High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 573: The Science of Burnout and How to Prevent It with Dr. Peter Olusoga, Professor, Researcher, and Podcast Host

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

Dr. Peter Olusoga is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom. His Ph.D. thesis, completed in 2012, focused on stress and coping in elite sports coaching, and his current research focuses on coach burnout, and well-being in high-performance environments.  Dr. Olusoga is a BPS Chartered Psychologist, an experienced consultant, and host of the award-winning sport and performance psychology podcast, Eighty Percent Mental. In this podcast, Peter and Cindra talk: Stress in high-performance environments The 3 components of burnout  The role of recovery in burnout  How self-awareness is a performance skill  4 research-backed ways to reduce burnout Advice for high performers on how to reduce and prevent burnout    HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE: www.cindrakamphoff.com/573 FOLLOW CINDRA ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/cindrakamphoff/ FOLLOW CINDRA ON TWITTER: https://twitter.com/mentally_strong Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/high-performance-mindset-learn-from-world-class-leaders/id1034819901    

Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Dr. Sindra Kampoff, and thank you so much for joining me here today for episode 573. I'm joining you from the Association for Applied Sports Psychology Conference in Orlando, Florida, where I've been attending the sessions for the last couple of days, learning from my colleagues. And I just want to say thank you to all those who came up to me, who listened to the podcast and share how much they enjoyed the episode. So thanks so much. I loved attending the sessions. I attended several and my favorites were about the YIPS, which we'll talk about in future episodes on the podcast. I also attended a session on self compassioncompassion that I loved and entrepreneurship.

So I just want to give a shout out to those presenters who shared information and expertise with us to just keep on helping us grow as practitioners. In this episode, I interviewed Dr. Peter Olushaga, who is a senior lecturer in psychology at Sheffield Hallman University in the United Kingdom. His PhD thesis completed in 2012 focused on stress and coping in elite sporting environments and his current research focuses on coach burnout and well-being in high performance environments. He's a chartered psychologist, an experienced consultant, and the host of the award-winning sport and performance psychology podcast called 80% Mental. And in this episode,

we talk about how we can all experience burnout and what leads to burnout. We talk about stress and high performance environments and how to reduce it, the role of recovery in burnout, how self-awareness is a performance skill, and research-backed ways to reduce burnout. We talk about, at the end, advice for high performers on how you can reduce and prevent burnout. To find the full show notes for this episode, you can head over to syndracampoff.com slash 573 for episode 573. And I hope you enjoyed this episode today with Dr. Peter.

I learned about different ways I can prevent burnout and I hope you learn a lot too. Without further ado, let's bring on Dr. Peter. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. I'm excited to have Peter Olushaga here today on the podcast. So thank you so much for joining us. I'm grateful that you're here. No, thank you for the invitation. And can I just say perfect pronunciation of the name just then? So well done.

You know, I had to write it out phonetically to make sure I was saying it right. But I'm really looking forward to talking to you. It was really fun before our podcast interview to dive into some of your research. And what a breadth of research that you've published in the area. And so I'm just really excited to talk to you about it today, Peter. And maybe just to get us started, tell us what you do right now and what you're most passionate about. Okay. Well, my main job at the moment is a senior lecturer. So I teach at a university in the UK and i teach psychology on undergraduate

and postgraduate courses i am a chartered psychologist as well with the british psychological society so i do um little bits of consultancy work some psychoeducation with different uh organizations and uh worked with a couple of athletes and teams and so forth as well. But yeah, so my main focus is teaching and obviously research as well. My area of research is in well-being, in particular well-being in high-performance environments and in particular related to high-performance coaches. I think often coaches kind of get neglected in that conversation. The focus is kind of traditionally very much on athletes.

That's changed a lot in the last few years. Coaches are getting a lot more attention, but yeah, traditionally somewhat neglected. So that's kind of my area of focus. Excellent. And as I think about your sort of origin story or what brought you into studying burnout and well-being in high performance environments, but also just to be in the field of psychology and sports psychology, tell us what led you to do some of this work. It was a total accident. It was a total accident it was it was a total accident i am i i was always interested in psychology and i went to university to do an undergraduate degree in psychology and all the way through found it really interesting found it fascinating had no idea what i wanted to do with it

and on that undergraduate course we didn't we didn't look at sports psychology at all there was a tiny little bit if i remember right uh where we looked at kind of behavior change in in exercise sure but sport wasn't the thing sports psychology wasn't wasn't a thing that we looked at on our course anyway so i didn't even know it existed um obviously i was i was kind of into sport i would i play basketball i coach basketball as well. And it wasn't until four years after I finished my undergraduate degree, I just happened to randomly bump into a friend of a friend who was studying sports psychology. And I was like, studying what? Sports psychology? And I was like, well, I mean, that sounds perfect. Sport. Yeah. Psychology. Yeah. Great. Um, so I ended up going back to do a master's in sport and exercise science, um, with a psychology pathway. Uh, and then as it happened, I came to the end of that, uh, master's degree, there was a PhD position came up, which I applied for and got. So, um, yeah, it's kind of like a series of happy accidents,

uh, led me into the field that I'm in now and the field that I love. Well, it sounds like you are following your passion to me and the things that were interesting to you. So, you know, maybe maybe it's all about the choices that you made. So pretty cool. Well, let's let's dive into really this area that you study. You know, you mentioned well-being in high-performance environments. You know, as I was reading more of your research about burnout and stress, what made you decide to study well-being in high-performance environments? Well, a couple of reasons, really.

I mean, first of all, you know, I mentioned before that I played a bit of basketball, i mean first of all you know i mentioned before that i i played a bit of basketball but i coached as well and my own experience is you know i never coached to any high level or anything like that but i coached the university teams and coached a little bit of national league in the uk and um you know that's a that's a stressful experience that's a stressful job um yeah and any any kind of player coaches out there don't don't do that that's a that's a stressful experience that's a stressful job um yeah and any any kind of player coaches out there don't don't do that that's ridiculously stressful um so my own kind of experience in in coaching uh led me to sort of have an interest in okay well how do how do coaches at the high level kind of really manage this stuff because obviously the stresses at that level are you know that much more intense um and the other thing again as i mentioned in the intro it's

at the time anyway uh it was a an under-researched area yeah coaches are carers but who's taking care of the carers and there was a little bit of research you know people like uh dan gould kristen deepenback had published a little bit of research around coaching psychology and coaching stress um but again the focus was mostly on on athletes how do we manage athlete stress so that they can perform under pressure um and the coaches were kind of a little bit ignored so that that combination of my own personal experience and okay well, well, this is actually an area that's kind of ripe for being looked at, led me to study that for my PhD. So my PhD, I received it at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where Dan Gould was one of the faculty. And guess who was one of fellow student, Kristen Dieffenbach.

So I saw that you did some research around or with her. And I'm like, well, isn't that cool? It's such a small world. And I was reading your study on stress in the Journal of Applied Sports Psychology. And maybe just tell us a little bit about what you found in that study that leads to elite coach stress. And I was also thinking about as you're describing it, as I think about how, you know, many people who are listening work in high performance environments, and I could imagine that they could apply it to their day to day. But to get us started, what did you find in that study

about stress and what leads to elite coach stress? So that was my first, first research study. That was my first publication. And, um, we interviewed a bunch of high performance coaches about their experiences of, of stress and what caused them stress, but also how they respond to it and how they cope with it. But in terms of what we found, um, uh, that, that stress coaches out, what are these stresses that they experience like one of the things that we found was that the stress comes from all sorts of different places so you might imagine high performance coaching is a stressful environment um and yes there was some stress that came from those places as well but actually there was a lot of stress from the organization. So just day-to-day conflicts with managers, with other coaches, with performance directors.

There was stress to do with the competition itself. So the competition environment, again, you'd imagine that these things are pretty stressful. There's also stress from the interpersonal relationships with athletes so athletes not showing up on time or you know not putting in the effort or kind of all of those kind of day-to-day athlete type stresses but also stress from more personal sources so coaches experience a lot of isolation a lot of interference with their home life as well because of the nature of the job. So that in itself was also a source of stress that sort of fed back into their coaching role. So the kind of major takeaway was that these stresses come from all over the place and they're often overlapping and often interrelated.

Now, in terms of how we can kind of use that stuff for our own everyday experiences, one of the things that I always talk about is we should consider what stress actually is. You know, I've just listed off a whole lot of stressors there. But if we think about what stress is, stress is an imbalance between those stressors or the demands that we face on a day-to-day basis and how well we think we can cope with those demands so stress is just that the process and i often liken it to um like a seesaw where you've got the demands on one side of the seesaw and the uh your coping resources your ability to cope on the other side of the seesaw and when that seesaw tips that's when we experience strain so the kind of emotional responses maybe physical responses to stress uh behaviors might change as well and i think from a um kind of from the layperson's point of view just understanding that process

understanding that that stresses that imbalance means that you know we we we know that it's not just big things that might cause us stress it's not just big things that can tip that seesaw it's lots of little things or even one little thing or the seesaw can tip when some of our coping resources are taken away so maybe when we're tired or maybe when we're ill um when we haven't had much rest so just understanding that stress process i think is something that's really important because it means that we can then take steps to either take away some of those demands or increase our coping resources. And what I appreciate is that's my, was my next question is like, how do you define stress? And you already went there. And I, what I appreciated that you said, Peter, was that it's how well we

think we can cope with the demand. So it's like our perception of how well we can cope with them. And it's really about what we're thinking about what we're focusing on. So we can either increase our coping skills, or what are the other, you know, choices that you think we have when we're experiencing this imbalance? Well, it's really easy to say that we can reduce the stressors you know that's the obvious thing to take away some of the stressors that are on that side of the seesaw that are causing it to tip but again if we think about what some of those stressors are there's all sorts of things that are organizational and big structural things that might cause us stress and anybody that works in any kind of organization many of those exactly knows that lots of those things are out of our control um but you know when we think about coping

um when we look at the literature again there's there's problem solving sorry a problem focused coping where we try and deal with the actual problem itself so you know if there's conflict with with another coach or with another person, we try and address that conflict. Or if there is, again, you know, the example I gave before of athletes not performing or not turning up, you know, we can address the specific problem. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. The other thing that we can do is focus on our own responses and kind of managing our own responses to those stressors. And often those responses are the things that are a little bit more controllable than the stressors themselves. So I think trying to deal with some of our own responses to stress is one thing that can certainly help,

as well as, like you said, increasing some of those coping skills, you know, our support networks, our kind of relaxation, meditation skills, all of those kinds of type things, the psychological skills that we can use to help us manage some of that stress. So the way you define stress as the imbalance between the stressor and how well we think we can cope with the demands. And with that definition, is there positive stress in your opinion? Absolutely. Yeah. It's really important to remember when we're talking about this, that the stress isn't always a bad thing. And anybody who's had an assignment due in the next day, or anybody who's had a

deadline that's due, you know, a close deadline, will understand that stress can be a really powerful motivating force. It can increase our productivity, concentration. And, you know, the coaches in the study that you mentioned before, but they also did talk about the kind of positive experiences of stress as well. So it wasn't all kind of this doom and gloom. This is an awful thing. It can be a really powerful motivator. So we shouldn't forget that. Yeah.

And I feel like that in my life as well. I do a lot of keynote speaking and there are times where it's a really big keynote. And I think just the magnitude of it or the number of people are going to be there or all the things that can make you, it can feel a little bit stressed. And I can feel stressed, but it also helps me rise to the occasion. And those are the times where I really knock it out of the park, you know, which is really interesting. So if you were dealing with somebody and let's say you're working with someone one-on-one who might be a coach or somebody else who works in a really high performance environment, what would you say are, you know, the top couple of tools that we should use to reduce stress? Well, the first thing that I would say, and the reason that people don't necessarily go there is because they don't really think of it as a skill, is self-awareness. And self-awareness as a performance skill is one of the most valuable, and it is a skill as well,

because we can get better at it and we can practice it but self-awareness as a performance skill is one of the most valuable tools that anybody can have when trying to to manage stress so you know understand what are your stressors because they're different for everybody and everybody responds totally differently but what are the things that actually you know what are the demands that you're But what are the things that actually, you know, what are the demands that you're facing? What are the stresses in your life? How do you normally respond to some of those things? You know, what are your behaviors that you exhibit when you experience stress? Physiologically, you know, what happens to you when you're experiencing

stress is it that a little bit of an increased heart rate those kind of typical almost somatic anxiety type symptoms um and what are the behaviors that you exhibit you know do you pace up and down the sidelines you know as a coach do you you know keep looking at your watch and you know bite your fingernails like what are the behaviors that you exhibit so understanding and really being self-aware about those things is a vital tool in the management of stress because what that does is it allows us to notice when it's changing it allows us to notice that, okay, my responses to what I would normally find mildly irritating, I'm now kind of like really thrown by it. Or, you know, my responses are completely out of whack with the stresses that are, you know, I would normally experience.

So that self-awareness honestly is the top performance skill for me anyway um in terms of of managing stress and then obviously there's expanding our range of coping resources as well um so like i mentioned before that uh developing your support networks finding people either within or or outside of your environment who you can perhaps open up to a little bit and developing some of those relaxation skills, breathing skills, all of those types of things are really useful in managing stress as well. Yeah, that's perfect. After this, I get to go watch my son play football and he's a ninth grader. And so he plays quarterback. And for some reason, Peter, when I watch him play football, I feel a lot of stress. I don't know if it's because, you know,

he plays basketball and my other son, like they track, they track him field. But it's something about maybe the violence of the game that I really have a hard time., I pace, I stand up, I sometimes feel like I'm going to puke and I'm like the mom. So I was just thinking about when you're talking about self-awareness as a performance skill and just like continuing to be aware of my own reaction to that. But I like what you said about using these coping skills. Is there one or two coping skills that you feel like seems to really be the most beneficial or that you'd like to share with us? I don't want to be that guy that says mindfulness is the cure for everything. Okay. Because it's one of those things that's gained in popularity everybody's talking about it but you know honestly in terms of just

that that practice of noticing and noticing when your responses are different noticing those physical sensations that perhaps thoughts that you're having that are associated with stress, you know, allows you to just take that sort of step back and create that gap almost between the stimulus, the demand and your response to it. So just practicing mindfulness in this way is a hugely important skill, I think, in the reduction of stress. Yeah. And for those people who are listening, mindfulness isn't the same as meditation, right? Where you're kind of this meditation would be more like the sit down practice of, you know, training present moment focus. But mindfulness is exactly what you just said, is just the act of noticing, noticing how you're feeling, noticing what's going on, noticing the environment. I like the definition by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and I think it goes something like is practicing being in the present as if like your life depended on it.

You know, I think that's really powerful so tell us a bit about peter about the role of pressure and how you think pressure can impact stress and burnout well i i think again you know when we're talking about high performance it's it's important to remember that pressure again isn't necessarily a bad thing and we need a little bit of pressure in our lives and um pressure can um spur us on to do really good things it can it can be motivating and uh can can help us uh do some really good work so i think you know again as with as with stress it's not necessarily always a bad thing. However, when we're talking about burnout, burnout is essentially a response to chronic, ongoing stress. Stress that isn't managed very well.

So when we're experiencing pressure that is relentless, when there's no space for recovery. And when that pressure starts to cause us to experience stress, again, we don't get the chance to recover from that. That's when that can lead to burnout. And burnout can have some fairly severe consequences. I appreciate that you just said that. Chronic stress that isn't managed well. I think that's really eye-opening for some people who might feel like they're burned out or they're burning out, whatever, however you might say that. As you are doing your research about burnout burnout tell us what you're finding about what people can do to reduce the chances of that well i i think let's probably start with what burnout is because it's like i said it's a response to chronic stress but it isn't stress

it's slightly different so burnout and you know i don't know if your listeners will be able to identify with this but burnout is a a syndrome of three different characteristics it's an ongoing experience of these characteristics so everybody is probably you know at some point felt a little bit exhausted like emotionally and physically exhausted everybody's experienced that everybody has also probably felt like there are times when they're just not really achieving anything even though they're still putting in the same amount of effort it's almost like you're on a hamster wheel and you're just going round and round and round you're not really getting anywhere and again everyone's probably experienced that at some point the third thing is it's called depersonalization and this is where you develop a cynicism like a

cynical attitude towards work or towards the relationships that you have with people at work and again at times everybody's probably experienced that sort of cynical attitude towards the work that they're doing. Now, burnout is when you experience all three of those things at the same time for an extended period of time. And that happens, like I said, as a response to chronic stress. So when people, let's say, just use the word burnout in their language, it might not necessarily be what you're describing. Maybe they're just tired or they need an evening of rest or a day off, but this is more a syndrome ongoing. And what have you found is the, I've done quite a bit of reading about burnout, but I'm curious in your own perspective, it's, it's, what are you seeing is like the,

is it three months? Is it one month? Is it six months? Like what's the ongoing nature where people experience, you know, these three components of burnout? Yeah. I mean, there's no, there's no sort of definitive length of time, I don't think. But it seems from the literature, it seems from the research that we're doing with coaches, that this is more than something that you'd experience for a week or two. This is something that is a couple of months at least. Like you say, six six months and we're really starting to to kind of feel that that that burnout um because again it's that ongoing stress

that causes it so this is something that's going to take more than just a few weeks to to develop to develop and like i say everybody experiences these things from time to time and they come in sort of peaks and troughs um but it's when it's really ongoing that's when we start you know you might start to experience some difficulties i'm thinking about your review on coach burnout that you published a few years ago where you talk about burnout and i'm curious about what did you learn about burnout from these high-level coaches? A couple of things. And I think perhaps one of the most important things to think about here is that when we talk about burnout and when we talk about stress these are these are organizational issues rather than

individual issues it's very very easy to look at somebody who's experiencing stress and think okay you know we talked about it right at the start okay what are the things that you can do to manage stress what are the things that you can do to perhaps recover from burnout where really what we what we're seeing is that stress and burnout are perfectly normal responses to situations that are abnormal in the amount of stress that's being placed on an individual so these are workload issues essentially um so one of the things that we learned from from the coaches in in the studies that you're referring to are that you know there are organizational issues that are at the heart of their their burnout experiences um so you know we're talking about

things like um the the culture of the sport and the organizations that they're in are a real driving force behind the burnout their experience and when i talk about culture i mean things like you know if you think about high performance sport that's driven by things like um this hyper masculine almost environment where right things like toughness and things like grit and, you know, all of those kinds of, all those kinds of words that we love in sports psychology, um, are that, you know, they're great, but they're also prevent people from helpeking and they create this sort of like tough masculine culture where help-seeking behavior you know it's it and vulnerability aren't really things that people want to want to display because it's a competitive environment right you know um so it's it's that kind of organizational

culture and it just builds and builds and builds. And like I say, vulnerability and self-compassion, they're things that aren't really thought of. So self-care just kind of takes a backseat. So it's, you know, what we learn from these coaches is that really it's those factors, you know. And a couple of them talked about things like it didn't matter how good the results are in their organization. Nothing was ever good enough. It was constantly needing to produce more and to do more. And that sort of culture is a real driver of burnout. So rather than thinking of it as like, what can the individual do?

No, what can the organization do? Yeah, that's a really good point. Because I think most of my questions so far have been about, you know, how can we cope? And I don't think this is unique to sport. I was just working this morning with an executive who doesn't engage really in much self-care at all, you know, admits that, you know, that he's just constantly working and doesn't have really any downtime. And, you know, it's just these cultures, they can be really competitive. This is a sales culture that he works in, right. So I think kind of very similar to sport where maybe it's hyper masculine and you know, it's a weakness to ask for help or say, Hey, I'm going to turn off my computer tonight and, and not do any work. Right.

But I appreciate what you're saying about that. It's the, you know, when you think about burnout, we should consider the organization as well as the individual coping skills i think the key point that you mentioned there was when you said as well because what we think about controllable versus uncontrollable like the individual has limited control over this organizational culture that's kind of you know battering them essentially um so yes the organization has a responsibility to look after its employees and to create a culture where well-being is perhaps as important as performance um because those two things are kind of inextricably linked right um so yes it's it's

important for the organization to do that, but that doesn't mean that people can't also practice a bit of self-care. They can't look after themselves a little bit better. The two things go hand in hand. So yeah, organization and individual. Hi, this is Cinder Campoff, and thanks for listening to the High Performance Mindset. Did you know that the ideas we share in the show are things we actually specialize in implementing? If you want to become mentally stronger, lead your team more effectively and get to your goals quicker, visit freemental breakthrough call.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call with one of our certified coaches. Again, that's freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free call. Talk to you soon.

Yeah, really helpful. So let's say there's somebody who's listening or a few, several people are listening there that are thinking, gosh, you know, I'm on, I'm feeling burnout right now. These three components, the syndrome ongoing, what advice would you give to somebody who's feeling that right now um it would be it would be lovely if we could take a two-week holiday in the bahamas every time it would be wonderful to be able to do that but it's it's also not particularly realistic okay um okay recovery recovery is important yeah yeah when we think about workload you know i said before it's a workload problem but that's not strictly accurate it's a problem with workload without recovery

so when we don't give ourselves the time or the space or when we are not given the time and the space to recover from an excessive workload that's when problems start to occur so um back in back in the 70s uh maslach and lighter christina maslach um is a kind of you know really sort of famous burnout researcher they talked about this idea of our work life having six different areas okay so workload control uh community uh values fairness and rewards i can never remember them i think that's right um we got six i'm pretty i'm pretty sure that's them um and the idea is that you know we we can't control all six of those things as individuals right um but if i can't control my workload my ability to recover from an excessive workload then maybe there are other areas that i can take a little bit of control in. So maybe I can do something about, I don't know, the community that I'm working with.

Maybe I can create something of a sense of community. Maybe there's nothing that I can do in terms of, you know, rewards and recognition at work, but maybe there is something I can do to take back a little bit of control so whilst we can't control all of these six different areas there are little bits and pieces that as individuals maybe we we can do a little bit of work on um but you know really in terms of of kind of dealing with burnout and and and this this idea of recovery we can't like i said we can't take a two-week holiday we can't control the workload that's being given to us but we can think about okay well where can i take a little bit of recovery where can i take a little bit of control back over my day-to-day

so you know i talk about something called micro breaks. Yeah. Um, maybe, maybe I can't take a day off, but maybe I can go and just stick my head out of a window for 30 seconds and breathe in some fresh air. Yeah.

You know, maybe I can't do that because I'm in an office that doesn't have windows. Okay. So maybe what I can do is I can just stretch for 10 seconds every hour, you know, and it's those tiny little sort of mindful breaks that we can start to build in that allow us to develop some of that recovery time, you know,

in lieu of the two week holiday in the Bahamas. But I think you'd be surprised when you start adding up those little micro breaks as to how much of an impact that can actually have. Yeah, I appreciate the concept of micro breaks, right, or stretching or just these mindful moments where you just notice how you're feeling. And I think people are sometimes just back to back to back with commitments. And, you know, we know the importance of recovery for high performance athletes. If they're not sleeping, if they're not resting, if they're not eating good and taking care of their bodies, you know, they can't perform at the highest level, just like you and me. Absolutely. Yeah. It's the perfect analogy. You wouldn't expect an athlete

to be training for 22 hours a day. Yeah. In the world of business and even coaching, you know, we're expected to be on 24 seven and always working and always producing. And, you know, it's not, it's not realistic and it's certainly not healthy. What are you, so besides the micro breaks, which I think is super helpful, what else are you seeing in terms of like just active recovery right when i think about my day and what i do i might um relax listen to music watch a show you know i like to go for a run in the morning um you know i'm just trying to think of the things i love to do that i think helps me the next day feel like I have the energy to take on my day

yeah it's it's that downtime uh like you say exercise comes up a lot uh as a strategy that that coaches in our in our studies have used for for sort of that stress reduction um spending time with friends and family um and and kind of really being present when you're doing that as well. I think that's one thing that a lot of people, and I'm guilty of this as well. I'll come home from work and I'll be sitting and having dinner and my phone's on the table, or I'm thinking about the meeting that I've got to go to tomorrow,

and we're not really truly present. So taking those breaks is is great and spending time with family is great and exercising is great but if you're going out for a run and the entire time you're doing that your mind is in you know the conference call that you've got coming up in in two hours you're not getting the benefits of um of the exercise well you're obviously getting some benefits of it but you're not maximizing benefits of the exercise. Well, you're obviously getting some benefits of it, but you're not maximizing the benefits that you could be getting. So really practicing being present is huge

because then that allows us to get those breaks, that recovery time, during ordinary mundane activities that we would be doing anyway. There was a study published last year, I think in 2022, and you probably heard of the study that suggested 42% of the time we're not focused on what we're doing, you know, and the study was also about like how an unpresent mind is a worried mind. So the more likely that you are to not be present, the more likely you are to feel a lot of anxiety and worry. And it just makes me think about how there's so many demands on our attention now compared

to 15 years ago that it's difficult to say do what you're saying practice being present and and you know 20 years ago would we even say that because i think we did that better naturally as humans yeah but you know i think for for anyone listening there's lots of ways and again it's a skill right so you can practice just getting better at being present there's loads of different ways you can do that you know i i examples so everybody brushes their teeth well i would hope that everybody brushes their teeth yeah hopefully so take take a simple activity like that okay two minutes for two minutes can i just focus completely on what i'm doing can i notice the weight of the toothbrush in my hand the sound of the water coming out of the tap like what do the bristles feel like what does

the toothpaste taste like what does it sound like when i'm brushing my teeth and anytime that you notice your mind wandering away from that acknowledge where your mind went and then without kind of you know beating yourself up about it just bring it back to brushing your teeth what am i noticing and you know this is this is mindfulness yeah this is just this is just being mindful can i do it when i'm just washing the dishes or having a shower or you know walking down the stairs and if we can practice doing it in those just really mundane activities, you know, we don't, we don't have to sit under a tree and meditate for half an hour at sunset every night. We don't, we don't have to do that. Can I take those really mundane activities and just practice the skill of

being present? Because if I can do it then, then what I'm really doing is I'm just practicing noticing when I've been distracted yeah so then I get better at noticing when I'm being distracted when I'm playing with my kids and I get better at noticing the distraction when I'm supposed to be sitting down and having dinner with my family and the more I can practice noticing the distractions the more I can bring my attention and focus back to the present and what I'm really trying to engage in. And, you know, being able to engage in those things, those things that you really value, it's a really, really nice way of protecting yourself against burnout. Yeah, excellent. It makes me think of the practice of mindful eating and how

many times when we just eat, we just put it into our mouth without really even tasting it. And you've probably seen those activities where you might eat a chocolate really mindfully. And I did it with a group of, I don't know, 150 teachers about a month ago. And the exercise took like two minutes, but they found that so difficult. One person was like, I'll never eat a piece of chocolate the same way again. You know, because it was just so unique because we just usually pop that into our mouth and just do it and be done in 10 seconds. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's, you know, understanding that it is difficult because we don't do it. We don't practice being

present so when you are practicing these things and when you are trying to develop that skill you know be compassionate towards yourself like this is difficult it's really really difficult to sit and focus on an activity for any length of time you're gonna get distracted it's just what your mind does is what your mind naturally does. So just notice that distraction. And the more you notice them, the better you get at noticing them. One study I want to talk a little bit about that you conducted was about female coaches. And my dissertation was actually on why women leave college coaching, mostly because of my own experience where my college coach left,

and it was a really tough experience for me, just like not having that social support. And I do think it led to some burnout for me. But I'm curious about what do you find in terms of the unique challenges for women in these kind of high performance environments that we're talking about? Yeah, well, I guess a little bit of backdrop to the study, which again, I guess being your area for your dissertation, you probably know about already, but coaching is still obviously a very male dominated environment and high performance sport is a very male dominant environment. I think that the figures that we quoted in the study was somewhere between like 10 and 20 percent of leadership positions in a few of the countries that we studied. So I think Canada, Norway and Sweden were women.

So women are hugely underrepresented in sport and in sport coaching in particular. So there's lots of challenges. Some of those challenges are kind of universal to high performance coaching um but the the study that we conducted uh found that uh there was there's two main themes really uh related to to these challenges one was the sort of stereotypical male culture of high performance sport as a stressor and then the second one was around work-life balance so uh in terms of the sort of male culture you know we referred to a little bit earlier this hyper-masculine environment of toughness and grit and and you know no help seeking and no

vulnerability and that is an issue for male coaches as well. But the women coaches in our study highlighted things like the kind of inappropriate comments and sexist behavior and sexist comments in that male dominated culture, which sort of led to an environment that wasn't particularly comfortable. Yeah, absolutely. A sort of discomfort around some of that stuff. As part of that culture, they talked about the fact that men would often choose other men. And it's kind of the old boys club type scenario. So that sort of led to a bit of a lack of confidence for women coaches that they were on an equal footing. And then there's also the lack of confidence around women coaching male athletes because of the perception and because of those stereotypical views of of well what women coaches are available you know the whole sort of well what can you tell me about my sport you're a woman type attitude so there was some kind of

things about the environment that particularly impacted upon women high-performance coaches. The other theme was around sort of work-life balance, which again has an impact on male coaches as well. But in particular, in this study, the women coaches talked about conflict with family, but kind of conflict starting a family as well which was that additional uh stressor that obviously doesn't have an impact on on male coaches so yeah

uh the sort of hyper masculine environment and the work-life balance are two of the major major themes i think that's consistent what i've seen in high performance business environments and i'm just curious from the research, what maybe recommendations you'd have for women who are listening or maybe men who want to support women in these high performance environments? Yeah. I mean, in terms of the environment itself, and again, this is an issue that, as you pointed out, is broader than just coaching. it's broader than just business this is a sort of huge societal issue that we're experiencing at the moment and it's about speaking up and challenging that that sexist and misogynistic behavior and

as a male coach in that environment like you know you're the one with the power yeah to step up and challenge um you know you're the one that can really sort of shape that environment and change that culture to how you want it to be so it's it's not incumbent upon the women in that environment to change that environment because they haven't created that environment sure it's the male coaches who've created that environment so it's up to it's up to them, I would say, to challenge those behaviors and call them out and really push for something a little bit better. Because again, when we talk about things like, I don't know what your listeners will think about the phrase, but the phrase toxic masculinity, you know, I think this has an impact on everybody. So it's not about male coaches calling this stuff

out for the benefit of their female counterparts. It's about the betterment of, you know, society in general. There's an impact on everybody. So if we can call out those types of behaviors, then our coaching environment or a business environment or wherever it is that we're going to be, uh, is just going to be so much better for everybody. Well, your answer is also very much organizational structure, right? Which I appreciate when we were talking about stress and how stress isn't just about you coping. It's also about the environment you're working in. And are there changes to culture or vulnerability in the culture that you can impact?

So I appreciate that answer because we could just focus on here's what women could do to cope with the environment. But it's also like, hey, who can advocate for the women and what changes can be made in the organization? So I appreciate your answer there. Peter, you got an awesome podcast. So before we wrap up, tell us where we can go check out the podcast and, you know, a little bit about why we should check it out. So the podcast is called 80% Mental. And you can check that out at 80percentmental.com, which is all words.

And it's really, it's a podcast about the mental aspects of sport and performance and we kind of wanted to start off by just exploring different topics and we've had you know some amazing guests on the on the podcast and the series that's going on at the minute we're sort of kind of branching out so we're looking at high performance but we're looking at it with uh coaches athletes but also dancers and uh actors uh singers um we had um like boxers as well so you know we've got a whole range of different performers from different environments um so it's it's been a really interesting series. And I would love it if you went to listen to that podcast as well, 80percentmental.com. Or you can just search for 80% Mental wherever you listen to your own podcast.

Awesome. If you're on Apple Podcasts or whatever. I saw that you were doing that series and I thought that was really cool that it was specific to the domain, right? And so, yeah, definitely check it out. 80% mental. Well, Peter, what great value you gave to us today. So I just want to acknowledge you and thank you so much for being here. Thanks for all the research you've done to help us understand stress and burnout. And I'm going to do my best to summarize here today. So you define stress as the imbalance between a stressor and how we think about how we can cope with those demands, right? So it's really about our

perception. We did talk about how stress can be a good thing as well. I appreciated when you talked about top tools and your like awareness as a performance skill is the top one. And just noticing what's happening with you, being mindful and practicing, noticing what you're doing. We also talked about burnout as this chronic stress or chronic syndrome when it's not, when stress isn't managed well, right? And you shared with us three components of burnout. We are talking a lot about the organizational structure and individual, you know, coping skills. And I appreciated what you said about recovery and these six ways that we can impact burnout, workload, control, community values, fairness, and reward. I think I got them all. And then just the importance of just being mindful in these mundane tasks so that we can continue to train our present moment focus.

So thanks so much for being on here. We're grateful that you're here. Do you have any final thoughts or advice for people who are listening? Advice for people who are listening? Well, first of all, thank you. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. In terms of, you know, because it's about high performers, right? High performance. Yeah. I think it's about high performers right my performance um i i think

it's a really interesting question i think we're in the middle of a culture that almost dresses up unrealistic and unhealthy practices as high performance i think we're kind of in the middle of a little bit of an epidemic of that and like if And if I can take the time to give you a little example here. Yeah, of course. I mean, there's so much stuff on the internet and there's so much stuff floating around. And one of the examples that I saw the other day was this video of the late, great Kobe Bryant. And he's held up as this kind of motivational marvel, right? The Mamba mentality and all that. But the video was talking about him saying that you know if you want to to be better than everybody else you have to do more so most

people would get up the train 10 till 12 take a break you know have a rest go get some food train maybe four till six uh and then you know have the rest of the evening go to bed but what he was saying he was doing was well you know what if you got up and trained got up at three o'clock in the morning and trained from four till six and then had a break and then train again from 10 till 12 and then had a break and then again from four till six and then again from you know nine till 11 and this is kind of this sort of motivational video right about putting in the work and doing more and more and i'm like what are you thinking yeah okay but that means you're getting like four hours sleep right and you're talking about doing that for five years well that's that's really really unhealthy yeah and also people do that right exactly it's really

unhealthy it's it's damaging you know in terms of health to not get enough sleep. But also, you know, you're a professional basketball player who's probably got a personal chef, you probably don't have to do your own laundry, you probably don't have to worry about, you know, taking the bins out or that sort of stuff. So, so living that sort of lifestyle, we're kind of taking that sort of mentality a little bit out of context and trying to apply it to ordinary regular folk yeah and like yes hard work absolutely is something that's required if we want to get ahead right absolutely we need to to work hard but there's a line somewhere between working hard to achieve what you want to achieve and getting to the point where you're

engaging in really unhealthy counterproductive behaviors and i think in high performance culture it's really easy in a culture that celebrates overwork and celebrates kind of burnout to step over that line so you know we live in a culture that tells you what success should be and what achievement is so if i was going to leave listeners with one bit of advice it would be first of all ignore all that stuff on the internet but second of all think about what success really looks like for you not what you're told it should be think about what achievement looks like for you not what you're told it should be think about what achievement looks like for you not what you're told it should be and it comes back to values again doesn't it yeah it does we're really

living a life that's moving us towards what we value and we have to negotiate that sometimes you know because the world of work but if you're kind of constantly doing that, then that's possibly the best way that you can manage your own stress, avoid that burnout, and live a life that's just sustainable in this world of high performance. Yeah, excellent. I'm so grateful that I asked you that question and you answered that way. It makes me think about when I talk about grit during my keynotes. Recently, I've said like grit is not grind. And I think this word people think that grit is like pushing until you're ready to be,

you know, you're ready to fall apart and kind of this overwork mentality of like just grind, grind, grind, grind, grind. But that's not sustainable for high performance in the long run. And there are times maybe we have to grind it grind, grind, grind, grind. But that's not sustainable for high performance in the long run. And there are times maybe we have to grind it out, you know, an hour or two, a day or two. But I think exactly what you're saying is like, if we grind for weeks and weeks and weeks straight, you know, what's the consequence? And I think it's exactly what you've been talking about today is just overload and stress and

burnout. Yeah, love it. So thank you, Peter. Thank you so much. I'm grateful to have you on. It's really fun to learn more about your work. So thanks. Thanks so much.

Thank you. It's been wonderful. 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 dot com. See you next week.