Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest who
Speaker 1: will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding
Speaker 1: of yourself, others, and the world we live in. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening and enjoy the podcast. Today we have Patti
Speaker 1: Steinfort on the podcast. Patty is a mental conditioning coach
Speaker 1: and assistant instructor at the University of Pennsylvania's Applied Positive
Speaker 1: Psychology Program. His latest book is Breakfast with Baales, The
Speaker 1: incredible true story of a dying coach and his final
Speaker 1: message about life, learning, and leadership. Patty is also a
Speaker 1: former professional football player. Patty. It's great to have you
Speaker 1: on the show today, Scott, thanks for having us, great
Speaker 1: to be here. A lot of things we could talk about.
Speaker 1: I thought we could start. We're talking about your experiences
Speaker 1: as a former professional football player and how that led
Speaker 1: you to see the psychology of sports in a new way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you know. I found a lot of success
Speaker 1: with psychology myself as an athlete. I wasn't super talented.
Speaker 1: I was obviously physically the right size to be able
Speaker 1: to compete at least, but I was definitely not the
Speaker 1: fastest or the strongest or anything like that. I think
Speaker 1: my advantages I found came from my psychological skills, and
Speaker 1: that was my first introduction to it. I guess at
Speaker 1: the age of seventeen and eighteen getting drafted as a
Speaker 1: professional back home and then learning the hard way also
Speaker 1: that even once you get there, it's still not over.
Speaker 1: There's still a lot of improving to do. I had
Speaker 1: the inglorious honor, I guess, of having a record by
Speaker 1: the time I finished my career of the longest time
Speaker 1: playing without actually getting on the field. I had five
Speaker 1: years as a pro and was injured pretty much the
Speaker 1: whole time. So there was a lot of frustration. And
Speaker 1: but you're still getting paid. I was still getting paid.
Speaker 1: I was a professional. Yeah, that's right. That sounds I
Speaker 1: want that gig. I could do that. I could do
Speaker 1: that myself. It sounds good. You could have done it, man,
Speaker 1: you could I'm very what do you say you could
Speaker 1: have done it better than I did? Probably I could
Speaker 1: get injured better than you. I bet that is true.
Speaker 1: So I learned the hard way. I guess about the
Speaker 1: resilience that's needed as well. Just it sounds like a
Speaker 1: cool life, but sometimes it's not that easy. So that
Speaker 1: led me to explore it academically, and as you said,
Speaker 1: I finished the master's recently and now working as a
Speaker 1: coach of the coaches and the leaders in elite sports teams,
Speaker 1: helping them be more resilient and be able to focus better. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of talk in sports psychology about a
Speaker 1: concept called mental toughness and wondering if you apply any
Speaker 1: of those principles. I mean, resiliency is such a core
Speaker 1: aspect of that. Yeah. I think the word mental toughness
Speaker 1: it's a little bit like the word leadership or culture,
Speaker 1: like it's a really broadly defined word that mean different
Speaker 1: things to different people. And so when you look at
Speaker 1: it within the literature, there are probably two main leaders
Speaker 1: of that research who have fairly specific definitions. But if
Speaker 1: you're talking about you know, you watch the NFL on
Speaker 1: a Sunday and I'll refer to something as mental toughness,
Speaker 1: there's not a lot of clarity around what that means.
Speaker 1: Some people would say it's being resilient and dealing with
Speaker 1: hardships and setbacks, and other people would say it's the
Speaker 1: ability to focus on a simple task when there's fifty
Speaker 1: thousand people young at you and another five million watching
Speaker 1: at home. So there are many different aspects of it,
Speaker 1: and we definitely touch on that. A lot of the
Speaker 1: resilient stuff that I do with the athletes is based
Speaker 1: on some of the UPEN training that they've done with
Speaker 1: the US military and within schools. In terms of training,
Speaker 1: optimism is really the main thing there, and then the
Speaker 1: other part that probably the Seattle Seahawks have made the
Speaker 1: most visible is their incorporation of mindfulness into their training practices,
Speaker 1: and that's based around, I guess, at its core, the
Speaker 1: acceptance commitment therapy model, which is performance context being able
Speaker 1: to accept that people are yelling at me and it
Speaker 1: doesn't feel good, but I'm getting paid a lot of
Speaker 1: money to do this job, and I just have to
Speaker 1: accept that that's one of the conditions of my employment.
Speaker 1: And then guys can still go about doing their jobs effectively.
Speaker 1: Same as having a crowd yelling at you, or a
Speaker 1: three hundred pound man standing five meters away I wanted
Speaker 1: to bash your skull in. They're pretty distracting, but that's
Speaker 1: part of the job. And so people got to accept
Speaker 1: that and be able to still stay in the moment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure. And a lot of what you talk about
Speaker 1: is how football can teach you a lot about life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and a lot of those insights came through your discussions
Speaker 1: with Bells. Right. So first of all, let me clarify something.
Speaker 1: You're a former professional football player, football meeting soccer is
Speaker 1: that football in Australia is a little bit like football
Speaker 1: in America. We've got our own football that no one
Speaker 1: else plays. So I'll take about Australia football because some people,
Speaker 1: some people might have heard of accent coming from them.
Speaker 1: So yeah, the game is called AFL back Home, but
Speaker 1: it takes up the same position within society as what
Speaker 1: the NFL does here in that it's the biggest game
Speaker 1: in the country, most popular game. The guys who are playing,
Speaker 1: you know, they make a very good living out of
Speaker 1: it and are considered semi celebrities. So it's very similar.
Speaker 1: The game plays a little different, but a lot of
Speaker 1: the mental challenges are almost identical. Gotcha, So it actually
Speaker 1: you do throw a ball. We are not allowed to
Speaker 1: throw a ball. Actually you kick the ball. You can
Speaker 1: hand pass, which is where you punched the ball out
Speaker 1: of your own hand. It's a three six. It's probably
Speaker 1: more like hockey than it is like football in that
Speaker 1: it's a three sixty game where you can get hit
Speaker 1: from any angle. Now, yeah, I can't, I can't, but
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is. I need to watch
Speaker 1: a video. If you're listening, go to AFL dot com
Speaker 1: dot au and you'll see some video of it. Great. Great,
Speaker 1: So tell me a little bit. So I'm glad we
Speaker 1: got that out of the way. Tell me who is
Speaker 1: Bales and how did you make contact with him? So?
Speaker 1: Bails is a At the time I met him, he
Speaker 1: had just finished as a head coach of the team
Speaker 1: in Melbourne and we were both hired as coaches as
Speaker 1: part of the coaching staff at Adelaide at the same time.
Speaker 1: When moving over to Adelaide, I got a random email
Speaker 1: saying Dean Bailey has offered for you to live with him.
Speaker 1: And this is a guy who I only knew from TV.
Speaker 1: I live with him for the first month or two
Speaker 1: while when we said into a new town and then
Speaker 1: moved out. But we obviously then worked together for the
Speaker 1: next three seasons or two and a half seasons, and
Speaker 1: it turned out and so Bales was a very respected coach.
Speaker 1: He'd played at one of the best teams in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, had coached, been part of the coaching staff
Speaker 1: in a couple of Premiership teams, so he knew what
Speaker 1: success looked like. And then he'd been a head coach
Speaker 1: at a very team that really struggled a lot. So
Speaker 1: he'd seen a whole range of things. And so that's
Speaker 1: why he was brought to Adelaide as an experienced wise mentor,
Speaker 1: I guess to some of the other coaches and some
Speaker 1: of the older players. Gotcha, So you've got a chance
Speaker 1: to know him for a while before he got sick. Yes, right,
Speaker 1: And so you really you saw this, I mean it
Speaker 1: was amazing transition of such a strong character, rate such
Speaker 1: a wise man, and kind of going through this entire
Speaker 1: transition from not even having any idea that this was
Speaker 1: on the horizon to this, you know, happy and him
Speaker 1: dealing with what became queer was going to be an
Speaker 1: inevitable course soon you know, death, death, you know. So
Speaker 1: it is quite an experience for him and for you
Speaker 1: and for both of you guys together to kind of
Speaker 1: be on that journey together. Yeah, it was I mean
Speaker 1: just to paint a picture for those who might not
Speaker 1: know this story. Obviously, it was fairly famous back in Australia.
Speaker 1: But Bales, or Dean with his first name, but everyone
Speaker 1: called him Bales, was diagnosed with cancer on the eve
Speaker 1: of training camp for the third year that we were
Speaker 1: working together. What kind of cancer? It was a MESOTHELIAU,
Speaker 1: so it's the lighting of the lung. And he'd never smoked,
Speaker 1: so it was a real surprise and it was a
Speaker 1: bit of a I mean, I know now, having having
Speaker 1: gone through everything that we dealt with, that once you
Speaker 1: get that, you're pretty much like you're clock sticking. There's
Speaker 1: no way you getting you're going to beat it. There's
Speaker 1: no way to beat that cancer. And so but I
Speaker 1: didn't know that at the time, and I said to Bales,
Speaker 1: I'll come and sit with you, and you know, you
Speaker 1: can give us some inspirational messages. I'll take it back
Speaker 1: to the team that you stay in contact while you're
Speaker 1: beating the cancer and then you come back and everyone's happy.
Speaker 1: And then he and his wife were probably the only
Speaker 1: ones at that stage that knew how serious the diagnosis
Speaker 1: was in terms of how soon he would pass away,
Speaker 1: and so pretty quickly it became clear, once I'd visited
Speaker 1: him once or twice that this was really serious and
Speaker 1: more serious than I had thought. And so the talk
Speaker 1: quickly turned from short term inspirational messages to some real
Speaker 1: deep wisdom. And for me it was as you said,
Speaker 1: it was a really special experience that literally changed my
Speaker 1: life in a number of ways. Why did you say
Speaker 1: it to do this my role in terms of the
Speaker 1: mental conditioning stuff. I was doing a similar role back
Speaker 1: at Adelaide, And so part of what we do within
Speaker 1: that in some instances is to help the team craft
Speaker 1: and identity, to build some leadership and a team culture,
Speaker 1: I guess around certain themes. So I saw it as
Speaker 1: a fairly normal step in terms of, look, while he struggling,
Speaker 1: will help him out. I work on the people side
Speaker 1: of the team rather than the tactical side, I guess.
Speaker 1: And also we had both when we lived together, discovered
Speaker 1: to shared interest in psychology. So Bales was never trained,
Speaker 1: but he was always super interested in Malcolm Gladwell or
Speaker 1: a Daniel Cordle sort of a pop psychology book. And
Speaker 1: so when when he fell ill, I knew that we
Speaker 1: read Tuesdays with Murray. Both of us and had enjoyed it,
Speaker 1: and I just suggested to him, look how about I
Speaker 1: come and do that. I'll just sit here, you tell
Speaker 1: me some stuff, I'll take it back, not knowing that
Speaker 1: it would end the same as Tuesdays with Murray did
Speaker 1: as well. Gotcha. So I have quite a few listeners
Speaker 1: in the in the sports psychology community, coaches and players,
Speaker 1: and they're going to want they're going to be very
Speaker 1: interested in this advice and then the in the wisdom
Speaker 1: abil So for the remainder of this podcast, could we
Speaker 1: could we go through some of the great insights and
Speaker 1: then you know, let's not give it all the way.
Speaker 1: I want people to buy the book. It drops December seventh, three,
Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah, and all of all the proceeds go
Speaker 1: through his family, so it's not a profit making exercise.
Speaker 1: This is really just to help out the family that
Speaker 1: he left behind. Wonderful, wonderful. So yeah, let's let's go
Speaker 1: through the ones that you're comfortable sharing right now, because,
Speaker 1: like I said, I do have quite a few listeners
Speaker 1: that work in the field of sports psychology and would
Speaker 1: love to take some of those insights to their own
Speaker 1: their own work. Definitely, definitely one of the things that
Speaker 1: became apparent really quickly, and I sort of knew it
Speaker 1: intuitively having lived with him and he just randomly offering
Speaker 1: a place to stay. But one of the things that
Speaker 1: became clear early on in the visits was that performance
Speaker 1: actually starts with people. And so I probably before these
Speaker 1: visits and throughout my career, had a view of the
Speaker 1: world of it's a it's dog, e dog. You don't
Speaker 1: need to worry about friendships. I'm here for business, and
Speaker 1: so I don't need to get along with people. I'm
Speaker 1: just going to be good enough to make it. And
Speaker 1: particularly when you get into a leadership position within a
Speaker 1: sports team, so as a coach or as a leading athlete.
Speaker 1: There are a number of stories that Bail's told and
Speaker 1: also examples he gave that really once I started looking
Speaker 1: into it. In terms of the psychology research, there's a
Speaker 1: heap of evidence that stacks up that actually having really
Speaker 1: good relationship skills are really key to improving the results
Speaker 1: of a team. So you know, there's obviously the classic
Speaker 1: study by George Vallen in terms of the impact of
Speaker 1: warm relationships on people's outcomes across a number of measures,
Speaker 1: both obviously personal outcomes but also education, income, all sorts
Speaker 1: of things. But then there's also something about Kelly mcgonagall's
Speaker 1: work on compassion and its ability to develop improved willpower
Speaker 1: for the athletes. So there's a number of things that
Speaker 1: the more I looked into it, the more surprised I was.
Speaker 1: But it also really rang true with Baios. He was
Speaker 1: a fantastic people person, and his people's skills made the
Speaker 1: teams around him developed quicker than you know, a similar
Speaker 1: talented team might have without him. Yeah, no, that's great.
Speaker 1: You know the importance of social relationships has been shown
Speaker 1: to be so important for education, contacts, business, there's something
Speaker 1: that transcends sports. So if you're a coach, how can
Speaker 1: you be, you know, cultivate these warm relations but also
Speaker 1: you also want to show tough love sometimes, you know,
Speaker 1: you want to you want to motivate people to work harder,
Speaker 1: for instance. Yeah, and how do you do that without
Speaker 1: having them walk over you? Well, I think you actually
Speaker 1: put me onto some great research as I was writing. So,
Speaker 1: once Bayos had passed away and I started really digging
Speaker 1: into transcribing our visits and trying to trying to make
Speaker 1: sense of everything, I asked you a question Scott about
Speaker 1: is there research or are there examples of environments where
Speaker 1: you provide certain environmental factors that allow people to flourish,
Speaker 1: particularly creatives or performers, and a lot of the research
Speaker 1: pointed towards I think it's a fit. Well, sorry for me,
Speaker 1: it seems fairly well known, but I'm not sure for
Speaker 1: some listeners they may not know of the idea of
Speaker 1: developing autonomy, mastery and relatedness within. So if we're talking
Speaker 1: about self determination theory, there as a big overarching umbrella,
Speaker 1: but that as a coach, if you can engender that
Speaker 1: within your players or athletes, and this goes for teachers
Speaker 1: as well or mentors in a business sense. The more
Speaker 1: you can have the three key psychological needs met for
Speaker 1: the people you're trying to lead, the longer they're going
Speaker 1: to persist in whatever the task is that you're giving
Speaker 1: them improved. Obviously, within a sporting context, there's always an
Speaker 1: element of we're trying to master something. We're going to
Speaker 1: be working on a skill, so that one sort of
Speaker 1: takes care of itself. And I say with most of
Speaker 1: the coaches I work with, that's a pretty natural thing
Speaker 1: that a lot of people have switched on to the
Speaker 1: other two though, are really important and are often underestimated.
Speaker 1: The ability to have the player make a choice about
Speaker 1: what they're doing, so not just giving them the answers,
Speaker 1: but having them be involved in the problem solving and
Speaker 1: actually giving them the freedom to almost play it a
Speaker 1: little bit, particularly playing small groups, which allows them to
Speaker 1: develop the autonomy and also the relationships that help them
Speaker 1: stick out things a little bit more. One of a
Speaker 1: great quote from Vincent Lombardi, who's the best non trained
Speaker 1: psychologist coach ever, was that those were the most invested
Speaker 1: are the last surrender. And that's a fantastic lay person
Speaker 1: summary of this bit of research or this and I
Speaker 1: say a bit of research. It's a massive body of
Speaker 1: research around the more autonomy there is, so the more
Speaker 1: people who have actually chosen and invested themselves into the task,
Speaker 1: the longer they will persist. And that research comes up
Speaker 1: in education, in healthcare, in spore, there's a heap of
Speaker 1: examples of that concept actually coming alife. Very interesting concept
Speaker 1: that the more you know that you know autonomy and freedom,
Speaker 1: doesn't that also come with a certain kind of detachment.
Speaker 1: Like you're talking about the importance of mindfulness, right, I'm
Speaker 1: trying to square away the importance of mind reconcile the
Speaker 1: importance of kind of having a detached sort of I mean,
Speaker 1: mindfulness is obviously a very intense awareness and heightened awareness
Speaker 1: and focus, but at the same time, it's also a
Speaker 1: detachment from your emotional reactions to immediate stimulus. Right, So
Speaker 1: you can be really invested in what you're doing and
Speaker 1: be free and autonomous, and yet still have this kind
Speaker 1: of stolid, you know, very stoic I should say, temperament
Speaker 1: about what you're getting. So you know, all these things
Speaker 1: are important, right, yes, yeah, So they may seem on
Speaker 1: the surface incompatible, but you would argue they're not right, definitely,
Speaker 1: definitely not. And I think that's a really important clarification
Speaker 1: around the word autonomy. Some people look at it as freedom,
Speaker 1: and particularly coaches, they tend to cringe a little bit
Speaker 1: when they say, well, if we give them too much
Speaker 1: of this, the inmates are going to run the asylum.
Speaker 1: That's why a coach is here. I'm supposed to teach
Speaker 1: these people. But autonomy doesn't necessarily mean freedom. It means choice.
Speaker 1: So you chose to be doing this now. It doesn't
Speaker 1: mean you're going to be having every single choice in
Speaker 1: the on the menu, but you have some autonomy to
Speaker 1: say that, Okay, I decided to do this. Now I've
Speaker 1: got skin in the game. And the ability to have
Speaker 1: that present does It's not mutually exclusive from the ability
Speaker 1: to also be emotionally separate, particularly within a performance moment.
Speaker 1: So in the third play of a final drive in
Speaker 1: a two minute drill. Obviously we want people to be motivated,
Speaker 1: but their ability, particularly if we train them right in preparation,
Speaker 1: their ability to stay disconnected from the outcome and focus
Speaker 1: just on the performance cues that they need to is like,
Speaker 1: that's one of the biggest predictors of performance in an
Speaker 1: instant is their ability to not think outcome but think
Speaker 1: the process. Right. Yeah, and that's such important lesson in life.
Speaker 1: Like you said, you learn a lot from football about life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is there a place for daydreaming at all in sports? Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think part of the mindfulness approach is
Speaker 1: we don't sit there and let them just daydream for
Speaker 1: twenty minutes. But there is a lot to be said
Speaker 1: about two parts of day dreaming. One is the use
Speaker 1: of imagery in sport. It's a fairly well established psychological practice.
Speaker 1: I guess, and it has a lot of person support
Speaker 1: from performers who say, you know, I pictured doing this
Speaker 1: title Woods is a huge rap for it. Although Tiger's
Speaker 1: results these days aren't fantastic, but there are a number
Speaker 1: of fantastic best ever performers, Michael Jordan, a lot of
Speaker 1: performers across different disciplines in sports who used imagery, which
Speaker 1: is a form of controlled or positive day dream if
Speaker 1: you will. But there's a Jordan use imagery Yeah I did,
Speaker 1: Yeah you did. And then the other element of that
Speaker 1: is also the idea of mental recovery. So when I
Speaker 1: tried to explain the amount of cognitive load on an
Speaker 1: NFL footballer to someone in at the Positive Psychology Center
Speaker 1: by describing it like this, think of the periodic table,
Speaker 1: and you have to memorize the periodic table twice. So
Speaker 1: there's two different types of periodic table. Plus you have
Speaker 1: to be able to record on spec knowing which atoms
Speaker 1: and ions can go up or down one period to
Speaker 1: make different elements. And then also you have to do
Speaker 1: that while your heart rates at one hundred and eighty
Speaker 1: bits a minute and there's a three hundred pound person
Speaker 1: standing in front of you wanting to bash you in
Speaker 1: the face. Go That's the sort of cognitive load that
Speaker 1: you have to deal with as an NFL footballer, and
Speaker 1: so not only the installation of that knowledge, but the
Speaker 1: recollection plus the physical load. There's a lot to be
Speaker 1: said about the ability to shut down for twenty minutes
Speaker 1: and just not force any thought, but allow your thoughts
Speaker 1: to wander and have some freedom in that sense, because
Speaker 1: by the time you come to game time, we can't
Speaker 1: have your mind wandering at that point. That's a perfect
Speaker 1: metaphor for how I felt when I took the SATs,
Speaker 1: Like the whole thing with a three hundred pounds, like
Speaker 1: the whole thing was exactly exactly how I how I felt. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that's imporptriate. So there's a police. There's time and police
Speaker 1: for meditation for my mindfulness, and there's a time and
Speaker 1: police for the preparation stage of definitely of visualization. Are
Speaker 1: you familiar with any recent research on in sports. I'm
Speaker 1: not a huge fan of it. It has mixed support,
Speaker 1: and so there are some who will out of as
Speaker 1: this is the most important tool you can use, and
Speaker 1: it's one of the easiest most of us are, particularly
Speaker 1: if you're a performer. You can picture you can create
Speaker 1: a mental picture of yourself executing fairly easily. Most people
Speaker 1: do that relatively simply, but there's mixed results in terms
Speaker 1: of how effective it is as a tool for improving performance.
Speaker 1: It can improve your sense of self efficacy, and it
Speaker 1: can improve your confidence because you see yourself performing well,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't necessarily translate into your ability on the
Speaker 1: field to do what we're asking you to do. And
Speaker 1: so the separate The use of imagery for me, at
Speaker 1: least in my programs, will often be more about problem
Speaker 1: solving in advance. So we'll picture something, we'll picture you
Speaker 1: doing it well, and then we'll say that, oh, something
Speaker 1: just happened there in the ball. What might have happened
Speaker 1: if the ball didn't go the way you wanted it
Speaker 1: to go? Okay, So if that's going to happen next time,
Speaker 1: what would you do to adjust? So we're almost preparing
Speaker 1: answers in advance, yes, because the game is not always
Speaker 1: going to go how you like, but when it does,
Speaker 1: when something does pop up, you've already sort of practiced
Speaker 1: your response to that. Very cool. Yeah. Someone told me
Speaker 1: once that a good way to overcome social anxiety is
Speaker 1: to like before I enter the party, like right before
Speaker 1: I enter. Just imagine that like on the way for
Speaker 1: the party, like that people like like me yeah, and
Speaker 1: that really it really matters, like when you get in there,
Speaker 1: you set off that vibe exactly, Like vibes matter. Like
Speaker 1: how much in sports do like vibes that you put off,
Speaker 1: you know, like matter to other players? Well, I think
Speaker 1: to other players a lot. I think there's a you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of research around emotional contagion in a
Speaker 1: lot of different areas, and in sports it's no different.
Speaker 1: Cam Newton is a perfect examp at the moment who
Speaker 1: is over the top with his confidence and his bravado
Speaker 1: and celebrations, but it does lift the other players around him.
Speaker 1: There are some players who have a outsized impact on
Speaker 1: the guys beside them, and potentially the opposition as well.
Speaker 1: It can be more demoralizing if we keep attacking this guy,
Speaker 1: but he just doesn't seem to get deflated, like there's
Speaker 1: nothing we can do to turn him down. That definitely
Speaker 1: does have an impact. I don't know of any specific
Speaker 1: research in sports that has investigated that, but I do
Speaker 1: know obviously of the emotional contagion research and then there's
Speaker 1: also the impact to you the individual. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: within subjects, so in terms of your ability to go
Speaker 1: out and do what you need to do. If someone
Speaker 1: feels better the I guess the best way to explain
Speaker 1: it is they're less likely to question the first thought
Speaker 1: that pops into their head. And that's the entire point
Speaker 1: of mindfulness in terms of being able to get into
Speaker 1: the zone or prepare for a performance mindset. We do
Speaker 1: this stuff so that you can quieten your head and
Speaker 1: stop second guessing yourself. Everyone who gets particularly to a
Speaker 1: semi elite or an elite level of sport, whether it's
Speaker 1: in college. Even if you're playing college football and you're
Speaker 1: not a starter, you're still better than ninety five percent
Speaker 1: of the rest of the world at what you do,
Speaker 1: and so there's no even if you can't play for
Speaker 1: five years at all. Exactly well, yeah, exactly, I was
Speaker 1: one of the two percent. Your ability to when you
Speaker 1: get into that position, not question your talent is one
Speaker 1: of the big things. Most people get in their own
Speaker 1: way in that instance, and they worry or what if.
Speaker 1: I know, I've got to be really careful about my
Speaker 1: follow through on this shot, because there's a million people watching,
Speaker 1: but that stops you from doing what you've trained yourself
Speaker 1: to do for ten years, and your ability to not
Speaker 1: think while you execute is vital to execution great. Once
Speaker 1: you've built up the expertise base, that's right, you want
Speaker 1: to let be it go automatic, But there's this whole
Speaker 1: process where you're really making me conscious unconscious exactly. And
Speaker 1: that was the Probably the second thing that came out
Speaker 1: from the time with Bales was the idea that there's
Speaker 1: no magic pill. Now. It was almost an ironic play
Speaker 1: on words because he was undergoing chemotherapy at the time
Speaker 1: and often there was pill sitting on the table in
Speaker 1: front of us. But we talked a lot about coaches often,
Speaker 1: and it's no different from leaders in business or teachers
Speaker 1: who want to know the next big trick, what's the trend?
Speaker 1: What do we do here? How do we make someone
Speaker 1: more gritty or how do we make how do we
Speaker 1: get them better quicker? There's no real magic trick like
Speaker 1: whatever it is. If you want to build a grittier kid,
Speaker 1: you have to do a lot of things over a
Speaker 1: long period of time. You can't just click your fingers
Speaker 1: and then after a six week program, we've got more grit.
Speaker 1: Same goes for developing skill or expertise, or your ability
Speaker 1: to chunk information as an expert. You know, That's one
Speaker 1: of the things that and as Ericson talks a lot
Speaker 1: about is the ten now as a practice does have
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of I guess neural plasticity
Speaker 1: it in terms of wiring the right pathways, but there
Speaker 1: is also an element of I've seen this scene so
Speaker 1: many times that I'm able to tune into the right cues,
Speaker 1: and that only happens from the scene so many times.
Speaker 1: We can't fast forward the ten thousand hours. Now. There's
Speaker 1: obviously a lot of research that since that big Obviously
Speaker 1: glad I was probably the one who made that the
Speaker 1: most widely known theory, but there's a lot of counter
Speaker 1: counter research that argues against that. But there is still
Speaker 1: a lot of in my eyes, and I'm not sure
Speaker 1: about your thoughts actually, Scott, but there is a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot to be said about the time required
Speaker 1: to build mastery, particularly in a very specific skill physical
Speaker 1: skill domain. Yeah, when we're talking about mastery, that's absolutely correct.
Speaker 1: I wonder about the difference between mastery, however, and creativity,
Speaker 1: and I wonder in sports like the creative. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't think that like Dilbert practice, just following a
Speaker 1: set of rules and practice training regimen is going to
Speaker 1: make you necessarily an imagine never creative warmers, you know,
Speaker 1: sports performer. But even if it gets you to mastery. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what is the difference between an expert or even a
Speaker 1: professional athlete and some who's a really creative athlete? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's a really fantastic distinction. And there's a
Speaker 1: great story within the book that Bales actually details some
Speaker 1: interactions he has with a player who is if you
Speaker 1: gave him something to do for ten thousand hours, he
Speaker 1: would do it, and he'd do it in nine thousand hours.
Speaker 1: Like he was a great student to teach because you know,
Speaker 1: you're not going to get any pushback and he'll do
Speaker 1: what he's told. But the problem was when we change
Speaker 1: game plans with us as new coaches coming in, he
Speaker 1: got stuck in his one way and he wasn't able
Speaker 1: to get out of what he used to do because
Speaker 1: that was how he trained for ten thousand hours. And
Speaker 1: so one of the important things I think some the
Speaker 1: research shows up is it's good to have a base.
Speaker 1: So you have to have before you can go and
Speaker 1: add lib on a freestyle, on a concerto solo, you
Speaker 1: need to be able to play your scales. You need
Speaker 1: to have that stuff downpat and your technique to be
Speaker 1: able to reach and move and flex. But once you
Speaker 1: get to that point, then you almost have to do
Speaker 1: the opposite. So the ten thousand hours isn't rigid and constructed,
Speaker 1: it's play. Do something different, and actually we force the
Speaker 1: athlete to think outside of what they've been trained. So
Speaker 1: the great example from the book was, I was told
Speaker 1: this guy that we want you to start practicing being
Speaker 1: different than what you used to. So every day when
Speaker 1: you drive to training, you've got to go a different way.
Speaker 1: You can't go the same route every day. So when
Speaker 1: you get to that place that you normally go straight ahead,
Speaker 1: you've got to turn left and then make it up
Speaker 1: from there. And over time with that as a practice,
Speaker 1: and the kids still spoke to him as I was
Speaker 1: writing this, he still does it two years later. Is
Speaker 1: you start to get the individual more comfortable with freestyling,
Speaker 1: being able to not feel like things have to be
Speaker 1: this way for them to be successful. That's great. Is
Speaker 1: there anything else you wanted to talk about today? I
Speaker 1: think that one of the and this is probably the
Speaker 1: biggest life changing thing for me coming out of Bails's
Speaker 1: the conversations I had with Bales was the idea of
Speaker 1: he used a metaphor towards the end when I was
Speaker 1: talking about why he coached and what do you get
Speaker 1: out of coaching, and he was really strong on this
Speaker 1: point of the There was an empty coffee cup and
Speaker 1: he said, look, to me, coaching is a little bit
Speaker 1: like this cup, in that the cup doesn't exist just
Speaker 1: to hold whatever you put in it and keep it
Speaker 1: to itself. The cup exists to pass that into something bigger.
Speaker 1: So the coach is you have a certain amount of
Speaker 1: knowledge and experience and that's inside you, but really the
Speaker 1: only point of that ever being there is so you
Speaker 1: can pour it into something else, and particularly into something
Speaker 1: bigger than yourself. He was really connected with a strong
Speaker 1: sense of purpose and that really struck me as one
Speaker 1: of the turning points to me of having me look
Speaker 1: at what I was doing at that time, and that's
Speaker 1: what led me to move over here to the US,
Speaker 1: knowing that there was probably a larger calling I felt.
Speaker 1: I felt pulled towards doing some more researching and positive
Speaker 1: psychology and working at a higher level here to impact
Speaker 1: the lives of coaches and athletes and not just help
Speaker 1: them get better and grittier and have better results. And
Speaker 1: that's awesome because I'm a competitor and I love people
Speaker 1: helping people win, but more to the point, changing the
Speaker 1: way that people are coached so that we improved their
Speaker 1: lives at the same time as improving their results. And
Speaker 1: I think for me, there was a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: in there towards the end of the book about the
Speaker 1: legacy of a leader, the ability for a leader to
Speaker 1: leave behind a neural imprint on someone that they've taught,
Speaker 1: that even if you do move on to another team,
Speaker 1: or God forbid you die, you're still alive within the
Speaker 1: minds of everyone that you've touched as a teacher or
Speaker 1: as a coach or as a leader, and that really,
Speaker 1: you know, that was life changing for me. That's great.
Speaker 1: I think it's a good quace to end. Really recommend
Speaker 1: that people read the book. I found it very insightful
Speaker 1: and wise, but also just very touching. You know that
Speaker 1: there are these two people got together that cared about
Speaker 1: each other so much, and and you know it's very
Speaker 1: clear that you know he gained from you as well
Speaker 1: as you gaining from him, so thanks for sharing some
Speaker 1: of that today on the on the show great Thanks
Speaker 1: for having us get Thanks for listening to The Psychology
Speaker 1: Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found
Speaker 1: this episode just as an informative and thought provoking as
Speaker 1: I did. If you'd like to read the show notes
Speaker 1: for this episode or here past episodes, you can go
Speaker 1: to the Psychology Podcast dot com. Do