High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 138: Developing a Predator Mindset with Gene Zannetti, Owner of Wrestling Mindset

Episode Date: October 11, 2017

Gene and Jeff Zannetti developed Wrestling Mindset to help wrestlers reach their full potential in wrestling, school and life.    Gene Zannetti graduated with a Psychology degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He has two masters degrees; one in Sport Psychology and the other in Clinical Psychology. Gene is a certified School Psychologist, Personal Trainer and Nutritionist. His masters degree thesis (Perfectionism & Anxiety) has been published in the International Journal of Wrestling Sciences.  Gene was a nationally ranked All-Ivy League wrestler at UPenn.  Gene has studied the best wrestlers, coaches & experts in the world to learn the secrets of performance success. This led to the development of a one of a kind, trademarked Wrestling Mindset program. Since 2008, Wrestling Mindset coaches have worked with thousands of wrestlers, teams, coaches & clubs. The Wrestling Mindset program has been used by the Men's & Women's USA National Team, top college and high school teams & wrestlers, as well as youth and rec programs throughout the country.  A full description can be found at cindrakamphoff.com/gene.

Welcome to High Performance Mindset with Dr. Sindra Kampoff. Do you want to reach your full potential, live a life of passion, go after your dreams? Each week we bring you strategies and interviews to help you ignite your mindset. Let's bring on Sindra. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Sindra Kampoff, and I'm grateful that you're here, ready to listen to episode 138 with Gene Zanetti. Now, the goal of these interviews is to learn from the world's best leaders, athletes, coaches, and consultants, all about the topic of mindset to help us reach our potential or be high performers in our sport and our field.

Now, today's episode about developing a predator mindset is with Gene Zanetti, the owner of Wrestling Mindset. Now, Wrestling Mindset was developed by Gene and Jeff Zanetti to help wrestlers reach their full potential in wrestling, school, and in life. And today, we talk quite a bit about wrestlers and the mindset of wrestlers, but I think you'll be able to see that really what we're talking about is how to use mindset training in your life. Gene Zanetti graduated with a psychology degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where

he was a nationally ranked Ivy League wrestler for UPenn. He has two master's degrees, one in sports psychology and the other in clinical psychology. He's also a certified school psychologist, a personal trainer, and nutritionist. And his master's degree thesis was on perfectionism and anxiety. So Gene and Jeff have studied the best wrestlers, coaches, and experts in the world to learn the secrets of performance success. And this led them to develop this one-of-a-kind wrestling mindset program. And since 2008, wrestling mindset coaches have worked with thousands of wrestlers, teams, coaches, and clubs.

The wrestling mindset program has been used by the Women and Men's USA National Team, top college and high school teams and wrestlers, as well as youth and recreational programs throughout the country. Now in this interview, Jean and I talk about how wrestling mindset is different than other sports, the four areas that we should train, we talk quite a bit about the predator and prey mindset, which I think you'll find interesting, why we should not engage in a fan or hype mentality, the four main qualities of a pre-competition routine, and four parts of mental recovery. Now there's two of my favorite quotes that I'll share with you. One of them was

when we were talking about predator and prey mindset. And Jean said this, the difference between the predator and the prey mindset is this, eyes on the front like to hunt, eyes on the side like to hide. And then my second favorite quote of today's interview is this one don't let a day go by without improving yourself i encourage you to head over to twitter and you can tag myself mentally underscore strong as well as jean at wrestling mind se so that's wrestling mindset without the t so wrestling mind se before we head over to the interview today, let's head over to iTunes and read a comment. This is from Sweeney McMahon. Sweeney says, a performance mindset isn't simply adopted, but it's practiced. It takes effort and syndrome reveals the discipline and

clear thinking that can take us there. Thank you so much, Sweeney McMahon, for your comment and your rating over there on iTunes. Now, if you enjoyed today's episode, we'd encourage you to tweet about the podcast or share the episode. Like I mentioned before, you can tag myself, mentally underscore strong, or Jean at Wrestling Mind SE,

or you can head over to iTunes and provide a rating or comment. Thanks so much for listening today. And without further ado, let's bring on Gene. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset. I'm excited today to talk to Gene Zanetti. So Gene, I'd like to welcome you here to the podcast. Thank you.

Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you specifically about wrestlers and how you see their mindset different and just how you began to start Wrestling Mindset. So just to start us off, Gene, tell us a little bit about what you're passionate about and what you do right now. Absolutely. So I run a program called Wrestling Mindset. It's a business that we nationwide, we work with individuals and teams from youth right through the Olympic level. And my background is in wrestling. So as a kid,

I played pretty much all sports, baseball, football, soccer, wrestling. And as time went on, I started focusing more and more on wrestling. That seemed to be the sport I was most passionate about. So I began to focus on that singularly once I got to high school. And then from there, I wound up wrestling. So in high school, I wound up taking third in the state. I won the counties a couple times in the regions and the districts. And I wound up going on to wrestle at Rutgers, a Division I school. And three years into that, then I wound up transferring to the University of Pennsylvania. We were a top 15 program in the nation. I was ranked as high as 19th in the country and I was an Ivy League wrestler. And really from there, then I wound up going for my master's degree

in sports psychology, exercise science, sports psychology at Springfield College. And I also wound up getting a master's degree in clinical psychology at Montclair State, New Jersey, which is the state I'm from. And then from there, really, I was a school psychologist and then wound up starting this business on the side, Wrestling Mindset. And here we are today. I love it. I love it. That sounds like a really fascinating journey that we can dive into a little bit more.

Tell us about your experiences as an athlete, perhaps in college or, you know, in high school, maybe you could paint us a picture of a time where you really felt like your mindset made all the difference or maybe a way that, you know, your mind, you weren't mentally tough and how it got in your way. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you learn very early on in wrestling or really any sport, how much of it is mental. And I could think of many, many matches I lost because you know I was I was

mentally I made a mental mistake maybe I I let a bad call get into my head or I got scored on early against someone who I wasn't who I knew I was better than and then I I crumbled I panicked and then there's other there's other times I could think of where I know that mentally I was able to bounce back from no bad call or a mistake. That really made all the difference. My senior year of high school, I was undefeated going into the state quarterfinals. My goal was to be a state champ. And I don't know how much you or the callers know about wrestling,

but there's a thing called stalling. So if you're not creating enough action, you can get hit with a stall call. Well, those are supposed to be very rare. That doesn't happen. That shouldn't happen very frequently. It should be like an every now and then thing if you're clearly not trying to create action. Well, I was winning by three points in the last 26 seconds left of the match, and I wound up getting hit with four stall calls. And so what happened was that that actually made the score 7-6. I wound up losing without having any offensive points scored against me.

So basically, my heart was ripped out of my chest and my dreams were shattered just like that. Really unheard of calls from the referee. And thankfully, I was able to bounce back mentally and wound up coming back taking third. In fact, beating that person who beat me for third place. So that's an example of a success story where the mindset came in. High school and college, it was more, you know, hopefully I was on mentally. There was no formal work being done on improving my mindset. It was just, you know, some days he had it, some days he didn't. And it's kind of just leaving it to chance. And that's a big problem.

You know, we don't leave our technique to chance. We practice our technique constantly. We go to camps. We go to clubs. We go to clinics. We have one-on-one instructors. We don't leave our strengths to chance. We go to the gym. We have strength coaches, personal trainers, and so on. But mindset, we just hope we're ready that day.

And that's a problem. Yeah, that is a problem. And I can see that you're passionate about that. Because I think that's a problem too. And why, obviously, why we have mental training. For sure. For sure. And so we didn't hear anything about sports psychology in high school. And then in college, one of the first books I really ever read was this book called Fight Your Fears and Win by Dr. Don Green. He's at Juilliard now and he talks about performance, performance success.

I think he, he, he was, I think he was a diver. He might've worked with the Olympic diving team and he was, he worked with green berets and, and, and all this stuff. And it talked about sports psychology. And this was the first time I ever heard about this. And I said, yes, this is what I want to do with my life. And, and then, and then also in college, we had a sports psychologist come in and speak to our teams,

but unfortunately it was very sports like general and understandable. You know, he had, he had many other sports that he worked with and, and it was, and it was a little bit more just geared towards like goal setting, which was kind of basic and visualization. And those are both great things. I'm all about goal setting. I'm all about visualization. But when he was, he was dealing with a very high level team that already had very high goals. So it would have been better if he was speaking straight to the issues that the wrestlers were dealing with. So basically that gave me the inspiration to pursue sports psychology and create a sports specific psychology program. That's Wrestling Mindset.

Yeah, that's great. I think about my own journey is kind of similar to yours. You know, I was a college cross-country and track runner, struggled myself sometimes, and that's why I got interested in the mental game and, you know, pursuing a degree in sports psychology. But also, like, I had sports psychologists that I worked with that, you know, like were good, but I could see, you know, that they didn't quite put it into practical terms or didn't quite put it in a way that I understood. So that really inspires me to do good work today. So that's cool. Tell us a little bit about Jean,

you know, like when you were an athlete and a wrestler in high school or in college, or maybe you can even kind of paint us a picture when you're kind of describing that time in college when you had a rebound, how did you rebound? Do you remember the mental tools and strategies you used or what did you do in that moment to move past that tough round? Well, and again, this was something that was more stumbled upon rather than something that was learned. So I would never recommend an athlete to just kind of hope that they have it that day. I would recommend having a plan and that's what we do with them. But for me that day, I really was there to win the competition. I wanted to win that tournament and I felt like it was taken from me. So I just told myself that if I, I can't, you know, I can't do anything about

the bad calls now, but if I bounce back and take third in my heart, I'll know that I was good enough to beat anyone. Like if, in other words, if I lose again, then I didn't deserve to be the state champ because clearly I didn't beat everyone. But if I could win all my matches from then on, then in my heart, I could say, well, I know I had a chance at winning this thing. Yeah, that's good. That's good. That was pretty much it. Yeah, for sure. Well, let's go back to kind of the moment when you decided to move forward with the wrestling mindset. And you

said you were a school psychologist and obviously had a degree in sports psychology and then a master's in clinical psych. What was the, you know, the moment that you decided to move forward with this business wrestling mindset? Yeah, well, see, I was always into the spirit, mind, body approach. Like you have to be the total package, right? That was something that was always stressed to us in the sport of wrestling, that you use wrestling as a vehicle to make you better in all aspects of life, right? School, academically, financially, your career, everything, right? So really what it was, we started off actually with a fitness company called Z Fanatical Fitness. And there we had high-intensity workouts it was it was a group fitness program in different

gyms around the state of New Jersey. And we also included a nutrition plan. We also included a mindset plan with different worksheets that we did. Okay, so it originally started with this fitness company, that was something we did. And then on the side, I also started going into different wrestling clubs and also started this new program, the new business wrestling mindset. So both of these things were kind of up and running at the same time, Z Fanatical Fitness and Wrestling Mindset. So really, we had a great opportunity to speak at the National Wrestling Coaches Convention six years ago. We told them we could speak about both fitness and mindset. So it was kind of a way we could, we kind of weaseled our way into that by being able to do, to talk about both. You know, we figured maybe they'll be interested in mindset. Maybe they'll be interested in the exercise.

We'll be able to get one of them. So we kind of used everything that we had, all that experience we had. And it's had and it's and it pretty much started from there I wrote an e-book you know 10 ways to turn yourself 10 ways to wrestling mindset 10 ways to go from practice room wrestler to gamer the gamer someone steps up and rises to the occasion yeah so we started that with it with the e-book and I started working with individuals and and um and teams so that really started back teams. So that really started back in, that informally started back in 2008, formally started in 2012. So while I was doing my master's, I was working on both the fitness business and the wrestling mindset.

I like that you went to the sports specific area and just like developing a business in this area, particularly because, you know, you had the experience of having a sports psychologist who was pretty general. So, you know, Gene, one of the things I really wanted to talk to you about is the differences that you see between wrestling and other sports. And I work with wrestlers myself, and I see some differences, but I'd love for you to kind of share your observations. What makes wrestling unique in terms of the mental game? All sports are definitely holistic. There's no doubt about that. If you want to be great at anything, you have to be thinking about all the

different areas of the sport. Well, wrestling has some of those areas more built in than others, right? So in other words, there's weight classes. So there's a nutrition component, right? And that's the whole mental thing on it in itself, cutting weight and maintaining a certain weight class. And then, you know, comparing ourselves to different wrestlers. Am I too big for this weight? Am I too small? How much weight should I lose? So that's one of the things, definitely the weight class factor. So now nutrition automatically is another mental hurdle in the sport. Also being an individual sport, I mean, there's, of course, many individual sports. Something about wrestling, and you could probably say this about all combat sports, but one thing you really see with wrestling is that it's basically a fight.

It's really a legal fight. And so there's kind of an element of if this person beats me you know as a guy you kind of have that ego that that macho thing and and it's you start to think well he's a better man than me you know he was able to submit me to his will not it's like not that it's true submission like jujitsu or something but he he bent me to his will and it becomes very very personal you know and you can't blame other people it's you against the other person and you have your chance you know you're going to get your chance to get your hands on that person you know so it's it becomes very very personal also and again this

is also true for a lot of sports but definitely with like a um a more niche smaller sport like wrestling if you're a wrestler chances are you had a parent or a family member that was a wrestler and it just becomes very personal. Because again, also, your parents understand like, hey, it's basically your kids down there fighting. Not a true fist fight, but the closest thing to a legal fight and your kids out there. So it gets pretty darn heated. I love that perspective.

I think that the interesting thing that you're describing is how it becomes really personal and how it is like close to the legal fight that you can do when you describe the legal part and how when you lose, you know, it's kind of like your ego is impacted and you think that the person is a better man than you. You know, I could see how that could directly connect to confidence and a lack of confidence and a lack of belief in yourself. Tell us a little bit about the impact of that and how you might work with a wrestler to make sure their confidence is high

for the next time that they wrestle. Okay, a few things there. So first thing to understand that we have to explain to our wrestlers, and it's difficult because when you're in that moment, it's the most important thing in your life. And when I was a kid, it was all about wrestling. It was the first thing I thought about waking up in the morning. Last thing I thought about going to sleep. It had an impact on every decision I made, how I lived my life.

And usually, a lot of the people that we work with, that's, that's, that's where they're at. All their, like a lot of them, their only relationship with, you know, their dad might be just talking about wrestling. Right. So it becomes, it's something that you really become engrossed with. Okay. Number one, that's, that, that, that's not good. I know it's kind of a byproduct of our competitive society, which is good in some ways, but it's bad in the way that it over magnifies, it makes the importance too great. We start to think that's what our life is all about. So one of the main lessons that we have with our athletes, and we have many performance success, confidence exercises also that we do with them. But one of the biggest things is them understanding who they are as a person, what their values are, what are their priorities in life, and what their purpose is.

So I wouldn't start with this with the wrestler, because again, it becomes way too general. And it doesn't directly address the mindset struggles. But several weeks into the program, probably about a month or two into the program, we start addressing these things. What's their purpose? Who are they as a person? What are their values? And understanding that how they do in wrestling has no impact on them as a person. Of course, we want to be successful.

Of course, we want to be the champion. And we want to help them become the champion. But if we're making it into too big of a deal in our life, we're actually going to block ourselves because we're going to raise its importance. We're going to blow it way out of perspective. And we're going to compete worse. Nine out of 10 people. That's what's going to happen. Right. So, yeah. So we have to address it somewhat early on who they are, what are their values and what do they believe in life? And that's, that,

that becomes more important than anything else. So now whether or not you win or lose, you know who you are. You're not a better or worse person because you're a state champ. You're an Olympic champ, but okay, great. That doesn't change who you are as a person. That doesn't change your values,

which remain solid no matter what. So understanding that life is far more important than their success in the sport. And that's something I did a terrible job of when I was competing. That's a big reason why I got very nervous. Sure, sure. I don't think I did a very great job when I was competing either, especially moments in my life where the sport had too much of importance. And what do you see, Jean, in terms of like, when you help an athlete clarify who they are as a person, you know, their values, their purpose, what do they believe about life? What does that do for them? My sense

is maybe they can wrestle like pressure free or, you know, experience less pressure, less anxiety. Like what are the, what's the outcome of that that you see? Right. Well, first and foremost, they, they gain perspective on life. So that's, that's really, that's, that's the number one thing that it does. And as a, as a, as a consequence, as, as, as basically a secondary benefit, it also has, it also has the ability to help them relax, not be as nervous and to perform better, to wrestle, to wrestle, to compete a lot more free because how they do in a competition doesn't define them. We tend to define ourselves based on our successes. We live in a competitive society. And if we don't have that in perspective,

again, it's going to mess us up, which is why you see a lot of even top athletes, professionals, they might be highly successful, terrible families, depression, suicide, things I don't take lightly as a school psychologist, substance abuse, because, yeah, they might be great at the sport, but they don't take lightly as a school psychologist substance abuse because yeah they might be great at the sport but they don't have the perspective so number one you know their their mental health needs to their mental health you know emotional

well-being has to trump everything and then as a result if we're if we have that in place they're also going to compete better now as far as like specific confidence exercises that we have for the wrestlers we have that too but that's going to be more of a band-aid compared to them knowing who they are and knowing what's important. Yeah, that's a really, really good point because that's the foundation of performance and, you know, our resiliency, our ability to handle, you know, success and failure. You know, Gene, one of the things that I really see that's different for wrestlers is just like it's a grind, right? Like, you know, I, one of the things that I really see that's different for wrestlers is just like, it's a grind, right? Like, you know, I worked with a wrestling team a few years ago,

and it was like the middle of the season, they were just exhausted. So, you know, tell us about how wrestling might be different in terms of just the exhaustion and the grind and what you have to do to craft your body and your mind to be successful. Yeah. And again, it goes back to that kind of, that mentality where it's like a legal fight. And also it's kind of like the military in a lot of ways too. Because it's just, it's like that constant PT, that constant wear and tear in your body. You know, there's no, it's difficult to get better

if you're not constantly, you know, there's no, it's difficult to get better if you're not constantly, you know, practicing with people. And when you're going, as you go up against better and better competition, that wears on your body. And also you're going to, and also you're going to have the same, people generally tend to have, you know, two or three really good takedowns or two or three really good moves on top or bottom. So what happens is also, and this is kind of unspoken, but you start to compensate in different ways. As a, you know, former, you know, fitness guy, personal trainer, group, group training instructor, you look at overall your general mobility and stability, which is like, you know, the wheel and axle of a car, or you could have a high performance Lamborghini or Ferrari,

but if it's not, if the wheels aren't properly aligned, it's going to have problems, right? which is like the wheel and axle of a car. You could have a high-performance Lamborghini or Ferrari, but if the wheels aren't properly aligned, it's going to have problems. Well, when you're compensating using the same moves all the time, which is very important, I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but that also has the effect of now you start moving your body in different ways, and you could start having more asymmetries and imbalances in your body. So now that's why you start to see, even at a young age, you know, some knee injuries, shoulder injuries, because you're doing the same thing with those muscles all the time.

And you're not always in, and here's the personal trainer in me speaking, you're not always in anatomically or physiologically correct positions. And that's just kind of an effect. You can't, there's nothing you could really do about that while you're competing, but making sure you're balancing that out with your other strength, your strength training that you're doing. That kind of leads to maybe my next question, Gene, is like, when you think about the best of the best and some of the best wrestlers that you've worked with, what do you think separates them from others mentally? What are, you know, the psychological characteristics that you would list or include in their profile? Oh, yeah. Well, the second worksheet that we do with our

athletes in our program is we ask them, what were you thinking before and during your best matches? What were you thinking before and during your worst matches? So having them write down as specifically as possible, three of their best, three of their worst. And after doing this for a while, between me and our other mindset coaches and the teams that we worked with, we have tens and thousands of people all around the country. And it's pretty predictable at this point what they're going to say. So the way we explain it to make it very simple for everyone to understand, the difference between the predator and the prey mindset.

So I took an animal behavior class when I was a pen, which is very difficult, by the way. Okay. I wound up getting a D in the class. But I did learn this. I might be the only person applying what I learned in that class. You look at predator animals, predator mammals. You could tell a predator just by looking at them because their eyes are on the front

of their head. Lions, tigers, bears. Oh, them because their eyes are on the front of their head. Lions, tigers, bears, oh my, their eyes are on the front of their head. So we say eyes on the front like to hunt. So we say that athletes that are wrestling at their best, the best of the best, they tend to be focusing on things that are in front of them, not what's going on around them. Specifically, things that are directly in their control. And the three things we always talk about is effort, attitude, and aggressiveness. That's what they focus on, things within their control, not even winning or losing. Now, the wrestlers who might be very good but struggle mentally, we tend to have more of what we call prey mindset. So prey animals, squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, deer, their eyes are on the side of their head because they're focused on what's going on around them. So they're

thinking about records, rankings, seedings, predictions. What are my parents thinking of me? I don't want to let down my friends in the stands. I want to look good in front of my friends, right? What's going on in social media? They tend to have too much of a focus on what's going on around them and what other people are perceiving them, how other people are perceiving them. So we say eyes on the front like to hunt, eyes on the side like to hide. And as far as, so it's a great analogy. They understand this, the wrestlers, and they know it applies to life. It's the same thing in school. You focus on your effort, attitude, and aggressiveness. Your future career, you focus on your effort, attitude, and aggressiveness.

Your future career, you focus on your effort, attitude, and aggressiveness. So it really is a great metaphor for life. Absolutely. And I could see that just learning these things as a high school or college athlete helps them be more successful later on. So, you know, going with that, when I think about like cutting weight and how wrestlers, you know, you kind of were talking about how one of the ways that wrestling is different is this nutrition piece and the weight classes and the cutting weight. How would you say the Predator or the best wrestlers that you work with, how do they approach the cutting weight part? First of all, keeping themselves in shape all year round. That's number one. So you shouldn't even be capable of losing too much weight because you're eating healthy most of the time, even in the off-season, right? You're exercising hard,

even in the off-season. So number one, making sure you keep yourself in shape year-round. And then also remembering that cutting weight doesn't make you a better wrestler. You might be bigger for your weight class, but it doesn't make you a better wrestler. My high school coach, Steve Giordano, he was a state champion, All-American in college in his own right, and he used to tell us that cutting weight does not make you a better wrestler. So thinking about it in terms, when you think of weight class, asking yourself before the season, what is the best weight class for me to compete at? So, you know, maybe it is a little bit part of the sport.

So you might go one or two weight classes down. But you have to ask yourself, am I able to compete hard for the entire duration of a match? And overtime and double overtime, if need be. So if you're going to be like once you start getting to the point where you're trying to achieve your goal, once you're up against the best of the best, you're going to need all your horsepower. You're not going to be able to win at 90%. You're going to have to be at 100 or darn close to it. So making sure that you're able to go 100% at that weight class.

In other words, what is the best weight class for me? And not thinking in terms of who am I going to avoid around the state? Or who do I want to avoid on my team right or wondering how big or how small am I going to be for my weight class like not comparing ourselves to other people but comparing yourself to yourself am I going to be able to bring out my best at this at this weight class so if I'm if let's you know in high school i weighed my first practice i weighed out after practice at 146 pounds so the weight classes there are 135 140 145 152 well if i just if i had to if i stepped on the scale at 146 that would mean i'm in the 152 weight class well that was my first practice of the season. So I didn't need

to go 152. And I thought about, well, if I lost one pound, I'm at 145. I feel okay at 140. I'm still making the decision based on myself. I'd be okay if I lost six pounds. Then I started thinking, what about 135? No, now the whole time in the season, I'm going to be thinking about my weight. Every practice, I'm going to be thinking about, I got to lose three pounds this practice. I got to lose four pounds. It's going to become a weight cutting practice. I'm not going to be focusing on getting better. You know what I mean? Once I know my attention is going to be focused on weight class and not getting better, and also thinking that I'm going to be tired out there, now I know, okay, well, 135 is too low. I'm going to go 140. So making the decision based on yourself,

not on your teammates or who's in your weight around the state. Yeah. I think that's really important, you know, to stay focused on yourself instead of other people. I guess that goes back to the predator prey mentality, which you were talking about. How might you work with somebody like really struggling to, I mean, maybe the weight class is right for them, work with somebody like really struggling to, I mean, maybe that the weight class is right for them, but they're just really struggling with, you know, kind of like the lack of food or just being really tired. Would you just suggest that that's probably not the weight class for them if they're really struggling or, you know, what do you think of

that in terms of kind of the mental side? You know, it really depends on, it really depends on the kid and the situation. I'll use this as an example. A kid's freshman year of college. Chances are their senior year, they've lost some weight. In their into college, they're in a brand new environment, right? They're in a situation they've never been in. Normally they're with their parents, now they're not with their parents. Normally they have, you know, class throughout the day, now classes are scattered throughout the day, throughout the week. And now you're not one of the best people on your team, you might be one of the worst, right? So a lot of mental, there's a lot of mental factors there so in those kind of situations most people most of the time i would recommend them not losing not losing much weight in college at all their freshman year because you're already dealing with enough that this is just going to add fuel to the fire right um so that would be so like that that would be an example where i would say you know just just go up in weight class.

Now you'd have to, you'd also want to, you'd also want to isolate the variables too with the weight cutting. Like you're saying they're, they're struggling making weight. Is it, is it that they don't know how to diet properly? Is it, um, that they're, they've been cheating on their diet? Is it that they're, or is it that they, they don't really like wrestling? Are they getting too much pressure from a parent or from a coach? So trying to see what's going on there. Is there pressure from other people? Is it something they're doing? Usually it's some kind of combination of all of

those things. Yeah. And, you know, working from there. Yeah. Yeah, that's good, Gene. You know, one of the wrestling coaches that I know submitted a question today for you, and he said, how do you work with an athlete who's experiencing a lot of pressure or stress, perhaps maybe after they've been nationally ranked? Tell us a little bit about that since you just mentioned that pressure can be one of the variables that get in the way of people being at their best. For sure. Yeah. And you see a lot of times wrestlers will say their freshman or sophomore year, they weren't very nervous. And in their junior and senior year, they are. Yeah. Well, what's going on there? What's happening is they start to experience some success. And now where there wasn't expectations, now there are expectations. You know, now that's something that isn't directly in your control, what expectations are on you, but your focus, your focus, you want it to remain on, focus on the things within your control, your effort, your attitude, and your aggressiveness. So whether or not I'm the first,

the top seed in the tournament or unseeded, that's none of my business. Whether I'm, you know, one of the top ranked wrestlers in the state or unranked that doesn't matter right um so not not focusing on keeping up with my friends not focusing on any of that stuff records rankings seedings predictions not focusing on expectations sometimes going on social media too much and these kids actually have it way harder in many ways than than we did when we competing, because you tend to be friends with, with other people who play your sport around the country, around the state. Yeah. Right. So if I'm friends with different people that I know in wrestling and I'm competing in high school, um, and I'm on Facebook,

I'm on Snapchat. Everyone starts to post pictures like around the post season. Everyone's posting pictures about, you know, districts are coming up, regions are coming up, states are coming up, excited to wrestle, excited to go for my goals. And what happens is we start focusing entirely too much on that. Even in fact, in this past Olympics, we've had some of our best wrestlers who wound up underperforming because they were focused a little bit too much on social media. And we're not picking on them. This happens all the time. And again, they have, they have these kinds of struggles far more than anyone who's ever competed in

the Olympics. So it's not getting sucked into what we call the fan mentality. We don't want to get caught up in the hype. We don't want to get caught up in the fan mentality. So continuing to focus on the effort attitude and aggressiveness and what the coach can do is making sure verbally and non-verbally probably more importantly non-verbally to encourage the athlete and reinforce that effort attitude and aggressiveness and kind of brush off to decide the wins and the losses and sometimes coaches they don't mean to do it but you know

kid wrestles poorly and they say well hey a win's a win well if a win's a win that means a loss is a loss so what does that mean if i lose i'm a schmuck right yeah so me so so not getting too caught up like when the kid wins the tournament hey great job pat him on the back what i really liked was that you didn't quit the whole time you're winning by five points and you kept trying to score another point like you know and the kids are going to be aware of that so as the mindset as the mindset coaches we look to be at least the one person in that kid's life who's not asking them about their record not asking them about their ranking not not being concerned with if they won or they lost i don't even ask the kids what they placed in the tournament

or if they won i say how did you feel out there were you aggressive you know were you were you positive the whole time did you wrestle hard the whole match did you go for your moves were you were you going after were you pulling the trigger as as we call it? And so they see that the placings aren't nearly as important to me as the effort, attitude, and aggressiveness. Yeah. You know, Gene, I think that's something that we all have to, like, relearn. I think there's so much in our culture. Like, when you turn on ESPN, it's all about who won, who lost, you know.

And it's like, especially for young kids nowadays, I think it's really hard for them to not be focused on winning or losing. And if coaches, you know, they don't try, but they might reinforce it or parents, especially, you know, so tell us a little bit more about like how to do that. You know, do you have any strategies or techniques that you would suggest, you know, for them to really focus more on just being at their best, more of the process? Yeah. You know, I think it's really important to watch the interviews after the Olympics, after the Super Bowl, after the World Series, and understanding the difference,

understanding what I'm talking about when I say this fan mentality and the hype and why you want to stay away from it. So if you watch, like most of us, we're more focused on Hollywood and movies, right? And we're focused on the media. So when ESPN, SportsCenter, all these things, they're talking about rankings, records, seedings, predictions, that's great TV. That's entertaining TV. So it's good that they do that

because it keeps us all engrossed in the sport, right? But is that helping the competing athletes? No, right? And so if you watch, if you watch, and it's the same thing with Hollywood, if you watch the movies, I think of any given Sunday, Al Pacino gives the speech, then you think of the movie Miracle, Herb Brooks, the USA coach gives this great and inspiring speech. And what happens is, as kids and parents, we look at this and we say, okay, this is what I'm supposed to do for my kids and for my team when they're competing. Give them this big speech before they go out there and compete and get them fired up. What parents and coaches don't realize is that nine out of ten times,

this is actually hurting the wrestler. It's really hurting them because now they start putting the competition on a pedestal. And nine times out of ten, if you make a match or a tournament special, if you make an interview special, if you make a test special, you wind up underperforming. You see the same thing with kids saying they're not very good at standardized tests when they take the PSATs, SATs, ACTs. It's not necessarily that they're bad at taking the tests. Sometimes they're just putting far too much pressure on themselves because they're making it special. So back to

what I was saying before, if you listen to the interviews in the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the World Series, all these top sports events, they're not saying the same thing as Hollywood is. They tend to be saying, I was just being me. I was doing what I always do. I treated it just like any other in baseball. I treated it like any other at bat, right? And golf, they were just treating it like any other swing, just being myself. Right. That's, that's what brings out your best. Yeah. Most people, that's, that's what brings out your best. Yeah. Most people, the main, the main problem we see is people being practice room wrestlers

or practice room competitors in other sports. And what's happening is in practice, we're telling ourselves something very different practice. We tend to tell ourselves this doesn't count. This doesn't mean anything. Just try things out there. Just be aggressive and then try things. And we tend to compete well.

Then it matches. We do a 180 and we say to ourselves, this is it. Now or never, do or die, make it or break it. There is no tomorrow. This is what counts. Well, that's what happens right there. We start breaking ourselves down mentally and emotionally. And if you look at those top athletes, whether they're being coached to think this way, or they're just stumbling upon it on their own, they're not

thinking like that. Most of the athletes are not telling themselves that. There are exceptions, but they're exceptions, not the general rule. Gene, that's really good. It's a really important point. When you think about, you know, some of the Olympic level wrestlers that you work with, or elite wrestlers, what do you see them do? Like when you think about their of the Olympic-level wrestlers that you work with or elite wrestlers, what do you see them do? When you think about their success at the Olympics or just in international competition, what do you think allows them to thrive at the highest level? Several things.

I think they're able to recover well in between rounds. And we always say, you look at your cell phone. You only have so much battery life in your cell phone, right? So you can't keep the power on high the whole time, you know, the brightness all the way up, you know, YouTube constantly playing. Because what happens is it just sucks the battery life out of it, right? They're very good at recovering in between rounds. So just like your cell phone only has a certain amount of battery, so do we as people. We only have so much physical, mental, and emotional energy. Common mistake we see in high school is

people, the day of a tournament, they're intense the entire day. They're thinking about the competition all week. So if my tournament's on Saturday and today's only Wednesday, I'm thinking about wrestling this whole week. Then the night before, I'm thinking about it before I go to sleep. I wake up. You know, my mom asks me, are you ready to go today? Yeah, I'm ready. Now, this is hours before I'm going to compete. Right.

Then I compete. And then I'm still intense after the match. And the problem is we're sucking the battery life out of ourselves. And we don't even realize it. And stress will take more energy out of you than a two and a half hour practice. We've seen it over and over. So making sure that mentally, emotionally, and physically, we're recharging our personal battery in between rounds, whether it means some stretching. The Russians are very big with, you know, massaging their own arms, massaging their legs. Bring a Theracane there. Bring the stick that you use to roll out your legs.

Bring a, what do you call it, a lacrosse ball to get your back. So that's like a physical recovery. Mentally, get out of the gym. Go into the cafeteria, get some fresh air outside if it's not too cold, and just get away from the environment. Jordan Burroughs, who is an Olympic champ said, you know, multiple time world champ. He says the more wrestling he watches during the day, the more nervous he gets.

Well, that makes all the sense in the world. When I was in high school and college, my brother was on my team. He was the weight class below me. I would watch him. I would cheer or, you know, a couple of weight classes below me. I would cheer for him. I would yell out things. And my mom once pointed out to me that, hey, I'm wasting all this energy thinking about my brother.

You know, and she would say, your opponent doesn't care about your brother's match. So save your energy and get yourself ready. So not getting too caught up in the team score, not watching a lot of wrestling, having practical things that you're doing during the day to help you relax laughing with friends joking around listening to funny songs or relaxing music watching funny youtube videos in between rounds not just thinking wrestling wrestling wrestling the whole day if you're going to visualize before a competition um don't do it the night before the night before visualization tends to be worrying. Visualize, if you have a tournament on Saturday, visualize on Monday and Wednesday or Tuesday and Thursday.

The night before, watch a comedy. So they have very good mental, emotional, and physical energy management. They do a good job of that. And also they tend to focus on those things within their control, their effort, their attitude, and their aggressiveness. Also top athletes tend to have a very good pre-match routine. Now there's a difference between a warmup and a pre-match routine. A warmup is what you're doing, you know, about an hour before you compete. Your pre-match routine is the 15, 20 minutes right before you step out on the mat.

That's when people tend to be the most nervous. It's very important what you do in those 15 or 20 minutes to get you ready to go. And it's not just in wrestling that the top athletes have a pre-match routine. You see, you know, in golf, top golfers tend to have a pre-swing routine. Basketball players, before they take a foul shot, they have a pre-shot routine. Right? Baseball players, they tend to have the same routine before they, before they, before they get in the batter's box,

same thing with the pitcher. So they're doing things that's going to keep them in the same mindset, the same consistent mindset, every at bat, every golf swing, every wrestling match. So what happens is that the variability goes down. He starts to perform consistently. And that's what all top athletes want, consistency. Absolutely. When you think about what do you see the top wrestlers do in that 15, 20 minutes,

I'm getting a sense that it's going to be focusing on themselves, but what else do you see them do within their pre-match routine? Yeah, we broke it down into four main qualities of a great pre-match routine. The first one is dynamic stretching. So knowing the difference between static and dynamic stretching. Static stretching is just holding your stretch. That's great after practice, after a lift, after a workout. That's not good before a competition.

In fact, studies show that you're 15% weaker if you go for a max effort weight lift, if you do static stretching before that. The neuromuscular response it gives you in your body, it actually puts your muscles to sleep. So that's a physical thing you could do, having dynamic stretches that you do before the competition. Now, how that plays into the mental is making sure you're doing the same stretches every time in the same order. Now, it's not to be superstitious. It's not to build a compulsion. You want to do it. So the routine puts your mind at ease. If I'm thinking about the order that I'm stretching, if I'm working from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, you get my neck first, then my shoulders, then my upper arms,

then my hands, then my fingers. if i'm working from the top of my body down in the same order i know what i'm going to tell myself i know the actions i'm going to take i'm not thinking about the scoreboard i'm not thinking about my opponent i'm not thinking about my coach's expectations or any of that i'm just focused on my stretches so it has both a physical and mental component when i do my dynamic stretching okay so dynamic stretching means movement stretches I didn't say that in the beginning making sure you're moving your body leg movements arm movements neck movements where you're moving through the stretches in a controlled way not in a spazzy way okay so number one is dynamic stretching

number two having some kind of element of fun, something you do that makes yourself smile and laugh before the competition. So you're not taking yourself so serious. Yeah. Big mistake athletes make. I'm guilty. I was guilty of it too. I was always smiling and laughing with my friends in practice and just generally in life. And before a match, I'd put my hood up, you know, frown on my face, looking real mean. I don't want to talk to anyone. I completely changed my personality. That's a major red flag. When you see an athlete change their personality that drastically before a competition, they're probably going to do worse. So what you want to do is be yourself. And since the tension is a little bit higher,

the stress is higher, you're going to want to overcompensate in that direction of having more fun. So do something to make yourself smile and laugh. Some of our wrestlers, they put on dance music and they do some dance moves while they're warming up. Other athletes might juggle. Some of them might joke around with the coach, talk about anything other than wrestling. So have something physical you're doing that reminds you to smile and laugh. So that's number two. Number three, doing some deep breathing. Strongly recommended. Do it when you're in the hole, or what we call in New Jersey, double deck, when you're coming up in two matches. You don't want to do it when you're on deck,

because if there's a quick pin, now you have to run out there. The idea is for about two minutes, you want to think about nothing else than deep breaths, in through your nose, out through your mouth. And it's's just a relaxation strategy if you forget about everything else going on in the world you pick some kind of relaxation image we go over that with our athletes everyone has one relaxation image kind of like happy gilmore go to your happy place right so everyone has that relaxation image and they're deep breathing and they do that for two minutes straight. And they do that with green berets, Navy SEALs and, you know, top athletes. So there's, there's no reason why it won't help, you know, a high school kid or a college kid. I can tell you personally, when I, when I started, when I learned about that, that helped me probably more than anything else. I started being much more calm and I actually would use that strategy in school before taking a test, before a job

interview, before, you know, going up to a girl and asking her out on a date. These are ways I could come before, before speaking in front of thousands of people. If you're trying to calm down, taking those deep breaths really, really helps. So making sure you're doing the deep breathing. And then finally, the fourth element, the fourth quality for the pre-match routine is making sure you're drilling with a partner when you're on deck. So when you're the next match coming up, you want to have some contact with another person. And the reason is usually before matches, kids are just standing around. And that's completely different than practice. So one of the things I've learned with mindset is that you want to make matches

similar to practice and matches similar to practice. You want to try to make live wrestling, live wrestling, right? If there's no difference between practice and a match. So you think you want to mimic, you want to mimic your practice conditions as much as possible because that's physically and mentally what your mind and body are used to. Okay. So before you go live in practice, you tend to, you tend to practice your moves, your drilling. So six days a week,

your pattern physically and mentally is drill, go live, drill, go live, drill, go live. So what do you think you should do before you go live in a match? You should drill. Mimicking the practice conditions. And this is something most wrestlers do not do. And that's why a lot of wrestlers tend to be slow starters. They don't feel good until the second or third period.

Well, because physically and mentally, they're not ready. They're not prepared to do battle. So making sure you grab hold of someone, it doesn't have to be long, but 30 seconds to a minute, practice your moves, make that contact. So, so you're not easing your way into a match. A lot of wrestlers will say, well, I was feeling the other guy out in the first period. You're not feeling anyone out. You want to be imposing your will right away. The best wrestlers, when they step on the line, they're ready to impose their will. They know how they're making contact. They know what attacks they're looking for.

They're not seeing what the other person is doing. So, and in fact, they've done studies on that. My former coach at the University of Pennsylvania, Zeke Jones, he's now coach of Arizona State, Sunkist Kids. And he's, he was actually the Olympic coach a few years back. He did studies on the national tournament, on the World Championships, Olympics. Most takedowns happen within 15 seconds of a whistle start. Either right when the referee blows the whistle in the beginning of the match, there's a stalemate, maybe there's a stall, you go out of bounds. In other words, anytime there's a break in the action and you get back to the middle, most takedowns happen within 15 seconds of starting. So in other words, the best wrestlers are not slow starters. They're ready to go. They're ready to attack.

So the way to get yourself physically and mentally ready to attack is mimic those practice conditions, drill before you go out there and wrestle. So those are the big four things, dynamic stretching, an element of fun, deep breathing, and hands-on drilling when you're on deck. And then two other minor points that we recommend. Number one, keep your clothes on a little bit longer. Wrestlers tend to strip down to their singlet sometimes five, ten minutes before they go out there and compete. And what's happening is your body's cooling down. And that tends to be, we do that because we're, we're nervous. We're anxious to get out there. So it's keeping ourselves calm and reminding ourselves that we're in control. So it's, it's both a mental cue and a, and a physical help that you're keeping your body warm. So that's one thing. Keep your, keep your shirt on up until right before you're going to go out

there. Don't take it off too quickly. And then the other point is when you're warming up, not a bad idea to chew gum. Studies show that chewing gum tends to reduce social anxiety. Just make sure you spit it out before a match. But, hey, I know it's kind of counting change there, but when you count the change, it eventually adds up to dollars. But those are the big four, and then eventually adds up to dollars. So, but those are the big four and then those two little side notes. Yeah, excellent. I could see how just like the

prescription of the, you know, four main qualities of the pre-match routine just could really help, especially high school athletes who have never considered many of the things that you just shared or aren't really thinking about it in detail. They're just kind of like showing up. You know, a few other questions I have for you, Jean. One of the wrestling coaches that submitted a question asked this, so I'd like to see what you think about this. How would you deal with a wrestler who's been injured and what do you typically see, you know, in terms of their reaction to the injury and then, you know, how might you work with somebody who's been injured yeah and we saw this was this is a common struggle among among wrestlers again when you're when you're

banging bodies with the with really tough competition you tend to get banged up and hurt right you tend to have if not injured some you know minor bumps and bruises and that could really wear on on someone's mindset. So we got the importance of that early. We made a whole five-part series on injury recovery, the mental side of injury recovery. We've had a lot of success with it. First things first is that understanding that as the season goes on, most people are banged up. We tend to think, hey, it's only me, right? Everyone else is at 100%, and I'm the only one who is banged up we tend to think hey it's only me right everyone's everyone else is at 100 and i'm the only one who is who is banged up so understanding that most people are banged

up throughout the season also understanding that at one point in time or another in an athletic career most people have some kind of injury right so number one you want to get them away from thinking it's just me. Absolutely. Next, understanding, let's say you are out, you can't compete right now. That doesn't mean improvement stops. So one of the things we do in our goal setting series with our wrestlers, and then we revisit this during the injury recovery worksheets, is going through their action plan.

So breaking down wrestling into about, into about seven or eight different dimensions. So there's technique, there's mindset, there's strength, there's plyometrics, there's your tendon strength, there's rest and recovery, there's nutrition, you know, all those kinds of things, technical strategy. There's all those different areas of wrestling and understanding that just because you broke your arm, you could still strengthen the rest of your body, right? That you don't let, you don't let your whole body. And, and my coach in college, I think he was very good with this. He'd say, just because your left knee is hurt, don't let your right, don't let your right leg

go to crap. Right. So we'd have, we'd ride the bike with one leg. We'd, we'd do lifts with, with one leg, things like that. Um, we do a lot of arm workouts. ride the bike with one leg we'd do lifts with with one leg things like that um we do a lot of arm workout if someone was hurt with their leg they do a lot of rope climbing they would you know they they would still if we're running the the stairs or the stadiums that person would be running it on you know the the three limbs that are working they'd instead of running up it with their legs, they'd be running up it with their right leg and their two hands. So in other words, understanding that physically, you could still improve. You could make strength gains in those different areas. One of the areas I didn't mention was flexibility. You could take this time now to get better with

your flexibility. Take this time now to get better on your technique, watching more videos, talking to a coach about strategy, cleaning up your nutrition. Now you're not competing. Let's spend more time in our nutrition, eating healthier. So now when you come back, you've improved on all these different areas, right? So making sure that they have a plan how they're going to attack this injury. Okay, maybe they could be getting, if their hands are hurt, they could still do stance and motion right they might not be able to grab in a partner what they could do is move around their stance every day so it's doing all these things so they understand still working very hard physically so when they come back in their in their minds they don't say to themselves well i haven't been

training no they've been training very hard and in many ways harder in different parts of their body so again improving their flexibility improving their nutrition working on their mindset been training very hard and in many ways harder in different parts of their body. So again, improving their flexibility, improving their nutrition, working on their mindset. I mean, athlete, sometimes parents will say to me, well, my kids hurt. So, you know, he's going to start competing in a month or two months. So we'll start the mindset then. I say, no, now's the time you want to start your mindset. If your body's not improving at the same rate, now's definitely the time you want to do your mindset training. So even recommending double down on your mindset training. If we have a guy who's only going twice a month or a girl who's only going twice a month, now would be the time to bump it up to weekly. Things like that.

Absolutely. Next, understanding that the injury, if you saw the movie Peaceful Warrior, great sports psychology movie, and great story in general. And it's understanding that the injury is part of your training. It is working on your mindset. And what the top athletes tend to tell themselves when they're hurt, it's the way they view it. It's the way they perceive it. And they all tend to say, it was the best thing that could have happened to me.

So once you can't change the past, your best bet is saying, even if you have to brainwash yourself into it, you tell yourself, this is the best thing that could have happened to me. And this is the reason why. And we, you know, we'll tell them, write down five reasons why this is the best thing that could have happened to you. Okay, maybe you've been training very hard for the past four years, very few breaks. Well, guess what? Now you have a break. Now you could physically and mentally recover. You know, now is you're going to take extra time to work on your mindset, which you might not have done before. You know, if you didn't get hurt, maybe your dad or your mom wouldn't have called us up as mindset coaches to help you. You know, so it's a major blessing in disguise that you got hurt so writing down why why it's why it's a good thing so it's a combination of doing all those things also

thinking about other people who've succeeded despite injury having them actually make a list of all athletes who have um who have bounced back from an injury and there's countless examples both within your sport and and other sports right so So they say to themselves, well, if they did it, I can do it too. Reminding themselves also that most athletes play with a little bit of pain. And now we're not encouraging them to fight through an injury before they get clearance. But once they do get clearance, sometimes they still have it in their head where, you know, they're not perfect. So making another list of athletes who are competing, even though maybe they're wearing a shoulder brace or they're wearing something on their knee, right? So they understand that there are no perfect conditions

and people still can succeed even when you're banged up. Even writing down times, examples of, of times where you were banged up and you were still able to compete well. And the point is, rather than us saying it to them, rather than us telling them, hey, you can do it, it's them building a case for themselves. So basically, they become a lawyer and they provide evidence for themselves why they can bounce back and why they're capable of bouncing back. Because I've done it in the past because other athletes have done it. It's very different when you're saying it to a kid versus when a kid's proving it to themselves. So that's why it's never, mindset training in my mind is never just about talking to them with the lessons. They have to be writing it down. They have to be

seeing this in their own handwriting or, you know, their own typed, you know, they typed it. Just making sure they put it down on paper and they have those examples. They're building a case for themselves. Those are some examples of the exercises we do with them. Combination, combination of all of them that helps. Yeah, go ahead. For sure, for sure. Well, I was going to say, like, I mean, just in that last, you know, several minutes,

you gave so many practical things that coaches and wrestlers can use. Even if people are listening and they're like, well, I don't wrestle. I mean, these things can be applied to any sport and to life as well. So I appreciate you sharing so many tangible things that people can use. When you think about all the things that we covered today, is there a topic, a mental topic or a mindset topic that, that you always talk about with your clients that we have not discussed? Anything you can think of? You know, there's so many, we break it down. So we break it down into eight different, eight different main topics. And you know,

they're not mutually exclusive. Of course, there's a lot of overlap, but we have our foundation level mindset, which tends to be goal setting, mental toughness and motivation. Right. That's like the early stages. And then and then we also have the peak performance side, which is present moment, relaxing under pressure, confidence, clarity and aggressiveness. So, in other words, the reason why we break it down like that, I realized early on when working with athletes, you can't just assume that everyone's at the same place. In other words, if we have a kid who's just starting out the sports, it's only their second or third year, we're probably gonna have to talk about more of the foundational things, goal setting, mental toughness and motivation. Before we talk about relaxing under pressure and confidence, we have to get them hungry, we have to get them fired up, right? Get that passion built.

Now, once you have someone who's already passionate about it, someone who's been going hard for a few years, you might insult them a little bit if you start talking about goal setting or mental toughness. Sure. I don't need this. Right. That's true. So we break it down into those different categories. Excellent. And the two categories would be like the foundational and then what's the name of the second, the second like list? Peak performance. Peak performance. Peak performance. Okay. Got it. And also just as time goes on, the more, the more you, you do this stuff and the more you look at it, you realize that, you know, that originally what we spoke about with knowing ourselves, knowing our beliefs and knowing our values that really becomes the core of all this so we might even if you have an athlete who is who is who is very successful we might not touch on this right away but eventually it becomes

important to ask them who they are what do they believe and what are their values because ultimately everything else winds up becoming a band-aid, right? And the key is keeping things in perspective. We don't want people to just be successful. We want them to be happy also. We don't want them to just be happy. We want them to be successful, so it works together. So knowing yourself, knowing who you are, knowing what you believe really becomes important, and that's really why in the more recent years, the last two or three years, we have a faith-based option of our program. So that's if, you know, we're certainly not trying to push anything on anyone. But if anyone is interested and we see a lot of people around the country, a lot of parents interested in more of a faith-based program, we have that option also.

So that's something so where athletes can really get to the core of who they are, you know, what are their values, what are their beliefs, and, you know, and how that ties into sports, keeping everything in perspective. And what I find is that, you know, I could give people the best psychology answers I can. I could give the best, I give the best, the best ideas that psychology and science have to offer. But if I can't talk about the faith, which I won't if someone didn't want to, if I can't talk about faith, I can only give them 70% of my best. It's impossible to help them fully and give the full 100% unless we're talking about faith also, because it's just that important, if that makes sense. Sure, sure. And do you mean like faith in terms of, you know, religion or kind of describe that to us a little bit more for those people who might be interested in

contacting you about that? Yeah, so we have, so we'll have different Bible verses on the bottom of our, of our worksheets in case anyone's interested in talking about that. Of course, we tell our athletes, if that's something that doesn't concern them, you know, they don't have to pay attention to it. We have that there. So that's available. And we also have, so all of our mindset coaches are former college wrestlers. So in other words, they're not going to speak to someone who hasn't been through the same grind as them. So we tell them if any of the 30 mindset coaches that we have working for us, I would say probably a third of them are also very comfortable speaking about their faith. So if a parent said, well, my kid also wants to, you know, improve their faith, we would match them up with a mindset coach who we consider one of our faith-based coaches also. So again, it's not something we're

pushing on people, but we're making it available for those who would like it. And really, then you see, then you could see the real, not just changes where they're getting a little bit better in sports, that's when you start seeing transformations. Because kids do, kids are smart. They ask questions, especially athletes, because they're working so hard

and dedicating so much time. The natural question is, why am I here? What's the purpose of all this? You know, you're putting so much time, especially a wrestler, which is why we see a lot of wrestlers are very interested in the faith-based program, because they're cutting the weight, they're training way harder than most other sports. So they start to say, well, why am I doing this? Does all this have a purpose? Who am I? Right. And we can, and, and, and psychology being one of the sciences doesn't have answers for those questions because that's something that,

that's a, that's more of a philosophical answer than a psychological answer. Sure. Sure. And do you think like if people are interested in the spiritual component, you know, who they are, what they believe, you know, what their values are. You still might connect with that and talk about that regardless, or do you think that's only connected to kind of the spiritual part? Well, we would, like in mental toughness, we do ask them, who are they, what do they believe, and what are their values? Now that's up to them. And again, our job is not to push that on anyone, but to just ask them, get them to start thinking about it. Yeah. And that would be, and that would be important to me as a, as a school psychologist, because again, things I don't take lightly, substance abuse, peer pressure, depression,

suicide, all these things. It's like some of the key, some of the key indicators of suicide, hopelessness, purposelessness, right? Well, that's what people struggle with. Who am I? What's the meaning of all this? Is there any hope? So in other words, I want them to know whether or not we're going to talk about the safe part of it. I want them to think about on their own, who are they? What do they believe in? What are their values? And in our society being so entitled, so, you know, a lot of young kids being disrespectful and I could do things my own way, sense of entitlement, all this stuff. You tend to, it's kids don't know who they are.

They're not even thinking about that. It's just, hey, let's go on Instagram. You know, if I get more friends, if I have more success, I'm great. And unfortunately, what happens is it's just scratching the surface. We're distracting ourselves from the main issues. So again, we're not going to push the faith-based program on anyone, but we are going to ask them, who are they and what do they believe and make sure they write it down. Excellent. Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally makes sense. Well, Jean, you have given us so much value and insight into the wrestling mindset and how you do your work. I am so grateful and appreciative that you spent the last hour or so just sharing more about what you do to help people learn more about how they can really develop their best mindset. I want to share with you a few things that I really enjoyed about the interview. I loved your discussion about the predator-prey mindset and how you talked about how the predator has eyes in the front and they like to hunt,

whereas the prey mindset, they have eyes on the side and like to hide. I think that was really clear, and I can see how that definitely connects to wrestlers. I also enjoyed how you described that really the best control the controllables. They control their attitude, their know, that really the best control the controllables, right? They control their attitude, their effort and aggressiveness. And for us not to get like wrapped up in the hype, you know, for us to really stay focused on ourselves. And I heard you say many times the importance of being at our best and being our best self and, you know, focusing on yourself and being yourself. And that's what brings out the best in you.

And then I'm just so grateful that you shared, you know, the four main qualities of a routine and then, you know, how you deal with athletes. So is there kind of a final point or a final message you'd like to leave the audience with? And then we can talk about how people can get in contact with you, Gene. Yeah, absolutely. That's exciting stuff. And I appreciate you having me on the show. And I'm happy to answer any questions from you or anyone else. You know, it's my passion. It's my business, but this is my life. You know, and I really believe this is my purpose. This is what I'm called you to do. God put me here. So anytime I could help, I'm happy to do so. Anyone who wants any more information, anyone who wants any more information, you go to wrestling mindset.com.

You know, we've, we've eBooks, we've mid tournament mindset, MP3s. Obviously our best programs are, are one-on-one programs, our team programs.

There's many different options they could do. And again, I would have to say out of everything, all the information is great, but keep them, keep the main focus on who am I, what are, values, and what do I believe, keeping things in perspective. You know, understanding that the sport is just a vehicle to improve you as a person. And I just did, every day I do a different mindset blast on our wrestling mindset, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and it'll be a 10 second tip. And I said, you don't let a day go by without

improving yourself athletically, academically, financially, socially, spiritually, you know, and just every different area. Intellectually, you just don't, nutritionally. So take, taking time to constantly improve and knowing who you are as a person. So those are the, those are the real big things. Excellent, Gene. And where can we find you on Instagram and Twitter and Facebook? Is it Wrestling Mindset or tell us the exact handle we should look for? Yes, everything should be under Wrestling Mindset. Our Snapchat might be Wrestling Mindset without the T because it might not have enough letters that are allowed for that.

But it's either Wrestling Mindset or Wrestling Mindset Without the T. Also on our Instagram, we have Z Winning Mindset, because now over the past year, we've actually expanded to other sports. We're going to be branching out sports-specific programs for gymnastics, basketball, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, all the different sports. So the Blanket Company is going to be winning mindset, Z winning mindset. That's our Instagram also.

But anyone interested in the wrestling specific program, if you Google wrestling mindset, it should pop up. Excellent, Gene. I'm so grateful that you're on today. And I definitely encourage people to go check out Wrestling Mindset. And I've heard quite a bit about your Mental Mondays, and you mentioned that you're starting those again. So I definitely think you're producing some really awesome stuff that is just helping more and more people all across the globe. So

I'm grateful that you're following your passion, Gene, and you're calling and it's great to hear the awesome work you're doing. Thank you. I'm grateful for what you do too. Keep up the great work. Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset. If you liked today's podcast, make a comment, share it with a friend, and join the conversation on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. For more inspiration

and to receive Sindra's free weekly videos, check out DrSindra.com.