halfway line of the field and you have this sort of long like walk the plank kind of vibe all the way to the spot and there's all sorts of things that are going on as you're doing that, right? The goalie might run up to you and give you the ball and say something to you. You know, the referee might interfere a little bit with what you're doing. Um, you know, there's there's all sorts of things that are going on. Uh, and if you miss and your team acts like you don't exist, right? Now you've got this experience of shame about that, right? No one wants to feel that way.

And so there's lots that you can do to mitigate that, right? Like even if you miss or make it, people run up to them and celebrate or run up and give them a hug, right? Like, and so I think you're you're really leveraging just a ton of cool tools to help your athletes manage all that pressure a little bit better. >> To stay on the penalty kick thing for a second, I thought it was really interesting. There was a video of of Cristiano Ronaldo taking a penalty kick for Portugal. And this is a guy who's won everything in his sport, who's been named the FIFA player of the year in the world. I don't remember the exact number that he's won.

I think it's six times, five or six times. He and Messi clearly the best to ever play the sport. and he's he's there for Portugal in this stressful moment and they zoomed in on his selft talk on his lips before he's taking the kick and then translated it and he was talking to himself repeatedly this is normal you always show up in these big moments you always make this happen and I thought it was incredibly really educational that this guy who you would expect that he's just got nerves of steel. Like that's just who he is actually was still going through the same selft talk we'd recommend for for someone who knows nothing about mental training for a young kid.

He's still going through these things and and um and sure enough at least in that moment it it worked for him. Um let's let's dive into that a little bit that importance of self-t talk and what does that even mean selft talk >> he he does have nerves of steel but he has those nerves of steel because of the selft talk and maybe we could kind of break that down a little bit but um yeah I I guess broadstrokes right you know your brain thinks somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 thoughts a day so there's a lot going on and most of those are self-relevant right which is just like oh what am I going to have for lunch later today or oh I wish I should have said that differently or gosh, you know, I wonder what it would be like to go outside right now, you know, and then some of it is language that you use in reference to yourself or you think about yourself, right?

Like, ah, I'm such an idiot or I never should have done that or oh, I'm really proud of how I handled that, right? And so, we're constantly in a communication with oursel and we relate to ourselves through some of the ways that we we talk. Um, and so what you can do, which is really cool, is you can kind of change how you talk to yourself, right? Um, and the way that you do that is by sort of rooting out what is or isn't working for you and then doubling down on the things that work. I'm less of a person who thinks like it all has to be positive or it all has to be negative. Like there there's a time and place for each.

Uh, but in general, you can imagine that being more positive with yourself is going to lead you to feel a little bit better and probably perform a little bit better. Um, and so what we do with athletes like Ronaldo is we teach them how to use their selft talk to help themselves perform well. So we identify, you know, what are the things that really resonate for you that feel true that feel like you could say to yourself that would help you feel confident in that moment, right? And you hear him say things like you were you were built for this, right? Or you always show up in these moments, right?

Well, that's true. And so that statement is built on evidence, right? It's built on the fact that he has done this time and again. It's not just some airy fairy like I wrote on my mirror and lipstick, you know, I always show up. like no this is this is based on real stuff and that's what makes selft talk like that so effective right is that you've got real proof backing it up and you found a way to proactively say things to yourself that help you perform better because your brain is going to say things to yourself regardless so it's just a matter of how much control you want to exert over that and if you're looking for another great example if you Google Aaron Donald selft talk you'll see like 43 seconds of just the best selft talk you could ever imagine Imagine.

And he's going through, you know, his pregame like all everything you've worked for right here. Everything you've trained for, this is it. And he's talking to his teammates. He's doing the same thing. And you can just hear how this person who maybe is the greatest NFL defender ever, certainly in the top five, is getting himself ready for a game. And it's no coincidence that it sounds quite similar to Ronaldo because they're leveraging a lot of the things we talked about in the stresses enhancing mindset, right? we're seeing it as a challenge or we're reminding ourselves of our signature strengths and they're channeling that physiology in a way that's super effective.

But the other thing I'll point out because I think this is something that gets missed a lot in these discussions is that this is not the first time Ronaldo has said those things to himself. Um and so you know people often think of selft talk like oh well I just need to change you know not be so negative and if I'm more positive everything will work out fine. like he had to practice that, you know, he had to be in practice taking a practice penalty kick, practicing that kind of selft talk. And that takes an extreme amount of discipline to take a situation that is sort of like manufactured and not anything close to the real thing, right?

when you're shooting a penalty kick in practice is 90,000 fans yelling at you. But to treat that moment with like I'm getting ready for the moment where I have 90,000 fans screaming at me and I'm going to use this selft talk now and I'm going to practice this now and I'm going to do it for decades. That's how you get to the point where that stuff shows up automatically at that point. And so I think people often think well if I just you know am a little more positive I'll I'll be just like Ronaldo. like not really like you've got to be positive but you got to do it for a really long time and you got to practice it in different situations and scenarios and conditions and if you do that long enough yes you you will get nerves of steel like Ronaldo because your selft talk will be a little bit better that would be part of why your nerves of steel are there and you are of the belief that being aware of past achievements can help you remember the body of evidence that some of that positive selft talk is built on.

>> Yeah. I think um especially in our culture, we're really quick to move on from things that we do well and we spend an awful lot of time on things that we we don't do so well, right? Um almost everybody I know probably spend, I don't know, 20 times more time on their failures than their their successes. And you know, in some ways, uh it's adaptive and evolutionarily based, right? We don't want to make that mistake again because it feels really crappy. And so if we can figure out, you know, how to not repeat that, that'd be ideal. Um, and if things have gone well, it's sort of like, yeah, we just expect that we would do that again.

Um, but the reality is, you know, if you do that enough, what you find is you've created a universe where you're really focused on things going wrong and all the problems that you have and a universe that sort of misses out on what you do quite well or where you've been successful. And so, I think it's really important to build up that bank. I call it a confidence resume. Like a list of things that you've succeeded at and how you made that happen. Uh that you can turn to time and again to give yourself a little bit of a sense of like, oh yeah, I can do this thing. You know, I have been here before.

I do know what this feels like. Um and if you can leverage that, it's actually quite helpful. You know, having that kind of bank of evidence plus preparing really well, those two things will make you feel confident going into just about anything. And confidence is one of the most robust predictors of good performance that we know of. And so having that that bank of past data is really useful. The other thing I find is that when people start to look for the things that they're doing well um they end up doubling down on those things more and that I think that's a path to leading to higher performance versus fixing what doesn't go well.

Right? So if you imagine like a bell curve for a minute, right? If you're spending all your time working on things that are to the left side of the bell curve, the things that are below average, you know, it's going to take a long time to sort of shift your curve overall to the right. Um, because you're just going to be pulling up a bunch of stuff that's not good into the average. But if you take things that are a little bit above average and you push them to the fringes, what you'll find is that that little middle line moves a little bit quicker. Um, and you can doesn't mean you can't ever address your weaknesses, but it does mean that spending time focusing on what you do well and your strengths and what you've gotten right is much more likely to actually lead to you being successful over the long term than focusing on what you don't do well.

And you see this a lot at the highest levels of sports. My favorite example is is Steph Curry, right? So, um, Steph is like a worldclass elite shooter. Um, and he did that by just doubling down on shooting over and over and over again. He's obviously an incredible basketball player overall, but what makes him special is one elite skill. Um, and he figured that out by focusing on gosh, I'm really good at this shooting thing. Like, if I just keep focusing on that and keep doing more of that, things will get better for me. And I think that's true for most people. You know, if you focus on the things that make you special based on real data, stuff that you've done well in the past, and you focus on maximizing that, I think you're going to find that you reach heights that you didn't think you could reach.

you're going to be pretty happy along the way because you're going to be using things that make you excited. >> Yeah. I have found with athletes and this is in direct this directly contrary to my experience as a player with most coaches. Uh you know we would do a lot of film review when I was a player on things that had gone wrong. And I find most athletes, what is effective for them is to do film review on things you've done well, then go out to the field and address the things the mistakes that were made, but to do it in a more abstract sense. We're not going to sit down and go, "Okay, Alex, let's look at the moment where you lost your mark and something bad happened on the film." because that's almost reinforcing if you spend just like you said too much time focusing on those mistakes.

You're you're there's a tendency to just proceverate on things that have gone wrong. But you can go out on onto the field and just talk about it in a generalized sense and not single anybody out and go, "Okay, let's review for everyone that this might apply to. What does it mean?" I mean, whatever that specific sport situation is. could be sticking with a a mark on a corner in soccer or it could be how to run the coverage um for a complicated defense in in football. Um how do you how does that strike you as a technique to reinforce the good but also still address mistakes so that we don't repeat them?

[snorts] Nick, I think anyone listening in Southern California who wants their kids to play soccer should consider having their kids join join your soccer team. Um, I think I think it's great. I mean, there's a time and a place for for everything, right? And I think um, you know, often times the best time to correct a mistake is as quickly as possible after it's happened. Um, and that can be hard in the context of a competition, right? Especially if the person's still out on the field. Um, so I I like what you're doing, but it's really hard, right? Because really what you've done is you've taken like a core principle and you've extracted a you've abstracted a mistake and you've applied it to a principle and then you've taught the principle as a way to correct what's just happened versus you know Sarah over here me missed the shot and now we're going to bate Sarah for missing the shot and we're going to talk about all the things that went wrong.

Um so I like that and I think there's a cool kind of embodied nature of the way that you're teaching that. I wouldn't solely advocate for not showing anything negative or bad on film, but I I think that may be just a difference in, you know, level of sport, right? Like I think at the youth level, absolutely probably not really that necessary. And again, like I think we have to be thoughtful [snorts] about the fact that, you know, in any youth sport organization, you know, 0.001% of these kids are going to be pro at anything related to sport. Um and maybe 01% will be involved in sport period after they're 22.

Like working in high level sport is also really really hard. And so you know focusing on all these mistakes that they made is probably not all that fruitful. Um and certainly has much greater social consequences to say like 13 to 17 year olds than it does 30-year-olds. And so I'd want to be really thoughtful about that. Um but it can be useful to review mistakes. But I would focus it less on what this individual did and more to your point kind of as a teaching point, right? And so whether you're doing that in the film room or on the field, I think focusing on how does this negative play mistake, whatever it is, inform what we all collectively can do differently next time, that I think is powerful.

Focusing on, you know, you Sarah messed this thing up and we're going to publicly shame you now. I think uh shame can be a powerful motivator, but it's also extremely unhealthy. And so, you know, to the extent that we can avoid that, I think we should try to. >> This episode is brought to you by Manta Sleep. As you have astutely observed, I've got one of their sleep masks on my face right now. I'm staring up at thousands of watts of studio lights. And yet, all I see is pure black. It's as though I've been dropped into the middle of a cave in Kentucky. This sleep mask helps me sleep like a baby.

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That's mantasleep.com and the [music] code is nicke. Join the pronap movement. Try the mantle sleep mask. Good night. Well, let's talk about a mistake I made in my thinking recently that you inadvertently pointed out for me and it was actually the motivation I had to then invite you onto the show. you wrote a post, I believe it was on X, about the potential benefits of a fixed mindset and and I'm a big believer in Carol Dwek's work. I also, as I was reading this, I thought, man, it makes me crazy when people engage in binary thinking or oversimplification because the devil is always in the details and often in a good way, right?

The expertise can be built at a lot of different levels. It's not just as simple as hit the 10,000 hour mark and you're done. And [snorts] I think social media drives us towards binary thinking and it's not helpful in any way. And man, when I read that post on the benefits of a fixed mindset, I thought, man, I have absolutely fallen into this thing that I really try hard not to. So, I appreciated you pointing this out because I've read uh mindsets or mindset and uh Carol Dwek's work and it's it is far more nuance than growth mindset is good, fixed mindset is bad [snorts] and yet it's so easy to to fall into that trap of like we're always going to be growth mindset oriented and we got to push these fixed beliefs away.

And so I really appreciated your post and I wanted you to elaborate on that on how these two things interact to get together um to get the best out of both our growth mindsets and our fixed mindsets. >> Absolutely. Well, I I appreciate that you're even willing to to entertain this thought. And I think the mistake that you've made is one we've we've all made. I mean, even at one point I felt that way. Uh cuz when you read the book, you're like, "Yeah, fixed mindset is terrible." You know, but if you look at the research, these two constructs, right, growth mindset and fixed mindset are based on what they called incremental or entity beliefs.

And what they found is that they're they're actually orthogonal, which just means they can coexist like independently, right? There's some overlap, but like they basically sit on like an XY axis, right? You can be high on fixed mindset and high on growth mindset or low on fixed mindset and high on growth mindset or low growth mindset and high fixed mindset or low low, right? You can have all sorts of permutations of these things and it's not as easy as you either have a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. And I think Carol Dwek has even said like look growth mindset isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Like it's a good idea and there's there's some good stuff in here but it's not that simple. And so I think it's important to sort of frame up like what are these things actually right? So growth mindset is just the belief that hard work effort and persistence lead to the outcomes that you want. And a fixed mindset is just the belief that talent or natural ability leads to the outcomes that you want. As a function of the mindset book, people have extrapolated growth mindset into all these other things. Like, oh well, it means you're better able to learn from failure or it means you're always going to keep trying even when things are hard.

And like those are nice things to think, but it's not true. Um, and we have, you know, very limited data to suggest that like first of all that persisting all the time after you fail is always good. Like that's that's actually not always true either, right? That can lead to injuries, for example. And so we need, like you said, a bit of nuance in this discussion. And so the way I think about it is you really want to be high in both. You want to believe that effort, hard work, and persistence matter, of course, because, you know, no one really does reach the highest level of anything without working hard.

And often times when you see players in pro sports make it to the highest level like get drafted first overall. I won't name any names but I can think of several uh you know who get drafted first overall and then don't really pan out into anything. I think a lot of what we can point to is hard work. Now there's obviously some other things that go into it. But if you just don't work hard once you've kind of made it, you're not going to stick around for a really long time and people are going to notice that. So of course hard work, effort, persistence, grit. Yeah. Yeah. Those things are really important.

We can agree. We don't have to though then turn that into well believing that you have natural ability is bad. And I think that's where people have gone gone a little too far. And so the way I think about it is it's also really important if you're going to be a lead at what you do to understand what of your natural talent or ability makes you special. And if you think about this like in the context of let's say like an NBA team for example, everyone that's on the floor, all five guys work super hard. If you don't have any idea why you're out there or what about your game or your gifts makes you deserve being on an NBA floor, it's gonna be really hard to stick around with a bunch of people who think like I'm the man because I can do this, this, and this, you know, and so it's not working hard alone is not a separator.

And at the highest levels of whatever you're trying to achieve, you do need something that makes you special, unique that separates you. And we all have that and we all want to believe in that too, right? We all want to feel like I do have something that makes me a good father, a good partner, a good um sister, brother, husband, wife, whatever it is, right? I'm a good worker, I'm a good leader, I'm a good CEO, I'm a good manager, right? But we have to figure out what those things are. And so fixed mindset is really just about figuring out like I need to know what that signature strength is or what that talent is and I need to double down on that because that's going to help me get where I want to go.

And so again, what you want is to be high in both, right? you want to have some growth mindset. Like, yeah, I want to work hard and I want you to have some fixed mindset. Like, I'm also pretty special and here are the ways I'm special. And if I pair that hard work with the stuff that makes me really special, I'm going to create something really unique and powerful. And again, I think that's something we're all capable of. But you've got to lean into the fact that you do have something special to offer, >> right? I'm reminded of a moment I gave a talk in front of I don't know, there's maybe 500 people there and I asked ahead of time.

I said, "Hey, can I bring a a video camera for this?" And afterwards, the gentleman asked what the video camera was for. And I said, "Oh, well, I'm I want to see what I look like from the audience's perspective." And I'm because I'm always trying to get better at this. And he said, "But I I thought you were I thought you were good at this." And I said, "Well, I don't think those things have to be mutually exclusive. I absolutely believe in myself as a speaker and I also think I can always get better at it. The moment where you start you you get latched into the fixed mindset entirely. I am good at this and stop trying to improve well then your performance is going to start to dip.

But at the same time right I not to start with that belief. Yeah I've put in the work. I worked my butt off on the presentation and I've put in years of getting to the point where speaking in front of 500 people doesn't feel like a big deal to me so I can be in the present moment. You got to have that too. Um it's not just one or the other. And yeah, like I said, I really appreciate you uh pointing that out. Even though I did use it in practice, if you'd asked me about fixed mindset versus growth mindset, I would have been I would have had that just immediate reaction. It's like, well, growth mindset's better.

Um, even though that's not really the way I approach performance situations. So, I [snorts] really I really appreciated that. Um, can I ask you about So, what's it like? I mean, what what are some of the specific techniques of teaching this with elite athletes? Like when you're getting in there, I mean, what how does that their schedules are busy, right? I mean, they have an insane practice schedule. They've got to get into the weight room. They've got to review film. They've got to have some recovery time. How do we how do you guys work this in in an organization and make it a priority in the organization to improve that long-term performance?

Everyone's way of doing is a little bit different and some of it depends on the organization you're a part of and how much support you have in in executing. But you know I think for me the way I've thought about it is to try to make it as simple and practical as possible and then be able to deliver it in basically like 2 minute 20 minute or twohour format. Um, and I I would joke with people when I worked in the NBA like there's no such thing, you know, therapy therapists get trained to do like 50-minute hours, right? And there's no such thing as a 50inut session with an NBA player. It's either like, you know, I got a guy running on the court saying, you know, hey doc, I'm tired.

What do you got for me? Now I have 30 seconds to give you something helpful. Or we just got off the practice court and I struggled with this last night. What do you think it should be? And then I want to go to recovery. Or it's like, hey, can we go to dinner? I got something big I want to talk about. Right? But there's never the oh let's come in and we'll we'll sit down for an hour and we'll you know it just it doesn't happen that way. And so I think a lot of it is about having a good framework that you can use to sort of deploy. So that's you know we talked about it early on but those four levels from the bottom up informs a lot of how I'm able to do that in a really quick way.

So if a player say lay laying on the training table for example and you know wants me to come over and talk for a minute it's like I know what I'm drawing on right away to be able to help them. Um and then some of it happens in the form of like team talks, right? Coach might give us an opportunity to get in front of the group and teach something. And then in that moment is trying to give them an experience of the mindset skills so that they can come in one-on-one. They can certainly seek it out individually if they want help with something. Um and then a lot of it is the way that you kind of move through an organization and use the background that you have as a psychologist to to shape what goes I mean ultimately I think of myself as and all psychologists really like we're we're experts in human behavior and performing is just a behavior.

It's one subset of behaviors where we know uh it's really hard and there are some skills that we can use that will make it easier or more efficient or whatever, right? And in sport, the performance is behavior that's really coordinated around brain body communication. And so like all those things inform the way that I'm talking with everybody and the way that I'm thinking about uh what it means to practice hard or what it means to do well or the way I think about load and psychological load. And so you're also educating the rest of the system about the ways that these things play out. And again, you try to make it um tangible and sort of based on like what people can experience in their own life so that it feels more real.

So for example, you know, if an athletes um really struggling with sleep and that's causing performance problems, you know, well, every executive, you know, not everyone, but most executives like have gone through the phase of having really young kids and being sleepd deprived and having to do their job, right? Like it is hard. It's hard to make a lot of decisions when you're really tired. Well, it's really hard for this guy who's not sleeping well to perform well. like it doesn't mean we can't fix it, right? But we have to have those kinds of frameworks so that we can move move athletes through it.

And so there's lots of different avenues for doing the work, but ultimately it's really about basically like assessing what the issue is, figuring out how quickly can we get this resolved or helped. Um, and then third, like sending them back out of the nest, right? So that they can go put all this work into practice. I mean, ultimately, you know, the goal is not to keep athletes in one-on-one services. The goal like any kind of medical profession, right, is to get them on the field healthy doing what they need to be doing. >> Yeah. I thought it was interesting that the key term is self regulation.

>> Yeah. It's >> it's really Well, go ahead. I mean, I Yeah, it just implies that I need to be to able to regulate myself. You're as the performance coach are going to give me the skills to do that for myself. >> 100%. That's that's exactly right. But it's like I can't do it for you, right? Just [laughter] the same way I can't go out there and throw a 60 yard pass for you. I can't I can't go out there and slow your heart rate down. And so you're exactly right. A lot of it is giving athletes the tools that honestly none of us are really taught. Like it happens kind of organically in your home, right?

you know, your parents tell you to take a deep breath or count to 10 when you're really upset as a kid, but we're not really giving people robust sets of skills to manage all of their experience that goes on. Um, and so, you know, athletes have a a different range of experiences that they're having to manage and we've got to give them the tools to do that, but ultimately it's up to you to use them. Now, if I want if let's I could be a professional athlete or I could be someone who has a a big venture capital presentation or whatever the performance situation is. And I look at these guys like Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, where they it's it's not that they're good even when there's high pressure.

It is that they're better when it's high pressure. They're better when the chips are down and it's an impossible situation and I've got a minute and a half to move the ball the length of the field and bring my team back from the brink of defeat. How are those skills built? Because thriving in those extreme situations is a whole different level of performance than just doing well in those situations. >> I love that you're asking this. uh a couple couple parts to it. So, one is practice, right? One of the things that people don't often see is how much time in a football practice or a basketball practice is dedicated to these really unique scenarios that you just never know when you're going to face, but you will face them.

And I don't see that much in the world of knowledge work, right? So, if you're, you know, a venture capitalist or you're a CEO, right? like uh how many hours are you spending prepping for your board meeting in that way? You know, I've worked with tons of CEOs. They all prep for their board meeting, but how many of them go to prep for well this guy's going to ask me this and what if they ask me that and oh, what about these 30 other possibilities here? Cuz it's timeconuming and it's really hard. But what happens is, if you've practiced a lot, uh, this is how we're going to run it. When we've got a minute and 37 seconds left and two timeouts and we're down three points and we get the ball on the 21 yardd line, this is what we're going to do, you know?

And then people are smart, right? They can reason by analogy. So, if we get the ball on the 27 yardd line and we have a minute and 39 seconds left, like we can figure it out, right? But we practice that over and over and over again so that when they get into that situation, it's basically like we've been here before. Now, we haven't been in this exact situation, but our brains are constantly issuing basically predictions based on past experiences, right? So, all that preparation is doing is giving you a robust bank of historical data to draw on in this new situation so that you can make accurate predictions.

Like that that's it. That's kind of like the core of how your brain works. Um, and so all that practice is really, really useful, but again, most people don't practice for things that way. Whether it's a time issue or dedication issue or some other issue like there's lots of constraints that people have that make that hard. And in sports, you're kind of lucky where you've got like all your job is to prep for that thing, right? You got three hours and you want to rehearse these different things and then you can prep for that that one thing. So I think that's part of it is just extreme preparation and attention to detail on these really unique circumstances that you know in sports like you play 17 football games.

So if that comes up once that really matters. Being ready for that moment really matters. But if you're running a company you know you might have 50 board meetings over the lifetime of your company or 100 board meetings over the lifetime of your company. And so of course each one still matters but you know I think it gets less attention as a function of that. So preparation is one part of it. But the second part is like what are the psychological skills that go go into that and how do people learn that is the same way that we teach people other psychological skills. And there was this really cool research done maybe in like 2017 um about what they called the integration of flow and clutch state.

So people are pretty familiar with the concept of flow, right? It's that moment where things feel effortless and easy and time time is absent and you lose track of yourself and you're just like in the zone. Um and those experiences are awesome and athletes have that experience a lot when they're playing sport. Um, and people can have that experience when they're giving a talk in front of 500 people or they're parenting their kids. Like there's lots of ways that you can experience flow. Clutch is a different psychological state where the pressure is a little bit higher and is usually about how do you either not underperform in that moment, right?

So we think of like choking, right, as making this big mistake, but choking can also be just I didn't play to what I know I can do. Um, and then there's also that sort of like Tom Brady element like how do I come back down from 27 to three and win the Super Bowl or drive the team, you know, 90 yards if you're Byron Leftwitch on a broken leg and play. >> And that comes down to kind of three three key things, right? First is setting a clear and tangible goal around the outcome, right? So, it's like um you know, I used to use this example a lot in basketball when I was working with players, but like if we're down four points with 38 seconds to go, like the goal is to get two stops and score five baskets like or five points.

It's like pretty it's pretty clear, right? But having that clear goal drives your focus. When you have a goal, it drives the focus of your behavior to things that are only that important and you kind of tune everything else out, right? So, that is that's part one. The second part is to consciously increase your effort. People don't realize how much valitional control they have over how hard that they're working, right? You can force yourself to do a lot of stuff. And this is why you hear stories of like, you know, dad lifts a car off an infant. Um, it's not because dad became Hulk in the last 10 seconds.

It's because dad has this extreme rush of adrenaline and cortisol and all these hormones and then consciously is like, I this is the most important thing I've ever done in my life. I'm going to use all of my effort, everything. And often people get like very hurt in those instances, right? Like they rip muscle off their bone and all sorts of other things, but it's an example of like you can do some really extreme stuff when you want to um if you're willing to put in that effort. And what's super interesting from like a physical standpoint, for example, is there's some data that shows that around 30 to 40% of your capacity, your brain starts sending signals to your body that it might be better to rest.

So, if you're someone who likes to run, for example, you've had this experience where you're running, you're kind, ah, my legs kind of hurt, like, oh, I'm tired. Maybe I should be like done soon. And if you push through that threshold, right, you get to the runner's high and all these other things that are really exciting. But in that moment, all you want to do is quit, right? And it makes sense. Your brain has evolved to keep you alive. It's not evolved to get you to run 13 miles or 13.1 miles in under two hours, right? It's evolved to keep you keep you alive and keep you safe. And so if it detects pain, right, of course it's going to say, "Well, you should stop doing that thing that that's hurting you." Now again, you can consciously override that.

And that's the second part of this formula is I can increase my effort, right? I can leave it all on the floor. I can empty the tank at this point and that's going to be okay because the game is going to end, right? Like if I don't do that, there's no other option. And then the third, to tie it all the way back to something we talked about earlier, is to see it as a challenge, right? to leverage that stress as enhancing mindset. And what they found is that athletes who do those three things, right? Clear goal, consciously increase effort, and see this as a challenge versus a threat, those are the athletes who activate that kind of psychological clutch state.

And that leads to the performance uh either elevating under extreme pressure at the very least kind of maintaining their performance and what they know they can do. And if I'm a normal person listening to all this and I say, "Man, I I want to thrive in pressure moments in my whatever it is that I do for work. What are some things I can practice leading up to those moments?" >> Uh, so outside of the athletic sphere, but if Yeah. the the podcast host who wants to be in the present and keep all the things in the back of your head that questions you want to ask but also really listen to what the person's saying so you can follow up on what they're saying I mean whatever whatever that line of work is or in that marketing meeting you know you've got a great idea you really want to express it well so the team gets on board with it and we'll actually go and execute it >> a [snorts] lot of the things that we just talked about still apply right so let's take the marketing meeting [clears throat] for example you've got a market mid-level marketing marketing manager who's trying to speak up to the VP of marketing and communicate an idea, right?

And maybe feels like we've all felt at some point, you know, a little bit of anxiety and oh, what are they going to think about my idea and how's this going to go? The same kind of principles apply here, right? So, first let's set a clear goal. My goal is to get this idea out of my head, right? To not leave this meeting without having expressed whatever this thought is. Like, great. Now that we know that that's the goal, there's lots of possible ways we can do that, right? And we should sort of and we do this naturally, but you can sort through like a whole host of possible behavioral solutions to reaching that goal, right?

Could write your idea down on a notebook and slide it across the table like it's a negotiation. You can blurt it out in the middle of a meeting. You can raise your hand. There's all sorts of ways that you can communicate it. So that clear goal is now going to narrow what possible behaviors you can do and help you select from a more adaptive set of behaviors that are going to get you to where you want to be. The second is to see this as a challenge, right? Oh man, I'm feeling nervous about having to communicate this. Like, okay, this is an opportunity for me to like show that I've got a good idea.

This is a challenge like push myself and become a little bit braver when it comes to speaking up in these meetings. No one wants to feel that way all the time in a meeting. You know, it's pretty unpleasant. And so doing that, right, like pushing yourself into that challenge is going to help you uh not feel that way all the time, right? Through a process called exposure. Um and then third would be to consciously increase the effort, right? So, it's like, okay, I know I need to push myself to do this, right? So, I'm going to here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to like write it down and I'm going to give myself bullet point notes so I know what I'm going to say and then I'm going to say it and I'm going to commit to saying it before the end of the meeting, right?

And you could do all those same three things that an athlete would do at the last 30 seconds of the game. Just looks a little bit different. >> Yeah. Yeah. I like that. [snorts] something that I am picking up on more and more just anecdotally with friends, neighbors, people in the community, even people I don't know that well AI is really exerting this subtle anxiety um just broadly because people are worrying is this thing not only coming from my job but my whole industry and I wouldn't just lose lose my gosh my job. I wouldn't have another one to go into. I might have to switch fields entirely.

And it's not happening at broad scale just yet. But there's a there's so much coverage of it in the in the media and on podcast and it's an very important topic because I do think it's going to change vast a vast array of ways that we live and work. But what are some techniques we can use to combat that anxiety about things that one aren't under our control and two that we don't know are going to come to pass because I don't know that the anxiety serves most people to worry about things that haven't happened yet or aren't happening yet. >> Yeah. I mean absolutely it does does not serve you to do that.

Right. So you know the first the first thing would be to focus on what you can control right I mean people tend to do quite well when they're clear on you this is within my control so so in the context of work let's say if you're worried about AI replacing you like what can you control you can control doing a great job right you can control showing up with a good attitude and good effort um you can control you know being on time and and doing it to the best of your ability what you can't do is control the pace at which open AAI or Anthropic or any of these other companies is developing something that that might impact your network, right?

So, that's that's one. The second thing you could do would be to figure out how to like integrate more effectively with whatever that technology is because I think, you know, if you really get into it, right, a lot of the what people are pointing to is like good AI should augment the human experience, not not remove the human experience. And there's all sorts of, you know, confusing but interesting data on this so far, right? So, there's a study that came out in my world maybe a year ago at this point now. I was like, oh, you know, patients prefer doctors who are AI over real doctors. It's like no patients prefer real doctors who are patient with them over anything.

But the usual medical experience is that doctors are not all that patient with you. So that's like a different problem to solve. You're not going to replace a doctor, but you might replace doctors who are moving so fast because of the constraints under healthare that they can't do a good job, right? So it's like we've got to make sure we're we're asking the right question there. And so I think putting it into perspective and and that would be kind of the third technique is like uh I don't know if you're an Alex Hormosi fan. and I just listen to him on a podcast. I'm like just getting introduced to some of his work.

But he had this idea that >> I am familiar with it. Yeah. >> Yeah. He had this idea that I thought was like really kind of poignant. He was talking about that he calls it cosmic irrelevance which I think gets back to the example the test I gave earlier. >> But it's just like the idea that the reality is like if you get replaced by AI like you'll kind of figure it out because you know the world will continue right and then eventually it won't matter and you'll die. And I know that's a [laughter] dark way to look at it, right? But the reality is like we get so worked up over these things that we can't control and that comes from this place of uncertainty, right?

We don't know how it's going to be. And uncertainty is really taxing on the human brain. Um, and so that's why focusing on what you can control is helpful, reduces uncertainty, but putting it into perspective can also help make that a little bit more manageable, right? So if your job is getting replaced or impacted by AI, everyone's job is getting replaced or impacted by AI, right? And we all are going to have to figure out how to live in this new world of technology and help have it be a part of the experience that we have versus something that takes away all of our opportunities. And I do think, you know, the last thing I'll say is like uh I think that's a popular extreme to push that argument to, right?

It's like, you know, AI is going to replace us all. Um, but so far there's basically no example of that to my knowledge. And I think we're still very far away from the idea that say like AI is going to teach your kid how to do math in a really effective way. AI might get the answer to the math problem, right? But again, that's a that's a different thing than teaching your kid math. And so, you know, being thoughtful about the fact that um, you know, there are two extremes to every every side of the argument, right? And one extreme is we're all going to be replaced and the others is never going to replace us.

And the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. [snorts] >> Yeah, I really like the idea of cosmic irrelevance. That's good. There's a meme that was popular a few years ago, but it was just an image of the entire Milky Way and then there was an arrow pointing to the spot where our little solar system is and it said me crying in the shower. I thought it just encapsulated how we get so caught up in what's going on with us, but cosmically it's completely irrelevant and that can have a calming effect. I really also like your idea of [snorts] yeah, it could come and replace you as a math teacher, but the more likely scenario is that you'll be replaced by someone who is familiar with the tools and so they're more effective teacher.

And there's nothing to stop you from becoming familiar with those tools and becoming an effective teacher and finding creative ways to use these new technologies to be better at what you do. >> 100%. [snorts] 100%. No one's replacing you as a podcast host, Nick. Well, [laughter] I it's funny because I saw that one come up on Diary of a CEO uh at least two times and they talked about, well, we could have a AI generated version of the host and have it ask really incredible questions and that AI would be familiar with every book that this person had ever written and could draw from the different examples.

And all I could think while I was watching that was, you know, AI is also great at chess, but no one watches AI play chess online. And yet, I'm not a big chess guy. Um, but ever since the Queen's Gambit came out, I guess watching chess online between humans is super popular, more popular than ever. Um, and they've set up cameras with the speed chess in the parks and people know who the the characters are and the players are, and what they get interested in is that human element. And I think what what you're getting out there is that the human element is not going to leave the human experience at any time soon.

And so it probably will be a marriage of humanity and technology rather than one of these extremes where it's it's going to destroy 95% of jobs out there and Sam Alman's going to own the world. >> I think that's exactly right. >> Well, good. I'm glad we solved the AI crisis. Uh that's we could check that one off the list. Um >> okay the uh Alex anything that >> is pressing that we have not touched on that people need to know around mental skills interesting stories from the work you do. I I think that the message I'd leave you with is I think to get started um you know I think there's so many ways that you can access brain training right like you can do mindfulness or you can do breath work or you can do selft talk or you can do visualization or you can do goal setting but like just do one do do one pick one thing and try it you know what you're going to find is that it does help you and I think it's easy with anything you know when you're getting started to to be overwhelmed by the possibilities.

And so I' I'd just encourage people to to get going and to try something for yourself and experiment widely and figure out what works for you. Treat yourself like you would treat any elite athlete, right? Like this is going to take a little bit of work. Um but with a bit of work, you can find that you know your mind will work for you much more effectively. So that's that's kind of how I'd put a bow on our conversation. Nick, >> I like it. And if anyone wants to find you and your company and all the stuff you're doing online, where's the best place to find you? >> I'm I'm all over the internet. So, you can find me on link LinkedIn or X or Instagram, Alex Hourback, PhD.

Uh my company is called Momentum Labs. We run a mental performance coaching and soon to be mental health services company for youth athletes. So, if you've got a young athlete who you want to help think, feel, and perform better, you can find us at momentumlabs.coach. Um, and you can just find me on my own website, alexourback.com. I answer every email. I read everything that comes through. So, if you want to get in touch, get in touch. >> Fantastic. And we will put all of that in the show notes with links for anybody looking for that information. Alex, thank you so much for your time and all these insights today.

This was a fascinating conversation. Okay, everybody. Until next time, ask questions, don't accept the status quo, and be curious. >> The Nick Daily Show.