Barbell Shrugged - Body of Knowledge  — Chapter 7  —  Conscious Coaching w/ Brett Bartholomew

Episode Date: May 25, 2018

Brett Bartholomew is a strength and conditioning coach, author, adjunct professor, and Founder of the performance coaching and consulting company, The Bridge Human Performance® along with the coach education platform ArtOfCoaching.com. His experience includes working with athletes both in the team environment and private sector along with members of the U.S. Special Forces and members of Fortune 500 companies. Taken together, Brett has coached a diverse range of athletes from across 23 sports world-wide, at levels ranging from youth athletes to olympians. In chapter 7, Brett joins us for a gripping conversation about conscious coaching. He explains how early struggles with extreme dieting and exercise provided the life experience that would ultimately influence his coaching philosophy. Brett emphasizes the importance of communication, psychology, and trust in relationships. Enjoy! - Kenny and Andy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bok_chapter7 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please support our partners! Thrive Market is a proud supporter of us here at Barbell Shrugged.  We very much appreciate all they do with us and we’d love for you to support them in return!  Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get $60 of FREE Organic Groceries + Free Shipping and a 30 day trial, click the link below: thrivemarket.com/body   How it works:  Users will get $20 off their first 3 orders of $49 or more + free shipping.  No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so why not give Thrive Market a try! ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedp... TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Mike Bledsoe here, CEO of the Shrug Collective. If you haven't already noticed, we've got a lot of new cool stuff going on. You hit shrugcollective.com, you'll see some great content that you won't be catching if you're only listening to the podcast. Hit the website and see the new look and feel. This week, we get to introduce you to two new shows. Today, we bring you Body of Knowledge. This show has been created by a couple of guys you already know, Dr. Andy Galpin and Kenny Kane. They've had their own project and I love that we get to share it with you here. As we're expanding and improving the shows, we have partnered with amazing companies

that we believe in. We talk and hang out with the people who run these businesses and know why they do what they do. Not all products are created equal, even if it looks like it on the surface. We've done the research and have been in the industry long enough to see what really works and what will make the biggest difference for you long term. With that being said, one of my favorite companies, Thrive Market, has a special offer for you. You get $60 of free organic groceries plus free shipping and a 30-day trial. Go to thrivemarket.com slash body. This is how it works. Users will get $20 off their first three orders of 49 bucks or more, plus free shipping.

No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so hit up Thrive Market today. Thrivemarket.com slash body. Enjoy the show. Can we start again? Yeah. Where's the future of this understanding going? Don't know. Why? Anyways.

Anyways. We are not a singular thing. We are built to change. At the most advanced levels of everything, it comes down to fundamental basics. These are general health practices that every human should be striving for. It's candy madness. Scream if you like candy. practices that every human should be striving for. It's candy madness.

Scream if you like candy. I don't know where that came from. I wasn't listening. I was just thinking about that. You're more insightful than most because most people fail to understand that, like Brenda Shoshana says, all conflict is conflict within ourselves. If you feel a certain way about it and you're getting that emotional response towards somebody else is an inward reflection of something that you're unhappy with. Maybe you didn't do this correctly or you could have done that better. It wasn't the best. And we do that with interactions

as well. That's the whole kind of thing with the science of first impressions. When we have a poor first impression, you can recover from that. But literally, when you metite, sometimes just creatures. But how can I admit that? How can I reflect upon it? And how can I drive more thoughtful and thorough interactions going forward? And that's the hallmark of a great teacher and a great educator and a great conversationalist and just a good communicator in general is saying, I probably didn't do this well enough. And how could I, how could I change it going forward? So if you're just tuning in, you are hearing the voice of Brett Bartholomew, current author of the book, Conscious Coaching,

a good friend of Dr. Galpin's, now just being introduced to both Josh and myself. And today, obviously, we're going to be able to cover a lot of territory, starting with or maybe ending with the book and a lot of the content in it. But I do think it's important for us to kind of go back just a smidge to maybe around 15 years old and some of your experiences when you had a crisis that kind of drove you to this point where you're at as a coach right now, affecting the people that you are. Yeah, and apologies to everybody listening.

You're hearing the pseudo voice of me. My immune system absolutely crapped out on me after writing this book, so I'm sorry. I sound like I'm plugging my nose and reminiscent of 1999 Eminem. So I appreciate you guys dealing with that. Some of his best work came that territory. So I think it's a compliment personally. Right. So yeah, just to touch on that, the nature and my fascination with human behavior,

or that's introspection or understanding why we label things the way we do, why we perceive things the way we do, dealt with the situation I had faced in my past. I was 15 years old, had a core group of friends. We played sports together growing up. It was a relatively stable kind of childhood environment, what have you. And my parents had gotten divorced. So we moved to different parts of town. My good friends were going to one high school. I was going to another. It was a nice high school. I mean, by and large, you'd see people that the cars in the student parking lot oftentimes were better than the cars in the, in the teacher parking lot. Now, you know, our dad was from, my dad's from Iowa and he came from a

very, very, very poor kind of background. Like basically at 11, he had to work to support his family. His father died, his father died when he was, you know, 54. My dad was 13 at the time. So he just kind of had to pick up a lot of the load. And so we never had that. He was like, you're driving some 19, 60, whatever Ford Bronco. And so anyway, my friends went to one school, I went to another. And really competitive in athletics. I played baseball and football growing up. But there was a period of time where, you know, I think a lot of the parents, you kind of get these yuppie parents that want their kids to be as popular as the parents want them to be. And, you know, just going over to a friend's house and having

casual drinks and girls over started turning into a lot more serious drugs. You know, eventually, like, I think now it's probably pretty common for people to be like, oh, you know, you go to a friend's house in high school, they're probably smoking weed just from where we're at right now, right? And who am I to judge? I don't, you know, I have no say in that. But my friends at the time were now starting to do cocaine. And I'll never forget that. You go to a friend's house, you're sitting there, usually you're playing poker, you're having some drinks, you're watching TV, there's girls over. And then a childhood friend, I remember one time, like we had bought beer with a fake ID or whatever. And he's like, cool, you want to hit this? And passes back literally a mirror, a mirror with lines of cocaine on it.

And this was not a ride that I was interested in getting on. And a lot of the kids at my high school at that time were going down that kind of spiraling path. And so right then I was kind of faced with a conflict of what the hell do I do here? Like these are the guys, not necessarily that I grew up playing with. They went to a different high school. But this is kind of the social group I'm going to have to kind of interact with going forward. They're the ones I relate to. They play sports like I play sports, but this isn't a path I'm interested in going down. So I, you know, I thought I was doing

kind of what the smart choice was at the time where, no, no, I'm not going to do this. I'm a serious athlete. I'm just going to train. I'm going to focus on that. And at the time you're like 15, so you don't know what to buy. I'm buying every muscle rag you can find. I'm a serious athlete. I'm just going to train. I'm going to focus on that. And at the time, you're like 15. So you don't know what to buy. I'm buying every muscle rag you can find. I'm flipping through men's health. I'm flipping through whatever I can find at Barnes and Noble. I start this kind of habit of doing pushups and sit-ups every night. I'm training after school. My parents, you know, fresh off the divorce are still fighting in the evening. So you don't really want to be home because there's always, you always hear one of them yelling at the phone and what have you. So I'd go work out at the local health club. So I'm working out like three and a half times a day. And it was totally like Christian

Bale and American Psycho. Yeah. Yeah. Sitting there and like, he's playing that. It's that image where, you know, he's playing some like horror movie and he's just sitting there knocking out crunches and doing double unders. Like that was essentially my life for a period of time. And I just went down this dark hole of not really knowing what to do with those emotions. It started off this fixation of wanting to be perfect or at least find my limit. There were some times where after two workouts, I'd go run 13 miles just to see where I'd end up. I was in a pretty dark place and I was fascinated by how hard you could push your body. And it wasn't until at one point in time when I was running around the school, you could run around it in the winter,

and I think three times around it was a mile. It was a pretty big high school or long high school, and I just blacked out just right on the floor. And I had lost a significant amount of weight at this time because it was right around the time people were doing low-carb and low-fat. And in traditional just extremist views, I did both. Yeah, double Yeah, I'm a high school kid, I want to get jacked, you know, so I'm going to double I'm eating egg beaters for you know, breakfast, I'm eating like salads with nothing other than like fat free deli meat for lunch, you know what I mean? Pure orthorexia is what it was

later termed, you know, is and it's a type of eating disorder, right? Like you have this perfect I didn't want to it wasn't my goal to lose weight. It was my goal to like perform at my best and look my best. But that was my 15 year old version of what that looked like at the time, based on the magazines that I was reading. So I blackout, I, you know, we go to the doctor, the doctor's like, listen, like your kidney and liver enzymes are in a terrible, terrible place. I think my resting heart rate at the time was in the high to mid thirties. And at the time I'm like, yeah, I'm in shape. And they're like, no, you're going to die. You know what I mean? Like you're not in shape. And so, you know, they told my parents and I'm, I'm clearly a minor at the time being 15. They're like, listen, we think the best place

for him is kind of an outpatient eating disorder hospital. And so I go to this place and yeah, my dad would drop me off at like 6.30 in the morning. You get in a gown, they weigh you. They want to know exactly what your weight is every day. You go to these groups and all these groups are centered completely around body image, right? And it's all body image. Hey, like food's not the enemy. Like, are you scared of being fat? And I'm sitting here like, no, you know what I mean? This isn't me. Now, a part of that's denial, right? Because even though I didn't, I wasn't nervous about being fat, I had failed to recognize that I still was using diet and exercise as a way to control and, and, you know, deal with

kind of what was just this depression and OCD kind of tag team. And so I'd sit in these groups, and I just get more pissed, because I didn't relate to anything that these people were saying. And every time I would tell, they'd be like, hey, Brett, do you want to share? And I'd sit in these groups and I just get more pissed because I didn't relate to anything that these people were saying. And every time I would tell, they'd be like, hey, Brett, do you want to share? And I'd be like, yeah, I'm not scared of chicken thighs. I'm good. And they're like, okay, denial. You're here for another week. Like you didn't show progress.

It's like that jacked up. It was like James Caan in Misery. Like if you showed anything that was like defiant behavior, If it was anything like defiant behavior, you just had this check mark. And you have these people that again, like we were talking about it off air, these people that are supremely well-educated, but just straight judging you, you know, every, every single thing. And they're trying to tell you, and they control what you eat and drink. So you're there for three meals and two snacks. And then you have a snack later that day that's supervised by your parents. And I have to meet weekly with a psychiatrist that looks literally like Dr. Katz. All he wants to do

is med you up on SSRI. And he's like, anytime you get animated, oh, this is the disorder talking. This isn't you. Some demon needs to be exercised from you. And I'm like, no, man, I'm right here. You can talk to me. I'll be happy to talk to you about my issues. But if you're just going to keep pushing me for more, and my parents don't know what to do. They're listening to all the doctors, right? Because what are you going to do? Listen to like, I was 130 pounds in a healthy standpoint in high school. By this point, I'm like 105.

So you're going to look at your, you know, skeletor of a son, or are you going to listen to the medical professional? So I stay in these places. They try to tell you that eating, you know, milkshakes and fries and burgers is normal and healthy. They very much pit this into your brain that you are not normal. You are sick. There's a disorder. There's a denial. And apparently this is a really effective way to change behavior in their minds. So it doesn't work. I find ways when I go home at night, I tell my parents, I'm going to a friend's house or I'm going to the mall. I go to the lake or a 24 hour fitness and

just start going full speed. I would find ways to walk extra laps or extra distance anywhere I went. It was a compulsion and it's how I dealt with anger at the time. So eventually in the book details it, big family intervention, because I'm not doing any better. I think I've seen three or four psychologists at the time, they're all infuriated or convinced that I'm in pure denial, because I don't want to sit there and admit to them that I have a fear of pizza, you know, and, and I'm not falling into like a neat category for them. So I get put into an inpatient eating disorder hospital in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Now, for anybody listening, the difference here is you don't leave the eighth floor of this hospital ever, never. Like you are in a room with a padlocked bathroom. And anytime you want to

use the restroom, you have to have a nurse stand outside. They measure everything. You're woken up at five or five 30 in the morning. Your blood's drawn. They get to decide if you get to take a shower or not because with how low my, of all things, my BMI was at the time, like they think that the initial shock of hot or cold will send me into cardiac arrest. Oh my God. Because my heart rate,

my resting heart rate now is like 32, 33 beats per minute. And that's not a bragging thing, right? Like I'm not Dean Karnazes, like the ultra marathon man. And so there's a day room, probably about two times the size of this room we're sitting in now. You spend the majority of your time in. And the nurses all sit outside and they're observing you. There's only PG movies.

There's only PG movies. So much healing going on. Oh, boy. You listen to music. You have grooves. Why does this work? Crazy. Oh, it gets better. And the feedings, the mandatory feedings to music. You have groups. Why does this work? Crazy. Oh, it gets better.

And the feedings, the mandatory feedings are held in a dining room. Literally, it's a glass table. You meet with a dietician every week, and you go over the hospital kind of meal plan, and they use the diabetic exchange list of how many breads, how many proteins, how many fats you need, because they don't want you to think about calories. So you're in this day room. If you stand or fidget or chew gum, anything, wrap on the window, they give you one warning. You do it again, another warning. You do it a third time, you're either made to drink a boost or insure

something similar, right? Or you're fed intravenously because they think just from pure neat, they think that you're trying to burn excess calories and you're trying to be defiant. Anyway, just quickly, NEAT, by NEAT you mean? Non-exercise thermogenesis. Right, so you're twitching on purpose so you burn more calories so you stay skinny is what they think. And what's funny is at the time, I wasn't thinking about these things, but by them bringing them to my attention, you start creating behaviors.

Learning to become a better one. Right, because now they start teaching you basically how basically how to lie cheat deceive and beat the system in the hospital so they don't allow you to work out there's no working out until you're at a certain percentage of your ideal body weight again like the absurdity of that their exercise variation was like you get to sit on a stability ball and do ankle weights and they start teaching you about basal metabolic rate and so you take somebody like us that we all inherently love to be active. It's a big conduit to our mind and our thoughts and just how we behave and I think best operate. So I'm sitting here like fidgeting all the time now, whenever I can, I'm timing up when they come into our room at night, you know, I'm doing pushups

because like, you're like, if I'm going to gain the weight and you're force feeding me all this shit, I'm going to make sure at least go towards some kind of idea of protein synthesis for me gaining back healthy weight. And so you sit in these dining rooms whenever you're not in the day room, glass table, nurses on both ends, patients on both ends. So I'm staring just like I'm staring at you. You're eating whatever the meal is of the day. The portion size is dependent on the person and the calories they need or whatever. And let's say I took,

you know, I had grease on my hand from a piece of pizza that they were feeding you that day. And that gets a smudge on the table. Same thing. They think that you're trying to basically hide calories or you're trying to get rid of it. So you have a choice. You can basically, whatever they deem is the equivalent of the calories lost from that smudge or from that gravy not licked up or anything like this, you can either have another serving, you can have another kind of isocaloric equivalent or fed intravenously. And so you're just sitting there and you're watching all kinds of behaviors, right? Like you're watching one woman cut her pieces of fish into the smallest pieces possible and try to like, you know, swirl it in mustard and whatever to mask the taste. You're seeing people take foods they normally would enjoy

and mixing it with other things on their plate so that they can convince themselves psychologically they don't enjoy it. Like stuff that doesn't make sense. You'll see somebody like take a piece of chicken and dip it in sour cream and then dip it in ketchup. So it's, you know, they're repulsed by the taste so that that can feed their bias of like, yeah, I don't like those foods. And so you're just watching. And again, I'm 15 and I'm like, what the fuck is going on?

You know, and- This is straight up one flu of the cuckoo's nest. Oh, again, I mean- Nurse ratchet, all of this. And again, you're never like, you're never off this floor. And so there were a couple of nurses that, you know, despite these people all having advanced degrees,

this was supposed to be one of the premier places in the country to deal with this kind of stuff. They all kind of like their power a lot. And you'd see, you know, somebody wouldn't share in group or somebody wouldn't talk about something that the nurse thought that they should address in a certain way. And they basically say nothing short of, you know, you're going to be in here longer. Right. They very much enjoyed their power. And in part of the book, I talk about when i finally did get released from the hospital a woman and in the book i call her rita um when i left and this is my parents walking with me out of the hospital

she looks at me and i'm 16 at the time because i turned 16 in this hospital i was in there for about 8 to 12 months and uh she looks at me and says you'll be back and i don't agree that you're getting discharged and i looked at her and i swear to god i was like you'll be back. And I don't agree that you're getting discharged. And I looked at her and I swear to God, I was like, I'll be back someday. You're right. But to talk to all the people that you can't help. I mean, they were the, I had never met people like this in my life that just thought education and data and metrics and what they were used to seeing literally everybody fit into this box.

And they didn't care. They didn't care what your background was. You were all sick. You were all diseased. And it was just a question of whether you wanted to admit that you were at whatever level they wanted you to kind of typecast yourself at. But they weren't very socially agile at understanding, oh, no, this is your deal. It literally took until I met a therapist named Katie, again, what I call her in the book. In real life, her name's Kathy Wise. And I'll say that because, you know, she helped save my life. She was probably

the eighth or 10th psychologist I'd seen at the time. And she convinced my parents, literally, this is not the right place for your son. And that was only after eight to 12 months of being in this place and not really getting any better. And had she not convinced my parents to kind of take a chance and let me get my life together, you know, I probably, who knows how long I would have been in there. Now, this is to me, maybe an obvious question. Perhaps you've been asked this before, but do you think that background, that experience, that year of your life directly relates and heavily influences your approach to what we're calling

conscious coaching now? No question. It probably took a while for me to figure that out. So it's a gift in a way. Yeah. Well, I mean, you have to experience what you want to express, right? That's like a quote that that one's like, that's Van Gogh at probably his best. Like you have to experience what you have to, what you want to express. And that to me was a timely quote because right now in strength and conditioning, human performance, whatever we want to kind of put that label on, you have people that I think,

you have too many painters and not enough artists. People that want to tell other people what to do, but they maybe haven't experienced that for themselves, whether that's a taste of that. No, not our field. You know what I mean? There's just braggadocio Superman persona. And just because i look a certain way or i have this kind of background that i have now i can tell you what to do and you should listen right and when i got out

of there i know for a fact i had this increased kind of awareness of people and interaction and and just different social domains because i saw how jacked up it was i mean imagine if you were talking to me right now as if i wasn't in the room and you were telling me something you felt like you knew about me, even though we just met probably what, 15, 20 minutes ago. And then if I showed any sense of animation, right, whether I was explaining, yeah, you're just sitting there talking to my wife or Andy or anybody in the room as if I'm not here talking through me. And I witnessed that. And you're talking about like, I was already kind of dealing with depression and anger and OCD. So then I didn't know how to control my emotions at the time. So I'd eventually just get, I'd lose it at that

therapist. And they'd be like, see, this is the disease talking. We're going to up, we're going to up your medication. We're going to up the dosage. And so it literally got to the point where, you know, you're hiding your medication, you're swallowing in front of nurses. None of that is made up. You learn how to be deceiving. You learn how to be manipulative. When I was an undergrad at K-State, I read the book, The Game by Neil Strauss. Then he starts talking about social dynamics, right? Completely different application. That was like the underground society of pickup artists or what have you. But you start seeing common themes of people on how they interact and how they relate and how they perceive.

And at the time, I'm just like, oh my God, like this is in some way, shape or form what I experienced or this helps explain that. You know, I take abnormal psych classes. I would take improv classes. I'd try to see how people reacted to things. You just cast bait out there and see how you could get people to react or respond. And then you start realizing all your own faults and you could get people to react or respond. And then you start realizing all your own faults and you go down a completely different rabbit hole. And that to me

is human performance, right? There's a physiological, there's a psychological, there's a cultural, all those domains go into what we do. And it's no question why I started to gravitate towards conscious coaching, especially in the, we talked about this off air too, in this kind of sports science age that we live in now where everything is apparently data driven. Well, what's behind the data? Data can make it say, you know better than anybody, Andy, like data can make it say whatever you want it to say. You know, and a lot of people, our world does. Data drives marketing campaigns, data drives everything. And so you have to understand what goes into that, what goes into behavior and what goes into us being these, you know, we're always, our ego and our perception and our heuristics that we operate off of are so flawed. But at the same

time, you have to realize that and accept it to be able to change it and influence it. We're not living in a utopian society. If you've never heard, if you're listening to this at home, and you've never heard of Brett, to give you some context, you're around the world right now. You're one of the most hotly sought after guest speakers, strength conditioning coaches. You are the name that people use to market their conferences. We've got Brett coming in and now people are going to show up. And what makes you different and the reason why you're standing out particularly at such a young age is because of you approaching this entire strength conditioning field differently uh i i want to connect this directly back to what you just got done telling talking about and so that's

why i'm setting this up what is different about conscious coaching as you lay out in the very beginning of the book most people are only concerned about the program design, what's the technique for squatting, and those are important. No doubt. But there are other conversations we need to have to be truly effective as a strength and conditioning coach, and that's what you really mean by conscious coaching,

which is can we improve our communication skills to our athletes? So when you were going through the hospital and you were noticing everyone was treating, or these nurses were treating everyone the same way when they should have been more effective at communicating with them, is that the parallel between your hospital experience and now what you implement to be a more effective coach? Yeah, I just think it goes down to the essence of effectiveness and awareness in total, right? That was the term what conscious was meant to allude to is just an awareness, a 360 degree awareness

of what drives performance in any domain, whether that's business, whether that's, you know, strength and conditioning, whether that's athletics, what have you. You have to have an awareness. You have to be able to call an audible because you have to know what influences outcomes at all levels, right?

Like look at the New England Patriots. They won the Super Bowl this year. They don't do, they're widely known as a team that does not do a lot of sports science type stuff. They came back from the biggest deficit ever. And you'd like to think that, oh, that's a one-off, cool, N equals one. Well, N equals one kind of happens in the sporting world a lot. Do you notice that? And it also happens in tactical populations, right? Operators, like my first few years at Athletes Performance, now Exos, we would see these operators that would come back and they were just riddled, right, from war. How

many people are told they're not going to do something and they do? So like, what really are odds now? And how can you really use these kind of metrics and data to say, yeah, I know what you're going to do. Things that don't happen all the time happen all the time. So it gets a bit odd. I always think of the Joker in The Dark Knight, this kind of what they represent, this element of chaos and randomness and how eventually, and Nassim Taleb talks about it, right? You have to submit to this anti-fragility of the more control you think you have, the more off base you are. We don't have control over shit in our lives. All you can hope to control is your own kind of reason, emotion,

decisions, interaction. And even then you don't have that much control because then it's how do you perceive those things. I can't imagine probably the first time you and I really met. It was at the combat clinic, right? That was when we first met. You probably saw, and I'm assuming here. So if I'm wrong, cool. But you saw me speak a lot about influence and psychology and whatever.

If you didn't know anything about me, you could have been like, what the hell is a strength and conditioning coach doing up there talking about that? Yeah. And it could very easily- Which is probably what some of our listeners are going through right now. They're like, whoa. And that's attribution bias, right? We assume that we know why somebody is behaving a certain way and that that deals with an interpersonal type thing as opposed to experiential. But when you're 15 and you've dealt with eight to 10 different psychologists, you've been hospitalized, you've been treated like a statistic. It's like goodwill hunting, right? You get to the point where you start to learn their games and flip it on other

people and you study, what did I do wrong here? What did they do wrong? What would effective treatment intervention and interaction look like? When I started working with pro athletes, I wanted to know at one point in time, I had taken over a program that was kind of dwindling. It was my job to kind of reinvigorate the pro sports side of this company I was at. And we had done it. We had been successful. It wasn't just me. It was a team of people. But you start thinking, okay, I asked all my athletes, I go, why do you come to me? Because I know we clean, I know we squat, I know we sprint, but who like, there's a lot of people doing those things. Why do you come? And eventually, they were just like, it's how you break it down. It's how you break it down and talk about how what we're doing connects to something

that we care about. And then you get that, right? You get that social validation. You get what's called an emotional payment. People, human beings are the only mammals that want kind of validation. If you forget your cat or dog's name, as long as you give it attention, it's really not going to get pissy. It's certainly not going to hold a grudge.

But if I forget your guys' names, I don't honor kind of my duties and responsibilities as a guest. And somebody is like, what did you do this afternoon? I'm like, oh, I went to some place, was on some podcast. That'll piss you off because it's a lack of respect. Humans want validation and they want to feel like their needs are being met or at the very least acknowledged more than anything. And so you start to realize, okay, these are things I have to start making the majority of my teaching moments centered around. And that goes into like my master's thesis in attentional focus, right? Internal and external cues.

Internal being focusing on knee or hip or joint angle, just something related to your body position or direct kind of reference to biomechanics, right? That's a really, I want to stop you right there. You can finish your story there. But can you give us a very quick example of that? Because internal versus external acuity is extremely powerful. You can use it tomorrow, and it's a very effective way to improve performance.

So can you give us one example that jumps out to your head? Yeah. So if we're going to do a vertical jump, me telling somebody to, hey, extend at the ankle, knee, and hip, right? And try to touch the highest rung or anything like that. So I'm telling them, I'm giving them a body position as a reference point. That's kind of like the landmark, right? That's where Waze tells you you're starting off. Whereas an external focus would be push the ground away or jump as high as you can. That's an outcome centered view. And so Gabrielle Wolf, she was the lead researcher on this. And she said she learned it when windsurfing. She was trying to focus on her

foot placement, her body position in an ever-changing chaotic environment, which was out at sea. You know, she's trying to maintain her balance. And she's like, it wasn't until I learned to kind of focus on the outcome I was trying to achieve, where cognitively, all these things started to self-organize, right? That kind of psychosomatic nature of you're not having this noise created within your neuromuscular system of trying to overthink the movement. Think if you brought somebody in off the street right now that had no background in weightlifting or athletics or what have you, and you're trying to teach them to clean.

And you're trying to explain all these things by giving them biomechanical reference points that they have no emotional or psychological, they have no kind of reference to at all, right? Where if you give them an outcome, okay, it may be shitty reps at first, but at least we've got it moving. Now they know what to feel. You can start to say, now, did you feel that rep? Okay, the bar got away from you. What did that feel like in your own words? Oh, I felt out of control or it pulled me forward. Great. We don't want to pull it forward. Andy,

you're wearing a hat. If I'm teaching the snatch, knock the ball cap off your head is a great way to clean up bar path as opposed to saying, hey, you know what? Lead with your elbows and really think about this vertical projection of the bar. Somebody's going to look at you and be like, what the hell are you talking about? Yeah. You know, but that's how we like to communicate in strength and conditioning and human performance. Yeah.

Information, information, information, information. Cont context alters behavior and is far more effective than information in any circumstance in life what's the context what do we start with why that's why that whole book was written context is more powerful than information in anything you do and the science will support that that external cueing is far more effective for long-term learning even a short-term learning than internal cueing so those ideas and this long-term learning, even short-term learning, than internal cueing. So those ideas, and this is why we've used these cues a bunch. Push the floor away, Kenny. You've probably used a ton of these different ones.

Versus, oh, I need you to get your knee out more. Oh, I want you to feel this. That's what gets me. And you're speaking to a feeling. There's an emotional tie into that. Go ahead. I'm sorry, Kenny. No, there's an essence to that. And I think that that's where this whole thing is either going to succeed or break down. If

coaching as an art and a science evolves to a place where we're teaching people to develop their intuitive selves, then we're going to see a lot more progression in the whole thing. But if we're keeping it in strictly X's and O's as we're breaking it down, then we're going to stay stuck. One of the things that you mentioned a little bit earlier that I want to kind of come back to because it's a huge part of this emotional dynamic that you're trying to get to is one of the things that I talk a lot about with my coach, who's a former naval commander, is he talks about, listen, the world's a volatile place. There's a lot of uncertainty. It's very complex and it's always ambiguous. If you can understand that from the get-go, it's a lot easier to develop contextual practices and therefore develop your, you know, intuitive abilities. So when in practice, that means for a coach, when you're talking about

internal versus external sort of cuing, I mean, sort of biasing that understanding of like, people have to have a feeling for this. And in the end, it's a feeling that is going to last much longer than anything else because the metric will come and go, but the feeling is going to last a lot longer. That's the place where we're trying to evolve this coaching. Well, there's a visceral element to that, right? When I stepped into the first boxing gym I was ever in, you smell, you smell, everything, the senses are attacked. And emotion drives reason and emotion drive behavior. All those things are very much linked. Motivation and inspiration are not indelible. And those things, to your point, Kenny, they can be impacted by, okay, there's a metric that improved here.

Great. And there's some motivation and there's a motivational element to that. But that in and of itself will not keep you coming back. Talent needs trauma. And that's shown. You look at something they talk about in the research, the tragedy to championship phenomenon. Whenever a community or whenever an organization suffers, you usually see some kind of uptick in productivity, however, that's measured within that domain, right? And so when you look

at the book talks about drives and conflict and how important those things are to coaching, because you need to figure out why somebody is there at a very deep level. Is there something that they're trying to overcome? What's that internal struggle? And you don't need to get like, I get a lot of bite back from some people that are like, well, listen, when we're coaching, we don't have time to excavate kind of what's going on in our athletes mind and, you know, and what they've struggled with. And I'm like, how do you not have time for that? You know, like, like, you don't have five seconds to sit here and, and hopefully this is a relationship, right? As if these things are supposed to be done overnight. As if I'm supposed to, you're my athlete and I'm supposed to just touch your head and you're speaking in tongues, right? Like this is a long-term commitment

relational process. And so the idea is like you're seducing strangers and that word choice is purposeful. I know seduction, manipulation, these things are not, they're usually dirty words to us, but we're trying to uncover what's the reason behind why these people want to achieve X, Y, or Z. And like you said, there's going to be experiential tie-ins that they've had from their past or their present that we need to keep coming back to in order to make them engage at the level we need them to, to make whatever we're prescribing them have the kind of effect that we want to achieve a certain outcome. But people don't really tie into that.

They just get caught in the minutia or the process or the procedure instead of the person and the individual. That's part of coaching. Your social media accounts, your Instagram accounts are amazing because you give away so much tactical information, which is another way of saying you cover a lot of these concepts, but you give us like try this tomorrow instead of this. And in fact, you do that. Probably the only one I've seen package that that can rival

is Kenny, your mastery method course. So can you give us one or two or three examples, maybe a specific scenario where you've had an athlete struggle to learn X movement and you cue it this way instead of that way. And then all of a sudden they picked it up or anything where I can say, look, I'm sort of bought in this conscious coaching thing, but what can I start doing tomorrow differently that I've done today that I can immediately. Yeah. One example is when working with operators in the AP Florida location, we're teaching them an Olympic, a weightlifting practical, and you'd get guys, some of them had never done any kind of weightlifting before in their life. Right. And at that point I was 25 at the time I was trying to attack

everything through knowledge, everything, everything. So we'd go through these progressions and we had them kind of scripted and you're trying to, you know, just go do this elbows. No, come on, pop the, you know, shrug a little bit more. And you just get these very mechanical kind of, is this okay? No, bring your, bring your hips through, extend your hips. And you're just seeing these guys and not get it. And you're like, all right, dude, jump and shrug. And you're right. And you're just literally these guys and not get it. And you're like, all right, dude, jump and shrug. And you're just literally trying to get like the most just banal outcome you can. Just literally, and he's like, wait a minute, leave the platform?

Yes. Jump. Like leave the ground and shrug. And there's somebody right now listening that's like, well, I wouldn't teach that movement like that. You don't want them leaving the ground? And I'm like, and the guy would do it. And I'm like, do you feel that element of weightlessness there? Like what do you feel? He's like, yeah, it's fluid. It's weight, you know, like that. You don't want them leaving the ground. And I'm like, and the guy would do it. And I'm like, do you feel that element of weightlessness there? Like, what do you feel? He's like, yeah, it's fluid. It's weight, you know, like whatever. I'm still trying to figure

it out. And he go, all I want you to do is that and then throw your elbows through. And so the guy does it and it looks horrendous and awkward and what have you, but he's now moving the bar with some velocity and he's actually achieved some kind of extension, right? Like may not be sequential triple extension the way that you want it, but he's getting there where before he was just kind of sitting in this kind of position, trying to muscle curl, you know, squeeze Ace Ventura out of the rhino's ass kind of thing. And so you literally just try to like, you feed them bits, you try to make them feel success in any way they can. And the minute, the minute somebody feels like they're accomplishing something, what do they do psychologically?

Oh, it's fun. Yeah, it's fun. They start to open up their ego. They don't feel quite as insecure. They're like, I did something right. Think about boxing or fighting, getting somebody to learn the jab. The jab becomes second nature for any fighter. But at first, you're like, how much shoulder do I put behind it?

Hey, just whip it. Act like it's a whip. And then all of a sudden, somebody's kind of loose with it. Cool. Now, do this as opposed to, I remember one coach was telling me, put your shoulder and elbow in line and really try to create torque. And I'm like, dude, what? You know what I mean? And I started to learn how to jab just by hearing the sound of the mat or the sound of the mitt, the pad against it. You hear more experienced fighters just crack it. And you're like, how do I get that sound? So then you'd try that. And then I started realizing that, okay, how do humans learn?

Metaphor, analogy, rhythm, right? That's why most tribal kind of, and you look at tribal behavior, we all like sounds, music, dance, all these kinds of things. And you start thinking, all right, now I need to start talking in contrast, metaphor, analogy, rhythm, timing, tempo, anything you can do to create something in their mind's eye that gets them out of their own body. And sometimes that's a bad joke.

Working with high school kids, you try to get them to do something and they're so insecure, they're overthinking everything. It'd be like, Billy, just march, go to the beat. You know, anything you can do to get it out of their mind. So that to me is conscious coaching is stripping away your ego as a coach. Because usually we're all trying to prove how smart we are, right? We all want to say, Hey, listen to my jargon, listen to my jargon. And to them, it just sounds like Charlie Brown, to find out how they want to learn. If an athlete does something right, be like, what happened in your head right

there? Oh, well you told me to think of it like this and that worked. Okay. So do you like metaphor? Yeah, man, that always, you know, that always helps me. And so you start kind of learning it. Now it's a playbook. Now it's no different than how we prescribe sets and reps, right? If we want this kind of adaptation, we're going to do this. We're going to cluster these. We're going to, you start looking at your language and vernacular the same way. You have this kind of wheel that you can spin based on how that person engages or interacts or the feedback they give you non-verbally or verbally. And you start thinking, this is how I'm going to coach this and you have a personality profile now for your team and he likes metaphor kenny likes contrast here's examples of each trying to teach younger coaches how to use does that yeah does that answer your question you know

can i there's there's a really interesting thing that you mentioned with the jab where you'd like try to like create the sound that the really good guys do yeah um there's a thing in the learning process that's really apparent in basketball where you get you get positive reinforcement when the ball goes to the hoop so there's this thing that happens where you like you shoot it a certain way and the ball goes in and your brain remembers like oh my elbow was in but you don't think that it just happens do you have examples other than the jab of like a thing that people can look for in their olympic lifts or their squat that's like that positive reinforcement of it should feel like this. It should sound like that.

It should. No question. And with the Olympic lifts, it's a sense of effortlessness. The bar almost pulls you at a certain point. Yeah. Right. Like especially with the snatch, right? Like, of course, you have to overcome inertia, apply tremendous force.

But there's a point when you're pulling yourself under the bar where there's a fluidity, a yin and a yang. And did you feel that? But that goes into like, we want to be in control. People squeeze the hell out of these bars and they feel like, but that effort, like you don't feel the good reps is what you start to learn. You really don't. And I know that's different with PRs and what have you, but by and large, would you agree? You don't feel the good reps? What's the thing that almost every person says when they hit a PR snatch? Oh, that's, and it sticks in your head. The first time you hit a baseball on the sweet spot of the bat. Oh my God. Still, regardless of any sport there is in the world, that has to be amongst some of the, one of the best feelings there is when you hit that sweet spot. And think about

what you just said, right? It felt, people will tell you how they want to be communicated with, and they'll tell you more importantly, how they want to be coached. If they say it felt like this, everybody wants to know what's the feeling. That's why people get addicted to drugs. There's a feeling. There's a response there that if I feel this, or if I take that, I'll feel this. That's why people don't want to do certain behaviors that they don't perceive to be, like what benefit am I going to get from that? But there's a great gap between feeling and knowing.

No question. Right? And so I think that that's where well-developed coaching and trust development come in very well. In your book, you talk a lot about the trust, the relational stuff, the social intelligence. In the few minutes that we have remaining, can you talk about filling that gap? Because that is a giant, for the coaches

that are listening, for the practitioners out there, we've all experienced, okay, I'm in my mind. I know that I need to be in my body, but that gap needs to be felt. It needs to be felt. And feeling requires a certain sense of trust. So those things, in my view, are very connected. And I think that's some of the things you point out as well. Well, the biggest, the term that you use, I think our society's lost, and feel free to disagree with me, honestly. I think our society in the information age that we live in now has lost a grasp on what is real intelligence or social intelligence.

I agree so much I wrote a book on it. Yeah, right? And like, and think about it, like. And look at your background, right? Look at everything that you study. You study epigenetics, right? And so by and large, that requires a certain amount of just intelligence in general. But socially intelligent individuals do not get hung up on trivialities. It shouldn't take me or you, Kenny, or anybody in this room to say something very specifically and 100% accurate fashion for me to know what you're getting at. There should be a certain level of like, we act as if an inference is a bad thing.

And when I was writing this book, an editor would tell me, because I wrote parts of it like a research paper. You're writing the troll. Right. Yeah. And he goes, man, you can't write that. True intelligence is not sitting there trying to explain everything. I use the example in the book. If your friend Jim starts talking to you about, hey, I played basketball today and it was a pickup game. And he's trying to just get the story across of something that happened in the game. I don't ask Jim, hey, what kind of shoes were you wearing? Hey, what kind of shorts were you wearing? And I have a friend like this. He's like a rain man that I go ahead. You want to go get lunch? He goes, yes, I would like to get lunch, but I'm unable to get lunch today. And I go,

if you ever fucking answer me like C3PO again, I will knock you out because like, that's not intelligence. It's not. And people want to act like, and he gets off on it. And he's my best friend. He was my best man at my wedding. He'll be, he'll be like, why don't you ask me better questions? And I'm like, he knows he's being a dick about it too. And he'll just be like, ask me better questions. And there is a point in defense, right? His defense, you usually knowledge comes from not thinking you have all the answers, but just learning to ask better questions. But you still have to know what not to get hung up on. And so I think that's been lost in coaching, right? We've lost, we think that asking people

or talking in metaphor or analogy and all these things is not a very sophisticated way to communicate. When in reality, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, right? Michelangelo was always, statues are carved by subtraction. What are you trying to say? Great. What I'm trying to say to you may make perfect sense in my mind, but maybe not to you. You have to start asking them questions. You have to get on their wavelength because how we understand the body, how we understand elements of kinetic

linking, going back to the weightlifting example, that is a foreign language to some of these people. They may have not felt it. They may have not seen it. They may have had a coach in the past that was death by information or just kind of beat them into submission, which you tend to see a lot in weightlifting type circles and fighting circles. Coaches that just drill it and drill it and drill it and drill it. And drilling does not foster a higher level understanding all the time because drilling does not mean that you felt something. It just means that it's kind of been routinized in you. You may be disconnected and emotionally detached from that activity. It's our job to attach significance and meaning to an activity or behavior

that we want people to adopt or adapt. I have a question that I really want your opinion on. How do I phrase this? Phrase it carefully. Yeah. Don't fuck it up. Okay, so there's this tendency I find in the academic and research circles that I run in as the typical, like I'm the

statistician on the team. They're like, Oh, what's the fancy new metric we can use. I've found that the quantitative stuff, the data, the numbers are this crutch that people use. It's like a control issue. No question. Like you feel like, Oh, it's a number, so it's true. Yeah. And I'm curious what you think about the role of measurement and data and quantitative shit in general with respect to the psychology of people. Like how are people using that

as a crutch or an excuse? In this really intelligent time or in this time of high level intelligence that we live in now, we've now replaced words with data. Like you said, it's this protective element of, ah, look what the numbers say. But again, numbers don't drive behavior. You see that in every manifestation of life. You see that we were talking about the stock market. We were seeing that in predictive values. I don't even like the term predict. I think at best numbers and all these things act as a guide.

They act as a guide and a reference point. And you get people, to your point, that they'll point at data for whatever they want to prove. But it's funny how you can never seem to find the numbers or the outliers of things that show the opposite. Whenever people point to one thing or one metric or one example, get as far away from that individual as possible. Get as far away from them as possible because they just want something that's going to control you and speak to kind of a, hey, I can validate this now. And if you don't understand this, something's up with you.

Data is not knowledge. Knowledge is not understanding. That's perfectly said. And that was like, when I'm in these groups, I get these reflections and people would be like, Brett, you want to share? You're like, yeah, I'm not scared of pizza. They're like, you're obviously not cured. Another week. I'm like 15 at the time. These people are looking at me like with an element of disgust, which is the most powerful human emotion. You made this point earlier, but I want to really spell this out for the listeners. What you basically said, and I've heard you say this before, so I know this is true. One of the major mistakes that you see coaches make and that you

bring up in the book is you, to be an effective coach as possible, you need to find out the way your athlete wants to be spoken to and coached, and then your style needs to change based on them. It can't work if you're like, this is how I coach, this is how I cue. You will fall in line, or you will move or like you will get out. You will find another place. You have to identify the way they like it. And then you have to be that chameleon. When I, when this athlete walks in, I go into this mode. I get very intense or I get softer or I get whatever. And then when the other athlete walks in, I go the other direction. Now I'm going to get very tactical or very specific. And so can, number one, can you

speak to that? And then number two, could you give me some exact examples of that, some things that you do differently based on a different athlete, some of the archetypes that you've outlined? Yeah. So there's 15 archetypes in the book that all talk about common examples of athlete or just personalities you'll encounter. Everything from there's one that I know, that I call the royal, and the royals is kind of entitled. They may be naturally pretty talented, and they've had people kiss their ass their whole life. And so they expect you to kind of like, you know, oh, you should understand and I'm confident here or I'm competent here and you should communicate with me this way. There's manipulative type personalities. There's kind of the soldier type mentality that

will do whatever you tell them to do. Right? And then there's politicians, people that are always trying to negotiate. Well, how about if I do it this way? How about if I do it that way? So being a social chameleon, and people may say, well, that's being dishonest. It's a whole nother rabbit hole. Research I'm doing right now and things I present on called dark-sided personality traits, basically how elements of Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism can be used strategically to be able to adapt and manipulate different personalities to get them on the same page. Teddy Roosevelt, one of the highest ranking presidents in terms of effectiveness, they say rated really, really, really high in Machiavellianism and really high

in narcissism. Now, not from the stance that he was a narcissistic person, but he did have an immense amount of self-belief that he could accomplish certain tasks that nobody else would have. And everybody's got to have an element because there is a difference between narcissism and confidence and it's a scale, right? And they have ways of objectively measuring that, that I outlined in the book. But the most primary example I can give you is who here has got a significant other right now there's yeah all three of them yeah they're all married everybody in the room right raise your hand do you communicate with your significant other often the same way that you do many of your athletes no there's a terrible look on Kenny's face your wife was your athlete yeah

my wife was my athlete. But still to this day, do you talk to her the same way you did back when you met her? Well, that evolved because it developed into a personal. Can we go with somebody else? I'll go with this one very quickly. Because it's so complex. Let's frame it this way. This is a very easy one for me. There is no way.

In fact, this is like an on-running joke one for me. There is no way. In fact, this is like an on-running joke between Natasha and I that she'll phrase it as like, you don't understand how to motivate me very well, do you? And of course I'm doing it all the time on purpose the wrong way to be funny because I will speak to her the way that motivates me, that I know motivates me. And I know it only irritates the hell out of her. And so she'll constantly be like, okay, fine. Great. Keep talking like that. I'm going to go eat cookies. It's one thing we're conscious of. So it's like an honoring joke, but your point is exactly right. If I tried to communicate to her, like I communicate to my UFC fighters, no way possible. And so think about that from a proximity standpoint,

we often reach for examples that are, you know, oh, well, an athlete or a friend or a colleague. No, look at your family because your family is the best example of how we start to adapt to behavior. Your in-laws, how do you talk to your in-laws versus your parents? How do you get through Thanksgiving and the holidays? I have an older brother that like, we have some similarities, but we could not be on more opposite ends of the spectrum. And I know how to feed his ego. I know how to feed his ego strategically in order to make him more receptive to my message, even if that is just us being able to hang out without fist fighting over the holidays, right? So family and how we interact with family is the pure or our significant others is the purest form. Athletes, right? That is the example. And I use this one a lot. I'll communicate with a kid differently from East St.

Louis who maybe saw his parents that one of his parents stabbed a lot differently than a kid from rural Iowa. And you can't communicate your realities the same way of those people like and you're not being fake you're not saying no I'm not no you're not being fake at all you're showing there's an element to being able to show them a reflection of themselves and say I may not understand because I think that's a sticky wicket you can't tell somebody that comes from a hard background just use this example save an athlete from a hard background you can't just say I, I understand where you're at. What you, cause you haven't, you haven't been down that alleyway. Even if you have shit in your life, you can say you appreciate it and you've got to connect with them in a way that they, so Andy, let's use this.

When I was in the collegiate environment or what have you, or even now, if I'm dealing with a skill position player, and I know that we're squatting, you know, we're getting pretty heavy. And I know from, from a physiological standpoint that we're squatting, we're getting pretty heavy. And I know from a physiological standpoint that we're gonna get that nervous system to respond in a way that enhances speed and power and all these things. But that guy just knows I got a heavy fucking bar on my back and I don't like the way

this shit makes me feel. So you think I'm gonna stand up there and be like, guys, right, we're working up to 87% today. Make sure when you get under that bar and you're straining, you know, X, Y, and start telling him my view of that. Or am I gonna be be like, guys, you want to get fast, right? Yeah, we're getting fast. Okay. Well, here's how lifting heavy gets you fast. And you give them boom, a one

sentence synopsis or an image or an idea. Think of your brain as a circuit board. Think of it as this outlet and we're pushing more electricity into your phone. We're charging this battery, like whatever. You've got to find some way to talk about what you want that person to do and what they care about because they do not care about our shit at all and you've got to do that in one sentence or less yeah so when you're when you use the iowa kid versus the east st louis kid you're not talking like oh i'm gonna have an accident when i talk to these no no that's not what you mean by talking to them communication on my point yeah yeah you what you mean is okay you're walking into the gym you're both going to do the same workout i need to set the scenario up differently for the wide receiver You're both going to do the same workout. I need to set

the scenario up differently for the wide receiver than a linebacker because the linebacker in these stereotypical scenarios is probably more likely to like the heavy squatting, but the receiver probably is like, oh, I like fast things. I don't like heavy things. So if I give you the same motivation part of that workout, it's not going to work for the wide receiver. That's what you mean by talking differently. No question. Yeah, no. And thanks for clarifying that. We have performance profiles that will by and large guide us on what they need. But do we have that for personalities? Do we have that for communication? And it's not like you get in front and you're describing the day's training session in 8 million ways with subtitles. You may say something very brief and to the point,

get the session started, and then start making your rounds as you're checking technique, coaching people up, little things like that. And that can even go into how you're programming. That's why a lot of the skill players love contrast modality when you're in a strength power phase. Something heavy, something light. Yeah, because that's a compromise, and we deal with compromise really well. So it's like, hey, you don't like that? I hear you, man.

But after this, look, you get to pair that up with a sprint or a box jump or a med ball throw or whatever. Fighters love that, right? A heavy one-arm dumbbell bench paired with a one-arm rotational punch with like an eight-pound med ball. Okay, I can connect the dots. So you have to show them the world that they live in. Otherwise, you start playing favorites subconsciously and you don't even know that. Yeah, to your point, you can't talk to a kid from Tennessee and be like, hey, y'all, we go squat today.

Unless you're from Tennessee. It's just how to be different versions of yourself in the moment. And that can be authentic. Can we go through one of those, a politician or soldier or something? Yeah, let's go through the... Give me one workout and then walk me through how it'd be different for the politician versus the soldier or whatever one comes to your mind. So we're talking about one the other day, the Wolverine.

The Wolverine is an archetype that is kind of that, as the character, right? If you're familiar with X-Men at all, it's kind of this rogue kind of personality that can kind of be irascible in their demeanor. They have talent, or they may not. It's not talent dependent. That has nothing to do with the archetype. But it's a persona that is kind of this loner. And they're easily, they can kind of flip the switch into an aggressive type persona really quickly. So it talks about, the book lays out how to identify strengths and weaknesses of that kind of personality and having them in your

environment, and then how to connect. And 15 different coaches, male, female, different sports all around the world, all gave their take and told a story of how to identify and interact with that kind of, that archetype. And I said, hey, talk about what you did wrong. And also what you did right. Cause I have kind of a personal mantra. I don't, I don't trust anybody that only tells me their successes. You can't. And so like, you know, the Wolverine, like typically you're going to see that individual. They're going to kind of keep to themselves. They're going to kind of look at you sometimes like they'll show you some body language, like they're open to your help, but like to a fucking point. Right. Like, and so those are the people you do not want to sit there and information overload, give them a bunch of attention. You feed

them in bits. You give them a couple of things, right? Whatever the point of the day session is, or whatever the training session, and you start watching them, right? You watch them. And again, you might even, and you never turn your back to an athlete, but you just kind of let them know that you're- Especially at Wolverine. Right. But you never, you don't, you also, you just can't show them. My focus is always on you. I'm watching you. Are you doing this right?

Cause I'm the authority and you're not kind of like breaking a horse, which is the example that coach Dennis Logan uses. You can't break a horse by this direct kind of, uh, you know, control or demonstration or show of force. There's a process to this. So you give them a guy, you give them a little bit of a breadcrumb, you let them roll with it. You'll see them struggle.

Now, when they struggle, they'll tell you two things usually. They don't want your help, but they're kind of hoping that you kind of go over there and give them some form of acknowledgement. Because by and large, all of us want some kind of, what did we talk about earlier?

Validation or acknowledgement. So you go over there and say, listen, I know you got this. Here's one tip. Boom. And you just leave it and let them do it. Because they're going to look at you like, I don't need your fucking help again know you got this. Here's one tip. Boom. And you just leave it and let them do it. Because they're going to look at you like, I don't need your fucking help again. I got this. And those are the athletes that are the most fun to watch because they'll try it. They'll try it.

They'll pop. And it is something that will work, whether it's, you know, they finally get into the rack position or they get it overhead or they caught it in the overhead support position the way that they should have in an effective quarter squat. And they'll want to be like, they'll want to show you like, thanks for your help. They'll just kind of maybe flash a grin and be like, oh shit, the guy kind of knew what he was talking about. And then they'll go right back to it. So you live for working with people like the Wolverine

because it's like that girl or that unicorn that you spent so much time trying to get. The minute they showed you some flash of like, you might have a chance here. You're like, okay, now how do we keep this process going? Right? Like, whereas one, like the manipulator,

and I talk about about there's a variety of different manipulators, you do have to meet with a little bit more of a head-on approach. You have to let them know that you understand the game that they're playing and that you can also do that as well. And that might be just some kind of,

you know, if somebody's talking to you in big words, let's say meet them that day, and they're trying to, they're clearly trying to display their intelligence, right? Just to fuck with them, you can start using big words of your own or maybe pull out something out of your back pocket that you know they don't have any kind of knowledge of on the subject.

And so you're kind of like, yeah, we're in the same playing field now. I know what you're trying to do to me, right? The manipulator, and they'll be in the team environments or private sector environments. It's somebody that they kind of want. They want to be known as kind of the star of the show or they kind of want the attention. Or sometimes it's an element of superiority, however that may manifest itself. And so those

are guys that sometimes it's fun to kind of put them in a position. And I don't mean doing this in an unethical format, but here's an example. We had a guy come in, he was a top dog wide receiver, and he was very much like every opportunity he had, he wanted to show people that like, he kind of ran the session or was the stud. And so we put him in a position where this guy was very powerful, but he had no work capacity. So we were doing a VersaClimber challenge. And it was a team challenge. Everything was paced. Everybody had to kind of hit a certain amount of feet per minute at a certain kind of rate. And he sucked at this, and I knew it. So I put him with a bunch of other top dogs or guys that at least wanted that kind of status. And I knew he was going to gas out before because everybody

had done it for six weeks prior. He had just shown up. It was maybe a second week. And so I purposely put him in a position to fail. And so that situation didn't lend itself to him being able to show like he couldn't be in charge there. It wasn't until he finally like kind of failed and was humbled until he was like, okay, like I might be more receptive into you showing me a trick here. The soldiers are the easiest to coach because they're just going to say whatever you need, that's what, right? You need to do certain elements of mobility overnight or on these days when we're working more technical parts of the lift in between sets, work on that. You don't really have to worry about that guy. Just show him the path. A tricky one that didn't make it in the book, just to give

you one more, was the drone. The drone is that athlete or individual that will do whatever you tell them to do, but you know what they're lacking? Intent. So they're task-focused instead of the soldier who's team-focused. The soldier will want to bring everybody else up around them, or they'll want to try to set a competitive standard. But it's always pretty altruistic, right? There's a better team goal they're trying to drive.

The drone is a clock puncher. And they're not trying to do anything wrong they just hey i did what you told me to do coach galpin right like this is what you told me to do you're like yeah man but like you're not pushing yourself the intent isn't there like you have to perform this movement aggressively or we're trying to hit a certain meter per second here if we're doing velocity based lifting and they just kind of but i did the program what am i doing wrong very analytical like computer software engineer type dudes, right? So there's some people you have to coach up more on intent.

There's some people it's more just kind of guiding them and leaving them alone. Other people, it's more direct interaction. Other times you have to like kind of take a step back yourself, which is really hard as a coach. And so all these different elements that you have to kind of show people a reflection of themselves and move forward from there. Brett, have you ever encountered somebody where it hit you very potently as you're looking at them going, wow, this is me, maybe 15 years ago when you're in the hospital? Yeah. And I would say, and that's a really good question. The primary way that I identified that is they're an athlete that let an action become an identity. Meaning if they failed at something, they were a failure. Anytime he didn't meet his own expectations for himself, I'd lose a day or two of coaching him because he'd be so warped in that kind of abyss of self-doubt or just emotional kind of like dogma that he had

created for himself that you kind of be like, hey dude, snap out of it. And that's almost kind of like immersion therapy or flooding. Somebody's scared of a spider, right? They'll show you, hey, there's a spider in a jar. Eventually the spider's on your arm. And then all of a sudden there's 50 spiders with you on a car, on the 405. And you're like, Oh God, you just have to keep putting people in those positions where they have to kind of like eat their own ego. And that was what helped me get over that. Like I've, I've learned it's okay to fail at this because that's experience, that's exposure, that's experience. But yes, to that point, and that's a specific example, or at least tried to give it actions became identities. And those are really hard to get people to overcome. When that happens, or it sounds like there was a couple of occasions where

that happened in your answer. Do you break that fourth coaching wall, if you will? Do you actually say, yeah, I actually know right where you're coming from? Yeah, but you have to choose the right environment in which to do it. So this athlete in particular, I had known him for three years, but he had came on the off season. He had been training for about six months. He was a free agent at the time. I wasn't going to do it in the training environment. It's a testing ground, right? But still supposed to be a safe, like a relatively sacred place. That's where you go to get away sometime. Right. Yeah. I didn't want to, I didn't, I didn't want it to infect that. So we had done it. We

were trying to, I mean, six months of me coaching you. And even if it's in a group or what have you, it's a lot of me and you. And so we had invited a bunch of people out. We'd gone bowling and we were on the same lane and everybody else was kind of at the bar, getting a drink in between games. We had played like two or three games and I was chatting with him, you know, and I did it in that environment. Cause by that time he had, he had had some fun. It's a relatively like, it's a fun environment. We had been with each other long enough. Like, it was kind of an elephant in the room. And it wasn't going to, if he didn't want to talk about it, cool, we could still disappear into the group. And there was still kind of a safety net there. So you usually don't want to do that. Like, at least in our field, there's a one-on-one kind of like, boom, I'm going to hit

you with this. And we're about to dive deep. That doesn't really work as well within our field. I got one more. I want three very specific examples for building trust. I'm going to do my Billy Mays impersonation. If you look at chapter four, you'll see the trust tenants only for $14.95. So in the book, one thing I wanted to do is I want to make sure that there was no abstract, right? That I wasn't just talking about all this shit and not giving you a very clear example. So there's a whole chapter on what I just called trust tenants, right? And one of them, the number one thing you can do is you have to understand the importance

of showing vulnerability yourself. Like that doesn't mean like, oh, you get the tissue out and I want you to know my struggle. But like you can't expect people to show you aspects of themselves if you're just kind of this bottled up, hard nose, arms crossed coaching persona. Like you gotta be able to get on their level and bullshit with them. And like, there's times I've messed up a drill

and I'm like, fuck me, right? Cause this is my first time coaching, you know? And like one time I was teaching the snatch and I was trying to do, knock the brim of the cap off and everything. And I had done this like 15 times flawlessly, drilled myself right in the chin. But you make a joke out of it and you just kind of like move on. Like you have to show vulnerability. And you have to do that again. I'll bring it back to

personal relationships. You have to do that. Two, the one you can't control, but you still have to acknowledge and recognize is time. Trust is unique because there's no fast forward button. You're not just going to be able to, boom, I got you. And you're going to believe in everything that I say. There's some places that do that and they're called cults, you know, but like by and large, like you have to chill out. Like people were like, that's why the whole proverbial, you know, the teacher appears when the student is ready kind of thing. And that's a big mistake I made young in the field is that I would expect people like, you should know I care. Look how intense I am. I care. Like, I want to do this. I'm giving you all this information. I'm giving you things to take home. And they're like, dude, like, chill out. You're kind of like a needy

chick in a relationship. So you've got to let time, you know, the other one, a big one is a display of emotional payments, which we quickly alluded to either on or off air, showing them or giving them some kind of validation on a daily basis. And that can go into how you apply like the Oreo technique or the sandwich technique. Somebody messes up, one thing you did well, one thing we can improve on, let's tie it all together and maybe another kind of compliment. And don't bullshit them. And that's actually the fourth one is authenticity. People aren't here to like have their ego stroked. So I think vulnerability, authenticity, and I think authenticity is a more important leadership trait

than empathy. Because empathy can be bullshit. Like saying, I feel what you feel, they find that surgeons and EMTs, the most effective EMTs and surgeons are actually relatively low empathy or what are like cold empathy. What's more important is compassion.

So instead of I feel what you feel, I understand what you feel. And so there's 12 and I think there might actually be 14 more examples in the book. So not only what it is, how it was showcased, how you can use it. I tried breaking it down so it can guide coaches. The science behind the art. It's real. There's not an art in science.

There's science behind the art. You can objectively measure outcomes. It's usually by giving ground to gain ground in one of many ways referenced in the book. That's a capacity of any relationship, right? You have to ask a question. I want you to say your piece. I'm going to learn a lot from it. Same time, I'm your guest, so you want me to talk a little bit. I want your input. Giving ground to gain ground is the art of human interaction. The book tries to just give people tips and then not only give them tips, like here's what psychosocial literature says about why that works. And here's how simple yet complex and messed up we are at the same time. I appreciate you all being very open-minded to it

because it's not sexy in the realm of human performance. It's really not. What's funny is that one of the reasons why we're doing this show is that we're trying to investigate the non-sexy conversations because we feel like the non-sexy conversations are probably going to be the most effective in making this thing move forward, actually. Yeah. He's our guest, Brett Bartholomew, author, obviously, of Conscious Coaching in the event that you've had nine bottles of NyQuil, which I certainly hope is not the case. Sitting alongside me is Andy Galpin and Josh Embry. Brett, where can people find you on social media? Just at coach underscore Brett B. I try to be pretty active primarily on Instagram and Twitter. I'm on Facebook. I'm easy to find,

but Instagram and Twitter are the best. So just at coach underscore Brett B. You can also go to consciouscoachingbook.com or bartholomiestrength.com. And they can find out more information at those websites at your future gym. Yep. Yep. No question. And by the time some of you hear this, it will be an actual gym. Been a total pleasure having you on the Body of Knowledge.

And we certainly look forward to having you come back. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Been a lot of fun. Cheers. Looks like you enjoyed the show. Make sure to go over to iTunes, go over to Shrug Collective, give us a five-star review, positive comment only, and make sure to go over to thrivemarket.com slash body to order your groceries this week.