Modern Wisdom - #325 - Lauren Johnson - The Mindset Secrets Of Elite Athletes

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Lauren Johnson is the New York Yankees ex-Performance Psychologist and a mental toughness expert. We all have a lot to learn from people who are performing at the limits of their ability. As the person in charge of the New York Yankees' mindset for 4 years, Lauren has seen first hand just how important mindset and mental toughness are for enabling peak output. Expect to learn how we can improve our self talk, how athletes deal with pain & discomfort, Lauren's best advice for dealing with criticism, what the difference is between a good and elite performer, how to avoid being too outcome-focussed and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on Odd Balls’ entire range at https://www.myoddballs.com (use code MW20) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Follow Lauren on Twitter - https://twitter.com/_laurenjohnson_ Check out Lauren's Website - https://www.laurenjohnsonandco.com/  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, you beautiful humans. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Lauren Johnson. She's the New York Yankees X Performance Psychologist and a mental toughness expert. We're talking about the mindset secrets of elite athletes. We all have a lot to learn from people who are performing at the limits of their ability. As a person in charge of the New York Yankees mindset for four years, Lauren has seen first hand just how important mindset and mental toughness are for enabling peak output. So today, expect to learn how we can improve our self talk, how athletes deal with pain and discomfort, Lauren's best advice for coping with criticism, what the difference is between

a good and an elite performer, how to avoid being too out-confocused and much more. This conversation is so good. You can tell that Lauren spent a lot of time around people who've needed their mental architecture reframing and just to be given some perspective on how their mindset works. It doesn't matter that all of us aren't elite athletes, the lessons that she gives today I think can be applied pretty much across all of life. And yeah, I was super, super impressed. If you enjoy this episode which you are going to please hit the subscribe button. It's the only way that you can ensure that you are never going to miss an episode every Monday,

Thursday and Saturday when they were uploaded. So just take your thumbs for a walk, come on, open your podcast app and press subscribe. It would make me very happy indeed. I thank you. Open your podcast app and press subscribe. It would make me very happy indeed. I thank you. But now it is time for the wise and very wonderful. Lauren Johnson. Lauren Johnson, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, glad to be here. What's it like working with the New York Yankees?

Well, so I don't know, I don't know if you knew this. I actually broke off from the Yankees in February. I did not. What are you doing now? Yeah. So I have my own consulting company now that I do, I work with all sorts of athletes and companies and executives and CEOs. But I would love to tell you about my time there, because it was very formative. Those four years I was with the Yankees was extremely formative into the position that I am in now. And working with the Yankees is pretty incredible for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons is the standards that they hold themselves to. And they hold

themselves to an extremely high standard and not in a way that's unrealistic, but in the way that if you think you can do this, we think you can go further. And if you essentially success to the Yankees is if you win a world series. So a couple years ago when we got close, you know, they were people were like, what a great season. And if you would say that to anyone in our organization, they would have told you, no, it was a crap season, a good season is winning the World Series. So I think that because you're surrounded by that level of expectation and by such brilliant minds in baseball and in all these other areas and realms

that in resources we pull from, that because you're in that environment, you have no other choice but to level up yourself. How common is that degree of excellence chasing in baseball at large? I would say it's pretty common in terms of levels of excellence. I can't speak for really many other clubs because I've not worked with them, but I can say that the level of expectation feels different at the Yankees. And I'll tell you why.

Because of the name, there's a lot that comes with it. And so you have a lot of eyeballs on you. And like, come on, if you need love or you hate the Yankees, there's really no in between. And so because of that, including your own fans, some days they love you when you're performing well, and when you're not, they hate you. So it's learning not to ride the roller coaster

of the outside noise and being able to define what excellence means, not only towards the mission, but also for your own kind of internal scoreboard. I imagine that produces some very unique challenges as a mindset and mental toughness expert. Very. Yeah. Very, lots of challenges, especially, especially deriving from constantly needing to perform. It's not easy, especially with as long as a season

as baseball is. What about baseball as a sport? Obviously, I'm from the UK, but there'll be a lot of American people listening to whom they're gonna cringe at my lack of knowledge about it. What would you say as some of the unique challenges that baseball as a game presents? There's a lot of pausing. And so, like, for instance, soccer, I played soccer growing up my whole life. It's constant, right? It's a new game. Yeah, you lose the ball, you get on deep heads.

You win the ball, you're on attack. It's non-stop. In baseball, there's a lot more downtime in between, really similar to golf, where you strike out or you don't locate your pitch or in golf, you just completely screw up your t-shot and you land in the water. You now have time between your next shot, between your next opportunity. And those, we have to maximize the opportunities we have. And so a lot of times the pressure can increase and it can rise, especially for, you know, give an example of a player that's in a slump. You know, he's over and he is, he needs to get a hit.

And so every, every time he's at the plate, just the pressure of having to perform increases tremendously. And so being able to manage the pressure that is required especially when you're not performing well can be difficult. And it's really managing those in-between moments so that we can maximize the time we do have. That's cool. The fact that it's discreet and iterative as a game that you progress through it step by step as opposed to this continuous flow that you get in other sports. I imagine there must be some players who

are unbelievably talented athletes and probably could have tried their hand at a number of different sports and made it through into baseball but found that their mentality was built to be that of someone playing a continuous game or perhaps somebody that played football but has the mentality of somebody that would have preferred to have played a iterative game, like cricket or golf or whatever. And I guess you never really know. You don't ever get to split test your own life. So you can't go back to being 10 years old

and decide to pick up a golf club instead of picking up a pair of football boots, right? Given the fact that you've worked with some of the most elite athletes in the NLB. MLB, yep. Yep, yep, got it. What are the differences between the good ones and the elite ones? That's a great question, because there's a couple things.

But if I had to sum it up, I would say the elite ones are willing to do the things that the average ones aren't. They are willing to pay that extra attention to detail. They're willing to remain disciplined when their circumstances aren't. They're willing to bounce back from adversity and they're able to bounce back from adversity faster because they're willing to look at what you can gain from it. And I think one of the biggest predictors of success, especially in a game like baseball, is the ability to see the opportunity in the struggle. Because it's a game full of struggles. It's a game full of ups and downs.

It's a game full of failures. If you're able to see the opportunity in that, the ability to bounce back is much quicker. I always explain it like, if you think of just like a high and low, right? You even draw it out and you draw a kind of like really high peak and then a really low peak. That is really consistent with maybe somebody that's a little bit more novice in baseball or maybe they're they haven't made it to the major league level. And then you go to a very elite

level. It's not that those highs and lows have been eliminated. That's not going to be eliminated. You're going to have highs. You're going to have lows no matter what level you're at. It's just the in-between shrinks. So instead of this really high peak, we have a peak, but then it goes down and it goes up and it goes down much faster than the average. And so I think that has to do that in- between, has to do a lot with your ability to manage

and build a relationship with discomfort. That is interesting. Yet I think James Clear in a time of cabitzi interviewed someone, was it the head of the Chinese weightlifting team? And he says, what's the difference between the best in the world and everybody else? And the coach said, it's the one that can deal with the boredom of daily training the best in the world and everybody else. And the coach said it's the one that can deal with the boredom of daily training the best.

They just turn up and they grind. And Matt Fraser, CrossFit Games Champion, five times over, he talks about this, he says people think that he's pumped every time to go in. He's like, if I'm doing a monostructural workout, but I've got 45 minutes of threshold rowing intervals, no one's excited for that. Nobody, the bikinis to rower in the history, isn one's excited for that. Nobody, the keenest

roar in the history isn't excited to do that. But I do it. And breaking the veneer that people believe around great athletes that, well, yeah, it's easy for him because he's pumped to go in and do it. He's like, I'm not, I just do it. And this is what David Goggins says as well, right? That he detests public speaking, but he goes into public speaking. He detests learning stuff. So he goes and learns even more. He is crap at running and he's fat and he's all the rest of these things. So that is, I'm going to guess, finding the opportunity in the challenge. Yes. And that's doing the things most aren't willing to. Most people, especially at that level,

like if you take our, like an entire minor league system, our entire system of any club, you're going to be able to split them up into some categories. And one of the categories are going to be the people that are willing to do the things that are boring. They're willing to do the things that are monotonous in nature that aren't exciting. But those are the small details that add up to big ones. And I love James Clearing in his book.

I love this example when he talks about this is that if a plane takes off in L.A. and its destination is New York City, if it just adjusts the nose, three degrees south, when it's multiplied across the United States, they're going to land in Washington, D.C. And so those little things that we do on a daily basis, while three degrees doesn't seem like much, it starts off looking like three feet. When we do it every single day, and we multiply it across a season, you end up in a whole different place than somebody else. And Confucius said, the man who moves mountains starts by moving away small stones.

And so that's what we're talking about is they're willing to move away that small stone every day when most people look at the small stone and say that's not gonna make a difference. I was gonna say is that why you think the not elite athletes don't do it? Is it because they don't believe that the small victories, the 1% do add up? Or is there something else in there?

So I think there's a couple of things at play. One of them is they don't see the benefit because they're so locked in on the big details. And this is what I have to say about details. Is that the big details are the obvious ones, but the small details are the important ones. Because while the big details, they're obvious because there's an immediate, there's an immediate consequence. What like? So if, if a big detail, so you want to make sure that you're pitching well in a game, it's the World Series. Those details are easy to pay attention to because

they're big and if you don't pay attention to them, it's an immediate consequence. You know, if my picture is going into the World Series and he doesn't do his homework on the on the batters he's going to face. That can have a negative impact and it's pretty immediate. Where if he does, if he doesn't do that in game one of this of a hundred and you know 70 plus game season, they're like, it doesn't totally matter because, you know, even though we think it matters, they don't see it because that game doesn't mean as much. The consequence isn't as high. The problem with the small details is that by the time you realize that it's important, it's often too late because it is this lagging measure.

It keeps up with you later, and I'm sure I keep quoting James Clear, but it's because his book is phenomenal, and he illustrates this so well, is that we are a lagging measure of our habits. And so, you know, your finances are a lagging measure of your spending habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits and so forth. And so when we think of these small details, you know, working out once is not, you're not going to leave the gym suddenly in shape. But if you work out consistently over three months time, eventually you're going to walk out and go, wow, you're going to look different. You're going to feel different. Your endurance is going to look different. And so I think that's where those small details we want in a immediate result, but small details

require trusting the process even when the result isn't there. I've been saying about consistency a lot as well recently that more people are talented or enthusiastic than are consistent. So there's a ton of people who find new enthusiasm for a project. They decide that they're going to start a YouTube channel or a podcast or maybe begin playing a sport. So they're all motivated to begin and then maybe some other subset or maybe even a subset of those people will find out,

oh wow, I'm actually fairly talented at this. I can have a conversation and it goes, well, I really enjoy being on camera or I've got good endurance. So when I go and play football or whatever, I have a natural talent for it. There are more people out there who are enthusiastic or talented than consistent because everybody encounters the challenge. 90% of podcasts don't make it past episode three and of the 10% that do 90% don't make it past episode 20.

So simply by making it to episode 21 you're in the top percentile. Simply by getting to episode 21 you're in the top percentile Simply by getting to episode 21 you're in the top percentile now. Are you going to be in the top percentile for talent or enthusiasm? No, do you even control those things? No, but do you get to choose whether or not you turn up every day? Of course you do that is the thing which is entirely within your power So I advise people I was like look if you praying for something, don't pray for talent or enthusiasm, pray for the strength to keep going, because that will select you out from your competition far more quickly than anything else will. So well said. It's so well said. And it's true. I literally said this to my husband this morning that we were on the same wavelength.

Goal for, right? Yeah. A home professional golfer working his way up. And I said, this to my husband this morning that we were on the same wavelength. Gold for right? Yeah, a high professional golfer working his way up. And I said this morning, I said half of success is showing up long enough to see it. It's being, it's sticking with it long enough to where you can see the fruition. You can see the fruits of your labor come to life. And there's most people are not, yeah, most people won't stick out that long. You'll beat half the competition by just continuing to show up. And I think one of the things that we can do, because I mean, this cool thing is like

goals are awesome. Like, big fan obviously, like big believer in setting goals, big believer in going through like, you know, what we need to do to create those goals and get there, big believer in developing your why. There's one aspect that gets overlooked, which is one of the most important aspects of goal setting, which is instead of just focusing on what you want to have happen, which is the fun part,

and we all love to do. Is focusing on what you're going to do when things go wrong? When you start thinking about what obstacles would stop you, limit you from continuing on your journey. And so in psychology, we call this mental contrasting. And so you'll start out and you'll visualize what you want to have happen. You know, connect to those feelings of accomplishment. You know, not not worrying about the how, just the what, like what do you want it to look

like, well, you know, what kind of car are you driving, like what what home are you in, really kind of coming up with that image. And then the other side of that is what could get in the way of you making progress to that goal? What are some things that might stop you? And when we start to consider those things, I will tell you that it starts separating the people that are interested in the people that are committed. Because those that are committed are going to look at that.

And then the second half of that is creating some contingency plan around it. All right, if this happens, then this is what I'm going to do instead or this is how I'm going to respond to it. If this happens, this is how it's going to happen. And so with a lot of my clients, especially are dealing with issues with consistency towards a goal, is what can take you off the tracks? What has, and you can think about past mistakes.

What has taken you off before? You know, for a lot of people that want to get healthy, okay, what has stopped you before from continuing that journey? And then let's work through what we're going to do if and when that does happen. Because what we do is we're creating a connection in our brain between a situation we may face and then in action or a behavior we want to follow.

And our brain loves us. And so if you're in a situation where you have a goal and you're going after it and you want to develop consistency, don't just think about what you want to have happened. Also think about what would get in the way of it happening. And how you'll deal with it. And how are you going to deal with it? I love that. I've been thinking a lot recently about think like an athlete. It's the title of a blog post that I think David Parallel wrote

a couple of years ago. I haven't got it out of my head. And you as someone who's worked with Elite Athletes so you were my sounding board for this little mental model that I've come up with. What I've come to believe is that almost no other industry in the world, apart from athletes, athletics, almost no others take their preparation for their chosen pursuit as wholesale, as globally,

as athletes do. So with an athlete, their nutrition styled in, their sleep styled in, the way that they spend their time socially, the bonding that they have with the team, they're watching game tape of what's coming up, they're doing their conditioning, they're doing their stretching, they're doing skill drills, they're doing their endurance, they're recovering right, they're foam rolling, they're hydrating, everything that they do, their entire life is permeated, it's infused with this desire to facilitate the best performance that they can have on this step out under the field. And I don't think that there's any other industry that does this. Maybe chess champions and stuff like that, I'm not sure how far they're pushing their performance. But even if you think about the absolute best of the best of the best on the public speaking circuit or in the YouTube world, right? The degrees of freedom that you have for people

not knowing where your performances at, comparative to previous performances and also comparative to your competitors, as so murky in the way that they're measured. If there's a 300-kilobar on the floor and you need to pick it up, we know if you've picked it up or not, you know if you've picked it up or not, you know what you can pick up and how close it was to what you were doing during the on-ramp, building up towards peaking, ready for the meat and so on and so forth. But you don't have that equivalent in almost anything else. There's no objective metrics, there's no tight parameters for success and failure. You don't know what has contributed to the performance that's come out of you. And what I've been thinking a lot recently is,

we're talking about commitment, right? But there's only a very small subset of people who want to make that one thing that they want to become perhaps one of the best in the world or the best in their country or the best in their region is athletics. Only a small subset of people are actually doing it within a sporting pursuit, right? So how can we take the principles that athletes use to maximize their performance and how can we apply them to all of the things that we don't believe that is applicable to? Because I've tried to do it since I was thinking about it, I turned pro last year with the podcast and that meant that I started to read things that I knew that would facilitate me. I focused on my sleep because I knew if I'm better slept, then

I can talk with more clarity. I got a speech coach and I got a theatre and acting coach so that I would have more vocal dynamic range and my diction would be more precise and I thought, okay, well, if I want to do this I need to train because if I train well then my mind's moving quickly and I'm not even close to like a Sunday league footballer in terms of the level of preparation that I do for the thing that I have classed as my calling. So first off, what are your thoughts around think like an athlete and kind of this sort of cognitive athlete world that I'm talking about here? And then let's go through some of the things that people can do.

They want to become better at what it is that there is, is there chosen pursuit? And let's run through some of those strategies. Yeah. When I'm speaking with corporate clients, a lot of them come to me because of my work with the Yankees. And one of the first parallels I draw is what makes an elite major league baseball player.

Mentally, is the same thing that makes an elite executive an elite CEO, an elite parent, an elite significant other, an elite friend. There are so many parallels. The thing that changes is the language. So instead of talking baseball, you know, I'm talking CEO. And so the language changes, but many of the principles are very similar if not the same. Cool. What is what is some of the biggest ones at that? Well, one of the ones that you kept talking, the word that kept coming to my mind as you were saying what you were saying is purpose. That what athletes have

done is everything that they do has a purpose. And I'm going to quote my good friend Justin Suah here and he says, do things on purpose with purpose. And So one of the things that every individual that I've worked with has is a routine that starts their day. And the principle that things in motion tend to stay in motion. And so how are you getting in motion in the morning? And maybe your day doesn't start in the morning. Maybe it starts at night. Everybody's schedules are different. But how you start your day sets the tone in the morning. Maybe it starts at night. Everybody's schedules are different,

but how you start your day sets the tone for the rest of it. And so I know that when I don't do my routine, I feel like I have like 10 to 15 cabs open and they're not in order. And then I'm having to use the rest of my day to organize them. Where now, when I have an evening routine that actually sets up my morning routine.

And I decide what my morning routine is going to look like at the end of the day. And so one of the ways that we can do this, because a lot of times we wake up in the morning and then we decide what we're going to do. And so one of the ways that we can do this is the night before, you know, I have two categories. I have a category of scheduled. So these are appointments with clients. This is Dr's appointments. This is all the things that I've scheduled for that day. And then I have my high important tasks. And these are the tasks that I like, these are the things that I want to get done that day,

and I list them in order of priority. And then I write a timestamp next to them. And so I can organize my day based on those two things. The next morning, I know exactly where I'm supposed to be at 6.30 a.m. I know exactly where I'm supposed to be at 8 o'clock. I know exactly where, what cask I'm supposed to be working on at 2 p.m. And so what it does is it takes the guessing

out of it the same way we plan our contingency plans with our brain and say, oh, if this happens, then I'm going to do this. We are scheduling and creating a plan that our brain no longer has to decide. It simply has to execute. And what we know is that we only have so many decisions, we have decision-making power, and it depletes

throughout the day the more decisions we make. And so again, if we do this at the very end of our day the night before, we wake up and we have already made 90% of the day's decisions in terms of what we're going to be working on. And we can spend the rest of that energy working on those things and making decisions within them. And so that's one thing that we can all do

is adopting an evening and a morning routine. Splitting off planning and execution is such a hack. It's such an easy hack. And let's draw it back across to a sports analogy. The players might try and change the plays during the game. But the actual fundamental way that they do the plays isn't. They're not coming up with new pitches on the fly. I've practiced this one a million times before I've thrown this a million times and the catch has caught it a million times and we know where the field is and we know I don't know anything about baseball.

Can I am I pulling it off that I might know something about? Yeah, you're doing good. execution. I had Stephen Kotler on the show from the flow research Collective a couple of months ago and he has this saying and God it absolutely nailed me. He says One of his friends was very disciplined and he asked him how is it that you're able to continue doing these hard things every day? And he said I don't know what you're talking about, man. I'm just working for the boss. And what he meant was when he writes down the things that he's supposed to do the night before, he's in manager mode.

And then when he goes and does them the next day, he's in employee mode. And he just referred to himself. He was like, no, I don't know what you're talking about, man. I just work for the boss. The boss wrote it down and I've got to do. It's on the piece of paper. You know, it's on my to do list. I'm just working for the boss. I boss wrote it down and I've got to do it's on the piece of paper. You know, it's not meant to do this. I'm just working for the boss.

I love it. I love that analogy. But you're right. You know, in baseball, our guys are not coming up with new routines at the plate every time. That's what I meant to say. That's what I was. Yeah. Yeah, no, it was good. It was good. I can't. Yeah, it was very well said. In our infielders, they're not developing new in between pitch resets. For them, it's already ready to go.

And you're right, there's the difference between planning and execution. And I'll tell you right now, if you haven't planned in your under a high level of stress, your execute, your ability to execute is going to go down. You may get lucky every once in a while. You may be okay every once in a while,

but if you're not preparing and planning in a way that allows you to freely execute without a high degree of thinking when the pressure is on, you're going to struggle. I love that. What about self talk? How can we improve our self talk like an athlete? Ooh, this is a huge one. Huge one. Because the way you describe yourself to you

impacts not only the way that you see yourself, but the way that you perform in big moments. And so a lot of, I actually, I had a player who was really, really struggling with this and he would consistently beat himself up after every mistake that happened. And there was one time when he was, he got sent down from AAA to AA. And I, I'm sorry, AA to single A and I was at single A and he walks into my office, slams the door behind him and just starts venting. And I was like, oh, well, hello, I wasn't expecting to see you here, but he had just arrived. And he's like, yeah, I didn't expect to see me here either.

He's like, this is BS and he just starts kind of going in. Like, I don't believe I should have been sent down. I'm better than so, so and so and I should be up there. And then it's self-doubt. It's like, he started venting and then self-doubt started to creep in. And he's like, if I can't even execute at that level, like, what makes you think that I can do it

at a major league level? And so he starts, you know, going into this kind of, like, pretty negative self-talk. And so he starts going into this kind of like pretty negative self talk. And so I stopped him and I said, okay, I was like, I understand how frustrating this situation is. And I said, I want you to think about this for a second. Let's pretend you've made it to the major leagues,

it's game seven to the world series, the most important game of the entire year. And you're asked to come into pitch, you're asked to close, and your catcher goes down. Your manager gives you an option. You can either choose a guy behind the plate that has never failed, that has pretty much like went through the system very quickly and made it up to the top. Or would you want the person that has failed many times to get to where he is now to the major leagues?

Which one would you want behind the plate in the World Series? And he's like, oh, like the guy that failed. And I said, why? He goes, well, because he knows how to handle failure in big situations. The guy that's never failed, I don't know how he's going to respond, especially in the biggest moment of the year. And so, of course, that's what I wanted to hear. So I was really proud of this answer.

And I turned it back to him. And so I said, you have an opportunity right now to respond and build your response to failure. What you're going through sucks. I'm not trying to take away that feeling from you. That's real. But I said, you have an opportunity to respond differently. And so we went through this exercise of controlling what we can control.

And I asked him, I was like, you need to own your three feet around you. Anything within your three-foot world, you need to own your three feet around you. Anything within your three-foot world, you have to totally own when you're out there. So I was like, what are those things? We completely went over those things. And then we talked about, all right, what is the thing that you need to hear when things aren't going well? And we addressed what that was.

And essentially he goes out, he ends up closing a game, and he strikes out three out of the four hitters that he faced, and they won the game. And he came back to me, and I was like, how'd you do? And he's like, I just owned my three-foot world, and I let the rest take care of itself. And so for him, reminding himself in those times, the first batter he faced, he, or he, they got to hit. And so imagine feeling the way you're feeling, the first one in, that's when you feel it, I'm like, it's your response, it's your response. And when he was able, he was, I was able to feed myself with what I needed to hear.

And John Gordon talks about this. And one of the things I'll say is that he says, he talks about this, uh, Dr. James Gills and he was a try I think extreme triathlete I'm gonna get this I always bought this story. I should really work on this story myself But essentially he runs like a an extreme triathlon and then like 48 hours runs another one And he was the oldest person to do this it was like in his late 50s and he asked me said how do you do it? And he goes I learned To talk to myself instead of listen to myself.

Because when I talk to myself, I can feed myself all the things that I need to hear to keep going. And when I listen to myself, I hear all the negative, I hear all the things that the reasons why I can't and the reasons why I'm limited. And so for those Dr. James Gills and my player, elite individuals, no matter what sport or non-sport you're in, negative thoughts aren't the problem believing them is. And sometimes we have to be our biggest fan and we have to feed ourselves with the things

that we need to hear to continue going. And so I don't know what that is for you or for anybody listening to this, but what is that phrase that you need to hear when you need it most? Think of it from, what would you want your mentor to tell you? What would you want your best friend to tell you? And then make sure that you become your own mentor and your own best friend in those moments when it matters most.

That's awesome. That's so good. I love the third-party perspective as well, stepping back and trying to develop that metacognisance a little bit. Okay, where am I? What's happening? We've planned for this. This is what this is why I'm here. This is one of the reasons I'm here. This is a feature. It's not a bug. I'm playing baseball. The point of the baseball is for the batter to hit the ball. It's going to happen inevitably. How do we respond?

I suppose as well coming out it from the James Clier Habits setting example, the more that you drill poor responses to failure, the more likely that response to failure is to occur again. So breaking that cycle gets even more important. Oh, yeah, huge. And that's one of the biggest things that we teach is, you know, I think mental toughness oftentimes is accepting our reality and choosing our response. There's a lot of things that happen that I mean when things are good, mental toughness is easy. We're like, yeah, I got motivation. Yeah, I want to show up. Oh, success is fun. But it's oftentimes when things aren't going well. And so it's often our response to those things because they're inevitable. And when people say, oh, well, how do I eliminate distraction?

Well, there's only a certain amount you can eliminate. And the others, we're going to have to learn a response when we become distracted. And we can try and eliminate failure to our best ability, but there's going to be some failure. So how do we increase and prove our relationship with it so that we can improve our response? So I think a lot of it has to do do with that and what you're saying is choosing that

better response and that better habitual setting so that when that happens, our bounce back becomes quicker. What about pain and discomfort? How do athletes deal with that? It's probably fairly common, I'm going to imagine. And baseball looks like a pretty brutal sport for rotate the cuffs and knees and faces sometimes. Yeah, we actually had, this is actually a pretty funny story

but kind of lends back to that perspective piece. We had this, it was one of my first years with the Yankees as players really, really good, like really talented and loved the game. The poor guy just always got injured and not like little injuries, like just didn't have good luck. And he had just gotten back from his horrible ankle injury

and he's at the plate and he takes one off the shin, like a 90-mile-hour fast fall, like right off the lower shin. And I had just finished showing him this video from Jocco Willink, who I just love, and it was called Good. And he talks a bit. Yes. You know, I'm talking about. So I just finished showing him this video about like, you know, changing our

perspective and reframing the things that like, you know, if you don't make the team, all right, more time to train. If you don't get the plane time, you think, okay, more time to, to earn it. And so he gets hit and he turns around and looks at me and he just goes, good. And we all just lost it. We were laughing so hard. We were just like, oh my gosh, poor guy. Oh, it broke our hearts at the same time. But I think that there's a part of it, you know, when it comes to pain and it comes to injuries, the first thing that has to shift is, kind of, is our goals, our goals change a little bit.

So our goals become more therapy focused, our goals become, you know, more daily focused. And so we shift there so that we can create that light at the end of the tunnel, especially when it feels like that light just got shut off with an injury. So we start to create those moments where these little milestones are we can work towards. Because that's one of the things an athlete without a goal is lost.

So we try to recreate that to define success. That's more within their control, not success obviously out in the field or stat wise because that's been taken away. When it comes to discomfort, I think a lot of people in my field feel this way, but our brain is wired for comfort. It's wired to try and keep us safe. But the problem is that as we have evolved, or the human race has evolved, one of the things that hasn't is that protective mechanism in our brain. And sometimes it jumps in to protect us when we don't need protecting. And that's when it tells us like this is scary. Maybe you shouldn't try it.

You know, there's no guarantee of success. Like, why do it? Oh, you failed. Ah, that's all right. At least you tried. We're done. There's all these different things that kind of come into play in terms of protection. And now a lot of that looks like, instead of looking like life or death, like it was originally

designed for, now we're looking at it like threats socially, threats in our job. And so one of the things that we talk about is that discomfort isn't always bad and comfort isn't always good. Comfort can lead to complacency. And discomfort is the only way that we can improve in terms of growth. And so I like to call discomfort as kind of like the growth zone when we're in it. And there's a study done by your piece in Dodson Harvard psychologist where it was called

the optimal zone of anxiety. And it was kind of this U-shaped bell curve. And right when we're on the left side of the bell curve, that's the comfort zone, right? We got the maps memorized, we know which streets to turn down, which one's not to. And then when we get towards the top, that is the optimal zone for learning because we are just slightly outside of our comfort zone. We are just slightly, we have our toes just like right on the line of our current ability. And that is where growth happens.

Now it doesn't mean go all the way on the other side because then that leads to panic and that leads to, you know, setting ourselves up for failure, but it's just right outside of that comfort zone. And so the way that we grow is by existing there. And studies show that we don't need to exist there all the time. But if we exist there, you know, about, you know, 20 to 30% of the time, that's where growth happens right there. And so for our guys, we're constantly trying to put them in positions of discomfort, both mentally and physically. And so it's not always, you know, pushing them to the edge in terms of weight

training, even though there's certainly a place for that. Sometimes it's working on meditation and are working on focus, or working on being consistent. In those ways, we're challenging our ability to do that because there's so many things that are getting in the way. When we do this, we develop a relationship with discomfort. Instead of running from it, we rewire our brain to lean into it, because we know that what we want on the other side of it. Leaning into discomfort is if you invited it through the door is a term from Ben Berger

on Chasing Excellence and he's coached CrossFit Games Champions and stuff. I absolutely love thinking about that. That the discomfort really is a feature, not a bug. This is why you're here. That's the little mantra that my favorite mantra for going through discomfort is this is why you're here. You're here for the discomfort. You won't hear for the warm up. You won't hear for set one or set two or set three. You're here for set four, five and six. That's why you're in the gym. That's why you're doing the podcast. That's why you are here for the conversation which pushes the limits of your cognitive ability that where you're doing the podcast, that's why you are here for the conversation which pushes the

limits of your cognitive ability, where you're forced to bring everything, you get an example from when you were nine years old in a desperate attempt to try and make this conversation work, that's why you're here. And when it comes to reframing, Sam Harris has this example where he talks about, imagine the level of fear that you would be in if you just spontaneously felt like you did at the end of a workout, whilst sat in your car, you would shit yourself. You would think, what? The actual fuck is happening to me. I'm sweating, I'm so hot, I'm out of breath, I feel anxious. Okay, and yet that's the outcome that people chase in the gym around the world every single day.

So what does that tell us? It tells us that the effect, the outcome, the sensation that we have doesn't actually matter anywhere near as much as our interpretation of what that means. It's so true. And it reminds me of this analogy of a butterfly. I heard this from a friend of mine. This guy is sitting on his porch and he sees a butterfly in a cocoon. He sees it trying to get all the cocoon.

It's about halfway open and it's struggling. He's like, wow, what a cool opportunity to watch this. He's sitting there and he's watching it. And the butterfly just stops. And he's like, he feel like it almost like a gave up. And he felt so bad that he ran inside and he grabbed the scissors and he snipped it open. And the butterfly fell out.

And he was so excited to like watch it fly away and grow and see the beautiful wings. But he goes, I noticed something that was different. The body was really swollen and the wings were all shriveled up. And he's like, oh, that's right. I'm sure that's all his growth, you know, things to do. And so he's like watching it. And the outcome was is that this butterfly never grew. And what he didn't realize, was it was the struggle getting out of the cocoon that actually forced that fluid from its body into its wings to fully develop. And so, it's oftentimes our struggles that form our strengths. It's these moments of discomfort.

It's the moments of struggle. It's the moments when you feel like giving up and maybe quitting is your best option. Those are the moments that form our greatest strengths and Tony Gonzalez, Hall of Famer, said this. He goes, I was leading the league in dropped passes. And he says, dropping the football is actually the thing that taught me to catch it. He said, I'm so thankful for that now because that's exactly what made me the player that I am today.

Or I was then, I guess he's retired now, but... What about not being outcome focused, especially in sport, the scoreboard at the end of the day is the thing which matters most. And a lot of the time we have externalized, quantified, objective metrics of success, followers, revenue, growth, year on year, sales, whatever it might be, my kids scores and on their homework, all this sort of stuff. How can people be less outcome focused? The one thing I like to always point out is that not all good results are the result of good things. You can do everything right and still get a bad result.

You can also do everything wrong and get a good result. Results are not always the result of bad things or good things, I should say. And results alone don't make you better. Doing the right things do. And so when I look at it results are great. But again, because of that they're not all from the right thing, we redefine success

to be the things that are right. So, for my athletes, for instance, I had a player that was in a really tough slump and he came to me and he's just like, I just need a hit. He was really struggling. I was like, I understand. I totally understand that and I said, and so how was that mentality working for you right now? And he of course was like, I get your point. And I said, okay, so let's look at this and let's restructure it. I said, because when the ball leaves your bat,

there is nothing you can do. You may hit, you may swing at the right pitch, you may hit it square, you may do everything right. And it just happens to go to an outfielder, or he makes an incredible diving catch. That's just a possibility. So what I care about more is redefining success to be within our control. And so that's how I had him redefine it. So if success can't be a hit, if success can't be anything past you hitting the ball, what would success be defined as? And so we broke it down to three things. We redefined success as number

one, it was timing. So his timing at the ball. So number one timing, number two pitch selection. So meaning he's swinging at the right pitches. And number three, having an external focus. He goes, when I'm focused externally on like where I wanna hit it. So it may be focusing on the batter's eye. He's like, I'm much better at actually recognizing the pitch I need to swing at. And so that's how we redefine success.

We redefined it within his control. And so for him, that was the most important piece because when he was able to do that, now it didn't matter what happened when the ball left the bat. It only mattered what he did up until then. And then what you end up finding is that when you focus on the things that you can control

and doing the right things, those results end up taking care of themselves. But oftentimes when we need a result we're willing to abandon ship to get it. And the problem with that is you might get lucky every once in a while but that's not a sustainable way to sustain success. Stoicism. So you should have just got Marcus Aralius and he could have been a coach. When you left, when you left, go and do do it. Look, right gentlemen, sit down. I'm gonna teach you about the dichotomy of control for a second.

Yep, yep, yep, no, it's fine. What about taking things less seriously? This is something that I see a lot. People make a big deal out of the new presentation for work. You know, they care about it and they're concerned. This is slightly different to the outcome, right? This is taking, it's losing joy in the process of even focusing on the process. Right.

And I think that a lot of times, so yes, I agree that there's probably, it's one of those things where strengths can become weaknesses if not managed properly. So a strength of being really detailed oriented, really on top of things, can be a huge strength until it's not managed properly and then it can lead to burnout, right? So I think that taking things less seriously a certain misstrategy to go, all right, let's look at the big picture here.

And oftentimes, I think we can use zooming in and zooming out as a good tool for that. If you're overwhelmed by the big picture, zoom into what you need to do right now. That's very, very moment. And then if you're so overwhelmed by what you're in right now, zoom out to look at the big picture. So we can kind of use those different perspectives.

But my mind actually goes to something else. It goes to this idea of Formula One. And in Formula One, they all do something very consistently, and they pit stop. And the question is, why do they pit stop? Now, of course, there are many times that they pit stop because of mechanical issues. But more often than not, that's not the reason why.

More often than not, it's a proactive approach for a long-term performance to make sure that they come in at the right time so that they're not only coming in if something blows up, they're not waiting until they crash to actually take a pit stop. Because that would obviously limit their ability to perform. So the question becomes, okay, what is their signal to pit stop? You know, for some of them, it's a, their fuel reaches a certain level for some of them, it's tire pressure. And then they have their refuel and they change their tires and then they're able to go out and perform like they were

for in a longer period of time. And so my question to a lot of people is, what is your signal to pit stop? What is your signal to pit stop? What is your signal when the boundary of something that is a strength turns into a weakness? What tells you, all right, I need to pit stop and refuel, maybe it's reframing, maybe it's taking, going on a walk, you know, maybe it's connecting with somebody that really empowers you or gives you energy. Whatever that is, the question is, number one, what is your signal to pit stop?

For some people, it's going to feel like overwhelmed, it's going to feel like, you know, maybe taking yourself too seriously. And then what do you need to do to refuel so you can go out there and perform your best? And so that's kind of where I go with that because I think that for some people it's going to be checking in with themselves and going like, right, let's look at the big picture. Like, let's not take ourselves so seriously. And that's one strategy I think that we can use when we do pit stop. One of the common threads that Yusef, one of the guys that's often on the show mentioned, is a lot of these strategies that multiple different people, multiple different groups

are really proselytizing about at the moment. What they boil down to is a state change. So ice bath, sauna, meditation, so you've got heat changing, you've got volume of brain changing, listening to good empowering music, that's the same, but on the other side, more energy going for a walk, so we're changing visually what we're seeing, we're low commotion, so that we're moving in that kind of a way. Have you seen these acupressure mats? They're like a little mat with a pillow and there's kind of spiky and they hurt a little bit, but they're also satisfying a little bit. What's that doing? That's a state change. It's forcing your body to feel something else. And one of my favorite strategies, actually, we have a series called

Lifehacks and I haven't put this in, but this will be in on a future one, which is when you're finding yourself far too much in your own head, a lot of people that listen to this show and perhaps yourself are very cerebral, you know, with front-brain thinkers, we want to wrangle the world with our own cognitive capacity. And a lot of the time that can cause us to ruminate and just get foggy up here. One of the things that I've found really helps me is to take something that is dexterously interesting. So a little pebble that's a unique shape or to run my hand across a leaf or the steering

wheel of the car if I'm sat in the car and focus every single bit of my attention on the little perforations in the leather on the wheel of the stitching that's on the inside or the way that the rock feels in the temperature and really just try, and it pulls you out of that. And again, it's another state change. And I think that the perspective that you're talking about, do we give it the 30,000 foot view and realize,

this isn't too big of a deal. It's going to be okay because we're playing the long game. Or if that's too much anything, oh my god, this project's so overwhelming, I can't believe I'm not going to get it done. Okay, what's the next action? What's the next physical action? Open the email. Open the email and press high, Lauren, or whoever it is. You know, do that. And all of the state changes, I think, just give us a little bit of perspective. Absolutely, and are so important for those moments that you're talking about. I could not agree more, and I think the cool thing is a lot of people will ask, well, which one do I do? And I can't answer that for you.

I try them. Pick one. Pick one and try it. See what works best for you. I know for me, one of the state changes that works really well for me is going on a walk. Going on a walk, and I just walk right around my block. I grab my dog and I leave my phone at home and I just, the only thing I'm paying attention to is the things around me

and kind of taking that meditative walk. What about dealing with criticism? Hmm. Dealing with the critics. Man, this is such a part of like my athletes lives on a daily basis. Even if within their own family, not just fans of theirs. But I think that criticism, when it is a part of if you're going to do anything great, you have to know that you're going to have critics. It's going to be a part of it.

And I think one of the things that's important, and I struggled with this myself at the very beginning of just like, you know, my own journey in my field was before I consider the meaning, I need to consider the source. I oftentimes would attach meanings to sources I would never ask advice from. And there is this great analogy I heard from Jamie Kernley, who is the founder of A Cosmetics. And she said, you know, everybody, you can't, we can't change what people say to us, right? We can't change perspectives of other people necessarily we can't control those things I should say But we can control the volume of the mic in our lives and So there's some people that you know they have lots of opinions that I don't they don't carry a lot of weight in my life

And so their their mic's pretty much been muted in my head. And then there's people that, you know, maybe it's harsh criticism, but it's valuable criticism that I think I need to hear. And I'll turn that one up louder. And then there's people that, man, they fill me up and they are the people like, that's the track I want running in my head. And that volume is way up. And so I think that there's two sides of criticism.

As one, is we asking the value of it? Is this a valuable source or is this an invaluable source? And then stripping away the emotion of it. Because I think that when emotions get involved in criticism, it can really cloud the value of it. So I know for myself, the first time I was told that my Presentation sucked. It was hard to hear, you know, emotionally. It was a hard to detach but I have a rule for myself is before I respond to anything that is kind of, you know, emotionally

Charged like that is I give myself 24 hours to really consider the meaning after I've stepped away emotionally of created space. And so I like to create space in those moments because it's often my initial reaction that is not the either the correct one or it's clouded with emotion that I'm not able to see the message clearly. So your solution to the emotional response of the criticism is just to give yourself a beat. Space, yep, is to create space there. And then I can accurately, after I've created space, I'm able to actually look at it non-judgmentally and go, okay, what

part of this is true. And I think the other part, especially for creators out there are people that are constantly putting out content, is you're gonna have people that just hate your stuff that are gonna, you know, you can get those troubles and people that will say things. And that obviously hurts, but I think the more important thing is to find the consistency, is that if there are consistent things that people are saying, there may be some truth to that.

So I try to look at what my audience says to me, and like, okay, so maybe I wasn't this clear in this point, and trying not to take it like an emotional hit, but more, because sometimes the tone does it come across in text, but trying to find the consistency there. But I would say that there's, like I said, there's a couple things, which is one, is rating the value,

and then two, if there is value and you're feeling emotionally charged, just to create some space. Matt Fraser tweeted something a couple of months ago where he said, don't take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from. And Nicole Arbor, who is a magnet for hatred online because of what she puts out, she mentioned something like, I've almost never been criticized by someone who's better than me at what I do. And those are nice defensive mechanisms, but I think that we need something a little bit more nuanced, like you've said there, because even with all of those things in mind just being cast off-ish and disregarding what people say The emotions still gonna be they still gonna be triggered by the things that occur so you need something more scalable and I think giving yourself time

Thinking about okay, where's this coming from? What maybe why is it triggering something in me? Because a lot of the things that I know is about other people are things that we fear that we may manifest in ourselves. We hate the lazy person at work because deep down we're worried that we might be lazy. That's why it really triggers us because we think, fuck, that could be me. Maybe that is me. And that's one of the things that we need to be careful of. I had a couple of episodes recently as the channels grown, I'm starting to reach

what I call the real internet. So you've got the normal internet, right, which is your audience. But then you have the real internet, you know, the ones that are slinging feces at each other and supposed to post-apocalyptic wasteland out there, people are mad maxing all over the place. And those people are the ones that are really interesting to do exposure therapy on for this sort of stuff.

Had an episode that went out this week that was talking about sexual conflict between men and women. And we had comments that both said it was far too pro-profeminism and that it was obviously completely immersed in liberal bias. And then another bunch of comments that said, well, this is absolute patriarchal ridiculousness. I'm thinking, right, okay, so people on both sides of the aisle are unable to see the thing that the other ones doing. And with that in mind, you think there are people, this is the same piece of content. They haven't watched two different things.

They've watched the same thing and come up with completely opposing criticisms about them. So, okay, am I supposed to believe one of them, both of them, neither of them? Well, probably neither of them, because they kind of cancel each other out. And that's why is it Don Miguel Ruiz and his four agreements thing? That's one of the reasons that he says to never take criticism personally, because that person at that time in that place said that thing, but it doesn't mean that it's right. It doesn't even mean that it's what they meant. They just made some mouth noises or thumb shapes, and now you're taking it like gospel wisdom descended from the heavens ready to inform you about something that you know how to do and this person doesn't.

What about when someone is struggling over a longer term, you've used the word slump a couple of times, if someone's got into this negative spiral, how can they, we'd call it the yips in cricket, where the ball is running up to ball and he just can't hit his length, he's spraying it all over the place, he's just in his own head. Are there some strategies that people can do for a more protracted macro, longer term period of struggling with getting themselves into the performance? Yeah, so one of the things that I notice in those moments that work really, really well is just especially going back to the foundation, the foundation that kind of built the home, because if you think about by the time somebody is struggling to that degree, especially at a certain level,

the house is pretty much built. And, you know, we've got, we're now just like designing the inside, right? And so when we're, when we're, you know, noticing kind of this shaky foundation, that's where I like to go back to is, okay, let's go back to that foundation, the thing that is holding everything together. And so we go back to the basics and the fundamentals of what made you great in the first place. Because a lot of times, like I said, like I was telling telling you is that the longer, when we are focused on the gap between where we are and where we want to be, nothing but perfection will do.

Because anything less than perfection means that gap is widening. It's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and what do you think that happens anxiety Stress frustration just continues to also grow in size With this and so one of the things like I said I like to go back to is the fundamentals and focusing on Progress from the fundamental level. So one of the things that actually the military does is when they're working on cleaning their guns, they actually have this strategy where they start off like ridiculously like comically slow when they're put in piecing their gun back together. So this is for instance, it's in a situation where somebody's in the middle of cleaning it and then they need to use it.

And so how do you get it back as quickly as possible? And so they do it meticulously slow. Like, okay, now I've got to put this part here and I've got a slow as possible. It's like hilarious. And then the reason why they do that is they train it at the slowest level and they start with accuracy then they add speed. And so their main goal is accuracy at every level of speed. And so they start at the slowest speed and then they slowly go upward from there. And so that's one of the things that's one strategy

and one of the things that we can do is by taking the fundamentals and focusing so much on our accuracy and then adding the speed of the game as we go. And every time we kind of master that level of speed, then we can add a little bit more. And every time we master a level, it's a confidence builder. So when we can prove to ourselves that we can do that. And so anyway, it's pretty comical at the very beginning

of it, but that's one of the tools that we can prove to ourselves that we can do that. And so anyway, it's pretty comical at the very beginning of it, but that's one of the tools that we can use, one of the tools that we have used and strategies we've pulled from the military. Who are some of the toughest people that you've studied? Ooh, this is really, you know what? I think some of the toughest people are, they're the ones that number one, number one, they just don't say yes

to anything, which is to me it's a challenge. I had this athlete for instance, he came in though that I should say this, though the toughest and most enjoyable long term and I'll tell you why. I had this athlete come in and I had this kind of, you know, form that he was filled out and every player fills it out and then it's kind of like our way to introduce ourselves, you know, to meet them and then kind of get a little bit of a background on them. He stops me just before I start going into this intake form. And he goes, I just have to tell you, I filled that out. It's courtesy. It's like, oh, okay.

It's like, all right, you just did this. Like, or any of these true. I mean, you guys, I don't know. And I ask them, do you want to go over this? And he's like, no. So right there, I literally shredded it. I tore it in half and I threw it away. And I said, well these next 30 minutes are yours. What do you want me to know about you? Or what do you want

to talk about? What can I help you with? And he started asking me questions. So I was like the role was reversed and I was like, all right, let's chat. But what he was doing was he is not a yes man, which is fine. We don't want all yes people. But he wanted to make sure that what he was implementing worked, and he wanted to know more about it. And so he had had really bad experiences with mental conditioning somewhere else. And so to no fault of his own, he was pretty skeptical. So anyway, I think, you know, long term,

what ended up happening was instead of forcing him on these topics, I just would ask him, like, hey, do you even do you wanna talk about this? And he'd say, no, in a big, great, what do you wanna talk about? Sometimes we end up talking about like the football game that just happened, or, you know, it's not, whatever else it was.

And we developed this level of trust to the point where he actually it's a funny he hates Jaco which I can't believe because I love Jaco but he can't stand his content for whatever reason and it got to the point where he trusted me enough where he asked me to send him a Jaco book he goes all right I want to see what this is all about and sent him the book and he fell in love with him. So he's now a the jocman. Yes, but some of the toughest individuals, the ones that push back at the beginning, to me, it all matter, like relationship is the first thing that matters. Is that a lot of times it's not because they just outright hate this stuff,

but because the relationship to it isn't there. And so some of the toughest people I've worked with have also been the most enjoyable because they also force you to really know your shit. It's not just about like, oh, I'm the expert. And here I know about mental performance, but they question everything. And by questioning things, it actually forces you

to understand your argument even further. And so for me, I think the toughest athletes to work with are the best, or like, end up being some of the best clients, because they make me a better practitioner in the process at the same time. And I think that it creates, you know, new solutions in that way that maybe otherwise we may have not have come up with or thought of. What would you ask Joko if you had the opportunity? I think I'd want to ask him this question because it's one of my favorite questions to ask. If you were in a leadership role and you did everything you needed to do and you still failed, why would that be? What would be the reason for failure? And the reason why I asked that is because I would love to hear how he works

through like that question in terms of what would be his, the thing that he falls on, what would be the thing that he struggles at, what would be the thing that is maybe his vice, and how would he work through having to face that? Because I think he is one of an incredible model of leadership. And I would want to know, what is that area that even you think could be a struggle or that you're continuing to develop? That's a good question. If I get him on, I'm going to stay on that one.

Beautiful. Love it. Lauren Johnson, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for coming on. People wanna check out more of your stuff, where should they go? They can go to my website at Laurenjohnsonandco.com. I have a newsletter you can subscribe to

and all my social media handles are on there. Perfect, catch you next time. All right, thank you.