The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Shawnee Harle Olympic Coach – Mental Toughness Coaching

Episode Date: April 7, 2022

Shawnee Harle Olympic Coach - Mental Toughness Coaching Shawneeharle.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. As always, be sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Get them listening. Get them subscribed. Get in the big family that loves you but doesn't judge you.

The best kind of family there is, the Chris Voss Show. Go to YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Voss, hit the bell notification button. Go to Goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Go to all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those crazy places little kids are on the interwebs. Also go to our big LinkedIn group, 132,000 people over there. And also the LinkedIn newsletter.

That thing is killing it over there. It's just an amazing newsletter and this is growing so fast. That LinkedIn, that's really becoming something. I should be getting paid for that advertisement. LinkedIn, call me. Anyway, guys, we have another amazing person on the show. I think you're going to be just blown away by her resume and everything that she's done. We have on the show with us today, Shawnee Harley. She is a mental fitness coach, and she is a two-time Olympian as a former assistant coach for Canada basketball

and is one of the most highly certified coaches in Canada. We love Canada. She has 27 years of elite coaching and leadership experience, including the Olympic Games, World Championships, FIBA, FIBA Americas, and World University Games. Welcome to the show, Shawnee. How are you? Awesome. And I think your intro said something about all the smart people that you have on this show. I'm like, wow, thank you for that. They haven't even met me yet and you called me smart.

There you go. Well, we have to have smart people on the show because I'm the dumb one. So you guys make me all look, well, half smart. I don't know. My aunt eats nose after 12 years. Then I'm not the smartest one. But that's the beautiful part about having people like you on the show. Give me your plugs so people can find you on the

interwebs and get to know you more about your dot coms and stuff. Best place to find me is my website, Shawnee Harley.com. I'm on social media and people look for me when they're trying to train their brain because I work with athletes. I help them figure out what's going on in their head and their heart, cut through the noise because there is so much noise going on up there, and unleash their inner tiger.

Because it takes a village, parents and coaches are included in my coaching. There you go. My psychiatrist says I have a village, but it's like a personality, so there's that. That's a joke. So you've been doing this for a long time, 27 years of elite coaching. That's awesome. I have been doing it for a long time. It's funny how we get on these paths and journeys that we didn't think that was the original destination when we started moving along. I started out as an athlete.

Then I was an elite coach for years and years and years. And then now I'm on the place I think that I was truly meant to be. It's as a mental toughness coach helping athletes, parents, and coaches. Yeah. You know, what's always interesting is people think that being in the Olympics or being in a high championship sport or just being successful in life takes a lot of physical agility, physical talent, working out all the time and doing all that stuff.

But a lot of athletes, in spite of all that, if their head isn't in the game, their mental fitness, as you say, they don't perform well. And so that's, I don't know, maybe half the battle. Is that true? Or more? Well, I think it was Yogi Berra had a great quote, a great quote one time about he said, he said something like 90% of the game is mental. And so is the other 10%.

That isn't a perfect quote. But he way back in the day that was in baseball, he picked up on this. And what I'm seeing, and I'm sure what parents and coaches and athletes that might be listening to this, we know that talent levels out. I mean, the higher you go, everybody is good. So talent levels out, physical ability levels out. Then what? Now where's the advantage? If everyone's quick, strong, fast, and skilled, where's the advantage? I think hands down, the advantage becomes in the mental part of the game.

Most definitely. And I think I heard that Yogi Berra thing. I think that's what I was trying to pull out of my head. So what clients do you normally work with? Who are the people that you're usually handling? And if people are out there listening, how do they know that they're in your realm as a potential client for you? I haven't met anyone that isn't. Put it that way. The youngest client I've worked with is 10, all the way up to 46-year-old adult athletes who are still highly competitive in their sport. So I've worked with Olympians all the way down to the kids

that are just starting out in youth sport, because what we're talking about is the mental part of the game matters from day one. It's not like, oh, now I'm an Olympian. I guess I can work on my mental games. I don't know. You missed the boat. That should have been happening years ago. This mental toughness, I help people build a mental toughness toolkit.

There's no age limit on that. So it's good to start early. I remember Michael Phelps, who kind of has a freak of nature body that's built for swimming and, you know, just seemingly born talent to it. But even then, he went through a period where he needed to go get his head reassigned and re-put back into the game, if you will. And so, you know, you see that somebody even at that level, you know, has to get their mentality right for him. And rightly so.

If you look at, I mean, I don't know if sport has ever been more difficult than it is in this day and age. With social media, athletes cannot hide. I don't care if you're 10. I don't care if you're Michael Phelps. Someone's videoing you. Someone's videoing you. Someone's talking about you. Someone is taking pictures of you.

And it's going on social media. It's going on Facebook pages. It's going on websites. It's incredibly difficult trying to be an athlete in this day and age because you are completely exposed. Everything you do is judged judged either good or bad. Everything you do, someone has an opinion. So no wonder we need help with what's going on in our head.

We get, we're in these emotional storms all of the time because of the pressure. Yeah. I imagine, I imagine, you know, they, they, I, I, I'm, I can't think of the reference that I'm thinking of, but I think there's a thing that goes around about Albert Einstein. Uh, and I'm not sure if the story is true, but it's a meme that goes around it. And it tells a story about how he, he counted something up to 10 for his, for his class, and he on purpose made a mistake on one of the 10 items or something.

And they said, oh, you know, you screwed that up, teacher. And he's like, no, what I was teaching you was that you can be right 90% of the time, but people only remember the times you're wrong 10% of the time. And I imagine that happens with athletes from what you're saying, where if they have a bad day or if they're off, I can think of some athletes that were in the Olympics that had a bad day or start off wrong, and they came out swell. But sometimes everybody focuses on that and harps on it and comments on it,

and I'm sure that can get in your head. Without a doubt. I have a parent that messaged me the other day saying, my daughter is volleyball. They're in a club volleyball team. We finished second. So they got the silver medal in this big tournament. And at the end of the match, when they got second,

the coach made all the players run suicides. Right there in the venue at the end of the match, when they got second, the coach made all the players run suicides right there in the venue at the end of the game because they had gotten second. Wow. imagine what's happening with the Olympians. I think a March Madness because that's, you know, that's just recently, we're coming up tonight with a pretty big game in March Madness. Can you imagine the pressure of those two teams? Because someone's going to get what they want and someone's going to get what they don't want. And then everyone is going to have an opinion about both. Yeah. I mean, the Super Bowl, I think there was some down in South America.

It might have been Brazil. There was a soccer match for the World Cup or something, and one of the players screwed it up. I think it was the goalie. And he ended up killing himself. Yes. Just out of shame. And, you know, the whole nation was hating on him. And so it's very dark. So on your website, you talk about welcome to the mind gym.

Tell us about what that is and how that works. It's just like your local fitness center. You go and work out, you, you get stronger, quicker, faster. I think we need the exact same thing for our brain. We need to have a gym where we can go and get like our brain is just like a muscle. It can get stronger. It can learn resilience. It can learn grit. It can learn mental toughness skills. And I use skills intentionally. That means we're not necessarily born with them.

Skills are something that with practice, they improve. And the mind gym is where I train athletes, parents, and coaches to help them get ready for the storm. Because the storm's coming. I call it the shit storm. The shit storm's coming and you're going to be covered in poop. So it's coming and there's nothing you can do about whether it comes or not. And if you haven't had it yet, get ready. How do we prepare for that storm?

How do we manage that storm? I think we need to train for it. Now, it looks like you talk a lot about emotional intelligence. Is that correct? And bringing emotion into the mental part of the game. Oh, you bring in one of my favorite F words. Feelings. Feelings, eh?

Yes. Hey, you said A. Yeah. Are you from Canada? No, I do that. That, and you'll probably hear me pulling a boot. I have a lot of Canadian friends, so I always tease you guys. Love it.

Here's what I think about the storm. I think the storm is an emotional storm. When things aren't going well, when we're under pressure, three minutes left in the game and we're down six, whatever it happens to be, think about all of the feelings that come with that. We have nerves. We have fear. Some people say it's anxiety. We feel pressure. How in the world are we supposed to manage any of that if we have zero emotional intelligence. And I'll tell you something that

really pisses me off about sport. I think sport teaches us to be emotionally unintelligent. It says, oh yes, it says, because don't have a feeling. Oh, actually that's not true. Go ahead and have happy ones, but do everything you can to avoid crappy ones. If you feel nervous, oh, don't feel that. Just get out there and be confident. You got this. All the fluffy BS that we tell athletes and the athletes that I've worked with, hundreds of athletes, I ask them when you're in the middle of the storm and you're being overwhelmed with all of this pressure and someone says, just get out there and be confident. You got this. Does it help?

And they all say no. It's like, yeah, I know. It's a storm. And somebody says, just get out there and be confident just get out there and be confident get out there and be confident you know i see that a lot on social media too people are there's a lot of cheerleading or people go you got this and you're like what is this and what do i got again well you know what athletes say to me someone says to me they would go like hey coach you know somebody yells at me come on you got this got this. And they're like, and in my heart and in my mind, I'm like, hell no, I don't got this.

I don't got this. It's like they're telling me to swim, but nobody gave me swimming lessons. Or a paddle. Or a paddle or a life jacket. Or those flipper things. I think that's what I was Yeah. Or those flipper things. I think that's what I was going for, the flipper things. Flippers and goggles. Yeah, and goggles too.

That's always good. You get that chlorine in your eye. So you work with a lot of different people. Let me pull your website here so I have it. You have an online course. You do group coaching, sport family coaching and personal coaching and the sport family coaching do you help coach the whole family and not just whatever the athlete is so they can get support i sure do it's

i think that the parents have one of the biggest influences on the DTE. That's a fancy way of saying the daily training environment. Parents are hugely influential. And most of the athletes that I work with, one of the biggest places that they feel pressure is from their parents. So when a family comes, when somebody says, hey, I want to sign my athlete up, I'm like, okay, there's my online course, off you go.

But if they want to do any training with me, they can't sign just their athlete up. They have to sign at least one parent up because we all need to swim. Do you think parents aren't in the same freaking emotional storm as their kids? Have you ever watched parents in the stands? Yeah.

Do you see any of them calmly sitting there just cheering appropriately, just relaxed? Yeah. That's not what I see. So I get to help parents also. They might be more emotionally things. I've seen some, I've seen some parents get a little out of hand, you know, like go yell at the empire or something. You're just like, Hey, that guy should calm down. But, uh, you know, I mean, there you go. I it's, uh, it's funny, but, um, so what, what, what are some other things? Uh, you sent me several

articles. One was kind of interesting. One out of three girls drops out of sports by her late teens. Um, and, uh, trying to, trying to keep people in sports more. I know that sports, you know, when I grew up, you had to take, uh, you had to take, what would they call it? PE, PE sports, uh, throughout school. And you had to take it every year too, it, PE, PE sports throughout school.

And you had to take it every year too. And you always had the coach that made you run the laps until you bled out your liver or something. But there's been a lot of talk in recent years where schools have been cutting back on PE and sports and different things to where kids aren't getting as much exercise. What intrigues me about that stat, one in three dropping out, and just this conversation in general, is why. What's going on?

Why are we losing more youth than ever? Why are they quitting? I mean, 70% are quitting by the age of 13. Girls drop out at six times the rate of boys. What has changed? And it depends on who you talk to. Because when I talk to coaches, here's what coaches tell me. Kids are so soft. They're just so soft these days. We can't even coach them anymore. That's what I hear a lot. But then I also get to talk to athletes.

You remember I gave you that example of that parent that said her daughter's team that finished second at the end of the tournament, right there in the tournament facility in front of all the people had to run suicides for finishing second. So I get to hear a lot coming from the athletes. And what they tell me is why would I want to stay doing something where I get guilted, blamed, and shamed on a daily basis? And I'm like, wow, that's interesting to me. What has happened? Remember, we talked earlier, everything has changed with social media. There's nowhere to hide. What I see happening is I think parents and coaches feel as exposed as the athletes. And when their team isn't winning, when parents have kids that are sitting on the bench or making mistakes in big moments. Do you see what happened?

I think they feel, wow, this is a reflection of me. And we don't respond to that very well. Our ego gets in there, and then the blame always goes on to the athletes. That's why I bring parents into the training and coaches into the training. I think a rising tide lifts all boats. I think we all need to raise our mental game because the storm, I keep calling it the storm. Coaches feel it, parents feel it, and athletes feel it. And what I see happening is when the storm is raging, do you know who's really raging?

Who? The coach and the parents. And the athletes are drowning and struggling to swim. And they're finally like, this isn't what I signed up for. I'm out of here. This isn't fun. I don't enjoy it. I don't like my coach. I feel blamed, shamed, and guilted. I'm not in the cool kids club because our team has cliques. And people are like, you know what? I'm out. And I think that is terrible.

Sport should be, I think, should fill us up yeah i see it draining us definitely and we're becoming more sedentary because of it because you know now we just get fatter especially here in america we get fatter by the minute and and uh we don't exercise enough um and the coach does make a lot of the difference too. I mean, I, when I went to high school and of course I went before the participation generation, um, you know, I had the full metal jacket, uh, drill sergeant coach who, uh, didn't make it fun. And you're just like, I think he's really a masochist trying to torture me. I think that's what he's really about. Like, I don't, I don't know. I don't know what happened to him as a child,

but he has a lot of anger management issues. And maybe he built, well, I don't know. But I went to school in the 80s, and there were people still with paddles back then that would hit students. And so, you know, I was kind of an interesting age. But it didn't make P.E. fun. I didn't like P.E.

In fact, P.E PE was like the worst. And I still have no idea why we all had to wear jockstraps, but I don't know, whatever. That was like a live event. If you were caught without your jockstrap, you were, I don't know, suspended or something. It was like somebody's really obsessed with this for the wrongest reasons. I don't know. That's a joke. But no, the coach can make all the difference because if they demotivate you, you don't want to go forward.

You're just like, I don't need this in my life. Yes, we're in this chicken and egg thing. And you know what? If I had all the answers, I had already been on Oprah by now. And last time I checked, Oprah hasn't called me. So I do not have all the answers.

I have more questions. I do have some thoughts. How come sport, how come we're allowed to use reward and punishment to manipulate behavior? Because that's what we do. When you do what I want, I like you and I approve of you. When you don't do what I want,

I dislike you and I disapprove of you. And on top of that, we're going to run some suicides, hockey. We're going to bag skate football. We're going to do up downs. I mean, it's this, it's just like I mentioned before that team that lost in the gold medal game had to run suicides as punishment. And I keep asking, cause I get to see, I get to see the cost because I get to see the athletes.

I get to hear the athletes and the things that they tell me. They don't tell anyone else. But I can tell you this culture of reward and punishment where we manipulate behavior creates fear. There are a lot of fearful athletes out there. They are seeking reward and doing everything they can to avoid punishment. The other thing I find so interesting, interesting. When we punish in sport, this is my opinion, we're actually punishing athletes for things that are out of their control. Winning and losing. Winning and losing. If you could control it, you'd win all the time. Making mistakes. If you could control it, you would never make mistakes. What do athletes get punished for? Mistakes, messing up, losing, basically making the coach look bad.

And I see fear creeping in. And then everything gets put on social media. So the fear is even greater because it's like, now everyone's going to know about this. Everyone is going to see this and athletes are incredibly insecure and fearful. I, you know, I, I, it occurs to me that I probably should be glad that my PE, you know, social media wasn't around when my PE or any sort of sports that I did, I did, I did basketball for a while, racquetball, and then here's something else I did. But I guess I should be glad that it's not put on the Internet

where people can troll it and, you know, be ugly and nasty. I mean, it's already bad enough I have a YouTube channel for the last 12 years that gets plenty of trolling and hate and, you know, calling me fat. I've been, I've been told to go jump off a cliff cause our, sometimes their product review isn't quite, I don't know, whatever they thought it should be. And so my life revolves around the quality of a three minute video. So I know what that trolling is like. It's pretty ugly. I can't imagine going through it as a, as a, as a, uh, athlete, especially a young one that doesn't have a good sort of callous to that sort of criticism. Well, if you think about how we respond when we're in an environment where we are nervous, fearful, insecure, think about how that affects our performance, right? It blocks creativity,

it blocks risk-taking, it blocks trying new things, it blocks raising your hand to ask questions. I have an athlete that, this is a 12-year-old that I'm working with, and he was talking, I've been trying to get him to work on some of these things. And he just texted me the other day. He said, our soccer game finished zero, zero. So it went to a shootout and coach asked for volunteers.

And he said, and I raised my hand. Do you know how many kids don't raise their hand in that situation? Cause they're like, Oh hell no you think I'm gonna go out there with everyone watching might make it might miss it and then have everyone judge me for it throw me under the bus or punish me there's no way lots of kids are not signing up for that anymore. Yeah. It's, it's, it's disheartening. And plus it teaches you so much about character because you have to learn to deal with that stuff.

You have to learn to, to, uh, the downfalls and everything. And if you don't prepare for it, then you're really stuck later in life when, you know, you come across trials and tribulations and you're going to fail. Like you say, I mean, I remember there was a lot of games. I think you could even say games with, like, Michael Jordan or spectacular athletes where they may have had, you know, most of the baskets and scores in the game, but still they lost because either they met a better team or it was just their better night or maybe no matter what they did, they couldn't carry their whole team. And so, yeah, there's times where you're going to lose.

But sports is so important. I mean, when they taught us sports when I was a kid, it was about teaching sportsmanship. And being a good loser, being a good winner, and camaraderie and teamwork and stuff like that. Do they still teach that sort of thing in school sports nowadays? Here's where this is what I think is a valuable conversation. I don't know if they teach it in sport nowadays. I just watch what youth sport is doing. And I think one of the problems was, you talked about it already,

when we grew a culture of kids that got participation medals. Yeah. Right? Everyone gets a medal. Seriously. Who thought that was a good idea? Because what we said is, when

everyone gets a participation medal, we are going to save you from your crappy feelings of losing. So we're going to save you from the feelings. And when we save athletes from feelings, we are blocking emotional intelligence.

Feels or reels. Yes. So we're actually doing them a disservice. And now, to me, we are on these two ends of the pendulum. It's the participation medals or it's like run till you puke. You know, one of those. And what I think is that we need something in the middle. The storm is coming.

And instead of punishing you, instead of all these things that are going on, can we provide a mental toughness toolkit to handle the poop, the crappy, the storms, the losing, the coaches yelling, the making mistakes, because participation medals did not solve the problem. And now we think, well, then I'll just be hard on them. There, that'll teach them. I think we can be hard on them, perhaps, but not unless we equip them with figuring out how to manage that. Yeah. And you know, the mental game is, is so important. Like I recently started going to the gym for the first time in 54, 53 years, it would have been at the time, uh, daily. And I've been going daily since August, uh, first or second second so i think i'm at seven or eight

months now uh and i've never done that in my life i i've owned gym memberships for three years and gone five times uh i've owned uh i've you know i've gone for maybe a week straight or something uh and uh this is the very first time that i've i've gone every single day. There might be a few days where I take off for a rest day. But other than that, it's pretty much every day. I check in on social media for accountability, and everybody sees, oh, Chris was at the gym again. And the accountability really helps too. But I go, and it's become such a habit of mine that even if I don't feel like going to the gym, like if I'm having a day, like yesterday was kind of a day where I'm like really beat up and I'm like,

I really don't feel like going. And I'll still like get in the car and drive myself to the gym and I'll just start slowly. I'm like, okay, you don't feel like working out. Why don't you just try doing some stuff? And, you know, then I'll start doing it. And then, then the routine kicks in and the mental part kicks in and pretty much my body's like, okay, we're doing this. Um, but that part of what it is, is really the word discipline for me is the, is the key thing, just showing up, just going, just, just going to do it, having the discipline to do it. And it's really more of a mental game than a physical game.

Because once I'm there, everything kind of kicks in and I go, okay, yeah, we're doing things, you know, do all the things. But, you know, sometimes when you have that mental state where you're like, I don't know, I'm tired or, you know, you get some of that, what you call the S storms. You're like, I don't really, you know, my back's kind of hurting. Or, you know, you get some of that, uh, what you call the, the S storms. Um, you're like, I don't, I don't really,

you know, my back's kind of hurting. I don't know. Um, but you know, you, you push through it because you've got that mental clarity to do it with. Oh,

bam. Look at you doing your high performance habits. Okay. Well, but that one thing is so critical. We're coming back to the F word feel. I've been doing this for 40 years. When I look at the high performers in any sport, they do not let their feelings drive their behavior. I use the analogy of ice cream and vegetables.

For me, I hate vegetables, Brussels sprouts. If I even smell them, it makes me gag. So if you said, okay, Shawnee, here's two buffets. Here's the vegetable buffet. Here's the ice cream buffet. Which one am I going to choose? I'm going to freaking choose the ice cream buffet all dang day because it feels better. It tastes better.

So when we don't feel like going to the gym, of course not, because that's vegetables. You talked about the word discipline. When I look at the hundreds of athletes that I've worked with and you asked me, what's one separator? Sean, you're only allowed to say one. Don't give me three and don't say, Ooh, it's mental toughness. Cause that's too vague. Give me one thing. The one thing that I believe is the separator is self-discipline. It's the people that are willing to eat their vegetables, even though they don't want to, on a consistent basis. That is the separator. Because guess what? News alert. It's easy to pass lazy people. And there is so much ice cream out there. Look at what phones. Look at what phones are doing to us.

Social media, we will scroll all day long rather than go to the gym or do our workout. Well, you know that thumb, that kind of is when you're doing the swiping thing. That's like at least five times. But there's no freaking Olympics. There's no Olympics for scrolling yet. I don't know. I know some teenage girls that are probably Olympics at that. Yes, I hear you.

I've seen some of them type. They're like, you're like, holy crap, I can't even think that fast. Yeah. But that's the new age of their growing up social media. I'm kind of glad I grew up without social media and without phones and computers, but I don't know, maybe I'm dumber because of it. But, yeah, the mental game is really everything. You know, even like sometimes I'll play games, you know,

your head will play games with you, and I'll be like, you know, I have a treadmill here at the house. I don't need to go to the gym and do the treadmill thing. I can skip the treadmill thing today because I got it at the house. I don't need to go to the gym and do the treadmill thing. Uh, you can skip the treadmill thing today. Cause I got at the house. Well, the problem is, is here at the house, there's 5 trillion distractions, you know, there's a donuts and there's a, the computer. And like you say, the phone and you know, my dogs want to go play. And I've just learned that, uh, yeah, I mean, yeah, using that treadmill every now and then is pretty good, but I won't focus on it.

The nice thing is if I drive, you know, 15 minutes to my gym, I'm stuck there because it took me 15 minutes to get there and come back. So I might as well just get on the stupid treadmill and do the treadmill because there's nothing else to do there other than lift weights. And so, you know, it's all part of that mental game. And, you know, now I've got it down to a habit where I almost feel weird by not, if I take a day off and don't go to the gym, it's almost kind of like, I don't know, man, in fact, my muscles kind of start going, Hey man, we're kind of achy. Cause you need to get to the gym, dude. We need to, you need to keep these keep these things going. It's like a point of atrophy or something where if I don't go. But yeah, mental is everything.

What sort of other stuff do you want to plug about how you coach, what you do, and how you do it, and how people can work with you? I got to go back to your other comment first. Because there's a really important nugget in there. This practice of self-discipline, this thing that we're talking about, vegetables and ice cream, there's another thing in there that you said, high performers don't lie to themselves. We can tell ourselves all these little white lies. Oh, you know what? I'll do it later. Oh, you know what?

That shoulder's kind of bugging me today. Oh, I think it needs a day off. Oh, gosh, maybe it needs another day off. Maybe it, and we, we can get really good at lying to ourselves to help us avoid the vegetables. So what you're actually doing is you're not letting you stop lying to yourself because lying to yourself, you ended up having memberships where you would work out five times. So when we start telling the truth to ourselves, these are high performance habits. Yeah. It's the lying to yourself is the thing that gets it in your head where you're

like, you know, do that. And you know, it's, it's the habit is having the habit now after seven to eight months, I have to go calculate. I think it's eight months now since August 1st.

The doing it every single day and going. And like I said, there's some days where I just don't feel well. And sometimes I'll go. I'm just like get in the car, you know, and you take all the BCAAs and the protein and all the creatine, all that crap I take. That usually kind of helps when that kicks in. And there's been times where I've been at the gym and I'm just like, oh, man, I feel like crap. I just can't get motivated. I'm just like, hey, go take a timeout.

Go sit in the locker room. Breathe for a while. Just kind of relax. You know, know don't quit don't go home and sometimes maybe i don't know sometimes digestion or sometimes i don't know i'm just not feeling it the stuff kick in that i need um and then sometimes i'll just go sit in there and take a break and then and then i'm like okay i'm starting to feel a little bit better now i think we're you know the body's starting to kick into gear and the wheels are starting to move. And then I'll go out and finish what I'm doing. But yeah, showing up, the mental game is just everything, like you say.

Well, you're doing another piece of this is the ability to tolerate discomfort. And what a lot of coaches are telling me is that that's, that skill has becoming less and less in athletes. Maybe it's because of the participation model where we didn't have to practice, right? We didn't have to practice discomfort because soon as it got uncomfortable, we went home.

Soon as we got uncomfortable, somebody gave us a medal or a ribbon to make us feel better. But absolutely, high performers, they have the ability to tolerate discomfort. The other thing that happens is our tolerance grows. We get better at tolerating discomfort. Well, you're already eight months into it. Yeah. I'm really good at discomfort.

In fact, I, uh, about, I guess if you call it four or five days now, I switched my training program, uh, instead of doing five sets of, of 10, um, of 10 reps, uh, on everything that I was working on, uh, I switched to, uh, uh, four reps of 20 or 20, or until I could feel my muscles burning and on fire and screaming. And I can't do it anymore, you know, fail basically. And if I get above 20, I usually up the weight. Um, and I didn't think it would be that hard to so make that switch because i'm like i'm gonna do five at ten i mean what's four and twenty uh it's it's evidently a whole world of difference and uh it for about three days it was uh it was basically like getting hit by a bus it was very painful um and recovery and everything else. But now

I'm on the third or fourth day. I'm feeling really good about it. And I feel fine now. Like I'm back to kind of how I used to feel when I was doing the old sets. But yeah, pushing above that level and about three days there, it was like really hard to go to the gym the next day. You're like,

or at least take a recovery day. This is really like, I'm not sure I'm recovered. Well, that's grit. Yeah. That's grit. Right? Yeah. It's this grittiness to work through it, to tolerate the discomfort, the pain in your

case, because it would be really easy to not do it. It would be really easy to lie to yourself and figure out, oh, you know, I should probably have another day off. This concept of grit, again, this is a mental toughness skill, and it gets better when we work at it. Yeah, it's crazy. So, uh,

what are the best ways people can get in touch with you, sign up with your services, get to know you better. And, uh, and of course reach out to you. They can find my contact information. You'll probably be on your show notes,

but my website is Shawnee Harley.com. You can find me on social media. You can book a free no-pressure call if you just want to shoot the breeze and talk about ice cream and vegetables. You can book a free call also on my website. There you go. There you go. So this has been pretty awesome.

Anything more you want to touch on as we go out, Shawnee? I think that with this new world that we're in, we're trying to raise strong, mentally strong, physically strong kids and athletes. We're trying to get them to the podium. I think the most important podium is the podium of life. And I think sport is a context to help us become our greatest self. I think we cannot get there unless we have a mental toughness toolkit full of emotional intelligence, self-awareness, grit, vegetables, and self-discipline. There you go. Less burgers, more vegetables. I love that. Yes.

I love that metaphor, the podium of life. That's an awesome metaphor. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Shani. We really appreciate you coming and sharing with us your expertise and experience. Hey, and you know what? Great job for you. Eating your vegetables and having some high-performance habits. Bam.

Yeah, I'm getting there. Not bad. I mean, 53 years. I finally got around to it. But, you know, better late than never, I guess. You bet. That but that's right but yes well thank you very much thanks to my audience for uh tuning in be sure to refer to your family friends and relatives go to youtube.com fortress chris foss go to goodreads.com for us all the chris foss channels on facebook linkedin twitter instagram all those crazy places those kids are on the interwebs, flipping their phones.

Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.