Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Keith Power: High Performance

Episode Date: September 30, 2015

Imagine working to optimize the human performance strategies and outcomes for an entire nation’s elite sport efforts. It’s challenging enough to do so for an elite sport franchise, let alone an entire country. In this conversation with Keith Power, he shares with us how he’s structuring his efforts on high performance for Malaysia. He provides insights on how to align groups of people to pull in one direction. He breaks down his understanding of the art and science of human optimization. Show Notes: 3:27: Growing up in London and how sport influenced his early life "My passion has always been trying to be the best I can possibly be" 5:51 8:15: Getting offered to coach bobsled for the UK and becoming youngest coach at Olympics 13:04: How to get an athlete to balance external motivation "I coached myself most of the time [since] I was 18 years old" 13:58 "I don't think it's about teaching, it's about creating an environment in which people can learn and can make good choices for themselves" 17:29 21:46: Why concepts used in business coaching are way ahead of traditional coaching models in sport "Big part of great coaching is to ask great questions" 22:03 25:44: Number one factor that separates the good and the great "The number one factor that differentiates the good and the great is self awareness" 25:44 33:10: Definition of failure 38:00: What makes up his mental model 41:27: Most important skill for performers to develop 45:12: Where does confidence come from 49:06: How he defines mastery_________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And the basic mental skills that you've employed along the way and the mindset that you've employed along the way to be able to come to the understanding that you've come to. And could you just maybe talk to us a little bit about your current role and some of the things that you've done recently to give people a better picture of what you're up to nowadays? Sure, Mike. I mean, first thing to say, thank you very much for inviting me to do this. I'm very excited about it in terms of the ability to share and learn because that's really at the core of who I am. So my role is as the High Performance Sport Director for Malaysia. So in essence, I work for the Minister of Sport in Malaysia, through to Olympic Games level. And I guess many people who are listening may not be familiar with Malaysia. What I would say is, you know, Malaysia is actually one of the most progressive countries in the world.

And it's actually in the top 25 in the world in terms of economic power base, which people might not know. It has a population of about 30 million people. And at the high end, we actually have a number of world champions in a number of sports. So we're doing pretty well at sport, we're just looking at different ways that we can consistently improve the level. And unlike the US, the talent base is quite small for sport. So we have to work out how we can work with what talent exists and to grow that talent and to make it better. Whereas in the States, with the greatest respect, there's a real conveyor belt of ready-made talent that comes through.

Yeah, I mean, that's fascinating that some people are high performance directors for universities or for professional sport organizations, and you're doing it for a country. And so there's only a handful of folks that have this role. And so I'm excited to dig in and to really learn the path that led you to now and the things that you're most excited about. And as we take a look at the path, you do not have a Malaysian accent. So bring us into the fold before that. Well, kind of like where to start, I guess I'll try and just have in kind of a history background as well as a sport background.

I'll probably go over time. So first and foremostly is that, you know, we all have our own stories. And, um, I grew up in, in quite a tough neighborhood in, in North London and in England. And so without sport, sport really made my life. And I found sport very early and I created a tremendous passion and love for sport. And, um, I ended up through, up through through that getting uh actually a scholarship for um a very famous sports school in england called millfield which has produced many top sporting champions in lots of different sports and i actually got a scholarship for for six sports what was your sport of choice the main sport at that time was track and field.

It was actually hammer throwing. But I also played for the school soccer team and I played for the basketball team. And so it was, I think, kind of a... Keith, I've seen your body frame. You're not built like a basketball player. Well, no, I developed that over time. But obviously, as a younger man, I played many different sports.

And I think it's kind of a reinforcement that early specialization doesn't really work. And that really gave me a tremendous opportunity and i ended up going to a great a very famous sports university um called borough road college in london um and i continued my my studies in there which were were in um sports science essentially and also i took a history degree um there as well let me make sure that i'm tracking correctly which is uh north london uh or did you say north england north london yeah yeah okay tough town um use sport as a way to kind of be part of something to to get out of um the ins and outs of a hard a hard way of living and then found multi-sports uh played

with a lot of them and then um along that path ended up taking a sports science career i'm sorry a sports science um degree as well as a history degree and i'm assuming that was maybe an undergraduate program yeah so that was a an undergrad um program and during that time my passion has always been trying to be the best that I can possibly be and kind of for those who are familiar with task and ego models is that I'm kind of high task and high ego so I'll train really hard but I also want to kind of be the one of the best or the best at what I do. So I realized at university that I wasn't going to be a top level hammer thrower, although I was an international hammer thrower. So I transitioned actually to bobsleigh or bobsled as you guys in America call it.

And so at an early age, I actually ended up, there were nine semesters at my university, and out of the nine semesters, I was actually only there for three, because the other six, I was either at training camps and competing for Great Britain around the world. So that was a tough gig, but it was a great lesson, you know, in terms of me working my way through life and really having to do this, obviously the days before internet. And so I had to carry books around the world. I had to do sometimes my exams

at different places around the world, as well as having to learn how do you compete at the highest level. And we were a very successful bobsleigh team. We were triple silver medalists on the World Cup circuit. So essentially that's my sort of background up until university. And then unfortunately in the 1988 Calgary Olympics, I got injured a couple of months before the Olympics

and I actually didn't get back. And I got basically cut by the team that I'd been working with for three years. And again, it was, you know, a tough lesson at the time. But again, just a reinforcement that, you know, failure happens consistently. And it's how we deal with those particular failures. And my choice was actually to go to Australia and New Zealand, who at the time and still are today one of the world leaders in sport, and thinking about sport systems and processes and how you develop athletes and coaches and sporting systems. And I spent a year working and learning out there.

And then I got an offer to take over as the national team coach for Bobsleigh in the UK, which was a tremendously exciting role for me. And what actually ended up happening is I'm very proud of the fact that I ended up as the head coach at two Olympic Games before I was 27. And I understand still today that I'm in the Guinness Book of Records as the youngest ever Olympic coach in the history of the Olympics. So when you're that young and you're having to to coach more senior athletes more experienced athletes i really had to think through how i was going to do that because i didn't necessarily have the kind of experience or credibility and you know it's something i'd like to talk about a little bit later which which is really

about working with people rather than on people oh okay okay so there's so many gems that you've just dropped here you've dropped um uh task and ego process which we um we need to decode that just a little bit for folks we talked you talked about uh really managing two careers at the same time before internet school and sport you talked about being able two careers at the same time before internet, school, and sport. You talked about being able to work through an injury process and how challenging that really is to do so. And then what it was like to be a young coach and to work with people and not on them. And how you establish credibility. So there's a couple themes that have been coming up in previous podcasts, which are that just like yourself, people like have a vision, they had something that was compelling to them, and they put in some deep work to get there.

And then I wonder if we can jump into the place about just quickly, what was it about your upbringing? What was it about like your parents and your early structure? And I'm not looking for like, you know, any, anything kind of dramatic, but I'm, I'm looking for what, what did your parents do and how did they structure you to be both task and ego oriented? And do you want to decode some of that for folks or do you want me to take a run at that? Um, no, I'm happy to decode it. I mean, I don't think it was kind of a tremendous mystery. Essentially is, I guess, I've really always had an inner drive is, I know, particularly in the States, and I run programs on this about elite parenting,

and the whole thing about how do you create a situation where you can get your child to be more internally motivated rather than externally motivated and i was very fortunate with my parents because i talk about challenge balance right and one of the things with my company in the states um is we run a program called elite parenting and the big part of that is understanding a concept called challenge balance and and i think that a lot of parents are extremely well-meaning in terms of pushing their kids really really hard but the most important thing is to create an environment in which you encourage them, but don't push them too hard.

How do you create an environment in which kids are internally motivated rather than externally motivated? And for me, I was really fortunate with my parents because they were very supportive in terms of obviously taking me everywhere and looking after me. So how did you do that? How do you create more of an internal motivation as opposed to an externally driven? And some of the reasons why I think I would imagine you're so interested in that is because those that are internally motivated have the ability to weather the storm.

And there's a deep searching for the way it feels for things to come together and to execute at a high level, as opposed to just doing the act so that one day later you'll get a reward. And so the external motivation is just that. It's like chasing something that is temporary and then the sport and the progression and the development of the sport becomes a means to the end. And the end in American society is, I don't know, it's like a big watch and a big car and a big house or something like that or lots of likes on social media. So, yeah. Can you talk about how you help support people to be more internally engaged and some strategies around that. Because I can imagine parents listening to this and young coaches or even sophisticated coaches, because there's two questions.

And sorry if we keep talking, but there's two questions. One is, how do you do it for young people? So to set them down the path. And then the second is, when you've got somebody that's externally motivated and they're already a sophisticated athlete, meaning that they're performing at a really high level. How do you balance when they are externally driven? Do you leave that alone or do you help move them toward an appreciation for growth,

an appreciation for progression for the sake of the art itself? Yeah. I think when I was competing in sport and even when i was coaching and it's just a big part of my dna it's i guess it's a personality thing is that i never really thought about um kind of rewards necessarily is that ironically i used to actually enjoy training more than i did competition i enjoyed pushing myself to the limit and thinking. I was always very creative about training, and I actually coached myself most of the time from when I was 18 years old,

which I guess most 18-year-olds in the States and the UK and around the world just wouldn't be able to do that now. But that wasn't unusual, you know, 30 years ago. So I didn't kind of, it wasn't like a conscious thing, how can I internally motivate myself, is that I think it was just part of my DNA to push myself forward and always want to challenge myself. And so the question is how do you create that in in an environment where people want to

master tasks rather than like how do i get to the end game as quickly as possible with the least amount of pain right and everyone loves me so so you know how do you get to that point and i guess a few years later when i really got into my sports psych and did my post-grad work with someone who many people might know, a guy called Professor Stuart Biddle, who's actually a British guy, but he works in Australia now. And a big part of that was learning different models, different psychology models. And one of my favorite models, and it's really a key part of what I use today, is self-determination theory, and in particular the basic needs part of self-determination theory. And essentially, you know, for people who are listening who know it, you know,

forgive me for explaining, but many people may not know it. And the whole concept is that really there are three things that drive internal motivation. And that is the ability to make people and help people feel competent so that they feel that they have the skills and the abilities to execute the task, a sense of autonomy, which is the more choice people have around things and the more that they drive it forward, if you like, the more internally motivated people become. And the last part is relatedness. And relatedness is really about having great relationships, be it with your parents or your coach, and a sense of belonging to people and things and a real genuine love for those situations.

So in my early 20s, there are many motivational models, but it's one that I'm very, to me, anecdotally and intuitively, it all makes sense. And there is like 40 years of research behind this. So when I work with athletes and coaches and even systems and processes and when you're trying to change cultures, I think even globally, any culture, is that if you can make an athlete feel a million dollars, you make them feel competent, you give them the confidence to perform you're going to help them become in great shape the the choice thing is that i think often as as coaches and in in positions of authority in general um there seems to be a sense that you kind of got to justify your position and it's like teaching and you got to teach people and you got to be some kind of

guru and I think if you look at the research now is that that's a really outdated model and it's really about relationships and building relationships and helping people think for themselves so from a coaching perspective or any coaching role I don't think it's about teaching it's about creating an environment in which people can learn and can make good choices for themselves. So if you think about it, whether you're at work or you're a coach or you're on the end of something, if someone tells you what to do and how to do it, you're not going to feel too great about that.

But if someone says, says like you need to like achieve this particular goal but you know i want you to talk through how you're going to do that how can we work together then you've really felt part of that process and you feel engaged and that's going to help you become more internally motivated if you're just you know whacking someone over the head so you're going to do this you're going to do that that's just very behaviorist it's just punishing the reward that's external motivation that's're going to do this, you're going to do that. That's just very behaviorist. It's just punishment and reward. That's external motivation. That's not going to get high-level performance.

And, of course, the last part, which is about relatedness, I don't think many people would disagree. It's having strong relationships in your life and having a sense of belonging is really important to help you feel engaged and to feel successful. And so it's a very basic model. That's why I guess it's called basic needs. But it's one that is a mental model I've used for 25 years now. And I really feel it works.

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the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus recovery for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out, get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life. When you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Yeah. And for folks that want to do a little bit more digging around this, you can look up DC and Ryan.

They were the original researchers of this model. And the model is spot on. And then what I found is that the activation of this model. And it is, the model is spot on. And then what I found is that the activation of the model or the application of the model is there's some challenges. And the challenge is meaning like can somebody,

can a coach be smart enough to actually stick with it? Because the need for performance now pulls us away from the slower arc of helping somebody have competence. I could shift somebody's physiology by saying something aggressive or mean or hostile and get them to snap into place. But that doesn't mean that they're going to be competent. That means that they're going to respond to a fear-based culture and do something now. But it's not something that's going to respond to a fear-based culture and do something now, but it's not

something that's going to be sustainable. And so when we're trying to create a sense of competence for somebody, one of my favorite things to do to create a growth or a process-orientated environment is to say, hey, what just happened there? And it's as simple as that. Hey, what'd you learn there? What was that like for you? And when we ask those questions to people, it allows them to respond and reflect and go inside for just a moment to see how it makes sense. And then the second frame, and I'm curious how you'll respond to this,

is to develop competence is to allow people to feel pain and to create an environment that has swift, inconsistent, and relatively harsh conditions when a mistake is made. And when we can put those together, for me at least, when I'm my own working in Petri dish for psychology is that it requires me to be on point and on time because I don't know when if I make a mistake if there's going to be a great cost to it and so it's that inconsistent swift and harsh consequence that I found if we can get the environment to do it rather than the human then it's like like this whole other level of internal drive that we drop into the minds and hearts

of people that are interested in progression. Now, I'm curious how you'd respond to that. No, I think you've nailed it. I mean, I'm not sure what more I can add to that. I mean, you've articulated it beautifully and and it's certainly those exact things that um i've always been engaged in working with people and i think that the whole thing about asking great questions the irony of it all i'm going to go a slight tangent is that you know many people might understand that business coaching has become a real big thing in the last 15 years.

And the irony of it is that a lot of business coaching originally came from sport. And I actually think the concepts and models that are used in business coaching now are way ahead, way ahead of the sport models, traditional sport models that are used in very many parts of the world. And a big part of great coaching is to ask great questions all the time to to be reflective and and to evaluate performance and and again you talk about culture and you know i love america and america is my home you know i i still have a place there in california i'll be coming back um i have a place there in California. I'll be coming back. I have a business there. But I think part of it in terms of creating a high performance culture is really reflective practice. And I think

everyone is so passionate about being motivated and getting up every day and really going for it. I don't think they really take the time to reflect and to ask them, ask themselves and ask the people that work with them or for them or around them, like how are you performing? You know, what's going well, what isn't going well and what do we need to go to, to improve? And part of my kind of great philosophy is the core things. Oh yeah. I know we're on a little funny delay here trying to make this work on technology but i'm spot on right there with you and this is one of the reasons i want i've been wanting to ask you this question for a while because we haven't spoken in

a while is do you have a mindfulness practice and the reason i'm asking is because um I know you know the value of insight and the value of reflection. And for me, a mindfulness practice of quieting down, shutting down, looking deeply within to be able to explore without judgment, I can't tell you how much I learn from that framework internally. And then to be able to use that same framework

that I learned when I'm quiet to bring that across to other folks and to use what people call motivational interviewing, right? Motivational interviews, but it's really just a curiosity without judgment that with open ended questions that are orientated for the person across from you with such high regard for who they are that they're an expert in their own experience. And the two of us together can figure something out. And when we do that, we snap right into autonomy, we snap right into competence and relatedness or a deep relationship. And that's a long way of me asking the question, like, do you have a mindfulness practice yourself where you're quieting down, shutting down, getting connected to your breath or awareness of your thoughts?

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And I actually have a background in motivational interviewing or am I myself and I think I probably to be honest with you I don't do enough myself in terms of being mindful I do a reasonable amount but not to the extent that I feel I need to and certainly it's part of my own development at the moment to work on those particular areas. But I do spend a lot of time just in terms of shutting off and just learning to quiet myself when I perform. And a big part of the program is just not the pure energy

and the passion, the drive, the motivation, but it's that ability to shut themselves down and to really get into themselves and become mindful. And again, part of my philosophy is I think working with so many great coaches and performers over the last 30 years is I would say the number one factor that differentiates the good and the great is actually self-awareness. People often list out all these things about elite performers and what's the most important thing.

I actually think it's self-awareness. So the more we kind of become consciously competent, so the starting point of that model, the conscious competence model is, you know, understanding what we know and we don't know. And a lot of people don't know they don't know. So how do you get people to the point that they know they don't know so that they know they know?

So, and I think that often from a cultural cultural perspective there's a real struggle with that that i think a lot particularly coaches feel they have to be the oracle of all knowledge and that they can't be questioned by people and they know what they know and and i think the sad thing is is that i know so many coaches around the world who kind of stopped learning 20, 30 years ago. You know, it's like they've got this mental model of the world and they feel it works for themselves. They don't question themselves. They don't become self-aware. And by that, they're not maximizing the performance or the well-being of their athletes by helping them become learned.

Because to use a terrible cliche is is that we never stop learning and we shouldn't stop learning and every day you know i certainly get excited by going oh i didn't know that that's something i've learned and that might be something i observe or it might be a training program that i go on or or just take myself out of a comfort zone and and and that whole thing about it's okay to learn and it's okay to fail and it's okay to be high risk um i think they're really important okay so let me ask a couple questions is and um let me give you three questions and see if you can pick at them one is what what concretely do you do to either increase your self-awareness like what's your practice or you can maybe take a stab at what is it how do you help your athletes become more aware and then

the second is on the you mentioned failure it's okay to fail i'd love to hear your definition of failure and then um and then maybe i can share how i'm seeing failure as well. But if you could just take a stab at maybe those three, which is, again, what's your process for helping each other or self-awareness, and then how do you describe failure? Well, the thing around self-awareness is I guess on an informal and a formal level. The informal is just asking questions.

So when you're in meetings with we've been anyone it's not just athletes is you know i i work on every day with with administrative staff um with sports scientists sports medics with other coaches with athletes and so i i just informally ask them questions you know in terms of how they're thinking about things how they make sense of the world understanding their mental models so I can understand where my mental models how I can match me behaviors and thoughts with them so that's the informal part the formal part is actually being very process orientated so I love systems and processes and again it's a cultural thing and in a lot of parts of the world these systems and processes. And again, it's a cultural thing. And in a lot of parts of the world, these systems and processes, be it in business, but particularly in suspicious we are very suspicious in America of

systems from processes for developing people like we're a very personality driven culture and we love success stories of individuals and I love success stories as individuals but I think the question that you have to ask is that how do we put performance systems in place so that we can consistently understand what our strengths and weaknesses are, the kind of things that we really need to work on, what's the science, what's the best practice behind that, and how do we create learning cycles and performance cycles? And a big part of that is very simply performance reviews and asking yourself at least once a week to sit down and say what's going well what's not going well and what do i need to

improve you know next week you know it's really not rocket science but again i'm not sure how good people are of running through that particular process. So that was the first question, right? Sorry, I forgot what the other two were. Yeah, that was great. And I think the first, I think you just answered the first two, which is how do you increase your awareness? And then how do you help somebody else increase their awareness? And I think you just answered both of those. And then the second was, and then, well, before we go to the last question, which was your definition of failure, I'm curious, you had three questions, which is what went well, what didn't go well, and what are you going to improve on? Do you ever, I drop that second question. And after anything, I just ask two questions.

And I'd love to hear your take on this. And the first question is, what went well? And then the second is, what do I want to work on? And I feel like it snaps me and snaps others into a place of just focusing on what's good and what's possible. And so the first one builds base and the second one drives direction. And I'm curious why you asked that middle question about what didn't go well. And I want to learn. i want to learn why you asked that question yeah i think that over kind of like the last 10 years or so um is that i've thought about kind of different models and i know obviously positive psychology has been you know had a big

impact on a lot of people's thinking and um and i i went through a phase of doing a lot of kind of positive psychology stuff and not trying to focus in on the negatives and all all the things that aren't going well but i think the reason i go to that is that where society in general is going and i work all over the world and i think it's a common trait, which is accountability and responsibility. And I think sometimes we focus so much on what's going well, what's going good, how do you improve the things you're doing well, and I absolutely focus on that. But also I think that sometimes it's easy for athletes or coaches

or support staff to not acknowledge or not understand the things that they're not being responsible for and they're not being accountable for. And I think it's okay to say, you know, they're just things you're not doing well enough. And, again, I think that helps kind of a mental toughness and to understand, yes, we want to be positive and we want to focus on the good things. But also, I think, again, going back to failure, it's OK to say these things aren't going well.

I'm not doing them well enough or maybe I failed on them. What's my learning? How do I get better? I mean, that might appear and sound like a very basic way of doing things, but I just find in my personal experience that tends to work now. Awesome. That's great clarity. And then if you could snap in your definition of failure, how you're thinking about failure nowadays. It's maybe on the simple level and the complex level. So in terms of failure, I think one level is perfectionism and passion. And people might be familiar with Bob Valoran's work on passion and kind of positive passion and and i think the big part of negative passion is kind of um not wanting to fail and and

saying that if i do anything wrong be it small or little i've i've i've failed and i think again um you know certain societies particularly uh i think western society for in general is that we've become so critical. It's starting to become, you know, kind of so critical of ourselves on one level, but on another level, not wanting to fail. And so I think it's tough to just in a nutshell for me to define exactly what I mean by failure. But I think one part of it is not following perfectionism and accepting ourselves for who we are and the things that we're good at and focusing on those and acknowledging the stuff that we might want to be, but we can't be. And I think

people really get caught up in that um perfectionism so that's one thing and then i think the other thing you know it's not really failure but it's really kind of a combination of failure and learning so on a day-to-day basis is interpreting things as learning rather than failure and putting ourselves in challenging situations. It's just failure is okay. I mean, when I work with people, and for example, here in Malaysia, it's really tough because failure culturally is not tolerated.

It's a loss of face in Asian society. And so it's really working hard and trying to change the culture in sport here to say to everyone, you know, it is okay to fight. And it's part of a learning process and it isn't a loss of face. Yeah, boy, that's a challenge to shift an entire country's culture

on a frame of growth and learning and mistake tolerance. And yeah, I know you've got your work cut out for you there. And I love that you are bringing up some really good theories that I don't hear referenced often. So good job on bringing up Valor you know his work on the dualistic model that's some really good stuff and i think people there's two models that i think people are from this conversation are going to go take a look at um self-determination theory and then the dualistic model for valorant and that's great so okay let me let me we're hunting around your framework and we're playing with this but um is there one word that cuts to the center

of what you understand most in life gosh that is that's a very very big uh question and um no is is the is a is the answer because i think as a as a personality um and the way that i tend to work is that my mind wanders a lot and i think about a lot of things and i think uh i always feel that in terms of how i perform and how other people perform there are just so many things that affect performance i'm always looking at all of those as opposed to going down to a very simplified framework of the universe that, like, if we just did this one thing, it would be all okay. I'm not saying that's what you're saying there, Mike, at all. I'm not saying you're saying that.

But I think I don't tend to look at it in terms of just one particular area. You know, very, very briefly is that I always have my mental model and the mental model I like to work with people and teams and organizations. And this may be familiar. It's not rocket science, but it is this concept of a performance ecosystem and and actually the whole thing about performance ecosystems um was was actually um starting off many years ago um in the 1960s by a number of sports psychologists um and anyway the model i use people would be familiar with if you imagine um kind of cogs in a system.

It is that, you know, you've got the physical part of the performance. You've got the mental part of the performance. You've got technical and tactical. And that tends to be in most people's models. The two areas that I add to my model is lifestyle management. And within lifestyle management, I think life balance and spirituality are a big part of that. And the overriding part of that mental model is culture. Because again,

is that the areas where I think so many people, be they athletes, coaches, business people, performers, is really focusing on how you create a high-performance culture, so a culture in which people can learn, can develop, can feel that they're internally motivated. I do a lot of stuff in business, a lot of stuff in sport, a lot of stuff with parents or all sorts of things. And I think people really focus on the kind of the physical side of things, the technical and the tactical side of things.

Generally speaking, it is that I don't think they think enough and they work hard enough on the mental aspects of performance, even with the advent of performance psychologists in business and in sport. I still don't think that's really looked at enough. And lifestyle management is, again, the whole balance thing. It seems not to be focused on particularly things like decompressing yourself, mindfulness, sleep, those kind of areas. And for me, anyway, the biggest thing is just creating that performance environment, that culture as part of the ecosystem.

And I think it's kind of people go to the areas that they're, I guess part of the human trait is that we tend to focus on things that we're good at and we enjoy. So, you know, often the technical, tactical and the physical are things that are fairly easy to do and fairly easy to look at. It's a lot harder to change a culture, you know, in a country, country, a team, or for an individual, right? Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentous. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission, helping people achieve performance for life. they call the Momentus Standard. Every product is formulated with top experts and every batch is third-party tested, NSF certified for sport or informed sport. So you know exactly what you're

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no funky color distortion. Just good design, great science. And if you're ready to feel the difference for yourself, Felix Gray is offering all Finding Mastery listeners 20% off. Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code findingmastery20 at checkout. Again, that's felixgray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code findingmastery20 at felixgray.com for 20% off. Yeah, it is really tough to do because it's so embedded in history and in the invisible and uh some of the greatest coaches i've seen are really good um at switching on cultures and being relentless about um exactly the way it looks and feels and um you know i've come to really appreciate that side of the

the art if you will and you had talked, obviously my ears perk up when you talk about mental training and the psychology. And what I've come to learn is that coaches that just say exactly what you just said and really mean it, it creates this whole other lane for people to get better in. But when the culture says, you know, ah, just harden up, which sometimes is true, but you know, or they say, you know, you don't need any of that extra training stuff or whatever it might be, then people become stagnant. And I'm curious, how do you talk about mindset or mental skills training or psychology? And then here I am with two questions at the same time, but I know you've got a big brain and you can handle these. Of all of the basic mental skills, generating calm or confidence or having a deep focus or imagery or pre-performance routines or goal setting, whatever the basics are, which do you think is the most important for performers to develop um i guess the i would kind of lump the all those

things are under really one area um as opposed to one specific sort of mental skills technique which is the the ability to perform under pressure and for me it's it's again about two main things, which is psychological, physiological and emotional regulation. So and very importantly, self-awareness, because if we're in situations and we don't understand that we're too psyched up, too pumped up, too tired, not energetic enough, and what we need to do to change that, then that becomes, you know, a big issue. And so being able to use mental skills techniques to be able to energize yourself when you need to be there for something as simple as a meeting or a presentation or you know it could be an olympic final you know you get into an olympic final you've trained for for four years and you wake up that morning and maybe you're just way too pumped up or you're just not pumped up enough you know what are you going to do about it it's too late then to try and work out what you need to do how do you learn consistently how to monitor

yourself and be able to to change your thoughts your feelings and action and then linked to that is confidence so so this performance under pressure know, as most people would describe it as, as arousal control and psychological flexibility, but also within that is confidence and learning how to be confident and what confidence means is huge. And, you know, I think that, you know, I often see is that, well, you know, psychologically, I hear so many times, well, people have got it or they haven't got it. Now, some people can perform under pressure and some people just can't. And, you know, in terms of confidence,

some people are just confident and other people just aren't. And the reason we call it mental skills, right, is because it's a skill. We know the research. We know you can learn those particular areas. So in kind of summary, I would say is that it's the skills around peak performance and around performing under pressure situations, which are the most important. Oh, yeah. Cool.

For sure. It's the idea that either you have it or you're not, you know, to perform under pressure is so archaic now. We can get better. We can actually measure. We can provide tools and strategies and remeasure and test. human performance and obviously i'm biased about the value of the inner game but the inner game is no good unless you have a craft that you can attach it to and that's why i've i'm so curious about mastery and this process and um if we if i know i'm long on time with you and i just want to honor that but i've got two two or three, and one is mechanical. And where does confidence come from? In your deepest understanding, how do you see confidence as an experience? I think that's a great question. Again, I think it comes back to awareness,

is that we have to learn to become confident. And so I think going through the process of understanding, for example, what are the things that help you become confident and understanding when are the times where you have a dramatic loss of confidence or or a confidence loss over over a period of time so i think they become very temporal you know so sometimes it's like some days we get up and um just generally speaking what we may not feel particularly confident over a whole range of tasks. Or it may be we get up and we have something to do and we don't feel confident about specific tasks.

So, you know, as people, many people probably listening is, you know, there's a big difference between global confidence and self-efficacy, the situationally specific, you know, confidence. So I think understanding about what are the things that you can do to improve your confidence and what does that look and feel like. And, you know, you go to the research and you go to the anecdotal evidence and I go to what I see all the time, which is, and there's no doubt, the single biggest thing there is is just self-talk you know we are the stories that we tell ourselves and and um you know the more that we we question ourselves and put ourselves down you know mentally the the lower our confidence becomes and and the more that we can think through and find reasons to be positive and look at good things that we're doing, the more we become confident.

So I certainly go to self-talk as being absolutely critical on that. But also, again, going back to culture, I think that people, you know, often in sports psychology, we really focus in on the athlete and the athlete's mental skills. But significant others like coaches and parents have such a huge impact on the motivational climate and the confidence that's created for the athletes and their support staff. that I think generally there's a tremendous amount of education and training that needs to happen for coaches in a general sense globally to help them understand how what they do dramatically impacts the performance of the athletes. Because again, going back to awareness is that I'm not so sure is how well that's really understood by many, many coaches.

I would agree. We're so fast-paced nowadays and working so hard to get an end result now that to take the time to water awareness and, you know, there's a challenge for it. But this is why I'm so attracted for the last, I don't know, 18, 20 years, a mindfulness practice, because it's exactly the first pillar of it is awareness of your present experience, so that you can have some wisdom and insight. And for an accelerated frame of performance, I'm not sure I think you and I are both going to nod our heads that that might be one of the largest tools we can train

is that self awarenessawareness in the present moment how am i doing how do i just are some skills are the is the skill but the awareness is um is the arena to play in so okay last question in your words in your experience how do you define or articulate mastery um that's uh that is literally the $64,000 question. Well, I think that if I go back to, I was very fortunate to be the high performance director at Cal, which University of California, Berkeley for four years. And I got to, you know,

to work with about 80 coaches on a day-to-day basis. There were 24 head coaches. And of those 24 head coaches, 12 of them were either Olympic head coaches or former head coaches or national team coaches. And the quality and experience of people there was phenomenal. So the reason for mentioning that is that I don't think that there's any, again, and I know you're not saying this, Mike, but I don't think there's any one kind of definition for mastery because maybe out of those 12 coaches, they coached in 12 different ways. There wasn't a consistent, you know, those real top, top level coaches.

And I'm certainly not saying the other 12 coaches weren't top level. Absolutely all the coaches there were. But it is the way that they created mastery situations were very, very different. And so if I take someone like Terry McIver, the women's swim coach at Cal, who is one of the top swim coaches on the planet. She was the national team coach for USA head coach at the last Olympic Games. She really, again, going back to self-awareness, I think the key part of mastery. So I know I keep bringing it up and maybe I sound like a broken record, but if I look at someone like her and I look at kind

of consistent approaches, it was the coaches who built self-awareness for the athletes that was the precursor to mastery. So you can't really master things until you become you become self-aware once once we get that and that and create that self-awareness is that we talk about creating a failure environment again for be able to master things is that we have to fail on a consistent basis and and certainly um most of the coaches at Cal were very good at that, were very good at creating situations in which athletes consistently failed, not just from a physical perspective but mentally, mental failure as well, so that they could learn and grow and master things to to a different

level so taking them outside of their comfort zone and looking at an individual level and a collective level about how do we consistently grow how do we consistently get better and and one of the things that you know i particularly you know i loved about terry mckeever is that she was really um you talk about mindfulness and self-awareness she really broke the mold because before her women's swimming was about like every week we're just in the pool and we train two three times a day and and this is just what we do and she really questioned that and say well how how do I really master the art of swimming coaching because maybe there's a different paradigm here and so she put

she built in a tremendous amount of rest during the week and the yardage that she tends to do is much less than most coaches for all of her swimmers. She got them out of the pool. You know, she would be doing aerobics training. She would be doing yoga with them. She'd be doing mindfulness training. She was always looking at different ways that her squad and how individual athletes could learn and grow and how she could go on a journey of mastery to master herself and improve,

but also how with the student athletes and, you know, obviously she works with some very senior, you know, in the Natalie Coghlan's world, you know, 30-year-old plus, you know, athletes. So for me, that would probably be the best example of mastery. You know, I hope that's helpful as an example no and yeah no well done and i knew that would be nuanced for you and she certainly has broken the mold she'd be a great person to have a conversation with here she's certainly pushed limits and pushed on the edges and taken risks and created something that's really special

for the for the industry of swimming and for performance in general human performance in general so thank you for sharing her success and her process with this and okay so um the last final question where can people find out more about what you're doing i know you know kpa i think your business is still up and running while uh in california while you're in Malaysia. But can you tell us, you know, just where can we find you on social media, website, all that good stuff? Your home address? Sure.

So, yeah. So if you wanted to go to KPA Elite.com. So, you know, that's our website. And if you just put KPA, a lead-in, you know, we've obviously on all the social media, in terms of Facebook, Twitter, you know, those kind of things. That's where you find ourselves. We're based in California. We're a global company. And if you look at our website, we have about 20 associates who are experts in lots of different fields

and that's why I think what we're doing is pretty exciting because we're really not for the masses. We're really all about failure and taking things to the limit, not being safe, breaking the mould and that's really been I think part of my success. I've had any number of failures like we all do but uh you know part of that that learning process has been come from uh being i guess a little bit of a rebel and thinking about things in in a different way but uh you know i i think

it's it served me um one just last thing like if i can say is one big part of there'll be many sports psychologists who will be listening to this or people working in the area of performance psychology and I would just like to encourage them not to work from what I call a mono-disciplinary perspective so not just to look at performance from the process of psychology. And likewise, we might have strength and conditioning coaches here and we might have physiologists and sports scientists and coaches and all sorts of people. So I would just go back and ask people if there's one thing that they can do is is build uh an integrated

um performance model for themselves and for their athletes so think about not just the mental and the tactical and the technical and the physical but you know how do you build on those areas and how do you build on creating a world-class performance culture? Because I guess the one thing I'm really passionate about, and when you're passionate about it, there's certain things that drive you insane, is a really simplified view of the universe, that if we just have this one thing and do this one thing, then that's going to change things.

And very rarely does that ever happen. Excellence, by definition, is doing a number of things really well on a day-to-day and on a consistent basis so that would be my kind of parting thought wow i you know i i knew that this was going to be a nuanced conversation based on you know our conversations in the past and i i can appreciate just how delicately you have appreciated all of the different curves and angles and just, you know, it's just not clean and elite and even recreational development. It's not clean. It's not this thing that we see that's glossy.

Would you pull up the hood? It's messy and it's not, yeah, it's just not clean. And so I appreciate the importance that you're sharing on the having a multidiscipline appreciation and having a true model that works for you. And I love that you've included a spiritual sense inside of yours to be able to talk about that dimension of the human, you know, the progression of what it means to be a human, whether it's sport or otherwise. So Keith, thank you. Thank you for your time. I've so enjoyed this conversation, just listening to you be able to share over the past 20 some years that you've been able to

be at this. And like, I just really appreciate your approach and how you've done this. And thank you for giving me the chance to be able to learn from you as well and there's so many really deep nuanced things here so thank you and then if um those who are who are listening to us if you enjoyed this episode like help us out go to finding mastery.net or go to iTunes and look up finding mastery. And, uh, if you help us out and you like this conversation, hit the like button, share a comment, um, you know, help, help gather some momentum for us so we can keep this thing going. And then, um, you can also follow on Twitter, uh, which is my name at Michael Gervais, G-E-R-V-A-I-S.

And you can also follow facebook.com forward slash finding mastery. So make sure you check out Keith and his work at KPA Elite and follow along what he's doing and watch out Malaysia because you got an asset inside. So hopefully you know how to reward and value that. So excellent. Thank you. And I can't wait for next time that we connect in person. I hope you have a great time, Keith. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for the opportunity to speak today and learn myself about many things. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you.

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