Barbell Shrugged - [Performance Psychology] Developing a Mindset for Peak Performance w/ Dr. Alex Auerbach, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #727

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

Alex Auerbach is a counseling and performance psychologist currently working as an executive in professional sports.  He has been fortunate to work with the best athletes in the world in the NBA, NFL, MLB, and Olympians, as well as high-performers in other domains like elite military units, Fortune 5 companies, and venture-backed start-ups. In addition to his training as a psychologist, Alex is a former college football coach and NFL employee. I've been a part of several venture-backed start-ups in a range of roles from consultant to C-suite. My areas of expertise include wellness, high performance, performance under pressure, leadership, mindset training, systems optimization, and organizational development. Work with  Dr. Alex Auerbach X/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/alexauerbachphd Website: https://www.alexauerbach.info Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, Alex Auerbach is coming into the podcast. He is the performance psychologist for the Toronto Raptors. I was put in contact with him a couple months back through a mutual friend and wanted to bring him on just so we could talk about the different, I feel like, the mindset, the psychology side of any time those words are put up, they kind of get brought in like a healing fashion. And very, very rarely do we get to talk about it in a performance fashion and also doing it at the highest level with some of the best athletes in the world. So very, very cool conversation with Alex today. And as always, friends, you can access a free lab,

lifestyle, and performance report over at rapidehealthreport.com. That's where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are walking through. One of our past clients are very willing to let us come in and share the results so you can see exactly what everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that report over at rapidehealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Warner. Doug Larson, coach Travis Mash. Welcome back from Vegas, fellas. Yeah, it's good to have you. Alex Auerbach, the performance psychologist for the

Toronto Raptors. Dude, what is performance psychology? Like, how are you diving into all of the brains here of the freakiest athletes i think the the nba really is the freakiest of the freaks uh to be able to do the athletic things that they do at six foot nine moving like giraffes out there um i'd love to hear just kind of like uh one how you got into performance psychology as its own skill and then how do you really separate yourself from anytime you hear the word psychology, people just immediately go to the dysfunctions, but you're actually using psychology on the offensive side of things. But I'd love to hear just kind of starting this thing out. How did you start to

build this little niche into the world of psychology? Man, there's a ton to unpack here. Are you wanting to spend the whole hour on just this one question? Like, is that the path forward? We'll have more. We'll have more. I got into sports psychology actually originally as a football coach. So I began my career as a college football coach, started in recruiting, worked on offense, defense, took a full-time coaching job, worked with inside receivers. And then I kind of burned out of coaching. I mean, you guys have been around the coaching space a good bit. It's a long workday, lots of film. And for me, that just wasn't where I was most passionate, but I loved obviously building relationships with players, getting to know coaches. It was fascinated by the science of

essentially how you help people think, feel, and perform better consistently. And that's ultimately what performance psychology is really all about, you know, to use your language. It's really about the offensive side of being the best version of yourself and figuring out how you can get the most out of yourself consistently. And I thought that was super interesting, right? And the physical side of the game is taken care of by strength and conditioning coaches, the tactical side is taken care of by, you know, head coaches and assistant coaches. But there's not that many people really addressing what everyone says is very, very important, which is the mental side of the game, right? And so I went back to graduate school, ended up getting a PhD in counseling psychology

with basically a double major in performance psychology, went back to the University of Arizona where I did my undergrad and took over the mental health and mental performance services there, and then joined the Toronto Raptors about 11 days before Rudy Gobert ran in front of the microphones and touched them all and joked about COVID and then actually had COVID and the season was over. So a little bit of a rough intro into the league, but it's been fun. So that's a bit about my journey and kind of how I ended up here and why. Yeah. Where do you, I would say, spend most of your time when it comes to, say, working with the players? Do you feel like you spend more time overcoming issues of the past

or dialing people in and getting their mindset right for the future? Great question. The reality of the NBA season is you don't have as much time as you would think to unpack the past, right? We play every other night, sub nights, two nights in a row. And I come from a school of thought where it's not super useful to get someone to work on a bunch of really heavy emotional stuff where they also have to go out there and try to score 30 points that same night or the next night. Like there's just a lot to carry and process. And so you try to do that stuff in the off season, kind of like, again, to use the strength and conditioning or physical health parallel, right? The off season is when you're really trying to kind of build that foundation, develop new strength and new skills, kind of raise your game. That for us is the time to unpack some of the stuff that might be holding you back from your past and help you raise your game as well as build the foundation to help you perform better in the future.

So in the season, a lot of what you're doing is troubleshooting, right? It's, hey, I'm having difficulty with executing this particular skill. And so you might be talking about something like deliberate practice or skill acquisition or ways you could change a practice plan or post-practice plan to get more out of it. Or someone might feel nervous shooting at the free throw line. And you might be thinking about how you help someone stay calm and stay present during that time, where there might be some difficulties between a player and a coach that you're trying to help navigate. And so you're really most of the time trying to make small adjustments to help people tilt themselves just in the right way to perform a

little bit better than they were the day before. And so you use, you know, common skills, mindfulness, self-talk, imagery, goal setting, things to help keep people moving along a path. And then you're just sort of subtly nudging along the way to help keep them getting better and better. Yeah. How, I'd love to hear just kind of like the general framework at which you begin working with somebody and then how are we kind of like escalating them through to more complex issues from say an initial meeting? Is there a framework that you've either built or that you're working through? Yeah, I'm trained pretty deeply in what's called acceptance and commitment therapy,

which is just a bunch of jargon for really like a process-based behavioral approach to helping people get better. And so you start with identifying first the kind of core problem and all the different parts of the problem that exist for this particular person, right? So if you want to take performance anxiety, for example, one part of the problem might be managing their physiology. Another part of the problem might be managing their fear of how their teammates are going to respond if they miss a free throw. A third problem might be fear of how the coach is going to respond or if they're going to get pulled if they miss a free throw. And fourth might be that they think they're a crappy player if they consistently miss, right? So you've got

all of a sudden a pretty complex network of stuff that anytime a missed free throw happens, all these things are activated that you're going to try to sort through. And you sort of try to centralize one of those nodes that the highest leverage sort of point to intervene, and then move through a process of teaching people skills to better cope with or manage whatever that specific node is. And so my framework starts with grounding people in their values and their strengths, right? So helping people understand like, what are we doing all this for? Because we need a source of motivation to take some risks, experiment with new behaviors and try new things. And what are we already good at, right? A lot of performance in general and coaching in general is really focused on fixing what people perceive as wrong or broken. And in my view, that's a way to raise your floor,

but it's not a way to raise your ceiling, right? So if you fix what's not going well, you can reach a certain level, but they maybe won't fall beneath, but you're never gonna fully max out. And I think if you spend your time optimizing your strengths, you reach a higher level, you give yourself a better opportunity to max out.

We also know that people just feel more motivated and feel more engaged when they're regularly using their strengths at work. And for basketball players, I mean, playing in a game is work. It's your job, right? And so we start there. From there, we move towards setting specific goals, right? We've got to know what we're actually working on and come up with ways to figure out how we're making progress. And then from there, the work sort of unfolds in a somewhat, you know, nonlinear process where you're sort of unpacking the nodes of the problem and helping introduce skills to help someone more effectively deal with that. So again, you might introduce

something like mindfulness to help someone deal more effectively with their physiology and deal with some of the unhelpful thoughts that they have. You might introduce something like a pre-performance routine that they can leverage when they're walking up to the free throw line to help themselves feel more confident, more grounded, more focused. And you just keep layering the skills in until you get to a point where it feels like you've resolved the kind of core issue. And then you can turn your attention to optimizing whatever's left, right? Using the values, goals, and actions framework again. Yeah. Dude, I can only imagine a 19-year-old, 20-year-old NBA player with like 18 and 19-year-old tendencies coming in and you're like,

we need to talk about values. Like I have values for you. And they happen when I play on the court. And then when I go out at night, because I'm in the NBA, are there challenging? Does that present challenges of like, I'm sure many of these people have never actually even thought about this stuff before? 100%. And that's, you know, on the front end, right? You try to find players who don't have those off court things that you worry about, or the values that keep you up at night. Right. And then once they're in your organization, you know, I think it's often a pretty cool experience for a young 18, 19, 20 year old player for someone to actually ask them, like,'s either been, you know, presupposed, right? You're a 6'10 guy who grew up in a small town where all you could do is play basketball after school. And everyone was like, hey, you might be pretty good at this thing. You should just stick with it. And you've never actually explored, like, what am I actually doing this for? Right. And they come up with all sorts of incredible reasons, right? Whether it's, you know, setting up their current

family or future family for success or trying to become the best player that they can be at their position, just to have someone ask them is often very different, right? And I think the best coaches leverage that same practice to kind of figure out how to motivate their players. And it's also a way to hold people accountable, which ultimately we need to help people get and go forward. But it can take work to figure out what those values are. It can take a little bit of extra time to sort of help them learn some language around values and figure out what it actually means and

find those that are most resonant. But once you do, you can kind of unlock the next level of performance engagement motivation for that person. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to RapidHealthReport.com. When you get to RapidHealthReport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your

labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep, and then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program. And we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep,

the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. I started to dig into these deeper concepts with these relatively young players at times that we just mentioned. How often do you end up getting massive resistance to talking about things that like actually matter to them but they're just like hey i'm here to play basketball i don't know you just get out of my way that type of thing like i'm i'm a superstar and

go fuck yourself basically does that happen at all you uh i mean it can but i think you know then you're gonna get to the actual mechanics of doing the work right and and to you know, the work never really starts with someone coming into your office and sitting down and saying, hey, doc, I need to talk about this. The work starts on the practice court or in the locker room or pregame or whatever, where, you know, I've had moments where a player is running out onto the floor from the tunnel pregame and says, hey, doc, I'm a little tired. What do you got for me? And you got 30 seconds to deliver some nugget of insight that might be useful to this person for the next two and a half hours. And if it works, they might take one more step and say, hey, I want to spend five minutes with you in your office sometime in the next month. And then if that works, they might

be willing to have a 20-minute conversation. And then they might want to have a two and a half hour or three hour conversation. And so you've got to work your way up to the point where you can really have that and essentially breathe the room. Right. I mean, you know, for a lot of these guys, you're exactly right. The focus is on performance and getting the most out of themselves. They're not really that interested in talking about a ton other than basketball.

But when you can get them to a point where they trust you and believe that you have something valuable to offer them, just like, again, trusting a strength and conditioning coach or a head coach, once you can kind of cross that threshold, then you have their attention to get into these deeper things. And there's a bit more trust and conviction that what you're bringing forward actually matters. So you've got to get to that point before you can introduce these deeper concepts that involve a lot of deep work. I'm curious, like, you know, I learned just enough in getting my master's in exercise science. I had one course in sports psychology.

And honestly, when I entered that course, I didn't have a lot of respect for sports psychology. I thought it was not a real science. I was wrong. So, like, I learned that I needed more work in that than anything. But my question to you is this is like, you know, you learn about this process versus performance driven athletes. So do you, and to me, like, I don't know that you can completely separate the two because like, I don't know of any amazing athlete. It wasn't a bit of both, but like when you're talking to your athletes, here's my question is like, are you trying

to be more process driven, performance driven or somewhere in between? For me, it's both, right? I think the reality of being in high level sport is you are measured by your performance and your outcome. And so I think it's sort of foolish to pretend like the scoreboard doesn't matter. Like the scoreboard is the most important thing, 82 nights a year. And that determines whether or not we're going to the playoffs. And then it's the most important thing for seven more nights, right? Like that is the thing that you're keeping your job. It's 100%. Right. I mean,

we all are trying to take care of our families and stay employed and have good careers, like all those things. And that's how that is decided. It's just a reality. You know, no one is, you can try to orient as much as you want for the process. And there's some really good things you can do to do that, right? We can't guarantee a bunch of wins, but we can guarantee we're going to do our best in the draft process and hire the right people and try to build a great culture. All those things are processed things that you feel like get you to the right outcome. But even you do all those things if you win 10 games a year you're not going to make it very long it doesn't matter so i think you have to own that at the

highest levels of sport and honestly i think at most levels of sport the outcome does really matter and is what people are oriented toward and for like young kids learning to play sports even you're, everyone's measured by outcomes at some point in life. You never get to where people are like, yeah, it's real life. It's always both. But so once you own and acknowledge that the outcome matters, what it's really about is getting people to stay focused on the process that they believe helps them get. That's what I, that's what I thought too. I'm like, unless I want to be X, I'm probably not going to follow this process you're talking about. So I got to say, hey, I want to be the best basketball player, you know, that I can be. was like confusing is like I don't know that you can have one without the other I'm probably not going to you know have the stringent process

driven mentality without my desire to be x but yeah of course I mean the process is pointless without an outcome that you're actually trying to get toward right otherwise right processing it's like okay well you know we're all trying to reach something and actually reaching something is good for you, right? Like making progress on your goals, setting an outcome and reaching it or not reaching it is important for figuring out how you refine your process, whether your process works and what you want to do next. So you've got to. Right. You know, I'm super interested.

And the NBA, I think, is a sport that I know very little about. And when I look at the athletes in that, I'm like, every single person here has been so freaking good at basketball. Cause there's such a small number of people on the team. You get like, if it's hockey, there's 20 to 30 people. Um, if it's baseball, I feel like their, their roster is somewhere in the 25 to 30 people. Um, NBA, you're looking at like 12. So by the time you get to a team and there's 12 of you on there, you have been so good at basketball for so long and likely been told how good you are. And many people are just scared to poke holes

into a mental framework or really not trying to upset the number one player on every AAU team in the country. Do you ever find it challenging coming in there and really having to do the work because this person has been told how great they are and that they're really like so world-class that they're going to be one of 12 for the Raptors. Like is it challenging sometimes to come in and have to actually do the job? Of course. And they are all world-class, right? I mean, they're, you know, in our case, like 16 or 15 or 16 of 450 of the best athletes in the world that won particular sport. And you're exactly right.

They've been the best on their high school team and the best on their college team. You know, a lot of these guys play together now. So they're like one A and one B, right, for a long time. But they're obviously incredibly gifted. But you'd be surprised at the number of guys who really haven't been exposed to anything that would actually help them be successful at the highest level, right? I mean, especially now where you've got NBA players who have done, you know, maybe two semesters of college, right, which is like nowhere near enough strength training, or any other life training to actually be able to sustain a 15 year career. And so the best guys come in with a little bit of an eagerness about what it

is the experts here have to teach them. Of course, you've got to do your job to establish trust, and you can't be overzealous. And yeah, it's a fine line to walk between you know essentially saying hey i think we can get you better and not you know making it feel like they're not already great but a lot of times what ends up happening unfortunately is you wait for something bad to happen right you know they underperform or some outcome they're not proud of and then they realize like gee i wasn't as focused as i should have been during that game or it was a bit tough for me to bounce back, like that may be something I need help with, or someone in their circle says to them, hey, look, man, I think you need to work on this, whether it's, you know, physical conditioning or mental conditioning, whatever. And then you're, you're kind of in, right? So at the beginning,

again, you're trying to just build trust, kind of plant little seeds, help where you can, and then build that buy in over time. And it's really not about not being great when you come to a sports psychologist, right? It's about using that person's specific skillset to help you be the best that you could be the same way you'd use a chef, nutritionist, physical trainer, strength and conditioning coach, any other person in your network who's all here to help optimize you. Yeah. Have you found unifying threads between even the guy that rides the bench for the entire season or the number one player, as far as, you know, if you read like mindset from Carol Dweck, she's like,

everybody has a growth mindset. And you're like, everyone, there's nobody that's like really good that or grit from Angela Duckworth like um I feel like I've read many of these books and they're all like if you want to be good you have to have this trait but there's a lot of books out there um have you found unifying threads that just each person that kind of gets to that level is is actually possessing and and ways that they can start to build those character traits? Don't get me started on growth mindset. I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready.

Yeah. I mean, the one thing that the data sort of bears out in my field and that I think is directionally correct is this concept around self-regulation and self-regulated learning. And it's really, you know, in layman's terms, it's kind of like self-mastery, right? It's the ability to sort of control and direct your thinking, feeling, physiology, and behavior to sort of learn what you need to do to refine and get better and then actively apply it. And you don't get to this level without that level of self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-discipline, and willingness to like really put in the work on who you are. But what we know is that even at the highest level, like in the NBA, the starting

five are better at self-regulating than the next five and the next five, right? And so it's kind of neat that it both separates out by level, but it also separates sort of like within the elite elite group. And I think that's what the data shows is the most important thing um and that gets into all sorts of other you know parts of the game right cognitive functioning and those sorts of things that are also highly relevant here but that's the only thread i've found that i think actually makes a big difference to help you arrive there now i want to know why you don't like the growth mindset. Let's do it. Well, so the problem with growth mindset is there are several, right? So one is that we've positioned it as

growth versus fixed mindset instead of growth and fixed mindset. Just being perpetually optimistic about the future that you're constantly learning. Yeah, exactly. Which we, there's just no data. First of all, there's like very limited data that shows we actually learn from failure like with any real you know meaningful repetition right like it's i don't know about you every time i screw something up my first thing i do is defend my own ego it's not like oh yeah let me see what i can extract here it's like now you know i was a little tired or i could have done this better but whatever man it's no big deal which is what everyone does because they don't really want to learn from the failure. They want to first protect who they are in their sense of self-esteem, which is fine, but failure needs a bit of distance to learn.

So that's problem one with growth mindset. Problem two with growth mindset is this idea that effort is the only thing that matters. And of course, effort does matter, but if effort is the only thing that matters, like all four of us would be in the NBA if we really wanted to, right? I try to dunk all the time. Yeah. See, no one wants to see me try to dunk. That's just going to be blown calves, everything.

It's going to be bad, right? But you need a fixed mindset. You actually need something that you know is a natural talent that you believe separates you from the other people, right? So you need both. You need hard work and you also need a bit of a fixed mindset. And then finally, the last thing I'll say is your growth mindset in some situations actually takes your foot off the gas. And the best metaphor I can give for this is like, you imagine two minutes to go in a basketball game, you're down five points. I do not want my team thinking about what happens

if we lose and what can we learn? I want you to think about like, hey, yeah, we got to work hard, but there's like a clear goal that we're pushing toward here. We got to give a little bit more energy. We got to focus and we got to, this matters, right? And what we found, there's some really cool research with Navy SEALs who have sort of shown this. And the idea is like, if you start thinking about what you're going to learn from failure, you sort of like subconsciously start to fail. Right. Right. I'm sure you guys have seen this, like when someone's lifting or doing any of that, like, you know, if you're like, I don't know if I can get it, you're not going to get it.

You're not going to get it. And so I think that's the, that's the real downside. Again, it doesn't mean growth mindset doesn't matter that it's not even a factor in some of these discussions or decision points. It's just like, it's not this end all patch all be all psychological absolutes, you know, are terrible in nature. Like, you know, you can't say this one thing is what you need to do. It's life like physiology, like our mental psyche, nothing's like that. There is no one thing. It depends.

It will always depend on where you're at and what you need to do and where you've been and where you need to go. Like you got to answer all the questions before you know what you need to do. So my question is this, is that here's one thing I learned valuable from, you know, so I work with USA Weightlifting a lot. One of my athletes is really good. Several of them are, but one who I travel with the most had a particular experience where we thought it was going to end our Olympic bid. And he was sick.

Anyway, I'm not going to go into details, but the sports psychologist literally is the one who lifted all of us. And so he gets there, like is, is, is a practice is terrible. And if we had, if we had not done well, that would have ended the Olympic bid for next year. And so the sports psychologist, here's the thing I learned is she literally tells me the things I need to say to him. Like, you know, it's just common for a coach to say, how do you feel today? To him, that's a perception of me thinking he's not in good shape you know so she told me to like say you look like a killer today you know all of these affirmations whether i believed or not into like and it worked and like he went from being and i've never seen anything more mystical i hate to use the word but like from a guy who i thought for sure were bombing out to like winning is which is that's what happened he actually won and so like my

question when you got a coach and you got athletes like how closely are you able to work with the triangle because like i feel like if you only work with the athlete and the coach is continuously like countering what you're saying, nothing's going to get done. So how closely are you able to work with all? Are you sure you don't want to become a sports psychologist at some point? I love it. Like I've learned to like really dig this because it was my weakest link as a coach. So I've tried to like, to get better, obviously. I love it. And I really respect that. Yeah, I think you better, obviously. I love it.

And I really respect that. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. I mean, in my view, the best practitioners are working with everyone in the system, right? Front office, coaches, players, even the support staff around them. I mean, we know the environment plays such a big part in how we feel and behave, right? If you walk into work every day and your culture sucks, like you're not going to perform very well. It's just a reality, right? And if you walk in and the head coach doesn't give you a fist bump or ignores you,

like that's going to feel really crappy and you're not going to practice as well. And vice versa, right? If you walk in and the head coach says, man, you look like a killer today. Like you look like you're really ready to go. Now, all of a sudden you're like, maybe I am a killer today. You know, maybe I do do have that. And so, you know, the language people use and the language coaches use in particular is really, really important. And in my view, like I'm, I view my role as kind of like a vehicle to assist the coach and align around the coach's goals, right? It's the coach's program. It's the coach's goals. It's the coach's team. It's just my job to bring a skill set around performance psychology to bear on those goals. And I mean, sometimes I can help our head coach, right? And

with every coach I've worked with, you know, at times it's like, hey, coach, I might try this, right? Here's a simple action step you can take if you're dealing with this player who's struggling, right? Or give some of the feedback you receive, right? Hey, try maybe giving the feedback this way and see what happens. And those little things end up really adding up and making you think. Gold.

It was, for me, it's gold. Like, I am so bought in to sports psychology because literally couldn't sleep that night. Like, and when he won, like, I'm in back. I've never cried so much. Like, I'm a grown man. But like, it was not me. It was completely and utterly that sports psychologist who, like, saved the day.

I was like, I didn't know what to do. Like, literally, I wanted to pull him out because I thought we hadn't. But then I realized it was one of those moments where he couldn't do that. And, like, because it's a long story, but in the Olympic qualification, you know, the quad, the certain check marks you got to check. And I had to check that one. And it wasn't a matter of just competing. We had to do X amount. And so I was so scared.

And that sports psychologist saved the day. So anyway. You both did. I mean, you both did, right? The reason the sports psychologist worked is because you had a relationship with that athlete that allowed you to say those things right i think that's that's kind of the beauty of really cool work in this space is it does take a little bit of a team right it's never one person making it happen but the sports psychologist might be nudging from one angle and the coach might be

nudging from another angle and all of a sudden you together unlock someone so i'm i'm really pleased to hear that you had such a positive experience yeah you know there's there's a lot of people who have not and so to hear these kinds of stories i think from someone like you who's had such high level coaching experience is really really important to show like what's possible if you're super important anyone listening it's super important yeah i feel like uh yeah go ahead doug sorry i was gonna say very similar to mash's question i'll use a parenting analogy and i'm curious how you think this maps on to coaching and working with professional athletes or any hyper high performer uh say my five-year-old falls down and scrapes his knee you know there's the tendency as a parent to you can go two

directions you can do like the the oh yeah that that does hurt it does hurt to skin your knee like the empathy route of like accepting like yeah that did hurt and going down that road or there's like you're fine get up you're cool no you're no big deal no big deal you're kind of like encouraging them to like come out of that state when you're working with pro athletes to what extent do you if they're feeling down or having trouble do you accept and, and go down the empathy road versus like, nah, it's not a big deal. Don't worry about that. You're fine. And like, you know, build them back up the other way. Yeah. For me personally, I tend to lean a little bit more toward like the empathy plus what are we going to do about it? Right. So I think, you know,

have you ever seen the radical candor framework? Is this kind of idea that you've got to, you know, challenge directly and care personally? I think that is a really good sweet spot to be for both parents and coaches and sports psychologists, right? Dig on that. Explain that a bit more. I'm curious. So if you build a good relationship with someone where you can clearly express that you care,

that you're invested in them, that you understand what they're going through, they're much more likely to be bought into what it is that you have to offer. And they're going to feel like whatever advice, direction, coaching you give them is going to be coming from a good place, right? So you've got to establish that sense that I care about you. And often that comes from empathy, right? It comes from, I recognize that what you're dealing with is really challenging. It must be hard. I understand. And then the other part that makes it effective is the challenge directly, which is like, you know, for one, you all have talked about this today, right? These athletes are incredibly high level and incredibly gifted. And unfortunately, what that means is oftentimes people sugarcoat

stuff, right? They don't want to give direct feedback. They don't want to be honest about what they're really seeing. And so the athlete lives in this sort of like delusional world where everything is actually fine when it may not be fine. And so someone, oftentimes the head coach, occasionally the sports psychologist or GM or president, whoever it might be for any given team has to be the person that says, look, I really care about you, but what you're doing right now is not helpful. And I think that's kind of the sweet spot you want to find where, you know, kid falls down and scrapes their knee. It's, hey, I understand that that might not be comfortable right now. What do you want to do next time so that you can deal with this more effectively? Right. And if you can find ways to get them coping effectively moving forward, I think that's the sweet spot. And unfortunately, too often we tend to lean one way too far the other, right? So it's either all empathy and no kind of like thinking about forward progress is like, yeah, that must be really hard. I feel for you. I feel for you. And it's like, okay, so what, like, you know, what you feel is valid, right? But that doesn't mean we

should just sit in it forever. And I think vice versa, right? Sort of denying with, oh, you're fine. It's all good. Keep going. Glosses over maybe an honest truth that people need to hear, which is like, look, that was kind of clumsy that you fell, right? Or that wasn't the best decision that you made. What could you do differently next time? And that gives someone a chance to reflect, learn, and make progress. Plus, as an athlete, like if you empathize with me and like say, oh, it is tough, but you don't give me a solution, I'm pissed. On the other hand, if you don't affirm what I'm saying I'm pissed like I need I want you to know here's my challenge I want you to acknowledge it but then I want how do I get out of this like I need to know there's a way to avoid this bad thing happening again so like

either way you need you know Natalie wants to hear how do I fix this shit of course I mean the best athletes want to be coached right i think ultimately like that's a what happens at the highest level of sport and if you are too far on one way or the other you're doing exactly what you're talking about you're either not really coaching by doing things like you're fine keep going keep going it's not like giving direction advice feedback right it's just sort of glossing over but you're all that would make me so mad yeah and i think that's one of the differences for performance psychologists. I think the best performance psychologists are a bit more comfortable playing almost the role of a

mental coach versus the traditional psychologist, right? Where you see someone with a notepad writing down whatever, right? And, oh, that must've been really difficult. And, oh, let me- Oh my God. It makes me mad to say it. Just pretending. I'm like, I want to shove that thing up your, you know what? I don't want you to acknowledge what I'm saying. I want you to tell me what I need to do. Exactly.

I already know it. I already know. Yeah. Help me make progress. Right. Help me. Help me out of this situation. I'm missing free throws all the time.

Why? You know. Yeah. How as kind of players progress like i you're clearly not the same athlete at the age of 32 that you are at 23 um and we don't fully form our brains until we're 25 maybe 27 is true, by the way? Yeah. That's what I'm always saying. Okay, yeah. How much of this stuff do you find with younger players just being sheer lack of kind of maturity when it comes to being an athlete versus somebody that has been in the league for a decade now and has just kind of developed enough to be able to make and

have just a better framework for how to handle problems. Yeah, I think, you know, early on, probably your best chance of having a long career is to like leverage sports psychology skills as soon as you get in, right? Because you're going to deal with a bunch of firsts. If you're a great college player, you maybe played 32 games in a college season, like max, if you had a nice run in the tournament, right? Now you're going to play 82 games. You're going to get knocked down by dudes who are just as big or bigger than you every single night. There's going to be a veteran who's played 15 years in the league who makes you look like a fool every three nights of a week, right? Like it's going to be really hard. And there are resources and people like me who can help you figure out how to cope

with that more effectively and learn from whatever those things are so you can keep getting better. And then as you gain some experience, you become the person that gets to do all that stuff for the young guys, right? And you have the mental skills and the mindset to help you cope with it. You also have a better perspective. You know not every loss is something to totally hang your head over. You're going to miss a lot of shots. There's lots of stuff that goes on over the course of a 15-year career where one bad outcome is kind of a blip on the radar. But in your first year, every bad outcome is a really, really significant blip.

And so you've got to figure out how to kind of move through that at the beginning so that at the end you're good to go and then at the end you know i do think the game becomes more cerebral if you will as you age right you've maybe got you've lost a step you're not as strong or as you know limber as you used to be right it takes you a little bit longer to recover and i've certainly heard that from you know some of the older players i've been, but you've got so much knowledge of the game and you've seen so many patterns that you can almost use that experience in a way where you're both better able to cope with what you're feeling and experiencing in terms of losing a step and you're better able to perform with this really high functioning kind of cognitive skillset you got. Yeah.

I want to know how you build those people that are just straight killers. Like how do we build Kobe Bryant? How do we build that mindset? Everybody knew Jordan was out there. His job was not just to score buckets, but he wanted to slit your throat in front of everybody. How do we build those people? Bro, if he knows the answers to this, he's about to become a billionaire right now i do not i thank you for giving me a cop out on that one i'm like i don't i don't know i really don't have a good answer for how do you help people do that i think some of it is the way that you're like brought up and some of your early experiences that you've had you know there's a really fascinating line of research in european sport around this concept that talent needs trauma they use trauma not in the necessarily like you know stigmatized word but just like adversity

or difficulty to sort of learn how to like push yourself harder faster farther than other people and so i think you need a bit of that right if you want to use like the jordan story right it's getting cut from your high school team everyone gets cut cut as a freshman. They don't turn out to be Jordan though. Jordan wasn't tall enough. Like play JV for a year, bud. Turns out he turned into Jordan though. I know. I know. I think I, I wish I had the answer for what, what that was. I think it's like an incredible competitive fire and just something about you wants to really see what you're capable of. And I honestly, I think that is something that a lot of people just don't feel. I don't think a lot of people want to see what they're fully capable of. I think a lot of people want to be

as comfortable as they can most of the time. Yeah, you're right. On a similar note, like if you, you're talking about using adversity to your advantage like if you're angry some people let anger destroy them and some people let anger fuel their their success like how do you how do you steer like an intense emotion like anger to be positive for you in the short term i think emotions like anger are evolutionarily designed right to increase to increase our energy. And so it's about consciously getting whatever that information is out of you and using it well. But I think over the long term, actually, anger as a motivator is like pretty debilitating, right? And I had a debate with someone on this on Twitter, or now X, whatever it's called, about this exact same thing, right,

which is just the idea that like, I don't think anger is a sustainable long term way to motivate yourself. It's you're just going to get burned out, right? Like no one can sort of fuel themselves with just being pissed all the time because it's just not, it's not inherently motivating. And it's also, you know, metabolically incredibly taxing to just be in that state of arousal all the time. So eventually just physically your performance is going to fizzle out. But in the short term, if you're feeling anger or this like righteous indignation, which is what I think people often feel is like, I got a chip on my shoulder. Like I've got something to prove. Like let's use that energy, right? What is your body getting you ready to do? And how do we

execute that? And try to just narrow focus, dial into one specific action and focus on that. If you give people a target, they tend to do really well with using their energy. If you're just like, go out there and play people like, well, I don't like what part, you know? So I think that's the part you got to like, you know, lead people to. Yeah. You need an event. You need to put your name on a list that says I have to be ready this day. Almost everyone listening to this show has some sort of performance goals, even if they're washed up 40 year olds like myself. And that's just to continue lifting weights and being healthy. But people that are signing up for CrossFit competitions, triathlons, whatever, whatever

their kind of hobby is inside the performance world. How would they start to implement some of these pieces into their training so that they may not have access to you, but they can, they can at least start working through some sort of model to, to be ready and most prepared on game day. I love this question. Thanks for asking this one. So I think there's a, there's a few things I would do. So one is kind of outside of the practice, whether that, you know, let's take CrossFit training for a CrossFit competition, for example, just to get kind of concrete, right? So let's call your day-to-day going to the gym practice, and then we'll call the competition, the competition. So outside of practice,

I think it's things like setting a goal for yourself in terms of time, reps, weight, whatever it might be, right? And being really clear about that, writing it down, putting it up somewhere where you can revisit it, building your process, and then coming up with what we call a competition plan, right? So this is a step that I think sometimes people skip, but it's coming up with essentially like, you know, if something bad happens, here's what I'm going to do and trying to kind of troubleshoot in advance with a series of if then steps called implementation intentions to help you sort of overcome any obstacle that you might face. Right. There's no competition where it just goes exactly according to plan, no matter how much you prepare. And so coming up with, OK, here are the things I can reasonably anticipate.

Here's what I'll do if those things come up. And here's how I'm sure that those things will help me kind of stay grounded. So you got to do a little bit of preparation to get the most out of the performance. And then when you're in the practice, what I'd encourage is starting with things like, you know, weightlifting and running and CrossFit are all good for a few skills. But the two that come to mind to start our self-talk, right? So just getting really effective with coaching yourself up, speaking to yourself effectively. And that doesn't mean you always have to be positive. Sometimes you need to be a bit motivational. Sometimes it's okay to be kind of a bit harsh on yourself. If you can then quickly turn it around

and kind of use that energy to perform. I wouldn't dwell on being self-critical, but there could be moments of being self-critical, but there could be moments of being self-critical that are useful. So just practicing how you talk to yourself and figuring out what helps you go, I think can be really useful. And then I would try to, you know, encourage like a mindfulness practice when you're doing some of that, right? Like feel your muscles contract. If you're doing the weightlifting section of a CrossFit workout, for example, like really, you know, zoom in and tune into what that feels like. Or if you're doing a triathlon, same thing, like how your legs feel on the run, there's lots that you can do to sort of be present with your physical experience that

will actually be useful for you staying focused, tuning into your body, learning a bit more. So those would be some of the places I would start. And then, you know, after practice, I would encourage, I teach all of our athletes like a simple three step reflective process to engage in basically every day. The first thing is to ask yourself, what did you do today that you want to keep doing? And the idea is to just find behaviors that you want to repeat. It's not necessarily stuff you did well, right? There can be things that you do well that you actually never want to do again, right? Like, maybe you, you know, felt really energized today, because you took way too much pre workout, like, you know, that that may not be the right path forward. And so it's, it's not necessarily like doing it good. It's just about keep doing right. So finding that kind of non judgmental scientist approach your behavior. The second question is, what did I do today that I want to do differently, right? So maybe it's a technique thing, or maybe, you know, you want to take less pre-workout tomorrow so that you're in the right

space. And then third is, what did I learn, right? So what can I reflect on and take away that I can bring forward? And so I would try those kind of five skills to get you started. And then when you go out and compete, just try to be present in it. Yeah. And then on game day or in the middle of game day are there techniques to maybe down regulating in in the in between competitions or you're running a marathon and use pass mile 20 where everybody uh kind of has like the big bonk where they realize they're still not done um are there there other tactics that you use kind of like in game with people? Yeah, so, you know, in game, you're trying to do simple things like,

you know, release a mistake, right? So we teach a simple three step process for letting go of mistakes or something that's not going well. It's kind of like, release, reset, refocus, right, actively let, come up with a simple reset action, like a deep breath or snap your fingers or clap your hands and then refocus on whatever you need to do next, right? So if you've made a mistake or something didn't go well, you could try something like that. You know, we teach box breathing as kind of a simple breath pattern that you can use to help downregulate, you know, especially if you do box breathing long enough, when you're sort of physically aroused at a point that becomes like a bit unsustainable,

that breathing pattern might just like kick in and you'll help drive your physiology back down. And so that's, I think, a good practice to institute. But in general, any out breath longer than an in breath will downregulate you. In breath longer than an out breath will upregulate you. So you can just teach like four, six breathing breathing is fine anything four seven eight really anything with a longer exhale will kind of shift you down and then if you're thinking about just you know kind of overcoming the wall that you're describing yeah there's a few pretty fascinating things that come out of the science here but one would be to look at that wall as a challenge or an opportunity right so to start to appraise that as a challenge or an opportunity, right? So to start to

appraise that moment a bit more adaptably, not like, oh my goodness, I have so much farther to go and I thought I'd be done. But like, what is the challenge for me here? What opportunity is here? What skill can I demonstrate? What strength can I use? Something that sort of optimizes your mindset to perform a bit better. The second is to set a clear goal or a clear action step, right? So I just need to make it one more mile and then one more mile and then one more mile. So breaking it down or I'm just going to keep up with, you know, the person right in front of me, right? So giving myself a goal to focus on. And then the third element would be kind of consciously increasing effort. And one of the things that's fascinating about humans is we have

this ability to raise our effort beyond thresholds that we're not necessarily comfortable with or used to by conscious choice but your brain sort of naturally starts sending you signals about things like pain pretty early on in the exercise process because it's trying to keep you alive right it thinks you're doing something dangerous or harmful but that's why you know you hear stories of people lifting like cars off of small children right they've tapped into some like next level of effort that allows them to actually do that. And so if you can sort of consciously override that by like either being present with, you know, how your legs feel and noticing that they don't feel as bad as you think they do, or, you know, pushing yourself a bit farther, obviously barring, you know, safety,

right, you'll find that you'll actually get more out of yourself. And so it just requires a bit farther, obviously barring, you know, safety, right. You'll find that you'll actually get more out of yourself. And so it just requires a bit of training to sort of push through those moments. But if you manage those three steps, you can, you can do it. Love it, man. If people can't play in the NBA, but still want to work with you, where, where can they find you? I do work with a handful of people that don't work in the NBA. You can find me online, alexauerbach.info or on social media, alexauerbachphd on both LinkedIn and Twitter. I also have a group that I do a good bit of coaching with where we work with athletes of all ages, basically like 12 to 50 weekend warriors, people training for CrossFit, police, firefighters, kind of the other performers that, you know,

don't have access to someone like me on their roster full time, but are still looking to get the most out of themselves. And the company where you do that through is called Momentum Labs. You can find that at MomentumLabs.pro. So that's where I exist and hope to see a few people there. Awesome, man. Coach Travis Mash. Mashlead.com or you can read most of my articles on JimOair.com.

There you go. Doug Larson. I'm on Instagram, Douglas C. Larson. Alex, appreciate you coming on the show, man. That was really fun. Thanks for having me. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged, Barbell underscore Shrugged.

And make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive. You can access that free report over at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.