High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 426: 80% Mental with Dr. Len Zaichkowsky and Dan Peterson, Authors of The Playmaker’s Advantage and The Playmaker’s Decisions

Episode Date: April 25, 2021

We have renowned sports psychologist Len Zaichkowsky and mental performance consultant Dan Peterson on to provide a deep dive on the cognitive demands of the sport and performance. Len and Dan recently released their new book, The Playmaker’s Decisions.   As a professor, researcher and consultant for almost four decades at Boston University, Len pioneered sport psychology by bringing cognitive neuroscience and sport performance together as an interdisciplinary science. He has consulted with teams in the NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB, Australian Rules Football, the Spanish men’s national soccer team, and Olympic sport organizations around the world. Len is a former president and a fellow of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. Dan is an Author, Speaker and Consultant. Specializing at the intersection of neuroscience and sports performance, Dan combined twenty-five years of technology management experience with his second life as a sports dad and coach to explore how athletes make decisions.   In this episode, Len, Dan and Cindra discuss: What are the attributes of a playmaker The best way to move forward after a mental mistake How to make a clutch play when you want to The Athlete Decision Model and how we can use this concept to improve our performance How we can improve our decision making skills in moments of pressure HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: www.cindrakamphoff.com/426 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/highperformancemindsetcommunity FOLLOW CINDRA ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mentally_strong TO LEARN MORE ABOUT LEN AND DAN’S WORK: http://www.80percentmental.com/ 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. Ed Jacoby said, pressure comes from within and must be mastered from within. Sarah Johnson said, pressure isn't supposed to break us, it is designed to make us. And the guests I have on the podcast today, Len Zukowski and Dan Peterson, right? The playmaker on any team makes the right decision at the right time, almost every time. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Dr. Cinder Akampoff, and I am grateful that you are here. If you know that mindset is essential to your success, then you are in the right place.

And today on the podcast, we have renowned sports psychologist Len Zukowski and mental performance consultant Dan Peterson on to provide a deep dive on the cognitive demands of sport and performance. Len and Dan recently released their new book, The Playmaker's Decision, and they also wrote a previous book, The Playmaker's Advantage. As a professor, researcher, and consultant for almost four decades at Boston University, Len pioneered sports, NLB, and Olympic sport organizations around the world. And he is a former president and fellow of the Association for Applied Sports Psychology. Dan Peterson is an author, speaker, and consultant. He specializes at the intersection of neuroscience and sport performance.

And Dan has combined 25 years of technology management experience with a second life as a sports dad and coach to explore how athletes make decisions. And in this podcast, Len, Dan, and I talk about what are the attributes of a playmaker and how you can be a playmaker in any profession or field that you are in. We talk about the best way to move forward after a mental mistake, how to make a clutch play or be clutch when you really want to. We talk about the best way to move forward after a mental mistake, how to make a clutch play or be clutch when you really want to. We talk about the athlete decision-making model and how we can use this concept to improve our own performance, and how we can improve our decision-making skills in moments of pressure. To find the full show notes and description, you can head over to cindracampoff.com slash 426 for episode 426 where you can get the description

and a full transcript of the interview and if you haven't already join us over at the high performance mindset community over on facebook where we're posting these episodes live as they happen you can make comments there interact with us as we are live on these episodes as well as ask us any questions. So again, you can head over to High Performance Mindset Community on Facebook and join us there. You can also find a link by scrolling down on the episode podcast notes. For example, if you are listening on an iPhone, open up the notes and you can find the link to the High Performance Mindset Community on Facebook. Without further ado, let's bring on Len and Dan.

Dan and Len, thank you so much for joining us here in the High Performance Mindset podcast. How's your afternoon going? It's going great, Cendra. Thanks for inviting us. Yes, I'm looking forward to this, Sandra. I've enjoyed listening to some of your podcasts and some of the work that you've done. So quite familiar what you're into.

And I hope that Dan and I can contribute a little something different and we'll go. Okay, excellent. Well, I read your last book, The Playmaker's Decisions. And then you have another book that came before that in 2018, The Playmaker's Advantage. So I thought what we could start is let's just really define what you think a playmaker is. Sure, I'll go first and then and then Len can follow up. So you're right. I mean, when we set out to write the first book back in 2018, first of all, I'm a sports dad. I'm not an academic.

I'm not a PhD. I work in the neuroscience world now as a project manager, but nothing to do like you do, Cinder, or like Len did for almost 40 years at Boston University. But I was a sports dad with three sons, and I loved coaching them up to a certain point until my expertise was gone, and then just watching them. And I was always amazed with what they did, but I always saw those one or two kids out in the field who just seemed to have something extra. They just, their vision on the field, the passes that they saw that nobody else did, the decisions they made very quickly.

And of course, being a fan of all sports, you know, you watch any fast moving team sport and there's those same players out there that just rise above the rest. And, and the common term across many different sports is playmaker, you know, they just make plays. And so when Len and I sat down to write this book, it was kind of like, we wanted to connect with, with parents and coaches. And as Len will say, he doesn't want to write another textbook. And so we picked that term as a way to kind of talk about the brain and talk about an athlete's brain and all the stuff that must be going on in an athlete's brain when they're out on the field, the ice, the court. And so we thought, no, playmaker seems like a good term. So I think

we'll go with that. And I think it's something that others can identify with. And I like playmaker because it makes me think of a person that can actually make the plays in clutch situations. And today, you might think of playmaker just in sports, but you can be a playmaker in life as well. Absolutely. Yeah, we wrote about them.

In fact, when I talked about Albert Bandura's great work at Stanford who I got to know quite well you know I I call them the playmaker in the field of psychology you know I wrote about that in that first book but if I could just expand upon uh what Dan was just saying is that that kind of laid in my career at BU, and I was moving more into the elite pro sports world and bringing sports science in there. I realized that one thing that in our field of psychology, we weren't teaching a lot to our students, is the whole area of decision-making,

kind of the whole idea of how athletes decide, these playmakers, what is it about them? And I got into that pretty late and Dan was thinking along the same lines. And that's kind of why we partnered. But, you know, Dan also has this great story where he talks about hearing Mike Sullivan, the coach of, he wasn't coaching the Pittsburgh Penguins then, but he was giving a seminar to a lot of aspiring hockey coaches. And he was just talking about the brain and, and future coaches have to understand how the brain works and how people learn

in order to be an effective coach. And so it turns out that I had Mike as a student at BU and he asked him what capacity he could help with the book. And of course we got him to write the forward. That was a great start, but he says, you know, the best playmaker I know in the world of hockey today is a guy called Sidney Crosby. You've got to come to Pittsburgh and spend some time with him. So I did. Oh, wow.

You know what, you know, so it was kind of a wonderful experience and have, have Sid talk to us about like how, and he knew this was very important and he had that skill set that he could see the ice better than most players and he could make quick and accurate decisions and that's why he is what he was or is and so we then just kind of followed other athletes and other sports and we're basically getting very similar answers you know that that yeah they recognized that they had that wonderful skill set. And I felt that, gosh, we've, we've got to promote that concept to teach other

people in our field to get into better understanding the cognitive field. Yeah, that's wonderful. Well, and when I look at your book, you defined, you know, Playmaker is one that can take over the game with superior athlete cognition. And I know cognition is part of, you know, your decision making. Maybe let's define what you mean by cognition and then we can dive into decision making. Yeah, I think that's, you know, when we picked out the first book and what we wanted to talk about, it was more just the broad landscape of everything out there that's going on in the athlete's brain. And it's really become, as Len said, more and more coaches are interested in learning about the brain. Players and athletes are learning about their brain.

Us as adults in our work life, we're learning how to use our brain and make decisions. And one of the things is just, we wanted to make it more commonplace to talk about it, to give parents and coaches and athletes kind of this common vocabulary that they could talk about these things rather than buried into some neurons and synapses and stuff like that. So we, you know, there's a lot of different models out there. Lynn and I just thought about it for a while and said, you know, this term athlete cognition, it sounds like something we could explain easily and people could grasp. So we broke that into basically three major functions as a player who's out on the field, goes through thousands of times a game. Think about a soccer midfielder or a

hockey center and thousands of times of games, they have to go through this loop and we call it the athlete cognition cycle. And it's basically search, decide, and execute. And it's pretty simple to talk about. But when we divide that out, that's kind of how we divided out the first book is into those major sections. Search being obviously perception, vision, sensory input. Decide, obviously, just like it sounds, that black box in the middle where they're actually going to make a decision of what they're going to do next, move, pass, shoot, do something, and then execute. Obviously, all the skill, technical skill training that they need to carry off those. And they all play on each

other. You can't make great decisions if you're not perceiving all the opportunities. You can't execute the right thing if you made a poor decision, et cetera. So it's a circle that we kept coming around and around it again. And we kind of formed the first book around that. Yeah. And I think, Cassandra, that other people have kind of grabbed onto that too. And I know they're applying it. We had at our biometrics conference last week, Adam Beaven from Hoffenheim in Germany, and talking about how they're using technology to teach mostly soccer players,

but they've got hockey and they've got basketball, teach them to scan, search for cues on the surface that they're playing, the game they're playing. And then making that decision and then executing it flawlessly and we also had Kevin McGreskin from he was an elite soccer coach from Scotland who talked about those same concepts but rather than using technology how do we you know create practices on the on the on the pitch in tight areas so we can teach them to scan better and look for cues and then make quick decisions and then flawlessly execute. Don't mess up. And that holds true in

any area that whether it's a surgeon or a pilot or a police officer, it's the same stuff happens. You're searching for cues and then you decide, then you execute. I was just going to say, going back to Mike Sullivan and one of the things that was so interesting is that a coach at his level, two times Stanley Cup winner, playing or coaching at the highest level, played the game for years and years in the NHL. And that's one of the things that he brought out when he wrote the foreword for the first book. And I'll just quick short excerpt here, but he was saying when I was playing in college in the late eighties at Boston university, uh, taking lens classes, uh, the new frontier was in physical fitness and training. That's when players started to get into the weight

room, work on strength and conditioning, develop power in the neuromuscular system. That was cutting edge back then. Now we have pretty good understanding of how to train athletes physiologically. The next frontier is how to get players to better understand anticipation skills, recognition skills, decision-making, how to deal with the high stakes environments, how to handle pressure. And he said, in my generation, there's always been an assumption around the ranks that quote hockey sense is something that you're born with. You either have it or you don't, but you can't teach it. But the reality is that hockey sense or sports sense is not unlike learning how to skate or learning how to stick handle. The new capability is what we call, then that's kind of where we

came up with the playmakers advantage. It's something they have that hopefully others can understand and develop those certain parts of their game. Excellent. So, you know, when I think about search, decide, and execute, and sometimes how quickly that we go through those three processes, what would you say to an executive, to an athlete, to a team, team you know anyone who wants to improve their decision making skills i think is the most important thing to start with is that so often these individuals haven't really thought too much about this and if it just heightened awareness about the let's think about how important decisions are in the work that you do

and we heighten one's awareness of how we look for the important cues to help us make the best possible decisions and then learn to make them quickly or and accurately and then whatever you're doing execute that flawlessly and that's the thing that you have to, you know, deliberately practice as well. So, yeah, I think it's heightening that awareness initially is the most important first step, Linda. Great. Dan, do you have anything to add to that? You know, I was just thinking about, we had a conversation in the first book with Dr. Anders Ericsson from Florida State. And unfortunately, he passed away in the last year. But, you know, his whole research for years and years was on deliberate practice. And that was the message he tried to get across.

You know, what grew out of that with Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, is the 10,000 hours, et cetera. But when we talked to Dr. Erickson for our first book two years ago, and he was always, you know, saying that the message is about deliberate practice and whether that's sports, whether that's music, whether that's business skills, whatever you want to talk about, whatever you want to become an expert in that you have to go through this process of deliberate practice. You have to work on the weaknesses and get better at them. And so that, I think that applies to all walks of life.

And it's something that we spent some time on in the first book. So one of the things that I remember reading in your book was this idea of mental mistakes. You know, and I'm thinking in sport, it could be a penalty or false start. And I think even you said that, you know, the top four penalties were mental mistakes. So I think that's what you reported. So give us a sense of how or what gets in the way of decision making and how do these mental mistakes get in the way of decision making? And just tell us a little bit about how that relates to what we've talked about so far. Yeah, well, as we went into, so the first book came, as you said, came out in 2018.

And we had a lot of great feedback from that and mostly from coaches and parents, and they liked everything we had there at a high level. But they all said, you know, the thing that if you wanted to solve anything for us, as coaches or parents, dive deep into that middle, that decide box, that black box of when they're actually taking in the input and making decisions. And because that's a lot of the places where it goes wrong, you know, and that's what causes the mental mistakes. They know better than to jump offside. They know better than to grab onto someone for holding, but yet they do it. And still, so they could understand how they, you know, why they make those mistakes. One of the contacts Len had was down in Australia

at the Australian football league, John Longmire, who's a well-respected head coach of the contacts Len had was down in Australia at the Australian Football League, John Longmire, who's a well-respected head coach of the Sydney Swans down there. And we talked to him, Len talked to him and interviewed him for the first book. And it was interesting. I have a quote here from him. He said, you know, athletes come to us having mastered most of the technical demands of the game, but without question, the biggest challenge our coaches face is teaching our players how to make quick and accurate decisions on the field. And so that's where we spent a lot of the time in this latest book is talking about the decisions.

And one of the areas that I'll just jump into is just like we had the athlete cognition model at a high level, search, decide, execute in the first book. In this one, when we drill down to decision making, we developed something called the athlete decision model, because those are the kind of questions we wanted to answer. Players make clutch plays. Some players make mental mistakes. What's the difference? Why are they doing that? So we kind of broke that down into a new model we call the athlete decision model. Yeah. And I remember, I think the five, six components maybe were time, tactics, rules, attention, cognition, and emotion. Do I got that right?

That's very good. All right. All right. I did my homework. So give us a sense of, you know, either Dan or Len, the athlete decision making model and, you know, how maybe we could use that to make better decisions. I'll let Dan take that on. But there's one other thing I wanted to mention before we leave that area we were just talking about is sometime overthinking is where the mistakes are made too. And we talked a little bit about that in the first book too on choking behavior, which I don't like that term because it's

failure to perform in the clutch. But sometimes it's, I'm thinking of baseball, for example, you know, the batter strikes up and they say, wait, we choked. No, it was a perfect pitch. It was an unhittable pitch. So we don't talk too much about that. So it was just, you know, somebody just outperformed the other person on these one-on-one situations. So Dan, I'll let you talk about the rest of the model. Thanks, Len. And the thing is, you know, there's a lot of, and we'll talk, I think, a little bit about the decision-making theory that's out there.

But one of the things we pulled from all of those is, you know, obviously making decisions in a time-constrained environment and in a sports environment is a lot different than, you know, picking what car to buy or what job to take, et cetera, where you have a lot of time to think about and weigh the options. So as you mentioned, those six areas that we identified, three of those are internal factors. Three of them are external factors. The internal factors we labeled traits or things that come naturally to an athlete. And one of those is attention, how well they pay, can pay attention to the right cues out on the field, out on the court.

And that's a lot of the perception research that's out there and how they take in that sensory information. The cognition part is really a little bit of what you're born with in terms of information processing speed and working memory. There's been quite a few studies that show that those two variables across athletes really determine a lot of, you know, expert versus novices of how well they can process that information. And then of course, emotion. I put a quote in there from Phil Knight, founder of Nike, saying, sports is like rock and roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions. And whether you've played sports or you've watched sports, it's all about emotion,

but emotion can get the best of someone and can cause some of those mental mistakes, or it can cause someone to, to rise to the occasion and make a clutch play for the external factors. You know, we really kind of thought about what really has an effect, uh, that is maybe a little bit out of the player's control, the athlete's control, or heck and daily life out of our control. But one of the things, obviously, in sport, like we talked about, is time. So whether that's time on the clock, 24-second clock, whatever it is, or time of your opponent coming at you, you have the ball, you have the puck, and in a half a second, you have to decide what you're going to do or you're going to lose the ball.

The other one is rules of the game, like we talked about, jumping off sides, holding, et cetera. Players, young players at some point in their development, they learn the rules. They're taught the rules. They get into organized sport and they have officials who will enforce the rules on them. But somehow in their decision making, they have to overlay subconscious enforce the rules on them, but somehow in their decision-making, they have to overlay subconsciously the rules. So they know this is what I can and can't do. Um, sometimes they make conscious decisions to break the rules. Sometimes they make emotional decisions to break the rules. And sometimes they just jump offside and they just weren't paying attention.

And then the last one is tactics. So coaches spend all this time showing game film, drawing up strategies and tactics for the next opponent. And they dump all of this on their athletes and they're like, here's how we're going to play the game against this opponent. And so again, especially for developing athletes, they have to take that out into the field and under the pressure of time and under the pressure of the rules and the emotion of the game and all of that, they have to say, oh, that's right. Coach wanted me to do this, not that. I can pass here, but not there. This is how we're supposed

to bring the ball up the field, et cetera. And so those are the three things that kind of weigh down on the decision making of athletes. And then based on their internal makeup of their traits, it kind of all combines and how well they'll do with the decision making. That's really helpful. So the traits include attention, cognition, emotions, and the constraints would be time tactics and rules. Yep. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about emotions because I find that really interesting. And I know that the people who are listening also will. Tell us a bit about what type of emotions you think

help or enhance decision-making. Well, I just say that it's the best book i've read on it was quite recent a recent one by uh dr sary evans from new zealand who's a psychiatrist he he worked with the all blacks rugby team and he wrote a book uh on this whole topic of finding balance and controlling your emotions that balance you need between the sympathetic nervous system which energizes you and parasympathetic that kind of slows you down so it's emotions can be very healthy uh in a lot of sports but they can if you get overly emotional uh it can hinder your performance and then there's certain emotions like fear you just don't want to have so it's

incumbent upon us to kind of help athletes and help coaches teach athletes to to control those emotions particularly the negative emotions the positive ones yeah I think we we have to encourage that yeah yeah that's really helpful, and I was just thinking about helping people find the ideal emotions that they want to feel to play well. But I was curious how that impacts decision making. I think there was something about aggression in your book. Do either of you have any thoughts on that, how that helps or hinders decision-making? Yeah, I was thinking about one of the theories that's out there that we were mentioning in that chapter on emotions, and it's by Dr. Michael Eisner and Dr. Mark Wilson, and it's called the intentional control theory. And by itself, that's its own theory, but then they took that and applied it to sports rather than just across a wide variety of domains. And I'm looking here at one of the quotes from how they described how they approached to sports. And they said, quote, sports provides

almost a perfect environment for examining performance under pressure. Skills that have been honed and perfected during practice can break down just when the need to execute them is greatest. And then in studying that, they found that any factor or combination of factors that increase the importance of performing well can cause problems with decision making. The proposed mechanism by which pressure exerts its effect on skilled performance is via increased anxiety and emotional response to threat comprising cognitive worry and physiological arousal. And I was like, yeah, cognitive worry and physiological arousal. You think about young athletes out there and their desire to please their teammates, to please their coach, to please their parents who are on the sidelines, if it's a high school game, to look good in front of their friends, and obviously the physiological arousal, you know, the emotions of the game of, and there's been studies of, you know,

if you, a basketball player misses three shots, you know, what typically do they do next? If a, one team commits X number of penalties, are they likely to come back from that or not? And so there's been a lot more attention spent to those emotions and make the best next decision versus someone who's not as experienced will be a lot more affected by those emotions. Senator, what I liked about Evan's book is that he really simplified it for players and coaches, and he called it the red state and the blue state. And everybody has this common language, you know, you're in the red, you know, which means that's not good. Get into that blue state, you know, and hopefully they've learned how to,

to move from the red state into the blue state. So it's a very simple concept, but rather powerful. And I really liked it because of emotions for sure have, have an impact on high pressure performance. That's great, Len. What was the name of the book? Performing Under Pressure. I think it just came up in the last year, Indra.

And so your listeners may want to look for it on Amazon, Performing Under Pressure. I like it. He's not the best writer in the world, but I like the way he conceptualized it and kept it as simple as possible. Right. And I think we need simple things to be able to actually implement. Right. And if it's like, you know, and if we can say that on the field or on the court, you know, hey, get to your blue state or red state.

That I when I connect that to emotions, I think of red is like anger and frustration, you know, whereas blue is like calm and confidence, you know. That's right. That's exactly it. Yeah. The other thing I want to mention, so we don't forget about it is that one of my colleagues in Australia, Dr. Eugene Aidman has put together a kind of an international task force to study this cognitive fitness. So for your audience who's really interested in this rather new area, cognition and performances, just kind of follow that literature, because it's going to, I think,

explode in the next couple of years where Dr. Aidman really wants to kind of have a common language about what are the factors that make up cognitive fitness, how do we measure it, and then how do we train it and i think that's going to have a huge impact not only in sport but you know it's across disciplines into the military and and tactical decision making and special forces and police policing and and certainly with surgeons and other high pilots other high performers well thanks for the heads up on that and that was kind of connecting to my next question. We've talked about emotion and some about cognition. Is there anything within the trait part, you said

attention, cognition, and emotion, Dan, is there anything that we haven't talked about related to decision-making that you think would be important for the listeners to better understand? I think there's one of the distinctions we drew in both books, but more in the second book is, you know, there's a lot of, as you know, Cinder, there's a lot of decision theory out there developed by folks like Len, Dr. Daniel Kahneman, Dr. Gary Klein. And we really kind of, we tried to draw from those examples out there to say, how does this apply to sports? And we were lucky enough to talk to Dr. Klein for our second book. And the difference there is, you know, a lot of people know Dr. Kahneman and his research partner, Amos Tversky from Thinking Fast and Slow, the very popular

book from several years ago, where they introduced, you know, the system one and system two thinking. System one is, you know, do things automatically. You know, if you're an experienced basketball player, you don't think about dribbling the ball, You just do it. Versus system two, where you're actually having to compute and figure out some things. And that's where more of the decision making comes in. But the goal is to have all this tacit knowledge built up to see so many patterns over years of playing games. You're going to see thousands and thousands of game scenarios and patterns, and those start to add up and build a tacit knowledge database in your brain that you subconsciously draw from when you're presented with a new situation.

And so Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky focused more on kind of what goes wrong with decision-making, heuristics, biases, how we're influenced by these things when we're trying to make the right decision. Dr. Klein, on the other hand, he's spent his whole career outside of universities and studying decision-makers in the wild, if you will. So he's studied firefighters, medical personnel, first responders, military, and really looking at, instead of trying to bottom or come from a top-down theory of decision-making, let's watch these decision makers making decisions under pressure, under time, under stress, under emotions, and then interview them and ask them how they do it. And what he found is, no, they don't go

through a laundry list of the best options. You know, Tom Brady, when he drops back, he doesn't, yeah, he goes through his reads, but he doesn't spend a lot of time creating new options, etc. He finds the option that's going to work the best. He does a little mini simulation in his brain that takes a half a second, and then he makes a decision and go with it. And it's kind of a take the first theory that's out there. And so what Dr. Klein said is it's unfortunate that we don't teach a lot of that when kids are young, especially in sports. I have a quote here from him that we included in the book. This is Dr. Klein.

I think it's too bad when the training in youth sports is about not making mistakes. It is very procedural. It's getting these drills down. Part of the assumption is once you get all the basics down, at some point later in your career, you can learn about the decision-making part. But now you have all kinds of negative transfer to overcome that you have to overcome the way you've been taught to do it. The decision-making should be there from the very start. That's the way of building adaptive models rather than trying to graft it on later.

And, you know, he talks about kids become paralyzed because they're afraid of making mistakes and you can see the tension. So I think that's one of the biggest things for, for parents and coaches to understand. And that's why, you know, we talk about in the book about as much as you want to, and I was one of those parents, don't coach your kids from the sidelines during a game. Don't, even if you have all the best intentions, don't, you know, remote control them and tell them where to pass it and what to do and all of that, because they're so busy trying to make the right decision out there that you're just destroying any automaticity they have out there. Yeah, I think that's powerful, Dan, especially the quote by Gary Klein.

And I see it, you know, I have two boys, they're 11 and 13 right now. And we talk about mistakes in our home, right? And that mistakes are okay. But there's just all these messages that they shouldn't make mistakes, you know, how are they going to learn without making the mistakes? And, you know, they don't want to make a mistake either. You know, Glenn, I think about just your, how many different types of populations you've worked with and the incredible work that you've done within this field. Give us a sense of, you know, you could choose sport or you could choose a different population that you've worked with. You know, give us a sense of how what we've talked about today applies and applies to the real world.

How have you used what we've talked about in you know different populations well again my passion was always around sport but I knew it was quite generalizable these concepts and and again it was late in my career where I finally got smart and figured out that we're really missing out on this important dimension of thinking and making good decisions. And we just don't teach that. And we don't understand it all that well. But I think people like you with your communication systems are gonna hopefully have an impact. But I've also did similar things

in teaching self-regulation skills to surgeons. When we ran several projects with surgeons at major universities, helping them understand how to control what we talked about earlier, their emotions, because it's not winning or losing

a game. It's winning. It's perhaps losing a patient in surgery that you just can't afford to make a mistake. It's perhaps losing a patient in surgery that you just can't afford to make a mistake. But so it's learning how to control your emotions in those high pressure situations. So I really enjoyed working with that population, people in medicine. And I just want to emphasize the concepts are the same. It's just a different environment in which they're working.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking about. I think I read something about how you're working with surgeons. So give us a sense of just how you might, you know, briefly, I know you can't go into detail, but help a surgeon control their emotions. Because I think, gosh, if, you, if we can all relate to that, maybe we're not doing surgery, but there are definitely times where we're all in pressure situations. And being able to control our emotions is equally important, at least to us in that moment.

Well, the way I tried to get that message across was to monitor their physiology, their psychophysiology when they were in the operating room. Get baseline measures of them prior to going in, looking at their heart rate, their heart rate variability, EEG signals or GSR or electro dermal responses, things that are really activated by their emotions. And if they can look at their baseline measures and then watch themselves while they're performing

and then feed it back to them and say, ah, now with this kind of information, I know this is important. And this is how we self-regulate those emotions so that I am performing at my optimal ability in in surgery so and I've done that a lot with athletes too and and of course my world is getting a lot better where we were able to have wearables which not that many years ago they didn't exist but now these wearables provide can provide athletes with incredible

feedback about their physiology and which are by and large related to their their thinking and their emotions and they can better self-regulate those those dimensions great thank you for sharing that len uh dan and len is as we wrap up is there anything like i know we could talk you know hours about your book but is there anything for sure that you wanted to make sure to cover that we haven't yet yet what do you think Glenn you were very very thorough on asking the important questions and the only thing I'd like to leave you with is that I'm just being thankful that you're sharing this with your extensive audience and hopefully what Dan and I have been writing about and speaking about is we'll get more and more traction in the community. This notion of cognition and how to be better at what we do by thinking about thinking.

Love it. Dan, do you have any final advice or comments for our listeners? No, I just had one quote that I've always loved. It's in the first book. One of the gentlemen in our first book, Dr. Istvan Balje, he's a well-respected, developed a lot of country long-term player development plans for Canada and other countries when they look at their Olympic sports, etc. And he always had this quote that I loved, and I think it wraps up a lot of what we've talked about. This is Dr. Balje. He says, I learned this from Jesuit priests in Ireland. If you want to teach Latin to Johnny, you have to know Latin. And obviously, you have to know Johnny. So instead of Latin, if you want to teach any sport to Johnny,

you have to know that sport, and you have to know Johnny. We know the sport very well, but we do not know Johnny or Jane from age six to 16. Superimposing adult programs on young developing athletes doesn't work. And so I think that's for a parent, sports parents, and for coaches of developing athletes, that's one thing to keep in mind is they're not adults. They're not many adults either. And so, you know, you have to think about, as Mike Sullivan told us, you have to think about how their brain is processing this information you're giving them. Yeah, powerful. Thank you, Dan. So Dan and Len's books are called The Playmaker's Advantage, How to Raise Your Mental Game to

the Next Level. And then their more recent, The Playmaker's Decisions, The Science of Clutch Plays, Mental Mistakes, and Athlete Cognition. So Dan or Len, can you tell us where we might get the books and where we can follow along with your work? Well, Dan's not at that age. He's a business manager. Yeah. So Dan can give you input on that. Yeah. As they say, they're everywhere that you buy books. So yeah, they're on Amazon, Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes and Noble. If they're not at your local bookstore, you can ask them to order them. So both of them are out there wherever you choose.

And a lot of people buy them at Amazon, but some want to buy them at their local bookstore. So they're out there. The first one is also, both of them are in paperback and ebook format. And the first one also has an audio version and a hardcover version. Excellent. Well, thank you both for joining us. It was a pleasure to talk with you and to talk with you about your books and what you've been working so hard on the last several years. Thank you, Sandra. Pleasure talking with you. And feel free to share my contact information, my email, particularly with the audience,

if should they want to reach out to me. Okay, perfect. Do you want to give that to us now, Len, just in case anybody wants to reach out? Yeah, it's a simple one. Sport, S-P-O-R-T, at BU, like bostonuniversity.edu. Perfect. That's an easy email. It's easier than spelling Zykowski. No doubt. Exactly. Well, thank you, Dan and Len. What a pleasure. Pleasure, Cinder. 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. Sindra 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. Sindra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.