High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 606: How to Be Antifragile with Dr. Nick Holton and Dr. Adam Wright, Co-Founders of The Antifragile Academy

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

Dr. Nick Holton is a Co-Founder of The Antifragile Academy whose work focuses on helping individuals, teams, businesses and organizations become better versions of themselves through the application of the cutting-edge science of human flourishing – a synergistic development of both peak performance and overall well-being and fulfillment.  He also runs a podcast alongside the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. Nick has also directed multiple large scale implementation projects oriented toward human flourishing for schools and organizations around the globe, and has delivered talks and trainings across the US, Europe, India, Hong Kong, Australia, Uganda, Singapore, Mexico, and South America.  Dr. Adam Wright is a Co-Founder of The Antifragile Academy who is a high-performance and executive coach, consultant, and educator who supports a broad range of elite performers whose craft demands their absolute best in volatile, high-stakes environments. He consults with clients in such disparate performance arenas as the front office of the NFL, MLB, the European PGA, MLS, Hollywood, and Wall Street. As a practitioner-scientist, Adam draws from decades of practical experience as a coach and athlete, as well as lessons learned as a researcher and professor.  Adam currently serves as Major League Mental Performance Consultant for the Washington Nationals.   In this episode, Cindra, Nick and Adam discuss:  What does it mean to be antifragile 4 Thinking traps that get in our way of being antifragile Their “Top Down” and “Bottom Up” approach How to create an antifragile environment in sport, work and at home HIGH PERFORMANCE MINDSET SHOWNOTES FOR THIS EPISODE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ANTIFRAGILE ACADEMY  FOLLOW SIGN UP FOR THE FREE MENTAL BREAKTHROUGH CALL WITH CINDRA’S TEAM TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MENTALLY STRONG INSTITUTE Love the show? Rate and review the show for Cindra to mention you on the next episode.  

Welcome to episode 606 on the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Dr. Sindra Kampoff, and thank you so much for joining me here today. I'm grateful that you are here. And I'm the founder of the Mentally Strong Institute, where we help purpose-driven leaders and athletes play big and achieve their most audacious goals. If you want to achieve your goals quicker, up-level your confidence, and increase your influence, I invite you to sign up for a free coaching call with one of my team members at freementalbreakthroughcall.com. We will help create a breakthrough, a moment of more clarity and

understanding for you to help you practice the high performance mindset. Again, that is freementalbreakthroughcall.com to sign up for your free mental breakthrough call. In today's episode, I interview Dr. Nick Holton and Dr. Adam Wright about how to be anti-fragile. They are the co-founders of the Anti-Fragile Academy. And Dr. Nick Holton's work is around the science and application of human flourishing. He also runs a podcast alongside the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. And Nick has developed and directed multiple large-scale projects on human flourishing for schools and organizations. He's delivered talks in Europe, India, Hong Kong, Australia, and more.

Dr. Adam Wright, who I also interviewed in today's podcast, he consults with clients in performance arenas, such as in the front office of National Football League or Major League Baseball. He also has worked with clients from Major League Soccer and Hollywood and Wall Street. Adam currently serves as the Major League Mental Performance Consultant for the Washington Nationals. And in this episode, we talk about all things related to being anti-fragile. First, we talk about what it means to be anti-fragile, four thinking traps that get in your way of being anti-fragile,

their top-down and bottom-up approach, and how to create an anti-fragile environment in sport, work, and at home. I know you'll enjoy today's episode, and I know you'll learn something new about anti-fragile environment in sport, work, and at home. I know you'll enjoy today's episode, and I know you'll learn something new about anti-fragile. I know I did. And if you'd like to see the full show notes and description of this podcast, you can head over to cindracampoff.com slash 606. Without further ado, let's bring on Nick and Adam. Thank you so much for joining us on the High Performance Mindset Podcast. I'm excited today to have us be joined by two experts. We're going to be talking about anti-fragility today.

And so Adam Wright, thanks so much for being here. And Nick Colton, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thanks for having us. Glad to be here. Always happy to talk to you, Cedric. Yeah. I know. I can't wait to dive in. And I think that your topic is so meaningful right now and important for us to all discuss. And so that's why I'm really excited to have you on. And you have an incredible academy that we're going to be talking about today.

So maybe just to get us started, tell us a little bit about what does anti-fragile actually mean? Because most people might not be really familiar with that term. Go ahead, Nick. I'll let you, yeah, you can start and I'll jump in. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's start with, I think, two terms people are more familiar with, and it'll create a little bit of a, I guess, a spectrum here, levels of this. First, we've got fragile. I think people understand in the context of psychology and performance and performance and well-being and psychological health and all those things, fragile means adversity strikes

and you crumble, fall apart. Really, really hard to put the pieces back together if you ever do. So then we move to term number two, big buzzword out there, a lot of good stuff on this, great research, resilience. Like anything in science, different conceptualizations, but typically what you're going to see as a basic definition of resilience is I can bounce back, right? I've got some level of maybe even robustness. So when adversity strikes, I don't take quite as much of a dip, but at minimum, if I'm resilient, if I do take a dip in terms of my well-being or health or performance, I have the adaptability to sort of bounce back to baseline.

Right? Yeah. So that's a good segue into anti-fragility. Anti-fragility, we'll give our shout out to Nassim Taleb. Big in the kind of risk analysis world. And he's got a book called Anti-Fragile, one of the first times I think ever Adam or I saw this term, just takes it a step further and says, well, not only maybe don't you take a dip when adversity strikes, but you actually thrive through it and maybe even become better, stronger, better, you know, more well because of it, right? And that it is adversity, it's volatility, it's unpredictability,

some unpleasantness, to use Paul Bloom's term, maybe chosen suffering in some cases. But it's like it's doing hard stuff as a way of creating more robustness, a more solid foundation for consistent thriving, and I think for individualized potential. Yeah. Oh, whoa. So good. So many things that I could ask you about. I'm thinking in my brain about the difference between resilience and just the idea of bouncing back and grit and anti-fragile. And I don't know if you saw Andrew Haberman's podcast where he interviewed David Goggins,

but he talked about this neuroscience research where, and I'll got to kind of quickly summarize it, but he talked about how part of your brain called the anterior mid-singular cortex. That is like when we do hard things, that part grows and that part is connected to our will to live. So I just think about exactly what you're saying is, okay, chosen suffering. I've never heard anyone say that. Tell us what chosen suffering means. And then maybe also the difference between these other terms, grit, resilience, anti-fragile. How do you see that conceptually?

Let me just jump on that Andrew Heumann piece because I think it's interesting. He talks in the research, it's called like the tenacity aspect of the brain. I think what's most interesting about that, it's not simply diving into the difficult thing. It's also diving into the thing that we don't necessarily enjoy. And I think that's an important part of this. The lived experience is not positive, but it's embracing that which makes us not so happy or unpleasant.

And that's a big part of this. Yeah. So, and there's one other thing I want to mention here, because I think my interest in anti-fragility was originally evolved from my graduate studies when we looked at post-traumatic growth and Tedeschi's work and back in the mid nineties. And it was like, well, why is it the case that some people, when they have these adverse childhood events or traumas end end up growing from it? They actually improve and get better.

And there were certain characteristics that could explain this or a personality characteristic, but there were other elements that were very interesting to me, like social support, certain mindsets, the ability to cognitively reframe. So part of this idea was that maybe trauma doesn't necessarily have to happen to you, but maybe we can embrace stressful and challenging things and leverage some of these same skills and capacities to grow from them. Yeah. There's the good distinction and the bridge back over to the other part of your question about chosen suffering. And Adam's good about this language, trauma with a capital T, trauma with a small T, chosen suffering. We want to be really clear and make sure we're not talking about inducing trauma with a big T on purpose just to toughen people up, right?

Right. mean. So again, I'll take, I love the book, Paul Bloom, Yale psychologist, the sweet spot. I think the example, and I'm not a parent myself, but I think it just brings it home for a lot of listeners all the time. For most parents, happiness goes down, meaning goes up and meanings of better correlate with overall fulfillment and life satisfaction. Right. And so what's the difference for a nerd like me that studied eudaimonic well-being in his dissertation? Meaning-based happiness often is accompanied by struggle, by hardship, by doing difficult things.

That is part of what provides that sense of meaning, right? So you might be able to access things that are integral, so human flourishing or thriving, by doing this hard stuff. And I'm thinking about some of the examples he used, physical challenges, emotional growth, a deep sense of purpose, pursuit of high, hard goals, even spiritual challenges, right? I spent a decade plus working in a religious school and you know maybe a third of the school kept a certain type of eating style and that was deeply meaningful

to them in a way that i think was fulfilling through discipline through something that wasn't necessarily pleasant hedonically in the moment but was still deeply rewarding yeah i think it's a good point because i think that richer existential existence, that lived experience or phenomenological experience that you capture is the same experience that some of these people that do explain or talk about their experience of post-traumatic growth. So you can see the parallels. I think this is really interesting. And while there's a robust literature in post-traumatic growth, it's still not there in anti-fragility. It's something that we're exploring now, but we love the concept. I think it resonates with us because of so much evidence-based science.

I think that really does build it up and prop it up in a way that I think we could leverage even right now. And so, Adam, just so people, as they're listening, tell us how you would define big T trauma and little t trauma as we're talking about doing hard things and that, you know, our purpose, our meaning comes from doing hard things. Yeah, when I say big T trauma, I mean, the trauma with a level of severity that would be considered extreme, where it's a first childhood event, whether it's abuse, it could be environmental trauma. It's something that's that fundamentally changes your perception and lens in which you see the world. Something very different, right? Now, while a child may do that, it's not thrust upon you in a way that you feel threatened

or your life in some way is in jeopardy, right? There's still a level of control and risk mitigation in all this. And I think also there's an element of offensiveness in terms of we're taking this on as opposed to defensiveness where it's happening to us. And there's a sense of loss of agency and autonomy, which often is the main factor one has post-traumatic stress. Chose it. Yeah. I went back and even though my PhD is in kinesiology and sports psych, I went back and did mental health counseling training. And a lot of my patients now are dealing with complex trauma, child abuse and physical abuse.

And you really do see all these elements come play and how horrible this is and that people are just struggling to the day. That is not what we're talking about. This is something very different. I think of more in the terms of the stoic sense where we're engaging with hard things in a meaningful way with intention and agency. Yeah. I think about going in terms of the stoic sense where we're engaging with hard things in a meaningful way with intention and agency. Yeah, I think about going after hard goals like for myself and my business and stretching myself and setting stretch goals and doing things that are uncomfortable every day that are courageous. Like that's the way I'm thinking about what you're talking about. And so you do together, you started the Anti-Fragile Academy, which is really amazing in terms of the mission. And just tell us a bit about why did you decide to start this and what you plan to do in the academy? What are you already doing in it? I mean, in the onset, I think we exist in fields and environments where we're consulting for or training or

coaching like really, really high end performers and high pressure, high stress environments. And that's interesting and that's fun. But we have a deep sense, I think, of purpose, maybe even passion around really helping young people. And we come at it from different angles and different traditions, but we've got a lot of overlap around some, some metrics like performance and wellbeing and mental health and these sorts of things. And so we had just, we had connected professionally through some work we did together with first

responders when our separate ways kind of stayed in touch and eventually just connected. And we're like, we're seeing a lot of the same things, right? Like the science and the ideas that we're sharing with these sort of like highly accomplished, high-end individuals really needs to be democratized and provided to young people. And you can make all sorts of arguments. You can go the mental health and the rising numbers, right? Despite levels of comfort and prosperity unseen and all the sorts of things. But even aside from that, just in and of itself, it's a human potential thing. Like imagine what we can do if we can equip young people. And again, I started in education, right? So I wanted to transform the system. The system's pretty robust itself. And so Adam and I kind of connect and said, let's work outside of this system and see

if we can get some of this really, really good stuff to young people, create some real change. Yeah. And as I say, you work with executives and athletes and education, first responders, or some of the populations that you've been working with. Adam, what were you going to say? I was just going to offer, there was also a hinge moment, and this was back coming out of COVID. I want to say this was between March and May of 22, where there were five suicides with NCAA athletes. And I think that really solidified our commitment, Nick, to say we need to do something so that these, when you look at these skills, they really do need to democratize in such a way that not just certain SES classes are having access to this.

It has to be for everyone. And these skills should be encountered not simply when someone gets to the point where they are dysfunctional. It should be proactively learned so that they have enough psychological insulation that they can deal with these issues ahead of time. Because as we know, we all work in high level sport in college. People, we just don't have the power, the capacity to deal with all of these psychological issues. Absolutely. And so let's go back to one of my questions. I think I added like three questions into one. But when I was asking about, okay,

conceptually, what do you think the difference is between being anti-fragile and grit, right? And I think about grit, how Angela Duckworth defines grit as having passion and perseverance to go after your goals or resilience, right? I think there's so many similar traits to all of these concepts, but how do you see being anti-fragile different from those other concepts? I'll try to give an example the immediate thing that comes to my head is an anti-fragile person um might not consistently require the passion to be there right there there is and don't get me wrong in terms of like adam and i's you

know partnership i'm coming at it from like the human flourishing positive psychology. So like, I love the term passion. I've studied passion. I think it's an awesome thing for people to have. I hope everybody's lucky enough to find it. And what we're talking about is growing, uh, having a solid foundation of wellbeing and maybe the passions in place, but the differentiator is what do you do when it's unpleasant or adverse or volatile or the passion isn't there? Do you still have the same level of self-regulation or discipline that facilitates the perseverance side? So to me, it's half of the grittiness. It's more, I think, similar to what we might call conscientiousness. Yeah. Okay. Super helpful. Let me piggyback on that because there's another element too that I see beyond having these like the way you talk about what

is this recipe that we're working on and it starts with awareness and personality disposition, then it works on psychological skills that we all talk about and we're looking for certain human outcomes, right? Ability to focus on what matters and some level to emotionally regulate and recognize support and give support around us and so forth. But then we look at antifragile behaviors. And I think this is something that's different. Like the idea that we're intentionally seeking exposure to risk, whether it's interpersonal risk or performance-related risk, you're willing to try new things, right? You're trusting your skills. You're trusting the skills of others to support you around them. You're willing to try new things. You're trusting your skills. You're trusting the skills of others to support you around them. You're willing to make mistakes.

You're not worried about looking silly of a certain type and a certain magnitude because it is intentional. This is not big T trauma. You're willing to diversify your resources. You're willing to learn the cognitive resources, physical, emotional resources. And this idea about addition through subtraction too, it's about essentialism and really taking out, creating more friction for what's not necessarily working and creating more lubrication for what is. So I think this goes beyond that simple concept of grit. I know in your book too, you wanted to go beyond grit. So in many ways, I think we're kind of pursuing the same outcomes. Yeah. Yeah. I think we are pursuing the same outcomes. Yeah. Yeah. That's really helpful as I'm just thinking about and conceptualizing what we're talking about today and just for the

listeners too, who might be familiar with some of these terms. So let's dive into anti-fragility. And one of the questions I had for you was tell us a little bit about some of the thinking traps that get in the way of us just being anti-fragile. So, I mean, we could spend the entire episode just on thinking traps, right? So we'll try to categorize this a little bit. And I think we're going to get into this regardless. We try to section off a lot of our content and the science into sort of three distinct buckets, top down, bottom up, outside in. Let's set the other two aside for a second, just talk top down. When you ask about thinking traps, fundamentally what we're getting into

is an awareness of one's thoughts. So thinking about your thinking and having tools and strategies to develop, I think, what we might call cognitive flexibility and with it some emotional agility, right? To be able to kind of experience the range of human emotion, to challenge your thoughts and not just be stuck in the sort of rigid boundary of what you think the reality is, to be aware of inattentional blindness or to not experience tunnel vision, right, is a term a lot of listeners might relate to more. But just to have that sort of flexibility and openness more generally, right? Adam, what would you add? Yeah, I think it cops all this. And we know from the cognitive behavioral literature about catastrophes, catastrophizing, um, and the idea of this idea of looking at things from a negative perspective where something happens to you, it's always personal, it's always pervasive, um, and it's always permanent. Um, it's easy to fall into these traps.

And I think the other element of this too, is not just simply refuting them. And we, we do embrace a lot of literature on acceptance commitment therapy too, but it's accepting them, it's labeling them, and that it's taking value based actions to move forward regardless of how we feel at the time. So we don't fall into this trap of saying in order to move forward, we have to feel good. In fact, we could feel really bad and perform exceptionally well as long as we're value aligned. Yeah. So, and that's the top down, right? That's what we've talked about so far. I like the way that you've categorized these top down, bottom up.

And did you say inside in? Outside in. Outside in. Outside in. Okay. Hi, this is Cyndra 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 freementalbreakthroughcall.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. So let's kind of just dive into the top down a little bit more deeply. And if you could give the listeners a tool or like how, and how do we, how do we get out of our own way in this way with the top-down idea? Well, I think we probably have to give like two or three sequentially, which we can do. But I'll say, and I think Adam is probably going to the same one, that the number one most fundamental is the ability to be mindful in any given moment. Right? fundamental is the ability to be mindful in any given moment, right? Everything in top down hinges upon awareness and on some level, maybe controlled focus and intentional thinking,

right? So if you do not have the capacity to catch a thought, none of the other stuff matters, right? So you have to have the ability to identify, be aware of some of your self-talk, internal dialogue, thinking patterns, limiting beliefs, thinking traps, et cetera, right? From there, I think Adam mentioned cognitive behavioral techniques, acceptance commitment techniques. We spend time talking about gratitude, optimism, internal locus of control, growth mindset, but all of it comes down to, on some level, framing and perspective taking. So once you have caught the thought, the phrase I like to use is check your math, right? How did you arrive at that thought if you have the time and space and capacity to be able to do this processing, this doesn't always work in the moment, of course. How did you arrive at that thought? And is it accurate? Are you quote unquote missing the gorilla? Right. A reference to the kind of the famous video on inattentional blindness. Are you experiencing tunnel vision? What can you do to challenge your perception and And just make sure you're seeing the whole picture before you react and respond. Yeah, so helpful.

Think about it also, because we are dealing with elite sport and first responders and people do have to react in the moment. The idea is if we're training this and there's a level of automaticity here, we have if that algorithms, right? Because often there's a reposition compulsion. What you do once, you're probably doing the same thing. It's a loop. You're doing the same thing over and over again. It leads to avoidance, right? There's nothing new. You're kind of reliving it over

and over again. So you notice that every time I have this negative thought in the field, oh, I stink. Oh, I was horrible. Oh, I shouldn't be here. Then we're coupling it with a thought and a behavior that's going to move you forward. So you become and stay psychologically flexible. And as Nick said, this all hinges on getting a better witness internally, right? A contextual sense of self, right? That yourself is not the old narrative. Yourself is a context where you know the difference between the narrative and who I am and who I want to be. And that might be a little philosophical, but this could happen in the moment. This is not a drawn out. Now this is, I just got back from spring training for last week. Everyone who sits in my office will learn this process.

It is the primary process. They learn the moment they sit down from a mental skills model. Yeah. Yeah. So powerful. And I think what you just said about framing and perspective taking and how many times that frame of perspective is on default, right? Because it's

what we're used to, or what we're, what we're conditioned, or maybe what we've seen other people do. And really, this is about like taking an intentional perspective. I think how hard that can be with our own negativity bias. I was just sharing, I'm writing a new book right now. And I was sharing the story about my college, cross country and track career and how I felt like I was just sharing, I'm writing a new book right now, and I was sharing the story about my college cross-country and track career and how I felt like I was a head case, actually, most of the time. And the person I was telling the story to said, well, do you actually know that that's what your teammates thought of you? And I was like, no, I did not know that. And that's my story around my college career, right? And still, I don't know how many years ago did I graduate?

And it was just that question of, do you actually know that to be true? And I know all the stuff we're talking about. I do this every day, right? But it's like, I forget to do it myself, on myself. Yep. Yeah. And to be clear, it doesn't necessarily mean that you were wrong in your initial interpretation. It's why I like checking the math. Just make sure.

There could be some other explanations there. You just mentioned multiple thinking traps, making assumptions, jumping to conclusions, mind reading. Just ask a question or two, check your math. And there's another element to this too, particularly from a therapeutic perspective, all memory's wrong. We work on this as a subject, particularly from a psychodynamic perspective, it doesn't matter if it actually happened, in that you believe it happened is what matters to me. And I care about not right or wrong, not true. I want to know what's workable. What is the narrative that's going to move us forward regardless of truth? So in that way, it's like, let's kind of be the author of your own destiny in this sense. And we can create our own reality. It doesn't have to be absolutely true because truth really doesn't exist. Wow. That's a mic drop moment. I think people are writing that down. So, so far we've been talking about the first thinking trap of top down. What about bottom up?

You should do this one, Adam. Yeah. This is your world. Yeah. So my background originally was in exercise physiology. So I was trained as an exercise physiologist and a strength coach, and I still live in that world. And I think what Nick and I both agree on, and I'm sure you will too, Cinder, is that bottom up, like Descartes, the mind-body duality died a long time ago, but yet we still buy into this concept, right? Their mind and body are effectively one, and we're treating 100% nervous system. Robert Sapolsky just published that book on free will, and particularly he's an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, and he argues against it.

And he references a very interesting study called the Hungry Lawyer Study. Have you heard of this? So the idea is that you don't want to be up for parole or a hungry judge study. You don't want to be up for parole if the judge hasn't eaten anything in the last few hours because the likelihood of you getting released is effectively zero.

So the notion that we think we have control over our thought processes in and of itself without including our bodily feeling and lived experience is nonsensical. It just doesn't exist, right? If you have somebody eat something, that judge comes to the table after a good meal, you have like a 60% higher likelihood of being released on parole. Wow. So it's a simple argument, but I think it really does bring to the fact that we have to treat the body holistically and the brain holistically and the mind holistically because

it's all one. So what does that mean? It means we need to eat well. We need to move right. We need to recover properly. We need to understand our circadian diurnal rhythms. We need to work with our body in such a way that we could leverage it so that we can make the right decisions and we can fully experience our emotions in a meaningful way.

So we have the ability to be cognitively flexible. All this depends upon our basic foundational physiology. If that's not there, then largely I think we're a leaf in the wind. And this is why we look at things like heart rate variability and these other biometrics that help us give an idea of how fit is the nervous system? What are the routines that are placed that really are serving ourselves well and which in many ways are getting away about performance? What else, Nick?

No, I think you hit the nail on the head. I'm glad you brought up biofeedback. You know, we do, I think, a really unique kind of specialized kind of two-to-one coaching model with certain kind of levels of performers. And an aspect of that is almost always that there needs to be some sort of biofeedback device involved. Now, we understand there's issues of validity and reliability with these devices. But point being is sometimes the best starting point is just give them a scoreboard,

help them understand their sleep, their sleep cycles, their sleep consistency, let them see what their readiness or recovery scores are like. If they do have that glass of red wine at night or not, if they go to bed an hour or two later or not, pay attention to some of the other indicators. Adam mentioned heart rate variability, but that's always a great starting point for people. Grab an order ring, grab a whoop and get your baseline data and then just pay attention to what happens as you start to shift some habits. Yeah, that's powerful because I don't think people, even I, performers take a step back and sometimes we think we can just grind and grind to grind and we don't take care of ourselves to say, you know, how am I taking

care of this, this temple or this engine? Yeah. And I know when I'm hungry, it's really hard for me to control my own thoughts. And that's where the negativity gets really can get loud. I was just having a conversation with one of our starting pitchers the other day who has some issues with anxiety. And he began to tell me that he starts with three coffees in the morning, let's say about 300 milligrams of caffeine. He does two workout drinks prior to getting warmed up, which is another 300 milligrams of caffeine. And then he might do a Zin, which is basically nicotine patch, when he goes out and he's wondering why he has high anxiety, he can't go to sleep afterwards.

It's amazing, but they're not putting two and two together that are psychological lived experiences intimately connected to our bodily experience. Part of that just comes with psychoeducation. And then experimenting, what works for you? Let's try this out. And iterating and using this basically, let's say outcomes matter, right? Only in the sense that they allow us to course correct and understand if our processes are right. It's not about defining us as a human being or an athlete or performer. Yeah. Really helpful. And hopefully, as people are listening, they're thinking about their own habits and how are they taking care of themselves physically. And you talked about how subcomponents of anti-fragility, so well-being, resilience, performance, kind of optimizing performance, none of those exist in a vacuum. They exist in the context of family and friends and colleagues and communities and ecosystems. And so if somebody, and Adam just

kind of alluded to a little bit by talking about Sapolsky's work, but like what we're trying to get people to pay attention to is the stuff that seems invisible, but is having a massive effect on how they feel, how they perform, how they behave. And so outside in is really about primarily network effects, right? The impact of social connection on our ability to flourish, you know, worldwide, it's a single greatest predictor of happiness, life satisfaction, flourishing, you name it, like connection is where it's at, right? Of various types. But also just thinking strategically about network effects, like how does being around certain people make me feel? How does that change my habits, right?

What does that look like on my biofeedback if I engage in that habit? What does that mean about how I want to engage with that person or how frequently, right? Social contagion, emotional contagion, ideas like purpose or mattering, right? Which are core and fundamental to motivation. Those come from other people. Um, two of the big contributors of self-efficacy belief in ourselves are vicarious experience and verbal persuasion, right? They come from other people.

And so if you're not paying attention to the impact other people and your surroundings have on you, you're just leaving so much on the table when it comes to your potential, how you feel, how you perform, you name it. That's outside in, in an up show. Yeah. Can I add an element to that too? Particularly we talk about culture. We talk about that as a sporting culture, business or family culture. we often talk about resilience being in a person. And as Nick says, it's not simply in the individual, it's part of the environment and it's based upon relations. And I think Sukhar, the researcher did some interesting work on

facilitative environments and really understanding that if we're putting people in a high challenge environment, we can't low support. So if we put low support in a high challenge environment, we can't low support. So if we put low support in, it's inevitable. We will have an environment of burnout. We'll have negative relationships, people that are scared of feedback. There's no psychological safety. People are not going to take chances. It's impossible because they're always worrying about it's a zero sum game, right? So what do we need to do? We need to create environments that are high challenge and incredibly high support. I think that's essential. And the interesting thing is I see this in elite sport, yet I look at high school environments

and I look at college environments. Remarkably, I don't see it. I see just the opposite. It is a relentless environment and kids are scared to exist. And ultimately, they are not thriving. It is the opposite of and kids are scared to exist. And ultimately, you know, they are not thriving. It is the opposite of flourishing. They are floundering. Yeah. Yeah. I'm listening to you and I'm getting mad because I have two teenage boys, one's 14 and one's 16. And I have seen over the years when they have a really supportive coach

and when the coach really believes in them and then they can, man, they're just unstoppable. And then when they have a coach that there's clear favorites, they don't get any feedback. They sometimes they don't they don't know why they're not playing. They can get they get so scared of making a mistake and then they can't be their best, right? And so as I try to help support them, give them the mental skills and tools, like that's also super hard for kids

because, you know, how do you use the skills but you can't change the environment? Yeah. I also think that speaks to the importance of having a primary caregiver as not only the advocate for your child, but also a sports scientist. I think there's multiple roles we have to play because we're asking these kids to do so much. In many ways, they're doing more than the professional athlete because they are also dealing with social media in a different way because their brain is not fully developed.

They're dealing with those issues, but they're also dealing with the academic issues with a whole other pressure. And in many ways, they don't have agency autonomy to make their own decisions. So there's so many other things going on. It's important for us to look out for them because they are often in unrelenting environments. Real quick, I look at our team, like for how coddled our players are, right? If somebody gets an ache or pain, we have a trainer on them. We have the massage therapist. They have a sports psych. They take a day off. We're monitoring volume. We're on load. We're

making sure they're sleeping. What do our kids get? They get junk food and social media and TikTok and gross stuff. Yes. Yeah. It's remarkable. Yeah. So let's kind of add a little bit to the environment and how people, as I think about who's listening right now, it could be coaches or parents. And it also people who listen might be in charge of their business entrepreneurs or CEOs. So let's talk a little bit about like, how can we build an anti-fragile environment, like in sports and our families, in our businesses. And I heard you say, Adam,

high challenge and high support, but let's give people some, you know, is there anything else you'd say about that? And then like, how do you do that? So I'll speak a little bit to the how piece. And again, like there's a lot of different things that might go into this. This is a big bucket. Um, but I'll, I'll start with one that I think is really fundamental and I'm going to steal this from Dr. Mark Schultz, who's the associate director of the longest running study on human happiness at Harvard. And I do a podcast with the human flourishing program at Harvard called Flourish FM. We had him on to talk about his book, The Good Life. It's awesome. Everyone should check it out. And it just reinforces these ideas about connection as the key to sort of it all, right? So one of the things he talked about in

that episode I just thought was brilliant and you can find it in the book as well, relationship dashboard. So you got a two by two quadrant, right? And the divide is basically how much time I spend with them versus how much time I should spend with them. And you can do this in other ways as well, right? Like, to what extent do these people, I think of Kim Cameron out of U of M's language and workplaces, right? Plumbers and electricians. Do they light me up or do they drain me?

Now, we want to get a little bit more nuanced in that because it's not just exclusively about pleasantness, but the idea here is being somewhat utilitarian about this. What do these different relationships provide, regardless of affect? It could be unpleasant and still be a positive thing, right? A good mentor, a good coach, parent, guardian, whatever it might be. You know those are going to be some of the dynamics. But what is being provided by this relationship? How much time, right? And what quality of time am I spending with these people? What kind of time or type of time do I want to spend with

these people? Right. And using that as a starting point, kind of baseline data, if you will, about how you engage with some of the people around you and adjusting from there. Yeah. Very helpful. Do they light you up or drain me? And we can decide usually how much time we spend with those people. Really applicable and practical. Adam, you want to add anything to that? Especially being in high-level sport right now. Yeah. I mean, these are skills to be taught. These are not so inherent in our personality, right? Even when we look at the big five personality and the old research, it's like what we see now, if we could change your state well enough, we could change your trait to a certain degree. It's no longer stable for life. And

I think this new research really suggests that learning these skills like mindfulness, proper self-talk, visualization, intentional control, better emotional regulation skills, relaxation and activation skills, breathwork, these are skills to be learned. And in time, as we get better at changing our state, we can change our trait. Okay. So one of the things I know you also talk about is a part of being anti-fragile is experiencing consistent optimal performance. And that's really what we've been talking about today with, you know, the top down, the bottom up, the outside in. So tell us a bit about how the flow state is important for being anti-fragile and just the connection there that you see? Well, I mean, we, you know, we recently had a conversation where we got into this a little bit and it was sort of argued that, you know, flow is correlated with increased resilience, for instance, right? And so you dive into, first of all, like, let's be clear about terms, you know, my guess is a lot of your audience knows the flow state, but in case they don't,

this, right, this neurophysiological change, total immersion, time dilation, you're usually highly productive, typically highly creative. It's often a peak experience, if you will. It feels really good, just total and complete kind of oneness with the experience. So you can get this from sports like video games are packed with dopamine drivers that can facilitate flow states. You can get into group flow. People think of musicians, especially jazz musicians, where there's a little more improv, those sorts of things. But it's this highly desirable state to get into. Well, there's reasonable arguments being made that

a precursor to a flow state is actually a level of challenge that exceeds one's current capacity, right? In education speak, we call this the zone of proximal development. In flow speak, we call this the challenge skills ratio. And again, there's just, it's a stretch, but not snap sort of endeavor. And so what does that suggest? That suggests to get one of these peak states where you have this awesome feeling, this great neurochemical cocktail, and you rush life, right? Whatever you're doing at that moment, you have to have some distress tolerance. It's really difficult, maybe impossible, some might argue, to get into if you're not willing

to engage with that level of challenge that can create fear, anxiety, or stress, or doubt, or boredom, or whatever it might be. Yeah. So that's why we need to keep pushing ourselves and do hard things. That's part of it. But let's take the flip side of that too. Because if you look at the literature in terms of outperformance, many outperformances happen without being in a flow state. So what is otherwise called the clutch state. And so you could form exceptionally well in pressure situations, but unlike flow, it's much less pleasant in the moment. And what it's requiring is a very much a purpose-driven, extremely effortful, focused

concentration, intense physical effort. And rather than being energized, you feel drained after this and when you talk to elite performers this is happening most of the time so so you know there might be not you know sometimes negative thoughts maybe absence of negative thoughts but clearly the ego is much more involved in this it's not effortless state by any many stage i think this really does reinforces this idea that you don't have to feel great to perform exceptionally well. And chasing that as this holy grail is probably misdirected. It'd be nice when we get there and let's create the internal external milieu where it's more likely to happen,

the probability increases, but that doesn't mean you can't be an elite performer if you're not fighting that all the time, or at least even most of the time. If we were to line up a lot of the athletes, executives, whoever it might be that we've worked with and ask them, are you in a flow state? 80, 90% of the time, you've done great things in your career. You've won the medal. You've become the champion. You've delivered the bit.

You've performed on that presentation, whatever it might be. My pretty educated guess would be that they would say no, that very often they were doing like, there was probably a lot of flow leading up to it, but in the moment it might've been just good enough in figuring out how to make the most of what they had cognitively, biologically on that given day for a variety of different factors, right? It's this idea that we just have this flowy, optimized, perfect experience all through our most high pressure intense moments, I think is completely absurd. And I think you can look to like major sports. I thinking of like tiger you know u.s open turn

of the century like when he when he actually did destroy everybody and probably was flowing for four days straight that is still mind-boggling in part because it is so rare and it is so unique right yeah yeah so you're suggesting that maybe our goal isn't to experience flow because it's difficult to do that. And really, what should we do instead? I say this, Jo, but chasing the mundane, right? How do we achieve extraordinary performances? It's the ordinary things we do day to day and digging into these processes so that our capacities are trained up so that we're facing these pressure situations. There's a level of grittiness and perseverance that's available to us. So I do think what's happening when we see people perform up late on stage is really

based upon what's going on behind closed doors in the wee hours in the morning. And really that drive, that they're motivated in such a way that they enjoy the process and they're dialed into it in such a way that they're not fully extrinsically driven. There's an intrinsic element to all this. Yeah. To be clear too, yeah. Well, I was just thinking, and I'm happy we're talking about this performance piece. And just to be clear, I think, you know, Adam and I really view these three ideas, resilience, wellbeing, performance as a synergy that is unique to each individual. Right. And, um, you know, you can get into this happiness research. Like there's an inherent

level of subjectivity to some of this, But when we say optimized for that individual, that doesn't necessarily mean they're following every Huberman protocol and biohacking trick of the trade and sort of thing to live forever and to be the optimized performer at every minute of every given day, right? It's about thinking about the clear science on wellbeing or human flourishing, the clear science on resilience and optimizing performance and figuring out the right individual recipe

for that unique performer. And it's developmental. In other words, it's impacted by context. So over the course of the career, over the course of even a season, that may change, right? And that flexibility, adaptability is essential. What a cool conversation we just had. I hope everyone listening loved it, or they would still

be listening if they didn't. And I just want to thank you both so much for being on the podcast and sharing your expertise. And I know it got people thinking a lot about how they are anti-fragile. And so I love today when we talked about the difference between being anti-fragile and grit and resilience and actually what that means. I thought what also was really helpful was the top down, bottom up, and inside out. I love that and those three descriptions of how to be anti-fragile. What a great conversation about developing environments of being anti-fragile. And then just at the end about flow. So how might we learn more about the Academy, your work, get involved?

Just to give us the scoop here. Yeah, well, I mean, you can engage with us primarily through our website, theantifragileacademy.com. If you're more kind of in that adult high pressure executive space, you can check out the Anti-Fragile Athlete. You can also find us on social, really just LinkedIn and Instagram at this point. We'll be doing a little bit more on there in terms of trying to nudge some of these ideas out, have some conversations, receive some pushback and have the ideas get pushed and tested a little bit going forward. So main website, social, the usual sort of things.

You can get in touch with us through those channels. Awesome. Anything else you want to say, Adam? Well, I think basically if I'm going to one take home would be, you know, you need in the pursuit of excellence, you really need to fall in love with the process. I think both it's unpleasant and it's pleasant elements. And I think taking these opportunities to lean into fears, taking chances, being willing to fail, even look silly

at times, and then trying over and over again to develop a true level of antifragile confidence is essential because success is never a linear path, right? And this is the nature of antifragile mindsets, embracing this idea and loving this process. The idea that as Nietzsche said, right, if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger. Yes, only if you put these processes in place to support yourself with self-compassion and care. Yeah, love it. Thank you both so much. I really appreciated your science-based approach today

and also practical strategies. So thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thank you for having us, appreciate it. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Thank you for having Dr. Sindra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.