High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 196: Learning to Be Present Focused with Brett Haskell, Director of Sport Psychology, University of Nebraska

Episode Date: July 23, 2018

Dr. Brett Haskell, Ph.D., was promoted to Director of Sports Psychology in July of 2018. In her role, Dr. Haskell provides counseling, psychological services, mental skills training, teambuilding and leadership development services for each of Nebraska's 24 sports and more than 600 Husker student-athletes. Haskell works closely with student-athletes to help them develop skills and techniques that enhance personal well-being, address mental health concerns and optimize performance. She also works with coaches to provide team interventions that build student-athlete resilience and grow mental resolve. Dr. Haskell came to Nebraska in September of 2014 after serving as a counseling and sport psychology postdoctoral counselor at Kansas. Along with obtaining her doctoral degree from Kansas in Counseling Psychology, Dr. Haskell provided counseling and performance enhancement training to Jayhawk student-athletes for five years. Dr. Haskell earned her bachelor's degree in psychology from Nebraska-Kearney in 2005 and her master's degree in sport psychology from North Carolina-Greensboro in 2008. While at UNK, she was a member of the Loper volleyball team. Dr. Haskell resides in Lincoln with her husband, Brian, son Ezra and daughter Parker.  In this interview, Brett and Cindra talk about: Why we should “live deep” in our lives 4 levels of living deeply The continuum of mental health How understand neuroscience can help create a culture of thriving (training the 3rd branch of our nervous system – the social engagement system How she worked with Nebraska Volleyball to create a culture of respect where they are calm and focused on a team What it looks like when teams create an unsafe team environment You can find a full description of the Podcast at cindrakamphoff.com/bretthaskell

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 today, ready to listen to 196 with Brett Haskell. 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 field or sport. Now with

typically two episodes weekly, we explore everything related to mindset. So you can learn the secrets from a world-class consultant like today in today's episode. And typically every single week, I provide a short message to inspire you to be at your best consistently. So if you know that mindset is essential to your success, this is the podcast for you. Now this week, I'm just gonna be providing this episode with Brett Haskell, episode 196.

I'm on vacation with my family and my sisters and my parents. We are at the lovely Lake Okoboji in Iowa. So having a great time boating and skiing and tubing. Let me tell you a little bit about Brett and what I learned from Brett after doing this interview. So Dr. Brett Haskell is the Director of Sports Psychology at the University of Nebraska, where she provides counseling, psychological services, mental skills training, and team building and leadership development services for each of Nebraska's 24 sports and more than 600 student-athletes.

So she works closely with the student-athletes to help them develop skills and techniques that enhance their personal well-being, address mental health concerns, as well as optimizing performance. So she works directly with the coaches to provide team interventions that build student-athlete resilience and grow their mental resolve. So she came to Nebraska in 2014 after serving as the Counseling and Sports Psychology Postdoctoral Counselor at Kansas Kansas where she earned her PhD and she worked with the Jayhawk student athletes for five years. So she has a bachelor's in psychology from Nebraska Kearney and her master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. So crazy but Brett and I go quite far back to 2008 where I finished my PhD from the University of North Carolina Greensboro and then I stayed on and taught sports psychology courses. So she was in one of my courses in 2008 so it's kind of fun.

She also played volleyball when she was in college at Nebraska Kearney. So in this interview we talk about a variety of different things. We talk about how we can live deeply in our lives and what that means. We also talk about her work with Nebraska Volleyball and how they've worked to create this culture of respect and this culture of thriving. They're a two-time national champion, so I think you're going to really be interested in what we talk about that related to the Nebraska Volleyball team, how she really helped them create this culture of respect and the culture of them being able to be at their best consistently. We talk about how understanding neuroscience can actually help us create this culture of thriving.

We talk about the opposite and what a team looks like when it creates an unsafe environment. And then we talk a little bit about the continuum of mental health and how she sees mental health. There's several quotes that I really enjoyed from this interview. I'll share with you two of them. First, this is a message she gives her son quite often and she said, courage is being brave even when you're a little scared. I like that a lot. And then later on when we talk about giving tough feedback, she says, quote, if someone had to tell you the same thing, how would you want to hear it? Look forward to hearing what you enjoyed about this interview. You can head over to Twitter and you could tag me at Mentally Underscore Strong.

Or I'm also on Instagram and Facebook at Cinderacampoff. Look forward to hearing from you and enjoy this interview with Brett Haskell. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset, Brett. I am so excited to have you on the podcast. How is your day going? It's great. I'm really excited to be here and been looking forward to this all weekend. I know. I'm looking forward to talking to you and diving more into your work. And it's fun that we've known each other for a long time, but this is like our way of connecting. So I'm looking

forward to just diving in and learning more about the awesome work that you're doing there at Nebraska. I know. It's really cool how things come full circle. Isn't it? It's like, wow. So tell us a little bit about your passion and what you do right now, Brett. So right now, I'm the director of sports psychology at the University of Nebraska. And I think that, you know, while I'm passionate about high performance, my kind of first love and passion

is just general well-being and helping people pursue things in their lives that allow them to create meaningful experiences and connect deeply with others and with the things that they're doing on a day-to-day basis. So really learning how to live their values in a very present-focused way. So I get to do that both through the mental health work that I do here at Nebraska, helping people achieve high wellbeing. I see sort of mental wellness as existing on a continuum or a spectrum, anywhere from psychological distress or psychological illness, all the way to optimal performance. And I meet people kind of wherever they're at on that spectrum. And sometimes that changes week to week or day to day. And so just helping kind of people create deep and meaningful

experiences in their lives. And right now that happens to be with elite athletes. Nice. And so we met each other first when I was finishing up my PhD at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and you're working on your master's. So kind of fill us in, in terms of, you know, how you got to, to Nebraska. Yeah. So, you know, I, it was funny ending up at UNCG because I was a college student athlete. I was a volleyball player in college and, and a psychology major. And I knew that I wanted to go into clinical work, but while I was doing research as a undergraduate, I got really interested in the area of sports psych and high performance and the experiences of athletes. And at the time,

there was no sports psychology in the state of Nebraska, which is where I was a college athlete. And I had really limited access to anyone who knew much about it at all. So I decided, you know what, I really care about this. I'm really interested in this. I find that the stuff that I'm studying is really engaging for me. I should try to like at least get a master's in this and see if it could turn into anything else. So I did a little bit of research and none of my professors knew anything about sports psychology. They didn't even think that was like a real, a real thing. But they were like, we trust you, Brett, so go for it. And so I got connected with Renee Newcomer-Aponil, who was at UNCG, and applied to that program and decided to

kind of take the brave step of moving halfway across the country and giving it a shot and finding out more about what it was about. And it ended up being such a good experience for me being there. And I learned a lot about how to help performers perform at a high level and especially the applied work within sports psychology or performance psychology. But I also figured out while I was there that I was pretty interested in the whole person and global well-being and that it was really hard for me to just kind of stay in the lane of performance. And so with Renee's nudging, I decided to get my PhD in counseling psychology. And she actually, this is, I mean, it's really funny how things work out, but she was an undergraduate at the University of Kansas. And I, at the time, was interested in

researching positive psychology constructs like optimism and hope and things like that. And she was like, well, Kansas is like one of the foremost leaders in researching positive psychology. And they happened to have hired, I think at the time, one of like only four full time sports psychologists that were employed within athletics. And so she kind of pushed me in the direction of the University of Kansas. And when I was interviewing for the Ph.D. program, I met with their sports psychologist at the time. Her name was Megan Brent at the time, and now it's Megan Herity. And she and I just hit it off right away. And then I hit it off with the faculty there as well, and it just seemed like an absolute perfect fit.

And when I got there, I was fortunate that she was extremely overwhelmed with work and was really open to kind of creating some training opportunities for me, which led to me being actually in athletics halftime for four years during my graduate training, getting mentored by her and then working with student athletes around mental health and performance. Yeah. So it was really cool. I mean, just kind of, I, you know, I'm counseling psychologists are big into vocational psychology and we had a really great vocational psychologist at the university of Kansas and he taught us about planned happenstance, the theory of planned happenstance. And I would say that's probably really true to my vocational story is that it's just sort of like being aware and being open to the possibilities at the time

that are sort of revealed to you. And even if it's a little scary or a little uncertain, and that's kind of paved the way. So then after my, I did my formal internship at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, which was an awesome experience. They really kind of lead the way in terms of training around cultural competencies and working with diversity, which is a really important passion of mine. And so that was just an awesome experience. And then after that, Kansas created a postdoc for me to apply to. And I came back to Kansas for a year with the intention of staying, actually. I was pretty happy at Kansas, but then some more planned happenstance and a position opened at the University of Nebraska as they were kind of following suit with a lot of other Division I schools at the time, creating in-house positions

for licensed psychologists to provide mental health care and then also performance interventions and really afforded us the opportunity to kind of come back home and be close to family, which was really great. And then this has just ended up being such a positive experience for me. So really a fortunate, yeah, a fortunate pathway. It doesn't always turn out that way, but I feel like I've, you know, been pretty lucky. Well, and one thing I heard in just your journey is that you're continually following what you're passionate about, what was interesting to you and, and listening and letting your mentors kind of guide you along the way. So pretty cool. You know, Brett, what I always ask people at the beginning, before we kind of dive into your work is I'd like to hear a story about a time that didn't go so great for you and maybe, maybe how you might

describe a failure. And I want to ask you that question kind of at the beginning, because I think we can listen to people on the podcast and wow, you know, they've done so many things. They have this degree, work with these high level athletes or performers or business people when really they're just like us, right? That we failed along the way. So tell us a little bit about a time that you failed and what you learned from it so that we can learn something from your experiences. Yeah, I was actually talking to my partner about this question over the weekend. And I said, yeah, I have to talk about a failure that I've experienced. And he goes, well, parenting. And I kind of laughed at first, but the reality is that it absolutely has been

one of the most meaningful things I've ever experienced in my whole life, but also like a constant opportunity to learn from my mistakes and from my struggles and to try to be authentic and real about when I've not done it well so that I can hopefully get better at it. And I think, you know, my first, I have two children. I have a two-year-old seven year old. And my first child definitely rocked my world because I was sort of this achievement oriented person who could kind of exert my will over things. And, and I think had this illusion of control in my life. And, and when I had my first child, I think it really forced me

to come to grips with my lack of control and the amount of uncertainty in the world and the things that I could do nothing about, you know, and yet try to show up on a daily basis in a genuine and authentic way around those struggles. And it was probably one of the first times where I had to be really vulnerable with people in my life to get the support I needed to do it successfully too. I think that, you know, often when we're sort of goal-driven and achievement oriented people, we can kind of hide behind a wall of having it all together. And having my first child sort of just broke right through that wall and forced me to say, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know how I'm doing. I don't know how to do this. This is so hard. And I need somebody to just come sit with me, you know, in the middle of the day because I'm so overwhelmed and sleep deprived and I don't know what else to

do. And, you know, there's no book that I can read to improve my abilities here. And there's, I mean, there's plenty of books out there, but it doesn't teach you what you need to know to kind of figure out how to engage in that constant growth that's necessary to be a parent. And so I think, you know, it's funny at the time I was getting immersed in Brene Brown's work about seven years ago, and all of her work was around vulnerability, authenticity, and like showing up in our failures. And, and at the same time, like God planted this little person in my life to like, give me opportunity to work on that. So, you know, it really revolutionized, I think me living more congruent with the things that I was trying to teach people about every day. And I couldn't just talk the talk anymore, I actually

had to like walk it. And so, you know, I would say that parenting continues to be one of my greatest sources of failure, but in the best way possible, where I learn, my children learn, we become more deeply connected. And I am constantly reflecting on how to be present focused, how to stratify my values and figure out, am I living my daily behaviors in a way that's consistent with those values? I'm constantly, you have to balance all the time. And it's a real challenge, but also I think it's a great opportunity to learn more about yourself and about this thing we call life. That's true. I heard so much of myself when you were talking about that story. I have two boys, myself, nine-year-old and an 11-year-old. And parenting is very, very difficult. So for those

non-parents out there and for those parents out there, I think they can feel what you're talking about, right? And like still coming back to like your authentic self and like being genuine. And so maybe Brett, tell us a little bit about, you know, like what is at the foundation of your professional philosophy? Like I think about, you know, you've used kind of those words a lot and you've used wellbeing, but tell us, you know, like tell us just a little bit more about what is your philosophy in terms of your work? Yeah. Well, I think that, I think that I see that whatever you're engaged in on a in on a daily basis, whatever behaviors you're engaged in as being part of shaping who you are, right? So I try to help people live more intentionally. And I would even call it trying to like live deep in life, whether that be in the sport that they're participating in or other areas of high achievement or just in being a friend or being a partner or being a parent, how do you show up? How do you be authentic? How do you be genuine? How do you clarify what's most

important to you or what your core values are and then live in a way that your behaviors reflect that? Because I think that we can talk all day long about what we care about, but we show what we care about by what we do. And so trying to help people be more self-aware of what they would like to care about and then developing behaviors that are congruent with what they would like to care about. And then helping them develop strategies that enable them to achieve that. So just because we've decided these are the kind of behaviors I want to engage in doesn't mean behavior change is easy. It's quite a process. And so helping them figure out how do I? How do I develop the kinds of relationships and cultivate an environment that's going to support the things that I care about and me being living

those behaviors on a daily basis? So I think it's all about sort of living deep. And I kind of have like four categories of like how to live deep that I think are sort of the essence of it. But it looks a little different for everyone. Nice. What would those categories be? Tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah. So I think first of all is just self-awareness. So knowing your values and then having the self-awareness to reflect on how aligned your daily behaviors are with your core values. And I really see this as the core of authenticity is, you know, do I do what I say I care about? And then making changes, it's because we're not always going to be perfect. I screw up every day in some way with respect to my values. But I have the awareness to kind of say,

yeah, I wasn't living my values at that moment. And can I and I can make a change to align more consistently with my core values. Secondly would be I talk a lot with my clients about radically accepting their humanness. So vulnerability and failure are part of how we're wired as humans. And if we fight against that constantly, it distracts us from the opportunities that those experiences offer us. So in our vulnerability and our failures, sometimes we do our greatest learning. And if we fight against that all the time, either in our self-talk or the way we treat ourselves or the way we treat others,

then it prevents us from achieving the kinds of connection, growth, and meaning that those opportunities afford us. Third, I would talk about being compassionate. First, we have to be compassionate with ourselves by accepting our humanness, and then being compassionate with others by showing grace and forgiveness and understanding so that we can more deeply connect with the things we're doing on a day-to-day basis and the people we're doing those things with. When we can live a compassionate life, I think that we're better able to connect deeply, whether that be with a task or with a person. And then I think that that actually, so I would get into the neuroscience of that a little bit, because I think that that actually grounds us in a part of our autonomic nervous system that helps us feel the most safe taking risks and pushing ourselves into

those uncomfortable spaces that we need to be in if we're going to keep growing and getting better at things. And then the fourth thing would be to live in uncomfortable and uncertain spaces so that we can be true to our values. So I see that as sort of the essence of growth and development. In a college environment, that's largely what we're focused on. We've got kids here for four years and we're trying to help them figure out how to be their best selves and to become their best selves while they're here. And so kind of really thinking about how do I develop the tolerance to make the hard decisions that allow me to create a meaningful life that's congruent with the things that I care about. So I know I mentioned this to you before we came on the air, but one of the things I try to help people pay attention to is the things that scare them.

Because a lot of times those things that scare us are exactly the things we need to pursue. So I mentioned that I get a little scared doing these kinds of interviews and I experience a little hesitation. But often I have to kind of step outside that sensation that makes me want to avoid and say, okay, what's my body telling me right now? And if it's aligned with my values and I feel a little scared, it's very likely I should do it because it's one of those uncomfortable spaces where I can probably grow and get better. One of the phrases I use with my kids a lot is trying to teach them about courage. And I tell them that courage is being brave, even when you're a little scared. And I think that that's a really true thing when it comes to developing a growth mindset and figuring out how to overcome those sensations that make us want to avoid things.

When jumping into those things is the very thing that's going to help us achieve our desired end result. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I love the four levels of living deeply. And I like what you just said about courage is being brave, even when you're a little scared, right? It's not the absence of being scared or fear, but it's like doing it regardless of how you're feeling. So Brett, like back us up a little bit and tell us a little bit about, like, just give us an overview of your work at Nebraska and, you know, how you might use a concept like this.

Yeah. So we, we work with college-age students. So our, you know, our population are high-achieving elite athletes who have really performed at the very highest levels in their youth sport experiences, but are still in the age range of being 17 to 23, maybe 24 at the most. And so what we do here is our first priority is always mental health care. So just we know that student-athletes are no different than the general student population. One in four of them will experience a mental health disorder during college. So a quarter of our student-athletes are going to experience a mental illness. And we're here to first and foremost kind of identify those and create an environment where there's access to good services and to support so that they can work through those things. And then second to that,

we also, again, approach them on that continuum of care from, you know, mental illness and what we would call psychological injuries, because we like to use the injury model as a way to destigmatize sort of mental health treatment, but also looking at optimal performance. And so some of what we do is also working with individual athletes to build skills to perform in a mentally tough way on high pressured situations, and also to try to maximize their potential. So just enhancing their ability to grow and develop while they're here. Development is a big part of what we do, which is probably different than folks who work in like professional sports, but we don't expect all of our athletes to come here ready to perform. We often see athletes who maybe won't start out,

you know, playing right away. We'll even take a redshirt year and that whole entire year or a couple of years are focused largely on development. So we're kind of thinking about things from that standpoint as well. So a lot of what we talk about because we have that developmental focus is increasing our athletes' ability to tolerate discomfort because we see that growth, development, and high achievement are all about living in the learning zone. And the learning zone is inherently uncomfortable for them. And so we have to get them to sort of override those sensations again from their autonomic nervous system that tell them like, this is bad, this is dangerous, we need to get out of here. And to become more and more comfortable seeing those sensations as moving them in the right direction and helping them live on the

fringes of their abilities so that they can continue to get better. So that's a big part of kind of the work we do here at Nebraska. Oh, that's excellent. And tell me, or just tell us, you know, as those people are listening, tell us a little bit about like how you might do that. Tell us a little bit more about like, what is this learning zone? You know, how might you, you know, help athletes identify it? And then what, in your opinion, helps them kind of embrace that so they can kind of live on the fringes of, you know, what they're doing and constantly learning and growing? Well, we're emotional creatures. So a lot of it for us is helping them better understand what emotions are, where they come from, and then to more accurately make decisions, regardless of what the sensations that they are experiencing as

part of those emotions are. So we talk about emotions as being one part sensations, so physiological sensations, one part cognitions, or what we think about those sensations, and then one part behavior, how we behave. And those three parts interact and affect one another. So if I try something once, it's a new skill and I struggle with it and I experience embarrassment or I get butterflies in my stomach and I feel hot all over because my autonomic nervous system is responding to that. And then I immediately decide that I'm not capable or that's not a good thing. So now I'm making attributions about what those sensations are telling me. And then I engage in behaviors as a byproduct of that. So then I start to avoid doing that thing. So then I just want to do the

things that make me feel good or cause sensations that are pleasant. And often that prevents us from learning and growing and developing because we continue to do the things we're already good at and we avoid the things that we're not good at and we can't get better. So a big part of what we do is trying to help athletes improve their composure, their nervous system composure, so that they learn to keep themselves in an optimal zone to be able to tolerate the discomfort of those learning spaces or the learning zone. So during high risk situations or high threat situations, if I'm interpreting a situation as high threat, then my body's going to take over at a pre-conscious or subconscious level. And I'm not going to be able to do anything about it. It's going to affect my decision making. It's going to affect my behavior. And in a high pressure, like high game type situation, it's hard

to override that. And so what we do is we do a lot of bottom up approaches on the front end of performance to enable our athletes to control their nervous system better and maintain composure more effectively so that they stay in the driver's seat in their own bodies, so to speak. So the things that we kind of tend to focus on with that are sleep, nutrition, reducing physiological sources of stress, so getting massages, doing cold tubbing, a lot of sort of rest and recovery, like how are we being active in our rest and recovery, both from a physiological standpoint, but also from an emotional standpoint. We use a lot of mindfulness practice. So emphasizing learning to be present focused, nonjudgmental. So we're not creating additional stress, right? So I talked about self-compass to something or taking anything away from it, just seeing it as it is so that we don't, I don't know, create more stress and strain as a result of

our own appraisals, self-appraisals. So learn to be present focused, non-judgmental and living in the direction of our values. But then we also take really systematic and kind of systemic approaches to managing composure from a team standpoint, because there's some pretty good neuroscience to support how our relationships with those around us in high pressured situations affect our autonomic functioning, and then either enable us to perform at a high level and be motivated and goal directed and engaged with the task at hand, or cause us to disengage and kind of freeze up. Yeah. So Brett, tell us a little bit more about how you might use the neuroscience of kind of optimal performance to help teams kind of push their limits and really be at their best.

Yeah. So our volleyball team is one of the teams that we've done a lot of that with because so I've used, there's a theory called polyvagal theory that was developed by a guy named Dr. Stephen Porges. And it's really interesting stuff. He talks about a third branch in the nervous system. And he talks about how there's the sympathetic side of a nervous system, there's the parasympathetic side, and then there's this part that he calls the social engagement system. And what he's found is that that third branch is unique and exists only in mammals, and that it's sensitive to auditory sounds and facial expressions. And he's coined that neuroception. And he argues that neuroception causes the identification of social threats or social safety, which then affects our sympathetic activation. So the

likelihood that we'll go into fight or flight. And so if you think about this from a team standpoint, and we work with teams here, even in our individual sports, they're all part of a team and working towards team goals, is that that team environment and your coaches, that there's a ton of neuroception going on in the context of that team. And whether or not I perceive that team as a safe space or a threatening space is in many ways going to dictate what my nervous system does under pressure. And so while you can work on your individual nervous system and try to gain more composure, controlling your own autonomic functioning, the social system is also another place where for

some of our athletes where it's hard to manage their individual nervous systems for a variety of reasons, the social space is another place we can hack into that and enable them to remain calm and in a state of control under pressure. So for volleyball, what we did was we used mindfulness training as a way to create a socially engaged system or lifestyle among the team. And so from the very beginning of like, so I'll use last year as an example, they had a really fantastic year, came in not expected to do very well because they'd lost a lot of talent the previous year. They'd been a two-year Final Four team, and they'd won a national championship two years before, and then had a lot of turnover.

And so from the very beginning of the summer, we worked on identifying behaviors that would create a culture of respect and engagement with one another. So we're all committed to the task at hand, and we're going to treat each other with behaviors that show that commitment, that common commitment. And they had a bunch of team sessions they did throughout the summer that they voluntarily chose to do as a group, showing their own commitment to this. And a lot of it was about communication, rules for behavior, about how they wanted to treat each other. And then what that evolved into over the season, we did weekly mindfulness sessions that were focused on what kinds of things they could anchor themselves down into in high pressured moments to feel calm and focused on their identified goals as a team. So one of the goals they identified as a team was to be with each

other for each other. So they wanted to be all about this team and not the outside influences. The second goal was a process-focused goal of point by point. They just wanted to get better every point. And so then through mindfulness training, we identified specific sensations they could focus on, specific thoughts they could come back to, and specific behaviors they could come back to that would be engaged with the mission. And then we would do visualization or imagery, practicing them doing that. And if you talk to them down the stretch, they would say that anchoring themselves down into those behaviors, along with some breathing techniques to maintain composure, really helped them stay in that point-by-point mindset.

And not only that, but feel really purposeful with one another as they work towards their goals. And they ended up winning a national championship, which was a really fun way to kind of cap off their experience of making that commitment. How outstanding. I was doing some research about this bread, and one of the articles I read about one of the athletes

and what they said, and they said the sessions helped them throughout the season, stay focused on moments, not big goals. I thought that was a really cool way of saying it, like kind of this point by point mentality, the idea of winning the national championship, but you know, how are we going to show up? And what I'm also hearing is like, how are we going to show up with each other? You know, so could you give us some examples of, you know, what they, maybe it's not them or, but you may be other teams you've worked with. What do they say? Are there, there are ways that they want to show, you know, support for each other? Is it like high fives? Is it, you know, smiles? Like what, can you give us kind of some ideas of how they actually might, you know, focus on with each other and for each other.

Yeah, absolutely. So we try to ground everything in observable behavior so that we can really evaluate whether or not they're doing it. And they like that because, again, if we're feeling driven, it's hard to know how to, it's hard to make good decisions about how we're behaving if we're feeling driven. Because some days I'm not going to feel like being nice to you, but I need to be nice to you anyway. And that's just the reality of relationships and being with another person 60 hours of the week, you know. And so some of the things that they worked on were eye contact. So we're going to make good eye contact in practice with each other, with our coaches and on the court in games. Another one was physical touch. So they started to become aware that when they connect with each other through physical touch. So we use their optimal moments

as anchors, like, okay, in our optimal moments, what are we doing differently? And then let's do that in our non-optimal moments. One of the things they found in their optimal moments was that they physically touched each other more. They had tighter huddles. They were giving more high fives. They were hugging. high fives. They were hugging. You know, there was more physical touch. Smiling at one another and celebrating, even when, you know, it wasn't necessarily a moment that they would typically have a big celebration, to just try to take joy in those small moments more and to show that to one another. We talked about posture, how we hold our shoulders, how do we hold our head, feedback. Like, so one of the things that this team did was they decided they wanted to give

feedback more consistently. So they created, they had a feedback wall in their locker room, and they had anonymous cards that were readily accessible in there. And I think that twice a week they made a commitment, like twice a week they would write feedback to somebody. And it wasn't like it had to be to everybody. We wanted it to remain authentic and genuine, but that they had to consistently notice specific things that someone did and identify a specific example of something that person did that was consistent with the team values and what the team was working towards and make note of that. So these are all kind of behavior-focused things to anchor them down in

how we, what the values of this team are and how we're going to live those values out in practice, in games, on the road, in the locker room. Yeah. Yeah. So I can, I can tell that this team was really like socially engaged, kind of like what you said in terms of that third branch of our nervous system. And, you know, maybe the opposite of that is like a threatening space. What have you seen in terms of teams? It might not be at Nebraska, but what do you think the opposite is in terms of teams that aren't very psychologically safe? Yeah. What do you see them doing that's very different from this Nebraska volleyball team that was, you know, clearly high performing? You know, I think that the unsafe team environments, I think one of the main things I see, and this is again in a college population, and I

couldn't tell you if it would be different in a, maybe you could speak to that in a pro environment, but I think there's a lot of talking behind people's backs. And generally, we know when people aren't willing, we, so the volleyball team here they're right on the top of my head but we've got other teams that do these kinds of things but they have a p2p rule so if you're not willing to say person to person then you probably shouldn't be saying it to anybody else on the team either and i think the teams that i see where they have sort of an unsafe environment whether it's overt or covert because i think sometimes there's covertly unsafe environments where we talk about the right things but we don't live it. I think the covert would be

we talk about each other behind each other's backs, and we don't treat each other to our faces the way that we do when you're not around. And what happens, that creates a culture that's where we are tearing each other down. And the reality is, is when we're trying to achieve something difficult, we need to be able to give each other real feedback, even when that feedback is hard feedback to give. So it's not that we're, we don't emphasize, I don't emphasize being nice to each other all the time. I don't think that when you're trying to pursue excellence,

that it's ice cream and puppy dogs. We don't feel good all the time, but we have to be able to have the hard discussions. And when we really care about the same thing and we respect each other, sometimes we don't have affectionate feelings to each other, but we can respect each other and care about the same things and the same goals, then we can have those hard conversations and we're willing to do it face to face. The teams that can't do that, they often have very subversive ways of handling conflict. And that, and they know it. They know, because they know if I'm talking to so-and-so about Susie or Johnny, then Johnny is also talking to somebody about me, probably. So they're aware

that's going on. And that, so then you think about that neuroception that we were talking about earlier, where there's those subtle social influences of, you know, how we hear things and what the tone of our voice is and what the facial expressions are. And as human beings, even when we can't consciously describe why we feel off with someone, we know we feel off with them. And as soon as that's happened, we, our nervous system has been hijacked. And now there's a greater opportunity that under pressure, we're going to crack. And, you know, when you think about the teams that can give feedback, even though it's tough, right, even though it's maybe not nice and sugarcoated, what is the way that you think that the best teams give feedback to each other? And I'm, I'm thinking like, as people are listening to this, I mean, obviously we're talking about high performing athletic teams, but this is high performing teams in business, right? You can think about like a high performing team is your family, you know?

Yeah. These same things, they're related. So what do you think, Brett, in terms of like, how would you suggest somebody give feedback? Well, I think you want to first think about if someone had to tell you the same thing, how would you suggest somebody give feedback? Well, I think you want to first think about if someone had to tell you the same thing, how would you want to hear it? So it goes back to the compassion. And this is why I think cultivating compassion is so important to living deeply, is that you have to be able to take the perspective of someone else and consider

how what you're going to share is going to affect them. It doesn't mean that you should avoid it just because it's going to feel a little hurtful in the moment, but is there a way in which you can share that information that helps that person know you're sharing it because you're invested in their growth and development? And it's going to be a little different for every person. For some people, it's going to need to be one-on-one and outside the sport environment and you're going to have to shape it with here's some things that I've seen you really working on and doing better and then here's this one area that I'd like to talk to you about some people you can be more direct with and more real and it needs to happen in the you know in the practice environment because

that's what they respond to best but I think you got to really be able to step outside of how you're feeling about whatever that person's doing consider what do they need to hear in order for them to continue to get better and make that your motivation. I think when the motivation becomes helping others get better, helping your team get better, when the motivation is outside of yourself, then I think often we approach those in a much more compassionate way that helps people move in the direction of what's important to them. Super good. So if someone had to tell you the same thing, how would you want to hear it? Really good. You know, Brett, you said something earlier about like this top-down approach to emotional grounding versus like a bottom-up. Tell us about the difference and how that might connect

with kind of what you're saying about composure earlier and just kind of helping people and teams be high performing. Yeah. So when I think about a top down approach, I'm thinking about sort of conscious cognitive interventions or changes that we make. So thinking about the four strategies that I talked about for living deeply, those would be top-down strategies. So thinking about what are my values? How am I living my values? Where are the places that I'm not living my values? What do I need to change? What are some thinking strategies that I can use to make changes in my behavior? So anything that would be a conscious thinking decision. Bottom-up approaches are things that are going to affect our performance but are outside of our conscious awareness. So physiological changes in our nervous system that will affect our decision between being alert, ready, excited, engaged, but also calm and composed, that's kind of that sweet spot in our nervous system. A lot of whether

or not we can achieve that under pressure happens long before we step foot on the field or the court. It happens because we live a lifestyle of wellness, of being mindful of our emotional recovery, being mindful of how much strain we're under emotionally and psychologically that week and implementing strategies. So if we think about it, if you're a strength and conditioning coach and your team engages in a really tough workout that week, you're really mindful of periodization, right? So you're going to start the week early in the week with the hardest workouts. And as you get closer to the game, you're going to reduce the difficulty of the workouts and you're going to do cold tubbing and you're going to do normatex and

all these other recovery strategies to make sure your muscles are ready to go when it comes game time. I think about managing our nervous system and composure very similarly, is that we have to have things that we're doing throughout our week to maintain emotional and psychological recovery. So if that's practicing mindfulness regularly, or if that's, you know, taking walks or spending time with a person that fills your gas tank back up, it could be engaging in small hobbies that are really meaningful to you or, you know, connecting with something spiritual that's important to you. But you have these regular emotional and psychological recovery tools that keep your nervous system in a healthy space.

And I cannot impress enough upon people how critical their sleep is for that. And that's one of the big things we focus on in a college population because we have so much sleep deprivation. And it's almost impossible when sleep deprived to get your nervous system into that optimal zone for high performance. And are you thinking eight to nine hours of sleep or, you know, what's the recommendation in your opinion? Yeah, so we have some different, we have some different thoughts about that. For most college students, 9.25 is actually in that age range. 9.25 is sort of the amount of sleep necessary for adequate recovery consistently. We do a ton of sleep education, teaching them about the different things that happen during sleep, understanding how to use naps appropriately,

because they would like to think that if I slept five hours last night, then I can just get the other four during a nap in the middle of the day, which is not actually true. So yeah, we like to shoot in that nine-hour range for our age range. But the reality is everyone's a little individual. And the best way to figure out what you need is to go to bed at a normal time when you're not sleep deprived and then let your body wake up whenever it does without an alarm. And that's approximately how much your individual body needs for recovery. And there's some evidence that for high performance, getting what's called extended sleep or sleep extensions, so getting like 10 or more hours can actually aid in improving accuracy. So yeah, there's some evidence even getting more sleep is beneficial. Brett, I think you and I could have talked like five hours today. I know. Like things I could have asked you more in depth about, but is there anything, you know, besides what you've shared with us today that, is there anything else that, you know, is central to

how you do your work or anything that I didn't ask you that you'd like to, you know, just tell us a little bit more about? We kind of covered the gamut, really. I think the most important thing is figuring out if what you're doing today is meaningful to you and if it's leading you in a direction of your values. And if it's not, and then really taking a moment to pause and reflect on why not and what you can, what changes you can make to make your experiences and your behaviors more congruent with your values. I think we can tolerate uncomfortable things or even bad days when we know that we're living purposefully and intentionally in a way that is consistent with the things that we care

the most about. So I think that's what I emphasize the most in my work. Awesome. And if people wanted to learn more about some of the concepts that you talked about today, you know, like the social engagement system or, you know, like the top down, bottom up, like what would you tell us in terms of the resources that you might suggest? Yeah. So the books that I really like for that, there's Bessel van der Kolk has a book called The Body Keeps the Score, which is a really interesting read about using these strategies with trauma victims. But I think there's a ton of application for elite performance. And then Stephen Porges has a book called Polyvagal Theory. It's a collection of his papers, but he's got a lot of peer-reviewed journal papers out there where you can get a summary of polyvagal theory that's probably easier to understand. I wrestle with that book every time I pick it up. And then the other thing is some of the mindful compassion work by Paul Gilbert, I think is a really nice way to

apply those theories to interventions and how we actually kind of learn to live that way. And you know, but there's so many more big time college sports and the athletic departments that are hiring people like you or people like me, like sports psychologist, you know, what do you think is contributing to this? What's your thoughts on that? You know, athletes are humans, humans are complex and we struggle and we experience pain and yet we do amazing things. We do incredible things and we accomplish and, you know, with every generation, we seem to accomplish more and more and discover more and more. And I think we're just recognizing that you cannot separate your brain from your body

and that they are one unit working together and that the brain is an organ. And I think, you know, I think the evolution of neuroscience has helped a lot in helping people understand that talking about our emotional experiences and understanding better how those influence our decision making and our performances is a really productive thing to do, not a soft, squishy thing to do. So I think that, you know, as we try to take care of the humans in this world, I think that there's a push towards putting professionals in place who support that. And I think, you know, the NCAA has been a driving force in college athletics. So Dr. Brand Heinlein, the chief medical officer for the NCAA, has really

made it his personal mission to improve access to mental health care and college athletics. And that's driven a lot of these positions. Super good. Well, if people have any questions for you, Brett, how might they reach out to you or connect with you? I think email is probably the best way, but I am one of those poor email responders. So if I don't respond in 48 hours, email me again. That does not offend me at all. It's just one of the places where I have to be self-compassionate. So my email is bhaskell, H-A-S-K-E-L-L, at huskers.com.

Brett, I'm so grateful to reconnect with you and to just share with the audience and the people who are listening a little bit more about how you do your good work. And I want to share with you a few things that I got out of your interview. So here are a few of my notes. I loved your discussion about kind of living deeply and in your four levels. And it made me think a lot about myself and just continuing to grow. You also, I liked what you said about your, the advice you gave to your kids about how courage is being brave, even when you're a little scared. And then our conversation about safe spaces and what those look like, teams and businesses. And the last thing is I enjoyed what you said about giving feedback and just using this

as a guide. You know, if you had to tell someone or if someone had to tell you the same thing, how would you want to hear it? So Brett, I'm grateful that you shared your wisdom with us today. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Thanks for having me. This was really fun. Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset. If you like 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.