High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 765: Emotional Agility: The Missing Skill for High Performance with Kelly Ruta

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

Episode Intro In this episode of The High Performance Mindset, Dr. Cindra Kamphoff sits down with Kelly Ruta, private advisor to high-performing women, former clinical psychotherapist, and expert in emotional agility, to explore why emotional agility may be the missing skill behind sustained success. Drawing on more than 20 years as a psychotherapist and over a decade advising entrepreneurs, executives, and professional athletes, Kelly shares how psychological skills help people perform under pressure without sacrificing their well-being. Together, they discuss why confidence, resilience, and emotional regulation are no longer "soft skills," but essential skills for thriving in today's high-pressure world. Episode Description Pressure is inevitable. The question is whether you react automatically or respond intentionally. In this conversation, Kelly explains why emotional agility is one of the most powerful psychological skills we can develop. She breaks down how learning to recognize emotions, pause before reacting, and choose responses aligned with our values creates stronger leadership, greater confidence, and more consistent performance. Dr. Cindra and Kelly also discuss why emotions provide valuable information without needing to dictate our behavior. The conversation explores what the research shows about psychological skills training, including why organizations that invest in mental readiness consistently outperform those that don't. Kelly shares why so many high achievers reach success only to discover they still feel overwhelmed or unfulfilled, and how developing emotional agility closes that hidden skill gap. Listeners will also learn practical tools, including the Sacred Pause, to build greater awareness and respond more effectively when the stakes are high. Whether you're an athlete, leader, entrepreneur, coach, or parent, this episode is a reminder that confidence and high performance begin by learning to lead yourself first. You'll Learn: Why emotional agility is one of the most important psychological skills for sustained high performance. What emotional agility is and how it differs from simply managing emotions. How to recognize the difference between reacting automatically and responding intentionally. Discover why emotions are valuable data but should not become your decision maker. Learn how practicing the Sacred Pause helps improve emotional awareness and self-regulation. Build greater confidence by aligning your responses with your values instead of your triggers. Strengthen your ability to perform under pressure by developing psychological skills that reduce the likelihood of choking. Understand what the research shows about why organizations and teams that invest in mental readiness see stronger long-term performance. Episode Resources & Links Guest Website: kellyruta.com Mentally Strong Institute: https://mentallystronginstitute.com/ Request a Free Mental Breakthrough Call: https://freementalbreakthroughcall.com/ Download the National Confidence Research Study: https://confidencestudy.com/ Pre-order The Confidence Habit: https://www.confidencetools.com/

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And here's the best part. Registration is only $39 and you'll receive your own hardcover copy of my new book, The Confidence Habit, published by Simon & Schuster. You can join us live on the morning of August 7th, or if you're listening after the summit, you can still register to get access to the replay

and receive your hardcover copy of the Confidence Habit. Go to the Confidence Summit.com to grab your spot. That's The Confidence Summit.com. The next version of you requires a new level of confidence. Come build it with us. I'll see you there at the Confidence Summit. Welcome to the high performance mindset podcast. I'm really excited today to welcome Kelly Ruda to the show. Kelly, thank you so much for joining us here today. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to get into today's topic. I am too, and today we're really going to be focusing on this topic of emotional agility,

which I think is so important for everyone listening. So I'd like to share with you a little bit about Kelly before we dive in. Kelly is a private advisor to high-performing women, including founders, entrepreneurs, seasoned experts, and professional athletes, who we know whose success has created increasingly demands, right, across all areas of their lives. So she's going to be drawing today on two decades of experience as a clinical psychotherapist and more than a decade of advising, you know, visible leaders into high-stakes environments. We're also going to be talking about her inner architecture of success, which I'm really excited about. And then, you know, Kelly trains business leadership teams and athletic organizations to develop emotional agility. And that's

going to be our focus today. So Kelly, why should people continue to listen to us today about this topic of emotional agility? There are so many reasons. And the first thing I want to say is don't tune out when you hear emotional agility. I know it sounds soft and boring and squishy. But I promise you. The reason this is incredibly important is because skills like emotional agility, these psychological skills, they are the modern differentiator in business, in athletics, in organizations, even on a corporate level. And because AI has entered the chat, so to speak, we need to be finding the skills that we can create mastery over that allow us to perform no matter what the pressure is, no matter what the newest thing is entering our industry.

And Kelly, I think about how important that is. Like, everyone's listening. They want to perform under pressure. And they want the skills and tools to do that, right? They wouldn't be listening to the high performance mindset if that wasn't the case. So maybe get us started and just describe to us like, what does emotional agility mean to you? Yeah. I like to keep things really, really simple, even though the things I, I, I,

teach and advise on have loads of research, complex research behind them. But I think it has to be simple and easily digestible so that you can understand why this is so valuable, right? So emotional agility is the term that was coined by Dr. Susan David. And you know, you can learn all about it. But the simplest way to think about it is this. It is a skill set that allows you in the moment to be aware of what you're feeling, identify that feeling, observe it, take a step back from it, and choose a response instead of a reaction, a response that's aligned with your personal values, your professional values, and the outcomes that you really desire. So this used to be, you know, kind of thrown in with quote-unquote soft skills, which is a phrase

that makes me cringe because it makes it sound like it's not valuable. This is one of the most important, impactful things you can be investing in developing right now. Yeah, I think so because, you know, it's so important to be as a leader and as an athlete and even as a parent for me to be able to regulate how I'm feeling and to take a step back and be aware of it first. You know, I read Susan David's book, I don't know, maybe five or six years ago. And the point that I really loved about her book, Kelly, was how she described how every emotion is meant to be felt. And there's no like good or bad emotions. But emotions really tell us information.

I think she says something about how emotions are like data, not directives. Which means like to me at least it means it's like, you know, it helps when you're experiencing emotions, taking a step back and saying, all right, why am I experiencing this? What's what's going on with me here? and that emotion doesn't need to direct how you how you act. What do you think about that? I couldn't be in more agreement. And I sort of, I giggled when this book came out because I thought to myself, oh my gosh, I've been teaching this for decades. I just didn't understand that this was a quote-unquote thing. But this is so incredibly important to give it its own title, its own category, and identify it as a skill.

because it's more than just, you know, mental toughness development. It's more than just going to therapy to learn how to manage anxiety or grief and loss or things like that. Those things are tremendously important. This is a skill that helps you understand that your emotions have value. They are valid. They are pieces of data. But also emotions sometimes tell stories that are not. accurate and reliable. So we need to be able to separate ourselves in the moment, in the moment

when the pressure hits and we need to make a choice or we need an instantaneous response to an outside pressure. It gives us this ability to separate from that data point and be focused completely on values, goals, mission, and response over reaction. That doesn't mean that you shove the feeling down, you ignore the feeling, you shelve the feeling permanently. It just means in that moment, the emotion is not the driver of the choice that you make unless it's something that's life-threatening, of course. Then that fear in that moment is going to be important to listen to, of course. But later on, you can come back and process what's really going on under here. Why am I getting so angry by this other person's action, by what they're saying to me,

by what they're not saying to me. You can deal with that and process that later. But in the moment, we often don't have the luxury to do that. So developing this skill of emotional agility agility is a both and skill. So you feel your feelings and you have the ability to respond at a very, very high level and also very quickly. Yeah, so great. And can you give us a little bit more information about why you decided to study emotional agility? And I'm asking that question because I think when we hear the why behind someone's passion, it helps us really connect with them and understand, you know, why they do what they do. So tell us what more about why you do, Kelly, and why emotional agility. Absolutely. So the short story is I became a psychotherapist for the same

reason everybody who does, does, because my childhood was not the best. You're not going to meet a psychotherapist who said, oh, I just had the most incredible life experience and just decided to be a therapist, right? So I did that for 20 years and it was incredibly fulfilling. But the medical insurance system in the United States made it very, very difficult for me to continue to do that at the level that I wanted to do it. So I left and became a private advisor. And I have a passion for elevating women and providing women with the bandwidth, the capacity, the support required for them to flourish. And here's one of the real reasons why I'm so dialed into this. When you look at business owners, founders, athletes, most of the success systems inside

those larger systems were built for men with stay-at-home wives. So women enter the chat and these systems were not built for us to flourish. So now that, for example, I'm thinking of the WMBA in the moment, now that we're watching this. absolute explosion of women's professional athletics. And over the last many years, we've watched female entrepreneurs, the percentage of women-owned businesses rise so drastically. We're coming to understand that the systems that were built in, they're really not for us. They're really not for us. But we have to figure out how to operate within them while we are also changing them, while we are also being wives and partners, mothers, philanthropists, you know,

having our hands involved in lots of other things, while also being individuals who have interests in other things that we want to pursue. This requires a really deep level of basically psychological skills that were not focused on before. You know, performance for a long time has been centered on mental toughness. And that is really incredibly important, right, in order to consistently perform to a high level. But now what we're coming to understand, and I think a lot of it has to do with COVID, believe it or not, I think we're coming to understand that things like EQ emotional intelligence and emotional agility are not negotiable anymore. You know, we are not built to flourish on.

under chronic stress. And we saw, you know, the fallout during the COVID years because if that was just an acute stress, it would have been awful enough if it was a six-month event. It was a years-long event. And human beings had breakdowns in lots of different ways. And we see that within the family, but we see that within small businesses, large businesses, teams of every kind. So now people like us, my industry are seeing, oh, this is so much more than a nice skill to have. This is a not negotiable modern differentiator for success. Yeah. And I think, you know, as somebody who teaches mental toughness and has over the last 20 years taught it, I think people get this wrong impression that toughness means like suck it up or you can't be emotional or, you know,

So I like to use like meant be mentally strong or mentally tough because sometimes people think it just means like bottling it up. And I know from, you know, working with high level football teams and lots of teams and all different sports that it's like, you know, that doesn't help performance when you push things down. Can you give us an example of maybe a client that you worked with where you or a team or whatever it might be that you taught them some emotional agility skills? and then what was the impact? Sure. And I teach it to all of my private clients. It's part of what we do. It's not the entirety, but it's part of what we do.

And then I teach it separately to leadership teams and athletic teams. But just on an individual level, the women I work with already come in tough. They already come in super strong because nobody decides to pursue being a professional athlete or, you know, opening a law firm or, you know, founding something and having to go out and find, you know, financial backers without a real degree of strength and toughness. What unfortunately happens, and so this is sort of an amalgamation of a lot of clients, so bear with me. But what typically happens across the board is that toughness takes you so far, right? And it can get you to a lot of goals.

Unfortunately, though, strength is not enough to maintain a certain level of performance and fulfillment over a long period of time. And I'm a big believer in not sacrificing one for the other. So you want to be a present mother and you want to be able to show up on the court and give your full 38 or 40 minutes. You want to be a present partner and wife who is engaged. engaged and vulnerable and intimate, and you have the energy and bandwidth to do that, and you want to be able to show up in the boardroom and be a confident, centered, grounded leader. So the outcomes that I'm seeing are the both and instead of the either or, because a lot of women that I'm working with have achieved a lot of the dream already. And they secretly don't want to admit, this does not feel like I thought it was going to feel. I thought it was going to feel so much more fulfilled. I thought the money in the bank, we are going to feel so much less stress. I thought when I achieved

that accolade, that award, that a level of visibility, that my confidence was going to go through the roof. And what I'm really feeling is more pressure than I've ever felt in my life. And it feels too vulnerable and risky to be telling anybody that. That's a big risk to take. So, you know, this is why I get hired because of those outcomes. Also, when we're talking about women, we're talking about 8,000 hats. You know this already from the, you know, the people that you've worked with. We're not just putting on the athlete hat. We're not just putting on the, I'm going to be a good teammate and a leader in the locker room hat. We're putting on mom. We're putting on, oh, by the way, I'm going to go over here and open a beauty or skincare business or become an

influencer in fashion or whatever that may be. Same thing with entrepreneurs. It's not, I'm going to open this one business. I'm going to open three businesses and invest in five more, right, while I am also doing all of these other things. So what I'm seeing is the ability to not just do all of these things, but to create an identity, a nervous system, the capacity, and the bandwidth to do all of them harmoniously. Because this idea of work-life balance to me, I just toss it out the window. I try to tell people all the time, think of a gymnast on, you know, the balance beam. You're not going to stay balanced forever. That's a really, really difficult thing to try to achieve and when you get there, you're not going to stay there. Harmony is more about learning

how to dance with all of the elements going on. So you can know when to lead, no one to allow somebody to lead you, know when to step things up, step things back, and that you create harmony so you can be present in all of the places that matter to you and be really fulfilled. while also not cracking under pressure and not, you know, having to give up what, you know, going to your own kids soccer game before you get on the pitch, you know. So all of this both and that's really what the outcomes are that are most powerful and meaningful. Excellent. Well, okay. So one question I have is like how, you know, like when we think about how do we move forward with, I love when you can describe emotional agility is like, um, you know, this, we're working from our values, our purpose, and we're responding, not reacting, right? Tell us about how, is there any strategies or tools that you teach that can help us do that? Yeah. So one of the things that I like to talk about, which anybody listening can start to do today, well, number one, you can pick up the book and read it if you're just like, I need to start from a

place of intellectual and cognitive understanding of this. Great. I'm also a nerd. I'll, I'll, want to read all the time and read all the things. So I will always recommend that you read the book. But a really simple practice, and I just want to take one second and say, listen, I don't teach rocket science. The things I teach and advise on are generally simple to understand. They are very, very difficult to implement consistently on your own. Right? So the concepts, very simple. But when people go to make the, to implement it and make change, because that's what we're looking at. We're looking to make psychological change, emotional change, and behavior change that turns into habit formation, right? That's much harder to do on your own.

If everything was as simple as understanding it intellectually, we'd pretty much all be okay. We wouldn't need any help, right? So one of the things I try to tell people is just practicing what Tara brought, I don't know if you've ever heard of her. She's a meditation master. She calls it the sacred pause. And what that is, and you can do that just throughout the day, this is one of the easiest ways to start this process, is you don't wait until you're in crisis to practice this. You do it five times a day.

And you can even set like a reminder on your phone or something where no matter what you're doing with the exception of driving, you stop, you pause. And you tune into your breathing, your body, your emotions, the state of being you are in, and you just observe. You observe all of those things. The next thing you are likely to notice is what your ego is creating as the dialogue in your mind. So it's going to likely be some negative chatter. Sometimes it can be just kind of passive aggressive, Sometimes it can be absolutely awful. Like we can be so mean to ourselves. But you're going to notice your ego likely chattering in there about whatever is going on. That's the place that reactivity comes from. And so when you practice the sacred pause and observing, what you're doing is creating the space between observing and reacting.

and that space, that practice alone of stop, observe, and pause is what will allow you to begin to create emotional agility. Without that, you're not going to be able to create the skill because you just immediately go into reactivity. The pause with a little bit of distance from what's going on inside of you is what allows you the space to then shift from reactivity to responsiveness. Yeah, that's so good. And if you're not paying attention now, you're feeling or what's manifesting in your body, you know, and for me, it's like just that check in of, all right, what's, what's happening with my shoulders, you know, understanding my triggers, what tends to stress me out, what tends to, you know, keep me more quick to say something instead of like responding the way that I want to. So like understanding yourself is key. Yes, 100%. And again, it sounds so easy. right? It's simple in concept, but it's so much harder to practice in our lives today. I mean, the onslaught of just online information, the increased pressure, what it takes to, you know, run a family these days, money pressures, all the things are coming at us from a million different places. So pausing five times a day for two minutes sounds like a very simple thing to do.

watch how quickly you will dismiss that alarm on your phone, though, when you go to even just practice what I'm saying. And it's the people who have the discipline to begin to do this and then turn it into a habit that are going to see the biggest payoff, both short and long term. Yeah, I appreciate everything that you just said. And I was thinking about a tool that I wrote about in my new upcoming book called The Confidence Habit. I'm so excited to read that, by the way. I'm so excited. I can't wait for that to come out.

Thank you, Kelly. It's been a labor low, so I'm ready for it to hit the world. But one of the chapters about seven practices to grow confidence, and one of them has actually claim your emotions. And I talk a little bit about emotional agility in there, but then I introduce this tool called PCR. are. And this is something I teach my clients a lot. One I'm thinking about right now who's like a managing director at this big accounting firm. And he is just high, such high expectations for himself and

others. You can get really frustrated if people don't rise to those, you know, expectations. And the tool is just pause, like take a breath. Kind of like what you're saying, I love the sacred pause. Consider like how do I want to show up right now? What are what do I want guiding me? What is my life's purpose. What kind of leader do I want to be? And then respond instead of react. And you're right that it's like, in times of stress and pressure, we tend to react more than we respond. Can you tell us the difference between those two words in your opinion? And like, how have you found in your life to respond and not react? What works for you? This is a great question. So let me start with your, well, two questions. Let me start with the first one. Reaction typically comes without thought.

And so we have to remember, and I don't want to nerd out too much, but the habit- You can nerd out. That's okay. The habits that we have, we have neural pathways in our brains that allow those habits to occur really without much energy from us. That's the whole point. So our brains get wired when we've done something with repetition. And so, for example, if you're someone who gets frustrated and what you typically do is lash out and you're not thinking about it, it's just what you do when you get frustrated or angry or overwhelmed or flooded, whatever it might be, you're doing that likely because it's a habit and your brain does not have to really expend much energy to go from point A to point B, right?

responding to go from reactive to responsive requires your brain to rewire itself. Brains do not enjoy this, by the way. They're not big fans of having to do this because of how energy intensive it is, right? Which is why I'm saying this is a skill you must learn, practice, develop, master. And it takes time for the brain to rewire itself so that responsiveness is your new normal. Responsiveness is intentionally choosing a way to behave in a particular situation. And again, with emotional agility, that is in alignment with your personal values, your professional values, or say your business values, and the goals and vision that you have. So that has to develop over time.

One, you're not really thinking about and quite often afterwards don't feel great about how that went. but it feels very difficult to change, and that's because your brain is already wired to behave that way. That's why it feels so hard to change. When you become responsive, it's very intentional. And so after you get past the resistance for how hard it is to change, and believe me, it doesn't stay that hard. It just feels hard in the beginning. You feel resistance. But once you train yourself to be more.

responsive, you will be shocked at how much confidence you grow because it's no longer just about outcomes and things that are going on outside of you and achievements and things like that. Yes, those are wonderful. It's about your identity. It's about the person you have intentionally invested in becoming. So now you are living out your values. For most people listening to this, leadership and being a really solid leader is likely one of those things. So leading yourself and then being a good leader or a good example to other people.

Well, if you're being reactive, those things are not aligned. They're really not. And so that's the difference. Now, for me, if I can be really transparent, as a younger person, look, I am feisty. Everybody will tell you I have a spiked personality. I came out of the womb, spicy. This is who I am. And I love that about myself. But as a younger person, because I had not processed some things that had happened in childhood, I was aggressive and I was reactive. And believe me, learning the difference between being aggressive and being assertive was quite the process for me. And it was very, uncomfortable, but has paid off for, you know, decades now. But understanding that what happened to me, that's not my responsibility. I don't own that. But I do have to be responsible for what it left behind. So once I accepted that, oh, this is mine to deal with, this, I have to be responsible for this,

then learning to process my anger and learning what I did not know at the time was emotional agility, that's what allowed me to take my spiciness and use it appropriately. So I use it in, while I use it with humor a lot, but I also use it in appropriate pushback. I use it when people attempt to mansplain. That is always really entertaining to me when that happens. But the spiciness comes out in being assertive and confident. I don't need to be aggressive. I don't need to yell. I don't need to lash out. I speak in alignment with my values and what I know to be true and with unshakable confidence. Because now you're, I might even be triggered internally, which Susan David in her book called Hooked, but that's what we all generally know as being triggered. You might not. stop being triggered, but being triggered no longer dictates your behavior. And when you have that amount of command over yourself, that's really what I call the inner architecture of success. You are literally unstoppable when you have that developed. Excellent. You know, a couple years ago,

I took this assessment called the Energy Leadership Index, and it was part of my training as a coach. And I learned these seven levels of leadership energy. And I learned actually what gets me triggered or hooked. And I have this goal of getting triggered less. Like can I every day get triggered less? Because, you know, kind of this idea of what you just said is like I'm responsible for what's left behind and who I am now. I also love what you said about learning the skill, practicing the skill, and then mastering the skill. I thought those three steps were really helpful to people just kind of think about, okay, you first got to learn it.

You've got to keep practicing it, right? I do have some questions about your white paper, and so I'd love to ask you about that. Okay, awesome, especially because you just brought that up. And so I'd love for you to tell us first where we can find the white paper, and overall what it really encompasses, and I'm going to ask you my favorite questions around it. Sure, sure. So wherever you see this episode, I'm going to share a link. that you can go to to read the white paper, there will be a version that is for founders,

experts, entrepreneurs, and then there will be a second version that's specific to professional athletes. And you might be both. So feel free to read both. So that's where you'll be able to find it. So in the show notes right now. Perfect. Perfect. And I'm sorry, repeat your second question for me. I asked more about, like, tell us what led you to write this white paper and like just generally what's around it for the listener. So they know to like grab it. Absolutely. So I, in the last 12 years that I've owned this business, I've had the great fortune of speaking to and working with a lot of successful people. And so we've talked about what have you invested in that is given you a really solid, meaningful return on your investment.

And I've heard things like performance, coaching, leadership, coaching, business, coaching, things like that. And then I started to notice that women that had hit a particularly elite level of success across all of these categories that I work with, we're saying to me, I'm getting diminished returns on these things, and I don't understand why. It's not that these things hadn't worked and weren't amazing and weren't wonderful, but something's missing for me and I can't figure out what it is. So I just assume it's me.

Or I just assume this is the price of success and this is as good as it gets. So I started hearing this over and over and over from women. you know, across the industries. And that is where the light bulb went on for me. And I thought, you know what, it is just a skill gap. It's just a skill gap. But women who tend to be high achievers also tend to take incredible amounts, usually too much, responsibility for their outcomes. And so they were concluding, oh, I just, it's just me. I've invested in all these wonderful things and I guess this is just, I can't make it any better. And so when I was able to communicate, no, no, no, no, no, this is not some personal flaw, a character flaw, there's nothing wrong with you. It's just a skill

gap. Then what they were allowed to do is depersonalize it. And the minute you depersonalize something, you have less guilt, less shame, less pressure, less anxiety, less stress over it, and you can create some distance that allows you to lean into the learning. And because women in these industries and categories all understand that there are massive learning curves in all of them, whether you're learning to shoot a three-pointer or you're learning to be the CEO of a company, there's massive learning curves, all of the sudden, it wasn't that big of a deal to say, oh, actually, investing in this kind of advisory is just closing a gap which gives me a competitive edge and everybody I work with wants a competitive edge. So that's really where this came from is just observing the people I was

already working with and looking for, you know, a mantra for me, a personal mantra, is always leave people better than you found them, whether it's in my personal life or it's the women that I work with. So I'm always looking for ways I can do this. And this was a gap that I said, oh my goodness, this is exactly how I can do that with my clients. And Kelly, there was a few things I really appreciated about this white paper. And the reasons that people should go download it, again, on the show notes below, you talk about it, a meta-analysis that is a study that combines all different kinds of studies, right? Multiple studies to kind of show you the power of something.

And so you talked about how a 30 meta-analyses found that 90% of reviews concluded that psychological skills training enhances performance, athletic performance, right? And specifically, I loved how you described this return on investment. So you 8.15 to 1 ROI for embedded performance programs, including mental readiness professionals. Tell us about those findings and then how does that relate to us and what we should do. Okay. So this was done by the U.S. Army, but it is, it can be, the findings can be generalized pretty much across sports. So this one you'll find in the athlete way paper. And so what was found is when you have a consistent training program or consistent trainer or element

that works on mental readiness and these psychological skills that you see an 8X basically payoff for in performance. And the reason that this. was a really interesting statistic to me is that they pointed the word that jumped out to me was embedded. And so this speaks to organizations' willingness to invest in franchises as a franchise, not just for individual players to go out and seek this kind of, you know, investment for themselves, which please, if you want and can afford to do that, do it.

But the point is the organization becomes more successful when they invest in programs like this that provide consistent training and it's just built into what your organization does. Yeah, I love that. And I love just that data can show you the importance of what we're doing. And so you also talk in the white paper about how the stakes have never been higher, right? And we can talk about this in sport and in leadership. What are you seeing? And then what do you see is the need for these psychological and emotional agility skills? There's so many. So I'll try to be succinct and just hit on the biggies.

But, you know, let me talk about in athletics just to begin with. So there are so many threats to your career in athletics. Not only do we have injury that can take you out temporarily or permanently. We have whatever the front office is doing, we have whatever, you know, team dynamics are going on. Your job is almost literally always on the line.

Always on the line. That degree of pressure before they were getting paid, before they were, you know, on national television, before they were getting brand deals, et cetera, was massive. While now we're looking at a huge uptale. in visibility, in investment into women's sports, in the individual payer play, player pay, excuse me, tongue twister.

And so with that, expectations from the public and from inside organizations go through the roof, your own expectations of yourself are going to go through the roof. and you have all this convergence of things like social media and the public having a say, often not a kind say, in a lot of things. And now you've got a lot of money on the line. So the ROI here is massive, not just for the organization, but for the individual. Because I've said this for 33 years. The success and performance is 85 to 90 percent and inner game. Now we have all the data that says, you're right about that. So this is where, this is the next level of investment that I see organizations making. Now, on the leadership

team side of businesses, organizations, et cetera, it's basically the same thing. But AI, again, has entered the chat. So businesses, people are worried about losing their jobs. They're worried about their entire niche or industry getting wiped out and replaced by AI. Owners are concerned about how do I infuse this into my business, my organization, do it in an ethical and legal way, things like that. So there's a whole different level of pressure over there while trying to maintain, you know, gross revenue, your profit margins, you're, you know, the other people that you're collaborating with, all that kind of stuff. So the pressure again has never been greater to perform, but in the face of much more complex obstacles. So you need your leadership team to be able to lead in a very different

way. And to your earlier point, it's not pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Yes, do we have to do that once in a while? Of course we do. During the day, you might have to be like, listen, I know you're in a mood, get a coffee and like keep it rolling. You know what I mean? That's not a good long-term plan. You need your leadership team to operate, and this is the word that's important, consistently at a higher level and be able to rise to meet this pressure without losing your ability to creatively problem solve and innovate, not just react to problems and put out fires. The businesses that that are going to survive and thrive are the ones that can be creative and innovate as a response to AI and other pressures. Absolutely. And Kelly, I can give you just some anecdotal evidence in my work

in the NFL. The first year I was asked to interview everyone, all the rookies. And honestly, the ones who were focused on what they could control and they were using the mental skills, they were more likely to make the team, whereas those who weren't were less likely to make the team. So I saw it firsthand that if they weren't, if they were overwhelmed with stress and anxiety and, you know, not focusing what they could control, they were more likely to choke under pressure. And that's one of their questions I wanted to ask you. And I'm going to read this part of the white paper because I thought this was so powerful. So you said nearly 80% of a league to Olympic level athletes reported choking under pressure. in a given year.

Yes. And choking is not a character deficiency, which is really helpful. It's a documented neurophysiological event where you have excessive motivational arousal in the midbrain combined with diminished executive control and the prefrontal cortex, right? It produces a performance decrease under pressure. So tell us about this because not only just do athletes, you know, report choking, right? we all, I've had my own experiences with that. And, you know, this is what I teach people to do. So tell us a bit about what have you learned about choking and how could it help us. Yeah. I want to make it really relatable

for people. And one of the things that the average person will tell you that they will absolutely choke on is public speaking. If you take an average person and say, how do you feel about getting on stage in front of a thousand people? I mean, they go from white to green to whatever, right? Because the neurophysiological response to that is very activating. And this is important for people to understand. You've heard of fight, flight, freeze. You might have heard of fawn, which is a people-pleasing response. The thing is, when you feel overwhelmed by a trigger or by pressure, your brain chooses

is your response, unless you have trained yourself otherwise. So you may think of yourself as somebody who doesn't choke. And yet, you get mugged on the street and you absolutely freeze. When you're a person in real life who's like, no, I would punch that person in the face and run away, you know, or whatever. That's my personality. That's who I am. Personality does not dictate this.

And it is not, as you said, a character flaw. This is something you train your brain and your nervous system to do. And notice I said train. So just like you train your body to have muscle memory or you train yourself to be able to get up and present in a boardroom, a courtroom, or on a stage somewhere, you're training your nervous system that a little bit of nervousness actually helps performance. but getting flooded with these chemicals does not. Nobody chooses to choke. Nobody shows up and goes, you know what? I've worked for years to get to the Olympics and just I'm just not feeling it today.

So I'm just not going to give it my best. Nobody does that, right? Yet if you choke, that's usually how people feel. They feel I did something wrong. I somehow chose this. This is a flaw in me and this is not it at all. Again, skill gap. It's a skill gap. So if you're going to put all of these years and let's talk about not just the time, the mental and psychological energy into that and the money that people invest

to become really successful at what they do, regardless of what they do, if you're going to do all of that, why leave a skill gap wide open that could steal everything from you? Why? Oh, beautiful. What's one thing that you think is really important to train that skill so you avoid choking when it really matters most to you? Yeah. You know, it's going to sound so basic, but it's removing the resistance to acquiring these skills. What's really unfortunate, and I've seen it come up over and over and over, is that we as a society have been taught forever,

that these sorts of skills are quote unquote soft. They're soft skills. And I have been screaming about this for 30 plus years. That that's a terrible term. Fortunately now we're hearing more and more than called power skills, which I like better. But the way I think of them is they're not negotiable for success. And when I say success, I don't mean just achievement.

I mean sustaining and not sacrificing more than is necessary, right? So for me, it's that big mindset shift that these are not soft skills. These are not a waste of time and money for you to invest in. As a matter of fact, to your point earlier, the people who invested the time, energy and money in doing this, now we're seeing through research, much better results that last over time. And that's what we want. We don't want to win one game. We don't want to win one case in the courtroom. We don't want to close one deal. We want this overtime with consistency and even improved results. So that's where I would start. Is anywhere that you have some sort of either closed or resistant mindset around investing in these skills,

whether you're an individual or you're a gatekeeper or you're the person that would pay for this, please start to read about this. You're going to see that that is a misdemeanor. You're going to see that that is a misperception that is costing you individually and your organization dearly. Yeah, thank you, Kelly. Excellent. Well, we know that we can get your paper, your white paper, and the show notes. And there's also a website there that you can follow along with Kelly. But if people wanted to learn more about you, inquire about how you work with teams or

individuals, how could they find more information about you, Kelly? Sure. There's two ways. Number one is Instagram. Instagram, I am the only one in my DMs. I don't allow my team in my DMs. I don't have somebody in there saying they're me and answering as me. Because for me, relationship building is core for all of my work. So people need to know that they can connect and safely ask questions, share things, and build that trust. So send me a voice message anytime on Instagram. The other place is on my website. There is a, there are, there are, several links that you can inquire and apply and find out more. So if this is something you're really interested in, go ahead and fill out the form. I am the only one that looks at it.

Again, I am very discreet. I don't release names. I don't share information. So it gets sent directly to me for review. And I'll let you know whether or not this is a good match for you. This is a good time for you. And if not, I will connect you with a resource that I think is probably your best next step. Amazing. Thank you, Kelly, so much for being here on the high performance mindset. I took a lot of different notes. I'm going to do my best to tell people what I wrote down as a good summary. I love how you describe what emotional agility is and really focusing on your values, your purpose, with better understanding the outcome that you want, that it's a skill that you can keep growing. I love when you talked about learning, practicing and mastering these skills, the sacred.

pause was a great idea for us to like just to really pause throughout our day. I love how you suggested just a couple minutes. And at the end, when you talked about the power skills, love that, I didn't know this idea of Fawn that it's like people pleasing. So there you go. What great value. Thank you, Kelly, for being here on the High Performance Mindset Podcast. We appreciate you. Way to crush it. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. 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 enjoy my exclusive community for high performers, where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can add over to Dr. Sindra. That's d R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com. See you next week.