High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 62: The Formula for Success with Mental Game Coach, Dr. Patrick Cohn

Episode Date: August 5, 2016

Patrick Cohn, Mental Game Coach, tells us that focusing on the process over the outcome leads to the results we desire. He explains his formula for success which is no exceptions + high confidence + manageable objectives. He shares 4 things that separate the best from the rest: they have a strong base of physical skills, high motivation, an incredible work ethic, and confidence/trust in themselves. The 3 things that most likely get in people’s way of performing at their best is a fear of failure, perfectionism, and the fear of disappointing others. When athletes experience perfectionism, he encourages them to focus on embracing the imperfection and focusing on getting the job done instead. You can find Patrick on Twitter @ PeakSports. To get your free Ebook, visit peaksports.com, where he has a wealth of resources and products.

Welcome to High Performance Mindset with Dr. Sindra Kampoff. Do you want to reach your full potential, live a life of passion, go after your dreams? Each week we bring you strategies and interviews to help you ignite your mindset. Let's bring on Sindra. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Sindra Kampoff, and thank you so much for joining me here today. I'm grateful that you're here, ready to listen to an interview with Dr. Patrick Cohn. Now, Dr. Cohn is the owner and operator of peaksports.com, which is a, there's a wealth of information and resources and free information about mental skills training and peak performance on that website. Again,

peaksports.com. He's also a mental skills expert, mental toughness expert. He has worked with the Miami Dolphins, NASCAR winners, NHL players, national motocross champions, and PGA Tour professionals. He's also been featured in USA Today, on NBC, CNN, and many other media outlets. Now, there's a lot of really interesting and fascinating things that we talk about in this interview that I just would encourage you to listen for. He talks quite a bit about focusing on the process instead of the outcome and what that means to him, how he teaches that to his clients. He also talks about his formula for success, which I thought was really fascinating and I'd love to hear what you think about that. He shares four things that separate the best from the rest, as well as three things that get in the way of people reaching their best and their peak performance. We also talked quite a bit in this

interview about perfectionism, how he handles perfectionism and perfectionistic tendencies with his clients. And so I'd love to hear from you. Let us know what stood out to you about the interview. What's one thing that you found fascinating or one thing that you're taking away from the interview that you could use in your work as a peak performer, as a high performer. And you can reach out to Patrick. You can find him on Twitter at Peak Sports. You can find myself, Sindra, at Mentally underscore Strong. We'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you thought mentally underscore strong. We'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you thought about the interview. We'd love to engage with you and,

and just learn more about what you're doing and how you use information about high performance and how you're working to become a high performer. And if you enjoy the podcast, we encourage you to go over to iTunes, make sure you subscribe. And I'd encourage you to, to share it with one friend today. Tell one person about the interview or something else that you liked about the podcast. So continue

to grow and influence more people. All right, without further ado, let's bring on Dr. Patrick Cohn. Welcome to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. This is your host, Cindra Kampoff. And today I'm excited to provide you an interview with Patrick Cohn. Patrick, can you tell us a little bit about your passion and what you do? Sure. Thanks for having me on, Cindra. Love to talk about it with you. I started my career basically working with golfers very early on and just really, really enjoyed the process of following my students. Actually, I started inside the ropes. So in a different type of perspective where I would go out and actually caddy for my students and really, really enjoyed being inside the ropes and the competition

and just really fell in love with helping, trying to help my athletes succeed. I was a professor for a couple of years, but then I just decided to go into full time in the applied sports psychology realm. And tell us just, you know, how you got to where you are in your career now. Well, I did a dual major, and the second major was psychology. And they suggested if I was into sports psychology, I should go work with Ken Revista. And I did that in the mid-'80s. I worked with Ken Revista out of Cal State Fullerton. And then I got involved in working with golfers.

I knew some high-level golfers from my hometown, which was East Aurora, New York, where they have the international masters. And Ken suggested, hey, if you're into golf, go work with Bob Rotella at the University of Virginia. So I completed my master's with Ken, which was just a ball. I loved working with Ken. Then I went out and worked with Bob Rotella at the University of Virginia and finished up at the University of Virginia in 91. And then I taught, obviously, after I got my PhD, I taught for a couple of years and enjoyed the teaching aspect. But I really, my passion was really working with my athletes one-on-one. And so eventually I just switched out of teaching in the early 90s and went full-time, just jumped right into the mental training and mental coaching

with athletes. So I came up through obviously the physical education, kinesiology, being an athlete myself, and not through the clinical side. And you have a great website, peaksports.com, incredible amount of resources. So I can see that you've been developing those over many, many years. You know, so Patrick, you have an opportunity to work with some of the world's best athletes, performers. What do you think really separates those that, you know, just are elite? What's different in their mindset? Well, there's so much, I think, that we could talk about there. I think the formula that I talk about that athletes need is, number one, you need some level of base skills, like you got to have some level of talent. So let's put that aside.

And if you mix the talent with a high level of motivation and work ethic, and then you add confidence and trust to that when they go compete, then you've got a formula for success. So certainly they have to work hard. They have to know how to improve. They have to learn to be efficient in their practice. So all the stuff on the training side they have to have. But then once they go compete, they have to be able to trust in what they've been doing, trust in their skills and have confidence. And I think that's where most athletes tend to get to sabotage themselves. Once they take it from their training to the competition, they're not as good as the world's best performers. So you see that they just struggle trusting

themselves and that they have the physical capability and they put in the work. Yeah, well, they have that work ethic, they have the motivation, they have the commitment, but then for many different reasons, all of it gets thrown out the window when they go compete because they can't perform like they're capable of. Absolutely. And what do you think is getting in their way? Many things. Often I find that it's fear of failure. Wanting it too badly a la perfectionism. So perfectionism, fear of failure, worrying about disappointing others like parents or sponsors or peers, for example. All of that is combined. I feel like there's a relationship between all of those things. Perfectionism, fear of failure, social approval.

But those are the biggest things that I find. And that often leads to in competition, performing tight, performing scared, tentatively, afraid to make mistakes. Yeah, from a performance standpoint, that's how it ultimately I feel like it sabotages them when they go compete. And if you had somebody that wasn't reaching their potential in competition, what would your approach be to start with them? How would you figure out what's really getting in their way? Well, we actually do an assessment that's our assessment that we've developed over the last 20 years called the AMAP assessment.

We start with that to get the wheels turning, to get their mental game wheels turning in their mind so that they can start to put two and two together in terms of what's getting in the way. So once we have that information about what's getting in the way then we take it a step further and we talk to them in the first session about those things that they have on their assessment and so typically we'll find that there may be some fear of failure or they may be trying too hard trying to be too perfect worried about about disappointing a parent. These are all, you know, like common things that we find that get in the way. And so once we know what's getting in the way, then we develop a plan for them to help them, you could say, get beyond some of those challenges.

Absolutely. But it's all interconnected. As you know, all those challenges are interconnected in some way, but we tend to parse it out and talk about skills or lessons. Let's start with a lesson on how to manage your expectations, for example, and then they can absorb the information. The student can absorb the information more readily that way, even though it's all interrelated in some way. And is there a mindset topic, Patrick, that you typically always address with your clients that you're working with, regardless of where they're at or what they're struggling with or what their strengths are? I find that 90% of the students that at least come to us are perfectionists. So I'm always, always dealing with the challenges related to perfectionism in sports.

You would think, wow, being a perfectionist, that would be good for athletics, but it's a double-edged sword. It's good in one respect, but then it holds them back mightily in competition. So you could say that's not really one mindset, that's more of an umbrella. But that's the typical student that we see is the athlete that has perfectionism, really badly wants to succeed and is afraid of disappointing others. That's kind of the profile we see. Yeah. And I'm thinking about the research that suggests, you know, the high level athletes are adaptively perfectionistic, like they have high standards, but they're really flexible. So how do you help your athletes deal with that in general? You know, could you give us maybe one or two ways that you might address that perfectionism?

Yeah. So we identify what's changing in competition that's affecting their ability to compete. And typically, there's a litany of things for perfectionists. Super high expectations, which can undermine the confidence. So we find fragile or low confidence, lack of ability to trust in what they practiced and trained. In addition to that, they become easily frustrated because they're not performing up to their expectations. They're super critical, very judgmental and critical of their performance during and after.

They tend to care too much about what others think, a la the social approval. So we have this full list of the challenges associated with perfectionism, and we chip away at those one at a time on how we get them past those perfectionist beliefs, those expectations. They're filled with expectations. And when you write them all out for them, they go, well, wow, you know, no wonder I backed myself into a corner and no return. It's just impossible to perform to that level of standards, expectations, demands that I place on my performance.

Absolutely. So if people are listening and saying, oh, yeah, that sounds like me. I'm a perfectionist. You know, what would you suggest they would, what should they do just to start off, you know, just to start thinking and addressing their perfectionism? I always start with, well, typically I start with helping them manage those expectations. So I have a formula I teach, and it's having no expectations, high confidence, and setting manageable objectives. So when they come in to see me, the expectations are through the roof and the confidence is in the cellar. Right? Just the opposite of what you want.

So we try to get them on a path of high confidence and setting manageable objectives. So I start by talking about the difference between those concepts. They're not always clear for athletes. You have to define the difference between expectations and confidence because they tend to chunk them together, right? Well, if I'm confident, then I should expect to perform well, or if I expect to perform well, I should be confident. But that's not so. So we define what are expectations, we define what's confidence, and then we talk about the manageable objectives piece, which is the process and what they can focus on in the process. So that's the formula. And then the next step in the formula is to what are your expectations?

What do you demand of yourself that if you don't perform up to those demands, you either lose confidence or become frustrated, right? That's what I call the confidence expectation connection. When the expectations are through the roof and then athletes can't achieve those expectations, the confidence tends to be suppressed. So we have to remove the expectations. In order to remove the expectations, we start by identifying what they are. What are all those expectations? So, and we just ask a series of questions for your listeners. They might consider, well, what do you expect for the outcome? You expect a certain score, goals, statistics, for example. Then we go to performance. What do you expect of your performance?

Every touch has to be perfect in soccer. Does every shot have to be straight or solid in golf for example then we go to well what do you expect of yourself statistically or even uh what do others expect what do you think others expect of you because as you know, Sandra, the athletes will adopt others expectations sometimes as well. The expectations they're feeling from coach, parents, peers, they tend to adopt those as their own. So once,

once you have identified what all those expectations are, you have to challenge the validity or challenge the functionality of those. How functional is that to expect that every touch is going to be perfect or every shot's going to be perfect? Absolutely. I like your formula. It makes a lot of sense. Can you give us some examples of manageable expectations? You had mentioned the process. Oh, manageable goals. Okay. Okay. That's kind of what I was thinking that you meant was goals. Can you give us some examples of manageable expectations that an athlete should have? Maybe you just pick a sport.

Well, it's no expectations. Remember, the formula is no expectations. So you still want to throw in the expectations in there, don't you? So, and it's not lower expectations either. It's manageable objectives or what we call process goals. Nice. Right? Yeah, right. So let's pick a sport, a pretty broad level sport like baseball, for example, or softball. If I'm a batter, if I'm working with a batter, I want them, instead of to focus on, I need to get a hit, I need to advance the runner, or don't disappoint the coach.

Yes. All outcome stuff, right? I want them to focus on their on deck would be timing the pitcher. Visualizing maybe making contact with the ball. Getting loose and just getting ready for the at-bat. In deck, some of the manageable objectives would be to get set up and feel comfortable, see the ball early, and trust your swing. Very simple things that they do every day, but tend to make more complex when they compete.

So there's several purposes there. You're getting them to focus more on the process with these objectives, and you're getting them to simplify their performance at the same time. So it's two-pronged. The challenge is when you're working with those perfectionists is to get them to let go of the expectations that they've had for years and years. And get them focused on the process, I'm sure, is also very difficult. Because I think our nature and the way sports is organized and what we see on ESPN, it's all outcome and results. Yes. Statistics for college athletes, high school athletes as well. It's all about statistics, too.

They want good statistics so they can impress a college coach. So yeah, it is, it is very outcome driven and athletes, as you say, they think more about the outcome because they think that's what's going to bring the outcome and they don't, they forget about what they need to do in the process. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So you're, you're, I'm going to summarize your equation. You said no expectations, high confidence and manageable objectives leads to peak performance. Yes. That's one of the formulas for success that I feel like all athletes need to understand because success breeds expectations. The more successful they are, the higher their expectations and that at some point is going to catch up with them. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And how do you see that catching up with

them? Well, if I'm if I'm shooting under par in golf or if I'm shooting under 70 and having a lot of success or I'm winning tournaments or I'm finishing top five in tournaments, then pretty soon I start to expect that I have to do those all the time. It gets to the point with perfectionists where they expect that they have to make every putt because they've made that putt before. They have to hit every shot straight because they've hit every shot straight before, on and on and on. So it gets even a little bit more strict with perfectionists in that way. So, yeah, the expectations, that's always the challenge with athletes. As success rises, so do expectations. I should be able to do that every day, right? Yeah, that's what people think,

right? I've done it before. I should be able to do it every day. And that's what gets them into trouble because then they start to question, well, why aren't I doing that today? I've done it in the past. In some of your blogs that I read, I'm thinking about the one recently of Michael Phelps, or I liked your blog about Brenda Martinez, who's a track and field runner. I love watching the trials who fell in the 800, but then really used her drive to qualify later on in the Olympic Games. So do you have anything to say about either of those in your blog posts? Well, you would call that grit, right? Having that mental toughness, that grit that you're not going to, if you get knocked down,

that you're going to get right back up again in your next event and give it everything you have. Absolutely. Instead of, oh, the whole trials is blown for me. I just blew my experience at the trials. No, you didn't. There's still time to go out there and do well in another event. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Same with swimming. I mean, it's always that way with swimming. You have so many different events that you compete in. You can't let the carryover of one event carry over and affect another event that you do as well. That's a really, really important and difficult for people to do. You know, Patrick, can you describe to us a signature technique that you use with your athletes to help them improve their performance. A signature technique. Well, I'm, you could say, a composite of Revisa, Ron Smith, Ken Revisa.

I'm thinking of one that would be a particular technique that I use. Because, you know, as you know, we borrow from so many people in the field. I've learned from a lot of great people from Dorfman and Rotella and Reviza and Ron Smith and Galloway. The list goes on and on. We try to pull in and use what's appropriate for us or what works for us. One signature technique. That's a good one. around the idea of helping perfectionists change their perfectionist beliefs into more functional or rational philosophies. But then I could say, you know, that's kind of an adaptation of Albert Ellis with his kind of RET approach. So I tend to adopt the RET to things related to like perfectionism. But in order to get perfectionist beyond some of those expectations and beliefs they have,

they have to know what's keeping them stuck. So being able to identify what are the underlying beliefs and then being able to change those into more functional beliefs like um classic is winning ugly by brad gilbert i don't know if you've heard of it yeah it's a good book i talk about that all the time with my students perfectionists have struggle with the idea of winning ugly and you have to get them to embrace that and know that they don't take any pictures, you know, on a box score or the scorecard that it's all about just getting the job

done. But they tend to struggle with if it doesn't feel right or look good, or if it's not perfect, they tend to struggle. They would rather have it. The interesting part about that is they would rather have it, the interesting part about that is they would rather have it feel and look perfect and lose than be, win ugly, what I call functional, perform functionally and win. Right? So that, so I would say that's one of the signature things that I do is I address the belief systems that underlie underlie the attitudes that are getting in the way.

And if you're working with somebody who has perfectionistic tendencies and, you know, I like what you're describing is like a functional perspective. How do you describe that functional perspective? You know, what's sort of like the end goal that you might have for them in terms of what you'd want their thoughts and their beliefs to sound like or to be? Well, first they have to adopt the mindset that if they got the job done, if they made a pass to a teammate, for example, and it did the trick, it was effective, it was functional, they have to be able to embrace that. Even though they were off balance or the kick wasn't on target, you know, the pass wasn't

right on the stick, whatever it may be, it didn't look good. It wasn't perfect. It held up the player, but it got the job done. I tried to get them to embrace that. That's functional performance. For golfers, for example, it's the ability of hitting a bad shot, recovering, saying, okay, I can get this on the green, hitting another shot,

than just being able to get the ball up and down and be okay that they made a par the hard way. Right? So functional performance is kind of more of an acceptance more than it is a game plan, if that makes any sense. Sure. Acceptance of imperfection and acceptance of just getting the job done and that you won't be perfect. Yeah, absolutely. So we work on that mindset, obviously, is getting them to embrace that mindset of performing functionally, winning ugly, just getting the job done is what you need to do in athletics. Now, that may not work as a student that's trying to get good grades.

That might not work. But in athletics, it can work. So, Patrick, let's talk about yourself as a high performer. And what I know what the listeners would love to hear is tell us why you do what you do. You know, we believe here at the High Performance Mindset that knowing your why is really important. So tell us why you're passionate about what you do and what keeps you going. Well, I don't look at myself as a high performer. I look at someone that's dedicated to the field, dedicated to helping his athletes improve. And what really motivates me is when an athlete can say, you know what,

I've improved. You really helped me get to the next level or you helped me make a breakthrough or you helped me win. When I can take someone that's shooting 80 and then get them down to like even par all because of their mind was getting in the way, that's really fulfilling for me. So I essentially get a kick out of helping my athletes succeed. But as you know, we've got a lot of products and I really, really enjoy the process of building products and developing products that athletes can actively use and that are really applied and down to earth. Instead of throwing a lot of psychobabble out there and a lot of techniques, we try to get them to really look at, to heighten the awareness, educate them about good mental skills, and bridge the gap between the education

and the application. And that, to me, that's really where it's at. As a mental coach, if you do a good job between bridging the gap between the education and the application then your student is bound to progress and improve so we like to find in a new and innovative ways to kind of you could say for athletes to learn this stuff or for us to teach it in a way that's going to be more and more effective or efficient and so that's what really drives me is just that whole aspect of improving athletes, sport, improving their lives, building products that, you know, work for them. And Patrick, that's one of the ways I see you unique in the field is you have so many incredible products that are really down to earth and easy for athletes to understand and to learn from.

So I appreciate the contribution you've made to the field. Can you tell us about an aha moment that you've had in your career and what you learned from it and how it could help us learn something about us? Well, I think every time I work with a student, I get an aha moment of what makes them tick and learning more about the mind and how the mind plays such an important role in performance. When I started to really understand that athletes get scared, athletes have fear of failure because they worry so much about disappointing others, that was like, boom. And so every time I see an athlete, we tend to go there. We tend to go to social approval and worrying about what others think. So that was a big aha moment. But I like to think that every time I work with a student, they have an aha moment. I have an aha moment about what makes them tick.

Absolutely. And, you know, when you're thinking about or when you're approaching, you said that most athletes experience like this, the want of social approval and the need to not disappoint others. How might you address that with them? It gets that's probably the most complex thing that I do in the mental coaching world. But I start by talking about their needs, their social approval needs. What is it that you, what are you looking for? Is it the coach? You want the coach to respect you? You want parents to be proud of you or to be happy with your performance? Do you want your peers to hold you in high esteem for your athletic skills? So we try to get into what is the specific need that they're looking at?

Is it they're striving to be looked at as a star or they're striving to be looked at as avoiding others' disappointment? Same thing, right? Just two sides of the same coin. Once we have that information, then we're armed with a little bit more information about what are the assumptions that you're making. So I try to tell athletes that you don't know these really exist, this how others feel about you, the evaluations others are making for you, a lot of it is conjecture and mind reading. So what are the assumptions you're making? Then the tough part is getting them to the next level, and that is letting go of what others are thinking about your performance. The interesting part about that, Cinder, is sometimes if you make them aware of it and you tell them just to refocus

that that can often, I don't want to say often, but in many cases that can unlock them. But then the next level is I often find out that it's more of a self-respect issue, that they're looking for other respect and they don't have self-respect. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. There's levels of that. Right. OK. Mm hmm. So you're saying like when I start thinking about my dad in the audience or watching me perform,

you know, in the bleachers to refocus on perhaps the process or refocus on what's going on in the game to shift my focus. But that sometimes is just, you know, doesn't doesn't really always work because it's something more about self-respect, something deeper. Yes. I was working with a tennis player today, as a matter of fact, and I said, don't even look. I mean, what what's relevant about looking over at your parents in the stands if there's no relevance to it so I want you to just focus on a routine you know a post a between point routine instead of habitually you know looking over so that's always the first step is to get it in their mind to be a little bit more what I call selfish with their performance.

Sure. So they're focused on themselves and not others. Yeah. And then the second step, as you say, we often go to having more self-respect and knowing that they don't need the other respect. So self-esteem, basically, we go to being able to separate the performer from the person not really working on self-esteem per se but i'm just trying to help them understand where it's where their self-esteem is based on the person and not on the achiever the athlete good stuff good stuff um patrick let's move to the top 10 traits of high performers. So I'd love for you to look at this list. And could you tell us which one of those that you think that you exhibit the most? Wow. There's so many good ones there. I love the one, number five, about they control the controllables. They focus on what's

relevant instead of what's irrelevant. Yeah, I would say that for me, that's a big component for high performers is they're into their routines and they're only focusing on what they can control, what they can impact, and they don't get caught up into opponents and referees and bad conditions, et cetera, et cetera. They use what they have at their disposal and they don't allow all those external circumstances to influence that. Absolutely. And how might you do that as a business owner and a consultant? How do you stay focused on controlling the controllables? Well, as we get busier and busier i need more help so i have a full-time uh person that um

is here in the office that can manage my time and and deal with some of the tasks that i just don't have the time to deal with um and so that's one of the things that i use as a business person to control the controllables i also have other people that work for me that do artwork, people that do writing for me as well, people that help with the marketing aspect if I need that as well. So I tend to only want to focus on two things. Well, it's really three, but I'll, I'll, for the sake of this discussion, I'll eliminate the two. I want to use my time where it's the most effective. Absolutely. That's coaching my students, doing seminars, coaching my students, and developing products. Everything else for me is kind of like, turns into busy work.

Like Facebook and Twitter and all that. I just don't have the time to spend on Facebook and Twitter and do all that stuff. So I only want to narrow down on where are my strengths going to be used the most effectively, and that's doing the coaching and product development. That's so important as a business owner. You can get sucked into all the things that really aren't important or aren't the most important things. So, Patrick, which one of those traits would you say you're still working on? And I ask you that just because, like, we're all a work in progress and it's pretty difficult to be a 10 out of 10 on each one of these habits or traits. So, what are your thoughts on that?

I would say two. I'm constantly working on two, even though that might sound like a little contradictory. But what I said is because in this business of the mental coaching, you can get off in so many directions that it's difficult to really stay focused on what's important. Because we have memberships, we have a certification program, we have products, we have individual coaching team seminars. So, and there's just so much to keep track of and so much to do, you have to keep your eye on the ball. So having a clear purpose sometimes can get lost because you can get scatterbrained. When you're scatterbrained, you're multitasking and then you're not efficient. Absolutely. So for those people who don't have the list in front of them, number two is that they have a clear purpose to their work. And you can

head over, you can find that list actually at drcindra.com. So Patrick, let's head to the speed round. So what I'd like you to do is just tell us the first thing that comes to your mind after I ask you the question. Do you have a book or a resource that you'd recommend to the audience? You know, what's what's one thing that you definitely recommend? Flow or the inner game of tennis right off the bat. OK, flow the book, flow or the inner game Tennis. And what do you, why do you like those two? Flow, there's so many parallels to the concept of flow to the mental coaching and how to teach people to focus that it's just great information. And there's parallels beyond sports

to obviously business and students. It's just, you know, it's just a classic, I think. It's by Dr. Chixamalehi, who you probably are aware of, Flow, the Psychology of Optimal Experience. Great, great stuff. I often recommend to my students to read it. And I think the inner game of tennis, you don't have to be a tennis athlete to get something from that book. So it's a classic. Patrick, what is the best advice you've ever received?

The best advice I've ever received is probably from one of my mentors, Bob Rotella. He said, if you want to work with golfers, you have to go out and hang out with golfers. Not befriend them, but you have to go and hang around them and build relationships, get to know them, get to know what's going on with them. And I did that early in my career. I basically hung out with golfers and my students. And as I said, I caddied for my students early on to really understand what was going on for them inside the ropes. So you're encouraging people to hang out with the people that they want to work with, right? Get to know them, get to know their strengths, their areas of improvement.

Research them. You could research them. You could do interviews with them. You can go to competitions, observe the competitions. There's just so many things that you can learn and pick up by being in the environment. And Patrick, do you have a success quote that you use often and could you describe how it applies to us? In terms of for mental coaches or for athletes? I think either one, but let's choose athletes or performers in some way. Let's do that. I have several success quotes, but one of them is focusing on the process brings desired results. Nice. And tell us why that's one of your favorites. Because, you know, as you said,

we live in a result-driven world and athletes tend to focus way too much on outcomes, results, what I call the aftermath. The aftermath is the next level. How does the results impact me? And they forget about what they need to do in the process. Focusing on the process leads to desired results. Excellent. So let's go to the final questions here, Patrick. What advice would you have for those people who are listening, those high

performers? So that might be athletes, coaches, you know, business leaders, anyone who wants to improve their mindset. Well, you have to understand that mental coaching, sports psychology is not just for, you could say, broken athletes or problem athletes. It can help high performers who want to even be more consistent with their performance. But typically what happens, as you know, Sindra, is athletes come to us as a last resort. They've tried everything else and, oh, well, it must be mental. I don't want athletes to look at it that way. I want you to look at it as no matter where you are in your career as an athlete, you can still benefit from mental coaching by sharpening your mental skills and improving consistency in your performance.

Excellent. And Patrick, you have so many resources on your website, peaksports.com. What would you encourage us to check out and look at there when we go there? You can check out the product section if you're interested in products. You can certainly sign up for a free report for your particular sport. For example, you could jump over to youth sports psychology. If you're a parent, you could jump over to youth sports psychology and get information for parents and young athletes who we have a big emphasis in helping parents understand the mental game. I always suggest start with one of our free eBooks, check it out, see if you,

you like the material in the free eBooks, and then you can go from there. Excellent. And what are the ways that we should reach out to you? If people want to make a comment about the podcast or they just would like to, to reach you in some way, can you tell us where you are on social media and anywhere else you'd like us to contact you? Yeah, they can contact me at Facebook,

Peak Performance Sports, and Twitter at Peak Sports. And certainly they can go to peaksports.com and send us a question as well. Excellent. Patrick, I really appreciate your time and your energy today. There are two things that really stood out to me about the interview that we talked about. Just, you know, your success equation or your equation for peak performance, which was no expectations, high confidence and manageable objectives. And I really appreciate our discussion about perfectionism and how to address it. And,

you know, specifically how to how to focus on things that you can control when you're noticing that you are focusing on other people's expectations or social approval and how to get your focus back to what's important now. So I wanted to thank you so much for your time and your energy and your contributions to the field and for all those, you know, just for being here to provide something of quality to the listeners. Great. Thanks. Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset. If you like today's podcast, make a comment, share it with a friend, and join the conversation on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong.

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