High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 79: Mental Preparation for the Olympics with Dr. Sean McCann, Senior Sport Psychologist for the USOC

Episode Date: November 24, 2016

Sean McCann, Senior Sport Psychologist for the United States Olympic Committee (USOC), has traveled to the last 12 Olympics to work with the nation’s best athletes. In his work for the USOC, he works directly with teams and coaches, from mental skills seminars and workshops about Olympic pressure, to individual sessions with athletes.  In this interview, he talks about how the best mentally prepare for a competition that only happens every four years. Sean describes that one key factor is to overbuild mental skills so that the athlete can perform when the conditions are not perfect. He suggests to focus on behavior and to ask: 1) What does it mean to do my job well? and 2) What does it look like to not do my job well? Dr. McCann says that mental skills are the bedrock to performance which athletes use to self-regulate themselves, but there is an extra layer. This extra layer is the 3-step process: 1) Get your questions answered (i.e., logistics, strategy, doubts, etc.), 2) Find a focus of 3-4 things that are process focused (“To perform well, I will…”) and 3) Perform with certainty. You can reach Sean @sportpsychone and at [e-mail].

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, Cindra Kampoff, and I want to thank you so much for joining me here today. I'm grateful that you're here, ready to listen to an interview with Dr. Sean McCann. So I just want to first thank you all for your emails and your tweets about the podcast.

Each and every one of them mean so much to me, and I'm so appreciative that you listen each and every week. The comments that I've gotten, people have said, we love these short radio interviews that you've been posting every week. And when are you going to get back at posting the interviews? Well, I have had a crazy month of football season. I work with several college football teams and a pro football team,

but I am back at posting the interviews and I'm stoked about this one. So you should expect one once a week from now on. So the interview that you're going to listen to today is an interview with Dr. Sean McCann. Now Sean is the senior sports psychologist for the United States Olympic Committee. Listen to this, he has traveled the last 12 Olympics working with our nation's best athletes. Amazing. He has been a sports psychologist for the USOC for 25 years. And in his work with USOC, he works directly with teams and coaches. He provides mental skills seminars and workshops about Olympic pressure,

and he also provides individual sessions with athletes. In addition to his work with the U.S. Olympic Committee, Sean has worked with professional athletes in a variety of sports, from NASCAR to ball sports. He has received the Distinguished Professional Practice Award from the Association for Applied Sports Psychology and was their president of ASP in 2007. He's also a licensed psychologist in Colorado. All right, so the interview that you are listening, going to listen to, man, is with the best

of the best in applied sports psychology. And so here's a few things I'd encourage you to listen for. Sean talks about what it's like to work directly with teams and coaches for an event that is only every four years. So it provides a really unique perspective in terms of how do you get athletes to mentally prepare for an event that only happens every four years. He talks about overbuilding mental skills and what that means. And he also

talks about how the bedrock of performance is really mental skills so that athletes can learn to self-regulate. But he also has this extra layer. And this extra layer is this three-step process that is unique to him. And I think you'll really enjoy learning about his approach. So a few of my favorite quotes from this podcast are, everyone has the capacity for brilliance and a key to consistent performance is to stay in control on the edge of out of control. So we'd love to hear from you. Go ahead and head over to Twitter.

You can reach Sean at Sports Psych 1, that's 1-O-NE, and myself at Mentally underscore Strong. We'd love to hear what's it out to you about this interview, how you might use the content that Dr. McCann has provided. And again, if you could reach out to him and just thank him so much for being on this podcast. I appreciate his willingness to be so open and transparent with his work so that we can each learn and better understand what it takes to help the best of the best perform under pressure. So without further ado, let's bring on Dr. Sean McCann. Welcome, Sean McCann, to the High Performance Mindset Podcast. I'm pretty stoked that you're here today and you're ready to just share with the world a little bit more about what you do.

Well, thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to talking. Awesome. So let's start us off and just can you tell us a little bit about your passion and what you do? Well, I guess the thing that's sort of most unique about this job working for an Olympic committee is we're preparing people for things that only happen every four years. Pretty much all of the sport clients that I work with, whether it's coaches or athletes, they're getting ready for that once, we call it quad, once a quad experience. And so it's a weird situation where you don't get to practice a lot for the thing that's most important in your career.

And so it creates special challenges and problems and very high-pressure environments. And I really enjoy being in the middle of those environments and trying to help people get through it. So for me, it's really, really thrilling work, and it's really fun work, actually, too. So having fun is important to me. And it's something I get every day. So I'm pretty lucky. And you must enjoy it if you've been doing it for 25 years. As long as they keep me here, I'll keep doing it, I think, because it's just really, it's really a blast. You know, as you know, when you're working, whether it's in leadership or whether you're working with athletes, even if the situation is exactly the same, the individual performer

is so different that it makes everything, even if you've seen a similar situation before, unique and unexpected and unknowable ahead of time. So that's pretty thrilling. Well, I'm looking forward just to talking to you more about, you know, how do you prepare athletes mentally if the competition is only over the next four years? So I want to talk to you more about that in this interview. Sean, to start us off, just tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are in terms of 25 years with the USOC and now head of the sports department kind of a weird background in some ways I mean

I've always been interested well since I was a as an undergrad I was a psych major so I was interested in psychology but and I was interested in sports as the I at the time I went to grad school in Hawaii, I was doing a lot of bike racing. And I got a bike racing magazine. I remember distinctly in the basement of the psychology building at grad school. And there was this little advertisement for research assistantships in sports science. And they had them in physiology and biomechanics and psychology and I wrote off to this guy who had just been hired to be the head sports psychologist a guy named Shane Murphy and he he said well I was really thinking I just got here I was thinking maybe something for an

undergrad and so I just kept on applying and harassing him and I got people to write letters of recommendation for it says okay finally he let me. And I left grad school for a year and went and did this research stuff and some direct work with athletes in Colorado Springs at the Olympic Training Center. entire shifted my focus uh from cross-cultural psychopathology to to uh pain coping strategies and endurance athletes so it switched everything that little advertisement and uh uh led led to coming in ended up coming back to the u.s olympic committee as a fellow after getting another fellowship at University of Washington. And so, yeah, I stayed, I convinced my fiance that we could go to Colorado for a couple of years and then go back to Hawaii where she had a great job. And that was 25 years ago. Well, one of the things I heard in just that story is your persistence. And if the first time you applied or inquired, you know, you just kept on going after it because you knew that you wanted to do it.

I mean, all of us in the field of, you know, performance psychology and sports psychology know it's a hard niche to get work in. But it's really fantastic work to do because you're working with motivated people who, you know, when you work together, it gets you fired up too. And so you leave your work with more energy than you go in, which is unusual and fun. Yeah, that's how I feel too. Sometimes on my drive home, I'm just like on fire, my whole body feeling, you know, just pumped up. So Sean, you know, every four years the Olympics, you know, happens and you have the opportunity to work with some of the world's best. Tell us, to start off, what do you think separates those who really do well at the Olympics

versus those that don't? I know there's been a lot of research that highlights this, but what do you see? Well, you know, I think the thing is, even at a non-elite level, people will have moments of just brilliance, whether it's a high school athlete or someone that never goes past a JV tennis team. There's those plays and points that will play in their heads. I mean everybody has the capacity for brilliance. At the elite sport level, you see a lot of moments of brilliance. But I think the thing that separates the folks who have great Olympic performances and Olympic trials too because the trials in a lot of sports are more challenging psychologically than the games themselves.

But the folks who do best in that environment are the ones who have consistency of excellence. So they have consistently excellent actions and behaviors. And I think this is true in all walks of life, in corporate world, in coaching, in athletes, that it's this regularity of doing things the correct way. And I think it comes from great habits. And I think it comes from a conscious decision to do things in an effective way. And a lot of times that means not taking shortcuts and doing things in training that will lead to excellence under very different conditions of high pressure. So that's the thing I think for me. It's just that sort of consistent, great action. I like what you said in terms of everyone has, you know, the capacity for brilliance.

You see that they have consistent preparation. Can you give us like an example of what you mean? I'm a big believer in the idea of sort of overbuilding for what you're facing. Like the idea, like if you're, I've worked with some performers who really are better than people who have won gold medals, for instance. But those athletes, even though they're better, they're better for when conditions are perfect. When things start off well, they get their confidence and it just keeps on rolling. Um, and the, the problem is in the most important moments of performance that I work with mostly it's when things aren't perfect, when there's a lot of emotions, when there's a sort of a storm of thoughts and feelings and weird sensations in the body so that things don't feel exactly right.

And those tend to be, those tend to happen at the most important performances of your career. And so I don't think it makes sense to build like a race car for a perfectly smooth track, like NASCAR track. It makes more sense to build it for off-roading, you know, rally car racing where there's bumps and dirt roads and you're sliding sideways and you still have to be going at 100 miles an hour, but you're driving slightly sideways as it happens. And being comfortable with that sort of chaos and intensity, it's different. And so I think you have to overbuild for those situations even though you're not feeling those things right now. And so the people, you know, sometimes it helps to be taught a bad lesson or a hard lesson early in your career so that you have enough failure so that you see, wow, I can't just rely on my flow state, perfect, easy game. I need to have some, you know, ability to

manage a little bit of chaos and stormy weather sort of thing. And so the folks who prepare for those situations, even though it's not like that in practice, even though it's not even like that at regular season games, but maybe it's the playoffs or the Super Bowl or the Olympic trials, those sorts of situations where everything's taken up to number 11 and, you know, it creates a different internal environment. And if you haven't practiced for that situation, you're not likely to, unless you get lucky, perform really well in that situation. And that's the kind of conscious decision to prepare and over-prepare for what you face most of the time.

Yeah, Sean, that's really good. I'm thinking about how it's like you're the eye of the hurricane where maybe there's chaos going around you, but you stay calm and collected because you're right, it's not always perfect, and athletes don't always get in the flow state. So this is where mental training comes in. Can you tell us a little bit about if these situations only come up every four years, how do you really prepare an athlete to do that? Like I said, if you're lucky enough to have multiple bites of the apple, like some of our, just staying on the Olympic track,

some athletes have, have been to a trials and struggled or been to an Olympics and struggled. And they're for sure, you know, they're woken up to the idea that, wow, I, that's different. I mean, everybody said it was different, but wow, I didn't realize it was different, you know? And, and the weird thing is sometimes too, I I've had athletes who've been successful Olympians who all of a sudden had a new level of pressure because of sponsorship or some, the meaning of this, this next Olympic event or the trials or whatever it was. Um, and all of a sudden felt really disrupted in a way they had never had before. And literally the night before the competing, I'll get a text message or a phone call saying, hey, Sean, I never thought I'd have to talk to you, but oh my God, I'm like, I'm kind of melting down right now.

Can we talk? So, you know, you can't always predict when it's going to happen, but it helps to have had a little bit of exposure to the real disruption and feeling a little bit out of control. That makes it easy to motivate athletes to work on that stuff. The hardest is when you're working with very talented young athletes who've had mostly success, almost a straight line of success. for those performers they kind of go you know i got this you know it's okay don't worry i know what i do when i'm at my best and it's like oftentimes that's not really completely accurate they know what they're what they do when they're

at their best when things are easy but they don't know what they do when they're at their best when things are easy, but they don't know what they do when they're at their best when things are hard. And so, you know, sometimes you can have those performances that are a little bit ugly in some ways, but really better than the ones that look perfect because things are a little bit more on the edge. You see it in alpine ski racing. Sometimes the person who looks the prettiest coming down the mountain isn't always the fastest. And being able to stay in control on the edge of out of control is a special skill set that, again, you don't always see when you're kind of, well, I just need to stay at 90% at that level, and that makes things easy and it flows. And sometimes the difference between 90% and 93% is psychologically very different and creates different emotions that trigger different thoughts. And you start to feel a little bit out of control, and you back off down to 85%, 80%. And then everything starts getting all sort of different and the feedback's different. And so it's those sorts of, um, those sorts of experiences, if they haven't had them before, um, it's, it is harder to get them to work on that stuff. But, uh, um, I try and work

with coaches to integrate things into training that challenges athletes in a way that they don't necessarily need this week, but they might need three months from now. Wow, that's really good, Sean. What about, you know, those athletes who just are brilliant from the very first Olympics? You know, I'm thinking about someone like Missy Franklin. Her first Olympics was just like, you know, she crushed it. What do you think about those athletes and what makes them be able to thrive in that? Well, I think one sort of common thread for people who come to the Olympics on their first time and do really well is for whatever reason, and there's lots of reasons, they focus on executing their normal program. Sometimes it's they don't know that they should be scared. And so they don't realize. Sometimes they get a little bit lucky with things start off good and then it just sort of flows and the confidence actually builds. It helps when you have multiple events, you know, like some of the swimmers have, you know, four or five races in a games, including relays and stuff. And so having multiple

opportunities to succeed takes a little bit of pressure off when you only have one event. And so that can help too. And a lot of times you get through the first one and then it's sort of like, wow, then you get on a roll. Um, and, uh, sometimes too, starting off at the beginning of the games helps. And, and that's where swimming has the first events in the, at the Olympics. Um, and so that, that can help as well, because one of the things that a lot of Olympians say is they, when they're sitting around and watching, uh,, it starts to build, oh, my God. I trained with them or I had breakfast with them and they won a medal and it could happen to me. And you start thinking so much about the outcome, it starts to interfere with doing the job. And so there's a lot of different reasons. reasons, but anything that helps you stay on the task and doing your job as opposed to starting to

think about the meaning of the event and how big it is and the things that lead you to get a little bit careful maybe or prepare in a different way or think in a different way. Anything that changes stuff makes it a little bit harder. You can still succeed, but it's a little bit easier if somehow you're able to stay on your normal normal path that's a good message in terms of just focusing on the task and not the outcome or the meaning and focusing on you know doing doing their job let's go back to those athletes who don't have a very good start and you know how you said maybe their their confidence isn't as high right from the beginning and you, you know, you said earlier, you know, staying in control on the edge of out of control.

Well, you know, I think, you know, for instance, I can't tell you how many people have said something like, you know, after a rough performance, they said something like, wow, I haven't felt that for seven years or 10 years, or I remember when I was a kid when I felt like that, or I never knew it'd be such a rollercoaster. And a lot of what they're talking about is injection of emotions. And they've gotten pretty good at controlling their thoughts, and they've got pretty good training habits, and they've got good coaching. But when there's this flood of overwhelming emotions, it changes the way you think,

and it changes the way your body feels, and that can erode your confidence, and it can start to make you feel like you are out of control. And if that's sort of normalized for you and you know, no, this is how it feels when I'm at my best in the storm, then you kind of go, okay, oh, all right, this is how I feel. You know, like one time with one athlete, we were talking about this idea of getting comfortable with this sort of on the edge feeling and, and, you know, like this is an athlete in a, in a sport where they had to pace themselves and they were a little bit scared. It's like, oh my God, maybe, you know, um, maybe I'm going too

fast. Maybe I need to back off. And we, we worked on this idea, like looking for that cue of that feeling of being on the edge physically and mentally and saying, this is how I feel when I'm fast. And sort of like translating it to this is the normal feelings, normal sort of crazy intensity when things are going good. But it's not easy. It's not like, oh, wow, I was just floating along. I didn't realize how fast it was going. No, they realized this is right on the edge. And they were able to convince their brain who wanted to be a little bit careful and maybe over control to like, nope, this is how it feels. This is what it's supposed to be like when you're really going good and you're really going fast. Yeah. It's like they're reframing what that feels like and looks like. Yeah, it's like, you know, because I'd love it if it was easier to sort of convince yourself that make it work versus like pretending that it's not really happening, pretending you don't feel anxious, pretending you don't feel excited.

Instead, go, yeah, wow, this is what it's like when it's awesome and it's in this crazy storm. Yeah, you're accepting it instead of like denying, you know, that it's happening. So, Sean, what would you say is like a topic that you cover with all of the athletes that you work with? My training, a program that was really very cognitive behavioral, so really linking the idea of thoughts and behaviors. And I find that for a lot of performers, and this is not just athletes, although it's really apparent to athletes, the idea of making everything behavioral. What exactly is a good performance in terms of specific behaviors? And the idea of like, okay, say, just do your job. It's like, okay, well, what does that mean, do your job? You know, what specific behaviors, what do you do when things, you do your job well? And what do you do when you don't do your job well? What does it look like, you know, to an outside observer or to an internal observer? What are the behaviors and um then with that sort of behavioral focus it's easier to identify boy everything was going good till i got to this sort of deflection point and then i started

behaving in a different way and it doesn't matter what whether the trigger was what an opponent did whether whether it was an emotional response whether it was a thought whether it's fatigue it's like okay this is where things change and the behavior is not as effective. How do you get back to effective behavior? And sometimes just sort of having a roadmap of a behavioral roadmap of how I want to be behaving at different points in a performance is enough to get people on track. But I find that a lot of athletes don't take the time to make things behavioral. And a lot of, you know, executives don't take the time to make things behavioral. It's like, okay, being a great leader.

Okay, what exactly, exactly does that mean? You know, yes, you need to be smart and make good decisions. It's like, okay, how do you, what does that mean? Make good decisions. How do you, what's your process for making, is it, you know, incorporating other, other people you trust or someone with a different opinion, or is it doing, you know, a test of, of something? Is it, you know, what exactly is the behavior that produces excellence? And that, um, taking that step sometimes can feel like, ah, a pain in the butt where in the butt where it's like goal setting.

Well, to do good goal setting, you have to get behavioral. It's like, yeah, I know I should do a to-do list every morning, but I'm so busy. When I get in, I just turn on and get onto email and boom. Or like an athlete says, well, I just let the coach tell me what the training is and that's all I need to do. Because I get good coaches. Yeah, the coach is coaching the whole team, but your specific focus is what are you trying to get out of? Yes, we're doing intervals today, but what's your behavioral focus on your seventh interval out of 10? What exactly are you trying to do? So I mean, taking that step, that's the thing that I spend a lot of time with,

with athletes who aren't necessarily used to being behavioral. Sometimes because they do have great coaches who do that for them, but by the time they get to the Olympic level, they need to take more responsibility for their, for their situation. And so a lot of, a lot of the discussions I have with athletes are on those variations of those topics of what, okay, yeah, do your job, but what does that mean exactly? Absolutely. And I like the two questions that you ask them, you know, what does it mean when you're performing your job well? Like, what are you doing? And what does it look like when you're not performing your job well? Yeah, you know, and I think that's a, you know, in sports psych, we've all done the idea of like, okay, let's write down your best performance, write down your worst performance and what was different. And a lot of times I think what a lot of performers focus on is the antecedents, the thing that lead up to the performance.

And they focus on, well, if I do this the night know, if I say this thing, or if I, you know, and those are, those are important, don't get me wrong, but there's a, it's easy to focus too much on sort of things that set up the, set up the performance, but they aren't the performance themselves, and I think it's, it's useful to look at good and bad performance in terms of exactly the, what exactly was the performance? You you know you're a swimmer why why was this one a world record and this one wasn't what what was different you know and and it's those specifics that can start to give you places to do the work and other than like god i hope i'm ready you know right and then it's kind of like, well, I hope. Hope is never by the first three succeed and everybody else fails. And I worked with one athlete who had four Olympic performances and finished third, third, and fourth in the first three times.

This is over a couple of Olympic Games. And they end up winning gold on their last performance. But the brutality of the third, I mean, sorry, did I say third? They had fourth, fourth, and fifth. So, yeah, yeah. So being that close three times, I mean, they're very strong performances, but just outside the medals. And then that is really, really difficult for everybody. And since it's my job to try and help performers at the Olympics succeed under these conditions,

you know, all the – just the sheer amount of the Olympic team that doesn't get medals. I mean, the U.S. Olympic team's great, and we do really well, but the majority of our athletes do not win medals. And, you know, and that's a reality that people don't like to talk about, but that's my reality, my reality, you know, um, of, uh, that's, that's a standard of success. And if you don't get it, well, sorry, fifth place is not good enough. And so because, um, that's, those are the most important performances. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out, okay, what do you need to do differently at these high pressure events? Like when you've,

you know, when you've discovered that the normal stuff you do doesn't work. And I mean, the normal sports psychology stuff doesn't work, you know, like the normal things that we, we learn in grad school and, and, and, and working and they're all very important skills, but it's like, yeah, I did all my normal stuff, but I, I was but I was overwhelmed by this hurricane. You know, this one, I thought I was ready. You know, I was a world champion, but it was nothing like – world championships were nothing like the Olympics for me, you know, in terms of the amount of pressure I felt. And so I guess that has led me over the years to try and figure out what's different about these events and what can athletes do differently. So the, I sort of,

I've come up with, um, a three, three step process that athletes and other performers need to take to handle these very high pressure events. Um, and it's sort of basically the first step is answering the questions and that everybody's got questions.

And for instance, first time you're at the Super Bowl, it's like, wow, do I need to be better than normal because it's the Super Bowl? What do I do about family at the Super Bowl? Tickets and all this media stuff. And now we've got two weeks off instead of one week. Should I do more? Should I do less? There's nothing wrong with NEO's questions, but you don't want to have a whole ton of questions

as you're about to start performing. And so the first step is really answering the questions that performers have in big pressure events and moving through and developing answers that can can get you to the next step and a lot of athletes and they don't really answer the questions they sort of repress them they sort of push them away and they ah i don't want to think about it you know i just i'll just push that off and hope it doesn't come up but it comes up again in the performance logistics is a starting a starting point, one category.

There's also individual self-evaluation. Am I good enough? Can I really do this? I've never done this before. I've never been in a situation. And specific tactical and strategic questions like, wow, should I change things up or should I do what I normally do? Should I attack from the beginning or should I do what I normally do? Should I, should I attack from the beginning or should I be patient? Um, should I, um, you know, because this is so important and I expect things

to be rougher, do I need to be more cautious and careful? Um, and those sorts of questions, again, they're, they're legitimate questions you need to sort of find answers to. And, uh, a lot of, a lot of performers just sort of end up swimming in the questions. And like the, you're on the, you're on the starting block of a 200, 200 meter freestyle swim.

And part of your question is like, you have this question in your back of your mind is like, can I go out as hard as I, as I think I should, should what sort of split? It's like, that's deadly to have those sorts of questions right as you're about to start, instead of knowing exactly what you want to do. So moving through those questions is really important to end up. And sort of what you want to move to is some specificity and some

clarity and some certainty. And that's the sort of the second, second stage. The second step is finding a focus. And so that focus is the idea of, okay, this is where you get real behavioral. Okay. And, and it relates to something I do with a lot of athletes in terms of to perform well, I will. So what? What will you do? And like maybe I'm – let's say you're working with a BMX cyclist where you go down this crazy steep ramp and then you're going over jumps and there's six of you aiming for this first corner. And then it's chaos in that corner. You're slamming and there's crashes and all kinds of

mayhem. And then there's another set of jumps and other things. And so like a BMX cyclist might say, well, for me to perform well, I'll win the start. I go, okay, that's great. I go, but that's kind of an outcome. That's not really a task. It's like, how do you win the start? And so getting them again, getting real behavioral, that's where you start to have this sort of focus of, all right, what's my focus of what I need to do to perform well. So, okay. For maybe to win the start, I focus on a really good warmup. Like, because I don't want to have any sort of like surprise in terms of when I explode out of the gate. Um, and so the way to do that is have a really good warm-up, maybe even more than you think you should because part of your brain says,

well, I shouldn't use up all my energy in my warm-ups. But if you're not warmed up well, you're not going to be able to attack from the beginning. So that would be one thing. So the second stage is like finding a focus of two or three things that you want to really execute excellently and um with that with that kind of specific focus on a couple of ideas it doesn't mean that that's the entire event that that's the only two or three things you have to think about but if you do those two two or three things really, the odds of you executing well go up dramatically. And so that's sort of the second step. And then the third step is like, it's sort of the goal

and the product of the first two steps. And I call it executing with certainty, performing with certainty. And sometimes athletes will say, well, how can I be certain I don't know what's going to happen and it's like yeah you don't know the outcome it's not certainty of the outcome but it's certainty of the action that you want to perform so what is what is you what is it you're trying to do exactly and that sense of certainty you know when you're when you've trained really well and you've worked really hard and there's a sort of like you know if you're if you're a quarterback and the defense is showing blitz you know okay i need to i need to go to my blitz read option and my slot receiver is going to you know cut out really quickly and that's the safest throw and i'm going to you know

shift the protection to that side or the other side to free him up. You have that in your head and it's like, okay, but I know what I need to do. It's like I know what's going to happen. I know what it's going to look like and I need to stay calm. I'm going to be feeling pressure and I'm going to execute and get it to that spot right there. And that sense of certainty of your action, what you need to do, is the key in that crazy situation.

Not, well, it's going to result in a touchdown. No, that's an out. But what you need to do, what your slot receiver needs to do, as long as both those guys in the offensive line also, everybody's on the same page in terms of action. Then you can be certain that's the correct thing to do. And then when you know exactly what you're trying to do, the odds of doing it go up a lot. It's like you're sort of a little bit uncertain. I don't know what's the safest thing to do or the smartest. So it's getting to that sense of certainty of what you want to do.

And once you know that, and it relates to that sort of second step, but then you have to go to use all those sports psych skills that we talk about to regulate yourself in all the noise. And, you know, because part of the time you're going to be feeling this, your heart pounding in a way of, and it's like, oh my God, like this looks like this is an opportunity to win right here and be able to uh perform in that situation and you know you know whether it's you know mindfulness whether it's you know breathing techniques whether it's you know emotional centering what you know whatever it is the specific techniques that you need to to regulate yourself so you can perform with certainty. That's that last step. And so it's a matter of like really being self-aware.

And if you start to get doubts or uncertainty, you just come back to your simple step two. You don't go all the way back to step one with those basic questions. You always just come back to the second step. What is it I'm trying to focus on here that's going to lead to excellence? And so it's a way of sort of stripping down, streamlining to the critical thoughts that can help you perform with certainty. And so that's something that I spend a lot of time with athletes who I know are going to be under pressure because they're very talented and they're very likely to be in a position to win. And we walk through the variables and what might disrupt things

and how to get back on track, how to recenter, all those sorts of things. Sean, that's really, really, really good. A few questions I have about it. You know, the first step you're asking about answering the questions, do you think they have to have the questions answered before they leave for the game? A lot of times I've got athletes that I've worked with a lot that have gone through this process and they will say afterwards, I did the, I went through the three steps four times this morning on the day of competition because it came up again, you know, because questions, I mean, questions, doubt, anxiety, there's, you know, some questions are pretty simple,

can be answered very quickly, and some are more dangerous than others. Some questions where, am I good enough? Can I really do this? Should I be careful? Those sorts of questions where basically anxiety leads to doubts, which leads to don't screw this up. And when you're in that line of thinking, which is a product of a question that was not answered, you know, it's like don't screw it up means you didn't really answer the question, is this the best thing to do? Or can I trust my normal routine? You know, because that's basically when you're saying don't screw it up means you didn't really answer the question, is this the best thing to do? Or can I trust my normal routine? You know, if you, because that's basically you're saying, when you're saying don't screw it up, you don't trust that what you do is good enough. And, and that's so, that's, that's a reflection of an unanswered question. And that's a, those sorts of questions come up for sure for everybody, you know, like if you really want a result, you know, for everybody you know like if you really want a result you know for you know if

you're working in professional football it's playoffs or you know super bowl for you know or you know game to clinch the playoffs or whatever where in my world it might be you know world championships or olympic trials olympics but you're going to have doubts and and so sometimes those do come up on the morning of or the night before and having a process where you go, okay, what's the answer to that question? And one of the things is dividing and reframing questions from what if I screw it up? You reframe that to what do I need to do to maximize my preparation so that I perform well? Like what if I screw up the beginning? It's like, okay, what's the keys to performing well at the beginning? And like,

okay, so what do I need to maximize my, so you, you translate into something that's actionable and doable as opposed to just like, oh my God, I hope I don't F this up, you know? And that's, so switching, switching gears and translating those questions that help the more you do this exercise of recognizing that questions are normal, and I think necessary. Sometimes I'll tell coaches who say, I'm worried my athletes have so many questions. I go, it's three days before competing at the trials. You want those questions to come up now, and you want them telling you their questions now, because then you can do something about them. You can work through the strategies and tactics. What you don't want is unanswered questions. You know, that's, that's a recipe for problems. Um, and so I, I, it's important that coaches get comfortable with

the idea of athletes working through questions also. And, uh, and everybody's working towards the same thing. It's like, okay, well, yeah, we start with questions and we through questions also. And, uh, and everybody's working towards the same thing. It's like, okay, well, yeah, we start with questions and we move to answers. And that's, that's, that's the process. Like if they start to get a little bit out of sorts in step three, that, that sort of self-regulation phase and executing, then a lot of times they'll just come back to those, their focus, you know, what are the, what are the two or three things they're focusing on? And that's a way to sort of, you know, uh, you know, sort of having something to hold on to. Like, uh, I use all sorts of metaphors, like, you know, what's, that's the rudder in the water that keeps you

sailing straight, even though the winds are blowing really heavy. You know, it's like, it's what are the things that you can come back to, uh, when things are, things are rough or when you're flying in turbulence or whatever, uh, you know, whatever the metaphor is. It's like those are the things that you know are true. And you don't want to rethink it now. When you're nervous, when you're doubtful, when you're feeling strong emotions, that's not a good time to be coming up with a game plan. You want to have done that ahead of time and then saying, no, I know this is the plan. Absolutely.

So in terms of the step three, what do you see helps people execute with certain deeds? I think part of it is the self-awareness, you know, and the mindfulness stuff in terms of like recognizing when things are getting a little bit off track before they get really off track. That's a great skill. And you can practice that, you know, whether it's doing mindfulness exercises or just building it into a training session, you know. And again, I push for athletes to develop their own goals in training sessions, even when they've got great coaching staffs that provide a lot of, you know, sort of structure for practice. Those are a kind of goals, but they're not personal goals and they don't get it what's going on inside. So those are the kinds of things like, okay, when a coach sets these sorts of goals for the practice, like, oh, what are you,

what are you going to do to increase your self-awareness when, all right, this is going to be a test for me. Like, I hate this workout. You know, I really hate this workout. And it's easy to get in maybe survival mode in a workout where you just try to get through it as opposed to try to be excellent. And it's like, how do you, you know, how can you use practice in workouts that you hate to make yourself better and feel more confident? And so those are the sorts of opportunities that you need to sort of plan it out ahead of time. You can't, it's hard to do that in a practice session because once you get in survival mode, you're in survival mode. It's hard to switch gears then and go, no, okay, I've got six repeats on the fourth repeat. It's going to be the best one that I do because I'm going to

focus on turnover. I'm going to focus on efficiency. I'm going to focus on stride length or whatever it is. But if you set that up ahead of time, then you can claim that moment of excellence, even in a brutal practice that usually you just sort of go, oh, God, I hate this. And that's something that builds confidence and teaches the skills you need for these really disruptive high-pressure situations. Again, for me, the interesting thing is it's taken me a long time to sort of see that what we normally do in sports psychology isn't always enough. You know, like even somebody who's really good at thought control and they're good at goal setting and they're good at mindfulness and stuff like that. And they work on that stuff and they have developed routines and rituals that make things more automatic. All this stuff is really important. And it's, it's even in a high pressure situation, still bedrock foundation of performance, but this is an extra layer.

And it's because I, I, I just saw too many athletes who I thought were really strong mentally and did the work really well, the sports psych work or the mental training work, and they still were overwhelmed. is emotional upheavals. And this can come in if you're, let's say you're a young executive in a company and you're going to give a presentation to the board and your boss is going to be there and the CEO is going to be there watching this presentation. And you know that this presentation may be the difference between you getting hired to be a CEO yourself or derailed on your path to getting to the next level in a corporation.

And these board members are very influential. And maybe they – this is like – this is everything. And you've never had it before. And you know you've got a 15-minute presentation. It's got to be crisp. It's got to be clear. You've got to be confident. And you're freaking out of your mind, you know, and, you know, you haven't felt like this in a really long time. And you're sweating and you're in the bathroom. Maybe you feel like you need to throw up. You know, you're having to go to the bathroom a lot, all those sorts of things that you feel in that crazy once in a lifetime or, you know, three or four times a lifetime pressure situation. Maybe it's like, you know, somebody that you're asking to marry you, you know, and you're really not sure how it's going to, those moments of like the emotions are running so strong that you don't know that you can even talk correctly.

Those, it can have, it doesn't happen just in sports, but it's in those ones where the outcome means so much to you that it's blinding and it's disruptive and it, it, it, it makes it hard for you just to do your normal. And you start to doubt that doing just your normal stuff is good enough. You feel like I got to do something extra or I got to be extra careful. I got to be – and you start getting extra careful. You start getting defensive. You start thinking about instead of trying to be awesome, I'm going to try not to screw this up. And then you're not awesome anymore and you have a mediocre or bad performance and then it's done. And, you know, even people at the very highest level, you see it all the time. It's's the the challenge is a lot of times people

they don't believe that it's going to happen to them because it hasn't happened to them before because they've always been the you know that one who does things really well and you know and had all these different markers of success and they've been on the fast track. And boy, when you fail and struggle the first time, if you're lucky enough to sort of have it be the timing of the failure be good, it's the best thing that can happen to you. The challenge is with a lot of the athletes I work with, it's like the timing is bad because a lot of times the failures are at the worst possible time. It's the Olympic trials, you know, or it's the Olympics. And like, that's not the

best timing for failure. So I hear the really disruptive pressure happens when the outcome means so much that it's blinding. And the key is to really follow the three steps so that you can manage yourself in that situation. The outcome doesn't become bigger or you're not focusing on the outcome. And you can deal with the situation the effective way that you possibly can. I got a few other questions for you. I think you and I could talk forever. But when you think about, and I'm just like listening to your wisdom and kind of got caught up in the moment there, 25 years of Olympic experience. Tell us about an aha moment that you had in your career. My first summer games was Atlanta in 1996.

And there was an athlete who came up to me after finishing fourth and was really distraught. This was the, actually that night after the performance. And this is an athlete who fourth place really was a bad performance. You know, sometimes fourth place really is an amazing, but for her, she was a world record holder defending, world champion had won the last four, uh, events. Um, and she just didn't perform well. And, you know, uh, the, the thing was, she said, the problem is I always thought I was so strong mentally. I can dig deep where, you know, when, when I push myself through situations, other people couldn't push through. And, you know, I don't know what happened to me. And she started talking.

I do know what happened to you. I've heard this before. And this sort of was the moment where I started realizing, it's like, wow, it's like the basic sports psych stuff. It's like she got caught up in doubts because she was so good. She had never faced these sorts of questions before. She'd never really had a – she thought she was mentally tough, and she did have a certain kind of mental toughness. But it was a mental toughness that came from a well of confidence and certainty and self-assurance.

And so she didn't really know what it was like to race when it was hard. I mean hard mentally. She could handle hard physically, no problem. But hard mentally, she didn't know. And what she described was she had all kinds of crazy thoughts beforehand and questions. Like she said she spent about 20 minutes trying to decide which sunglasses to wear on the medal stand after she won her medal. She thought about that the morning of her event. She was like trying to choose which glasses would look better with her podium outfit.

And she just started freaking out. And then she started wondering about – she got to the venue at the Olympics. Like normally it's so different than other events where there's all the security. And normally she had this habit of, she would hug her parents who came to a lot of her big competitions, the morning of her competition, she realized there was a fence that was put across and the spectators couldn't get to where the athletes were and she couldn't get to where the spectators were. And this is a fence that hadn't been there a few days before the last time she was at the venue.

So she started freaking out. I was like, this is before cell phones. How do I get in touch with them? And they're going to freak out. And so she started freaking out about something completely unrelated. Yes, it was a routine that she had on race day, but it's really not important. But it became important. And, and then she started feeling her leg, she started getting nervous and sweaty and her legs started feeling really heavy. And she said, God, I, maybe I'm, maybe I'm tired. Maybe I'd need to just really be, do a light

warmup, not my normal warmup, because I feel like, I don't know how much of my legs are so heavy. I don't know how I've left. Maybe I worked too too hard in training maybe i didn't taper enough for this all sorts of doubt so she did a really insufficient warm-up and her race started and she had a terrible start for the first time in five years and she was behind you know and in a bad place and And even though in that situation, she could have still normally, she's so strong, she could have come up from that start, but she just started flailing because she was like, oh my God, what, oh my God, I'm, I'm, I'm losing, you know? And she started, and she started questioning and she started like her technique went out the window. She started flailing, she was inefficient. And she, you know, by the end of the race pulled herself up to fourth

place, but it's like, you know, and I don't know what happened. You know, I have no. And to me, it was like, wow, it's like this is somebody. That so strong and everybody is soon because she was so good and so dominant internationally, she would have no problem here. And she had no skills for this situation, which is the skills that somebody less talented would normally have had to develop to manage the situation because, wow. This is like I cannot be fooled by somebody's amazing talents, physical talents and their record and assume that mentally they're going to be ready for this crazy situation that the Olympics is. And I need to try and figure out what can we do to prepare athletes for this situation. And I can't just do the normal stuff because, A, some of the athletes who are really talented, they go, no, no, I got it. Don't worry. And even the normal stuff's not really enough for some people. So, because of the pressures they're facing and the expectations. So that was sort of an aha for me. And it was like, you know, the rest of the time I've been trying to figure out how to increase

the percentage of people who perform up to their ability in these situations and decrease the number that underperform in these situations. And you know one thing that I hear just throughout our interview Sean is just how failure can be such a great teacher and some of those athletes who haven't had to experience the storm or be on the edge, as you're talking about, sometimes have a difficulty, like, knowing what to do in the situation. So I can hear you're so passionate about what you're doing. You know, when you think about even separating yourself, how do you deal with it when the athletes that you work with maybe don't do so great at the Olympics. I learned a long time ago that it's a really bad idea to start to think you're smarter

because your teams do well, in part because most teams don't win medals. Most individuals don't win medals. And so if you're going to take the credit, it's like, well, I'm this awesome sports psychologist because these athletes I work with won medals. It's like, well, you better be ready to step up and take the blame too. And so you need to sort of focus instead on what, did you do a good job as a sports psychologist? And for sure, I believe I've done some amazing jobs sometimes with athletes who haven't won, you know, in terms of the work that I did and the measures that I use have to be based on what are the, you know, in terms of the work that I did and, and the measures, the measures that I use have to be based on what are the, you know, how do, how do I behaviorally define the job as a sports

psychologist? You know, what, what is it, what is a great sports psychologist doing? One of the things is I get to bring positive energy to the situation. I've got to be positive and not get stressed out and, um, not communicate stress and anxiety, um, and communicate confidence. And we can get this done. And I need to be available. And I'm a distractible guy. And I need to be as organized as possible. And I need to sort of make sure I'm available when I need to be and those sorts of things. And so that helps in terms of like, did I do my job? And I I don't always do my job well and I need to be honest about it like everybody else.

And but even even when I'm focusing just on my performance, it still is super painful when an athlete, you know, has the capability of succeeding, doesn't. And you can look at luck, you can look at what, you know, it's like it does in some level, it doesn't matter. It's painful, you know, and you know, this was a life life changing moment. And, you know, and now it's now we got to deal with this. And so anyway, I think if you're, if you're really engaged with a team, if you're really embedded and you feel like you're part of the coaching staff, it's going to hurt. Um, and I don't think that's bad. Um, but it shouldn't hurt because you didn't get something or you're not going to get at the accolades that you're not doing your job as a sports coach. It should hurt because it hurts. It's, it's, you're part of this process and it didn't work out. I mean, and I don't,

I don't think that's a problem, but, um, you have to be super able to get through that and resilient because maybe you've got somebody competing 20 minutes later and you've got to be, get yourself up for that event and be positive and energetic and in connected with that athlete and not carry those thoughts of like, Oh my God, this other person, it's horrible what just happened. You know, you have got to like, just be ready for the next thing. And just like the athletes. I mean, it's awesome when things go great. Everybody's happy. I mean, the parties are better. Everything is great. But, you know, that's part of the reason that those are so great is because the pain is so much more powerful and long lasting in some ways, you know, that's part of the reason that those are so great is because the pain is so much more powerful and long-lasting in some ways, you know, and that's the way our brains are wired.

We're loss-averse, you know, and that's part of our challenge as performance psychologists. Like, we need to help athletes not focus on avoiding loss, and that's hard to do sometimes because that loss is so painful and sticky, that idea. You know, and one of the things I hear from this whole interview, Sean, is that one thing that you do really good is when an athlete doesn't perform well, you're really thinking deeply about what's going on. And I, you know, I heard you say a few times just that traditional sports psychology skills, you know, don't always do everything.

And so you're really diving deep. That's, to me, how you develop the three-step process, which helps people deal with the pressure. And as I'm listening, you know, we've been talking about the Olympics a lot here, but gosh, I mean, we can deal with pressure every single day. And I think you brought up some really good examples. What advice do you have for those high performers? I think there's – boy, there's so many challenges in high performance. And I love your top ten traits, which are like, oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's true too because I was thinking about like what are – which of these things do I – and it's like they're all related to stuff that I do too. And I think maybe the most important thing that's universal – because that's the other thing that makes this work interesting is everybody is different and there's no one path to success. But everybody that is consistently excellent has high self-awareness.

Like your personality may be really different. You may be very sort of compulsively goal-driven and you really – you love to check off things in your checklist. Or you may hate checklists and you hate to write stuff down. the self-awareness of, you know, what are my strengths? What can I work with? And, you know, to develop that skill, I think one great way to start is write things down. You know, whether it's writing down performance analysis, writing down what have you achieved today to build confidence, whether it's, you know, a real behavioral analysis of what went wrong there. The more you record things, the more you start to develop habits and behaviors that lead to success. And so, and increase your self-awareness because, I mean, you don't have to like go back in terms of, you know, understand what how this relates to your relationship with your parents.

I mean, but be self-aware in terms of like, I didn't get the job done. What happened? What didn't I do? It's like, boy, I thought I communicated that well. I didn't because they didn't behave the way I expected. You know, that's me. What did I what can I do differently? And instead of like they didn't because they didn't behave the way I expected. You know, that's me. What can I do differently? And instead of like, they didn't listen.

It's like, okay, why didn't they listen? Because your job is to communicate. Like, let's figure this out. I mean, so recording things, writing things down, becoming more self-aware enhances everybody's performance. Absolutely. So the advice you'd have is increase your self-awareness, write it down, record it. And that's something I definitely see in high performers as well. They know themselves and they know what's going to work for them.

Sean, you provided so many value bombs. I want to tell you a few that stand out to me. I loved how we started talking about, you know, everyone has the capacity of brilliance and that, you know, the great performers have a consistency of excellence. And then, you know, how you just talked about how we need to kind of be the eye of the hurricane in terms of our performers and stay in control on the edge of out of control. So I thought we did a really good job of just like describing to us what that is and how athletes can do that.

Three-step process was like a gem. I know that people who are listening are going to take a lot from that. So how would you suggest that we reach out to you? Are you on social media or anything that people can reach out to you? Well, I've got a million questions for you too. So let's make a more balanced next time. Well, I am a Twitterer. A tweeter? What am I? million questions for you too so let's let's let's make a more balance next time well i i am i am uh a twitterer a tweeter what am i i have a twitter account i'm uh uh sports psych one that's sports

psych one uh all one word uh so i i i definitely that's a valuable place and i follow a lot of other sports psych and performance people and people in performance excellence across the spectrum. And I'm also on email at sean.mccann at usoc.org. So any of those are fine. Awesome, Sean. Thank you so much for your time and your energy and your wisdom. I know I got a lot out of the last hour, so I just want to thank you right here from the bottom of my heart. It was really fun, Cinder. Thanks so much. Great questions.

Thank you for listening to High Performance Mindset. If you liked today's podcast, make a comment, share it with a friend, and join the conversation on Twitter at Mentally Underscore Strong. For more inspiration and to receive Cinder's free weekly videos, check out DrCindra.com.