The Resilient Mind - You Learned to Survive | Now It’s Time to Lead - Lee Povey (Olympic Coach)

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

Watch the full video interview on the new Resilient Mind YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkri_GtWkKMIs the idea of the "self-made" person a complete myth? What if resilience, not intelligence, is the true key to success for both Olympic athletes and billion-dollar startup founders?In this powerful episode of The Resilient Mind, we sit down with Lee Povey, an elite performance coach who has mentored both Olympic athletes and top-tier founders. Lee dismantles the myth of the "self-made person" and reveals the psychological frameworks that separate the good from the truly great. He provides practical, actionable tools to help you rewire your brain, build psychological safety, and transform your relationship with stress.Whether you're a leader, an entrepreneur, or simply someone looking to build unshakable mental resilience, this conversation is packed with game-changing insights.Connect With Lee:Website: https://www.leepovey.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leepovey/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leepoveycoaching/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leepovey/----------Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_Journal Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind Podcast. In this episode, you'll be listening to You Learn to Survive. Now it's time to lead with Lipavi. This episode is also available in video. Watch it on YouTube by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. I sold my business a month before it was worthless. Wow.

We need to do it all on our own. We need to figure out everything on our own. This myth of the self-made person, it's utter BS. These athletes or these entrepreneurs, they build a team around them and actually shape the environment. In business, I think your resilience is more important than your outright intelligence. You find that some leaders have got common barriers, maybe resistances to look internally and be like, I'm the problem. I've met many athletes that were good enough to go to the Olympics. What they didn't have was the other two components.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that concept? There's no funding for Olympic sports in America. All of these organizations have to fund them themselves. There's no government funding for it. You've got to have the right kind of support behind you. You would be amazed at the crossover between elite athletes and founders. Welcome lead to the Resilient Mind podcast. We are super excited to have you as one of our guests here.

Hey. Good morning, Simba. Morning. So maybe let's start from the beginning. you are an Olympic or used to be an Olympic athlete, and now you coached your Olympians. How did you get started in that journey? Yeah, so actually I've not been an Olympic athlete myself.

I never went to the Olympics. I've worked at an Olympics, and I've coached athletes that have become Olympians. I, as a young man, was pretty talented at sport. So I was doing rugby, swimming, and track cycling. And track cycling was my dad's sport. So that was the one I was kind of most interested. in as a kid and my first part of that journey was I want to beat my dad.

So luckily for me, my dad wasn't actually that good. So I beat him when I was 12 and then it's like, okay, now I need some bigger goals. I ended up getting on to the national team and realized that I wasn't quite good enough. I was good at national level, but I wasn't going to go and win the Olympics. And especially at that time in the UK, there was no funding for sport. This was before a big rollout of funding for sport that happened in late 9. 90s, this was the early 90s, and I realized I couldn't make a career out of it. So I actually went into real estate instead. And I worked for a large corporate company. And then I opened my own

real estate business. And the money was great. Yeah, I never really felt fulfilled. I didn't really love it. And I started competing again myself. I wanted to get fit again. So I started competing again myself. And a little bit of an interesting story. Somebody wants. wandered into my office and said, I want you to coach me. And I said, well, I don't coach. And I'm not even competing anymore. And he said, well, I've heard you the best local guy and I want to do this sport and I want you to coach me and basically badgered me until I would start training with him. And that kind of got me back into training. And it was really, it was great. It was really helpful. And then I started coaching some of the younger riders at the Velodrome who were good at what I did,

which was track sprinting, which is kind of a smaller part of the sport. And From there, I was sitting at European Championships in Germany, watching one of the athletes compete. And I thought, I don't want to go back to the office next week. I don't want to be a real estate agent anymore. So I sold my business. I got very lucky. This was in December 2007.

And I'm not sure you're old enough, Simby, you look. You're a very fresh face. But this was a time when it was a huge property crash in the UK. And that happened in January 2008. So I sold my business a month before it. was worthless. So I got incredibly lucky. And then I transitioned from that to full-time sports coaching, had a wonderful career in that, ended up being the national team coach USA Cycling for their track sprint Olympic development program. And then COVID came and everything stopped. The Velodrome that

I worked out of was closed for over a year. USA Cycling said, we're going to pause all of our programs. So I had to pivot again and that's how I pivot to what I do now, which is founder and lead leadership capture. Fascinating. And it sounds like, again, you've been changing and transitioning different career paths as you've, as kind of as, as you've been progressing through life. And with the coaching, so going back to some of the athletes that you coach, what are some of the success measures that makes a great athlete or a high achiever? And what are some of the common barriers that made prevent someone from being a high achiever. Yeah.

So I've always thought there's three parts to athletic success. Number one is physical talent. You just can't get there without physical talent. And interestingly, in my experience, is actually more people physical talent than you realize. You know, we think that kind of Olympic talent is rare. And I've met many athletes that were good enough to go to the Olympics. What they didn't have was the other two components. You know, and one of those is that mental aptitude, fortitude, drive, and resilience.

And, you know, what somebody like Angela Duckworth, the writer of the book, Grip would determine as grit, that kind of just dogged ability to keep moving forwards. And then the last one is environment. So you've got to have the right kind of support behind you. You've got to live in the right place. You know, take my sport, track sprint cycling. you have to live near a velodrome to be successful at it. And there's only a limited number of velodromes in the world.

So if you don't live within a reasonable distance of a velodrome, it's unlikely you'll be exposed to the sport, and it's unlikely you'd be able to do it to a high level. And then you've got to live somewhere where there's a good enough coach that's going to get you to the level. And then you've got to hope that in your country there's a program that supports you. That was one of the issues here in America.

There's no funding for Olympic sports in America, all of these organizations have to fund them themselves. There's no government funding for it. And that actually means a lot of Olympic sports America is behind other countries in the world because we don't have that high level of funding. And then you've got to have the family system that supports you and helps you. And in my experience, if you don't have those three things, it's pretty hard to go on to be an Olympic level.

And I've met many athletes that have one or two of them that didn't go on to be Olympians because you need all three of those typically to succeed. And are those three components the same for startup founders or entrepreneurs? Yeah, you would be amazed at the crossover between elite athletes and founders. You know, we're talking highly driven people that are typically very resilient because you're going to get a lot of nose in life. You're going to have a lot of issues. You're going to have a lot of injuries.

you're going to have a lot of setbacks. You're going to have people that tell you you can't do it. You're going to have people that say, I'm not going to lend you money. This isn't a good idea. And you have to bounce back up and try again, or you have to adapt and do something differently. So there's a big crossover,

and it's why we often see successful athletes or maybe not even Olympians, but high-level amateur athletes do very well in business because that resilience, that ability to endure is super useful. And actually in business, I think your resilience is more important than your outright intelligence.

The ability to keep doing something and to get back up and to adapt is, I think, actually the most important thing for success. And then there's some luck. And, you know, there's luck in sport too. So we go back to those three things of, were you born in the right place? Were you born to the right parents? It's exactly the same for founders. Were you born in an environment that gave you an opportunity?

Were you born in Silicon Valley in America? Because if you were, you've immediately got a better chance of success than somebody who wasn't. That doesn't mean you can't succeed. It just means you're more likely to. So luck plays a part of this as well. But yeah, I see massive crossovers between them and really just high performing people. And one of the things I typically encountering the highest performing people is an ability to reinvent themselves. So an ability to go, okay, this isn't working.

How will I do this differently? and ability to get people around them that are going to support them. I first saw this with high-level athletes. They would bring people in strength and conditioning coaches, psychological coaches, sports scientists, technique coaches like myself. And they would bring everybody together and form this team. And that's what I see with the founders I work with. And that's why I love the jobs that I do,

which is actually to help those founders work more effectively with those people. So my favorite type of work is where I'm coaching multiple people in the same organization on how to be more effective with each other. And I love the complexity of helping everybody understand each other and then have empathy, compassion, understanding for how that person works and what motivates them and then bringing that all together. And I love what you're saying because I think there's this idea that we need to do it all on our own. We need to figure out everything on our own, right? Whether it's a founder or we like, like you're working in like in a high stress environment. It's almost like we feel like we don't want to ask for help. But what you're saying is these athletes or these entrepreneurs,

they build a team around them and actually shape the environment so that they can achieve the outcome that they want to achieve. And so are there any steps to building the right team or getting the people around you so you can start changing that environment? Yeah, great question. I want to take one step back, though, because I really liked what you said there to begin that statement and that question of this myth of the self-made person. It's utter BS, Simba. I've yet to meet anybody who's successful who's a self-made person.

And that doesn't mean that you can't come from poverty and become successful because that is possible. There is many people in your life that are part of that, whether it be a teacher that sees something in you. encourages you to do it, whether it would be a friend or a mentor or a parent or a parent's friend. And then it's the team that you build around you, as you said, that then enables you to be brilliant. We see because of ego and because of narcissism, people kind of claiming success, especially some of the successful people, yet there is always a team around it. Nobody can do it by themselves. It's impossible. You just can't. So then, you know, what do we do to build these teams? I was listening to an interview with one of the founders of Instagram,

and he said he believed his job as a founder and CEO is to find people that were smarter than him and then enable them to take over control and responsibility for areas of his business. And that's exactly how I think of it. I think your job as a CEO is not to be the smartest person in the room, even though typically the people like coach are the smartest person in the room and are incredibly capable, it's how do they let go of that and instead trust other people. And that's usually the hardest thing for very brilliant people is to trust other people

and that they might do it differently from you. They might do it a different way from you. I was doing a coaching session with a really incredible founder yesterday whose business is probably going to sell for some multiple of a billion dollars at some point in the next 12 months. and he was talking about how he's CMO, he's chief marketing officer. He doesn't understand how he does what he does, but he hits the sales target every quarter. And he's saying to me like, how do I let go? I've wanted him to do it my way when this guy's being successful. And he does it completely differently to what I would.

And he's successful. And we're working on like how he lets go and how he just keeps empowering this person to do what they're already doing and to recognize them. And a lot of this Simba comes from, what was our upbringing? How did we move through the world as a child? What are the genetic personality gifts that we had? And then how did the world meet us? And then we grow up and we keep acting out that family system in other systems.

So often when I'm in these businesses, I'm watching leaders act out the family system that they did with their parents and their siblings and their schoolmates. And if a leader came from like a family system that was not, adapted in terms of forming those relationships and achieving like great outcomes, how do they start becoming aware of how the environment when they're growing up might be influencing how they are showing up and how they are leading now? So we are all influenced by our environment. If we think of this in two ways. So we come to the world with certain genetic personality traits. And I watched my mom

foster 100 high-risk kids over a 10-year period. So I got up front to watch the nature versus nurture debate. And that made me particularly interested in it done a ton of studying in the net. And any parent will tell you, you can have two siblings with completely different personality traits that are living in the same family system. So we are absolutely born with certain personality traits. And then we come into the world and the world meets those personality traits and the biggest influence on them is our family because we spend typically the most time with them. And as children, if you're lucky enough to have a mum and dad, mum and dad are your example of a man and a woman. So you are most influenced by what that vision is. And there's lots of

different ways it can go. So you talk about adaptability. You might have a parent who is very unadaptable, that hates change, that is very rigid. And your adaption as a child might be to go in completely the opposite direction and go, I'm open for anything and I love spontaneity and I'll try anything. So just because your family system is one way, it doesn't mean that you will, however, you might have a reaction to it. And then the gift is, are you aware of your reaction? So what often surprises people when I start first start working with them is they'll get me in and they say, right, I've got this executive and I'm struggling to deal with them. And the first work we'll do will be, okay, tell me about you. Tell me about your upbringing. Let's

figure out you because what matters is how do you relate to them and then how can you relate to them in a different way that's going to be more effective. So I often get asked a question, Simba, what is my version of great leadership? You know, what do I think makes you a great leader? And I think there's two things. The first one is you are able to adapt yourself to the people that you are leading. So you don't show up as the same version of you to everybody. A big red flag for me is when I hear leaders or, you know, so-called experts on podcast saying, here's my leadership style or here's the best leadership style. There's no such thing. Everybody needs to be approached in a different way. So for me, the great leaders are adaptable. They know how to speak to the person

they're speaking to. And that can be tone of voice. That can be pace of speech. That can be so many different things. It can be understanding who needs a bit more of a hug and an arm round, them metaphorically speaking. It can be that person. You've got to get into the room and be high energy with and say, right, let's do this. And the best leaders by far are the ones I think are the most adaptable. And that comes from a strong sense of self. They really understand themselves and they understand who am I and why do I react the way I do? And then they're able to take that, put it to one side and meet that person where they're at. You find that some leaders have got common barriers, maybe resistances to look internally and be like, I'm the problem, where you're

when they first meet you? Or do you find that a lot of leaders are just open to that feedback? I think there's a bit of both, Timber. Typically, people want it to be somebody else's fault, right? It's not my fault. It's somebody else's fault that we're not succeeding. And then the smart leaders quite quickly take responsibility and go, oh, I see how I'm involved here.

I see my part in this. I see how I need to adapt or I need to change or I need to grow and learn. So I think it's a combination of, you know, usually if I'm called in, it's because they want me to fix something to begin with. That's where it starts, right? Okay, things aren't working like we want. Or typically with my clients, they're very, very smart people who have created something brilliant and is successful, a service, a product. But they're fairly new at leading. And they haven't come through leadership in a typical way.

So they didn't work for a corporate company. They didn't get that training that, let's say I was very new. very lucky to get. As a young man, I worked for a large real estate company. I had a fantastic manager. In fact, a number of fantastic managers and area directors that taught me so much about leadership. There was a lot of training in the company. So I've got that good foundation and leadership very early in life. Plus, I have a natural aptitude for leader. I've always been that person that likes to step up to take responsibility. And then I see these brilliant founders, typically in their kind of late 20s to early 40s, who may not have been through that model.

And suddenly they're in charge of 20, 30, 40, 50, maybe 100 people. And they're going, Lee, I know how to do the thing, right, to create the business, to make the product, to do the service, to do the marketing. I don't understand these human beings. Can you help me with that? Can you help me understand the things that make me be successful, the things that are going to ultimately lead to my success? And in my experience, you can have the best ideas in the world.

the best product in the world. If you don't have the right team around it, it will fail. So it always comes down to the human being. And so there's that moment where leaders, founders have that realization of, oh, I need to understand humans better if I want to be really successful. That's when they call me in. And how does identity play into this in terms of how people see themselves? It's everything. You know, it is everything. I've got founders that need to be the hero. And if they're not being the hero, they really struggle because their identity as a kid was I need to be the hero. And that doesn't work well as a leader. A leader needs to step back and empower other people to be the hero and to be the stars at time. So we identify that at the beginning

of the process as we're kind of helping them figure out who they are. And you know, how coaching works. Let me give you a quick of my coaching at least and how I believe coaching works is. I come to you and I say, what is it you want to achieve? What are we here for? What are your goals? And then we figure out where you are now. And the coaching is what needs to change for you to get from where you are now to to where you want to get to. And during that process, they might have an idea if it's one thing that's holding them back or it's this. And then we uncovered that it's probably not what they thought. And it's a multitude of things. And we start to address those and work on those. And they get this higher level of self-awareness. And this was the same attitude I took as a cycling coach. My job is to put myself

out of a job as a coach. I want you as an athlete to be so well prepared for the Olympic Games that if I got food poisoning on the day of the Olympic Games and I couldn't be at the Velodrome with you standing next to you, you're going to perform just as well as if I wasn't there. So there's a lot of self-reflection. There's a lot of teaching people to be able to evaluate themselves, to be able to understand what's going on for them, to be able to locate themselves emotionally and go, oh, fill in anger right now, what is this anger telling me? So when I work with my clients, especially men, because they've been told emotions are bad, don't have them, don't be a pussy, don't be weak, all of that kind of rubbish that we get told as young men, especially athletic young men, that actually emotions

that is data. What does my fear tell me? Okay, it tells me that there's something important to me that I need to prepare for. Am I doing that correctly? And what can I let go off, right? I, I can't control over the outcomes. What can I let go of? What can I trust? I will be okay, whatever happens. So working with people to kind of understand themselves on that level, their own upbringing, how it's impacting them.

And then just their survival system. How does my brain react to all of these triggers in the world? And then how do I take conscious control rather than being a reactive human being? And that is a game changer. Once we understand why do I react, how do I react? and how would I like to consciously choose to be instead, life becomes very different for us. And for someone who's thinking about rewiring or changing their identity, right? The first part is self-awareness.

What sort of strategies or things can they do to start reshaping some of those patterns? Yeah, great question. Do you mind if I do a little bit of teaching? Go ahead, I'm ready. Okay, right. So this is how I see the world and this is how I see human beings. there's three parts to our brain. So there is the emotional part. We could call that the childlike part, the reactive part, the instinctive part. And this is the fastest part of our brain and this is the part of our brain that reacts first.

So if we put this back into tribal times, we're walking across a plane, a lion comes out, and we've got four choices. And we still respond like this because evolution hasn't caught up with how much, like, less dangerous the world is for us now. So the responses are we can run away. So that is flight. We can stay still and I hope it doesn't notice us. That's freezing. We can feed it that's fallen in or we can engage it and we can fight. Okay, I'm going to fight and I'm going to beat you. So we get these four automatic responses and that's decided instantly by our brains, bang, whatever it thinks is going to keep us alive in the moment. And in the modern world, we still respond like that when we get a text that says we need to talk. And we go, oh, do I am I going to fight with

this person? Do I need to run away? And I ignore this text. Or do I need to message you and say, oh, are you okay? Is there anything I can do for you? Or do we ignore it? And that's our choices. And then with this becomes an emotional response. So we get that text. We need to talk. It could be fear. You know, it could be joy. You could, oh, I haven't spoken to this person for a while. I'm excited to speak to them. It could be anger. Like, what do they want? Why are they bothering me? And we have this emotional response that goes with it. And then hopefully we acknowledge that. We experience it. We don't try to hide it. We go, okay, we get curious. And that moves it from this emotive part of our brain to the executive functioning conscious part of our brain where we ask questions.

Oh, I'm curious what this text might be about. And here we have to be a little bit careful because what we can do is start writing stories. And this is what I work with my clients a lot. So the story might be, oh, this person's upset with me. I'm in trouble. We don't know that because all the text says is we need to talk. And in my experience, most of the times I've got a text saying we need to talk. It's about the other person, nothing to do with me. They just want to have a conversation like, hey, Lee, can you help me with this? Or this happened? What do you think? And they typically does want to vent or get some support. But our brains are desired to protect us. So, our brains go, oh, how do I protect myself? And actually, as adults, we don't typically need to do that.

We do as children, but not as adults. So as adults, what we want to do is move to that conscious executive thought that goes, I'm curious as to what's going to happen. I'm not going to write this story. I'm not going to make things up that may or may not be true. I'm just going to be curious. I'm going to wait. And I'm going to then see that person and say, I'm here. How can I support you? And then the last thing is we have this computer, memory, reactive part of our brain that typically, if we can't involve our conscious part of our brain, we go from the emotional part to the computer. So to give an example, we're driving down the road, somebody cuts us up, we flip on the bird. That is our stored emotional response of, fuck you, right? Here you go.

I'm angry with you. And it's instant. And again, we want to rewire that, as you said, and that's such a good way to look at it. We are rewiring these neural pathways. That is literally what's happening. To go to, I want to be curious. Why did that happen? Is that person in trouble?

Is their partner? They're rushing them to the hospital if they'd just been fired. There could be so many reasons, and it's typically not about me. They're not trying to kill me or upset me or ruin my dad. So how can I move to being curious instead? and bypass that immediate reactive response of this is what I do in this situation. We want to rewire that to curiosity, to stay and open. And a lot of that's about safety, Simba.

It's feeling safe that whatever happens, I will be okay. So whatever anybody says to me on that phone call, when they text me and say, we need to speak, I'm going to be okay, I'm going to be safe. And the problem for human beings is, and this is what comes up a lot for us, is we are hardwired for connection. Because going back again to those tribal walking across the plain lion days, if you are ostracized from the community, you died. You needed community to survive. And in this modern world, we don't need it in the same way physically, but we do need it emotionally.

We are emotionally driven animals that need connection. So anything that to us feels like it's threatening our connection or our connection to the group and being in the group feels like a life or death threat. And that's how our body and brain respond. So it's just having this awareness of here's my system. Here's how I respond. And when we look at that fight, flight, freeze and foreign system, typically we have a way of responding that's for us. Some people freeze. Some people run away.

We've all got those friends that when stuff gets difficult, they're disappearing. Where did they go? right and then the other ones that just want to make everybody happy they're forning right they're trying to feed the lion they're like what can i do for you and it's going to be okay and they need to make everything okay and then like i was when i was younger the fighters and it wasn't so much physically but i would engage with you verbally and i'd be like all right come on then let's go let's have that argument and that doesn't serve me well as an adult so i have to have control of that is this something i want to have an argument about is this about me is it worth it

there. And I now think, how do I want to be most effective? And that's what really helps me is, how do I want to be the most effective version of me and to be the most effective version of me and to get the outcomes I want for me and the other person? So the wind for all, which is what I'm always trying to do, I have to go, what's going on for me first, and then how can I be there for this other person? And one of the things you're talking about was psychological safety. Yeah. And is that something that we can build for ourselves or is it a combination of we can work with our internal like mental systems but we also need to have an environment around to help foster that safety? Both. And I mean really it's all internal because bar being in this situation where somebody's

pulled a gun on you or pulled a knife on you or it's threatening to physically harm you, you're likely to be safe. So the amount of situations that we encounter as adult human beings where are unsafe these days in the modern world is pretty small. So the safety part of it is really your interpretation of the situation. It's your brain going, I feel unsafe, when in reality, it's not unsafe. So it's how do we acknowledge that initial emotional reaction and then go, okay, I hear you, little child inside that screaming this feels unsafe. And actually as adult, I can give you a little hug and saying, no, we're going to be okay, and this isn't really that bad. And just because somebody wants to have a conversation with this doesn't mean we're going to die. But that's what that little

child feels. So it's how we relate to it that is the most important thing. And then, of course, choosing to be in environments and groups to trigger that system less is going to make it easier for us. You know, we might work in an environment where we've got a boss that's very aggressive and shouts the whole time and is kind of loud and takes up a lot of room and there's a lot of arm movements and stuff. And for somebody that's more sensitive, that's just not going to be a safe environment. For somebody who's maybe more resilient, done more work, or just didn't have that in their childhood, that might not be so threatening. They might be able to just ignore that and go, that's Bob, that's just the way he is, I'm not going to let that land on me. So I think knowing

yourself and knowing what environments you can be in and what you can't, I'm autistic, something I've only very recently found out. However, I've known my entire life, how that affects me is I don't like being in chaotic environments, loud environments. So, you know, as a young man, I would go nightclubbing with my friends and I would be standing back out of the way, observing it and enjoying observing it, but I didn't want to be in the middle. I didn't really like being in the middle of the dance floor or next to the loud speakers or around people that were very drunk. I didn't know why, but I knew that I didn't like it.

Whereas now I don't even put myself in those situations. You're not going to get me nightclub in. I'm not going to, it'd be rare for me to go to a concert. And if I did, I want to sit down and be comfortable and I can enjoy the music as long as it's not too loud. And I'm probably going to wear some headphones or earplugs and just knowing how to control the environment so that I can feel okay. And so much of it is this exploration of self. And I word that very carefully. I don't say self-exploration because you need another person to do it with you.

It would be a therapist, a coach, friends, a group. I run men's groups and we do a lot of great work in those because it's very difficult for us to see the things that we can't see about ourselves. You know, Carl Young would call this your shadow. This is the parts of you that affect your behavior. But typically we don't like them about ourselves. And we kind of hide them. It's called the shadow. It's kind of here behind you and it's this bit about you that you're like, oh, I don't really like that.

I don't like that about myself. However it affects how you behave and how you see the world. And connecting one of the things you had said earlier, like we have an event, we have a response to it. One of the things when I was studying some of your work was you talk about content versus context, when people are communicating, and that we tend to get so stuck on the content

without considering the broader context. Can you tell us a little bit more about that concept? I believe you have a name for it as well. So yeah, thank you for asking that question. So I really like this model content and context, and it really helps us understand how the world works and how we work. So I'm going to use an example. We agree to meet for dinner and we say we're going to meet at 6 o'clock. And I turn up at 6 o'clock and you don't turn up until 6.15.

And I'm sitting there and I'm writing all of these stories in my head about, oh, you don't care. I'm sitting here. I look foolish. I'm by myself. And then you turn up and you go, this isn't a big deal. you're 15 minutes late, it's a bit of traffic. Then we start arguing about 15 minutes. That's the content. So we're arguing about the details. Is 15 minutes late or not? Is it a big deal or not? And the actual context is, what did I need? I needed you to be on time because when you weren't

on time, it felt like you didn't care for me. It felt like I wasn't important to you. And you, the need for you, the context for you might be, well, I'm really busy. And you don't. don't know how busy I am. And just for me to be able to see you, it's like hard for me. And I've got 17 kids at home, and I've got all of these work things I've got to do. And typically what we don't do is stop and go, what is the need for you as a human being right now? And I might say, hey, I'm curious. I hear it was busy. But what's going on for you? It's unlike you to be 15 minutes. Like, what's going on, Simba? And you might say, oh, I'm feeling lots of stress. And, you know, home life is really busy and work is really busy. And then we can actually have a

conversation about what really matters. And then you might say to me, I'm sorry, I was late, mate, like, what's going on for you? And I could be like, well, I'm feeling lonely at the moment. And then when you turn up 15 minutes late, it makes me feel even smaller and less important. And it makes me feel even lonelier. So then we're having conversations about what we actually need, rather than focusing on this content. And we see this so much. We see it, especially in romantic relationships, but we see it in friendships. We see it in work relationships. So my encouragement is always, if you find yourself arguing about something and you're not even sure why you're so angry about that thing, it usually means you need to step out of that and go,

what is it I actually need? Or what is it the other person actually needs? And me and my wife have really been playing with this, because we will have these arguments about silly little things. Like she's not great at closing cupboards and I get really annoyed about it. And when I started to stop and go, what's going on for you? Her brain is quite chaotic. And she's just, like, well, I'm thinking about all these different things and I don't know what to do, and then I forget that halfway through it, so I forget to close the cupboard. So then what we do is I stop and I go, okay, what's your list? What do you need to get worked through?

And she can then calm down and she can work through a list. And you know what, Simba? I can just close a cupboard door. If I understand it's not about me, she's not leaving it open because she's lazy or she doesn't care. She's leaving it open because she's got a million tabs open in her brain that she wants to deal with and she can't deal with them all at the same time. and her brain doesn't work like mine.

Mine has this list. This is what's number one in the list. Get it done. This is what's number two. Here's all of these things open at the same time. And she's going bang, bang, bang, bang like this from one to one. So just having those conversations allows us to understand the other person more. And we can let go of so much of these little things that really don't matter and focus more on.

What do we need from each other as human beings? And how does that tie into emotional regulation or the stress response? Because I'm assuming there needs to be some level of regulation to be able to create that space. Yeah. So going back to what we were talking about before with this fight, flight, freedom, faun system. So you turn up late. That system gets activated. I want to have a fight with you because that's my response.

Right. Let's argue. And that takes us out of curiosity. So I think if we always think about how could I be curious instead of rather than how can I move to blame or to judgment, How can I be curious? What is going on for that other person? What is going on for me? Okay, I feel let down. What does that mean? Oh, I'm used to that. My dad never showed up to watch me do anything. Oh, that's why that one hurt so much, right? Oh, I get it. And then when it happens with other people, I might have an outsized response to that because that is already a wound for me. So me knowing the things

are likely to trigger me, being aware of them, seeing them and going, this person, my one, wife always shows up for me. My friends are very good at showing up for me. So if one of my friends 15 minutes late, it isn't about me. I think the more we can move through the world going, this is not about me. It's about the other person, the years your life becomes. And one of my best mates when we were younger was dating this girl, and we must have been in our early 20s. And she said to me at the time, I believe everybody is doing the best they can with what they had. And it's probably taking me 20 years to fully understand it. It impacted me at the time, but it's probably taking me 20 years to really get to. We have a toolkit as a human being. And some toolkit's are bigger than others. And some people know how to

use their tools and don't know how to use their tools. And most people, if we take out the, you know, the malignant narcissist and the sociopath, which is like 5% of society, most people are really doing the best they can. They're not deliberately trying to harm you or to make your life worse. They're just doing the best they can. If we have that attitude, it becomes much easier to have empathy of, I wonder why this person's toolkit might be a bit limited. I wonder why they don't know how to use their tools. And this is where people like me come in. My job is to expand your toolkit and to make you an expert at using those tools. And what is one tool or maybe a few tools that you've found to be very effective in developing mental resilience as well as achieving high performance? So one is

tied into what we've been talking about a lot today. So it's a model called Above and Below the Line. I got it from the Conscious Leadership Group. If you're a leader, you should absolutely read the book, The Fifteen Commitments of Conscious Leadership. I think it's a great book for leaders. And this tool is locating yourself below the line is what I was talking about with the fight, flight, freeze, and fawn response, and then our emotions, and then that cognitive part, if we think about it above the line, because it gives us this picture of we're moving. We're moving from our initial reactive response

to a place of conscious choice. Below the line isn't bad, and I really want to be very clear about that. We will always have these below the line, automatic, instinctual, immature responses. That's just the way our brains are designed. And then it's like, how do I stop, as you said, locate myself emotionally?

And this is the regulation part of it, right, I'm feeling this and be curious. Instead of like feelings are bad, get rid of those, I feel this, what does it tell me, what does it mean? Now how would I like to choose to be? And that is emotionally moving above the line. And our brains like thinking of I'm moving somewhere. So I'm moving above the line to choice, to being curious,

to realizing that this isn't about me, this isn't the world doing it to me. I have control. I have control of my thoughts, feelings and my reactions. So I find that a really powerful tool. I'm trying to think of another one that would be useful in this context. I think just accepting the world isn't doing it to you. And I see this so often.

People think these things are happening to me. And very rarely are things happening to us. We might be a recipient of something, but typically it's not the world happening to us. It's just a byproduct of what is happening in the world and or what is happening in our family systems. and it's not deliberate. So once we start to accept that,

and also as an adult, we're going to be okay. Whatever happens, if we take the premise or whatever happens, we're going to be okay. And what can help with this is working on these stories that we create. So if we go back to the example of somebody text me, we need to talk. My initial story is, ah, what have I done wrong? So I get people to do, and I hope you don't mind swearing,

but it always makes people laugh. I get them to do a fuck-it journal. And the point of this is you're going to write all of these stories in this journal. You're going to write all of these bad thoughts in this journal and literally throw it to one side and say, fuck it. That's, I'm letting go of that. And I want it to be very separate from saying an appreciation journal, which is also a really good thing to do. Or a thought journal and ideas journal. This is, here's all the bad crap in my mind.

Here's all the unhelpful stories. Here's all the old pattern. when we talk about this neural rewiring, and it's really good for us to exercise it. So another little bit of psychology teaching. The reason why what I do, why venting to a friend, why working with a therapist works so well, is because when we are talking, especially in an emotional state, and we're coming from that childlike place, that emotive place, that emotive part of our brain, when we verbalize it or we write it down, then the cognitive part of our brain either hears it or reads it when we read

it back to ourselves. And what typically happens is we go, oh, it's not as bad as I thought. So I'm sure you've had this. I'm sure people listen and have had it. I have this. You vent to a friend, you tell them the story, you tell them the situation. And they just listen and you finish it and you go, oh, my God, I feel so much better now. Because the cognitive part of your brain has heard this and got, oh, it's not as bad as I thought it was. Or you start to process it and you go, actually, I've got some solutions here. And now I know what I need to do. So we actually are pretty good at doing that self-regulation if we give ourselves the opportunity to do it. And another tool that's really good is exercise. So when we're feeling emotion,

we're feeling stressed, just some good low-level exercise or even intense exercise, but just some exercise can really help release it. Our bodies are designed to do this. You see this with animals. So I've got a 70-pound German chip at Husky, super athletic, you know, like fun dog. And we'll go to the dog park and she likes playing with other dogs, especially likes chasing other dogs. But sometimes it gets a bit fractious and, you know, they might correct her or there's a little bit of a disagreement. She'll get up, she'll walk away and she shakes her body. And that is her literally shaking off the stress.

And we can do that as humans too. and we can do that by things like going for a walk or low-level repetitive tasks, you know, sitting there folding the laundry, chopping some word, doing the washing up. All of these things just help our bodies process that emotional stress. So make sure that you have some kind of exercise practice, whatever it is, running, walking, going to the gym, swim in, ride in a bike. Something that gets your body moving, super helpful. People see stress is a bad thing and it's not. So if we take it in the sporting text, context, stress is what gets your body to improve. So without putting your body under a certain amount of stress, there can be no physiological

adaptation to make you better, fit, stronger, faster, whatever. And it's the same for our brains. Emotional stress causes us gross. It helps us become more skilled, helps us become more aware. The issue is when it becomes overwhelming and we can't recover from it. Same with sports. If you trained 10 hours a day, every day, eventually you become less strong, less fit because your body can't recover between each training sessions, you become more and more fatigued. Exactly the same for emotional stress. And what we have to do is find those ways to process the stress, venting, exercise, rest, holidays, vacations, get us out of our environment, and then we can come back.

And what typically happens is our ability, our ceiling to work under stress, to under pressure, goes up. And that's what high performers are so good at. They put themselves in these situations where there is stress, there is pressure. They learn from it. They adapt. They grow. They take some rest. They process it. They do some sport. They come back and they do it again. And the ceiling keeps raising. And this is also how we get resilience. We put ourselves in these positions of stress. We learn that we're going to live. Our fight, flight, freeze, fear, fawn system goes, oh, I didn't die. I'm going to live. And we keep teaching ourselves that we're going to be okay. It reminds me just hearing that, have you heard of the book, Antifragile?

Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I'm like just thinking and just reminded me of reading that book that it's also a similar concept of antifragility in which stress with adequate rest can make you much, much stronger. You can't, we cannot adapt without stress. You know, the way our brains and our body's work is we need stress to adapt. So the concept, the modern concept is, or stress is bad. Stress is not bad.

What bad is if we don't give ourselves the room and the tools to adapt from it. That's where the issue starts. This is so amazing. For people that want to learn more about your programs, your services, to read more about your work and they find you. I keep it really simple, Simba. So you'll find me just by Google and Leapovie. It's Leapovie on Instagram.

leapovey.com, leapovie on LinkedIn, and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn and Instagram. We didn't mention it today, but one thing I want to share with people is I run men's groups. I think this is particularly important. Male suicide rates are going up. Men are much more lonely than they were previously, and this is only getting worse than the technological internet age and the age of social media. So I run low-cost men's groups. So if you're interested in that, reach out to me. And I just want to be of service. If anybody wants to talk, they're very welcome to reach out to me. If I'm not the right person for you, I will point you in the direction of somebody who does.

And if you're an organization out there that wants to, you know, have better leaders and wants to be a better leader, if you're a founder that's finding yourself struggling to let go of control and struggling to understand why your team behave the way they do and to connect with them better, I'd love to come and help. And if there's one key takeaway you'd like every single listener to leave this interview with, what would that be? You're going to be okay. You know, the world is not as dangerous as your mind paints it to be. As an adult, you're going to be okay. And if you can switch from how is this going to harm me to, oh, I'm curious about this. What's the potential here for me?

The world is going to come literally your playground and so much more enjoyable. And I'll give just a little example. I had a founder of a company that I work with, or I still work with, incredibly smart man. He used to look at being a founder as the leadership part of this was this thing that he had to do, not that he wanted to do. And he related to the leadership as the thing that got in the way of him being successful and his company being successful because he had to deal with these people. And through our work together, he had this big shift to, I get to do it.

this. I get to be the leader of a company. Not many people get to do that. It's a privilege. I get to work with incredible human beings and I get to know and love these people and I get to be part of nurturing them and watching them go on to have careers in other companies and be successful. And that switch where he realized he had a part in helping people grow and he had a part in their success and that he could relate to it as a privilege rather than as a burden, has completely changed his life. I mean, literally this guy in the space for a couple of months went from really struggling and almost hating what he was doing to loving it and thriving. So I think a lot of it is within us as to how we relate to these things in. And we get to choose how we relate to it.

And we can relate to it as being uncomfortable, difficult, painful, or we can relate to it as being a challenge, a joy, a gift. Amazing perspective. Lee, thank you so much for your time and your perspective and your insights. They were very, very helpful. And I know I was taking some mental notes as well for me to use for myself. Thank you so much. My pleasure, Simba. And I hope the audience get something from this. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.