High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 224: The Enemy Gets a Vote in the Outcome

Episode Date: December 21, 2018

Dr. Doug Chadwick serves as the mental skills coordinator for the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club.  He designs the curriculum, facilitates the mental skills education, and teaches the Rockies major league and minor league players and staff about the mental skills necessary for optimal performance under pressure.  Chadwick’s responsibilities cover hundreds of professional athletes and include seven professional teams in the United States and two in Latin America.  Chadwick earned his BS in management and systems engineering from the United States Military Academy (West Point) where he was also a multi-year letterman and starter on a nationally ranked Army football team.  He was commissioned as a field artillery officer and served in the Army for over 20 years before retiring as a faculty member at West Point.  While serving in the Army, Chadwick earned his MA in applied economics from the University of Oklahoma as well as an MSc degree in kinesiology and sport psychology from Cal State Fullerton. After completing his PhD, Doug returned to West Point as the director of the Center for Enhanced Performance, a comprehensive student services center. In this interview, Doug and Cindra talk about: His unique journey to the field of sport psychology What the best do differently How various “Army slogans” are incorporated into this work in the MLB Ways to get back in the moment and why that’s important The importance of recovery in high performance How the best learn from failure You can find a full description of the Podcast at cindrakamphoff.com/doug

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 thank you for listening to episode 224 with Doug Chadwick. 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 typically with two episodes weekly, we explore everything related to mindset. You can learn secrets from a world-class consultant, like in today's episode, or listen to me provide a short, powerful message to inspire you to be at your best consistently. Now if you know that your mindset is essential to your success, then this is the podcast for you. Today, I look forward to introducing you to Dr. Doug Chadwick. He serves as the mental skills coordinator for the Colorado Rockies Baseball Club, where he designs the curriculum, facilitates mental skills education, and teaches the Rockies, both the minor and major league players and their staff, about the mental skills education and teaches the Rockies, both the minor and major league players and their

staff, about the mental skills necessary for optimal performance under pressure. So Doug's responsibilities cover hundreds of professional athletes, including seven professional teams in the United States and two in Latin America. So as you could imagine, he is busy. Doug earned his bachelor's in management and systems engineering from the United States Military Academy, West Point, where he was also a multi-year letterman and starter on the nationally ranked Army football team. He was commissioned and served in the Army for over 20 years before retiring as a faculty member at West Point. And while serving in the Army, Doug received two different master's degrees,

one in applied economics and the other in kinesiology and sports psychology from Cal State Fullerton. So we talk a little bit about his unique journey to his career. You know, after completing his PhD, Doug returned to West Point as the director of the Center for Enhanced Performance, which is a comprehensive student services center and is now the mental skills coordinator at the Colorado Rockies. And we talk about various different things in this interview. We talk about his unique journey to the field of sports ecology and how his Army work and his experience in the Army and his experience at West Point really informs his work with the MLB now. We also talk about what the best do differently, how the best learn from failure, how they recover, and why the importance of recovery is essential to high performance. And we also talk a little bit about his different army slogans, how they are

incorporated into his work in the MLB, and ways that we can really stay in the moment to help us do our best work. So my favorite quote from this interview was this one. Towards the beginning of the interview, Doug says, the best bring their best consistently. They can bring it when it matters. I hope you enjoyed this interview with Doug. Would love to hear from you. They can bring it when it matters. I hope you enjoyed this interview with Doug. Would love to hear from you. You can always connect with me on Twitter at mentally underscore strong. The full show notes from today's episode where you can find tweets or quotes from today's interview, you can head over to cindracampoff.com slash Doug. That's C-I-N-D-R-A-K-A-M-P-H-O-F-F dot com slash Doug. Enjoy today's interview. Doug, I'm excited to welcome you today to the High Performance Mindset. How are you doing?

I'm doing well. Thanks so much, Cinder, for having me on this. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to the conversation. I know we've been working at getting you on for some time now, and I always love seeing you at ASK, the sports psychology conference. So I'm looking forward to this conversation. Yeah, I know. We've been trying to get on the same page for a little while, and just, you know, the schedules of competitive sport

and everything else in life. But I'm glad we finally were able to find the time to spend, you know, just discussing how we do this work. I know, it's going to be fun. So, to kind of start off, tell us a little bit about your passion and what you're doing right now, Doug. Right now, I serve as the mental skills coordinator for the Colorado Rockies, and I'll be heading into my fourth season, which is hard to believe at this point. It's gone quickly. But I did, you know, I took the position right out of the Army. I had retired after over 20 years of service and went right into this position with the Rockies.

And I couldn't imagine it going much better. I love the organization. I love the people I get to work with. You know, when you're dealing with professional athletes, which I really wasn't sure I wanted to do initially, I love working at the college level, especially, but working with the professional athletes, they just, they have a real, as you said, passion for what they do. And it's just very rewarding to be a part of that and see these young athletes progress into the highest level, into Major League Baseball players. So that's, you know, where I'm at right now. I work at all levels of the organization,

from our brand new draftees at the short season level. Even our Latin players have two teams down in the Dominican Republic and the rest of the developmental side as well as our major league team. Excellent. So tell us a little bit about, you know, if you've been at the Rockies for four years now, Doug, tell us a little bit about how you got there and, you know, your progression, your career. Okay. So when I talk about this part of things, I always give whoever I'm talking to, but especially young practitioners who are looking to break into this world, a warning that my

path will probably not look anything like anybody else's because it's pretty meandering. But I'll go ahead and start at when I was a competitive athlete myself. I was a football player at West Point at the United States Military Academy back in the 90s. And just after I got there, or I'm sorry, just before I started there, they had started to build a program that worked on the performance psych side, just exclusively performance psychology, sports psychology work with our athletes and primarily the football team. And we had two primary practitioners there, Louis Choka, who was a full colonel that was working initially out of the behavioral sciences department and Dr. Nate Zinser. They worked, you know, pretty heavily with us while we were there or while I was there. But what happened in that in my progression as an athlete, we at that time in the 90s, we weren't particularly good. We weren't terrible, but we weren't very good at least the first couple

of years. And within the span of my playing career, we actually became a top 25 team, 10 and 2, and went to a bowl game and won their Commander-in-Chief's Trophy and things like that. And that really kind of crystallized, at least for me that the value of the mental game I mean people didn't see us as a great a great team or a bunch of a group of you know exceptional athletes but the value of the of working deliberately on the mental side of things really came to light for me at that point as an athlete you know with that I didn't think too much about it as I moved on into the military. And so right after graduation, I graduated and became an officer in the army and spent a good five, six years sort of figuring things out in the army, realizing, I don't know that I really want

to do this for very long and ready to get out right about the time that 9-11 happened. And I had actually already resigned and was ready. I'd done a graduate degree in applied economics. And I was ready to do something very different. And so when 9-11 happened, my wife and I really had a discussion about what we could do, you know, in terms of service. And so we decided to stick around and try some other things in the military. So I got an assignment that took us over to Europe. And while I was there, pretty soon after I got there, the war in Iraq started. And so I was deployed pretty quickly out of Germany into Iraq. And I was in a pretty secured, safer role, I guess, in terms of that context. For the first month or two while I was there. And the insurgency really emerged

as we got there. This was at the beginning of 2004. And so they put our unit in a very volatile place. It was a large city, about 330,000 people, the capital of the Diyala province. And it was really, you know, we faced all the challenges that you could possibly face in that environment. And I was given a command of the company that was in charge of the whole south of that city. And right away, we had lost soldiers and we had a number of injured soldiers. and it was just a very violent time there. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, how am I going to do this? And how am I going to get through this? And how am I going to lead these soldiers through this experience and do it as well as I can? And so while I was in command, I started to ask the folks back at West Point about the use of the performance psychology skills within the soldiering context.

So you got back to your football days. You know, and it really because I remember thinking even in some of these missions that I went on where, you know, things are exploding and there's so many distractions and, you know, you can barely hear yourself think. And I'm, you know, going back in my mind thinking, okay, that was like being on the goal line in this game when the crowd noise was deafening and having to function under all that pressure and distraction. And I remembered making those real connections to athletic experiences and then thinking, what about these skills that helped me do this and how we deliberately trained on them? And so I started to ask, and I asked the folks back at West Point,

and they steered me to a couple of different books and things that I could read while I was there and articles and links of people that I could look up. And so at that time, this is 2004, the middle of 2004, I, you know, in the middle of Iraq, sort of Googled or whatever search engine we used back then. Yeah, for sure. I looked up the sports psychology, you know, gurus, and one of them happened to be a guy named Dr. Ken Revizo. Yes, of course. I had no idea who he was at that time. But what happened just about the time that I Googled him or whatever,

he came in and he stepped in with Fullerton after they had a really really slow start and helped them turn their season around to the point where they won you know 30 something games out of their last 36 games and won in Omaha yes and this is baseball yes right yep baseball team right so, well, maybe something to this and something to this guy. So I ordered heads up baseball in Iraq and I started using the skills, the same in that environment without knowing him or knowing any of really hadn't been discussed too much that sports psychology, you know, was being used outside of that performance context or the, the sport performance context. So what did you, what did you see, what did you see yourself using from heads up baseball? Like, you know,

what are, what are the, the performance psychology principles you saw yourself using then after you were learning more about it? Right. I guess the thing that really resonated with me was trying to control the things that you could control in that environment where so much was not in your control. You could always control your response or choose to control your response. And so for me, that was a really enlightening concept that, you know, all those things that

are not in your control, especially in a leadership position where you're trying to manipulate the good guys and then the bad guys, they got to say in this thing too. And, you know, so many distractions and so much that can bring you out of the moment, but just focusing on managing yourself and managing your response appropriate to that situation. And, you know, so that really resonated with me as I'm reading through that and having some of the skills to do that, you know, using, using the breathing and using routines like pre-mission routines, doing some good self-evaluation after missions and capturing the lessons and just bringing that into the training, making training as realistic as possible. You know, taking those

very same skills of managing your emotions and your thoughts, just contextualizing into that situation outside of baseball. That's excellent. So I love how you reached out to the West Point. So probably someone like Nate Zinser got the book, started using a baseball psychology book in Iraq. So that's wonderful. Yeah. And so that's, you know, an unusual start to this path. Exactly. So then tell us a little bit more, Chad, your time in Iraq, you know, in your transition to actually study then with Ken. Right. So I we we were there in Iraq for about 13 months that first deployment and got back, got back to Germany and in the early spring. And I had about six months more in command. So I was there until the summer. And in that process, and because I had, you know, started that communication between West Point and myself, or at least we had started these conversations, I was asked to come back and work in the center.

And it's called the Center for Enhanced Performance at West Point. And so I was given the opportunity to go to graduate school for a master's degree. And so my first choice from the world of graduate programs was to call Ken or visit at Cal State Fullerton and let him know. I had used his information. I didn't know how he was going to take that. Sure. Because that's not the context he was writing it for, of course. But I called Ken from Germany. And this time, Ken didn't use cell phones, didn't write emails, you know, you had to catch him, make an appointment to catch him. And I'm in Europe, and he's in California. So we're trying to work across numerous time zones to get a conversation in. So I called Ken and said,

hey, I really, you know, I don't know how you're going to take this, but I use your information and your book in Iraq as a commander. And his response was sort of classic and I don't know I not say for work his response but he was just kind of like you know no shit he was real that's for sure and so I was like okay I think this guy and you know we're gonna get along pretty well so so we had some great conversations even before I got there and so I gave up command in Germany on August like 15th of 2005 and okay was flying across the you know several countries and and in Fullerton on the 16th, registering for classes. And I think I started like two days later. This is a sort of typical Army scheduling there, you know, not much break in between. But I got to spend two amazing years studying under Ken and just getting as much exposure to him and his work. And he was just so generous and open with opportunities for me to, to be able to be in the room with, with people.

I probably had no business being in the room with at that point and, and just hear him and see him interact with, with athletes and performers at the highest level and try and absorb as much of that as I could. Really remarkable two years, getting as much as I could out of that experience before I went back to West Point. And then I served, you know, another three and a half years or so back at West Point, working in the center as the deputy director of the Center for Enhanced Performance. And, you know, working heavily with the athletes there,

but also developing what became outreach and then permanent positions as part of the Army Centers for Enhanced Performance, which morphed into other programs, and then part of what's called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness and some of these other outreach programs or these permanent programs that are now in the hands of contractors mostly doing a lot of the performance work with the military population. So I was on the front end of that, along with the full time work of working with athletes at West Point. So it was a busy couple of years to say the least. And then I was invited to come back, I had to go serve more, I did another deployment, did a PhD, and then came back as the director before retiring back in 2016. Excellent. So then tell us a little bit about your transition then with the Rockies and why you decided to go that path in professional baseball.

It was really, I think, serendipitous. Timing, timing is everything. And I had decided that I was not going to do this work, that there was, you know, going to be too much time trying to build a consultancy clientele. And just I didn't think I wanted to do that. I really liked the idea of being part of a team or part of an organization. And so I was sort of leaning towards doing athletic administration at a university and looking at those opportunities. Because the center at West Point does more now than it used to. It does all the academic support. So I had experience in that. And so I was looking at kind of the student services side of, in a university setting. And I guess it

was right about the time that I was looking, you know, really able to start pushing out resumes or, you know, really think about interviewing with, I think it was about six months from being available after retirement. And I got a call from Ken, actually, from Ken that said, hey, there's a couple of teams that are looking for people and now they're hiring, you know, full time. And one of them is the Rockies. And so, you know, would you be interested in at least talking to them? You know, Ken kind of knew where I was at. And I said, of course, you know, I would love to. I mean, that's, you know, I'm not going to turn down an opportunity to have a conversation with a professional team. supposed to be sort of five minute conversations and they turned into hour long conversations and explaining you know my background and and you know what i've done in the work and uh really just it progressed very smoothly and very just pretty easily as as these relationships formed

with some of the front office folks at uh within the rockies organization and some of their developmental personnel that on the player development side and so I just you know it felt like the right thing to do and pretty soon you know I had an offer from them and and I wasn't really even available yet so I took a little bit of leave to go to spring training and came back and finished up things at West Point. And then just right after I, you know, like the next day, I'm a Rocky doing the work with the guys. Oh, that's wonderful. Outstanding. What a great story and a great journey. And I love how, you know, heads up baseball and the book seemed to kind of change your trajectory. So, you know, heads up baseball and the books seem to kind of change your trajectory. So, you know, Doug, I'm thinking about what you do now and day to day with professional athletes and even you

can rely on your experience in Iraq and at West Point, but tell us what you see that some of the world's best do. What do you think separates them mentally from others? Well, I think that, you know, what you see the world's best do is you see them bring the best that they have consistently. You know, you see a consistency out of the world's best athletes that separates them from those who excel occasionally or those who are, you know, you see that ton of potential in, but they can't bring what they have to bear at when it matters. And so I think often when you think of, you know, a gamer or somebody who's clutch, you're really not seeing them excel to a certain extent more than they would normally. You're just seeing them do what they do under pressure. And I think that's really what separates some great athletes

or great performers from others who might have the potential to do it occasionally, or you just see flashes of it. But those who are great do it consistently. Consistently. And what do you think that takes? You know, what do you see them doing in terms of maybe mental skills or, you know, how have they trained themselves to be able to really be clutch under pressure?

Yeah, I think what, again, the way you see that manifest is you see a short memory. You see them have the ability to go from one play to the next, whether it's in baseball, you know, in terms of one pitch at a time, you know, be able to make a mistake and come back on the next pitch and execute the way that they're supposed to. And that's the way you see it transpire. But I think, you know, the way that they do that is, it varies from person to person because some people are able to do that a

little bit more innately or inherently. They're able to just move forward and go forward. But for a lot of great athletes who spent a lot of time focusing on all the minutia, all the physical and technical side of their game, that's the tendency is to go back to that thinking of, you know, okay, I'm going to tweak this or fix this or keep this arm down or do all the little, you know, mechanical things that go into executing. And that really sends us into a spiral often. And so what we end up having to teach or unteach is that focus on all the mechanical and all the minutiae and get them thinking about just being in the moment and executing on that

particular play or that particular pitch. And I see, you know, so that's what I spend a lot of time doing, especially with baseball, because we have time, we have years to sort of deprogram that thinking, that tendency to focus on all the mechanical, technical side of the game. Yeah, that's one thing I see, Doug, too, in the NFL, when guys have, say, a bad game or maybe two in a row that they start tweaking their technique. Really, I find that it needs to be more of a reset. And then they get so much in their head and then their technique is so off, you know, instead of kind of what you're saying is being in the present and trusting, I think that your technique is there and that you've spent years and years and years building this technique. Right. And that, like you said,

Cinder, that trust is such a key component to this and having them prepare or, you know, what has been called training the trust, get them preparing to compete in a mindset that's appropriate for competition. And in training that trusting mindset, because so much of the training, so much of the practice is spent in that very technical mindset. And we've got to spend time getting folks out of that mindset in our preparation. Yes. And what do you think about, just from your own experience, what do you think about how to train the trust?

I think that's a really good term, and I like it. I could imagine that the baseball guys that you work with, that they like that terminology. So what do you think? What do you know, that they like that terminology. So what do you think? What do you think it takes to train that? Well, what I try to do with, and we can speak specifically with, with the baseball context is I try to get the guys out of, and here's the thing with baseball that, and it drives me a little crazy. One of the things that one of the axioms I use from the military, I try not to throw the military stuff at them too hard, although a number of athletes like to hear about that stuff.

I want them to focus more on where they're at. So but one of the things that I use with them is train as you fight. And so when I talk about that, that's something that's a military-ism that, you know, we talk about, okay, we got to create realistic training. And during the season for baseball players, their preparation does not look like games. Batting practice does not look like hitting in a game. Throwing a bullpen does not look like pitching in a game and so I have to spend time with these talk with the guys and the coaching staff and that's an important part of this is is getting everybody on the same page explaining the value okay we've got to spend some time you can spend time giving them the mechanical tips and making sure that they're mechanically correct. But then we've got to spend some time in our bullpen, you know,

maybe the last 10 pitches in a mindset that's more focused on competing and getting to the next pitch and being committed to the next pitch rather than, you know, okay, stop. Let's talk about where your foot was. Let's talk about, you know, how aligned you were, all the things that go into throwing a good pitch. At some point you have to start practicing competing. And so getting into that mindset of being narrowly focused on executing this one pitch. Right. And do you think that doing that in practice helps train the trust,

like trust in yourself and trust that you can, you're not overthinking in the moment of pressure yourself and trust that you can, you're not overthinking in the moment of pressure, right, that you can be clutch. Yeah, and I think giving them the tools, some of the things that we would say help bring you into the moment too. Right, for sure. Not just, you know, that internal dialogue, but having a few performance-oriented things that you're going to do anyway, but do, you know, put purpose to them so it helps to bring you in the moment. So for example, for a pitcher, before you step onto the rubber, clean off the rubber as if you're wiping away the last pitch and then step on with purpose and use some of those things

they're going to do anyway as part of a process to get them back into the moment. And there's one very, very important, I tell them they can have any, any crazy routine that they want, as long as they own it and put purpose to those things. But there's one, one thing I'm very, very prescriptive about the breath. Yeah, for sure. They got to include some nice deep breaths. And Ken always was so good about talking about the value of the breath in terms of not just what we know is a physiological process, changes some important physiological things in terms of, I use some heart rate variability measures and things, some biofeedback to show that there's a physiological change when we take some nice deep breaths. But he talked about it more like in the metaphysical that it takes you out.

If you're focused on taking a good breath in and exhaling a good breath out, that's in the moment. And it doesn't allow you to think about the past. And it doesn't allow you to think about the future, which is our tendencies is to think about, you know, the potential outcome in the future or ruminate about the last pitch or the last couple of pitches or the last at bat. And that breath just, you know, allows you to come back to the moment and it's very good for you. So that's the one piece I say they have to do. Love it. I love it. I like that you're prescriptive with that. I think that makes a lot of sense. And you know, how you were saying about how the best really do have a short-term memory and they can move on really quickly and how some people maybe have a tendency to just kind of ruminate on the past or maybe be too future oriented. Tell us a bit about

what do you see in terms of teaching that to stay more in the present and letting go of the mistake? Yeah, the letting go, what I try to do, which is always hard, what I try to do and and uh allow the guys to develop their own ways but there's there's certain things i like the the idea of using symbolic gestures so you know whether it's just kind of sort of picking up some dirt and and letting it go and or you know in baseball you can spit and nobody thinks twice about it and it's just part of the accepted culture. But to do it as part of your process, you know, literally spit it out and let it go and use some of these things that they might do anyway. Even if it's just take your hat off, you know, wipe your head and wipe that play away and then come back to your process that brings you back to the moment.

Excellent. And the process might be deep breath or what do you typically see at the highest level what their process is? You really see some interesting routines and some of it's related and it can be distinguished between ritualistic, which I associate with superstition. Yeah, me too.

Right. And distinguish that the ritualistic superstitious which baseball is full of um to things that are more routine on purpose adapted to where you're at and um allow you to be flexible allow allow you to realize, okay, I need a couple of breaths. I don't need one breath as I always take one breath. No, if you need more, you can take more. If you want to step out, but like there's these things with baseball because it's such a closed sport and Ken would always use those, the actual physical piece of stepping onto the rubber or stepping into the box. And if you're not ready for the next pitch, well, don't step in. And when you're ready, you know, you physically step in. And so using those things that they have to do anyway, as, as their process, but just putting more purpose to each of those steps or just to a few of those

steps. Absolutely. And, you know, Doug, when you think of when you think about like a signature technique or something that you keep coming back to that you're kind of noticing yourself talking a lot with these pro athletes about? Well, I guess I go back to some of those, those army isms, just sort of what I lean on. And when I, you know, I talked about the train as you fight, I really like to use that with with the guys, because I think that resonates that, okay, we don't normally practice the way that that it looks in the game. So let's, let's make the practice at least a little bit more competitive, so that there's pressures associated with it. And right now we're in the game. So let's, let's make the practice at least a little bit more competitive so that there's pressures associated with it. And right now we're in the off season. So as I'm

having conversations with, with guys about their off season preparation, I let them know, okay, it's okay to spend a majority of your time right now in, you know, getting your body ready, focused on the physical side of things focused on the mechanics that's fine but as we get closer to spring training let's start to integrate aspects of competition so even including gamism so if a guy's you know going to going to hit in the cage every um you know every other day or every day even that they they include an aspect and now you have all these uh mechanisms for feedback these technical like track man data and spin rate all these things that we can determine about things in in launch angle and things like that so they can get this

feedback and compete either against themselves or against somebody else and i like that. So they can get this feedback and compete either against themselves or against somebody else. And I like the idea of even competing against somebody else and putting something at stake when they do it, just so it hurts a little bit and they have to use some of those. It hurts a little bit to lose and they have to use some of those skills within their practice and preparation. Excellent. So train as you fight is something that you hear yourself saying quite often. Is there any other army-isms or military-isms that... I've got one more that I use.

And in baseball, I think this resonates probably more so than in golf or something where you're really competing against yourself often. But the idea that the enemy gets a vote in the outcome. You could execute every play, everything about your side of this pitch, you could execute perfectly. And the enemy is, you know, often associated with the other team, but it's also officials, ump process and focus on being, you know, controlling yourself, everything about the way that you, you go into each pitch, you get to control and everything about the way you come out of each pitch, you get to control that response. The stuff in the middle, the enemy gets a little bit of a vote in the outcome. That's a really good way to say that. And, you know, as I'm listening to you, Doug, I'm thinking

quite a bit about like, how does, you know, your time in Iraq and your time with West Point, just the military connect to a sport. And obviously, these two examples are ways that you've connected them. Tell us a bit more about, you know, how the enemy gets the vote and the outcome. How have you seen that play out in the military? Right. And I think, you know, that, that resonates across levels. But I think really it's, it's kind of a heavy thing to think about in the military because the potential outcome there, you know, fatal or potentially fatal. And that, if that's what you're thinking about, you're not in the moment. You know, if you're thinking about that potential outcome, you're not allowing yourself to be exposed

to what you need to do in that moment to survive and thrive and be at your best under that pressure. So it's really trying to get them. And if you can think about somebody under in that context, being able to get out of that potential outcome and just perform, if soldiers can do that, then hopefully great performers in highly competitive sport can do that too. Yeah, for sure. What other similarities do you see between the military and sport? I think, you know, there's certainly a competitive nature there, that there's people who want to excel and be great, and sometimes that can be consuming. You know, you can be obsessive about work and just not allow yourself to recover in the way that our bodies need to, our bodies in the holistic sense. And so

that's one of the things that in baseball has become, I think, in a lot of sports that you're seeing it at the youth level where kids are specializing at such a young age. And they're just focused on one sport. And that's their whole life. And I think that's consistent with the military is that you can really be consumed by that work. And it's important to build in these opportunities to let your body and your mind and your emotions settle and remain stable. So I think, you know, I think the athletes have a hard time with me making those comparisons. Like, I mean, you know, you've been in this environment and now you're coming and working in baseball and it's, you know, it's not the same. But for the athletes, I know they don't have that context necessarily. Most of them don't. But, you know,

that idea that I, you don't have to be in the military to understand that this is the most important thing to you right now. Absolutely. And, and I, you know, I believe that that's, that's a consistent thing that we've got to address is that this is the most important thing to you. You don't have to, you know, acknowledge my background or anything else in the military to know that this is the most important thing to you. And we've got to be able to manage your emotions and your mental state and allow your body to recover appropriately for you to be at your best. Yeah, and Doug, that's actually one thing that I see in the NFL as well, where guys, maybe it is so all-consuming, and they don't know how to turn it off,

or they're spending so much time watching film when they get home that they're just exhausted the next day. So what do you see, you know, the, the pro athletes there at the Rockies, or, you know, even when you think about the military, what do you see in terms of best practices and turning that off? Cause I agree that you need to have you give yourself some downtime. And I like that you said that it's mind, body and emotions. And I like the emotional part. because I think you need time to relax and recover. Yeah. And it's not always easy, especially when things don't go well, right? When an athlete has a tough game, letting that go is very difficult. And so what I try to, it'll certainly keep them

up at night, which is part of the cycle of not recovering, you know, and so I try to give them some of the skills in a broader context to not just specific to pitch to pitch to pitch, but also in this idea of day to day and game to game. And so using the process of coming out of competition as a process. And so there's, you know, the same idea, the same concept is you have to do certain things before you, you know, leave the clubhouse, leave the locker room, get on the bus, go back to the team hotel. You've got to change. You've got to take a shower. You've got to pack up your stuff. All of that could be used as symbolic, a symbolic process of washing away the game, maybe taking some notes before you do that so that they're fresh, but you're getting them out

and putting them on paper and allowing them to be constructive because we can learn so much from failure. And so we put them out there and say, okay, I did this, I did this. I have a process of getting that information out. And then I put it in my book or I put it on my phone and then I close it. And then I, you know, go wash it off, go take a shower, clean it off and use that all as part of a process to come back to being a human in a bigger sense. Awesome. Love it. So when I'm listening to you, Doug, I'm wondering, like, what powers you to do this work? What powers you, you know, when you were either, you know, at the Army or in Iraq or now with Iraqis? What's kind of the

why behind your work? I was thinking about this. It's kind of, I don't know if this analogy makes sense to anybody but me, but I take this, I was an offensive lineman and I sort of take this offensive lineman mentality is that, you know, you should only hear about me when I screw up. And, you know, I help, you know, people look good, but I don't need to be the person who's, you know, getting his, you know, compliments or whatever. And, and I think that a lot, I just take a lot of reward out of seeing people go from one place to a, to a much better place. And, and so that kind of offensive lineman mentality of, you know, I don't need necessarily the acknowledgments, but I love being a part of something bigger and watching people excel at the highest level.

Certainly, you know, watching soldiers excel and giving them opportunities to grow as leaders and the same idea with athletes, not just grow as people who can execute on, in terms of an offensive or defensive player, but also be a part of a clubhouse, be part of a bigger organization, and help lead our team to bigger and better things. Excellent. I know O-Linemen, man, they have to grind every single play, right? They're not getting the newspaper write-ups or many times the award so I love that analogy I'm glad it makes sense to anybody

makes sense to me so uh Doug how could people connect with you if they're interested are you on social or what's the kind of best way to reach out to you if i'm terrible with this stuff yeah so i don't do the social media too much i i do it for the guys like i do whatsapp and stuff with the with the players that i work with i i don't have a website of my own you know it's kind of this behind the scenes offensive lineman mentality too i guess so i i think that's probably probably the weakest weakest part of my work is that I'm not that progressive, and of course, you know, that probably was influenced by Ken and his old school ways, but yeah, so I don't know. You can listen to this podcast. That's perfect. That's perfect. Great. That's excellent. Well, and I think with your job, you don't have to be on social media, right? Whereas other people who maybe need to get out there with their work or building a practice or a following, but you know, you don't necessarily have to have one organization to work with.

And I love that baseball really has progressed in that way, that there's full-time positions now at multiple levels of each baseball organization. We're a little bit more conservative with our growth. I have one additional member of my mental skills team, Jerry Amador, who's actually out of Puerto Rico, but works full-time with us and does a great job. But this is great that there's these full-time positions that the pioneers in this world of, at least in baseball, with Ken and Charlie Maher and Harvey Dorfman helped lay this foundation that we have full-time jobs. Absolutely. And now the majority of Major League

Baseball teams have at least one person on staff. Yeah, yeah, which is just really, I mean, over the last 10 years, it's exploded. And as I mentioned, there's a number of teams with, with folks, almost at every level, every minor league team having a mental skills coach, just as they would have a, an athletic trainer or a strength and conditioning coach. They've got a mental skills professional working with them only on the, on the performance side, not, we're not talking about clinicians for the most part. We're talking about people working on the performance side of this.

Absolutely. Well, Doug, it was awesome to connect with you today and to learn more about what you're doing and your background. I found your background completely fascinating. And how, you know, the heads up baseball book was, was in Iraq with you. Here's several things that I'm taking away from from the interview. And I want to summarize it here for those people who are listening, but also, you just to just to tell you how much I appreciated it. And so I like how when you're talking about the world's best and how they can bring their best consistently, and they can bring it when it matters. And one of the

factors that you thought was really important was just the ability to have a short-term memory. And we talked a lot about like how to train that, right? Training the trust or train as you fight, kind of your analogy there, and even different ways to be in the present, kind of these symbolic gestures of picking up the dirt or spitting, like that one for baseball, or, you know, taking off your hat and wiping your forehead. And I appreciated the connection to the military and what you've seen, how the military is similar to professional baseball. And the two other things I'm taking from today is train as you fight, and just how might sports psychology professionals help coaches consider that and how they're structuring practice.

But also how the enemy gets the vote in the outcome. I thought that was an excellent phrase that really connects back to focusing on what you can control. And there's a lot of things in sport and even in the military, as you pointed out, in life that you can't control. Yeah, I think you got it. That's a pretty good summary of our short conversation here. But hopefully that helps a few people doing the work or for your audience here to start to integrate some of that stuff, if that helps them become great performers. Excellent. Thank you so much, Doug. I so appreciate you being on today. You got it. Thank you, Sindra.

Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset. If you liked today's podcast, make a comment, share it with a friend, and join the conversation on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. For more inspiration and to receive Sindra's free weekly videos, check out DrSindra.com.