High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 217: The Power of Mindfulness, Dr. Amy Baltzell, Former Olympian, Speaker, Clinical Associate Professor at Boston University

Episode Date: November 3, 2018

Amy Baltzell is a Clinical Associate Professor and Director of the Sport Psychology Specialization (of Counseling) at Boston University. She is a Certified Mental Performance Consultant with the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (CMPC).  She is a former US National (1989, 1990) and Olympic (1992) Rowing Team member, member of the All women’s America’s cup Sailing Team (1995), and Head Varsity lightweight rowing coach (1998-1999) at Harvard University. Amy is the author of 3 books: The Power of Mindfulness, Mindfulness and Performance, and Living in the Sweet Spot: Preparing for Performance in Sport and Life. Her research focus is on mindfulness and self-compassion in sport. Specifically, she is studying the impact of Mindfulness Meditation Training in Sport, an intervention designed to help athletes improve concentration, adapt while competing and increase their tolerance of distracting thoughts and emotions. Amy received her bachelors from Wesleyan University and earned a masters and doctorate from Boston University. She taught the first course in Sport Psychology at Harvard University. In this interview, Amy and Cindra talk about: Her experience as an Olympic and elite athlete The definition of mindfulness The benefits of practicing mindfulness Why self-compassion is important Her research on mindfulness and her mindfulness protocol How we can practice mindfulness You can find a full description of the Podcast at cindrakamphoff.com/dramy

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 episode 217 with Dr. Amy Botzel. Now, the goal of these interviews is to learn from the world's best leaders, consultants, athletes, coaches, all about the power of mindset to help us be high performers in our field or sport. In today's episode,

I interview Amy about the power of mindfulness. Now, Amy Botzel is the clinical associate professor and director of the sports psychology specialization at Boston University. She's a certified mental performance consultant with the Association for Applied Sports Psychology, and she's also a former U.S. national and Olympic rower. She was on the America's Sailing Team and was also a head varsity lightweight rowing coach at Harvard University. Now, Amy is the author of three books, The Power of Mindfulness, Mindfulness and Performance, and her first book, Living in the Sweet Spot, Preparing for Performance in Sport and in Life. In today's episode, we talk about mindfulness. She's done quite a bit of research

on the power of mindfulness, has developed a mindfulness protocol that consultants could use in their work. Amy also received her master's and doctorate from Boston University. In this interview, Amy and I talk specifically about her experience as an Olympic and elite athlete. We talk about her definition of mindfulness, the benefits of practicing mindfulness, why self-compassion is an essential part of mindfulness. She describes her research on mindfulness and her mindfulness protocol, and then how we can each practice mindfulness. Two of my favorite quotes from this interview was when she talked about how we could use mental skills from a

mindful approach. So listen for that. And then she quotes Peter Harberall and says, attention is the psychological currency of performance, and we can put our attention where we want it. I've been working on having Amy on the podcast for about a year now, so I know that you're going to love this one. So without further ado, let's bring on Amy. Thank you so much for joining me today, Dr. Amy Bossel. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to talk to you. Such an honor. Very cool to be Botsel. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so excited to talk to you. Such an honor. Very cool to be with you. Thank you. So Amy, I know, you know, most of your research has been in mindfulness and you've been studying

in the field of sports psychology for some time. Give us a little bit about your insight, like just give us a little bit more about what you're passionate about and tell us what you're doing right now. What I'm passionate about? Let's see. You know, the thing I'm probably most interested in, it probably came from my own experience as an athlete, is helping high-level performance deal with anxiety and be able to optimize performance. It's something that our textbooks are full of theories about how performance is related to anxiety or energy. But in my, from my experience as an applied practitioner, I found very little, the few answers and how to really help somebody with that. You know, as an athlete myself,

if someone said to me, just, you know, just relax and don't worry about it. Just get your head back in the game. You know, I would, it would have been like someone saying to me, I don't understand you and I have no way to help you and just be quiet, you know, and you're, you have to be alone and miserable inside this experience. And so I found that I kept, I gravitated those kinds of athletes to me in my private practice. And I found that, um, that I had to kind of expand out and look for solutions to help with help with this. And I stumbled into mindfulness and this idea of being able to be aware of what you're experiencing and not having to change it. And the other thing I'm really interested in is this idea of bringing, you know, helping people tolerate those feelings that arise

through really self-compassion and kindness to self, to allow them to get themselves, you know, focused back in and have the courage to get back into the game. So kind of the big picture is I'm really passionate about helping people with getting over that anxiety and fear and dread that can just destroy performance after all those years of practice, you know? Absolutely. And you were an Olympic rower. You are also on the sailing team, right? Yeah, I was on the U.S. rowing team for a few years, Olympic team in 1992.

And then in 1995, I was part of the All-Women's America's Cup sailing team out in San Diego. Outstanding. So how do you think your experience as a high-level athlete, how do you think that informs, you know, your study of mindfulness or what you do in general? Oh, that's a great question. It influences me a lot because I think that, you know, you can be lulled into thinking when people are great athletes, um, are super achievers that, that they, you know, have it together or, you know, they, they can handle things. And I think that, you know, I, I won more,

um, national championships and I can, I actually need to go back and count how many times, you know, how many of those medals I've won. But, you know, I was someone who suffered a lot and no one knew, you know. So I think that I know that performance anxiety is the most prevalent challenging issue that athletes face. And yet, and we need answers for that. So that is what's driven me. Wow. Can you give us an example of either yourself as a high level athlete when you experienced anxiety when you didn't really have any answers or? school and had won every race in college and she started running pro and all of a sudden you know she started losing races and she had never experienced you know fear or anxiety before she and she had no skills to deal with it she had incredible sense of self-loathing about it you know

and sleepless nights and feeling you know like totally worthless and you know she'd only lost like two races she wasn't that far behind you know and so um helping someone like that learn to normalize these feelings that arise and then um giving her some strategies of learning how to tolerate the feelings so you know we can avoid the feelings and shut down and quit. That's easy. But to stay with it and to stay engaged, it takes courage and it takes skills to tolerate those feelings and to get your, and be able to get your focus back in the game. Absolutely. So, you know, tell us a little bit about why you decided to study sports psychology in general to start with. That's a great question. So I, you know, I was like just an athlete, most of my twenties. And, um, and I was, uh, you know,

the U S team and training for that for five years post-college and then worked a little bit and then went on to the America's cup. And I found myself at, um, like 29 years old, you know, and I remember after the, after the Olympics, I kind of went into like a slight probably post Olympic depression. Like what do you do? Nothing's quite as meaningful or worthwhile as that kind of intense commitment and passion. And I remember during the America's cup sailing team thinking to myself, like, I must have some goal.

I must have some thing to work toward when I finish this. If I don't, I don't, I don't want to spin out again. And so remember that you're like, I would like to talk to hell, you know, America's cup. It's very, you know, helicopter pilots and TD personalities and, you know, cameramen and you know, I would talk to everyone about their job because I was just, I need to find something to try. Okay. And, and we had,

we had one sports psychologist and it was, was it didn't go well let's just say like that and I thought to myself I don't want to do that but then um in the spring we had Terry Orlick came aboard oh wow and you know he he would fly in for Ottawa I mean it's far away to San Diego he'd fly in for a couple days here and there and he had a very powerful impact in my experience where you know I had like a lot of things about how I thought my teammates should train and how they should be and irritation and frustration with that. And it was very distracting to my own performance. And he just gave me a few cues or I think we just talked privately maybe twice.

And it totally changed my experience. I went from being kind of like a difficult, irritating teammate to being a really great performer and part of the team in a positive way. And it was because of his intervention. And so after the America's Cup, he said, hey, why don't you come to Ottawa and come to this conference on performance excellence? And that was in 1995. And so at the end of the America's Cup, I got in my little Honda and I drove by myself from San Diego to Ottawa. And I remember sitting with Ken Ravizza and him and some other people. And I ended up going to school in Boston.

But I remember in that crowd thinking, like, gosh, I can't believe these are my people. You know, these are my people. This is where I want to be. So, and then, you know, since then I've just been involved in the field. That is cool that you got introduced. Yeah. From, you know, to the field from Terry Orlick, a legend, Ken Revisa, another legend. And you're sitting at this conference, right? Haven't studied it yet, but among the greats.

How cool is that? And they had me in as like, you know, I was like on a panel as an Olympic athlete and professional athlete. And I was like, wow, this is, this is really cool. Yeah, that's awesome yeah so tell us specifically because now you're a professor there at Boston University tell us why why did you like why mindfulness and why what what is your journey been to study that and specifically yeah good questions um so thank you for that I guess it's twofold one was I was really searching

for answers outside of the field to help my clients with performance anxiety because you know sometimes you know having like using you know visualization scripts or self-taught cues or you know any of these things can be quite quite helpful but there was some group of athletes i was not able to help as much as i would have wanted but i like that so that was kind of happening i was not able to help as much as I would have wanted, but I liked that. So that was kind of happening. I was really kind of exploring outside the field. And at the same time, this is 10 years ago, my sister got, this is kind of sad, got diagnosed with breast cancer, and she had only 18 months to live. And she said to me, you know, why don't you come do this

mindfulness training with me in this six or eight week program? And at the time I thought mindfulness, I have no idea what that is, but for myself, I'll do anything, you know, I'll go sit with you and close. I didn't know what it was. And I became quite, you know, I'm so grateful to her to introduce me to that. I became very interested in it for myself personally. And, and then I started, I started realizing that a lot of the work I was doing with the athletes who I didn't really know what to do with, you know, I was kind of using more my instincts. It was becoming like a, almost like a mindfulness approach organically, you know, because if we can't change how things are, then let's just like accept how things are and work with it the best that we can, you know. So that's really, that's where it started. I have to do say it's 10 years later, my sister just rode a hundred mile race on a bike.

Like she, she's amazing. So she's, she's, you. So she's still very much here. Oh, my goodness. I thought you were going to tell me the opposite. So isn't that amazing? She loves to eat. She wants to live. And I'm guessing mindfulness helped her just cope with that, right,

and the symptoms. Yeah, I mean, she's been a meditator for 20 years, a yoga practitioner, and eats clean and lives joyfully. And yeah, she definitely is an outlier in that for sure. Wow. Yeah. So you got introduced to mindfulness through your sister.

And you know, when you kind of say that there's a group of clients that you didn't, like they were, it just wasn't helping like the self-talk and imagery, traditional kind of mental skills. What, can you give us a sense of like who these types of clients were? Yeah. They tended to be, you know, Olympic hopefuls, you know, individual athletes, you know, like whether elite or professional who had performance anxiety, you know, people who would, you know, like they would, they would, and I had a number of clients with like that stuff would somatize.

Like it would be so bad that they were just like their bodies would like not function, you know. And so trying to figure out these dramatic cases. Got it. Okay. So how would you as a researcher and a writer within the field of mindfulness, how would you define what mindfulness is? So, you know, it's interesting. I think that we put more on mindfulness than it really is. I mean, mindfulness is kind of simply awareness of what's arising in the present moment

with a particular quality of awareness, meaning being aware of what's arising with some kind of at best curiosity and interest and at worst tolerance, but still not avoiding the truth of what's arising. Got it. And in 2016, I just, I just pulled this up before we talked. The definition I have in that mindfulness and performance book is a quality of awareness that objectifies the contents of experience internally and externally.

So what's happening inside ourselves and outside ourselves, promoting greater tolerance, interest, and clarity toward that content. So academic way of saying, you know, being aware and being able to be willing to stay present in what's really arising. Okay. So staying present in what is arising. Yep. So I think the way that we should kind of talk about this

is like what studies have you done that would show that mindfulness is something we should practice, right? Yeah. But then I'd love to talk more about like how do we even practice this? So I know that you just wrote a book, Power of Mindfulness,

which describes the studies that you've done. So tell us a little bit about this book and the studies that you've conducted that you highlight in the book. Great. So the book is The Power of Mindfulness, Mindful Meditation Training for Sport. And this book came out of, I'd say about eight years ago, I think it was the first study we did in collaboration with Josh Summers, who's been my colleague in this area of mindfulness and performance and um the first study is with with a soccer team and he he started the first intervention it was like a basic mindfulness intervention you know six one-hour sessions basically introducing what mindfulness is and and making um making it so it, the idea of meditation, formal meditation, how

that translated to sport practice and sport performance. Since that first study, I've added this idea of self-compassion, like how to offer yourself kindness when you're really suffering. So not so like you, and not to like be kind to yourself so you like go easy on yourself, but kind of yourself so you can like stay easy on yourself, but kind of yourself. So you can like state, so you don't just give up. So you can give yourself what you need so you can stay engaged in what you're doing. And so over the last six years, I think we've run this myself and other colleagues around

the country have run this, maybe about 10 athletic teams. And we've done pre-post measures with it both interviewing the athletes and coaches have done their interview intervention as well and pre-post measures quantitatively and we're getting consistently that the intervention increases mindfulness increases self-compassion increases distress tolerance to me that gives us some data on um and the other thing that i've done the studies is i have, we've always interviewed the participants after the intervention, like, you know, how has this been helpful to you? And usually it might take a few months for, that's interesting.

When we run the study over six weeks in this really tight study, sometimes the data doesn't show in terms of quantitative changes. But when we run the study over three months, we consistently get changes in all those measures I just mentioned. Okay, got it. So tell us a little bit more about like the this. So you said improves mindfulness and decreases stress or increases stress tolerance, right? Yes. Tell us a little bit about the sessions and what those might be composed of just so we can maybe get ideas of how do we actually practice this so how how we set it up so every session um it goes like in 30 minute cycles and so there's about 10 minutes of education

about so say the first session we talk about just basically what is mindfulness and offer examples of athletes that are mindful and mindless and how that can impact performance so through the entire program we're making connections to how everything we're talking about and all the practices we're offering, how that relates to their particular sport, you know? So then there'd be 10 minutes, say, of a mindful meditation breathing practice. And we'd actually do the meditation with the group.

And then there'd be about 10 minutes of Q and A about their experience, their comments, their frustrations, what worked, you know, and then how this could be applied to practice or performance that week. And that would be the rhythm of things. And there would be, you know, learning how to be, say, in meditation, learning how to be aware of thoughts and things that are arising and learning how to label them to create some distance between the thought and feeling and the person's experience. So they'd have a little more control over how they wanted to respond instead

of just automatically reacting. So there's about, there's 12 different exercises or meditation practices we use throughout the program. So again, the rhythm is, you know, a little bit of talk about the concept practice and then discussion of what

they actually went through. And then each week they're encouraged to practice 10 to 20 minutes a day on their own. Outstanding. So if people wanted to look for this and get more information about it, you tell them The Power of Mindfulness would be the best book. Yeah, thanks for that. So in The Power of Mindfulness, I would present this at conferences and I would get a lot of people interested in the, in the, what I was doing. And they say, please send the protocol. And I felt really uncomfortable sending out like a five page protocol or eight page protocol

for a mindfulness intervention, because it's not a standard sports psychology intervention. And, you know, unless you've had many years of mindfulness meditation practice and have some experience in the field of sports psychology, I feel like unless you have much more in-depth explanation, it'd be very difficult to teach it, you know? And so I wrote, it's like a 50-page protocol, I think, and about 200 pages. And it's like, I've written a trade book to explain like, what is mindfulness? What is self-compassion? How do these relate to performance? Here are examples, you know, what's meditation? How do you meditate? What's a natural way to meditate? What's a natural process of meditation? What are some myths about meditation? So my goal,

I plan that book is when you read through that 200 pages, anyone who's just like brand new to it, have a good basic understanding of what is mindfulness, what is mindfulness meditation training, and how can this help with performance and how to teach it and how to teach it. Outstanding. And what would you see, what would you tell people in terms of maybe even if it's clients that you work with, like at least one thing I see is that especially high level athletes, I think pro athletes specifically think that, man, if I beat myself up more, that means I'm going to play better. Right.

Like if I'm harder on myself, cause I have really high standards and And, you know, and sometimes maybe especially male athletes might say, well, I don't, what is this self-compassion? Yeah. Tell us about, yeah, like, what do you, why do you think we should practice self-compassion more? And how is it linked to our performance? I love that question. And I want to tell you that in those studies we had, it was more males and females. And there was no difference in terms of impact of increase of self-compassion or self-report to the value of self-compassion by the athletes versus the female athletes. So that's my own work. The thing is, it's not that we need to be kind to ourselves every time we're suffering. I'm talking about, I guess it's like a tool that you can use when it's necessary.

So if being hard on yourself helps and motivates you, good. You know, if it helps you stay focused and be more intense, good. If being harsh on yourself debilitates you and shuts you down and you tend to quit, then it's time to consider maybe a different way of dealing with, of how react you know and i think what a lot of guys would do is they would say i don't need self-compassion but they would they might just shut down and quit and if you in my opinion to to stay engaged when you get you're getting past or you're you're losing or you're disappointed in a teammate how they're playing to stay engaged and really still fully give it sometimes you need um a little bit you need to be able to offer yourself maybe what you need in that moment

to keep going you know absolutely and so i think it's like to me it's like sport sport appropriate context specific uh kindness to self you know so it might just be bringing an image to mind when you stage fighting no matter what or it could be a it, it could be a keyword. So I, what I like to do is use this mental skills, but from a mindfulness and self-compassion approach, you know, so you can use a verbal, verbal cue or an image that reminds you of something that is soothing. It could be like a, I'll give you an example. I work with a fencer, a young fencer. She was one of the top fencers in the country. And she was unbelievable, but there'd be times when, particularly when her coach could sit with her, you know, and be on the strip next to her, be next to her on the strip. But there's times when

her coach would go coach other people. And she found that there were some performances where she was feeling like very uncertain about the outcome outcome that she would get kind of like waves of lack of self-confidence and fear and she would um it would it would impact her ability to fence well and so we talked about what's that like to feel that you know what's what's going on i asked her you know what would you might most need to hear in that moment that would help you kind of get back in and get back in it you know move back on the strip and give it your all and um she talked about she just wished her coach was there i said okay well if your coach can't be there can you can you imagine what your coach might look like to being there next to you and she's like yeah and can you

imagine what he might say to you and she said yeah he'd say you got a girl and i said though how would he say it to you and he said okay he would be like you got a girl i said okay so in that moment like let's do the next time you go out you know the competition across the country um when your coach isn't there and you're feeling that feeling imagine imagine him there and imagine him saying those words to you in that tone you know and that is an act of self-compassion by that athlete for herself because she's knowing what she needs to hear. She's knowing what she needs at that moment to give herself the courage to get back and fight, get back in and perform. Amy, how would you tell us to use mental skills from a mindful approach? Like that's one of the things I just heard you say. Tell us about

how as a practitioner we can do that because I think that's maybe the first time people have ever heard it stated that way. Yeah, that's a great question. So how I see it is there's a big difference between formal meditation practice and taking a mindfulness approach to the field. So when I think about formal meditation practice, which I have myself in my own daily practice, you know, there's lots of ways to meditate, but I'm going to talk from a mindful meditation approach, which is maybe the most common way these days. So you have some type of focus, right? And so the point of the meditation is, well, the point is to develop your ability to pay attention and to have poise. But that's, we'll talk about that in a minute. But so you're meditating, say on your breath. And then what happens is everyone, this is the

meditation cycle, your mind will become distracted, right? And that's okay, until you notice your mind has wandered. And then in that moment, what do you do, you, you could you could relax, or you could just make the choice to bring your attention back to the point of meditation which is the breathing there's no mental cues needed there there's no visual nothing's needed to do there except notice and bring your awareness back to where you've chosen to place your attention so that's great and you think how does this translate to the field and this is where the mental skills come in. So let's say I'm a tennis player and I want to have a mindfulness, I want to be a mindful, I want to bring mindfulness into the tennis court to help me with performance. I'm a tennis player. I'm a little hotheaded. Someone calls the ball out when I know it's in.

I feel outraged. I feel, you know, typically my typical reaction is take my racket and smash it. I'm just so mad. And being mindful, this is like, this is smash it you know i'm just so mad and being mindful this is like this is how it goes so like playing tennis is the focus on the breath mind wandering and meditation is like the urge to throw the racket because you're full of anger then when you notice there's an awareness of awareness of mind wandering a notice awareness of wanting to throw the racket, at that point, you got to bring your attention back to playing tennis, like you bring your attention back to the breath. How do you do that? Well, if you're an athlete who has like an anger problem,

sometimes you just can't just bring your attention back, you know, you might need a little prompting or help. And that might be when you have like a pre-planned verbal cue, like, you know, staying, staying focus matters, or it could be any kind of cue that might help that person regain their focus back on the court, just next play or the ball or see the ball or whatever that verbal cue might be. And it's in the service of bringing their attention back to performance, which is part of the mindfulness process. I wish I had a chalkboard for you for this one. Yeah. Well, I follow what you're saying.

I like the way that you're explaining it. So I think that's a great contribution for us just to help understand it that way, that we can use mental skills from a mindful approach so because this is the thing i guess a more simple way of saying is like so when you instead of just being reactive like i'm mad i throw the racket in that moment of of choice when you're aware of like i have a choice and how i'm going to respond to you in that moment of choice you can use visualization a mental cue, a breath, arousal regulation, exercise to help you so you can make the choice that aligns with your values and what you want and the behavior you want as opposed to just reacting. Absolutely. Absolutely. So how would you tell us, right, as practitioners or as athletes, coaches, business leaders, CEOs, whoever's listening, how would you tell us,

you know, that we could practice mindfulness more often? What do you, what do you think? How do we get tangible with that? Yeah, it's a great question because, you know, I personally believe deeply in a mindfulness practice for myself. I know that I'm much more, over the years, I've become much more calm, less reactive, more maybe understanding of myself and other people through this practice. So it's almost like when you meditate every day, it does change your brain. Sarah Lazar's research with brain plasticity, we know that over time with practice, your brain starts to automatically respond in a different way, you know, but everyone doesn't want to meditate, and I respect that.

And everyone, it might not be what they resonate with. And so I think sometimes just understanding, it's just educational, understanding that when you have emotional reactions or thought patterns, if you understand you don't have to believe them, you don't have to do what they say or react the way the urge is to react, that you have a choice to notice what's arising, and you have a choice to respond the way you want to. To me, that is a mindful approach.

Meditation helps with that. Walking meditation helps with that. If you're a runner, just maybe taking a portion of your run to choose to not actively engage in thinking and allow thoughts to come and go without actively engaging in them can be a more informal way of practicing mindfulness. So I think that you can formally practice it through meditation, sitting, through body scans, through walking meditation, through mindfully washing your dishes, to mindfully eating.

I mean, mindful eating is, if you ever tried it, just to be present to what you're experiencing, like what you're tasting and what you're smelling and how your body really feels and the body signals that say that's enough after like the 10th bite, it can be shocking. So there's lots of places to practice it if you want to. Excellent, good, good. And the power, I think what I heard you just say It can be shocking. So there's lots of places to practice it if you want to. Excellent.

Good, good. And the power, I think what I heard you just say is that you felt more calm, more understanding. And what are the other benefits that you see like in your clients or other people who practice mindfulness? Yeah, I think, I mean, there's a lot of benefits. But I think that for sport, some of the things why it's so important, number one is when you practice mindfulness meditation practice, it's a way of having more control over your attention, where you place your attention. I know Peter Hobro from USOC will say, attention is a psychological currency of performance. So that is such a powerful idea. So the idea, it doesn't matter how you feel. It doesn't matter what uninvited thoughts are coming in and out of

your head. Like I can't do it. I'm not good enough. I'm not strong enough. I'm not fast enough. I'm not fit enough. I'm not, you know, all these things. Thank you for sharing, but you still can put your attention on what you're doing. And I think that we sell the myth that you have to be confident. You have to feel a certain way or think a certain way to have a great performance I don't believe that's true I believe that you have to place your attention where it needs to go moment by moment and you're lucky if it feels great and you're just human if it doesn't sometimes you know so mindfulness training can help you with strengthening your ability to pay attention to what you choose to pay attention to number one

number two meditation practice or mindful approach helps you with poise, meaning it doesn't really matter what you feel, anger, frustration, joy, irritation, boredom. No matter what you're feeling, you still can choose to behave in the way you choose to behave. And so meditation practice can help with that. And the third thing I think can help with a lot is learning how to notice like things are constantly changing you meditate on physical sensation you're gonna notice kind of constant change you know there's things constantly changing and with meditation practice and that kind of deep understanding you notice that when you go out in the world you know the team that you played a year ago is not the same team the teammate you're

going up against is not the same teammate you know know, it's like, if you're willing to be present in what's really happening, you have much more degrees of freedom in terms of performance. So those are the things meditation can do very specifically for performers. You know, and then generally, you know, it really does help with less reactivity.

You're not thrown on by your emotions so much and you can find yourself, at least I do, much calmer, much calmer. So tell us, Amy, what your meditation practice is. Yeah, tell us about that. Sure. So my meditation practice is, I would say, on average, five days a week, and length of practice is probably, on average, 20 minutes a day. And it's varied over the years. I've been practicing now for about 10 years, and it varies. But it's sometimes much longer practice and sometimes, you know, a few weeks with no practice.

So that's just the truth. I like – I mean, I will share with you with what I do, but what's most important with anyone trying meditation is to experiment until you find a practice in a way that works for you. Because if it works for you and you sort of look forward to it the next day, then it's something that will serve you. If it's something you're suffering through and you're doing it because you think you should be, you hate it, probably a good idea to try something else. Because it's not about suffering. It's not, you know, we're not monks, you know, unless, and we're not monks, but so you're

trying to find something that would allow you to practice consistently and for me i i love just a sitting practice with a mindfulness meditation approach which and i like open awareness practice where i allow anything to arise to arise in my mind and in my emotions and my body and um i just notice it until things quiet down and then it's quiet. That's what I do. That's awesome. That's awesome. And so what would you tell, like, I'm just thinking about a client that you might work with or people who are

listening who say, okay, man, if they, this sounds really good. What would you tell us in terms of maybe we can do a part a part B question, but how would you tell us to start yeah i mean this is great i've been teaching a class for the last eight years where one of the it's a it's a course where it's a six-week intensive and one of the assignments is to practice meditation every day for six weeks and that's um and i've learned a lot about teaching people about meditation the most important thing is just committing to sitting down and trying every day. The second thing, and there's wonderful now, there's all kinds of head space,

there's all kinds of wonderful applications now that you can use. And another thing that's really important that I've learned is that people think that when you meditate, you sit down, your mind's supposed to be totally blank and you're supposed to be totally comfortable. And that is just a terrible myth because the truth is that we all, as human beings, our minds are active. And what you'll notice when you sit down and meditate is your mind will be active. And that's normal. And it's not bad. It's just part of the meditation process. So there's kind of active mind. And so you just let those thoughts and feelings arise and you put your attention where you choose to put it.

Just like in sport practice, there's lots of worries about what the coach thinks and teammates saying, what the boyfriend's saying, what is for dinner and how your body feels and all these kind of thoughts that are distracting. But then there's paying attention to what you're doing, like passing the ball or putting the ball in the hoop or, you know, playing defense, whatever it is. So it's very normal that the mind is active. And it's also very normal the mind wanders. And so you kind of notice, oh my gosh, my mind's wandering. You think, oh, I'm so bad at this. I'll never be a good meditator. And the truth is everybody's mind wanders. I bet you even the Dalai Lama's mind wanders and you notice it. And what do you do with it? You just bring your attention back to

your breath or back to whatever the point of meditation is and that entire process all of that is meditating meditating is not just when your mind is quiet meditating is when you have the intention to have your attention on the breath meditating is mind wandering meditation is noticing your mind wandering and meditation is deciding to bring your attention back and meditation is having your attention on the point of whatever you're meditating on that is all meditating when my students realize that it's like everyone can take a big it's like it's like expecting the athlete to be in flow all the time right impossible it's not realistic you can it's not realistic you know there's times when you feel off and you don't feel good and you feel stiff and you feel irritated

and you feel distracted and then it's choosing good and you feel stiff and you feel irritated and you feel distracted. And then it's choosing to bring yourself back to doing the best you can to be engaged moment to moment and stretch yourself, right? That's the best we can do. And so, but there's a lot to be learned in the meditation process cycle. Like when your mind wanders and you notice it and you feel irritation, you bring your attention back. That's just like the basketball player who misses his third shot, feels angry and notices and makes the choice to bring attention back to basketball instead of throwing a fit. It's the same thing. Absolutely. So do you think

when people are getting started, like an app like Headspace is helpful, you know, to get them so they know what to do? Absolutely. So I think think going like that i think even like the deepak chopra oprah meditation those are good they're wonderful anything doesn't get you to try so i think often guided meditation if you can go to a local if you have on a local meditation center zen center insight meditation center um to get some instruction but absolutely i think that the i mean i use i think it's called insight meditation timer. I think that's what it's called. I use that. It's really nice. It just keeps track of the minutes I meditate every day and has different, you know, guided meditations if you want, which I don't use, but they're there and there's sounds that you can listen to as background if you need to, you know? So I think just use whatever you can use that is compelling

to you. And then there's different types of practice, mindful meditation practice, also closely aligned loving kindness meditation can be really good too. Like Metta, it's called Metta. To me, it doesn't matter what you practice, except if you can, whatever you choose, try to stick with it for a few weeks at a time and don't jump around daily, you know, the best you can. So you can kind of just, I think getting familiar with maybe one type at a time can be quite helpful. Okay. And what if people are like, well, yeah, I don't know about the meditation part, but I want to work to practice, you know, mindfulness throughout my day. What would you tell us in terms of like how to get started with that? You know, it's interesting, you might have heard

Ellen Langer, a social psychologist at Harvard. She doesn't, she's been a mindfulness person for the last 40 years and she doesn't advocate meditation. So not requisite. I think that you can choose different, if it was me, I would say just choose some aspect of your daily life where you're going to intend to be mindful to practice it. So you can practice what it's like to choose to pay attention to something, have your mind wander, notice it, deal with the frustration of not being good at it, bring your attention back. Because that cycle is just what you need to be doing on the court or in performance, you know. So I would say, try to take a shower mindfully, try to eat mindfully, try to walk from the, you know, from your house to your car mindfully, any of it can be quite helpful.

And do you find kind of the same impact when your clients, you know, choose to be mindful over meditation? Or what do you see in terms of the outcomes? You know, it's really interesting. It's like, maybe, you know, most of my clients don't meditate. And so that's my thing. So I would say that as a practitioner, my approach is very much a mindful, self-compassion approach. And when I think of interventions, when I work with my clients, that is like the framework. I don't even have to tell them that, you know, but that's the type of interventions that I would offer, learning how to be aware of thoughts and feelings that are arising before performance, during performance, after they're problematic, how you want to work with them, making a plan to work with them that would help them learn how to tolerate the feelings

and stay focused on what they choose to pay attention to. Absolutely. Yeah. And, and Amy, what have you seen in terms of the age? You know, I'm just thinking about how maybe some young kids blow up, like you were talking about tennis player, might blow up on on the court or you know maybe young kids at least what i see is like they they do have high school youth they have high levels of anxiety you know so what do you you know when you're thinking about meditation or mindfulness whichever you mean we can talk about both and what do you see in terms of the age range that this helps you know the answer is we don't know. Research, we don't know enough in research yet to answer that question. Certainly at the college level and up, they can meditate, you know,

if they choose to. Anecdotally, I know my kids are in, you know, I actually won't talk about it. I think it probably depends on how it's taught. Yeah. And it has to be developmentally appropriate. That's what I would say. Absolutely. And you have to be developmentally appropriate. That's what I would say. Absolutely. And you'd have to apply it with kids.

You need to have it so it's structured in and brief. So if I was going to work with young kids, I probably wouldn't do more than five minutes. For sure. Well, Amy, is there anything that we have missed, that when you think about what's important to your work and what you have discovered within your research or in your practice, anything that you would add to what we've talked about? I think that a lot of people

do suffer in sport with the pressure. Yeah. It's trickling down. It's not just the college athlete or the high school athlete. And as you said, Cinder, it's also trickling down to youth sport. And everyone can suffer from it. It's not just the kids on the edge. It can be the most dominant best athletes as well, you know? And so I think that the more we can normalize that, that anxiety exists and we, everyone has it, it's okay. Or many athletes have it and that not try to change it, but to try to

work with it and to give yourself what you need in those moments so you can have the courage to keep going. That message would be, I would love to see that message spread. Absolutely. And to use the mental skills to support that too. And let's bring it together. We don't have to have an either or conversation. You can have a mindful, self-compassionate approach using mental skills. Yeah, I really like that you said that because I feel like many times that they're either or. It's like you either practice mindfulness or you do mental skills, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I think that's a really important perspective just to bring into the field.

And as people are listening, Amy, I know you have three books. One, Living the Sweet Spot, which is actually how I first got introduced to your work. And then, yeah, yeah, very good book. Mindfulness and Performance is your second one. And then your recent one, The Power of Mindfulness. So tell us a little bit about each of those three books and, and the, the audience for each of those. So as we're thinking about how we want to learn more about this, we can be thinking about who we are and which one of these would be best for us. Oh, it's so nice. So Living in the Sweet Spot was a book that to me is intersection of sport

psychology and positive psychology. You know, how do you, how do you optimize performance through, through being able to also be in a place where you actually want to choose and be there. And I see that as like a, it's a really useful trade book for I would say collegiate athletes up. The power of mindfulness is a compilation of 23 invited chapters from experts from around the world on mindfulness and performance from different perspectives. And so you've got like Gardner and Moore and Peter Haberle. And there's a whole guy, I guess there's, there's a whole range of excellent authors that are giving their best there. So, but it's definitely like a graduate level or someone who is more of like interested in the intellectual details of things. And my most

recent book, The Power of Mindfulness is for people who want to learn how to bring mindfulness meditation practices and what you can benefit from that into the sporting world and how to do it. It's really a how-to book. It was written in collaboration with an outstanding mindfulness meditation teacher who, you know, he's gone off to ashrams for three-month silent retreats, and he's really the real deal. And together we created this to try to help athletes efficiently learn these ideas so they can bring it to sport and performance. Love it. Love it. Love it. Well, if people want to reach out to you, Amy, how might they do do so either like on social media or any other way that you'd like us to connect? So sweet. Just, just the old baltzel at bu.edu.

That's the best way. Okay, excellent. And what kind of final advice would you have for us that are listening? So anything that you would end with? Yeah, end with, if you even have a little inkling of interest, try the meditation. And when you meditate and your mind wanders

and you think you're bad at it, just know that you're not that it's just the natural and normal part of the meditation process um cycle and that having the courage to sit down and oh the last thing is you know we also get a lot of wisdom from mind wandering when your mind you're meditating your mind's wandering the content of that can actually be quite informative in terms of it gives you a insight into maybe the choice you've been making and how you've been living your life and maybe some insight into how you, what you might need to do to make some changes to make improvements.

So it's not called insight meditation for nothing. You can certainly get insights from those thoughts that arise. So it's not just wasteful to have that mind wandering a curve. It can actually be quite, quite helpful. Outstanding, Amy. Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. You impacted thousands of people today. So thank you so much. Thank you, Cinder. Take care. 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 Cinder's free

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