High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 464: Choosing the Uncomfortable with Purpose with Pete Kadushin, Ph.D., CMPC, Mental Performance Coach, Chicago Blackhawks

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

Pete has worked with a wide range of high performers, including athletes, first responders, military units, and performing artists. Prior to his current role as the mental performance coach for the Chicago Blackhawks, he held academic positions at both Western Colorado University and Boston University. In line with his goal of being a lifelong learner, he started the Mental Training Lab podcast in order to have fun conversations with brilliant people in the field of performance psychology. At the core of it, Pete's purpose on this planet is to help people learn the mindsets and mental skills that empower them to live a life of deep meaning, and to enable them to take good care of themselves and others along the way. In this episode, Pete and Cindra discuss: The importance of being uncomfortable on purpose The purpose of suffering How failure is the thing that activates growth Ways to have grace under fire How to start your own Suffer Club HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: https://www.cindrakamphoff.com/429-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2/ 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 FIND MORE ABOUT PETE AND HIS WORK: www.drkcoaching.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 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. Robin Schwarma once said, the more time you spend in your discomfort zone, the more your comfort zone will expand. Brooke Costillo said, discomfort is the currency of your dreams. And today I have Pete Kadushin on the podcast who said this, failure is the thing that activates your growth. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Dr. Cendra Kampoff, and thank you so much for joining me.

I'm so grateful that you're here, ready to listen to an episode with Dr. Pete Kadushin. Today, we are talking about choosing the uncomfortable on purpose. And Pete has worked with a wide variety of high performers, including athletes, first responders, military units, and performing artists. Prior to his current role as the mental performance coach for the Chicago Blackhawks, he held academic positions at both Western Colorado University and Boston University. And in line with his goal of being a lifelong learner, he started the Mental Training Lab podcast in order to have fun conversations with brilliant people in the field of performance psychology. At the core of it all, Pete's purpose on this planet is to help people learn the

mindsets and mental skills that empower them to live a life of deep meaning and to enable them to take good care of themselves and others along the way. In this episode, Pete and I talk about the importance of being uncomfortable on purpose and what actually that means and how to do so. We talk about the purpose of suffering, how failure is the thing that activates growth, different ways to have grace under fire, and how to start your own suffer club. Now, not supper club, suffer club. If you enjoyed this podcast episode today, we'd love for you to leave a rating and a review. Just scroll up wherever you're listening on your phone, for example, and you can leave us a rating and review there. This helps us reach more and more people each

and every week. So thank you so much for doing that. And if you'd like the full show notes, as well as the transcript of the interview, you can head over to cindracampoff.com slash 464 for episode 464. All right, without further ado, let's bring on Pete. Pete, I am so excited to be on the podcast with you. Thank you so much for joining me on the High Performance Mindset today. How are you? I'm really excited to be here. I've been a big fan of your podcast for years now, and so the opportunity to sit down and talk shop with you is the highlight of my day. Thank you. I know 2015, we've had this podcast, which is pretty crazy. Sometimes when I speak and I say, hey, if you'd like to listen to the episode, it's episode 420 and people's mind kind of, you know, is blown. Yeah, it's incredible.

But Pete, I'm excited to talk with you. And I know our conversation is going to be incredible. But Pete, I'm excited to talk with you and I know our conversation is going to be incredible. So I think we should just dive in and to get us started, tell us what you're most passionate about. I mean, other than talking shop with people like you, it's getting a chance to do the work. And for me, performance psychology is really about empowering and enabling people to make meaning at the highest level possible and as consistently as possible. And so it's about helping people understand what that meaning is. And so that could be sport and performance. It could be serving others for the tactical populations that I've worked with.

It could be helping people within the context of business, but it's really about finding the system that you use to make meaning and then building the skills so that you can do that as often as possible and as well as you can with the genetic gifts that you were given. And so the opportunity to understand what's going on in between somebody's mind and then help them get closer to what they want to do. That's the magic. It is the magic. And it's such an honor when people let us into their own minds. And it's just a privilege to work with people to really help them be the best them that they can be and follow what their goals are. So it is a really cool job, isn't it? It's the best. Yeah. I wouldn't

be doing anything else and want to be doing anything else. This is it. So tell us, Pete, how you got to where you are right now, because I think your journey has been really fascinating and you've had a lot of different opportunities to work with different various populations. So tell us a bit about that. I'll go broad strokes. And then if there's anything that we want to dive directly into, be happy to loop back around. I got into sports psychology because I was a head case as a wrestler. Wrestling was like my primary performance domain as a high schooler. So I did what any good nerdy young man would do. And I went to Barnes and Noble and got a book on sports psych. Awesome.

I went to Penn State and I did some psychology or majored in psychology, minored in exercise science, and then found my way to West Virginia University where I did a master's in counseling and a PhD in sport and exercise psych. And I had a bunch of really diverse experiences there, which I think set me up for the unusual and adventurous path that I've been on. I came in wanting to like work with the highest level performers possible, you know, Olympics, right? That's the rallying cry. And then I finished my career at WVU working in a weight management program, serving state employees who were overweight and obese with behavior change. So physical activity, nutrition, stress management, and seeing sort of the exercise psychology side of it and the outside of sport context in which all of the skills and tools that we can teach, how that could make an impact.

That ended up being a really important developmental touchstone for me. After that, I went and I taught for four and a half years at a tiny little university, Western Colorado University up in the mountains of Colorado. And I was teaching sports-like classes, motor development, motor learning. And every course, even when it was outside of my competency, ended up coming back around to really be a meaningful piece of the puzzle as I continue to grow as a practitioner and as a performer myself. After that, I went to Boston University and I taught in their counseling master's program with a specialization in sports psych for a couple

of years and the opportunity to work with master's students who were doing the work and then being able to supervise and really kind of be in the trenches with them. But with some perspective that you don't get when you're doing the work yourself, it was really a cool opportunity. And then to watch the light bulbs go on for the students as they were getting into the work was really magical. After that, I left BU. It coincided just about with the start of the pandemic. And so I spent the pandemic quarantine style trying to build, or excuse me, not trying to, I was building a business, which included Zoom-based performance coaching, and then built a podcast to go with it because

I love having conversations like this. And then about three and a half months ago, I was hired as the mental performance coach for the Chicago Blackhawks. And so I've kind of, I wouldn't say meandered. I've taken a lot of different interesting paths. And I think that when I zoom out, it's kind of like those mosaics where all the little tiny pictures, when you pull out, you see the grander picture. They've all been purposeful. It's just sometimes I didn't realize it. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing with us your journey. I remember hearing about that weight loss program at WVU, I think at our sports psychology conference. And I thought it was really intriguing. And I think sometimes when we're working with sort of non-athletes, it really teaches us the

importance of these skills for the everyday population, you know, and how they really do apply to all of us. And really cool that you started your business during the pandemic. That's not something I knew. And I thought, wow, your website is awesome for just getting it started a year and a half ago. What was that like working in starting a business during the pandemic when a lot of maybe things were shut down? It was the right challenge for the moment. I think that one of the things that was really beneficial is that Zoom wasn't part of our language, at least the common culture, you know, three or four years ago. And now if you ask somebody to hop on a Zoom call or Microsoft Teams or whatever, that's just, there's really not a whole lot of barrier there.

And so it opened up a world that I wouldn't have had access to otherwise, in terms of being able to connect with people and do the work. I think there's something that's lost and something that's gained. It's always about trade-offs. And so I love being in the presence of another. I think the body language and the energetics you get when you're with someone and doing the work, there's not a substitute for that. But the reach and the ability to connect with people when they couldn't have connected with me otherwise, I think was really an exciting piece of the puzzle. I think the other, I guess, the upside of doing this when everything was shut down was that there was a lot of space in my schedule that wouldn't have otherwise been there. And so essentially going back to school. So I went through Seth Godin's Alt-MBA program at the beginning of this year. I spent a lot of time reading and doing a lot of work around trying to figure out how to align marketing and business planning with my core value set so that it felt authentic when I was connecting with clients or potential clients. I never really wanted to sell somebody on something.

I wanted it to be the right fit. And when we found that right fit, the work unfolded much more organically. And so it was kind of like getting a crash course in business and website development and all of that. But one of my favorite things to do was learn. And so it was a great opportunity, although a challenging opportunity. Yeah. And now for the last three and a half years, I've been with the Blackhawks, or months, really, it seems like years, huh? You've been with the

Blackhawks. Tell us about that transition and a little bit more about that position so people can kind of get a frame as we kind of dive into some of these performance psychology topics? Yeah. So the way that the position's been conceptualized was pretty exciting. So I'm full-time embedded with the Blackhawks themselves. And so at practice, our office is in the practice facility. And so we're really, in terms of of proximity integrated into the team in a meaningful way. And then at games traveling with the team. And so really getting an opportunity to see the demands up close and personal of not just playing a hockey game, but also really having the opportunity to understand what's going on and all the demands in between. And it's something that I don't think at least when I was watching sport, but not a pro sport, but not a part of, you don't really understand all of the extra demand

that goes along with it. Especially within the context of, I said it back in the pandemic, but we're still moving through pieces of that. So the exciting thing for me is that when I was hired, I was also hired with another gentleman, also another WVU alumni, alumnus, there we go, AJ Sturgis, and he's responsible for the mental health for the organization. And so they found it important enough to bring in two separate people, one to do the focus of the off-ice work, and then one to focus on the on-ice performance. And I think that's, for me, a pretty important shift, whereas I know other places, they try and do everything with one person in-house. And I think there's some drawbacks to that. Yeah. Yeah. That's wonderful. And for an organization,

a pro sport organization, to see the value of two full-time people and cool that you have very similar training. So I know that we're going to dive into, you know, hockey, but first I just was curious, what do you think the high performance mindset really is and what does it mean to you? Let's go there first. It's a great question. And I think that the asterisk up front is that it looks a lot of different ways, depending on the performer. And I think there are a lot of, there's some commonalities that we can point to so for me, it's about, you know, when we think about systems, there's kind of a couple of different components. There's designing an environment that encourages it. And then there's the patterns of action and patterns of thought that support it, right? So our habits around what it looks like to grow consistently every single day. I think that

the hallmark of a high performer is that they weren't always a high performer, but they've gotten a little bit better every single day at their chosen craft. And I think cooked into that is ability to identify sort of the next little tiny horizon that you need to step towards, right? So really setting small process-oriented goals, but doing it relentlessly and then feeding that into the next part of the system so that tomorrow I take what I learned today and I can step on that as I continue to get a little bit closer to that goal. Once I hit that goal, I have the opportunity to pick the next meaningful step. And so there's that whole system that I think there's a lot of different ways to do

it. Some people journal after every practice. Some people are really good at setting goals before every practice or setting intentions, but having that in place and not leaving it up to chance. I think that's what I've seen across all of the different high performers I've had the opportunity to cross paths with. And then I think the second piece, so if that's like the one, sort of the practice growth side, then when it comes to performance, it's the ability to be deeply embodied in the present moment with a task focus. Yeah. That is so powerful, but so difficult. I think especially in sport where there's a lot riding on the outcome and or in business when there's a lot riding on the outcome, if it's a sale or,

you know, a close, whatever that might be. But I completely agree that deeply being focused in the present, focused on the task or the process is what high performance is a really important key to high performance. I just want to hop in and say that I think one of the challenges, because pressure is real, right? There are stakes. And sometimes those stakes are imagined or we've invested more in them than it's not actually life or death. It just feels life or death. But for some athletes and for certainly some performers, right, the tactical or first responder populations, it could be life or death. And so I think acknowledging, and this is one of my fundamental beliefs, is that we need to start with what reality is and then move forward from there and being able to be really grounded in that reality and honest with what it is. And so if you're getting ready to go play the Super Bowl, I don't think it's particularly effective to go, it's just any other game.

Yeah. Right? Like your body and your mind know that it's the Super Bowl. And when you go like, it's no big deal, it's no big Yeah. Right. Like your body and your mind know that it's the Superbowl. And when you go like, it's no big deal, it's no big deal. You go like, but it is a big deal. And I care deeply about the outcome. I'm attached deeply to one of these outcomes and I'm very upset if the other one happens. And so starting there and saying, okay, if that's all true and it is, cause it's there, then what do I do with it? Now, how can I work with the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations in my body in a meaningful way to still get to ready, to still be able to hit the

field when that first kickoff is going to occur and know that my body and my mind are in a space where I can perform my best? I think that's the task. And so it's not denying reality and it's not denying mistakes. It's using them in a meaningful way. Yeah. It makes me think of the summer. I did some work with the United States track and field team when they were over in Tokyo and you can't deny it's the Olympics. I actually think you have to acknowledge that it's the Olympic games and there's lots of different things because it's the Olympics and how are you going to manage that, but also be your best. And, you know, to me, that's why you have these different mindset tools that you can use and utilize on those, you know, the times where you want to really be your best. So I'm curious, Pete, when you think about hockey, and I've done some work with hockey players and teams, but not at the pro level and not in

embedded in a team like you are. Give us a sense of like, what do you think is specific to hockey related to the mental game or mental skills? I think when I'm starting to really try and climb inside the demands of a sport, I really want to pay attention to just that. What is an athlete being asked to do or respond to, or what demands do they need to meet? And then I think about it within the context of rhythm. And so what is the rhythm of those demands? What's the undulation of when I need to be locked in and focused?

And when can I sort of let that focus go a little bit, recover within the context of a game? And I think what makes hockey unique is that there's a very clear undulation to that on ice during your shift, 30 to 35 seconds, hit it. And you're going hard for all 30 or 35 seconds. And then you're back on the bench. And then what do you do with that time when you are not in the game to prepare yourself for when you get back out there? Which is a very different rhythm from somebody who's distance running, which is a very different rhythm from somebody conceptualize a lot of this. Uh, and I think hockey is unique because of that intensity. It's a hundred miles an hour and then stop and then a hundred miles an hour and then stop and being really purposeful with the gaps, the space between, I think enables you then to, to go and get it for that 30 or 35 seconds, uh high level and then be better prepared to do that throughout the course of three periods. Yeah, that's really fascinating to think about. And I also think the

emotional control piece is a piece of hockey that I think can really get the best of athletes because of the ways that you have to just be so all in, in 30 seconds. So how, how could you give us a sense of like, what are some of the things that you see, you know, top athletes do at the pro level? Let's say when they're on the bench and they're, you know, to be able to transition to really all out and then taking us some time space back and just resting a little bit with their mind or focus. I actually, I learned a really important lesson from a strange place. I was caddying when I was 14 and a big tournament, but you know, club tournament. And, uh, one of the guys, his son was with us, uh, for the tournament. And he and he was a cyclist and he sat down on a

tee box and then like basically just lounged for two minutes while we had to wait for the people to clear the fairway. I looked at him and I'd known him now for two days. And so I felt comfortable being like, oh, wow, that's hired. And he said, don't run when you can walk. Don't walk when you can sit. Nice. And it's something that stuck with me ever since, because it was this idea that there was an opportunity to conserve energy.

And being able to do that was actually not going to take him further away from task completion, being able to focus. But instead was something that was actually going to give him the energy to then attack it a little bit harder. And I think one of the fears of the athlete who's close to elite, but hasn't quite broken through is that they have all these tools and they've started to think they're working with a mental performance coach and they go, okay, well, I got to find my sweet spot, but I got to get my focus to the right spot. I have to get my activation and my physicality to that right spot. But then I get like worried that if I don't keep it there, right, that I'm somehow going to lose it. It's kind of how like worrying that you're, oh, am I in flow now? As soon as you start worrying about whether you're in flow, you're out of flow. Yeah, that's true. And so I think that there's a comfort and some of it just comes

down to a competence, right? You've done it enough at the highest level that when you have the opportunity to hop onto the bench, that you're thinking about taking charge of your breathing right out of the gate. So how fast when I'm in a full anaerobic mode where my heart rate is up at like 175 or 180, how fast can I get my mouth closed? How fast can I bias the exhale so that I'm really working on activating my parasympathetic nervous system? And then what am I doing with my attention as I'm manipulating my nervous system? Because our eyes help drive that activation. And so if I can actually let go a little bit with my eyes,

if I can go a little bit unfocused or get really broad with my attention and not be on something specific, I can actually facilitate that recovery. And then knowing the rhythm of, okay, well, it's almost time for me to hit the ice again. What am I doing then to tighten that back up? How am I starting to ramp my nervous system up by maybe shifting to more powerful inhales? And then how am I starting to pull that focus tight? So I might plug back into what's happening on the ice. And I think in general athletes, hockey players are aware of what's happening, right. But then really starting to pull into

the details and really starting to get their eyes activated again, in a way that's going to allow them to track the play meaningfully when they hit the ice. But I think this generalizes to any performer. It's just, what's the rhythm of the demands. And then where can I find those gaps? Is it timeouts during basketball? Is it when I'm playing soccer? Is it when the ball's on the other side of the pitch and I don't have to necessarily run quite as much? How can I limit how much I have to spend now so that I have more to spend later?

And then build the trust that I'm going to be able to get to ready, even if I'm willing to allow that to sort of open up and relax a little bit. It makes me think of your four core mental skills. And I'm like, I just heard in your response, many of those, like the energy management, mindfulness, strategic evaluation, and systematic discomfort. I thought those four together were really fascinating. So I want to ask you about those specifically, but give us a sense on why you chose those four as your core mental skills. I think I wanted to find a way to keep things simple. And the challenge is that you don't want to oversimplify something,

but I think that coming from an academic background, it's really easy to make things more complicated just because it feels good, right? The more boxes and arrows I can draw on the whiteboard, the more I'm doing, as opposed to sometimes it's sharing a cliche and then saying, here's what that looks like in action. And then that's all the athlete needs, right? And cliches are cliches for a reason because they often work. And so when I tried to distill down and part of the business development process was like really trying to clarify after a bunch of years in the field, what it is I actually believed, how do I think that the work works?

How do athletes reach that level? And then maintain that capacity to perform at that high level. And so I ended up with feeling pretty good if we couldn't hit anything else. And there's certainly some supplemental skills that I think are really, really important. But those were more tools as opposed to foundational cornerstones of peak performance. And so for me, these four were the ones that everything was built on top of. Yeah. It is difficult. I think when you've spent so many years in the field to ask yourself, what do I believe? And it's hard when you're just starting because you're maybe questioning yourself, but it's like after you've read so much, it's like, what is, you know, at the core of this? So that's cool that you've recently gone through that process.

So I heard like the mindfulness part and the answer and then the energy management piece and that answer, you know, in between the kind of breaks in the hockey game. But I'm curious about the systematic discomfort. And I know you said something before we hit record about kind of smiling through the discomfort. Tell us about your thoughts on that. I think that this is, maybe I could have gone back and said, what's the difference between high performers and everybody else? And it could have just been this, is that high performers are willing to be uncomfortable for a purpose. I don't think suffering, we can go back to Victor Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning. I don't think suffering for no reason is a good thing.

I think that suffering with a purpose, if it's getting you closer to something that's meaningful and important to you, is really the path forward. And it's not that everything has to be hard and arduous and you always have to be pushing the rock up the hill. But the truth is, is that growth happens at the edge of our comfort zone. And there's one of those cliches. We could put that on a, like a piece of driftwood and then hang it on a wall and it would look perfect. But it's, it's true, right? If we think about, and I often come back to physical skills or strength building because athletes understand the mechanics of that. They've been lifting for a long time, most of these athletes. And so when you say, okay, well, well, in order to get stronger, you have to get to that edge of failure, right? You have to put

more weight on the bar than you did a week ago because the weight that you used last week, your body's now comfortable with. Oh yeah, yeah, I get it. And the same thing is true with any skill for thinking about something you've perfected, doing that 99 times out of a hundred times correct. That's not learning. That's just reinforcing a pattern that you already have or reactivating the pattern that you already have. You're not growing because failure is the thing that actually activates the growth. It's the thing that neurochemically tells us, Hey, this thing needs to change in our brain. These new wires need to be solidified. And so I think the ability, if we're looking at both practice and training, you can't grow unless you're uncomfortable. And then the truth about peak performance is that at some point you're going to run into pressure. And so then the performance side of things, right?

It may be not preseason, maybe not regular season, but certainly the hope is to get to the playoffs or it's to get to the national championship or whatever your, the pinnacle of your, your performance domain is. And then there's going to be pressure and that's going to be uncomfortable, right? Cause we're going to care deeply about an outcome and it's going to be uncertain. And uncertainty is really uncomfortable. And so our ability to expose ourselves in training and then in other aspects of our life to discomfort, to develop the capacity to go, you know what? This doesn't feel very good, but I can smile and I can actually continue to move forward.

I can move through this. I think that becomes a universal skill that's going to facilitate the growth and performance side of things really meaningfully. I love this quote by Eleanor Roosevelt. And she said something like, if you do something every day, that's just a little bit scary that you do what you're intended to do in this world and you live your purpose. And I think it's very similar. You know, I'm thinking about discomfort in training. As a marathoner, it's like, oh, man, I can think of all the 20 mile runs that I went on that were really hard. Um, but also I'm thinking about in business that it's like doing something just uncomfortable every single day helps you make the impact. It helps you reach more people. It helps you get out there with your message. Right. And it's really easy just to sit and do nothing. Yeah. I think that we live in a world now where it's really easy to not be uncomfortable. In fact, a lot of things are designed for convenience. And so we now have sort of these two tides that clash together, where if I want to grow and invest in my purpose, if I want to do something meaningful, often, almost always, I'm going to go with 99.9% is going to require us to push the edge of tolerable discomfort and then continue to allow that comfort zone to expand. But we're also in a world now where

we don't really have to do that as often if we don't want to. And so high performers are exposing themselves to that on purpose. And I think one of the big challenges for domains who sacrificed a lot of stuff, relationships, a regular life, all these things for the sake of their craft. And I'm not putting a value judgment on it. It's simply a choice. But a lot of us, if you said like, do you want to have a happy, healthy marriage? And do you want to have kids that you're raising? And then do you also want to be the 0.00001% in your field? So yeah,

I want it all. And the truth is, I don't think we can have it all, right? There's only 24 hours in a day. And so being willing to say, I'm willing to push this boundary, I'm willing to grow over here and invest my time and effort, knowing that I don't have unlimited energy and I don't have unlimited time. I think that's something that we probably don't do a great job of talking about within the context of sport. But certainly, I think we should do a better job of it in the world of mental performance because nothing in life is free. And to become a master, I think it costs something. Yeah. Well, whenever you say yes to something, you're really saying no to something else.

You said something when we were talking about smiling through the discomfort that caught my attention and you said failure is the thing that activates the growth. What is your definition of failure? I think that failure, I like to define it pretty broadly because it takes a little bit of the sting out of it. Because we usually think of failure as the big stuff that we wanted and didn't get. And for me, it's anytime I have a desired state, well, I wanted a cup full of coffee and I ended up without one. But it also could be applying for a job. It could be going after a state title. It could be all of these things that are viewed with a lot more meaning than the cup of coffee that tipped over that you didn't get or you didn't manifest the exact vision of that you wanted. I think that's a really awesome definition.

And it's interesting how there's such wide responses to that question. I remember one person on the podcast said, well, failure is anytime I'm just not being myself or failure is anytime I really didn't go for it. And I like the idea of like intentionally defining failure on your terms. And, you know, I don't think we talk about that enough, that we just kind of define it maybe the way society thinks we should, which is anytime I set a goal and I didn't make it, reach it, or, you know, anytime I didn't like make my own expectations or reach my own expectations. So thank you, Pete. I also saw that you did some writing on grace under pressure, and we've been talking a little bit about pressure today and how we can all experience pressure. Tell us what it means to have grace

under pressure. I think grace under pressure is something that is not innate. I don't think we're born with it. I think it's something that's trained. And there's a lot of different ways to train that. And some of what we talked about in terms of systematically exposing ourselves to discomfort so that we can get better at dealing with being outside of our comfort zone allows us to have grace under pressure, but pressure is kind of a twofold. And I like to ask performers how they define pressure, how they feel it, where they feel it. But I'll go with my definition here, which is perceived stakes, whether they're real or imagined and a high level uncertainty about the outcome. So those are two of the components. But what that does to me, what pressure actually feels like is a dilation, a constriction of time. So time feels like it gets tighter and there suddenly becomes a sense of urgency, which means that my rhythm speeds up, which means that there are physiological effects to what happens in my body and that then feeds into my mind and we now have a feedback loop.

And so when everything starts to speed up, when my body gets tight, when my heart rate goes up, when all of a sudden, because my central nervous system is activated, my amygdala is more likely to see things as threat and then have me respond in that fight or flight way. Grace under pressure is being able to let my shoulders drop just like a millimeter. It's the ability to exhale just a little bit longer. And what that does is it opens up the capacity to engage in skillful action. So I'm no longer stuck in a reactive and um i'm trying to think it was the conscious leadership group and jim detmer that talk about above the line and below the line

so yeah proactive and reactive yeah and so moving yourself under stress under pressure under that fight or flight experience from a reactive mode where i'm going to act out of survival and safety which is generally not my best self, and move myself into a place where I can, even if this is all happening in a split second, access the skills that I've developed, the patterns and habits that are actually going to allow me to stay task focused and really operate at a high level. And so it's all of those things. And it looks a lot different depending on the demand. So grace under pressure for me when I'm walking my dog and she loses it when she sees a squirrel is way different than what it looks like for a Navy SEAL to stay graceful under pressure

when there's bolts whizzing over their head. Yeah. But I think the broad strokes end up being the same, which is the ability to really engage in skillful action. When everything around us, the context is demanding that we fight for ourselves and we engage in survival. I had an elite athlete tell me who was competing at the Olympic trials this summer, said that at the trials, she felt like her body, her mind was really fast and her body was really slow. And I thought, isn't that great awareness of like what pressure can feel like, like your mind is racing, but your body maybe is, is not quite, you know, it's maybe even slower than typical.

And the, I love the language that people put to, it was part of why I love what I do is the understanding the language they put to things that aren't really captured in language. And so what's going on in your body and people are like, Oh, it's kind of like it feels ish. And so for her to be able to use such pointed language, it's really a crystal clear window into what the experience was like. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible awareness. You said something that being strategic with our discomfort helps us have grace under pressure or doing it in practice or in preparation. Can you give us some examples of what you mean? I'll start with, uh, some silly stuff and then we'll work our way up.

I, uh, I once did a extra credit assignment called suffer club. That's awesome. I asked students in a mental training for peak performance class. I asked them to pick one thing that was going to be tolerable, but uncomfortable and to do that for a week and to journal on it. And then there was a reflection at the end where you had to summarize the experience and how you thought those skills would transfer over to what was really meaningful. So some students gave up social media for a week, uh, made others didn't hit snooze when their alarm went off. And as a former student, that's not easy. No, it's not. It's still not easy for me.

Cold water exposure. So for me, that was my choice. I don't like cold water. It's very unpleasant. And so I initially started with like, I'll do like 30 seconds at the end of my shower. And I had a student raise her hand and go, you owe us the whole shower. And I went, so for a week I went, and again, this is, I recognize the privilege and the inherent here. Like there are a lot of people who go without hot showers and that's just the way of living. For me though, this was an opportunity to practice systematic discomfort in a low stakes environment.

And what ends up happening, and I think this is part of the phenomenon around like the Wim Hof cold exposure stuff, the ice baths, is that you climb in and I don't know a whole lot of people who go, wow, that was just so tasty and delicious. No. But I think what ends up happening is if you can approach it with a particular mindset, you climb into an ice bath, you get a cold shower or whatever it is, that's really uncomfortable for you. And you go, you know what? That wasn't so bad. And by the end of the week, I had a lot of students say, you know, I'd get really contracted. I wanted to reach for my phone and the social media, and I couldn't do it. I got frustrated or I got hot or I got, I felt something. And it came with a set of thoughts and thought patterns because they were built into this habit. By the end, there was a little bit more looseness.

And so I'm in the shower and I'm like tight and I can feel myself just relax just a little bit. Still unpleasant, but I'm relaxing into that discomfort. I'm smiling through that suffering. And I think this becomes a generalizable skill. And so what does that look like then if we start to transport that into domain-specific work? I think that conditioning is another really great place to do this.

So for some athletes, it's going to be pushing harder than they thought. But for other athletes, and I think this is true for most high performers, the magic is in doing less. It's not doing more. It's about quality and intensity, not necessarily effort, but intensity of presence, intensity of really what you're trying to accomplish and how deeply can you bring yourself to it? And then not adding, because this can start to be really lazy. I'm going to do a hundred extra jump shots, right? But if I'm doing a hundred extra mediocre jump

shots, it looks like I'm doing the work and I'm pushing the comfort zone, but I'm not really. And so for some athletes about increasing the intensity, whether that's demanding that you're a little bit higher quality of attention or a little bit more present, sometimes it's the discomfort of doing less and then just being like, you know what, I guess it's all right. And we see this a lot with athletes who are tapering after they've trained for a big race. Oh yeah. Like the energy is bouncing around in their bodies and they're like, I need to do something with it because I'm losing my fitness. I'm losing my fitness. I know all of the science in the world of physiology points to the fact that tapering allows you to Excel when it's race time. And a lot of runners

are like, you know, I know the science, but what I feel is, so it's being able to sit with that discomfort and not let it run you. And so for some folks, it's actually, you know, meditation might be the discomfort. It's doing nothing other than being. And then you're like, well, yeah, I can control my breath while I'm meditating. Wow. Could you just pay attention to your breathing instead of changing the way you breathe? Can you not play whack-a-mole with all your thoughts, but can you just like watch the thoughts as they come through? And that's becomes the really uncomfortable aspect. And so it becomes a really a one size fits one question when it comes down to it. But I find that most athletes and performers, when they can get quiet and get honest, they know where that growth edge is.

They know what the rate limiter is that's really holding them back. And I think that our ability to excel is directly connected to our willingness to look at the stuff that other people aren't willing to look at and address the things that other people aren't willing to address. Awesome, Pete. Really insightful. I'm thinking about what should we do with this idea of the suffer club? And what do you think the real message for everyone listening is? I went and looked to see if there was a hashtag. Unfortunately, there already is. And so I don't want to hijack somebody's hashtag. But I think the message at the heart of it is, one, you have to start with reality and be honest. And if you can't be honest with yourself, then I think nothing else really goes. And I'm saying this out loud as a reminder to myself, just like I'm trying to remind others because suffering without purpose is just a recipe for

more suffering. And so once we're clear and honest, I think it's choosing to put ourselves in uncomfortable positions with purpose. And then when we're in those uncomfortable positions, it's just paying attention without judgment to what happens and noticing what's productive and what isn't. Not what is good or what is bad, but like what's getting us closer to the thing we want and what's moving us further away. Because getting really attached to good stuff, we could use the opposite, right? The hot shower. If I spend 45 minutes using up all the hot water, it feels good, but it might not actually be productive. It's not necessarily moving me closer to the things that I want to be doing or enabling me to then go operate at the highest level. And so it's really about, am I getting

closer to the person I want to be? Am I getting closer to the things I want to accomplish or am I getting further away? And so if you can expand your zone of tolerable discomfort, what you can tolerate while staying focused on the task at hand, I think that ends up being a skill that applies to like everything in life, hard conversations with significant others, right? Getting feedback from your boss, being able to walk your dog while there are squirrels and dogs everywhere. Applying for a job, like working with a black ox, right? And the first time you stepped on the ice with a team, I think all of those things are uncomfortable, you know, when we're put in new situations. So I love this idea. And I was also thinking about the time that I was the most

fit for a marathon was the time where my tapering started three weeks or so before the marathon. And I almost changed the marathon I was going to run because I didn't want to stop training. I was so nervous about tapering and my mind was going crazy. Like I had to actually have to, I had to remember this one conversation I had with my friend, Jim, who was my running partner at the time. It was just like, you know, he had to talk me down from, felt like a wall. And it's so interesting when you're just so used to doing something every day, and then you try to do it a little bit differently. Definitely uncomfortable. Well, and the not doing, I think, right? Because if I'm training, even if I'm overtraining, even if I know I'm overtraining, at least I'm doing something. And so I've tried to

reframe recovery as an active process. You're not laying on the couch. You're actively taking yourself down below baseline. You're getting your muscles softer and more relaxed. You're bringing your nervous system down. You're storing all that energy up. And that way athletes don't feel like they're being lazy. And look, if you can recover like a professional, right? If you could be 0.0001% recover, that's then setting the bar for how hard and how fast and how intense you can be when it's time to turn it on. If you're kind of stuck in that middle gear, you can only swing it back the other direction as far as you're willing to swing it one way. And so I think that trying to reframe it that way can get some of the competitive folks who are like, oh, I'm going to out recover the crap out of you then. I got this. But it's hard because it's inaction and inaction feels like letting go and letting go is very hard for us. It is very hard for us. One of the most difficult

things I think is to let go. So one of the podcast episodes I saw that you did, Pete, that was super interesting to me was about three layers of mindset and you had action and reaction on the top and then kind of in the middle, you had mental patterns and perspectives. And I think maybe the bottom was lens. I would love for you to kind of tell us a little bit about that concept before we close out today. I think one of the joys of the podcast was being able to push myself a little bit to break things like mindset down. And it's my definition. And so I don't want to suggest that anybody else's definition is wrong. But for me, when I think about what a mindset is, we generally flatten it and go, well, it's like an attitude or it's what you do most of the time. And I think that

starting with what's unseen or most unseen, and also I think hardest to change is that lens or perspective. We can really think about it like putting on different colored glasses and how that would change literally everything about what we perceive with our eyes. And what's interesting about the brain is that it gets really used to whatever circumstances you're given. And so you can actually put glasses on that are totally filtering out a ton of what you can see. And then you just kind of get used to it, not realize that anything was weird. And our lens is a lot like that when it comes to what goes on between our ears.

And so we can think about optimism versus pessimism. What thoughts am I filtering in and starting to notice with my attention or what is bubbling up from awareness? And oftentimes we go like, well, those are just the thoughts that showed up. And we don't really recognize that we have some agency in how that filter works or how we can change that filter. If we don't choose to affect that though, what that does is it starts to facilitate patterns. And we do patterns of mental activation, whether it's thoughts, feelings, responding to physical sensations. We do all of these because they're getting us something. And the question is, is it getting us what we want or is it getting us what feels good? And a lot of times it's getting rid of an uncomfortable feeling or it's giving us some pleasure or we're fantasizing about something,

or we're just worrying about something we don't have any control over, but it feels good because at least we're worrying, right? We can't do anything else about it. And then those patterns then feed the actions and reactions. So what do I choose to do? And then how do I choose to respond? And those are the visible things. If I'm watching from the observation deck and I'm looking at a bunch of athletes while they're on the court or on the ice or running around the track, I can see their actions and reactions, but I don't really have a lot of access to everything else. But in the work that we do, we can start to unpack what that looks like for a particular athlete so that we could understand

what does a growth mindset actually look like across each of these three domains? What does resilience look like? And why is it valuable to cultivate a mindset that's resilient? And thinking about, well, how does a lens need to shift to enable resilience at the behavior? And it's really a set of behaviors. What does resilience look like in between our ears in terms of those mental patterns? And by separating it into those three categories, it gave me places to assess and ask questions around. And then it gave me a way of articulating what we were trying to accomplish when we were building a mindset so that athletes felt a little bit more solid around stuff that just tends not to be very solid in between our ears. Yeah. I love it. So Pete, where can people learn more about your work? Listen to your podcast.

Tell us how we can follow along with what you're doing. Yeah. The podcast is called the mental training lab. And it's, it's just so much fun. And really one of the reasons why I started a podcast was because I'd listened to yours and you sound like you're always having so much fun. Yeah. And, and the conversations are always so tasty. And so for me, it was the opportunity to get a little bit more of that in my life. So I guess what I'm trying to say is thank you. You can also find me on Instagram at alldaydr.k. So all day Dr. K. That's awesome. I like to make sure that I'm not taking Instagram too seriously. And so with a ridiculous name like

that, I at least giggle every time I open the app. And then my website is drkcoaching.com, drkcoaching.com. So if you hop on the website, if you have questions about anything we talked about, or just want to reach out and connect, there's a, there's a form that you can fill out and it'll shoot me an email. And yeah, the other spots, I'm looking forward to releasing some more podcast episodes soon. And I'd love to have you on the show if you're willing. You know it. Yes, there it is. Of course.

It's now official because it's on record. Yeah. And so, yeah, those are the three main ways people can track me down and connect. Awesome, Pete. I had so much fun and I found our conversation incredibly insightful. I most appreciated what we talked about, actually just smiling through the suffering and the importance of exposing ourselves to discomfort is really important. Love your idea of the Suffer Club. I would encourage everyone to

try that for a week. What is maybe a behavior or something you'd like to change that maybe isn't serving you or if you changed it would really help you grow or learn or step into your potential. I liked that you said failure is the thing that we need to, or a thing that we need to activate our growth. And I love the idea of like grace under pressure and what we discussed today. So good. What final thoughts do you have for people as we wrap up? I mean, you just, you did a great job of putting a bow on everything. I, um, I think the, the last thing I would leave people with is that, uh, this is, these are all skills that we can improve. Uh, and so when it comes down to it, we have all these buttons and levers on our control

panel, and we generally ignore a whole big section of that that could enable us to live happier and healthier and more meaningful lives. And so in whatever way that looks like, whether it's working with somebody like us or just investing in yourself, not from a traditional self-improvement lens, but really from a place of being more congruent with your values, being able to live a more meaningful life, that there's things that we can work on every day that allow us to do that. That's what I want to push out into the universe today.

Thank you, Pete. I'm so grateful for your time and your energy and thanks for being on the podcast today. Thank you, Sandra. It was a blast. 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 dot com. See you 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.