The Pomp Podcast - #467 Lauren Johnson on the Performance Mindset

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

Lauren Johnson is the Mental Conditioning Coordinator at the New York Yankees, where she is responsible for aiding in the development of athletes and staff through education, application, and support. In this conversation, we discuss mental toughness, invincibility, breaking out of a slump, the importance of environment, visualization, how to change your behavior, and the secrets of the top professional athletes.  ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= The Rodman Law Group is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs realize their vision by helping them operate defensibly in sectors where laws and regulations haven’t caught up to the realities of the industry. The Rodman Law Group’s legal expertise combined with its understanding of blockchain technology makes it the ideal legal service provider for the industry. http://www.therodmanlawgroup.com/pomp

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there let's kick this thing off lauren johnson is the mental conditioning coordinator at the new york yankees where she is responsible for aiding in the development of athletes and staff through education application and support in this conversation we discuss mental toughness invincibility breaking out of a slump the importance of environment, visualization, how to change your behavior, and the secrets of the top professional athletes. I really enjoyed this conversation with Lauren, and I think you will as well. But before we get into this episode, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got a super awesome guest today.

I've got Lauren here with me. Thank you so much for doing this. Oh, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. All right. So you work with the New York Yankees and you essentially try to help the entire base of athletes get better mentally. Before we get into that, let's talk about kind of your background. Where do you grow up? How do

you get into this line? What do you go to school for? And like, why are you so interested in kind of the mental performance of individuals? So I'll start from the beginning. I grew up in a town called Placentia, California. It's in Southern California. I currently reside in Northern California. And I, it was all sports in my household all the time growing up. And I think that's what kind of drew me to this. I mean, I've always loved sports. And so I think I always knew I wanted to work in sports, but I didn't know even sports psychology existed until my senior year of college. Actually, I was getting my degree in kinesiology and thinking I wanted to go into physical therapy because it was the only thing I could really see

interested me in terms of sports. And I got injured my senior year of college and I had a little bit more time. I played soccer in college, I should mention, and I wasn't able to play anymore. So I was still able to be on the sidelines, but my role changed vastly. So I decided to take an elective course and I found sports psychology and I just totally fell in love with it. And I think the reason why is because I was the athlete that needed it. I was that athlete that would constantly get in my own way and would believe my limiting thoughts and believe these negative thoughts and allowed fear to kind of take the wheel many times. And so I think when I was in that course, I had so many light bulb moments and I thought, what would my soccer career?

I mean, I was no, you know, Mia Hamm, Carly Lloyd, Abby Wambach, but I thought like, what would my soccer career have looked like? Would I have enjoyed it more if I would have had these mental skills kind of in my arsenal? And so that's when I decided, you know, wow, this is, this is something I could do to help others where they wouldn't look back on their career and say, man, what if I had these skills? What if, what would it have looked like? So that's kind of what led me into that. And I've been super passionate really ever since then. And I think the biggest reason was because I never understood why somebody with talent wasn't successful. And I, again, I was no, I w I didn't have extreme talent. I was, I was, I was okay. But, um, I thought, why wasn't

I having success when I knew I could do things that I just wasn't living up to that. And so I think that was what really drew me into this field. And, and then it began to make sense about how these coping strategies allow people to perform at their best when it matters most in under extreme circumstances. Got it. And so as a mental conditioning coach, like talk through just like, what does that really entail? What is the relationship you have with athletes? What is kind of the day-to-day look like? And kind of where do you focus in terms of actually working with these people? Yeah. So really what we do, our job is to teach mental skills and help our athletes develop mental skills, mental toughness, so they can be their best regardless of circumstance.

So they can show up at the best level, no matter what is thrown at them, no matter what cards they are dealt. And I think a lot of people think, you know, Oh, pro athlete, they're really good because they can change their circumstances. Well, they're not known for necessarily changing, like magically changing the situation they're in. They're known for responding at a high level, regardless of what is thrown their way. And so I think it's our job to not only be able to recognize some of those skills that might be lacking or areas of improvement in terms of the mental side. And so my relationship with my athletes is, uh, well, I should start by saying the culture at the Yankees is you don't have to be sick to get better. I think whenever you put

this idea, like mental in front of anything, there's kind of this stigma attached and they, I walked into a really great culture. Um, when I first started with the Yankees four years ago, and that was already established. But I think sometimes, um, if there's kind of a one person show and you take on too much, you are limited to taking the worst cases first, which ultimately builds this culture of, Oh, you must have a problem if you're going to talk to that person. And so I think that that's one of the things that, um, I'm really lucky that I got to walk into that culture. And so we work with athletes that are not only performing their best, but, and, or performing their worst, but everything in between. And, um, and we do that through first,

the most important thing is building a relationship with those people because, and our athletes, because you wouldn't tell anybody something super personal about you. If you didn't know them, you didn't trust them. So that's probably the most important is to build that trust and relationship first. And then, uh, you know, we work with them with whether it's a one-on-one session, whether it's group sessions, you know, a lot of them take place like in the dugout, you know, in the outfield, you know, when we're chagging balls during VP, you know, it's, it's kind of it's it's not the traditional sit in the office you know and schedule an appointment and after an hour you're out it's like when sometimes they're five minutes before you know

before they go out um to the field it just it kind of depends so it's a little bit um more casual in that nature but that's kind of what it looks like so i want to talk about baseball specifics first and then we'll kind of extrapolate some of the learnings there to other aspects but um in terms of baseball who needs the most help is it hitters is it pitchers is it everyone in between is there a difference like how do you just think about uh if you're like hey you know i'm going to the ballpark today uh is there a certain framework you use as to who to help uh or who to evaluate um first or kind of take priority um well i think it's i think asking like who needs more mental toughness is the same as asking who needs more physical strength you know it's it's very

similar it's everybody needs some i mean here's the thing elite athletes what it really boils down to is their ability to adapt to any situation that they're put in that's like that one thing that makes really like a good athlete elite and that could be a physical adaptation you know when you have when you have a certain level of strength you're able to adapt in certain ways then maybe somebody that doesn't have that strength could. And same with the mental side is the adaptation mentally, emotionally, being able to adapt to maybe either negative thoughts, fear, self-doubt, adversity, feeling like, oh, I've got it. I'm going to cruise now. Like being able to override those default settings all comes through with that mental strength. And

I don't think there's a position that necessarily like needs more than somebody else. I just think it varies by the person. Some people, they are naturally born with a little bit more resilience than others, but also the more important piece is that our brain is so plastic in terms that it can change over time. And so it's also something that can be built and developed over time. And so I don't necessarily think that there's one that needs it more than the other, but in terms of prioritizing, again, we don't necessarily prioritize somebody who's struggling terribly versus somebody who's having the best, the best like year of their life, because that would go against our core belief, which is you don't have to be sick to get better. And so for us, it's,

it's really, of course there are situations, especially when they turn, they, when they cross the threshold of mental performance into, um, into a clinical, um, issue or a clinical symptom, sign or symptom, then we, then that might be something we want to address immediately. And there's, I guess, urgency might change, but in terms of one being more important than the other, I don't necessarily agree with that. Got it. And you mentioned earlier, kind of like being born a certain way, how much of it is literally you're just born more mentally tough or have certain kind of predispositions versus maybe

it's your environment as a young kid or the way that you trained or something in your life that has made you either more or less mentally tough or more resilient or more adaptable to kind of the changing environment. Yeah. I think that, yes, there, there is some of us, some of us are predisposed to some of these things, like to be, we, to be more resilient, more tough. And then you want to throw in your environment that you grew up and sure that does have an impact as well. But I think the coolest part about the mental side is that it can be grown and developed. It's just like people that, you know, are naturally athletic. They come out with these like they never work out but they're just jacked and you're like why who are you but

it's like that it's yes you can have that but then also it's this other piece that you can continue to build you can continue to uh and even if you you're born without it it's all it is is we have these default settings in our brain it's like an iphone except the difference is you can't just like download a new app for positive thinking right and the way that we download these new these new kind of neural pathways is through repetition. And so every time you repeat something, you increase the, you increase the chances that you're going to repeat them again. And that's how we develop habits. And we are a product of them. You know, your weight is a product of your eating habits. Your finances are a product of your spending habits. And that's

James Clear talks about this in his book. And so I really think that, you know, while yes, that does play some of a role that even if you don't have any of it, you can still become mentally tough. It is not a limiting factor. Yeah. And what seems to be really interesting about this is that repetition, right? And so probably the most popular question that I got when I asked for questions for talking to you was how do I become mentally tougher? Like what are the things that either you do for a baseball player, a business executive, I don't know, Maybe if they even change, depending on kind of what, you know, occupation somebody holds, but like, what are those things that maybe aren't the, you know, silver bullet and kind

of the one size fits all, but just things that people can do at home that really drive repetition and ultimately increase mental resiliency or toughness. Yeah. So we have these kind of big like terms that we hear often in sports and even in, I mean, business and just successful individuals is this idea of kind of consistency. So I think I actually talked about this a couple of weeks ago in one of my videos, because I think, especially with the new year, everybody's creating these new goals and, you know, everybody, I mean, we've all been there before where we've like set a goal and like a month in, it's nowhere to be found. Like we have, we've just completely eliminated it. And I think one of the tools that has always helped me, and this is kind of one of the foundational pieces of mental toughness in my

mind in terms of building it is consistency is repetition. And so I call it the lowest common denominator that a lot of times we go in, we're all or nothing. Either we, if our goal is to go to the gym for an hour, three days a week, if we don't go to the gym and we're not there for an hour or we don't have time to go for an hour, then we're just not going to go at all. And in my mind, I like to think of, I don't want to eliminate consistency. Let's just lessen intensity. If we can't go to the gym, maybe the gym is closed. Or if it's raining outside, so you can't go on the run you want, do a HIIT workout for 10 minutes inside or do abs for five minutes. We're lowering intensity, but we're remaining consistent. And so consistency, long-term consistency,

trumps short-term intensity. And Bruce Lee said that. And I think it's so important because little by little, a little becomes a lot. And so when we can string together these really tiny winds every single day, they don't have to be big. They can be really small. And I love this analogy that James Clear uses when he talks about if a plane takes off in LA and its goal is to land in New York, but it adjusts the nose just three degrees South. When it first adjusts it, it's only, you know, I don't know, a couple of feet, you know, it's not, it's not a big difference, but when it's multiplied across the United States, you end up landing in Washington, DC. And so that is how these small, tiny changes impact our lives over time. And everybody

overestimates what they can do in a day. And they underestimate how much they can do in a month, in a year. And so that's where I would, I would say like one of the biggest foundational pieces is being consistent. And so one of the things that you can do to be consistent in is increasing our awareness. You can't change anything if you're not aware of it. So first thing is awareness. And one of the ways that I do this with a lot of my athletes is journaling. It's one of those, like really, really, uh, a lot of people think it's boring. A lot of people may think it's mundane. It's not sexy. It's not like super cool, but it's, it works. It's simple and it's effective. And so one of the things that you can do is ask yourself these three questions. I ask

myself these three questions every single day. First, I write about my day because it just helps me get it out. Then I asked myself these three questions. One, what went well today? Or what did I do well today? One, I start with that because our brain defaults to the negative. It defaults to like what went wrong or how can I improve? So I want to start by kind of choosing like what went well today, no matter how bad your day is, something you can name either went well or that you did well. And then two, what can I improve? Because if you're not improving, we can become stagnant. And so we want to continue to evolve and change over time. So what can I improve or what can I do better? And then three, what did I learn? Like what's the lesson that I pulled from this?

Like, what was the final piece that I can then take and apply to my next day? So as we do that, we can start to learn these patterns of behavior. And once we see these patterns, like, oh, wow, I continuously say I need to improve this. I need to put some more time into that. Or, wow, that's a strength of mine. I keep talking about that. And we start to learn these patterns. Then we can start to decide what we're going to do about them.

Yeah. And as you're talking about this consistency, I think that you're dead on in terms of there's almost this compounding effect, right? If you keep doing little things day in, day out, they definitely compound. That's true of building a business and kind of compounding revenue. That's true of developing a skill. It's true of creating content on the internet or literally playing baseball at the highest levels and trying to win a World Series. At the same time, that consistency over long periods of time, it reminds me a lot of like

the long baseball season, right? So they play literally 182 games and it can really wear out people. And so is there this belief that there's almost like this journey where people will be at their highest mental peak at a certain point, and they'll go through kind of these troughs and they'll kind of fluctuate back and forth. And maybe you almost want to have them as you're hitting the playoffs being kind of mental fitness or shape. Or is the belief that, no, actually, you can keep some pretty persistent level of mental toughness and kind of mental acuity. And so we don't want a lot of variability. It's just, let's keep the same level, uh, throughout the entire season.

Like, how do you think about the consistency over long periods of time, whether it's a project that a business or a long baseball season or something like that? Well, I think, um, you know, you cannot improve consistency unless you're consistent with that thing. So when we start, when I talk about the lowest common denominator, I talk about, you know, you can't improve a habit unless you have one. And so if you, if we first establish it at the most basic level, then we can improve from there.

And so I think, um, yes, I think that when it comes to term consistency, um, especially over 182 games season, um, yeah, there's going to be days where you're not going to feel like it, where it's going to be tough. And there's going to be days where you're going to need some time. You're going to need to take some time for you. And that's where that kind of continuum of intensity and consistency really pays off is that, you know, you're not going to have a hundred percent every day. You know, nobody has that, but it's, can you still show up when you don't feel like it? Can you still perform when

you don't feel like it? The thing is, it's going to be easy to just say, ah, I'm not going to do it. It doesn't mean that you don't need days off. It doesn't mean that self-care doesn't matter. All that stuff matters. All that stuff. I think it, I mean, we're talking about a human here. Yes, they're athletes, but they're humans at the core. And so if we don't take care of the person first, yeah, we can burn out super easily. So I think that, but having said that, I should say that a lot of these guys, we look at, you know, Kobe Bryant, we look at, um, you know, LeBron, we look at some of the best in the world and they are insanely consistent. Like Derek Jeter, for instance, I've never worked with him, but it was way before me. But, um, but he walked into

the locker room the same way he walked out. He was insanely consistent. And now there are times where, um, we're not going to be perfect. And I think people, people mistake consistency with perfection. Consistency is a average over time. And I think the best athletes, they make mistakes, but they don't make mistakes twice because if you make a mistake once, okay. But if you make a mistake twice, now you're creating a habit in the opposite direction. And so I think that's really important part is that it's okay if you make a mistake. It's okay if you don't follow through one day, but how quickly can you respond? So it's more of the response to those downs than it is to not having them at all. Yeah. And speaking of kind of downs,

one of the things that's unique for sports and maybe for some of the people who listen to this, who are high profile investors or founders, is there's also media scrutiny on top of just to perform. So obviously the New York Yankees is like the perfect example where you play in New York. And if they believe that you have even the slightest weakness or the slightest kind of bad streak, they will write about it and they will not, you know, kind of be apologetic about it. How do you kind of talk through with players and maybe, you know, founders and investors can learn from this as well. Like you have to go to work and perform, but also then you have this external scrutiny that you have to deal with. So it's almost like, you know, whether you're

doing well or not. And so there's this mental kind of conditioning and strength that you have to have yourself, but then you also have to deal with like what other people think. And so how do you kind of help people navigate the difference between those two things yet they're still related? Yeah. Well, I think the first thing is knowing what fuels you. Okay. We have people that um, that totally shut off social media completely or any kind of media at all, because it becomes a huge distraction. And then, and I, you know, I'm thinking of, um, you know, there's lots of players that do that. And then when it comes to the other side, like I think of people like Michael Phelps, who would print out the credit critiques and he would put it in

his locker. And so I just think you first thing is to know which one you are, because the point is not to avoid it necessarily, but to optimize performance. And so sometimes what that means is learning what to ignore, learning what things that you need to cut out and for a certain amount of time. So I think number one, we have to know that. And then number two, your opinion of you is so much more powerful than anyone else's opinion of you. Everybody's going to have one. And especially like you said, like the Yankees fans, if you do well, they love you. If you don't do well, like they hate you. And so that's the important piece is to know that it's, it's easy for our attention to be pulled to these highs and lows. But what we, that's, I think the, the

challenge of the, this mental conditioning is choosing not to be pulled, choosing not to believe those negative thoughts, because just because somebody has a thought or you have a thought, it doesn't make it true. And so one of the things that we talked about is like doubting your doubts, like not necessarily set, like just falling into that. So number one is knowing which one works for you. And number two, focusing on your opinion of you. And number three, what is your process? I think a lot of people, they go are every, every player to some degree goes through a slump, right? They, they have a period of time where they're not great. And what we tend to do is we focus on this outcome. And I think a lot of times the fear comes from either the fear of

failure dealer failing or the repercussions from failing the articles being written what people are going to say and where our focus needs to shift is from instead of the outcome because a lot of times what we do is we will throw away any process anything that got us to be successful just to try and be successful once because we want we crave it so bad but what we're doing is we're creating bad habits and so instead i would rather focus whether you're an investor whether you're an athlete or anything else that focus on the quality of what you do versus the only the outcome of what you do. So for my instance, we redefine success. Oh, I had an athlete who, you know, was really, really struggling at the plate. And I asked him, I said, all right,

so if you, if success couldn't be defined as getting a hit or hitting a home run, whatever that is for you, how would you define it? Meaning if you went up to the plate and you did a, B and see that would mean that you're successful regardless of the outcome. And we came up with three things that he could control. We have to redefine success to be within our control. So it became, you know, making a good swing decision, being on time and having an external focus. If he did those three things, he said more than likely I am successful. And I would say I did everything I possibly could. I said, great. That is how we redefined it. And so it's very easy. what's going to happen is our default setting wants to go to the outcome because that's the

thing we're fearing, but we need to pull ourselves back to our process and go, all right, how can I redefine success to be within my control? And then evaluate your performance based on that. Yeah, it's so true. And sports is a great example of this. You know, there's plenty of coaches who kind of say, focus on the process and the outcome takes care of itself. Right. One of my favorite examples is I think it might be Bill Walsh or somebody talks all the time about like, look, every play in football is drawn up to be a touchdown. Like there's no play that somebody draws up and it's like, hey, we're only going to get one yard here. No, it's a touchdown every single time. And it's dependent on 11 people on the field all doing their job. And when a play

doesn't score a touchdown, it's usually because somebody, one of the three people or one of the 11 people didn't do their job. Right. And so I think that focusing on that process is really important. I want to talk about kind of these hacks or education. Two of my favorite things in the world to tell people just that really highlight how powerful the mind is how much it can change um kind of the rest of your life is uh one there's been a bunch of studies that if you just sit and you smile like a real smile uh for 60 seconds it can drastically change your mood right it can put you into a much more kind of positive uh mindset and the second thing is uh if you when you wake up in the morning rather than go read negative headlines if you get up and you read

three positive headlines you don't have to even read the article just the headlines themselves you're drastically more likely at the end of the day to say you had a good day rather than a bad day and so those are you know kind of cheesy positive mindset type things that there's been a bunch of academic studies around are there similar types of hacks or little things that people can take away from our conversation that you're like look you know here's something that we tell athletes that they can do that's kind of a quick five minute or less thing that can either help them refocus or help them kind of remind themselves of what their their goal is or kind know, get through a moment where they might not have mental strength, but is there any kind of

path or, or thing that you guys really kind of harp on? Yeah. And, um, and I love those, those studies that you mentioned, because it's what's happening. And I think why some of us maybe feel it's kind of cheesy is because we can't see the changes happening in our brain when we do those things. And, um, one of the ones that I actually really like is actually a study done by Amy Cuddy, a really famous one about, um, about body language. And a lot of times, you know, we believe that, or, I mean, it's true that our thoughts can influence how we feel and how we feel can influence our physiology and that can influence our actions. But what is also true is that your body language could also influence how you feel and can influence your thoughts. And so by simply

holding a power pose, which is like those, the poses of like winning, you know, when you have your hands in the air, like Superman, there's like all these different poses. When you hold it for a couple of minutes, what you're doing is you're creating the biology of courage in your brain. And so the, you know, different chemicals are being suppressed and different ones are being secreted. And so that's one way that, um, you can actually create this kind of biology of courage is that, you know, there's, again, there's this idea that like your actions and your thoughts and your feelings all have to interact. And I just don't believe that, you know, everyone's like, just fake it till you make it. And I just think that's BS. It doesn't work for me. Some, it may

work for some, but it doesn't work for me. And the way that I look at it is, is you can feel one way. You can think one way and you can act completely independently of that. You can feel unconfident. You can think, oh gosh, I'm nervous. Like, I don't know if I can do this. And then you can hold yourself with confidence and you can act based on what you know is right. And so feelings and actions don't have to match to coexist. And so I think one of the things that we can do is remind ourselves to take the right action, which is hold yourself with confidence. Cause I'll tell you right now, a hitter walks up and he steps into the box and he's got bad body language, the pitcher and the catcher are like game over, game over. And so it's an advantage to the other

team when you're doing that. And I also think, um, and then what you're also doing is you're creating, uh, you know, that it's working opposite, right? Different hormones are being secreted that wouldn't, if you were holding yourself in a certain position. So I would say number one is, you know, you may not feel confident, but you don't have to feel confident to look confident. And so hold yourself, you'll carry yourself like a champion, hold yourself with your head high and your shoulders back. Um, and then the second, uh, another one that I really like is, um, is really calming ourselves down using our breath. I mean, that's one way you want to control yourself when you're feeling out of control, start by controlling your breathing.

That's one of the, like kind of the dominoes to controlling our physiology that when you start to control your breathing, a lot of things in our body just sort of begin to kind of match that cadence. So we can really just start by controlling our breath and controlling our breathing. And then I would say the third one is, is the, the mindset between confidence, a threat mindset versus a comp or, um, sorry, challenge mindset. Um, when we view something as a threat, our body responds to a threat. So what happens is our lungs start to constrict, our blood vessels constrict, our breath shortens, and, um, you know, our heart rate just starts, you know, pounding like crazy. and our heart rate variability actually goes down where when you simply view something as a challenge, like I got this, like, or, you know, like bring it on. Like it's not, you're not saying it's easy, but you're willing to take it or face it head on. And you're not avoiding it. The opposite actually happens. Our body responds to prepare you to meet that moment. And so our lungs actually,

they expand and our blood vessels, they dilate and our heart rate variability goes up. So we're getting more oxygenated blood to the rest of our body, which increases our decision-making and our ability to see clearly. And so just by simply looking at something and something that would, you might be feeling nervous, just reminding and telling yourself to, Hey, this is a challenge. Like, let's go. This is my body telling me I'm ready. What it does is you're going to also change your physiology and change how your body responds yeah and part of this i think that's really interesting is that you're talking about you know when the batter's walking up to the batter's box uh that's all in game or in season uh one of the things that uh is fascinating about

sports specifically is there's kind of a start and an end date to the season so you can take a player and say hey you've really got to be at the top of your mental game you've got to kind of do all the physiological things to make sure that you're putting yourself in the best position you've got to control your breath like all of these things you're talking about and you're going to do that from the start of the season to the end of the season when the off season comes is there still a like very fanatical focus on doing those same things and so it's kind of like you never let your guard down you kind of stay on edge and kind of have that advantage or do you find that actually um this is somewhat laborious for uh athletes to do and so therefore like they

almost want to break in the off season and they kind of go away and you've got to almost build the muscle back up, you know, similar to weightlifting, for example, some people will go away. And then when they come back, they've actually got to get back in shape a little bit in the preseason. Like how does the in season versus off season work when it comes to mental conditioning and, and kind of mental strength? Yeah, well, I definitely think that there's, you know, it doesn't mean you can't take a break, like during off season, you know, guys usually take, you know, four weeks or, you know, whatever it looks like, depending on your position. Um, and that's okay. You know, taking a break from it all and just, you know, getting

away for a while is fine. However, the way that I look at it is you don't just, you don't just body language. Isn't just for in game, you know, body language does not just exist in baseball or in sports. It exists everywhere. And so I think that the skill of body language doesn't change just because you're in season. I think that there's other ways that you can practice it. So for instance, I, my husband and I like laugh about this because we didn't realize we were both doing this, but, um, we were watching the world series and both of us were getting really nervous. Like, you know, when you're, even when you're watching a movie, like your body responds

as if like you're a part of it. And we were both doing breathing exercises to slow ourselves down. And we, I was like, oh my gosh, we are such nerds, but we, we didn't realize we were both doing it at the same time. What is he? Is he also, uh, in like mental conditioning? no, he's a professional golfer. Okay. All right. So you've just taught him everything. You've just told him everything that he's supposed to be doing. And he listens.

Well, he doesn't really listen to me, but he listens to a lot of my colleagues that are really brilliant. But either way, we were just cracking up. Cause I was like, you do that too. So we practice it in, in things like I now notice when my heart rate goes up and in anything, you know, whether it's getting on a podcast to talk to you or whether it's, I'm about to give presentation or, you know, whether I'm going to play pickup soccer and I haven't touched a ball in six years or whatever it is that for me is it's pressure moments. I'm not just saying the moment in a game. I'm saying pressure moments in general, because that skill is universal, not just in sport, but in life and business and everything. And so I actually, what we do with

our athletes, if they can't play, we find different ways where they can use these techniques, whether it is in the weight room. And one of the ways that we can even do this when you're not, you know, in game is, you know, we may not be able to create the same pressure in terms of a situation, but we can create the same physiological response, meaning they can do a couple sprints and then get in the box. Their heart rate is jacked up. They're having a hard time breathing. So how can you then slow yourself down and get control of that? Even though we're not in a pressure situation, we are having our body act as if it is. And so now we're having to retrain that response. And so I think, you know, a lot of our athletes, they may take some

time off, but they're lifting heavy in the off season. They're getting, this is their time to lift heavy and get strong because they can't lift heavy and during season. So I think this is another aspect where you're still working on it throughout the off season, even as little as what you can and cannot control. I can't control that. I'm, you know, we don't have a season right now. I can't control that. I can't, you know, hit against live pitching, but I can control and then fill in the blank. And so I think that there's a lot of opportunities to still use it and to still build it in the off season. What's the upside of stress? One of the things that is kind of been talked about more and more, I think in the investing and business community,

I'm sure by a couple of books have been written is the upside of stress. How do you think about that in terms of um trying to put athletes in stressful situations intentionally is it using just ones that naturally occur as teaching moments and then kind of what are the conclusions of hey here's the positive sides of going through these stressful moments yeah uh first of all great book uh by kelly mcgonigal the upside of stress love it um i there's so there's a couple things but the way I kind of look at really difficult situations is our life. Like we can't avoid stress. Like a lot of us, like I want to eliminate it. And I'm like, okay, well, sure. You might be able to eliminate some,

but you're not going to eliminate all. And so I actually think our, a lot of our time is wasted. I'm trying to like eliminate it because we're, we're just not going to eliminate everything, every bit of it. So I care more about how our relationship with it, because like if you think about your relationship with you know people we build that when we're around them when we you know we invest time in them and so my question I guess the audience would be what is your relationship with stress do you have a good relationship with stress like

when you are you able to respond well when you're faced with it or do you have a bad relationship do you like retreat do you avoid it do you uh does it impact your ability to do what you do best And so I would say that stress can be really, really good in so many ways, um, because it can really push us past our comfort zone and it can be a really good signal for growth. Um, so I would not, I would never tell anybody to avoid stress. I would just tell them to, to look into like what their relationship is with it. And I think that we, you know, we can't expect athletes or our employees or anybody to respond well when they're under pressure, when they're under stress, when they're faced with adversity or obstacles, if we haven't trained them. Like one of the things I, it makes me laugh every single time. It's like, if you go to like a kid's soccer game and the parents are yelling, like relax,

and you're like never in the history of relaxing, has anyone relaxed because someone screamed at you to relax? Like never. so my question always is how do you have you ever taught them how and the question is usually no or let me sorry the answer is usually no and so i would say your response to stress matters more so if you're somebody that wants to like immediately you want to respond emotionally it's kind of this reactive nature i would actually challenge you to create some space between the stress you're experiencing and your response um again we want to train our response

not necessarily eliminate the trigger, which a lot of times can be stressed. And so a lot of times has to be trained. And again, we can't expect our athletes to perform well under pressure if we're not training them under pressure. So I think it's huge. I think it's a separator when it comes to performance, especially with elite performers. Lauren, I'm laughing because as you were saying, nobody ever relaxed when you told them to relax. I made the mistake one time. I And I said, you know, hey, just relax. And then all of a sudden, everything got ratcheted up a little bit. And I was like, all right, that was good feedback. That will not be that I use again. Do a mental note on that one.

Yeah, I'm well trained on that, on avoiding that exact phrase from now on. We talk a lot about kind of, I think, adults in general, whether it's business investing or professional athletes. I saw a couple of questions that people had around, how does this apply to kids? Especially if you're the parent of a child, the questions were really around kind of like kids in sports, but maybe we can just talk about it broadly. Is it something where like, will you screw up your kid if you try to make them mentally tougher by like doing exercises or like intentionally putting them in certain stressful situations? Or is it actually a positive thing? And it's like, Hey, look, you know, you should start almost conditioning or training your child from a

mental strength and mental resilience standpoint at a young age? Like, how do you look at almost like the child development around some of this stuff and how intentional people should be versus just let it naturally happen? Yeah, that's a really great question. First of all, I would recommend people to check out the book, Parent Pep Talks by my friend, Justin Sua. Great book. It's kind of teaches the parent about mental toughness and then gives really great exercises for you to execute with your child. So really, really great book. Highly recommend. And so, yes, you can totally train your kid, um, starting at a young age, but I think what a lot of people mistake that as is, is that we're just going to push them really hard and we're going to put them

in really tough situations now. Yes. And no, I think one of the biggest thing, pieces of advice, well, people ask me now while I don't have kids, I can, I've seen what it looks like on the other side, meaning when these things aren't implemented, what it looks like at the pro level, when we draft them. And one of the biggest things I tell parents is let your kid fail. Let them fail. I've seen what it looks like when they've never failed before and they get to the pro level. It's not pretty. And it's, it's a huge and very steep learning curve. And so I would say that, you know, if your kid doesn't bring their water bottle to practice, don't bring it to them. They're not going to die. They'll probably ask somebody for a sip of their water and they'll be embarrassed to

do so. And that may be the very thing that will motivate them to remember, oh crap, I got to bring my water bottle. You know, there's those little things. And so I wouldn't say that you need to go out to the field and put them under all this stress and make them feel insanely uncomfortable to where they hate it. The point is for them to enjoy it and to teach them how to cope with the natural things that sport and life offers us by not just trying to say it doesn't exist and take them all away, but teaching them productive ways to cope with it. One of the things that you can do, um, and actually talks about this in the book, parent pep talks is create kind of these controllable sex, successful wins that we talked about earlier when you're in a slump, teaching

them, you know, quality over just the outcome or sorry, um, the quality of what you do things within your control over the outcome, things outside of your control. And so we can do that by creating a visual of this. A lot of our improvements can't be seen immediately, right? When you go out and you go to the gym for five hours, you're still not fit when you walk out, right? When you get fit over time. And so even by creating like even a jar

and every time they do that one thing they said they were gonna do within their control, put a marble in the jar. Over time, it's gonna be a great visual. And there is something about either putting a marble in the jar or X-ing off on the calendar that is insanely motivating because there's nothing more motivating

than seeing ourselves make progress. And so that's a great way when we want to make progress in something that isn't immediately visual is to create a visual around it. Yeah, I love that. Two more questions for you before we go to wrap up.

The first is just, what's the craziest thing that you've had to do with a client? No names, but what's the absolute craziest thing you've had to do to either get them to break out of a slump or overcome some sort of mental burden?

whatever key thing that you just thought that's the one you should definitely say okay well i'm just like oh it's i don't even know if i have anything like incredible for you um i'm trying to think craziest craziest craziest um i mean i've there are a couple things um i've gotten calls in the middle of the game which they should not have their phones um and you know something happened on the field and he got thrown out of a game and ran into the locker room and called me and was in a very heated very frustrated understandably so and but it was like that was not an easy situation to handle because there was a lot of moving pieces there but um i've i've been on like you know i'm watching

the game and so when i'm getting a call i'm like what like why am i getting this call um because it happened in the dugout and the camera wasn't on the dugout. So I didn't see it. Um, so that was, that was really interesting. But, um, in terms of crazy, you know, I don't think they necessarily, like, I don't have these insanely crazy stories. I think that most, the most, I don't know, it's crazy as they come are actually pretty human in terms of when we get to the core of something that is really upsetting to somebody or the core of something that you would have never thought that was the reason behind this action. And I'll give you an example. I had, um, you know, I, within our system, you know, the other mental coaches, you know, in, in the mental conditioning

department could probably attest to this as well. We know all of our guys like very, very well. Like if somebody walked in to a room of all of our guys in our system, we would either be like, we either got even a trade and we haven't heard about it yet. Or like, you shouldn't be here. like, we know every single person that well. And I was at an affiliate and there was this one guy in particular that for whatever reason, it was really short with me whenever I would ask him a question, you know, we're in the dugout with them. And like, you know, not all the time talking about mental toughness, we're talking, just shooting the shit, talking about whatever. And this kid was just really avoidant, like, and I knew him really well and was like answering with really

you the short sentences. And I thought it was really odd. So I immediately, I take the blame and I go, maybe I haven't developed a good enough relationship. So I'm going to spend more time trying to develop that. And it's, man, it's like, no matter how much attention I would try and give that relationship, it was like, kept getting shut down. So I thought, man, maybe I, maybe I said something, you know, I'm not sure, but I wanted to get to the bottom of it because, um, because I've worked with this kid before. So I just want to make sure I didn't offend him in any way. so I went up to him and I actually got to the batting cages early and he uh he he was the only person there so I think it was like his worst nightmare and I walk up and I said you know hey

do you mind if I ask you a question he's like yeah he said um you know I every time I try and talk to you've been really short like you know have I said something to offend you or no is there is there a reason for that um and he's like well not necessarily like I'm it's not because like you haven't said anything, you know, to offend me or anything like that. And I'm like, okay, so what do you think it is? And he kind of quietly goes, you know, well, I just don't think I'm very good at speaking. So whenever somebody of authority talks to me, I just try not to speak. And I was like, interesting. So he met with me a couple of days later to kind of dive a little bit more into it. And what we ended up finding was that in first grade, his teacher

told him he's not good at speaking ever since then he has avoided speaking and so the way I like to break this down is that our beliefs plus our actions drive our identity he believed he wasn't good at speaking every time he didn't speak that action it solidified this identity that I'm not good at speaking. That was built in, that habit was built in since first grade. And we were like, I was like, whoa. And so I think that was crazy to think because I would have never guessed that here I am still self-absorbed thinking like it's me. And it's, and he's, he's dealing with this kind of like inner battle with something that happened in first grade. And so the way that we work through these things is we take the identity. We just

work it backwards we take the identity what what kind of person do you want to become and he's like i want to be the person that isn't afraid to speak in a big group setting and i was like great well then what action do we need to serve do we need to insert there to solidify that identity so that your belief catches up with that and he goes i need to talk more like yep and so that's how we restructured and rebuilt this new belief of himself is taking this identity of who we wanted to become And we supported it with daily actions that then solidified and created this belief. And in that situation, is the kind of like homework coming out of that conversation like, hey, I want you to go up to three strangers every day and go talk to them? Is it, hey, next time that the entire team's in the locker room, I want you to stand up and say something?

Is it kind of like very tactical, specific type of homework, I guess, or kind of assignment? Or is it more so just, hey, you need to now think of yourself as somebody who enjoys speaking. And so when the opportunity presents itself, like we'll leave it up to you, but you need to speak more and then you trust the, um, athlete to kind of, you know, actually put it into practice. Um, I'd say a little bit of both, um, with him in particular, I wanted to hold him accountable and he asked me to. So what we actually did is I set him up for success in our meeting.

So when we had group sessions, I would prompt him with the question before the meeting even started and ask him if it was okay, if I called on him. And so what we did by doing that, it started out that he was, I was putting him in a position to succeed. So that then over time, he got really comfortable being in front of people and saying things because he was getting positive reinforcement. Because it's not like I was calling on him in the middle of nowhere with a question he wasn't ready to talk about. It was, I was setting him up for that. And over time, it really, it got easy to where the point, he didn't need a prompted question. He was raising his hand and he was contributing like everybody

else. Yeah. It's amazing how by changing the identity and then just, again, the persistent and consistent activity of reinforcing it can really have an impact. One last thing I want to talk about before we do the rapid fire to finish up is kind of external forces. So we've talked a lot about kind of internally what you can do, your identity, your actions, kind of everything that I would consider natural and internal. I saw a bunch of questions people had around external forces. So everything from like micro dosing, all the way to like almost having a daily coach that kind of, you know, positive talk to you or whatever. How do you view the internal versus the external? Like, are there external things that you're like, yep, we think that these things are really valuable. And like, we recommend them a lot to clients. Or is it more so like a lot of that stuff is maybe not gimmicks, but just it can supplement the real work, which is more the internal and kind of the almost like self-motivated type work that you've got to do if you want to improve some of this stuff.

Yeah. There's one of the biggest things that I truly believe in is like your environment is kind of like the invisible hand that shapes a lot of our behaviors. And there was actually a study done at a hospital where they wanted to increase the amount of water sales and decrease the amount of soda that was being sold in these sugary drinks. And all they did, didn't tell people they wanted them to buy more water. They didn't promote more water. All they did was they changed the location of the water in the cafeteria of this hospital. And over three months time, they increased water sales by I think 11% and decreased soda sales by a ton. And so

just by simply changing their environment. And I think that's one of the things I call it like kind of feng shui-ing your habits is that we, we change kind of, um, James Clear also talks about this is that when there's a lot of friction, meaning there's a lot of things you have to do in order to execute a habit, the less likely you're going to. So when we can simplify that as best as possible, make it easier to do the good habit and more difficult to do the bad one. What we're doing is we are really designing our habits and our environment in a way that's going to support the things that we want to do without motivation. For instance, like in the, if I have to wake up really early in the morning, I don't even allow myself to have the option of hitting

snooze. I put my phone across the room and I turn it up to the nth degree because it's now easier for me to get up and turn it off than it is to lay in bed and ignore it. And so when we can kind of flip our habits by chain or sorry, flip our environment to support the good habits and make the good ones easy. And the bad ones difficult. What we're doing is we're changing our environment in a way that, that requires less motivation to take action, removing the friction from that. So another example of that is, um, is if you're, if you want to watch less TV, like take the batteries out of the remote, it only takes 10 seconds to put them back in, but you're adding friction. If that doesn't work, then unplug the TV. If that doesn't work, take it off the wall

and put it in the closet. Again, all that setup only takes five minutes. Well, depending on the size TV you have, I guess. But what you're doing is you're making the good habit easy, which is not watching TV, and the bad habit more difficult. So I think that we can really use environment design to really support our habits and our daily actions every day. yeah and you know in the kind of mobile social world right literally seeing people just say hey look i'm gonna shut off notifications right or i'm gonna put my phone and use it on desktop or whatever so i definitely think that uh that applies to everyone's life or whatever they're trying to accomplish um before we wrap up i always ask everyone the same two questions that you're

going to ask me one to finish up uh the first is what is the most important book that you've ever read most important book um can't hurt me by david goggins hands down one of my favorites he is a uh a very special person especially when it comes to this stuff very what do you think the biggest thing you've learned from him is um i think that it's just this idea that like you can override your default settings no matter where you're where your starting line is and so i think for me like he is such a good example of that is that there are these default settings but it's all it takes is sometimes a mindset shift um to be able to do that not easy it's it sometimes is simple but a lot of times isn't easy so i think it's just overriding the defaults yeah that's

fantastic uh the second question is more fun uh aliens are you a believer or a non-believer believer why i think it's crazy to i i think it would be wild to believe that we are the only things that exist in just the universe i think that it would be i don't know i just don't i don't know that's that's that's really all i've got like i don't have anything else behind it except that i think it's wild to think that we are the only life on earth or like on in this universe i agree with you uh i don't know if there's green men showing up but uh there's definitely intelligent life somewhere. It's too big. So we're, we see eye to eye on that. Um, you can ask me one question to finish up. What do you got for me? Oh, I want to know what is, what has been your biggest

obstacle? What was your biggest obstacle? And I've kind of two, a two part question, biggest obstacle and greatest takeaway from 2020. Um, the biggest obstacle, uh, I was very fortunate in this scenario. So it's easy for me to talk about because I kind of was able to sidestep it. So I was in the military, deployed overseas to Iraq in 2008, 2009. And when I came back, this is right about the time where the military started to really understand like, oh, shoot, maybe we're not doing a great job of helping people transition back. And there's lots of PTSD and kind of just the mental scars of sending young people to war. And so I always say that like I kind of had a escalation and a de-escalation from a mental perspective in that I went from

being a regular person to I was playing college football. I got deployed in my junior year of college. And so I went from this environment of like all dudes, you literally like put a uniform on and then you go to quote unquote, like combat on a football field. And so you're like literally physically running into each other. It's very testosterone heavy kind of competitive environment to then like, I went to war and like, same thing, lots of dudes, you know, uniforms, testosterone heavy combative type environment, just there's guns and you know, there's no whistles or time outs or anything like that. When I came back, most of the people who had been deployed with, they went back to their jobs. Literally like there was people I knew that were law enforcement,

prison guards. Uh, one guy worked at a hardware store. Another guy literally was a fish and wildlife, you know, park ranger, like all of these guys were going back to kind of normal day jobs or going back to live with their wives and their kids to pay their mortgage. And it's just a very kind of, I think, disruptive experience to kind of live your life, go deployed, come back and not have a de-escalation as well. And so for me, I went back and I had the opportunity to finish playing football. And so again, it went from like a semi-combative type environment to war back into that semi-combative environment and then back to kind of being a normal person that wasn't playing a competitive sport. And so I always credit, uh, that transition. There was no master plan. I

didn't understand that that's what was happening, but in hindsight, I think that really helped me kind of transition back was, uh, you know, they kind of took the guns away, but there was still the uniform. There was still that testosterone driven combative, uh, type environment. Um, and so I think a lot about like, uh, everything is relative, right. Of like, yeah, sure. I went back into kind of the quote unquote normal world. It's just the environment I went into was probably much more advantageous for me than if I had just been a 21 year old kid who just got thrown back into the real world. Um, you know, I was already doing some pretty stupid stuff in terms of, you know, bought a motorcycle and go a hundred miles an hour and say, well, you know, find a diet war,

like, you know, whatever here. Um, but, uh, having that transition, I think was really helpful. um and then for 2020 uh i think that really the thing that um kind of just got hammered home is like nobody knows the future like literally nobody knows the future and it seemed like every time uh something crazy happened it'd be like oh man how much crazier could it get and then like literally like within 12 hours like something even crazier would happen um and so if you even look at like 2021 i think a lot of people have this like psychological okay we made it through 2020, like take a deep breath, like it's over. And there was definitely this like turning of the page. And then like, we're six, seven days into 2021. And now you're like, wait a minute,

is 2021 going to be even wilder than last year? And so it's just like, you can't control this stuff. And a lot of what you started off the conversation around just like your ability to adapt to the things that happen are really important. And I'll leave you with this one controversial topic that I've talked about online ad nauseum. And people hate when I say this, uh, but I say it because it's true is I don't believe in luck. And when I say that people are like, well, what do you mean you don't believe in luck? And I say, well, we confuse the mathematical concept of randomness with the psychological concept of luck. And I always use the extreme example of like, if somebody goes to war and they lose their arm and leg, a lot of people be like,

man, that was really unlucky. But if you talk to that person, they'll say, no, I'm lucky. Like I'm alive. And so luck is really a mental perspective on an event that happened, right? The reason why that person lost their arm and leg, there's a sense of randomness, right? Are they the one who sat in that seat versus somebody else? Are they the one that was in that vehicle versus a different vehicle, right? And so I think that when you start to really unpack kind of the mathematical concept from the psychological concept, you realize, and there are studies that show, like, you actually can change your luck simply by changing the way you view the events that happen.

Sounds really stupid. Sounds like, oh, of course, then why aren't we all lucky all the time? but I do think that there's, you know, a lot of truth in that. And so it kind of just puts you back in the control seat a little bit and say, look, you can't predict the future. You can't control the things that happen, but you can control how you respond to them. And I think that that's kind of, you know,

really what it sounds like you spend most of your day trying to hammer home to a lot of these athletes and clients. Like exactly. Like it couldn't, I couldn't even say it better myself. I think, you know, just to like round all that out, it was that mental toughness. It doesn't make you invincible. It makes you adaptable. It makes you, it allows you to see things from different perspectives. When you get dealt a crappy hand of cards, you have the opportunity to see it one way or the other way. When my parents got

divorced, I could have, you know, when I look back, I, you could, I could tell you how horrible it was and all the bad things, but I can also tell you all the good things that came from it. You know, the, every, every bad moment we can learn something from. And I think all that comes down to is this power of choice that we have. And that's what I think mental toughness provides is it provides us more choices and more choices to adapt versus just to, I guess, fall victim to some of the default settings. Absolutely. It makes a ton of sense. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? I know you've been creating a ton of content. You've got a newsletter that's coming out. Where do we want to send them to find you and learn more

about some of the work that you're doing? So you can find me on Instagram. And when I got married last year, I changed my name from a Barka, which was my maiden name to now Johnson. Turns out there's a lot of Lauren Nicole Johnson's in this world. So all my handles are different. Um, I wish they weren't, but, uh, my Instagram handle pay attention is Lauren Nicole Johnson. Uh, Twitter is at underscore Lauren Johnson underscore, and then you can find me on LinkedIn. And I just, I'm a shout out to Ari Lewis for, uh, inspiring me to get a Tik TOK. Um, it's at Lauren Johnson with an extra N at the end, I believe. Okay.

Good luck. I got it. When you create content, what platform do you think first to post it? Is it Instagram? Twitter. Twitter. Yeah, Twitter and LinkedIn, actually.

Those are my top two. And then I usually go Instagram and then TikTok. And like you said, I am in the midst of creating a newsletter. And so if you want to sign up for that ahead of time, you can at any of my links on my Twitter and my Instagram and my link tree. Awesome. All right. Well, listen, I really, really appreciate this, Lauren. I think people are going to learn a ton from it. So thanks so much for doing it. Let's do it again in the future.

Yeah, I'd love that. Thanks for having me.