High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 379: The Importance of Rest in High Performance with Dr. David Eccles, Professor at Florida State University

Episode Date: October 16, 2020

David W. Eccles, is an Associate Professor at Florida State University, and his research concerns the psychology of skilled and expert performance and its development in real-world domains involving performance under stress, ranging from sport to law enforcement, and from medicine to the military. David received his PhD in Sport Psychology from Bangor University in the UK in 2001 and undertook post-doctoral training at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition from 2002 to 2003. He was then Assistant and later Associate Professor of Psychology at Florida State University (FSU), took a sabbatical from the Sunshine State for a few years at a small university in England, and is currently a Professor of Sport Psychology back at FSU. He serves as Associate Editor for Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport and is on the Editorial Board for the Psychology of Sport and Exercise. David has been the recipient of approximately $5M of external funding to support his research, where funders have included the Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. In this podcast, Dr. Eccles and Cindra talk: The importance of deliberate practice The benefits of rest to performance Ways to “cognitively detach” so we can rest How to get high-quality rest Ways to prevent burnout HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: www.cindrakamphoff.com/Sara HOW TO ENTER THE PODCAST GIVEAWAY TO WIN $500 CASH: www.drcindra.com/giveaway FB COMMUNITY FOR THE HPM PODCAST: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2599776723457390/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mentally_strong Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/high-performance-mindset-learn-from-world-class-leaders/id1034819901        

Hey, my name is Cindra Campoff and I'm a small-town Minnesota gal, Minnesota nice as we like to say it, who followed her big dreams. I spent the last four years working as a mental coach for the Minnesota Vikings, working one-on-one with the players. I wrote a best-selling book about the mindset of the world's best and I'm a keynote speaker and national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology. And I am obsessed with showing you exactly how to develop the mindset of the world's best so you can accomplish all your goals and dreams. So I'm over here following my big dreams and I'm here to inspire you and practically show you how to do the same. And you know, when I'm not working, you'll find me playing Ms. Pac-Man.

Yes, the 1980s game Ms. Pac-Man. So take your notepad out, buckle up, and let's go. This is the High Performance Mindset. Welcome to episode 379 with David Eccles. This is your host, Dr. Cedric Ampoff, and thank you so much for joining me here for another episode of the High Performance Mindset Podcast. If you know that mindset is essential to your success, then my friend, you are in the right place because every week we discuss a new topic related to mindset. And today we're talking about the importance of rest in our ability to be high performers. Now we started a Facebook group where we'd love to connect with you and share with you more behind the scenes

of the high performance mindset, more tangible strategies and inspiration, some free prizes like books and t-shirts. So if you have not already, head over to Facebook and just search for High Performance Mindset Podcast, and I can't wait to see you over there. Now, today's episode, I interview Dr. David Eccles, and I've read some of his research and was really looking forward to having him on this podcast for you. Now, David Eccles' research concerns the psychology of skilled and expert performance and its development in real world domains, such as

performance under stress. And it ranges from sport to law enforcement, from medicine to the military. He is an associate professor of psychology at Florida State University. And he also serves as an associate editor for the journal's research quarterly for exercise and sport and is on the editorial board of the psychology of sport and exercise now david has been the recipient of approximately five million dollars of external funding to support his research some of which we'll talk about today including the department of defense the national science foundation and financial industry regulatory authority. In today's episode, Dr. Eccles and I talk about the importance of rest to performance. What exactly is deliberate practice? We talk about ways to cognitively detach so we can actually rest, how to get high quality rest, and some good recommendations on

that, and ways to prevent burnout. And I think this really is an essential time where we have to take care of ourselves, where we're focusing on self-care and rest is definitely part of that equation. If you are on Twitter, you can find Dr. Eccles at David W. Eccles and me on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. And if you enjoyed this episode, take a screenshot, put it on your Instagram stories, and you can tag me at cindracampoff, or you can connect with us over on Twitter at the handles I just provided. But thank you so much for sharing this podcast.

That helps us reach more and more people each and every week. And if you haven't already, head over and leave us a rating and review wherever you're listening. If you are on an iPhone iphone for example all you have to do is scroll up on the episode and there is a place for you to provide us a rating and review this week's rating and review is from lewis 18 he had just listened to episode 362 with Justin Grunewald, and he said this, I just listened to episode 362 and was so inspired by Gabe's story.

I love this podcast. Thank you so much, Louis18. I'm so grateful for your rating and review. And again, wherever you're listening, head over and just leave us a rating and review. That would help us reach more and more people each and every week like you. Without further ado, let's bring on Dr. Eccles. Dr. Eccles, I am really excited to talk with you today on the High Performance Mindset Podcast.

How is the weather in Florida today? In fact, I was going to tip you off there that we might get disturbed because we're due for some big thunderstorms. It's been thunderstorming on and off today, and as usual, it's about mid-80s thunderstorms in the afternoon. We're about 60 here in Minnesota. That sounds nice. Yeah, that sounds about right. A few days ago, we were 40. So I'm looking forward to talking with you about your research and just helping us learn a little bit more about how we can be the best version of ourselves and the importance of sleep and rest.

And we're talking about deliberate practice today. But I want to start about this idea of your passion. And so I'd love for us to start this interview with just telling us a little bit about your passion and what you do right now. This is a great question. So you sent me these questions in advance. And two or three of them have led me

to think disproportionately about you know what what what that actually means so that it's been a great exercise it's therapy in itself um so obviously i have my larger life in my work life and and and you know one of my passions in in my larger life is my family, definitely. And it's been a fascinating journey to have children and see them grow. So that, without doubt, is at the top of that list. I always remember Lenny Briscoe from Law & Order trying to explain to Chris Noth's character that there are two types of people in this world, people with and without children. And, you know, when you cross over into the children territory, it's a whole different world. And so that's definitely a passion. On the work side, I think, you know, his biggest view version of it is, you know, I'm passionate about sort of thinking through thinking through problems and

concepts that relate to human performance and particularly trying to try to identify where certain gaps are in our understanding okay and and doing new work in those areas it's to to sort of try to understand the things that we currently don't understand and do some research on those things, and then attempt to disseminate that research to the level of practice, so then it's useful. So those are the sorts of things that, you know, in all the different parts of my job, I enjoy doing, enjoy interacting

with our students in relation to those things, of course, as well. But I think most academics would say at the heart of what they're passionate about is that thinking. Sometimes the writing and the publishing, you know, throws up a few challenges, but it's first and foremost, I think, the thinking about those things and discovering what others have done in research in relation to those things. And then what's missing and then trying to create some of those dots, which is the creative part, of course, to move us beyond where we are currently. So tell us a bit about how you got to Florida State. So right from the get-go in my research, my research has been influenced by Anders Ericsson, who, you know, historically has been one of the most cited psychologists in recent history. And because of that, when I was finishing working on my PhD

at Bangor University in Wales in the United Kingdom, I began to send papers off for publication and so on. And it was reasonably clear through the review process that, you know, a key reviewer was Anders Ericsson of some of my early papers. And so we already began to establish a relationship there. And so it was quite natural towards the end of my PhD that I basically wrote to him and said, do you have any jobs? And at the time he was on sabbatical at Stanford and he didn't. But he said, hey, I've got somebody down the road here who I knew vaguely from the literature, Robert Hoffman, who works for the Institute of Human and Machine Cognition, which is a standalone research institute now in the state of Florida.

I think there's only a couple of its kind, actually. And so he's looking for a postdoc. So we got talking, Robert and I, almost about the time 9-11 occurred, weirdly, you know, the original 9-11 occurred. And as soon as I could fly, he flew me over for an interview in Pensacola, Florida, where the Institute is. A lot of their contracts were connected with the Navy. And so they were located there in Pensacola. So I went over there and worked on expertise projects there on the military grounds and then but while I was there Anders returned and we kept up this dialogue and he invited me to FSU you know to give some talks and things. I met a bunch of the other expertise researchers Neil Charnasas and the Goshen Tenenbaum

in sports psychology. And then before long, I got a nice offer to come there. And I started there as an assistant professor at AFSU. And then I worked there for about a decade or so, had an extended sabbatical back in the UK, I never really lived as an adult so it was kind of fun to go back and live for a little bit as an adult but again one day I got another email saying hey there's a job back here we'd like you to come back to FSU and so I reapplied for the job and we came back then as a family to Florida State. But it's been a relatively natural fit because Anders has been here all along. And it's had, you know, always had a strong PhD program. In fact, the PhD program is the same age as me.

And it is scary to think in two years, that's going to be half a century. So, you know, we'd had this nearly 50 year established PhD, and there was an expertise group here in psychology department. And it was a big R1 university, well resourced and all those nice things. So it was, it's always been a relatively natural fit. Yeah. We'll talk more about Erickson's work as we keep going, but, you know, for those people who are unfamiliar, his seminal research on deliberate practice and how you develop expertise is, you know, really has contributed an incredible amount to, you know, our understanding in those areas. Yeah, that one paper alone, Erickson, Cramp, Tesch, Ruhem in 1993, about deliberate practice and its role in the acquisition of expertise

has been cited more times than my total number of citations. And yet Anders has, you know, about a dozen other papers like that. So it's definitely been influential, you know, in so many domains, including, you know, very diverse from medicine to the military to sports psychology. Yeah. So before we dive into the research you've been doing, Dave, I ask every one of my guests to define what failure is and to tell us about a time that you failed. And the reason I want to ask you that question is to kind of normalize failure, but also for us to learn a lesson that you've learned along the way. So what do you think? Yeah, it's a great question. This was the question

even more than passion where I had to think you know that is so hard to answer and you know I try to catch myself and and say you know how do I answer am I trying to answer in ways that are ego protected that's the first thing that you know and and I really try to think through and I don't think I am when I answer this but it can sound like it so I'm trying to uh you know prime prime the response now uh in in the audience here but I think when I look back and try to identify things I think are just abject failures that the first thing you think you have to realize is that in any failure situation there's more than one thing involved um The sociologists always remind us as psychologists that we tend to focus on the individual

and the individual brain and forget about, you know, the various other structures, the environment and society and all those things that are around us. In fact, the evolutionary psychologists, the ecological psychologists would do the same. They'd remind us it's not just about the person.

The person has, you know, limited agency and the other thing we need to consider do the same. They'd remind us it's not just about the person. The person has limited agency, and the other thing we need to consider is the environment. So the first thing I think I thought about was that, of course, the explanation usually for something we might label as failure involves both the person, their point in time, and the situation. And so, you know, the context. So the context itself contributes to failure to the point where the person might think they failed. But what was happening actually is that they just weren't in the right place at the right time and the right situation.

The easiest way to think about this is if you flip it, there's a classic critique of history called great man history, where we'll focus on somebody like George Washington and say, you know, that was a great man there, you know, and admittedly, you know, it also includes women much more, but it's called great man history critique. And the thing is, we never really know whether somebody else would have been better in George Washington's situation, because George Washington was in that situation. And yes, there was undoubtedly competition, natural competition for the role he served and take somebody else Churchill whoever it might be Charles de Gaulle in France but but the point is they were given an opportunity to show great leadership by the context they were

in yeah and if they had a very mundane time of things they would never have been seen as a particularly great leader because not much happens to really challenge their leadership right right they had a very mundane time of things, they would never have been seen as a particularly great leader because not much happens to really challenge their leadership, right? Right. And so it's the same with failure, that something that looks like a failure may be as much a product of the environment and the point in history as the person. And so I think that's the first thing I thought about there is that that's what I think failure is, is an interaction between those things, rather than just point to the single person and say, you've failed. The other thing is, I wonder whether, you know, this is going to sound much more like a standard psychologist response about failure now, but i think it is simply a phase

so when you feel you fail i think it's genuinely a phase um a process usually of recognizing sometimes that some of the things i talked about there's perhaps a mismatch between you at this time and the timing and the situation and um a student was just talking about this in our group dynamics class that she had been on a team where she actually attracted the label that you may know from the literature of team cancer. She was a negative, sort of spread a negative affect among that team and acquired that label. And we know, at least we think from our theories of role modeling, that over time you acquire that label. Other people have to label you that, the role senders and so on um and when she transitioned to a different team no problem she never had this label and seemed to actually be the good guy and and she realized that

uh the fit for her on that particular team at that particular time just wasn't quite right. There was some mismatch between who she was and what the situation was at that time. And I think that, yes, you can do things that are just blatantly do not serve your interests, right? To lead to this failure point. So I'm not taking the agency away from the individual you can absolutely do things that do not serve your interests that are genuine mistakes and you must reflect on those and think forward but i think often what's lost is that um this is a phase you may pass through uh and and as much as to do with the circumstances and the timing as anything else

so you may appear to fail completely under one set of circumstances but thrive you know a year later under exactly the same set of circumstances so i think there's some some some argument there so i thought about that for a while so when I thought back to things that I might be able to point to where I've been either unsuccessful in, you know, I don't know, romantic relationships or in, in jobs that have been given or in a family relationship somehow. I'm just not sure, even though those are the obvious ones to point to,

those are failures, and I've got a few of those, no doubt. Were they actually failures? Did I actually fail there? Yes, probably there were some steps I could have taken better, but I think it's just a phase like anything else you pass through that you can learn from genuinely. And it's just another set of circumstances. And, you know, your personal mental state at that time

may not be one that you feel is favorable. And now I'm going to sound like the resilience guys here and girls, but that's not necessarily failure. Those are the processes through which one passes to move forward so now i'm going to sound like the growth food through adversity people i know but uh anyway that's how i i i uh that's the point i came to and the reason that you know the answer is long there is because the thought chain is long because when I try to point at something that I felt was clearly a failure um often I think um I genuinely benefited from the process you know right I think you know one of the other things that we're thinking about is that

societally I think we all imagine and you know there are plenty of critiques out there about this but we're going to be gloriously happy all the time. I mean, it's in the it's in our fabric of our and I'm an American citizen as well. It's in the fabric of our society that we should be pursuing happiness. And I think that we forget that these negative affective states and, you know, negative emotions that trouble us are wrong. And I'm not convinced that they are wrong. I think they serve functions like any other emotion that position us to move to a different place in the future.

Clearly this doesn't explain why obviously some, some people, you know, are chronically affected negatively in certain ways. Why don't they appear to go on and thrive but um of course they may consider that they're thriving anyway i don't know well i really appreciate that answer to that question i know it was a long one but you know it's good it's good and it makes me step back and think that is a really hard question to answer but but it is, I mean, isn't that interesting that it's a hard question to answer? Like what is failure? You know? But I had never considered that the situation when I had thought about failure before, and as you were talking about it,

I thought about myself, about times that I feel like I failed and maybe it just wasn't the, there were these factors in the situation that didn't allow me to thrive. Right. And I think by viewing failure as understanding or a product of the time and the situation, it also like takes the personal out of it. And I think so many times when we fail as athletes, as practitioners, as people, you know, it's like we can let it negatively impact our confidence. But if it's like we see it as a time, you know, that it's this really like, it's a phase, it's a process, it's more, it's about the situation. I think that also helps me be not so hard on myself. it is a classic critique of the whole of psychology that

too much agency is given to the individual brain um and um and so you know and in society that that's definitely propagated that that concept so if you do fail it's your fault and uh and of course um you know the critiques of psychology is, and the science of the individual, you know, are that actually the individual only has so much agency in their situation. And there are plenty of structures around them that can explain a lot of what happened to them. Yeah. Yeah. So here's a few other examples of when I've asked this question.

So Michael Gervais, who Finding Mastery podcast and works with the Seattle Seahawks, he said failure is anytime I'm not being authentic. Okay. Yeah. Very good. I interviewed Jack Canfield, who wrote the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. He said failure is simply a delay in results. Yeah, that, so what I

would encourage people who are listening is to think about how do you define failure? Maybe how do you want to redefine failure? You know, I shared an episode ago, a couple weeks ago, where I just talked about these different ways people have defined failure. But, you know, what is the definition of failure that you want to guide your life and maybe redefine it? So thanks for answering that question. Let's dive in, Dave, to your work now. And what I want to ask you first about is like you study rest and sport and I think that's such an important topic. One that gets really overlooked a lot and one that we don't always see as

important to performance in general. Tell us about why you think it gets overlooked and just generally how you started to study it? So I actually started to study it once again because of my interest in these developmental and training frameworks that we have, including the deliberate practice framework. So at its simplest, the deliberate practice framework says at the day level of training that you should focus on your very highest quality practice. And when you're focusing on your very highest quality practice, you're not simply going through the motions. You are fully concentrating on improving some specific aspect of performance. And because you're fully concentrating, and in sports that involve physical physical movements often you're fully exerting yourself physically as well the time that we can

fully exert ourselves you know physically and mentally and devote ourselves to improvement is very short in fact the rule of thumb extracted from Erickson's original work is that that is about four hours. Really, really useful work. Four hours of every day? Four hours of work that genuinely advance you, change the structures of the brain. Okay. You know, that meets the proper criterion for learning as we would outline it in, you know, any of the learning sciences

that semi-permanently change the operation of the brain to some new level requires this very high level of concentration. The tasks are invariably demanding, more demanding than your current level, not so demanding that, you know, you simply withdraw effort, but more demanding than your current level, not so demanding that you simply withdraw effort, but more demanding than your current level. But because you're concentrating very hard and exerting yourself physically, you've got four hours there in 24. And in addition,

and so the rest of the time, the other 20 hours must be devoted by comparison to relatively restful activity for the system to be able to reset so that you can reinvest in these four hours the following day. And then the theory of deliberate practice then says, or deliberate practice conceptual framework then says, if you do that, you'll out-compete the opposition because you've maximized the quality of the training during the day and maximized your chances of recovering to engage in that same quality training the following day and therefore because you can keep engaging in this very high quality training you're going to out-compete others because they either don't

engage in the four hours of quality practice to start with or even if they manage that they then don't devote the other 20 to relatively restful activities so they're able to re-engage the following day and so over time the person who does that will outcompete the other person right so so then when you look at the practice conceptual framework as it's been applied to sports, and for example, a review in 2014 did this, they found something like, I think it was 24 out of 25 studies that had retrospectively assessed experts in a sport compared to less skilled performers to see, according to their self reports, which has its limitations, but according to the self reports, how much deliberate practice over time they were engaging in. Okay. On the average in those reviews, people were engaging in, you know, more deliberate practice,

not per day, but over time, they were able to engage in more of that. And so many of those studies have focused on the practice itself. And then they started to try and focus on the microstructure of the practice. So they say, okay, during those four hours, when we look at elite, you know, athletes, or those on the trajectory of becoming elite, when we look at the four hours, you know, what are they doing? What is the nature of the activities? And this has been going on for, you know, 20 years in this type of research, up to that review in 2014, for example. But nobody has been asking, well, hang on a minute, central to the theory is also this other 20 hours where they do more restful activities. What does that mean? So they've been studying the practice itself, which is natural to do. It's natural to think the practice is the route forward.

But forgetting the fact that equal, equal in this theoretical proposal is not just the high quality practice. It's effectively high quality restful activity. So what does that mean? And so the more I looked around, yes, there's work on recovery, lots of work on recovery, but it tends to focus on physical recovery more than mental recovery. And it tends to focus on recovery strategies like ice baths and taping and these sorts of things right when i try to look for um understanding what mental recovery and mental recovery is always important because even if you're performing a physical activity to get better according to the theory you've got to still be fully concentrating so if you're running routes as a receiver you've got to be fully

concentrating uh to maximize the quality of that practice session if you turn up and you're just half in it right your coach is going to recognize that your teammates are going to recognize that and so on so mental recovery is still important even if you're performing a physical or movement-based task so a few people have asked, so mentally, what's restful? You know, does it mean that you can't leave practice and sit doing, you know, algebra? What are we talking about? What is it that, what is it that, you know, football players do? And what is it that they might do better when they leave the field to enhance that that mental recovery and so we look around in the research literature and we see a few things a few insights from cognitive psychology and those sorts of things so there's for example an emerging

finding that if you in a kind of skill acquisition session like learning a new receiver route when you finish the session okay if you're able to then engage in in about 15 minutes of relatively low cognitive activity so you're not you know uh you're taking a shower on your own or you've got some quiet time where you can sit on your own and not think about too much and you know perhaps rehydrate or something like that versus you know get in a one-on-one with somebody else in the locker room or take a difficult phone call then recovery then learning will be enhanced for those people who had spent that 15 minutes post-skill acquisition in a relatively low cognitive demanding environment so we had a few insights like that so it basically means if you

have just and you as a working for a university for example if you've just been in a session where you're learning something new about structural equation modeling don't immediately come out and switch to something equally demanding take 15 where you do something relaxing and the theory is it allows memory consolidation so so these are some of the insights we got from the literature but my question was a little bit I suppose more driven by the sort of applied level by by real people doing real things we set out to actually just ask athletes what what does rest mean to you yeah you know and we literally started with that question we didn't even put mental rest we said what does rest mean to you in our studies uh and i'll give you we came up with what we thought were six key things from those okay i'll give you the first one which is what you asked me a question about this idea of detachment

yes that's actually a term from industrial and organizational psychology but i think fits very well on the answers that almost to an athlete were given, which was sometime not thinking about my sport. Right. Because I do that, you know, all of the time. And particularly for student athletes, I live with them. I train with them. We're on social media all the time.

And the beginning of season, the beginning of preseason is kind of fun two-thirds of the way through the season they would normally say I am sick of hearing about hockey or football or whatever it might be right and I want a day where I just don't hear that that word I mean almost to the point where they would say I don't want to see a hockey pitch or a hockey field or i don't want to see a soccer ball for a day you know because uh i don't need any more of this i love my teammates i love them but i need to be without them for a day because you know i'm going i'm going crazy here you And so that was one of the findings. This rest meant an opportunity to stop thinking about my sport for a while. And that has a basis in industrial organization psychology

where the focus has traditionally been on workers. Not that athletes aren't workers, but in more traditional jobs where they're unable to stop thinking about work when they go home which leads to maladaptive strategies like you know thinking half a bottle of wine to try to get your mind off worrying about something at work you know and so yeah we definitely saw that amongst the athletes even student athletes uh they were in high performance programs and the pressure was on them and they're worried about keeping their place and they're worried about their performance and they live with their room

you know teammates and so it's just their sport sport sport sport all the time fun at the beginning of the season not so fun two-thirds of the way through the season where you know starting to get old so that was that was one of the insights we've got there so i got a quick question before you keep going on so like this idea of cognitive detachment i think is really powerful and i think about how it relates to some of the athletes i work with also like my my own family like my husband's a school principal. So right now, really stressful time. When he comes home, he doesn't want to think anything about work. You know, my brain, I can't quite turn it off like that. But do you have, like from your research with athletes or in general, like how often should

we cognitively detach, you know, or is it just kind of, is it personal? Like you have to figure that part out. Tell me a little bit more about like what you would recommend. Well, I don't think we know a huge amount about individual differences in that. Okay. I've looked like, can some people just keep going and never burn out, you know, right. Never get psychologically demotivated and feel emotional exhaustion or any of those things um i but i doubt whether that's true for anybody that they're just immune and they can just think about their work you know all the time yeah um but um so i think everybody needs it whether some people need more than others quite possibly um but it's typically been studied at the day level. So how much and how often do I

need to be able to psychologically detach after work? And then does that predict my feelings of recovery the following day? And typically, if you are able to psychologically detach at the end of the day, at some point each day, there's, you know, know relationship with feeling more psychologically recovered and motivated the following day um you know the question is then how how is that possible and there's a few insights one is that what what people seem to ruminate about most after something you know after say they've done a team scrimmage and they go away or they're learning some new skill technique or whatever and they go away what they're learning some new skill technique or whatever, and they go away, what they tend to ruminate most is about things that they feel they haven't been able to do successfully in that session.

Because it worries them, usually because of course, there's some kind of implication for whether they start or their performance and so on, right? and so one of the applied implications that at least in industrial organizational psychology seems to have some um effectiveness is to after work if those things are you are ruminating about take 15 minutes and make a plan about how you're going to address those things the following day uh there's something about writing down those concrete actionable steps you're going to take to try and address those things that once you've done that you feel better about it like you feel like you can switch off a little bit more it's cathartic you know yeah but and if you don't otherwise you tend to ruminate

and then you do that 3 a.m wake up where you'll still ruminate about it because it's not down and concrete what you're going to do to begin to try to to address that problem it's difficult to switch off um the other one we found from the athletes so that's from io psychology industrial organization psychology with the athletes what we found is what they'll try and do is do sort of two things that go together. The first one is they'll try and focus on something that they can be immersed in that isn't their sport,

that's inherently enjoyable. Okay. And now that is a wide range of things, and that is personal. So that might be watching, you know, something you're really into on Netflix, through to walking the dog, through to going for a jog. Whatever is able to effectively switch you to another subject so that you're not focused on your sport or on the thing that's, you know, you're ruminating about. So achieving that shift in attention appears to be important.

Okay. And so that can be done by engaging in this other thing, whatever it might be that you like that you can immerse yourself in. And, you know, it's got to be something that the person chooses. The coach can't prescribe a set of activities, you know, in a blanket way because, of course, that feels like they're still doing their sport, right? They've been told to do something. So the second thing relates to this a bit, because the second thing is about avoiding cues that remind you of your sport. Okay. Now by switching to this other

activity, of course that achieves that, but there's some other things you can do. And so some of our athletes, and these are college athletes, and I was quite surprised by this, they'll actually say that if they got, you know, equipment, team shirt, whatever it might be, they'll put it away in a closet. And so because even just looking, you know, have to lie on the bed, relaxing, looking around the room, they see the stuff, accuse them to think about their sport. Sure. They'll also try not to, this is almost impossible as we know, connect with social media to be reminded about their sport. Always very tough. And they will also not go to the training venue. So this is one of the other problems. All their buddies are at the training venue or hanging out

nearby it and so there's a tendency to want to go there even on your day off or your time off because your buddies are hanging out there right but you're back at the same venue you're doing the same thing you've been reminded about for a while not hang around with your teammates they're your buddies hang out with them for a bit on your rest day. But for the rest of the time, you know, your other friend on your corridor as a student athlete who happens to, you know, do chemistry and is not an athlete, hang out with them for a while. Our athletes say, I'm actually interested to hear about chemistry because it's not hockey. And so each of these things

try to avoid these cues to rethink about your sport. Avoid the places to do with your sport. Avoid the people to do with your sport. Avoid connections to people through social media to do with your sport. So there was quite a collection of those things. And this is not to say any of these athletes didn't love their sport. They loved their sport. For sure. But they didn't love this ball. They love this ball. For sure.

But they didn't like, didn't like it 24, 7, 3, 6, 5. There came a time where they're like, I just need to think about something else for a while. How do you know when you have to sort of detach yourself? Like, are you, do you think it's, as people are listening, is it sort of like something you do every day or, Or are we not really sure on kind of the recommendation there? That's a toughie. You probably have to do it.

Prevention is always a bit harder than then identifying symptoms of when it's going wrong. So prevention has to, you know know as everything in life uh prevention has to come well before and the trouble is you have to sort of prevent that happening when you're not uh in any environment where you're getting cues that you need to do the prevention because you're not there yet but unless you do it you're eventually you're going to be feeling burned out right so the easy answer is to say when you start to experience the symptoms of burnout, so the classic one is sport devaluation. You just don't value your sport in the same way you used to at the beginning,

even just the beginning of the season. You just, yeah, I can give or take it, to be honest. So devaluing the sport, feeling of emotional exhaustion, like I'm just tired. I'm just tired of dealing with all this team crap, you know, and all the drama that goes on and tensions. And, you know, I just, I've had it with that. And we know after an off season, you're like, yeah, bring it on.

But by two thirds of the way through the season, I, you know, so emotional exhaustion. I'm supposed to know these three as a psychologist. But by two thirds of the way through the season, I, you know, so emotional exhaustion, um, I'm supposed to know these three as a psychologist, emotional exhaustion, and I can't remember the last one off the top of my head, but those are the symptoms of burnout. So I think, you know, if you start experiencing those, uh, sorts of symptoms, and the key is consistently, of course, right. Not just like the end of a tough week, but after a weekend on a Monday,

you still feel like that. Then you definitely need to engage in that. But the problem is to prevent the onset of those symptoms. And they're quite, they're slow to come on burnout symptoms. And the burnout syndrome is slow to come on, but unfortunately, it's slow to turn off so you have to wait you have to be resting for a long while and wait for that feeling of like i don't appreciate my sport very much anymore to go away right so i think prevention is still better

than trying to cure and i think yeah a daily routine of trying to make sure you have some other interests it's not sport 24 7 we have another study going on at the moment with nfl uh athletes actually uh players and um you know we've had we had one player say no no no you know even when i'm not uh at the facility i'm still um watching football games because, you know, if you're not fully into the game of football, then you shouldn't be doing it. You know, and so that's interesting. So it sounds like he wants to be involved in football 24-7. But as the interview progresses, he talked about his team at a point in time

not making the playoffs. And he was like, well, well you know I'm disappointed but that opens up next weekend you know and I've been wanting to go away for a while and um and do a little bit of traveling so I'm going to take some time off next weekend I was like oh but I thought you wanted to do 20 football 24 7 uh and so clearly you know there was still an appreciation there even though his team didn't make playoffs at so clearly, you know, there was still an appreciation there, even though his team did make playoffs the following weekend, you know, he could do what he wanted. So yeah. So Dave, one question I'm thinking a little bit about for those people who are listening is,

so we need to get away from our sport. I'm also thinking about like getting away from work to prevent, right, feeling burnout or exhausted or devaluating what you're doing. What about recommendations for rest? So this idea of like you can only do, you know, four hours of deliberate practice, but you have these 20 other hours. Like how often should we rest? What are some examples of what we should do when we're resting well i mean i gave some of them i think what they have in common are that they are distracting from task a they do distract you to something else um i think that it's useful if task b is something you're genuinely intrinsically motivated to do okay but this is something you do you know those

things we get your day off and they can be really obscure. We interviewed a coach recently. Okay. A very high profile D1 coach because we also have a coach study who talked about he was interested in a particular type of music.

Okay. And he insisted once again that he just worked all the time. And if you didn't like working all the time being a d1 coach wasn't for you and then spent disproportionate amounts of time telling us about how he traveled around uh seeking out this type of music venue and they're like oh that doesn't sound like your sport but um so i think you know but but that music was related to his upbringing and was also something very personal and dear to him that probably had connections to family and his community. And so he was going to go away and do those things.

So I think genuine, intrinsic motivation to want to do it. The third thing I think, particularly at the day level, so not talking about the off season now, but just talking about end of day, is that it is useful, of course, if it's not particularly cognitively demanding. Okay. And so, you know, lots of people have talked to us about, you know, walking the dog and things like that, because you can just sort of relax in your head, you know, be in your own head and relax and so you know many Netflix things are like that and perhaps reading a light book for fiction I've got a Jack Reacher novel that I dip into that is quite fun other examples listening to music is a another one a lot of people like jogging even if they're athletes jogging but jogging for as long as they

want and at a pace they want and that's usually pretty mild pace and usually through somewhere nice yeah around the uh through the blossom pink blossom trees there in washington dc if you lived in washington washington or you know through campus here on Florida State, you know, somewhere that you it's just genuinely nice. And we know, of course, about, you know, submaximal endurance exercise, that, of course, that's the kind of exercise that tends to make you feel nicest in your head when you're doing it. So I think those are the things that have in common, they distract, you're intrinsically motivated in them, you can be immersed in them,

and that they're not particularly cognitive demanding. So they give the brain a bit of time off. I think those are great points to make as people are thinking about how do they rest? How can they rest more distracting from the task at hand, intrinsically motivated, not cognitive demanding, and something that you can be immersed in. So let's go back, Dave, to when we were talking about deliberate practice and give us a sense of like, is there anything more that you want to say about the rest and how it contributes to deliberate practice and like why it's essential?

Well, it's essential because, you know, we're systems with finite resources. And so if you are going to do your best work, invariably, that requires, you know, sort of maximum attention. And the system just can't sustain that for very long. You know, it's ent's entropic you know if we really perturb the system by pushing it the system wants to pull back and try to maintain homeostasis right try and reset energetically and including mentally so if you're really exerting yourself for those for those four hours if you're right the middle of trying to master

that new receiver route or trying to master uh um you know the new part of that language you're learning or trying to master the new series of notes in a musical production or as a business operative trying to really understand how the changes in your state have affected the legal system and you've got to know that and it's requiring maximum concentration you're not going to be able to do that for very long and so you've got to both recover from that but also protect in advance those four hours so one of the things I say this to my students a lot, one of the things that it's difficult to sort of combat is this kind of cultural, you're virtuous if your schedule is packed. You know, if you're incredibly busy,

you're just generally a virtuous person, you know um and i would argue that actually put on your schedule some some restful time and call that a meeting so you still feel virtual a virtuous uh but make sure you rest a little bit in advance in of trying to prepare for this very cognitively demanding four hours of deliberate practice in in the. So you both need to prepare for it and recover from it. So goes the theory anyway. But it's those things, it's those four hours that are going to move you forward. So even if you pack your day with 10 hours of relatively mediocre work, you know, you dip in and out of the law journal, you know,

every half an hour as a business person, you may simply not know very much at the end of the day but it's that time where all of us know where our head is down we're in a quiet location and and it hurts doesn't it you know that's the other one of the other characteristics of deliberate practice is that that process in the moment while you're doing it isn't actually inherently unenjoyable because you're struggling mentally like i've read this sentence four times and i just i just don't get it right i just don't get it and you've got to step back and think through it and make some notes and go back and it's inherently unenjoyable because it's inherently frustrating and challenging because you are changing those connections in your brain. That's what's happening. And that is a process the system

resists a little bit because it wants to conserve energy. So you've got to get beyond that. But once you've done it, you've then got to have the period where you recover from that. That's what the theory asserts. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. You know, what do you think about, you know how Malcolm Gladwell in his book kind of popularized, I think to the pub, to the public, Erickson's work about deliberate practice. And he said that it takes about 10,000 hours or 10 years to become an expert. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah. So, you know, Anders was at pains after that to sort of distance himself from that hard rule. Right. But in most research, it seems to be particularly where there's some kind of competitive environment, right? If you decide you're going to be expert in standing on a fence post, you might, you know, you might do that pretty quickly. But if you're in a field where there's genuine competition, you want to be a football player or, you know do that pretty quickly. But if you're in a field where there's genuine competition, you want to be a football player or a business person, then because you've got the competition, the standards of performance are forced up and the preparation period is going to be longer.

When we look at those sorts of fields, those people who are recognizable as experts do appear to have engaged in thousands of hours of this deliberate practice. Now, right now, I'm just actually revising for the Journal of Sports Psychology in Action, a paper on deliberate practice with one of our master's students and Mark Williams from University of Utah. And we were at great pains in that to say that, of course, what this doesn't mean is doing more practice. And so that's one of the misconceptions sometimes about deliberate practice is just out practicing somebody else. Now, over time, over years, it is about out practicing. At the years level, it is about out practicing them.

But the problem is people begin to think that at the years level it is about out practicing them but the problem is people begin to think that at the day level and so they spell they'll make a schedule where i'm just going to do 12 hours of basketball practice and then within a few months of course they're injured or or they're just disenchanted you know not motivated anymore and deliberate practice kind of says the opposite it says if you want to accumulate these thousands of hours over years, you've actually got to do less. And it's going to be useful practice. You've got to do less practice at the day level. You've got to do the highest possible quality practice.

Okay. But not very much of it. And then recover. And so, you know, the message that sometimes gets miscommunicated down to youth sport is that if I stay longer than you, I'm gonna be better than you. And it, you know, it tends to be tied up with some machismo as well. You know, I'm gonna outwork you.

And in fact, the theory actually says the opposite at that level. It says, you know, structure practice so that it is, you know, at its highest quality and goal directed with useful feedback, attempts to push you beyond your current levels, challenges your weaknesses rather than just repeats your strengths. Because there's a tendency, of course course if we're particularly when we're young to to go out and just do the things we're really good at and try and ignore the really weak bits but challenges the weaknesses and so on you know to maximize the quality of the practice and you shouldn't be able to do more than four hours of it in a given day anyway anyway and the

four hours actually isn't a block uh the the other part is that, and these are rules of thumb, of course, nobody knows for sure, but the rules of thumb are no more than 80 minutes without also some rest injected in there, and no more than four hours in 24 hours is the sort of rules of thumb extracted from the original work. That's so good. Well, Dave, I want to thank you so much for this thought-provoking conversation. I have read quite a bit about deliberate practice, but I learned a lot. And I learned a lot about rest and the importance of rest. And what i'm going to do is work to summarize our conversation so wish me luck well and i definitely recommend some some post some post podcast session

netflixing to you know fully get your rest in at that end and i'll do the same here i was thinking about what am i going to do tonight to make sure I rest. I did not think about work. And so I appreciate that. But we first started talking about failure. And I think your definition of failure is awesome and really unique in that it's like it's a product of the moment and the time, right, that you're in in the situation. That it's more of like a phase or a process than something that I think you need to take personally. So I really liked that perspective

and just how deliberate practice can only happen for four hours. This 18 minutes where you need a break, that's, that's powerful. And like what actually deliberate practice is. And then you talked about what are you doing on this other like 20 hours right yeah and we talked about cognitive detachment which is not thinking about your sport or what you're doing um and if you do we actually talked about rumination and like writing that down for you know taking 15 minutes to write down whatever you're thinking so that you can release that from your mind but just this idea of especially especially to do this, use cognitive detachment when you're feeling burnt out or, or exhausted, or that you're not valuing your sport like you

used to. And then at the end, when we were talking about rest and, and how do we find what makes us rest, right? And you said like something that distracts you from the task at hand, involves intrinsic motivation that like you want to do distracts you from the task at hand, involves intrinsic motivation that like you want to do it, you personally want to do it, that you can be fully immersed in it. And that's not cognitive demanding. So thank you so much for your wisdom today and sharing your research with us. How can people reach out to you and get a hold of you if they'd like to learn more? So they can do it via email. So that's deeckles at fsu.edu, Florida State University. And of course, they can Google me to find that email address as well. And of course,

follow me on Twitter and I'll do the same. So that's at David W. Eccles on Twitter. Those are the two key mechanisms, actually. Yeah, yeah. But please do. Always interested to hear from folks. So yeah, be very welcoming of that. And thank you very much for your time. This is definitely a great mechanism to disseminate some of the stuff we do at universities. And look out for the Journal of Sports Psychology in Action article, which should emerge in the next few months, that tries to nutshell some of these things. The guide from the editor is that you should be able to, on a short bus ride,

glean something genuinely useful from it if you're a coach or a mental performance consultant or an athlete. So that's the acid test there. Can you get something useful from it in a short bus ride? So hopefully that will do that as well. Excellent. Well, thank you, Dave. I really enjoyed talking with you.

And thanks for sharing your wisdom today on the podcast. No problem. Thanks for your time and best of luck with the podcast. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindhra for show notes and to join my exclusive community for high performers where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindhra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.