High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 420: Psyched Up: The Science of Mental Preparation with Dan McGinn, Author & Harvard Business Review Senior Editor

Episode Date: April 3, 2021

Daniel McGinn is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review, and the author of Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed. He is an experienced business editor and reporter. In his current role at Harvard Business Review, he oversees the magazine's feature well and the team of editors who produce its long-form articles. Dan previously spent 17 years as a reporter, writer, and editor at Newsweek. He has written two books of his own, and regularly collaborates with authors as a ghostwriter and book doctor.  In this episode, Dan and Cindra discuss: How our performance can come down to a few critical moments What happened when he sent Malcolm Gladwell a keyboard How athletes, surgeons and other professionals can psych up A powerful centering exercise you can use The power of priming in your life and performance HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: www.cindrakamphoff.com/420 HOW TO ENTER THE PODCAST GIVEAWAY TO WIN $500 CASH: www.drcindra.com/giveaway FB COMMUNITY FOR THE HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET COMMUNITY: https://www.facebook.com/groups/highperformancemindsetcommunity FOLLOW CINDRA ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mentally_strong TO FIND MORE ABOUT DAN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcginn/ 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. Bruce Lee said, to become a champion requires a good mental attitude towards preparation. You have to accept the most tedious task with pleasure. Mia Hamm said, I am building a fire and every day I train, I add more fuel. At just the right time, I light the match. In today's episode, I interviewed Dan McGinn. He said, anxiety is like a tax that takes away from our performance despite all the practice we have put in to prepare. This is your host, Dr. Sindra Kampoff, and I'm grateful that you are here. If you know that mindset is essential to your success, then you are in the right place. And if this is the first time you're joining us for the podcast, welcome.

I am a keynote speaker and executive and mental performance coach, where I work with entrepreneurs, salespeople, business leaders, and athletes. If you are looking to level up your life or performance and free yourself of mental roadblocks, please reach out to me for a free discovery coaching session at cindra at cindracampoff.com. And if you haven't already, we have a high performance mindset community over on Facebook where we are posting these episodes live. So they are launched there earlier than their post here on the podcast. And you can actually ask us questions as we are live over there on the Facebook group. So you can scroll down to the show notes on this episode to find the link or just search

High Performance Mindset Community over on Facebook. Look forward to seeing you over there. Now, in today's episode, I interviewed Dan McGinn, who is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review and the author of Psyched Up, How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed. He is an experienced business editor and reporter. In his role at Harvard Business Review, he oversees the magazine's feature well and the team of editors who produce its long-form articles. He spent 17 years as a reporter, writer, and editor at Newsweek, and he has written two books of his own, this one we're talking about today, Psyched Up, and he regularly

collaborates with authors as a ghost writer and book doctor. So in this episode, Dan and I talk about how our performance can come down to a few crucial moments. What happened when he sent Malcolm Gladwell a keyboard? How surgeons and other professionals can psych up? He shares a powerful centering strategy, the power of priming, and several other tools and strategies to help you psych up. You can find the full show notes and description as well as the transcript for this episode over at cindracampoff.com slash 420. All right, without further ado, let's bring on Dan.

Dan, thank you so much for joining us here on the High Performance Mindset Podcast. How is your morning going? It's going well so far. It's great to be here, Sandra. Thank you. I read your book, Psyched Up, How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed, several years ago, maybe two, and I really enjoyed it, and I'm really excited to have you on and to help people just learn more about what you, your work, and what you wrote about in the book. Thanks. I appreciate you reading it. And, you know, I'm always a little intimidated when I talk to somebody who actually does this for a living. I think you know more about this stuff than I do, but I'm happy to talk about the little piece of work that I did on it. Sounds great. So maybe just to start us off, tell us a little bit

about what you're doing right now and your passion. Sure. So my day job, I work at Harvard Business Review, where I'm one of the editors on the magazine. I've worked here for just about 11 years. And so that's my, you know, I'm pretty passionate about my work. So that's passion. Like everybody else in the pandemic, I've, you know, tried to get outdoor hobbies going, played a lot of golf last year. I'm a really bad guitar player, but I picked up the guitar again. So I'm trying to, you know, keep from going stir crazy in lockdown. Yeah, me as well. And we were just talking about that last year, a year from now was the last day that you were in the office. So it's pretty wild what we've all gone through in the last year. Yeah, I mean, in terms of mental performance, it's certainly been a test of people's resilience and their ability to cope and adapt. And it's been amazing to sort of watch how innovative all sorts of different kinds of businesses have been during this.

So I admire especially small business people who found creative ways to sort of adapt and get through this. Yeah. And I feel like that's been my motto this year, just adapt and adjust, adapt and adjust. I meant to adapt and adjust and I can keep adapting and adjusting. Yep. Yeah. My favorite recent pandemic story, my wife and I refinanced the mortgage on the house when rates dipped down over the fall.

And we went to the bank and, you know, the people were concerned about going inside the bank because of germs. And we weren't sure how we were going to sign all those documents you have to sign when you refinance. And the bank manager said, oh, we just do those through the drive through now. So we drove up to the drive through with our masks on and they start sending documents through the chute and we sign them and send them back. And so I'd never thought I would actually close on a house through a drive-through window at a bank, but that's the kind of innovation that we're seeing during the pandemic. You're right. Yeah, you're right that people are realizing that, you know, we can change and adapt and make things even maybe easier for other people. So, Dan, when you give us a little insight on what made you decide to write Psyched Up, how the science of mental preparation can help you succeed.

There we go. What made you write that book? Sure. So the book came from three places, really. Number one, I was not a great athlete in high school by any means. I was the kind of player that if the coach put me in the game, it meant that we were either really far ahead or really far behind. But even though I didn't have a great skills for athletics, I became really fascinated by the stuff the coaches would do before the games to get us prepared. Whether it was emphasizing the rivalry or emphasizing the bonds of teamwork, there was a lot of sort of

amateur psychology going on that I found really fascinating. So that was number one. Number two, when I grew up and became a professional person, I would occasionally run into other people who were former athletes who would use some of these same techniques that we would use in the locker room as athletes. You know, I had a friend who was a football player in high school and college, and he became an accountant and he would have to go into a board meeting to meet with like the audit committee of a big company. And he would be getting psyched up for that the same way he would for a high school football game. So I saw this sort of translating into professional life. And then the third thing is when I started working at Harvard Business Review, all day, every day, I see research come

across my desk. And I started to see studies that emphasized priming and things like that. So that I realized that there was, you know, there's a lot of amateur psychology going on in locker rooms. At the same time, there's actually a lot of research, some of it done at business schools, about how to best spend those minutes before you perform. So those are the three places the book came from. One thing that I really liked, and there was a lot of tabs and highlights that I have in your book, but I want to point out really on page 11, where you describe the importance of what we're talking about today.

And you said, if you work 2000 hours a year, but your overall success rests mostly on your performance during a couple of dozen crucial hours, a pitch meeting, sales calls, a key conversations with your boss and so on. And what I like about that, you know, the passage there is that you're not just talking about sport.

We're talking about business and, you know, sales performance, a key conversation with your boss. And tell us a bit more about how you see that our performance comes down to these crucial moments. Yeah. So I live in the suburbs of Boston, and it so happens that a lot of my friends out here in the suburbs are salespeople for tech companies. And a lot of them do key account management. So they don't have like a hundred accounts. They have like four or five really big accounts and their quarter. And sometimes their whole year is based on a couple

of hours when they meet with that key account. So that's certainly one example of it. I, in, you know, the current economy, we all know a lot of people who are sort of doing client work or gig work or consulting, and, you know, you're doing a lot of heads down work in those jobs, but then there's the moment when you have to interface with the client, whether it's at the front end of the job or at the back end of the job. So that's certainly kind of a high stakes kind of environment. And even me in my professional life. So when I want to write a book like that, like the one you're holding, I write the proposal. I send it to my agent. My agent sends it around to the publishing companies. But then I have to go meet with the publishers.

And maybe it's a 45-minute meeting. And they've already read the material. But then kind of I need to sell them on the idea. So even to do a book like this, there's a little bit of a high-stakes moment involved. And how do you see mental preparation fit with that or, you know, the things that you wrote in your book? So one of the things I argue in the book is that especially in the last 20 years, we've become a society that's really obsessed with the idea of practice. And, you know, Malcolm Gladwell made famous the 10,000 hour rule.

And, you know, how do you get famous the 10,000 hour rule. And, you know, how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. Well, actually practice isn't enough. You know, if you go to Juilliard, which is one of the places I visited in the book, they actually have an entire semester long course about how to deal with the nerves before an audition, because practice isn't enough. if your nerves and your anxiety and your emotions get in the way and sort of tax your performance. So I argue, basically, the point of this is, I hope you've practiced. If you haven't practiced, you're not going to be any good, but you need another layer on top of that, something to do during the last 15 minutes

before that high stakes moment. Excellent. And you just mentioned, well, when you think about the 15 minutes before, you know, and you're the research that you did for the book, what how would you describe, you know, what you think people should do the 15 minutes before their performance? Well, I think I would answer that question two ways. I think there's the goal of what you're trying to accomplish in that 15 minutes. And then there's the techniques of what you're trying to accomplish in that 15 minutes. And then there's the techniques you use to accomplish that. When I started reporting the book, you know, when you, for, for me as a reporter, I start a project like this with more questions than answers and

sort of, I might have a hypothesis, but I don't really know the answers yet. So my experience as a high school athlete was that getting psyched up was like flipping a switch on or off. It was mostly about adrenaline and it was mostly about, they would try to, you know, make us more energetic and, you know, get the adrenaline flowing. Once you start reporting a book like this, it turns out that adrenaline is part of it, but it's not really the most important part. I think about what you should try to accomplish during that time as increasing your confidence, reducing your anxiety, reducing your

anxiety and adjusting your energy level so that it's appropriate. So I came from, you know, I used to think about it as a light switch on and off. Now I think it is like a tuning knob. You know, you turn the volume up and down on those three things. So confidence, anxiety, and energy level. And then there's a whole bunch of techniques you can do depending on what works for you to try to adjust those things. Yeah, that's really good, Dan. As I was reading the book, one of the things I really liked about it was this really storytelling way of, you know, describing some of the concepts in our field. Like you talk about Yuri Hanin's individualized zones of optimal functioning, right? Which is if people aren't trained in the field, like that's a mouthful, but it's really like finding your ideal emotions to perform to

your best and right kind of regulating yourself. One of the things that I really liked that you said, maybe towards the end of the book is you said you're really to perform to your potential reducing anxiety isn't enough. And you said you have to build positive emotions. And I was like, yes, because that's what I completely agree with that it's have to build positive emotions. And I was like, yes, because that's what I completely agree with, that it's like building these positive emotions. So can you think of a story or maybe a time that you have built the positive emotions before your crucial moment where you wanted to do really well? Yeah, well, let me answer that a little bit more broadly. So I wrote the book and then I've spent a lot

of time over the years talking about the book with people in settings like this and meetings and such. And one of the things I've found is that if you take those three things, confidence, anxiety, or energy, each person has a slightly different formula. So for me, I tend not to get super anxious about things. Like I don't have a particularly nervous kind of personality. So for me in those moments before a performance, I'm much better off if I concentrate on trying to pump up the confidence level, build that positive emotion, like you're talking about. And one of the techniques that I talk about in the book that works particularly well for me is what they, what I call the greatest hits highlight reel kind of thing so yeah one of the places I visited when I was doing the book was West Point the military

academy at West Point they have actually a very large sports psychology department there and one of the things they do for their varsity athletes is they have a psychologist come in and work with each athlete and make an audio reel and they bring in a professional voice narrator. They put music behind it. So, you know, the person I watched was the goalie on the lacrosse team. And they come and they put headphones on him. And this like Morgan Freeman style voice comes over the loudspeaker. I forget the guy's name was John. It's like, John, you're the best goalie in the East Coast. Remember the game against Yale when you did this. And it's sort of this booming voice.

He had ACDC going in the background. And it's like a five minute clip, like sort of forces him to visualize all his greatest moments on the lacrosse field and talking about how great he is. He would listen to that when he woke up in the morning. He would listen to it when he went to bed at night, he'd listen to it before practice, he'd listen to it on the bus on the way to his games. It almost seemed like sort of a,

you know, almost a little bit of a brainwashing kind of technique. But it was sort of the message he was supposed to absorb from that is you're really, really good at this. And I think no matter if we're, you know, I'm not a lacrosse goalie, but when I sit down to write a tough article or when I have to give a presentation at an important meeting, I try to think about moments when I've excelled in the past and focus on those a little bit because they sort of increase the odds that I'll be able to do it again. Yeah. What a great description of West Point. I have a few friends that work there. And I remember you mentioning Nate Zinser, who's been there for a long time. Yeah, I think the power of that, Dan, is like, you know, our negativity bias, and we're more likely to remember the negative,

the times where maybe we haven't performed as well, instead of intentionally remembering the times we have done great. So I like just the example that you provided of when you sit down to write, you're thinking about the times that have gone well for you as well. Yeah. When I talk to people who work in offices and sit at desks like I do, one of the, and you know, we've all gone through this transition where a year ago I was in an office in Boston and now I'm in an office in my house. One of the things I think about is whether there are visual reminders of your greatest hits that you can place sort of within eyesight of yourself. So, Sindra, I know you work with professional sports teams and if you go into their offices, I would imagine they have trophy cases

and they have banners hanging from their stadiums. You know, if they want their environment to be one that reminds them, hey, you're a very successful organization. You're a part of a winning team and a winning tradition here. And I think when we all think about our own office environments, it's good to do the same thing. You know, I've, over in that corner, I have a little bookshelf that just has the books that I've written on it, apart from all the other books in my house. Over in this corner, I have a magazine rack with the last six or seven issues of the magazine that I help edit. So I try to surround myself with little reminders of successes in my career to sort of, you know, increase the positivity around me. Yeah, that's awesome. I think I look in the back of me in my bookshelf here. I was in this competition, kind of like dancing with the stars that was really outside my comfort zone. That star right there represents getting out of my comfort zone. And there we go. I got to sign football. That reminds me, like, keep doing the good work. One of my favorite stories, one of my favorite stories that's not in the book,

it was from a guy who I was on his podcast in the months after the book came out. I did a lot of podcasts in the sales field because salespeople really gravitated towards the book. And yeah, after we finished taping the podcast, you know, after you click the recorder off, he said, okay, I'm going to tell you this embarrassing story now. And I'm like, okay, that gets my attention. And he said, in my office on a shelf, like the shelf behind you, Sandra, I keep a gold crown there. And sometimes before I make an important sales call, this was back when we used phones instead of video, he said he would actually put the crown on. And I'm like, okay, what was the crown? And what was that about? And he said, well, I moved when I was a kid in high school. So between my sophomore and junior year, I moved across the country,

lost all my friends, showed up the first day of school, didn't know anybody and had to rebuild all of my friend base from scratch. And so junior year, senior year, by the middle of senior year, I was voted the homecoming king and the crown was his homecoming king crown. And he says, that crown reminds me that I have the ability to build rapport with people very quickly. And that if I work at it, I can be a pretty likable person. And so he wears the crown before these calls to remind himself of how much success he's had building relationships quickly, which is a key thing that salespeople need to do.

Yeah, that's powerful. And what I also heard is he puts it on and he's had building relationships quickly, which is a key thing that salespeople need to do. Yeah, that's powerful. And it's, you know, what I also heard is like, he puts it on and he's not thinking about becoming a homecoming king. And that's sort of like the outcome or the recognition. It's more of like what it took to get there and the process that it took to, you know, build relationships and be kind to people and connect. Yeah, it was the skill and the input and the work it took very much more so than the fact that, hey, I was the most popular guy around. How, you know, you said that a lot of people in sales really enjoyed the book. Tell us a little bit about, because I know there's people who are listening that are in sales.

How do you see, and there's some great examples in sales as well, but throughout the book, but tell us how you see it connecting specifically to sales. Well, as I said earlier, especially if you're in sort of big ticket B2B sales, where you're not, you know, phoning 50 people a day trying to sell you're, you know, making a few key calls, That's sort of a thin slice by stakes kind of moment. So it appeals to them for that reason. I think number one, I think it's a field where confidence and personal affect really matter. You know, if you're only going to see your client twice a quarter, you know, you need to bring your A game during those moments. You know, in B2B sales, I think there's an emphasis in particular on sort of, you have the, your contact with the client company, but then you're always trying to sort of get up the org chart and meet, you know, meet somebody a little bit higher.

Those people are hard to get to when you get there. You only, you know, it's sort of like the classic elevator pitch scenario. You know, you feel like you only have a couple of minutes to make your pitch. So I think it's a, it's a field where it breeds nervousness. The stakes are high. It's natural to feel some anxiety because there's not a lot of room for do-overs. So it is, it is sort of a field where performance and, you know, performance is very binary. You make the sale or you don't, it's like a field goal kick. You know, it's not, you know, there's not a lot of room for judgment there. It's either in or it's out.

Right. And I think there's high stakes in terms of, gosh, if you don't make the sale, you might not be able to pay your bills or there's an impact on your, your, your, how you know what you do for a living and how you can take care of your family. Sure. The compensation systems are very leveraged. So you're aligned with success and the rewards for success are very aligned with positive outcomes, but there's also a lot more consequences around negative outcomes in sales than there are in most traditional kinds of corporate work, I think. So you had mentioned, Dan, priming. Tell us a little bit about what you learned about priming and maybe how the best in the world might prime. Yeah., priming. Tell us a little bit about what you learned about priming and maybe how

the best, you know, in the world might prime. Yeah, so priming comes up a lot in academic studies, and I certainly saw a fair number of priming studies that made me think there was actually academic research that would help this book. So a classic priming study in academia is you have somebody do this thing for a couple minutes and then have them do something performance related. So the one that gets has gotten the most attention certainly over the last decade or so was Amy Cuddy's study of power posing. Amy's a Harvard professor and she did a study, it's probably like 12 years old or so now, I would guess, where she had people change their body position. So she'd have them, you know, sort of stand very powerfully, like with their chest out and they're in expansive

kind of position. And she would have them do that, or she'd have those be very sort of closed off and small. And then she'd have them do gambling tasks or other kinds of tasks that would show their appetite for risk, their confidence. And she also did things where she would test their saliva to actually test their blood chemistry. And she found that simply changing your body position to a sort of a powerful pose for a period of time before you do something can change your body chemistry, make you more risk-taking. So that's sort of a well-known, she did a TED talk on it that went viral.

That's an example, but there's a lot of other studies about priming in negotiation kinds of settings, in ritual kinds of settings. This idea that if you do something before you perform, it can change the way you perform. Yeah, excellent. I also think about how that relates to the morning. Every morning I prime myself, and the way I kind of think about priming is I'm going to consciously choose how I want to feel in the morning so that, you know, I'm more likely to feel that way throughout my day. So that might be choosing to focus on some gratitude or remembering my purpose or setting my intentions or talking to myself really powerfully. You know, those are the ways that I use priming, not even just before a big performance, but it's like just every day. Right. Right. No, that's a great technique. Yeah.

When you meet high performers and you start asking them about, you know, okay, tell me about what it is you do, you know, sort of the same way every time before you perform, it's surprising how many of the people you find will have some set of things they do. So it's one of these. It's funny, actually, I had to give a presentation, I gave a talk in January at a law firm, they were doing an offsite retreat. And I just finished reading Barack Obama's new memoir. And there's a little section in there, I actually played an audio clip of his book on tape to this law firm where he talks about what he would do before a presidential debate. He had the same meal every time. He listened to the same three songs over and over and over in the car on the way to the

thing. He wore the same suit. He wore the same shirt. You don't think of Obama necessarily as a guy who would be super ritualistic or superstitious. Oh, he carried five special objects in his pocket to every debate, things that were given to him by voters. So it's surprising, like how many people have something, even if they don't talk about it a whole lot, that they do for comfort before these things. Yeah, and that's a really good point to, you know, what you just said is like, they do it for comfort. I think people also do the, the routines to build confidence, right? So I'm thinking about the research in sports psychology to suggest that routines do

build confidence. I find sometimes they can be over played. You know, for example, I worked with a hockey athlete once who had to have a grapefruit before every game. And unfortunately, someone would buy the grapefruit for him. So he didn't have control if he had the grapefruit. And one day, the person who was going to buy him the grapefruit, he was a coach on the team or athletic trainer or something, didn't buy the grapefruit. And he's like, he self-sabotaged himself because he didn't have the grapefruit. And I thought, well, I don't think it's the grapefruit that really helps you play well. Right. But, but I think that example of Obama is a great example. Yeah. Yeah. There's one of the other theories that I found in the research that appealed to me. So

there are all, as you suggested, there's all sorts of studies in sports psychology that say people who do a pre-performance routine or a set of rituals before they perform do better. They've studied it in darts. They've studied it in water rugby, water polo, you know, all sorts of sports. And part of it is that they think that it's sort of like the countdown to a rocket launch. Like it's sort of like, you know, if you do it the same way, every time the sequence of events comes in and it becomes habitual. But the other theory that's kind of interesting is that you're naturally going to be nervous before you perform. And that if you have something you need to do, it focuses your mind on that thing instead of being nervous. So there's a study I read one time. So I'm not only was I bad high

school athlete, I was I'm also currently a bad golfer. And I read a study one time that one of the best things you can do on the golf course, before I fear on the first tee is take a golf ball, and just start tossing it up and down like that. And it's kind of deceptive. Okay. Because it's not hard to toss a golf ball up and down like that. And it's kind of deceptive because it's not hard to toss a golf ball up and down like that, but it does sort of take a little bit of your attention and the focus of that attention, that's attention you're not giving to like, oh my God, I'm nervous. I'm going to hit the ball badly in front of all my friends. So this idea that you're, it's almost like you're intentionally causing a cognitive deficit and like sapping, you're basically, you know, doing something that is a little bit cognitively

demanding so that you don't get nervous. It's like basically, you know, one of the things I say to people is like, you know, okay, you're going to a job interview. You're going to get there early because that's the smart thing to do. You're going to be sitting in the waiting room. You know, if you don't have something positive to do during those moments, you're just going to sit there and be nervous and think negative thoughts. And, you know, so it's sort of a crowding out kind of theory. Yeah. And maybe a distraction theory, right. Or your focus is on something else besides your nerves. And the point of the,

my grapefruit story with the hockey player is sometimes I feel like the rituals like are overdone, right? Like if it's something, if it doesn't happen perfectly, my socks aren't exactly the way that they need to be, then it's like, you know, I'm going to have a poor performance. But generally, right, what you're saying is accurate that the research shows that routines do work. Yeah, yeah. I mean, what you raise,

so that's one of the things that does come up in the research is that like if you get dependent on your ritual, it does create the risk that something goes wrong. And there's a, there's a story in baseball. I think it was, I think it was Wade Boggs, the baseball player. So he had all these elaborate rituals before his games. And one of them was he liked to run on the field at 17 minutes after the hour, like before every game. So if it was a night game, it'd be like 5.17. He would want to run across the field. If it was a day game, it'd be like 12.17. So opposing baseball teams learned of this and they would manipulate their clocks in the stadium so that they would go from 15 to 20. And it would just, you know, they use those digital clocks, they would just skip 17 to try to mess with him. So yeah, you know, you can, if you leave yourself

too dependent on the availability of grapefruit, you know, you could have a problem there. But in general, the upsides exceed the downsides. Yeah, excellent. Really well said. One of my favorite stories in your book is when you sent Malcolm Gladwell a keyboard. Tell us about that story and what made you decide to send him a keyboard. Sure. I can't quite reach it, but it's right over there. It's on my shelf. So I read a study. It was probably one of the early studies that got me thinking about this. Somebody did a study. We wrote about it in Harvard Business Review, that they took a bunch of collegiate golfers who were about the same level of golfing ability. They gave them the same ball, the same putter, and they measured the same

distance from the hole. And they had them do several putts to measure how well they putted. The only difference was all these studies, they split them into two groups. There's an A group and a B group, the A group, they just handed them in the putter and said, okay, make the putt. The B group, they said, oh, funny story. This used to be a professional golfer's golf club. And they gave the name, I can't remember who the name was, but the people who thought they were using a golf club that had previously been owned by a PGA professional hit about a third more put pots, which is just crazy. There's no reason for that. So there's this idea that, you know, so why do people like autographs? Why do people, you know, want to buy Marilyn Monroe's rocking chair? There's this idea that

like a physical object that's associated with somebody we admire that has got some sort of magical power. So I decided I want, you know, to sort of test this out. I wanted to have a lucky keyboard. I wanted, you know, Malcolm Gladwell is a very successful nonfiction writer who I admire. So I sent him the golf study and I said, Hey, I want to send you a keyboard. You use it for three months, send it back to me and I'll have it and use its magic power. And he said, okay, I'm in. I, you know, I said, Mac or PC, he's a Mac guy. So I had to go buy a Macintosh keyboard for him, shipped it down. You know, he, I don't know what he wrote on it, but somehow in the process of it, he actually broke one of the keys. So it's now missing like the down arrow

button. I don't know what he did with the thing, but yeah. So I don't use it every day. I only, you know, I pull it out for special occasions, like, you know, the family China that you only use at Thanksgiving. If I have something that's like really important to write, I pull out my Malcolm Gladwell keyboard and, you know, does it make me 1% more confident, 2% more confident? You know, it doesn't make everything come super easy, but it's just one more thing. It's like one of my favorite things. And I think, you know, whether it's, you know, you know, lots of people in, there's actually been studies that lots of college students have a lucky pen they use for exams. There was a study about, you know, a professor who has had a lucky

pair of shoes. People often have some sort of object that they feel superstitious and, and gives them, you know, good luck and an increased chances of a good outcome. And for me, it's the keyboard. Yeah, that's wonderful. I love that story and that he actually like used the keyboard. I remember reading in your book and, you know, your colleague just said, well, do you think he just like, you know, went on Facebook with it? Or do you think he actually wrote his next book with it? I was tracking what he was writing during that time.

He did publish, he published a couple of New Yorker articles during the time when he should have been using the keyboard. And the fact that he broke the keyboard suggests he didn't just let it sit there. He was probably actually using it. He was using it. That's wonderful. I love that he just went with it and was cool with doing that for you. But really good point that maybe there's these things that we can do to help us feel confident,

right? And setting our environment up to help us feel more confident, even if it's 1%, 2%, 5%, 10% more confident. It's like we could make those choices. Yeah, I used to work at a magazine. It was a weekly magazine. And in that corporate culture, there was a lot of status tied to writing the cover story of that issue. And if you wrote the cover, they would, you know, they did 50 covers a 15 of them, but a series of cover stories framed on the wall. And, you know, when I'd walk in every morning, it was like seeing a trophy case walking into

the gymnasium, you know, it sort of reminds you of the fact that, hey, when I have a good day here, I'm actually pretty good at this. And I think having reminders of that around us can only help us do a little bit better. The second favorite story that I have from your book is Mark McLaughlin. And I was like, wow, what a small world. I actually had him on the podcast last year. So I'm like, it's like, you know, the world is kind of like meshing here. But you talk about how psyched up can impact surgeons. And I thought that could be a population we talk a little bit about because we haven't yet. And you report in the book how Mark's like longest operation was

18 hours. So, you know, tell us in your perspective, why, you know, surgeons, doctors need kind of psyched up strategies, similar to what we've talked about in sales or in athletes? Yeah. So Mark was a great example. So Mark was a championship high school and collegiate wrestler, went to medical school, decided to be a surgeon. And he, as he describes in the book, he, you know, he was a resident somewhere doing a fellowship or whatever. And he said, you know, I need a process before I go into surgery. And it's going to be sort of like what I did in wrestling. So he has, he has listens to certain music. If you've ever been in an operating room environment, the surgeons always play music. And there are a lot of them are very particular about what kind of music they play. So Mark has certain kinds of playlists that he does for certain kinds of operations.

He, he very intentionally has a discussion with the, with the operating room staff, you know, the team of nurses and anesthesiologists before he begins much like the kind of pep talk that a coach would give before a sporting event. He has little superstitions throughout. I believe one of them was his favorite number is nine. So if he has to administer medication, instead of giving like 20 milliliters, they'll give like 19 milliliters because it has a magic number in it. Which, you know, I think that's close enough that there's not a pharmaceutical difference between them. But he has this whole series of things that he does to try, to try to, um, make him feel more confident and make him feel good the same way. You know, it's again, this is all about just making ourselves a

little bit better, but he is someone who is, um, thought deeply about this, sees a lot of comparison between, you know, the kind of athletic performance and the kind of physical manipulative performance he needs to do as a, as a spinal surgeon. So as an example of the former athlete, who's incorporating this into their professional life. Yeah. And I, you know, Dan, I'd encourage people as they're listening to think about, you know, what is the performance that they want to do really well at and what's going to help what's, what's their mental preparation for that performance outline it, right. Think about these, some of these strategies that we've talked about so far, what's going to help you build your confidence, even if it's just, you know, a little

bit, that little bit can make a really big difference in the actual performance. Yeah. What I often tell people is take out your calendar for like the next two months. And if you had a magic wand and you could circle a day on the calendar and guarantee that you're going to be performing your best that day, which day would you pick and why? And that's sort of the idea that, you know, all of our hours are not the same at work and we need to really identify our use case and those moments when we really need to be on. And then you're right. We need to sort of figure out what kind of techniques work for us. So in the book, there's a chapter on music. Music is something that, you know, a lot of people associate, especially in a sporting environment, you know, and I've talked to people who, salespeople who drive between appointments,

who listen to certain songs or people like get to a job interview early and play certain songs on their car stereo before they go in or their iPod or iPhone or whatever. So music works really well for some people, not so well for others. Rit or whatever. So music works really well for some people, not so well for others. Rituals and superstitions work really well for some people, not so well for others. Some people, the idea is much more about getting rid of anxiety because they might have a little bit of stage fright or nerves. For other people, it's much more about boosting confidence and trying to accentuate the positive. So I think everybody's a little bit different in terms of which of the knobs they need to tune and what techniques they can use to try to tune them. Yeah. That's why we need like a mental toolbox,

right? Of all these different tools that we might use. There's one more study I really liked, Dan, that you talked about in the book and you cited a study where people wrote about a time that they felt powerless, and then a time that they wrote powerful. Can you tell us what you remember about that? And I think that's really impactful for the listeners, because of the impact that just writing about your times where you've been felt powerful and powerless really do make a difference. Yeah, I think that's another example of sort of a form of priming the idea that, um, uh, you know, getting back to golf because golf is a, I find that a lot of the studies have been done on sports where, you know, soccer is not a great sport for mental preparation because you're running around the field continuously for 90 minutes. And

whereas the more downtime you have. So if you think of like golf or figure skating or gymnastics, where you practice thousands of hours for like this little thin slice of moment. So in golf, imagine you're teeing off on a golf course and there's a water hazard to your right. You know, you don't want to say to yourself, don't hit it to the right, because that sort of ends up doing it. What you want to say is hit it to the center or hit it to the left. So it's the idea that you want to keep telling yourself or thinking what you do want to do, not about what you want to avoid. And I think this powerful, powerless sort of situation, focusing on a time when you felt powerful is connecting with the positive. It's modeling the behavior you want to exhibit in this instance.

And it's sort of avoiding the negative thoughts. Yeah, excellent. And I think what you said is if you want to think about what you do want to do, not what you want to avoid. And I think there's power in thinking about times where you felt powerful to help you replicate it and build your confidence, which is really one of the things we've been talking about a lot today. Right. I mean, you think of the greatest hits, you know, the West Point audio tape thing. And I actually, I spent a little bit of time at Fenway Park with the Red Sox when I was reporting the book, not with the athletes athletes at all but with um i was up in the with the guy who programs all their music for batting practice and he told me one of they um

they actually do have a videographer on staff who makes these highlight reels for the players just to watch at home and to watch on their phones because they think um having a personal highlight you know imagine that you know what i do there's no ESPN that covers magazine editors. It would be a really, really boring show if somebody like tried to make a highlight reel of me typing away here. But most of us, we need to sort of come up with this mental highlight reel of what our most positive, most successful moments are and sort of cram them together and find a way to sort of replay them during this sort of priming period right before we perform. It's going to increase the odds you do it again. So you could do that by thinking about times that you felt powerful, maybe spending even three or four or five minutes thinking about your successes to help you prime yourself to have a great performance. Yeah. And, you know, some people

get creative and find ways to, to create more vivid reminders of them. I mean, here's a silly example that I use. So the first book I wrote, which, which was more than 10 years ago, I was interviewed around a bunch of places, but there was one interview in particular that was done on NPR and NPR just has like the best editors ever. And they polish you and make you sound like the smartest person on the planet when you're done, even if you're only sort of marginally articulate like I am. And a lot of times before I go on a podcast or before I do a media interview, I'll Google that NPR clip from years ago and listen to it because there's just something about the way they edited that thing that makes

me sound a lot better than I do in real life. You know, it's, it's sort of like watching a touched up version of yourself. And I can't help when I listened to that, even though I've listened to it a bunch of times now saying like, wow, I sound pretty good there. I sound pretty good because they edited the heck out of it. But it sort of reinforces the positive feeling. And, you know, it helps me feel more positive going into these sort of situations where I need to feel like I'm a little bit more polished and articulate. Yeah, that's great, Dan. I think about for me now in my life, you know, I'm a runner. And so there's a lot of downtime in running, by the way. So you need you need a lot of mental, I, I'm a runner. And so there's a lot of downtime and running by the way. So you need, you need a lot of mental strategies when you're running a marathon, but the ways that

I use my mental preparation the most is like before I give a keynote speech. And, um, I intentionally think about times where I felt really connected to the audience, right. Times where I've really, um, done really well and been proud of what I've done. And sometimes my brain wants to go to the times where, you know, maybe I was a little bit more rigid or less connected, but I got to push those out because that doesn't help me replicate. That makes total sense. Yeah. Thinking about successes and not failures, I think is probably one of the most important things people can do before they perform. So the last concept from the book, let's talk a little bit about and then we'll wrap it up. You talk about centering, and it's from Dan Green's book, Fight Your Fear and Win. How do you see,

you know, centering maybe helping people psych up or being mentally prepared. So centering is one of a variety of techniques that they teach at the Juilliard School to people who are trying to deal with sort of performance anxiety and stage fright and the nerves that accompany auditions. And that course, it's a semester long course, and it's fascinating the things they do in that course they um they actually like the you know i went and sat in on the course they have violinists and trombonists and stuff and they'll actually have them like do burpees and do jumping jacks and then have them play the instrument because they want them to get used to playing when they're sweaty and when they're a little out of breath because that's what nerves can do to you so centering um don green actually taught at juilliard for a little while and centering is one of the techniques that he taught there. It's one of these things that it's sort of like yoga.

It's hard to describe. And if you want to learn it, you're probably better off. There's YouTube videos about it, or, you know, the other thing I sometimes say when I talk to people about this stuff is, um, and I'm sure, you know, you're in this line of work, so you know this, there's, there are quite a few sports psychologists and performance coaches around. It's a kind of thing that a lot of people don't think to reach out and to utilize these professionals. But I, I'm sort of surprised at how underutilized they are. I mean, one of the things I often say to people is, you know, I live in the suburbs where it's not uncommon to meet people who are spending thousands of dollars on their kid's club hockey program or on, you know, AAU baseball or whatever. And if a kid has sort of a little bit of performance anxiety, to spend a few hundred dollars for a

couple visits to a performance coach can make a lot of sense. And I think that's true for professional people as well. I think there's this whole sort of infrastructure of resources around the psychology here that people don't know the resources are there. They wouldn't think about it. They might think, oh, it's going to be like therapy. Well, no, it's really not like therapy. They're not interested in your childhood. They're just interested in trying to like, you know, adjust your emotions in the moments before you're making a sales call or giving a keynote. And it can be super useful. Yeah, for sure.

You know, and Dan, I've been in the field for about 20 years now. I can't believe that. But I feel like this has been like four. But I do think that things are changing, that there's more and more people that are recognizing, right? It's not, you know, we're not going to examine what happened when you're in your

childhood. But really more, it's like helping you perform at your best. And the small investment, I think about young kids that you can make in young kids, like, wow, you can give them these skills in high school, for example, or early college, like it just helps, you know, you be able to perform and live a lot more freer. And I wish I would have had it. That's how I got into the field is I struggled myself with the mental side. Right? Yeah, it's, you know, again, this idea that we're all spending 10,000 hours trying to get better at the underlying stuff. I do think

layering on some psychology that's going to help you deal with the emotions in the moment before the stuff can make a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. Well, excellent, Dan. I love talking to you. I think we definitely gave people a reason to go buy your book. So it's psyched up how the science of mental preparation can help you succeed. Do you have any final advice or final comments for us? Yeah, I mean, I think hopefully this has helped people think a little bit about not the moment when they're standing up making the pitch or making the presentation or doing the thing, but that moment of time beforehand. And I think whatever you do, have a plan. You know, you know, we're living in a in a work culture where more of our evaluation is on fewer slices of moments. And, you know, you're going to be in that waiting room, waiting to go on, have a plan for how you're going to spend that last 10 minutes, whatever it is.

Because if you're just going to sit there and be nervous, that's only going to hurt you. Absolutely. Some of the things I really enjoyed about our conversation today was the research on priming that we talked about, even that 10 minutes before reducing your anxiety, increasing your confidence, and then adjusting your energy to what fits you. We talked about developing a highlight reel and just being your best in these high stake moments. We also talked about how you can write down times you felt powerful. And we provided lots of great stories here to help you really think about how you can apply this to your life. So Dan, thank you so much for joining us. Tell us where we can get the book and how we might, you know, are you on social media or anything like

that that we can connect with you? Sure. Thanks. Well, I appreciate the invitation. This was a fun conversation. The book is called Psyched Up. It's certainly on Amazon. It's probably still in most bookstores. I'm on social media. It's at Dan McGinn. Excellent. Thank you, Dan. I appreciate you joining us today.

Thank you again. 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.