The Rich Roll Podcast - Todd Herman On The Alter Ego Effect: Unlocking The Hero Within

Episode Date: February 12, 2019

What if I told you that one secret to success just might be adopting a secret identity? I know. It sounds weird. I too was skeptical. But today's guest sold me with one unique thought: What if your alter ego is a more accurate representation of who you really are? Pondering this left me wanting to learn more. So I invited high performance coach Todd Herman on the show to elaborate. An author, advisor, and entrepreneur, Todd has spent the last 2 decades helping professional and Olympic athletes, entrepreneurs, leaders, and executives unlock peak performance at the highest level to achieve wildly outrageous goals while enjoying the process. Featured on the Today Show, Sky Business News, Inc. Magazine and CBC National News, Todd is also the author of the recently released book, The Alter Ego Effect: The Power of Secret Identities to Transform Your Life*. Equal parts instructive and entertaining, it's a provocative exploration of the heroic self within as a means to overcome that which holds you back with one goal in mind — to empower greater expression of your inner best self. This conversation tracks the viability of Todd's alter ego thesis through the lens of successful case studies who have used this strategy to their advantage. It explores the fraught terrain of actualizing peak performance and the proven strategies to maximize human potential. And it's about how to best confront and overcome the hurdles that unnecessarily prevent the best of us – often repeatedly or in some cases continually – from inhabiting our most expressed selves. In addition, we explore the why behind Todd’s work. More specifically, Todd relates how confronting a severe childhood trauma helped him overcome profound feelings of guilt and shame that held him back for years. Impactful for anyone who suffers in silence, it's a powerful story of healing and empowerment (but perhaps inappropriate for the little ones among us — so fair warning). Very much in the vein of my recent podcast with James Clear (RRP #401), I found this conversation both fascinating and entertaining. My hope is that you will too. To view our conversation on YouTube, visit bit.ly/toddherman422. And don't forget we're also now on Spotify. Peace + Plants, Rich

What makes human beings truly unique is our ability to tap into a creative imagination, to create a heaven from hell or a hell from heaven, or to suspend the disbelief for a moment so that we can unleash just a different self and show up like we know that we can, and show up like we know that we can, but we sometimes block it because of, again, shame, trauma, imposter syndrome, or any one of a number of things. That's Todd Herman, this week on The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. So what if I told you that the secret to success,

well, maybe not the secret, but perhaps a secret, just might be having a secret identity. Now, I know that sounds a little ridiculous, perhaps a little bit cheesy, but before you engage in that knee-jerk reaction, what if I added to this idea by also telling you that this secret identity that you're empowered to come up with on your own, whatever you conjure for yourself, might actually, when the dust settles, be a more accurate representation of who you really are. Think about that for a second. That's what we're going to explore today. My name is Rich Roll. I'm your host. Settle in, get comfortable, because today is a doozy. If you enjoyed my podcast with James Clear a little while back, he's the guy who authored a book called Atomic Habits. That was RRP 401. It was all about habit and behavior change. It was a very popular episode. If you did dig that, then I suspect you are very much going to enjoy today's conversation with

Todd Herman, as it is very much in the same vein. Todd is a high-performance coach who has spent the last two decades working with professional and Olympic athletes, entrepreneurs, leaders, and executives to decode and unlock peak performance, peak performance at the highest level. He is also the author of a brand new book that just came out. It's called The Alter Ego Effect, The Power of Secret Identities to Transform Your Life. The Alter Ego Effect, The Power of Secret Identities to Transform Your Life. And that book, obviously, as I just mentioned, explores this idea, this idea of the heroic self within. And that provides the focus of today's conversation.

Todd has also been featured on The Today Show, Sky Business News, Inc. Magazine, and CBC National News. And there is plenty more I want to say about Todd and the conversation to come before we get into it. But first, a quick little celebratory announcement, because today, my friends, today marks the 200th episode that my audio engineer slash producer slash behind the scenes do everything I ask you to do guy, Jason Camiolo, has worked on. He has now completed work on 200 episodes. Time flies, I'm telling you, because I feel like we just started working together. Jason, you have done an incredible job on the show. I could not have taken this program to the place it finds itself here today. And I just

wanted to publicly acknowledge all the amazing work that you have done and continue to do to make this show the best that it can be. So thank you from the bottom of my heart. I'm extremely grateful to have your support. And to all of you out there in audience land, please do me a solid favor. Hit Jason up on Twitter or Instagram or Facebook. He is at Jason Camiolo on all those platforms. And let him know how much you appreciate all the work that he puts into the show every single week. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety.

And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care. Especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, support and empower you to find the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a

struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life and recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time.

It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. by the people at recovery.com who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more.

Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself. I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com.

Okay, Todd Herman. Let me say this up front. In general, I think it's fair to say, I'm pretty leery of pop self-help, self-improvement books and programs. And in fact, I would go so far as to say I harbor a pretty healthy distrust and at times distaste for all of it. And overall, I think my skepticism is grounded and appropriate, but it can also at times get in the way of my best interest. And I think today's guest is a good example of that because my knee jerk at first was alter ego effect. I'm not so sure about this. But two things turned me. One is that Todd is very good friends with my friend Jonathan Fields, who I think is just one of the best and most amazing people on the planet.

And two, I met up with Todd when I was in New York City a few weeks back, and I was just super impressed with him, with his work, with his approach to life, and realized that I'm the one who's got something to learn here, because this guy has a lot to offer, a lot to teach me. I checked out his new book, which I very much enjoyed, and I thought this guy would make for a great podcast guest. So here we are. This is a conversation about actualizing peak performance. It's about realizing human potential and how to overcome the barriers and blocks that hamstring prevent and block us, often repeatedly or in some cases with some people

continually, from being the best, most expressed version of ourselves. We track this idea of the alter ego through some successful case study individuals who have used this strategy to their advantage, and we explore the why behind Todd's work and how confronting and owning a rather severe trauma from his childhood helped him overcome the feelings of guilt and shame that I think burdened millions of victims all over the world. It's a very powerful story, but also just a heads up that it is quite intense, not terribly graphic, but perhaps best to make sure the little ones are out of earshot for at least that portion of the conversation. I really enjoyed this talk. I think you're

going to get a lot out of it. And you know what? It's all happening now. So yeah, I've connected him with another friend of mine to help him with like meditation stuff in New York City, Emily Fletcher. Have you ever heard of emily she runs sounds familiar i don't know her she has a book coming out right away to stress less accomplish more she's fantastic former like um broadway actress and singer whatever um just an amazing spirit person she's just amazing yeah cool i think i have heard of her i've heard of that yeah i, I mean, it's coming out in a, it comes out like two weeks after mine. Anyways, if you ever do something with them,

because they've, I mean, that's a massive network WeWork is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm hooked up with some folks out here in that space. So, you know, it's just something to explore. But in any event, dude, this is about you. Nice to have you here today. Thank you for having me. I got a text from Jonathan Fields several weeks ago.

And he's like, I got a guy who I think you're gonna dig. My good buddy, Todd, he's on your page. He's all about peak performance and working with athletes and executives to unlock the best version of themselves. You guys should definitely hook up. And I was like, yeah, it sounds like my kind of guy. I was in New York last week and we connected and here we are, man.

Yeah, this is how fast it works. Not usually this fast. Like normally it's like months and months, if not years to like pin down a guest for the pod, but this was fast tracked. Yeah, that's why you have good friends like Jonathan to just squeeze the grape faster. Well, anybody that Jonathan would refer to me,

I would welcome with open arms because I love that man. I love everything that he's about. And if he's saying that we should connect, man, I trust that wholeheartedly. Thankful for that. Yeah. So good to have you hereheartedly. Thankful for that. Yeah. So good to have you here today. Very exciting times for you.

You got this book coming out very soon. Definitely. The Alter Ego Effect, which is great. I just got my copy the other day. So I will admit that I'm not done reading it yet, but I'm about 25% into it at this point. And I'm really digging it, dude. It's a cool idea.

So let's work our way up to the ideas in the book though. Yeah. You're somebody who has created a career and you've been doing this for a long time. 97. Since 90s and you're a young dude. Yeah, well, I'm 43. I started super young working with young athletes,

but yeah. Working with athletes, Olympic athletes, professional athletes, and now business executives and all manner of people to help them become unblocked and unleash their peak performances, right? Just whatever genius that they have, yeah. Remove the emergency brake on their performance, like I say, if we can release it just 10%,

then that means we can release it 10% more and keep on going. What are the biggest blocks that you come across in working with these athletes? Like what are the common things that most people struggle with in terms of, you know, kind of taking their talent and their expertise to the next level? There are a lot. There are one large one that doesn't get talked about enough is definitely trauma, something from their past that has turned into a little bit of a demon that can

stop them from seeing what their possibility is for themselves, definitely. I mean, of the hundreds and hundreds of more elite athletes that I've worked with, 82% of them I've referred off to get help with a therapist or someone else on just helping them unblock some of that past trauma stuff. 82% is very specific. Yeah, well, I mean- You've quantified this. Well, I'm a data guy.

I really track stuff a lot. And so, you know, is 82% the exact number? No, but that's about the right number. It's definitely, if I had 10 of them in front of me, I know for a fact, eight of them have gone or I've referred eight of them off. Because again, like I'm helping with people with mental game strategies

and pre-performance strategies, which is all about helping them to move forward and compete even 5% better tomorrow than they did today or 1%. Like we're just looking for marginal improvements because when you stack them all up, it creates a big difference. Of course.

And unlike some people who want to take what they have as a skillset and think they can solve everyone's problems with it, I don't. I stayed very much in my lane. And the moment I've poked and found, I'm crawling around between the six inches of their ears trying to find, hey, what's that thing that's that pebble in their shoe that's kind of stopping them or trying to give them new strategies. And when you're building up such high levels of trust with people, you end up just having really raw and honest conversations with people. And the moment I found that, I was like, whoa, I am not a skilled therapist. That's not my game. And so I'm going to definitely refer you off. However, that doesn't mean that

that person needs to go to the sidelines and quit on whatever it is they're doing. Right. How often is that trauma something that the athlete is consciously aware of? Very, very little. Yeah. Yeah. It's not something. And I can speak to it very honestly because it was the thing that I dealt with. I had a very rough experience when I was a young. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that. I mean, you kind of made passing reference to that when we met in New York. Yeah. And I went back and looked at your Facebook post where you wrote eloquently about this experience that you had. Yeah. So walk me through that.

Yeah. Well, as a little bit of background, I grew up on a big farm and ranch outside of Medicine Hat, Alberta, which is south of Calgary, which for people who aren't familiar with Canada at all, it's in the prairie provinces and kind of middle of nowhere is where I grew up. But- Medicine Hat. Medicine Hat. Yeah, got its name because back when the English and were sort of colonizing everything, they found a Native American tribe. And when they fled, they swam across the river and the medicine man lost his hat.

And so that- That's how it got named? that settlement was named Medicine Hat. That makes me like lose faith in humanity. Like really, it's that dumb? It's that simple. Yeah. It's that simple. Yeah.

Canada is fantastic for great names for cities and towns. But yeah, so I mean, I grew up in a farm family and I would always long to be around people all the time because they're very much isolated. So I would constantly ask when summertime hit that I wanted to go to whatever church camp was available. So if there was a Catholic camp this weekend, I'd be a Catholic. And if there was a Presbyterian one next weekend, it didn't matter to me. I just wanted to go and be around people.

And when I was 12, I went off to a church camp and unfortunately had an experience where two men over the course of a couple of days sexually assaulted me. And after that, when I was coming home, you know, it just robs you. I don't have to go into the details about it. But multiple occasions of abuse then? Yeah.

Wow. And kind of the worst part about it is just the systematic nature with which they develop that trust with you and then break you down kind of thing. And that's been something that I held on to for a really, really, really long time by myself. But I came home and I was very honest with you. The Facebook post you're kind of referring to was kind of, which is very new. I just said it to the world for the first time. In fact, right before I posted that, I read it to my parents and my siblings for the first time. So is that the first instance of you addressing this, even with people that you care about in your life? No, it wasn't the first instance. The first instance was about 16 months before where I basically just kind of hit a breaking point where I was going through a major business lawsuit. This book, anyone who has written a book knows the challenges

of getting your thoughts down on paper, especially when you're a first-time author like myself. And that stress had just brought me to kind of a breaking point. I'm a new-ish dad. I mean, I've got three little kids and my wife had gone through a pretty bad last pregnancy with our youngest boy. And yeah, so it just, all of a sudden,

it all came to a head and- But prior to that, it was decades of compartmentalization. Three decades. And trying to just say, this was in the past, I'm moving forward, and pretend that it didn't happen. Yeah, ignoring it and suppressing it. And you even forget a lot of the details about it. And then when you start getting help with it, there's all these things that get revealed that have shaped your behavior that you would have never guessed. it revealed that have shaped your behavior that you would have never guessed.

You know, for example, I've been known and it's been on my social media stuff for a long time, kind of as a bit of a needle to myself, but that I'm a massive root beer aficionado, love root beer. And it wasn't until going through, you know, and getting help on this about five months ago, even I was talking to the psychiatrist that I was working with and working with. And it all of a sudden it came to it that the very last drink that I had before the incident happened was a root beer. And so for my entire life, I've basically been trying to go back to that little kid.

Prior to the incident. And that's my kind of my last known memory of just being an innocent kid kind of thing. So it was a sort of progressive inability to manage your life that culminated in a crisis flashpoint in which you realized you had to confront this and deal with it. Yeah. I mean, the big, one of the big tipping points was I was picking up my, you know, I live in New York City now. And I was picking up my, you know, I live in New York City now, and I was picking up my two little daughters from preschool. And as I put Sophie into the carriage, and then I picked up Molly, my oldest one, who's, you know, four at the time, to put

her in. And as I did, she put her hand up to my cheek and she said, Daddy, are you happy? And I said, yeah, I'm happy. And she said, oh, because you've been yelling at us a lot lately and it's making us sad. And I just lost it right there, broke down. Because now all of a yeah, I'm happy. And she said, oh, cause you've been yelling at us a lot lately and it's making us sad. And I just lost it right there, broke down. Because now all of a sudden I had been confronted with this internal reality, which was manifesting now into just me hurting my kids in small ways. But did you have an awareness that that was being fueled

or driven by this childhood trauma? No, no, it wasn't that. I mean, there was just this, all of, there's only so long that you can hold onto that emotion before it just bubbles up into just sort of poor behavior, you know, whether it's anger or rage and just the culmination of so many different events coming together at the exact same time just was turning me into a massively stressed out person. And this is coming from someone who has practiced meditation since before it was very cool. It was before yoga was cool. And I have a lot of the tools and the toolkit to do it.

But then after a certain point in time, some people, maybe they can keep a bottled up, but when you're constantly striving and still achieving, it's really hard to keep on running with the line in the red area of your RPMs. Yeah. Well, and that just compounds the shame. So, you're starting from a baseline point of harboring a tremendous amount of shame because on some level I would imagine you feel responsible for this trauma happening to begin with and so shamed by it that you can't talk about it or share it with anybody, which keeps you stuck in it. And then you become this high performance coach

and this parent, this meditator, this person who has all these tools and these practices, and you're still handicapped by this, which makes you feel even more disempowered, which just completely accelerates the vicious cycle. Yeah. And I mean, you brought up two big things, two major emotions that shape people's performance and how they operate in life are shame and guilt. They're just insidious how much they prevent people from... I talk about the idea of the heroic self that's really sitting inside of all of us that is waiting to get unlocked. And even for me, because I have worked with some extremely successful people over the course of my career but i've always stayed in the

periphery i've never you know tried to pursue like a personal brand name for todd herman and then once i started getting into this really kind of clearing this out of my system it was just so evident and became evident that it was because i i didn't want someone to fundamentally find out that this happened to me at some point in time, which kind of got to the purpose of the post. I actually was sitting down, it was New Year's Eve night, December 31st, and was about to kind of map out my year,

just some ideas or thoughts about how I wanted the year to go, which I'd already done, but I was just kind of fine tuning it. And all of a sudden, this is the stuff that came out because I just fundamentally felt like I really wanted 2019 to be something very different for myself. And I wanted to let that go for the final time

and not carry it with me because it's not my fault. I didn't do it to myself. And yeah, and I mean, it's definitely, my point wasn't to help other people with it. It was to really help myself with it. But I've actually talked to seven different people who have reached out to me privately since then about how close they were to suicide as well and had conversations. Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of people who read that who have had similar experiences. And you can't move forward until you clean house.

And you will hold on to that shame for as long as possible until it becomes no longer tenable. And we don't need to get into the graphic details of this story if people wanna read it. You can go to your Facebook page and read it. But there's an aspect of the story that's so horrific that involves this event being publicly shared in a way that I can't imagine the fear and the shame that would

surround that aspect of it. So, it's just, it's so horrible. And it takes tremendous courage to own that, even though intellectually we all understand and nobody would dispute the fact that, of course, you're not to blame here. It has nothing to do with you. To hold that private for so long, to harbor that amount of repressed emotion, it's amazing that your life didn't fray at the edges sooner or more substantially than it did. Well, I mean, it definitely, I mean, I think it was constantly being frayed at the edges,

I guess, but yeah, I don't know. There's some part of that kind of human will to survive and not make it, I always had this feeling inside that there was something bigger waiting for me if I could actually face this kind of, this demon. And, you know, it's still unfolding for me, I guess. But yeah, I mean, I talk about in that post that there was many times where I attempted suicide with it. And, you know, there's nothing that you would think would maybe jar you to get some help more than when you're sitting on a hospital bed after taking three bottles of pills and sucking back charcoal, which is what's used to, you know, try to take away the effects of those drugs. And it's hard stuff to choke down that you would maybe reach out for help, but that even then still wouldn't do it. Because that, you would kind of, just that idea of the fact that, you know, I was constantly getting trolled and still do get trolled today with people reaching out with GIFs. Because that incident was videotaped and it's a very popular video in the pedophile community, apparently.

And yeah, people troll me to try to like extort money from me and just, you know, be not that kind. And yeah, so. It's horrific. You know, I'm so sorry that that happened to you. Yeah. But you seem good. Yeah. And like, there's more to it than, hey, I'm gonna write a Facebook post.

Like, this is a public acknowledgement of it in a way of saying that, you know, the way I refer to it is shame can't survive the light. And you refer to the Martin Luther King quote, you know, something about, you know, you can't resolve darkness with darkness. That's a starting point. I'm sure there's a lot that then went into

you processing this so that you can own it and talk about it and share it and move forward. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's definitely felt good to get it out. Right? Like it's not, it's cause that whole fear of people finding out in a, like I'd much rather just say it my way and own the story.

And yeah, it's not something that, because that, just that constant fear of it going to be the thing that defines me for the rest of my life, even if someone did find out. And then saying, you know what, if someone wants to define me with that story, then, you know, go ahead. I can't control everybody and how they perceive me. So, because I know I'm a lot more than that. Yeah. What about the two guys? They're both gone. They are?

Yeah, they're both dead. Oh, wow. Yeah. people hold on like so many athletes and or people that are high performers have held on to um an idea of something that happened that's hard for them as the thing that's helped to drive them right that they they think that if they let that thing go that they're going to lose their edge and it's and and it just it does it keeps them operating at an emotional RPM. That's just way higher than they need to. And I think the one thing that did allow me to be very good at what I did early on was because of my incident, the incident that happened to me, I'm just extraordinarily highly empathetic and probably at a wavelength where I can kind of connect with people that maybe, maybe in some way I attracted a lot of the more, you know, challenging hurt people. And then maybe that's why my 80% is higher than, I don't know what other people's ratios are, but I mean, we all know that every human being has experienced trauma.

And, you know, trauma is experienced by every human being, whether they're in a car accident, that can still get experienced as trauma, you know, that's just now it's the degree of it and the narrative that gets handed to it. But, you know, it's the one thing that definitely allowed me to connect with people and probably build trust at a high level very quickly with them. Yeah, and beyond that, it's fascinating that

you pursued this career trajectory that was almost a quest to answer and resolve these questions for yourself as much as developing an awareness and a toolbox to help others. And I think we all do this as human beings on some level. Yeah. When I shared this with a friend of mine, he said, wow, now you make so much sense to me. Because you would tell the origin story of why you got into mental toughness training. And it was always like a veneer kind of thing. Like your origin story didn't sound as great as other people's origin stories.

And that's because if I actually told someone my origin story, I was going to be revealing too much for myself anyway. But he's like, now it makes so much sense. I mean, you got into it just out of survival. It's a survival story. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. On that tip about high-performing athletes over revving their RPMs and developing an attachment to the idea that that's necessary

for them to maintain a certain level of performance. That is something that I not only agree with wholeheartedly, it's something that I suffer from and have always suffered from. And I have made this commitment in 2019 to shift that paradigm, which I have to tell you has been quite uncomfortable and the results have yet to be told on this. So trust me, I'm gonna harness you to make this all about me and my problem. I have the opportunity to be coached by you today. Let's do it. Don't think I'm not gonna take advantage of that, right?

We don't have to do that right now, but I think it's an interesting way into kind of what you do and how you do it to evaluate, hey, here's what's working, here's what's not working. And I'm somebody who I know what it's like to perform at a high level. I also have a fair amount of self-awareness about what my Achilles heels are. Yeah. But I also have this incredible inability to do anything about it because of these attachments that I have or superstitions or OCD behaviors around what it would mean to let go of a certain behavior pattern

and try something different. Yeah, well, I mean, whether I've said it on stages or I've said it just with people privately, when you take a look at a company, there's a CEO, there's a CMO, there's a chief operating officer, and all those three people will sit inside the company and they can operate at a high level inside the company. But there is a role nowadays that's coming to kind of fruition, which is a chief performance officer.

And I've always thought of myself that way. And the thing about a chief performance officer is it is impossible for a performance, anyone who's trying to help someone perform to be inside the bottle with you. You know, it's the classic, you can't read the label when you're inside the bottle. And a performance officer or someone who's helping the performance has to by nature be sitting outside of you to be able to get context not be so emotionally engaged that's why we all need coaches so much because that coach can you know reflect back to you um more easily than you can because you're so wrapped up in the narrative of who you are and this is how i am and

all that kind of uh this is the way i've always done it. And, you know, unless you become that person who can be coachable, which is a very difficult thing for people to allow. It's actually quite amazing how many people are not willing to be coachable. I was one of those people who was not a coachable person until I had an amazing coach break that paradigm for me. And then all of a sudden I was like, oh, wait. Yeah, life becomes so much easier when you can lean on other smarter relationships than your own. Well, it requires a little bit of self-esteem and trust, right? Absolutely. And I think receptivity to the idea that whatever story you're telling yourself about yourself is probably flawed.

Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So the story that I tell, well, first of all, the idea of a chief performance officer, I think is great. It reminds me of the Maggie Siff character in Billions, who's, do you watch that show? Like she's basically, that's what she does. That's a role, she's a shrink, but she's there to get the best out of all of these employees. Right. And they go in and they, they drop their secrets on her and their fears and all of that. And she helps them figure all that stuff out.

I think every company should have somebody like that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so you kind of do this individually for people. Individually. I mean, I've done it with companies as well, of course, too. But yeah.

What? Well, I just, it's just been such, I mean, it's such an interesting conversation for me anyways, like that I'm hearing about because it's just, I would never would have thought I'd get to the point where I'm on a podcast talking about my history like this and not be breaking down into a puddle on the floor.

You're more than welcome to cry. Other people have on the show. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. I can get you there. If we want to make that a priority, I can work my way towards that. Let's see how it happens organically. All right. So the story that I've always told myself is, I'm not the smartest, I'm not the most talented athlete. But if I have a talent or a superpower, it is an ability to outwork the guy next to me, a higher capacity to suffer and to outlast. And I will leverage that to bridge the talent deficit gap and get on top. And what that requires is a certain level of commitment that is probably deeper than the other person, control issues, perfectionism, and that leads into some OCD around habits, you know,

when you're trying to make everything perfect, everything has to be just so, I've got to control it. And the minute that I relinquish any control or I say, look, it doesn't have to be perfect because I've taken care of this, is the beginning of the end. And in the context of kind of what I do now, I've grown this enterprise to a certain point,

doing things a certain way, and it's been successful. Yeah. But to get to the next level, I have to, I can't do things the way that I always have. I have to build teams, I have to empower people around me, I have to let go of certain things. And I can't pay attention to the details as deeply as I'm used to because I have other things that are vying for my attention that are equally as important. And this is terrifying for me. Yeah. And so what is, but what's the consternation around that?

Like, what's the really challenging part of that for you? The challenging part is if I let people in and I release my stronghold on the reins, that it's all going to fall apart. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So there's this, one of my favorite sports I ever worked with and still work with is equestrian because it's one of the few sports where you have a partner that is a mirror reflection of what's going on inside of you. And when you think about when you're out there running, someone can look at your face or your body language and they could see, oh, he's focused or he's like, whatever. But when you're on a horse, that's why horses are used in therapy for, you know, people who've got autism or anyone of a manner of many PTSD.

When you're on a horse and if you're feeling anxious and if you're feeling stressed inside, your horse is going to get jittery. Yeah, it will reflect that. It will reflect it immediately. And even down to, if you are even holding the reins of a horse lightly, but you're still feeling stressed, those reins will pass that emotion through to the horse. And so that's why they were always, if I could get an equestrian rider to shift their stress levels into a calm state, then I can work with anybody. They're such a great, challenging group to work with. kind of grip the neck of your company or your business or your enterprise, whatever it's, all it's doing is, um, creating a stressful environment, not only for you to be operating in, but for everyone else to be operating in. And then, uh, there is no opportunity for your

business to be supple. Supple is just a word I love to go to because it's just, well, I just, I'm a fan of the word. Well, here's the other part of the story, kind of the backdrop here. Yeah. And hopefully it answers this question about the stress level. And that is that I tell myself that if I'm not, because I have this capacity to suffer, that if I haven't really mined that with respect to a project, whether it's athletic or professional, that I haven't really given my all. That I have not shown up for it to the extent that I'm capable. So I have to create an environment in which I create pain for myself. Yeah. create an environment in which I create pain for myself.

Yeah. Because if I don't experience that on a visceral level, when I'm trying to birth something into the world, then I haven't really shown up for it in the way that I could. And the end result will not be as good as I know that it can be. Yeah. So that of course creates that stress,

but on some level I'm addicted to that stress because I feel like I need to feel that in order to validate the effort. Yeah. And so, but when you're going through that, is there a part of you that enjoys that process at all? In a perverse way, yeah. In a perverse way. It feels very uncomfortable to adopt a different mindset or perspective on this, which is to say, what if it was easy, right? Like this is kind of a thing that people are saying, what if it was easy? What if you could navigate this with grace and ease and a lack of stress and presence of mind, what would that feel like? And one might say, well, that would feel great. But for me, that's terrifying because that means that I am poking a hole in that story that I need to suffer to create something of value. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you think about your values, what are some of the things that you value the most?

In my personal life, you mean? Yeah, in like, you know, whether it's the world or especially like how you see yourself, like what does Rich Roll value? I value my relationships. I value integrity. Mm-hmm. integrity. I value striving to align the public version of myself with the private version,

like being an integrated person. And I value a life of service, giving back is super important to me. Yeah. And I'm sure that we can go on and on. And family and like, you know, there's plenty of other things. I mean, I could go down the line. Yeah. And I mean, in the short time that I've got to know you, I would say that all those things definitely come to the surface as well. The reason I ask that though, is there is, I talk about it in the book in chapter three, when I'm talking about this kind of idea of the field of play and the identity that how it gets created, that there is a, we have our core self, which is just this place of like pure possibility. And, you know, one of the big

ideas behind the alter ego effect is that one of the great things that makes human beings truly unique on this planet, it's not that we can love because other animals display that. Now, I'm not discounting the power of it. I'm just saying it's not the thing that makes us really unique. What makes human beings truly unique is our ability to tap into a creative imagination, to create a heaven from hell or a hell from heaven, or to suspend the disbelief for a moment so that we can unleash just a different self and show up like we know that we can, but we sometimes block it because of, again,

shame, trauma, imposter syndrome, or any one of a number of things. And so in order for me to kind of explain this out for people, I had to come up with some sort of model to help kind of just reflect back how we end up showing up in performance on whatever field of play. And performance is like as a parent, it's as a friend, it's in work, it's whatever. Transformance is like as a parent, it's as a friend, it's in work, it's whatever. And I talk about how just beyond the inside core of, you know, that self that's inside of all of us, it's just like kind of pure potentiality. And it's not about getting woo-woo on it, but it's like that is, it's there. I've seen it be with intention, have that show up for me. But right outside that layer is this layer that I call core drivers. And core drivers are often

things that happen underneath the surface for people and shape their behavior. And they don't realize that it's shaping. An example is we can, a core driver is us saying, you know, oh, I'm an American or I'm a Canadian. That's a core driver. We end up taking on these kind of, these behaviors and these value sets and these beliefs based on that. Because now it's something that's a bigger part of who we are. It's not just me. It's actually something that's larger that I'm connected to. It could be the tribe of people that we hang out with. It could be the religion that you're a part of. It could be the group like you've got. I've worked with US Marines and Navy SEALs and there's a different, there's a code that they operate Sure. And one of the other ones

is values. Um, that's why values are so important. And we just, I just, I'll look in at them with people and then see, well, is that person honoring that value or have they attached a narrative to that value? That's just, that's not quite right. That's actually having it causing them to rev the engine more than it needs to um and you know it's not like i discovered anything you know radically different about the values that you have but um you know just your idea that in order for you in order for success for you in order for you to point at success, suffering needs to be there is definitely not true. That's a belief that you own. And intellectually, I agree with you and I understand that.

But there's a gap between that understanding and actually doing anything about it. And this is something I've had self-awareness around for a long time, but it's only now that I've decided like I'm actually going to attempt to do this differently. And today's a perfect example because I have a show going up tonight. Normally I would have put in a huge number of hours of like getting all involved in the minutia of it. And I haven't even looked at it yet. And after this show, I'm gonna have to get into it and I'm gonna get it up. But my relationship to it is different and that is where the discomfort is coming from.

But I have to create those new neural pathways and I have to get on the other side of it. Okay, tonight it will post. Over the next couple of days, I'll see how it's received and responded to. And of course, that will have no bearing on the amount of pain that I'm going to experience later today getting it published, right? I understand that. It's just walking that walk as opposed to the theoretical understanding of it.

Yeah. I think a useful idea for people to get engaged with too is around the idea of all of us are born in with just classic intrinsic motivators, the things that intrinsically motivate us without any outside effect needed. Things like growth. Growth is a natural intrinsic motivator. That's why the moment that a young child who might be involved in sport doesn't see themselves constantly progressing and growing, they will become bored with it. So growth is an

intrinsic motivator. Another one is learning, which is different from growing. Learning is an intellectual activity. And when we're learning, we stay engaged with something as well. And then you got things like adventure, another one, and exploration. That's why young infants are constantly reaching out with their hands and exploring the world around them. They're trying to figure it out, map the world. But curiosity is another one that's lost with many people. And I think it's something that for people who are, and I mean, I can be a control freak too. That's why I know this quite well. But curiosity is another powerful intrinsic motivator to tap into where it's like, you know,

you had said, I'm willing to. And there's a big difference between the word interested and committed. It's the thing I'm always testing. I had an opportunity to do something with the United States Navy, a big project opportunity. And when I was talking to the head of that project, I just asked him flat out, are you interested in this project being successful or are you committed to it? Because it's two vastly different outcomes for us. I mean, you'd have to be willing to give up a lot of the paradigms that you operate with because it'll just run counter to exactly how we're going to be implementing this. And he thought about it for a moment. And because most people that are in corporate or high positions are very risk averse. He said, we're probably very interested in this.

And I said, well, then I'm not the right person for you because I get to choose who I get to work with. But for you, it's like you're saying willing, but what if you became curious about committing to this for three months, this just attitude of I am going to give up responsibility to someone else or some software system or whatever it is that's going to be doing this and see how it goes. See how it would shape my life and shape my impact if I was free to do other things. Yeah.

Well, I'm on board with that. I actually am committed to that. And I have thought about that 90-day window and giving myself that amount of time before making any judgment calls about the success or failure of this new experiment. And I'm confident that it will be successful and it will free up time for me to focus on other things that I want to be doing. So, you know, I don't want to get too in the weeds on like my specific stuff here, but I hear what you're saying. And I think there is a huge difference between interested and committed, you know, and I think a lot of people don't spend enough time parsing that, you know, they say, oh yeah, I want to lose weight or I want to do is like, well, do you really, you know, what actions are you taking that would demonstrate, you know, the level of that interest or commitment? Yeah.

I mean, the difference is there's so many people who, you know, they think that the scoreboard is how many books they've purchased, you know, which is fine. But, you know, the difference between someone who's interested in a book and committed to the book is the person who's interested will flip through the book. And let's say it's a nonfiction book. They'll flip through the book and they'll look at the exercise and think, okay, well, I'm going to come back to that. No, that's a neat idea. Yeah, I'm going to come back to that too. And they get to the book and they go, that's a really good idea.

And they share with other people, you've got to try this. This is a great book. You should read it too. That's someone who is interested in the idea. Someone who's committed will instead get to the end of chapter one and sit with that idea or actually answer the questions because the intent is just massively different. And that's kind of one of the spirit, that's the spirit of that's lying inside the book too, is just this power of intentionality.

Like that this has nothing to do with being fake or inauthentic at all. Because fake and inauthentic is someone whose motivation is to deceive others. Because that's what, like if I was here and I was, you know, trying to put on a face so I could deceive you in some way, then that's being inauthentic. But, you know, nothing wears on people more than when you get to the end of your day and your head hits the pillow and you think to yourself, why didn't I say that? Why didn't I do it differently? You know, why didn't I raise my hand and speak up when that person said something demeaning to my coworker or whatever? You know, in that moment, you didn't live authentically because you didn't honor the values of who you are. And so just the idea that we have in the book is sometimes, you know, I call them like it's that phone booth moment, that moment when an impact,

a moment of impact truly is about to happen. And sometimes we have whatever blocks that we've got, we can tap into the power of the characteristics and traits of someone or something else that can draw out our best self because we can suspend the disbelief of what we can and cannot do. Well, let's unpack this whole idea of the alter ego. But before that, I just wanted to

comment on something you said just prior to that, which is this sense of accomplishment that we get or we have by buying a bunch of books, right? Like the entire self-help industry, let's be honest, is built upon that human impulse of tricking ourselves into thinking we've actually done something because we read a book. It gratifies us on some level and actually lures us into this sense that we've moved our lives forward

because we've intellectualized some idea, but that's very different from actually implementing any of the wisdom in any of these books. I mean, do we really need however many thousands of self-help books that are written every year? It's like, it's crazy, right? Like most of these, it's just, there are core ideas that are great truths, but the trick is in the utilization, the leveraging of them.

And the kind of key idea in your book is this idea of the alter ego, which we should just define before we dive into it. I mean, you've already kind of talked a little bit about it, but essentially what you're saying is that in order to overcome certain blocks that stand between ourselves and the best version of who we are or can be, there is wisdom in this practice of adopting almost a superhero personality of your own choosing that allows you to create an arm's length distance between you and all your baggage and the person that on some level, you know, you're capable of becoming. Yeah. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, and I go into the book around just the psychological science behind why it's effective and the history of people that have used them. Oftentimes people that they would never have guessed have used elements of it because I

say it honestly in the book that do you need to do every single kind of step of the process in it to tap into the power of it? Of course not. And tons of people haven't. However, as someone who's hired to unleash the performance of people who are operating at a very high level um i had created a process and system over time uh because i always talk about how you know you know usually utilizing an alter ego is kind of like truth it's like the center of town you can there's many streets and avenues and ways to get to it and that's why after

chapter three i basically say like, listen, from here forward, if you're interested in chapter 14 and learning about how to tap into totems and artifacts to find your alter ego, go read that one. Cause that might just prop up something where you wanna go back and learn about the superpowers and characteristics and traits back in chapter 10 or whatever the case is. So yeah, I'm excited to get it out

because it's an idea that's kind of been laying dormant. And yet there's been so many breadcrumbs throughout history of people using it that I can't wait for it to get into people's hands. Well, it's come up in this podcast on several occasions. I've had James Lawrence, the Iron Cowboy, on the show a couple times. For those that are newer to the show, he's the guy who did 50 Ironmans in 50 states in 50 days. For those that are newer to the show, he's the guy who did 50 Ironmans in 50 states in 50 days, which if there was a superhuman feat of human endurance, that would certainly qualify.

Very much so. And he's very in touch with his alter ego. Like he fabricated this personality that is the iron cowboy, which is very different from James Lawrence. And when asked point blank, like, how did you get up every single day during these 50 days and do it? He'd say, look, I'd get up, I'm weary, I'm tired, I don't want to do any of this. And I'd have to, you know, step into the identity of the iron cowboy. What would the iron cowboy do? And I would go out there and execute

as if the iron cowboy was this superhero figure that my kids would look up to and that I aspire to become. And something about that process allowed him to transcend his own sense of personal limitation to achieve something extraordinary. David Goggins, the same thing. He calls himself Goggins. It's a different version of the same idea. And it's left me in reading your book and thinking about this, it's left me realizing we like to mock and make fun of people, especially professional athletes that refer to themselves in the third person in media interviews. But now I have a whole different perspective on this. They're saying this person is the performative aspect of who I am. And that is distinct from who I am when I hit the pillow at

night and have my fears and insecurities. Absolutely. And it's, I mean, the context that I try to create with it is that you're not building out an alter ego for all of your life. You know, we're building out an alter ego if needed for someone in a field of play, I call it. So we live on many stages. Everyone understands that. We've got our home life, we've got our family life with our parents or whatever, or we've got our friends and we have our work and we've got our sport or our hobby self. And of course, there's aspects of our personalities that are coming out differently that are being magnified in each one of those areas. You know, like for myself, when I started to leverage this in business, you know, because I played high school football,

and that's where I started to get into using the alter ego. And again, I used it like some people do as a survival mechanism against the trauma and the stuff that I was dealing with and to play with a new and to be playful with myself because, you know, the rest of the time I was highly stressed and anxious and it was my one opportunity to kind of just be more free. And yet that was my actual true self that was coming out. I was just leveraging Geronimo, which was my alter ego's name for football. But I was leveraging Walter Payton as well and Ronnie Lott, two Hall of Fame football players. And I was stepping into their characteristics and traits when I was on the football field. And when I got into business, you know, I said I started at a very young age.

But I looked like I was 12. And I'm like, who's going to listen to me? I mean, I'm 21. And I look like I'm 12. And I'm about to go out there and talk about mental toughness and peak performance with people. But the reality was I wasn't going out trying to work with pro athletes right off the bat. I was working with the people I was really qualified to work with at the time, which is just youngsters, 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds,

and just sharing with them the ideas that I had naturally done that had helped me perform at a high level and get a college football scholarship and, you know, be a nationally ranked badminton player in Canada because badminton and football, they definitely go hand in hand, right? Yeah, I know. It's weird that you played badminton. Yeah. You say it. I've always said it badminton. Badminton? Badminton. Is that a very, is that a Canadian spin on the word or is that how you're supposed to say it? Probably. It's badminton. Badm badminton. We could do 90 minutes on badminton and how that whole thing happened, but keep going. We're going to see a drop-off in the listenership right now. And so, when I looked at the self that I wanted to be bringing to the table in business, it was someone who was confident because I wasn't confident. It

was someone who was decisive because I was terribly indecisive at the time. I couldn't pick a strategy to do and grow my business. And I was terribly inarticulate about what it was that I did as well. So putting words together to describe what I was doing wasn't easy for me. And again, maybe someone was, I mean, I'm dyslexic as well. And so I'm challenged by that, but not challenged by it. It actually is a superpower that I have, frankly, because it allows me to think in pictures in my head. I think in shapes and not in words anymore.

But, and then I thought to myself, wait a second, I use this idea of a character when I played football, why don't I leverage that for business? And because I wanted to be smarter than what I was, I had a belief from a very young age that people who wore glasses were smart because my best friend in my small little rural school, Mark had glasses and grade below me, James, he had glasses too. So I went out to LensCrafters at West Edmonton Mall, where I lived at the time, largest mall in the world at the time, by the way, and bought non-prescription glasses, which that was when wearing glasses was not cool.

Like it's more cool now. And even the optometrist kind of gave me that funny look of, look, really, you don't need glasses, but you're going to buy glasses? Like, yeah, just leave me alone. I can get me some glasses. That's the glasses on the cover of the book. Well, in some ways, yeah. And I used it as my, you know, reverse Superman, you know, Superman put on the glasses to become, you know, mild-mannered Clark Kent. I put on the glass to

become the Superman version of myself in business where the glasses meant something to me. And we'll kind of get into the science of it in a second. And yeah, and so when I put them on, I was very intentional about the person that was showing up, and that's so important. And the moment that Todd version that was lacking confidence, was indecisive, would start to show up, I'd immediately take off the glasses. Because at no point in time, when I am that version, would he have that thought? Like which my alter ego in business was Richard. It's my first name. And we talked about that before. So when I put on the glasses, I was stepping into Richard and Richard never felt unconfident, never felt indecisive. But the moment I did, I'd take them off. And after a while, people know that are in, you know, this in that operate in athletics, there's triggers that happen that

we create for ourselves that allow us to step into a state that's powerful. And just the act of me practicing putting on those glasses, it was almost like a switch was getting flicked on the side of my temple, that the moment that those glasses went on, just this cascading thinking pattern changed in my head. Like a talisman. Yep, 100%. How do you reconcile this? Like the validity of this practice is undisputed. You see it with varying degrees of success

in all kinds of people. And you have tons of examples in the book and even people like Bo Jackson. And like, so this is something that's happening and something that works. At the same time, when I'm thinking about this, I struggle with how to reconcile this practice with the idea of inhabiting this integrated, authentic persona. Like so much about what I do and what I talk about is this journey towards being comfortable in your own skin so that you can navigate between all different types of environments and feel good about who you are. And you don't have to modify that persona based on your environment because you're grounded in your strong sense of self.

Sure. So you kind of alluded to this earlier when you were talking about authenticity, but I'm interested in your thoughts and how these two things are different from each other or perhaps more similar than we might imagine. They're far more similar than the same or than different. And it's that first, similar than the same or than different. And, and it's that first we need to recognize that this is, we're all a process of becoming right. There is this onion that we're trying to peel away. And this is a tool that we use to help people find more of themselves on the field of play of life.

Again, like I said, like we constantly are human beings, not everybody, but many people who strive to achieve or want big things for themselves will judge themselves for their current performance, beat themselves up. They'll stop themselves from getting out on the field of play because of the worry and the judgment of others, right? That's one of the, you know, when you'd asked originally at the very beginning, what are some of the things that stop people? Judgment and worry of what other people are thinking of them is probably the second most challenging thing that people have.

And because just it's hardwired into us to get worried about whether or not the tribe is gonna kick us out. It's just, you know, anthropologically in us. And so for me, it's, yeah, you can try to get to that place of core authenticity, which that's what I'm encouraging with people is to really find that core self where you're just honoring the fact that there is this pure place of possibility that isn't governed by all these layers that I talk about in chapter number three, that you can actually circumvent it by instead of attacking it, because that's a,

those things that are stopping us is a force. Resistance is a force that we have to deal with. And the force that people are handing, the tool that people are handing people to try to overcome that force is another force called willpower. Willpower will typically come from an intellectual frontal lobe place. And when you're trying to battle the unconscious part of you, I just say to people, good luck. Good luck with battling force with force. luck. Good luck with battling force with force. However, there is a natural genius that's inside of us called the creative imagination that allows us to suspend the disbelief of what we can or cannot do, whatever we think and define ourselves as, and tapping into this creative imagination, which moves the energy into the more primal part of our brain and thinking about, geez,

how would Rich Roll handle this situation, right? Because we have this grass is greener on the other side things. I look at you and I immediately strip away all of the other narrative that you've had to live with. And I go, man, that guy's strong. He's tough. He's charismatic.

He's good looking. People wanna be around him. And all of those traits, I'm like, well, I'm not those. Maybe I just, someone doesn't feel like they have those things right now. But if I can step into those for a moment in time or for even longer than that, I can circumvent the thing that's stopping me. And then in that circumventing process, you actually are releasing the authentic self. It's just that the carrier is an alter ego or a new character.

Or you're having to cut through the lies that you tell yourself that create that false narrative that holds you back, right? So, when you're saying, well, what would Rich Roll do? And you roll off this litany of characteristics, like a lot of those to me, like don't feel true or, you know, so, you know what I mean? Like, I can't, I don't feel like I can own that for myself. Sure. And some of them are true and some of them maybe not, it doesn't matter. But I get what you're saying about the idea of like the idealized version of myself, when I'm firing on all cylinders, would make this choice and would do these things. So if I can create some kind of mental construct that I can inhabit, where those decisions become easier,

second nature, that will serve the goals that I seek. Well, I'll use another example that's in the book. So, you said, you know, because on the cover are a pair of glasses, which again, friends think, you know, that's Todd paying homage to his alter ego. And, you know, that would be an easy place to go to, or it's like, oh, it's the Clark Kent Superman thing. Okay, that's smart too. But really, those are a replica of someone who led a movement in America, probably one of the most important people of the 20th century in American history that used this exact same concept to help him go out and do the very hard things that he was motivated to go and do. And that was Martin Luther King. And here we are on Martin Luther King Day.

Recording this. That's, yeah. And so I did a talk back in 2004 at a leadership event. And I mentioned just different mental game strategies that we all use to help us perform to the level that we want to get to. And afterwards, this lady came up to me and she said, I loved your talk. And specifically, I really liked what you shared around she said, I loved your talk and specifically, I really liked what you shared around the fact that you wear non-prescription glasses too.

And it's funny because Martin didn't wear them either. And it was Coretta Scott King, it was his wife. Oh, wow. And that's where I learned the story. And she said, he felt like he was doing something so important that he wore those glasses as a way to make sure that he was stepping into the version of himself that would help lead such an important movement and not get in the way

with his own insecurities of that thing happening. And so those glasses in some ways were a shield to his really kind of sensitive core self. So that when he was stepping into that person, that person was the one who was taking the slings and the arrows from other people and the criticisms so that he could protect that kind of more pure part of who he was. And now there is actually, and I never told that story because it was always, it was always a personal story between Coretta and I. And, um, and so I was like, oh, are people gonna believe me that she did that? And then she passed away like two years later.

But now there is a monument to Martin Luther King in Atlanta Hartsfield Airport, where it actually shares that story of his glasses in a little case along with a couple of other items where it says that these are non-prescription glasses and Martin wore these as a way to step into his quote unquote distinguished self. I feel like there's something important about protecting,

protecting the idea, like not overtly publicly sharing it. Yeah. Like if it's one thing for the iron cowboy to say, okay, this is my, it's fine. But for Martin Luther King to kind of keep that to himself, right, it's a private relationship. I'm glad you said that. That I think creates energy around it.

It also reminds me of, this is something that screenwriters and actors do. Like a screenwriter writing a character will have a secret about that character that helps inform how they write dialogue that only the screenwriter knows. And once you know that secret, you're like, oh, it's so obvious, but you would never know it.

Or the actor inhabiting that character will say, well, this could be anything. It'd be like, you know, my character's terrified of water or some little, or I'm just channeling, you know, Robert Redford and Bush Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or something like that. Like they're hanging their hat on some alter ego that informs the choices they're going to make on screen, but it's their little secret. Yeah. Right?

And once you know that secret, you're like, oh, now I can see it in everything that they're doing. But if you don't know it, you would never know. But you're like, wow, that's so amazing what they're able to do. Yeah. Well, I mean, and again, that's what I think just makes human beings just fascinating is like when you become more friendly with someone,

you're like, oh, that makes such a book. I mean, now they make more and more sense to me. And it's like the very first time I shared with my wife, you know, what happened to me? She's like, oh my God. She actually smiled and got happy. Not because she was happy that that happened to me? She's like, oh my God. She actually smiled and got happy. Not because she was happy that that happened to me, but because she just was like,

oh, you make so much sense to me now as to why you do things the way that you do. But 100% that- Was your wife not aware of the abuse situation until recently? Just, I didn't tell any human being until September of last year, or September of 2017. So, a year and a half ago, roughly, from right now. Yeah, I did not share it.

And there's so many times where I got really close, but, you know, didn't. But yeah, so that idea of keeping it private is something I encourage people to do. And especially like with athletes where it opens up the doorway for trash talk, you know, and that's, you know, that's, that's why. To be mocked. just such a fortitude with it. They're like, I don't care. It's like Kobe Bryant and the Black Mamba. Black Mamba, you know, I tell the story in the book about when he got, where he got the inspiration for his alter ego, the Black Mamba, which is when he was watching the movie Kill Bill. And that snake came on and he was just like, wow, that's exactly who I want to be. That quick strike. And that shaped, you know, what he said was the characteristics and traits that he wanted to bring out onto the court. And, you know, and then there's other people where if you're, you know, again, I'm building a, I'm sort of leading this mission of, and I say it in the book, I didn't invent alter

egos. Cicero was the first person to mention alter egos in 44 BC. And the root of the word alter ego means the other eye or trusted friend, which is really the big, which is really kind of one of those ideas that I want people to take home is this, this idea is that trusted friend that can help you go out and do the things that you want to strive to go and do, or help you become the person that you most want to become. That's that trusted friend. It's also extremely healthy psychologically to have that kind of healthy version of yourself inside of you, right? Instead of that version of yourself that's always beating you up. Yeah. So help me create an alter ego for myself. I don't even know how to, I've never put any thought into this. So how does that work?

You know, we talk about it in the book. You know, again, like I say in the book, there are many, many ways to start building the alter ego. But if I was going to? You know, we talk about it in the book. You know, again, like I say in the book, there are many, many ways to start building the alter ego. But if I was going to, you know, unfold the process, it's first quickly identifying where are the places that you're most frustrated. We always start first in context. What part of your life would it make the most sense to go and do? Because people automatically go to work, sports, like depending on their, but I've had clients, their biggest

successes came from the fact that they built an alter ego that was for home life. It was about being a better dad. Right. You talk about that with like the Navy SEALs and people like that who, who, you know, crush it at work, but then are challenged when they come home and have to be a dad and have to kind of inhabit a different type of skill set and personality. Yeah, so for you, you know, it's choose which one that, what's that place that we- Well, I'll give you one.

Yeah. So here, so I don't feel like I need an alter ego for most of what I do. I don't need it to be a dad. I don't need it to do what we're doing right now. I don't feel like I need to do it as an athlete. I feel like I still have plenty of room to grow and expand on stage.

Like when I do public speaking, I have like, I feel like I'm batting, I don't know, 300 or something. Like sometimes I go out and I kill it. Other times I'm all up in my head. That's a terrible analogy. You can't say I'm batting 300 because that's actually a really great batting average. That's actually, it shows me how little I know about baseball. I was trying to think of like, what's a low batting average. I wanted to protect all the baseball players out there, right? I'm going to get crushed for saying that. Oh, my God.

All right. Whatever like a low batting average is. Yeah. Because, well, I would, I'll temper that by saying, more often than not, I'm pretty good. But I know I could be, I know I have the capacity to own the stage. Yeah. And deliver in a much more profound, impactful way than I generally do. Most of the time I do fine. Occasionally I'm not good at all because I'm nervous and up in my head or tired or

what have you. So that is one scenario in which I feel like if I could narrow down, like if I could zero in on some kind of alter ego that would allow me to get out of myself and all my insecurities that come with stepping up on a stage and seeing a bunch of people in front of me, that that would serve me. Well, I mean, you just encapsulated perfectly as to why we go and we do it. To step out of those insecurities is a fantastic motivation to do it. So, you know, are, who, who have you seen? Well, let's go back again to that starting place of what are the traits that you're currently exhibiting that you don't like right now? You kind of already said a few of them, like one, you're in your own head, maybe, and again, I'm just going to spit ball, but you're concerned about what other people are like,

how they're receiving you at this time. You're probably also talking to audiences who aren't ultra types, right? You know, it's like- It's all different kinds of people. But yeah, I mean, there's a whole litany of reasons why, you know, I feel like I hamstring myself. And I certainly have people that I look to who I think are masters of the art form that I try to emulate. And what are those? What are those things that you are looking at?

Just total comfort, completely don't care whether the audience is responding or not because they're in their thing. Unbelievably relaxed, very clear on the message that they're trying to convey. Spontaneous, fun, reactive, sort know, sort of, they're not so wed to whatever it is that they're doing that they can enjoy the presence of the audience and bring them into it. Like there's a whole variety of things. Do you feel like you take yourself

really seriously? Too much, yeah. Yeah. Especially in that context. Yeah. Probably. Yeah, definitely. So, well, then it's not shocking as to why you're going to go to the opposite and go, well, I want to be more fun, reactive, playful on stage, more kind of in your own body then as well. others, is there any one or anything that you think as a person, as an animal, whatever, also contains those qualities already? And the reason I ask that question is because human beings are so story-driven and narrative-driven, we watch movies and we get engaged with that character that's on the screen. And they oftentimes become great sources of the characteristics and traits that we want to embody. And because we're so story driven, that's when we're connected to someone or something emotionally, the chances of us embodying

and then carrying out those characteristics on stage for ourselves is just that much higher. Why? Because I don't want you to be consciously trying to think about being that person. I want you to feel that person. And so, you know, and again- How do you train that?

It's like practice with anything. Truly, like I said, with stepping into quote unquote Richard or Geronimo, I'll tell you the process that I did when I was an athlete playing football is I went into my mental movie theater. playing football is I went into my mental movie theater and in through two separate doors would walk Walter Payton and Ronnie Lott, Geronimo leading a tribe of five Native American warriors. And they would walk up to me and Walter Payton would collect trading cards from Ronnie Lott as well and hand them to Geronimo. And then Geronimo would hand them to me. And as he handed them to me, Walter Payton would say to me, take these cards and you embody all of us with the way that you show up on that field. way that you show up on that field. But don't you for a second dishonor who we are and how we showed up by not showing up like we would. And that's what I did. I had five trading cards. This is very specific. This is like a lucid dream. That's a lot to keep in mind.

Not even. No, it's so fast, man. And so I had these five trading cards and I put Walter Paytons in my helmet because I wanted to think like him on the field because he was just a phenomenal, he could read things that other people couldn't. And then I wanted to hit like Ronnie Lott out on the football field. And if you don't know, Ronnie was an absolutely explosive, damaging defensive player.

And I tucked those underneath my shoulder pads. And then I'd take Walter Payton, the final two cards of Walter Payton, I'd stuff them inside of my thigh pads because I wanted to run like him. And again, I was a six foot tall, scrawny 159 pound soaking wet kid, but I would play way beyond my size on a football field. Now I'm not going to make myself out to be like, I'm just like this NCAA champion. Cause you know, I definitely untapped as much as myself as I could, but I played way bigger on that field. And it was just that ritual. You talk about those rituals before, about, you know, you getting into that rhythm when you're getting ready for a race, right?

That was my ritual mentally to be very intentional about who was going to show up. Not the 159-pound version. That person was left on the sidelines. I didn't even put a category of what my size was. And I loved it because people saw me coming and they're like, oh, I'm going to barrel over this guy. And I would just destroy them. I broke shoulder pads consistently, actually. Straps on my shoulder pads.

In one game, I actually cracked my helmet twice by hitting guys hard. Right, because you're basically inhabiting this Ronnie Lott, Walter Payton hybrid, Geronimo character who doesn't look anything like you and is capable of things that you're not capable of. Suspended disbelief about, you know, whatever. So you're gonna play above your level,

but you're also gonna end up getting injured, right you know, whatever. So you're going to play above your level, but you're also going to end up getting injured, right? How does this differ in a professional context versus sports? Like what are the differences between the work that you do with high performance athletes and business executives? I mean, obviously there's a lot of similarities. People are trying to perform to their peak, but there's got to be differences as well. Yes. So for the most part with athletes, with a lot of them, you're embodying the characteristics for the majority of a performance. But I talk about in the book, this idea of moments of impact that maybe you don't need an alter ego for every single moment that you're a salesperson or someone who is performing in business like you are.

But there's these opportunities that are, it's like a KPI, a key performance indicator, the thing that's going to really help you be successful. And so if you're a great presenter as a salesperson, but then when it comes to closing the deal, you shirk away from actually closing it because you are concerned about rejection. And the longer that I don't hear a no, at least I've still got them in as a prospect kind of thing that's not really serving you at all. And so I don't want to dive into the deep history of why that's stopping you. That's not my role. Instead, I want to give you some tools and strategies to help you perform

right now. And that's why the alter ego became my number one tool. You got to remember, I was being called on a Wednesday to come and show up to help someone on a Friday when they're performing at the US Open the day later. I didn't have time. I mean, we leaned on, for long-term strategies, meditation, my go-to, easily. It's fantastic at developing focus and concentration skills because it's the equivalent of flexing the bicep muscle for the frontal lobe, right? If you want to get bigger bicep muscles, do arm curls or any sort of back exercise, that's going to strengthen your bicep. Well, what do you do to strengthen focus and concentration? Well, it sits in their frontal lobe. So meditation, I haven't found anything

that's better at developing that. But on a Wednesday, when they're performing on a Friday or Saturday, I need something else. And alter egos were a fantastic way to help make that happen. So for people in professional lives, it's, well, what are those areas

that are kind of chafing you right now? You talked about getting on stage. Well, it's categorically proven by other people to step into a, you know, a different alter ego or, you know, leverage that idea at least. And do you have to give it a name like I did or like, you know, I'm the Iron Cowboy, right? Yeah, the Iron Cowboy. Iron Cowboy. Or, you know, Goggins, all he's doing is just removing his first name.

No, you don't need to, but it's super helpful to do it actually as well. I talk about using names in the book and how to give you like so many different ways to create a name for it, to create a new identity that you're gonna take out there that's more playful. Does it matter if your motivation

is predominantly derived intrinsically versus extrinsically? In other words, certain people, as you know, like are motivated by the desire to be the best version of themselves. They're competing against themselves versus the person who hates to lose or just has to beat that other person or has to win or has to get the approval of X, Y, and Z people. Yeah, absolutely it does. If the motivation is coming from the external part of the field of play that I talk about in chapter three, all you're going to do is still create a trapped self.

Cause that's that feeling that we get. Like when we feel like we're not showing up, like we know that we can, that's, that's that sense. That's like, oh, not all of me is getting out there. It's trapped inside. And then we get caught up in our own head of like, well, what's causing me to get trapped or how do I get past this? And conversely, when you actually feel like all of you is getting out there and the all of you that you most want to be getting out there, the internal feeling, and this is actually a term that one of my clients gave to me is he just said, I feel like my heroic self is getting out there. I feel like the hero that's living within me is truly now showing up. So that intention that you're talking about

is the intention coming from external, trying to impress other people, well, you're gonna get trapped. That is going to wear you out. Plus you're putting on a facade then. Whereas if your intention is about activating these characteristics that I am going to borrow from Mr. Bean being playful,

and I talk about Mr. Bean's, you know, process of creating his alter ego, which helped him become a better actor. Then, and, you know, and because you want that goofiness on stage, I've got, because I work with people who go into a lot of speeches. There's, you know, one of my guys who's, who loves to be goofy up there. He's not using Mr. Bean, but that could be one of the, but what are those characteristics and traits that they embody that you're intentionally bringing so that you can bring the best self to that moment?

Right. Absolutely. And in a way that I would imagine once you're tapped into these intrinsic drivers, then it becomes a calculus or a conversation about how they mesh with a core value system. So if those intrinsic motivators are in alignment with the core values of that person,

then that's gonna create a potent combination that can be accelerated by this alter ego, but which ultimately is gonna be the propulsion mechanism for success. And the magic of it for me is, we had talked about this at the beginning, is whether someone is outcome-orientated, they're waiting until they get the medal

or finish the race, that's a shitty existence because it's a fleeting moment. Whereas this brings you right back to the thing that makes the people who are truly powerful performers, you get locked into the process. Process, yeah. And I think it's important to point out that any athlete, any successful athlete

with any kind of longevity has to be process-oriented in order to avoid burnout because there invariably will be plateaus. You're not always improving. And if you're attached in an unhealthy way to the idea that every time you have a match or a game or a competition or what have you, that you have to be better than you were the week prior or the month prior or the season prior,

that's going to be problematic. Because ultimately, it's going to ebb and flow. If you're invested in the process or in marginal improvements in different areas of what it means to be a well-rounded athlete, that's going to keep you energized about your career. But that's a very slippery slope because being an elite athlete means constantly improving your performance, even if it's those tiny marginal 0.05% gains. Well, and it also gives you a tremendous sense of control because the thing that makes you feel out of control is when you're so focused on outcomes. And I'll use me as a perfect example in this book. So I had, you know, when, when I was out

talking to publishers about this book, there was, we had, we had meetings with 19 publishers, which if you're not familiar with the publishing space is an obscene amount of people that were interested. And it was great. It was an amazing experience. And we had so many people that were saying such nice things. And this is going to be huge and filling up my head with all of this stuff. Right. And so my expectation now is that this is going to be a New York Times bestseller.

Right. And I'm going to make this thing a New York Times bestseller. Well, that's an outcome that I can't control because ultimately that's a curated list. It's actually not a true representation of books sold. And so I was focused on engineering all the different activities that would make this thing a New York Times bestseller. And I was getting massively stressed out. And then one of my really good friends who was one of the kind of launching pads for the book, Tucker Max, I was sitting at his place in austin and he was like dude you've won like you had 19 people bidding on this you got a great advance for this book it's a great

like the finished product is a great book you know when was the last time you ever told anyone oh go buy this because it's a new york timesseller? And I was like, well, never. It used to mean something that it doesn't really mean anymore. Yeah. And so it just brought me back. I'm like, wait a second, Todd. For 20 plus years, you've been doing nothing but coaching people on the process to get them locked in the process. You've now shifted your perspective on your own book to an outcome.

You've now shifted your perspective on your own book to an outcome. Again, this is the value of having chief performance officer sitting outside because inside the bottle, I wasn't reading the label right. And so since that moment, which was November the 12th, I've been just doing the do, just staying focused on the process that I can control to help get the message out and the book out. And, you know, leads me to sit here with you because talking to jonathan about hey do you know anyone that could you know help you know you know um uh sit down with so um yeah just this idea of that intentionality being something that you can really control is extremely powerful to get people to enjoy

as many moments of their day, their work life or whatever as possible. It's also okay to wanna be on the New York Times bestseller list. You know what I mean? Like it's a very human thing and that would be like, oh my God, what a lifetime achievement.

It's a super cool thing. Yeah. So I would say that it's important to also be gentle on yourself and not shame yourself if that is a goal that you want. An analogous situation would be an athlete who's trained their entire career to go to the Olympics. They go to Olympic trials, they make the Olympic team. That's the equivalent of you getting a book deal with 19, whatever, 19 publishers wanting the book. It's going to be predictable and logical

for that athlete to then say, boy, I'd like to win the gold medal. So is that person attached to process or outcome? Well, that's an outcome driven thing. If they don't win the gold medal, they're probably going to be disappointed. Yeah. So, I think there's a place to want that gold medal or want that New York Times checkmark, but being wary of that attachment to that outcome not being unhealthy. Like having some attachment to that outcome

is what's driving the work ethic and the investment in the process to get there, right? So it's a more nuanced thing, I think. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, we live in this world of polarity, right? I mean, there's black, white, there's up, down, there's inside, outside. And so, you know, just this idea that everything is process-oriented. And I mean, I am not that

person at all. I mean, I'm around achievers and strivers, you know, ambitious people all the time. And so, there is this balance and, or this, really, I don't think of it as balance. It's this integration of both of them living together. But when you're doing the activity to help you win the gold medal, if you're focused on the gold medal in that moment, you are dead in the water. Well, also not self-identifying with it. It can't be a commentary on who you are as a human being.

Exactly. So the stakes of like winning that gold medal can't be a referendum on whether you're a human being of value or not. Yeah. There's a, there's a, you would love this. Have you seen the documentary that just came out on HBO about the surf culture in Hawaii with Kelly Slater? Yeah. I just watched it actually. Yeah. I just watched it like two days ago. It's awesome. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of what we're talking about And just the journey that all of them went through and the destructive nature of, you know, pursuit, pursuit, pursuit.

And yeah, anyway. Well, it's about, you know, the love and purity of all of that gets merged into this subculture, how that fractures the community and leads people in different directions. So you have Kelly Slater, super competitive, was willing to do what some of these other guys weren't willing to do in order to win and maintain that status. to do in order to win and maintain that status. And then other athletes who were really just in it for, didn't really want to compete at all, right? But they shared this love of this thing and how, you know, that generation had to navigate that and what it did to those relationships. Yeah. Super interesting. I forget the name of the documentary. I'm blanking right now. I'm blanking on it too. But it's something generation

or something like that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. Highly recommend it. Yeah. I don't know.

What were we talking about now? Yeah. We were talking about process and intention, but I think we've covered it too with people. Yeah. So, yeah, it's like, it's the journey. It's not the destination. Great.

It's the process. It's not the outcome. Yes. But's the process, it's not the outcome. Yes, but it is more complicated than that. You know, it's a desire for a certain outcome that's gonna wedge you in the process. Like you can't completely, you know, remove these things from each other. It's their relationship to each other

that creates that alchemy. Yeah, and I mean, what you just said is exactly right with this. you know, it's complicated and that's what gets, we, if there's ever like an objection around the idea of the alter ego is they're trying to simplify life down to just like, oh, but shouldn't we all just love ourselves anyway? I'm like, I love that idea. But as someone who has had an entire career helping people achieve things and through that process enjoy it as well it's a lot more nuanced and complex than just sitting down and saying yeah but you just need to love yourself i'm a great example of that you know there's there's

a lot more to human beings and what people have gone through than just, you know, waking up and doing some things. Like there's layers of narrative that people have. And so, you know, that's why it was important for me to put in this kind of the science and the psychology behind why this is so effective. Like the idea that I wanted to share from the beginning around enclosed cognition. Enclothed cognition. Enclothed cognition is an idea that sits in our psyche that we as human beings attach meaning, we enclothe meaning cognitively to things that we wear and things around us. And a good example of this was, or a study that was done by the Kellogg School of Management was, they brought a bunch of students into a classroom. And on the board was, have you ever seen one of those kind of puzzles where it has five blocks across the top, five blocks going down, and then each block is the word of a color, but it's colored in a different color? So, it's like, the word is yellow, but it's blue. And then it's green, but it's red. So it

says green, but it's red. And the trick with it is, if you've ever given it, is you've got to go through and say all 25 of the colors, but the word. But it's really, it's hard to do it because you're seeing blue, but it's a yellow word. The color that you're seeing is not the word that you're seeing. And so they brought in a bunch of students and they asked them to, they were testing their focus and concentration skills. And they said, okay, like go through this puzzle and, you know, give us the word. So they timed them, tracked how many mistakes that they made, and then they left the room. Then they brought in another group of students and they gave them a white coat and told them it was a painter's coat. Okay. And they got them to put it on. And then they did the exercise,

track the results. They leave the room, bring in another group, give them the same white coat, but this time they tell them it's a lab coat or a doctor's coat and they do the experiment. Okay. So what do you think the results were or the differences were between the people who were plain clothes and wearing the painter's coat? The people in the painter's coat did better because they were adorned in something that made them feel like they were an expert. Okay. So, the stats were zero difference between the two. Oh, really? Yeah. And it comes down to because the test itself was testing your focus and concentration skills and your ability to see detail.

Now, the people with the lab coat or doctor's coat, they made less than half the mistakes as everyone else, and they finished it in less than half the time. So they showed higher levels of focus, concentration, you know, didn't have as many mistakes. Because they were enclosed with the idea that when you were wearing a lab coat, someone who has a lab coat on or a doctor's coat, they're smart, they know details, whatever someone's meaning was, it helped them perform better. Again, they performed better. Now, they did the same test.

This time, they told them that the coat was the same. It was a painter's coat for one group and a lab coat for another group. But this time, they were just standing next to it and it was on a mannequin. Didn't change. No results changed. Unless it was on them, they didn't enclose themselves with the cognitive traits of someone who was more detail-oriented. And then they did a creative test with them. So paint, again, this is the exact same coat.

The coat is no different. Whether they just told them it was a painter's coat or told them it was a lab coat. Did a creative test. Now the people who were told that it was a painter's coat, they performed the test better than the people who were wearing the lab coat and plain clothes. the lab coat and plain clothes. So that's why for me, when I'm helping people to develop this ideal of tapping into an alter ego, making sure that the glasses that I'm putting on mean something. And I mean, I talk about in the book, how there's been many studies have been done around people who wear glasses are perceived to be smarter, more patient, all these types of things.

And for my client who was an equestrian writer, her alter ego, she grew up in the time of Wonder Woman, not the current Wonder Woman, but the 1970s version of Wonder Woman. And just that was immediately when I said, well, who would be your alter ego? She immediately just went right away, loved her. I'm like, why, what traits do you think? She's like, she's just calm. She stands her ground. She's just, just filled with like pure confidence and a relaxed confidence. And for someone who was sitting on a horse that didn't have that relaxed confidence, that was great. I'm confidence, that was great. I'm like, okay, great. What are we going to use now to activate her?

Okay, what's that totem or artifact I talk about in the book? You said a talisman. And so she went out and bought a, or got a custom made bracelet actually that looked a lot more similar to hers and use that. hers and use that. Now, for me, I know human beings, when we develop triggers for ourself, sound is actually one of the most important triggers that we can use. It's a very underutilized one, the sound of something. So for me, I was like, no, when you get that bracelet made, make sure it has a nice snap sound to it because that's the moment when you're- Like on the clasp. On the clasp itself.

Yeah, like the Wonder Woman. Yeah, when that thing comes together, I want that thing to snap in place. Sound is just so powerful. She hold them up to like get, you know, deflect bullets. Of course. Stuff like that, yeah. All right.

Yeah, and so, you know, just that- I would have opted for the invisible plane, but. That's a tough one now. Yeah. How do you, this is sort of similar to the other question I asked, but like, how does this, how does this square with the problematic nature of fake it till you make it, right? Because on some level you're saying, well, look, you know, she doesn't have the confidence when she gets on the horse.

So she's got to like conjure up this image of Wonder Woman and try to inhabit this artificial persona in order to be the person that she wants to be. Is that not faking it till you make it? Like what part of this is really authentic and what part of this is kind of trickery, I suppose? Sure. So just the idea of fake it till you make it, for one thing, as a term, fails the first

sniff test, which is why would you put the word fake it in there right off the bat? Because that's going to deliver resistance to people because no one ultimately wants to be fake. But again, getting back to the true intention behind this is for people to realize that, the true intention behind this is for people to realize that, okay, so her current narrative is that she doesn't have confidence on the horse. But what I know as someone who's worked with so many people, she does have the confidence. It's sitting inside of her already. She's just- This is a way of giving her permission. Exactly. It's suspending the disbelief that you don't have this right now and allowing to step into this

idealized version, which we as human beings do. It's that grass is greener on the other side. We think that that person is flawless. So I'm like, well, great. I'm not here to argue with human psychology, right? I'm here to tap into its power to allow people to get out onto their field of play as they most want to. So they can lead the lives that are true reflection of who they really are. Instead of being impeded by traumas, imposter syndrome, or any one of the little hidden, the hidden kind of things that the enemy likes to use

to pull us into the ordinary world. Outside of crafting, cultivating these alter egos for your clients and the practice of meditation, which you already talked about a little bit, what are some of the daily habits or rituals that you have a performance that's upcoming there is this a lot of people talk you've probably heard this as well a lot of people talk about the importance of visualization or imagery skills right and um for those of you out there who have heard this before and are frustrated because you don't know how to do it very well you're in good company because it's it's a skill you have to learn how to do. Everyone just, that's been a lot of my problem with people in the personal development or self-help or even the mental game spaces. They say it so flippantly, like you just got to visualize as if it's something that is very easy to do. It's actually

not very easy to do. Just because we have the capacity and we do it all of the time anyway, doesn't mean that we can do it with the intention to bring about the outcome or the process that we want. And so, one day when I was sitting down just journaling for myself, it just occurred to me that in that moment, I had sort of slowed down space and time in my own head because writing is the thinking part of, is the doing part of thinking. When you're writing, it's the doing part of thinking. I'm actively thinking, but I'm on paper. Now, because I can't write as fast as I think, it sort of slows down my mind. And for anyone who wants to try to train people to get into the flow state or the zone state, this is going to be one of my tools

I'm going to use then. So it just pinged me in that moment. And so I started scripting out what I wanted my next speech to look like. And I would script it out in a process-orientated way. So for people who are, you know, one of the, you asked the question around what's some of the daily rituals, not that it needs to be a daily ritual, but a ritual to help people perform. If I had a presentation coming up, I'm going to script out on paper how it's going to go. So it's, you know, when I step on the stage, I feel this extraordinary sense of calm confidence that I'm talking to the exact crowd that wants to hear me today. And the closer and closer I get to the stage and shake the hand of the person who's

handing me the mic, I just feel this deepening relaxation as I'm walking towards them. And when I grab the mic to turn to the crowd, I see a sea of smiling faces that are eager to accept the ideas that I'm there to share with them. And as I talk about how important it is to find that authentic version of who you are, it becomes like this playful experience of just read and react with the crowd. And at the end of the presentation And at the end of the presentation, or at the end of the speech, when I end it, I know deep down that the person that needed to hear that today heard it and it landed hard for them. So, you know, I could go on with it, right? But with it, what I'm not doing is necessarily thinking about the outcome of the moment.

I'm not saying, and when I end the speech, the crowd rises to their feet and throws a thunderous applause at me, because that's not something that I can control. The moment I start scripting up my outcome, the moment I'm going to get, create some anxiety for me. Yeah. Visualizing the emotional experience that you want to, you want to have and inhabiting what that feels like specifically. Exactly. So you asked, you know, what's one of the rituals that is one of my core tools to, to work with athletes on. And, you know, I've got so many

that after, you know, cause some of them, I work with them in a short term and I'm coming in to just be a kind of a quick hit artist to help them with something. Some of them, it's a long-term thing, but probably beyond the alter ego, that idea of scripting out performance, scripting out a day and really engaged with, you know, who and what is intentionally showing up there has been one of their absolute favorites. Yeah, the idea of slowing it down, I think is really important. Like I think visualization is super important. It's something I've been doing since I was, I don't know, 12 years old.

I learned it in swimming. And in my particular version of this, or the way that I practice it, it is about that interior emotional landscape. Like, what does it feel like viscerally to be in this situation so that nothing is unanticipated? It's not outcome-driven, although you can visualize success and experience that. But I also think it's important to do it like so incrementally slow. Like, you could spend an hour on the first minute of diving into the pool for this race.

So you are so connected to every minuscule detail of that, that it's impossible for anything to come as a surprise. And I think then it's important to visualize how you're going to respond when something happens that you don't anticipate. Because I think that's really the defining factor in the successful versus also ran athlete. It's how you manage the unexpected. Yeah.

Because we can all crush it when everything goes our way and it's everything, the stars perfectly aligned for us to perform at our peak. But what do you do when you get thrown a wrench that you didn't foresee? The ability to adapt is crucial. And if you allow that to throw you out of the game mentally or physically and just unravel, then it's a disaster. I'm so glad you said that. It's one of those, because I get asked the question all the time. Well, what is mental toughness? Like what's your, how would you define it?

Resilience. Yeah. And I say mental toughness is your ability to be flexible and adaptable despite what you're given as circumstances or what the world is giving around you, right? It's that you were talking about that flexibility, like that ability to respond in the moment,

not with that emotional self that's maybe going to cause you to wear yourself out or just take a stupid penalty if you're playing a team sport or anything like that, but truly be able to be, because the moment you think that your mental toughness is about that square jaw rigidity, that's not what it is. It's not that. It's the people who are the most flexible and adaptable that can respond, you know, rejig their strategy to win are the ones who come out at the end the most successful. Right. What's your favorite alter ego story? There are a lot of them.

There are some really unique ones. The one that I share at the very beginning of the book, which made a big difference for me because it- The Bo Jackson one? Yeah. Why don't you just tell that story? Sure. So I was speaking at an event in Atlanta, Georgia,

and I was waiting backstage in the green room to come out for my talk, which was gonna happen in about 15 minutes. And I was by myself in the room and all of a sudden through the doorway came this like really physical specimen of a human being. And in my head, I was like, oh wow, I used to play that guy on Nintendo all the time.

And it was Bo Jackson and he started walking towards me and he's like, hi, I'm Bo Jackson. I said, yeah, I know who you are. I'd be pretty terrible person in sport if I didn't know who the only two sport all-star was in pro sports. And I said, you know, I played you a lot on Tecmo Bowl as a kid. You won me a lot of games. And he laughed and he's like, yeah, you're not the first one to say that. And he asked me, like, what are you, are you here to talk? And I said, yeah, what are you going to talk about with the kids and with the coaches? And I said, well, I'm you going to talk about with the kids and with the coaches?

And I said, well, I'm going to talk to them about like mental toughness strategies and tools. But specifically, I'm going to talk to them about using an alter ego to go out there and truly untap those traits and characteristics that are naturally inside of you. So you're not caught up in your own head. And he stopped. And I'll just never forget his face because he kind of got this really quizzical look. And he just looked at me and he cocked his head to the side and he said, you know, Bo Jackson never played a down to football his entire life. And I was like, interesting. Tell me more. I like how he used the third person.

I know. Yeah. But that's what you said before. It's so classic. It is. It's so classic. And that's what I mean before about the whole idea of breadcrumbs have been laid throughout to really point to people that this is a very healthy thing for you to do. So anyways, he then said, you know, when I was, a lot of people who know my backstory know that when I was a youngster or when I was a young kid, I was a very angry kid, you know, misbehaved.

And I would take that anger out onto the playing field, but it would get me into a lot of trouble, take bad penalties, be very uncoachable. And so one night I was watching a movie and I saw this character come on the screen and immediately I was like, oh, I want to be him. He's cold. He's methodical. He's calculating. And if I could just step into that when I go on the football field, I won't take so many penalties. I won't be so angry while I'm out there because this person wasn't angry. And it was Jason from Friday the 13th, which shows the power of the human mind and how he didn't, if people go, what? So someone who's angry and filled with rage or whatever is going to step into Jason from Friday the 13th. And, but his takeaway were the things, the traits that he most wanted to start

embodying that he thought would help him overcome these deficits that he was dealing with. And he would say- Dispassionate killer. Yes. Yeah. And he said, like, listen, I know what you're, I know you're probably gonna go out there and maybe talk to them about like the importance of goals, but he said, I truly didn't have them. I went out there on a mission. And I talk in the book about the importance of a mission and missions are more powerful than goals. I went on there on a mission to just destroy anything that got in my past uncaringly.

And so he said, when I came out of the tunnel or when I get onto the football field, Jason lived on the football field. And when I came out of the tunnel or when I get onto the football field, Jason lived on the football field. And when I would step on the grass, I'd make a heel-to-toe motion. And the moment that that happened, that's when Jason would enter me. And I would just embody that cold, calculating nature of who I wanted to be. And again, that's beautiful. Has he never told anyone that, though?

No. This was his private little thing, right? Well, it was out there a little bit in the kind of circles of people who knew him and stuff. But, you know, he was just like, this is, he's like, you get paid to do this for a living with people. And I said, well, it's not the only thing I do.

I mean, this is just one of my strategies, but I said, it's such a big core part of it. And he was just fascinated with that idea that this was a real thing. Like it was just, he thought it, like many people do, they're like, oh, I just kind of fell into doing that. And I said- Yeah, they just do it.

They just, somehow it just spontaneously occurs, whether it's a safety mechanism, a survival mechanism, or some way that they just fall into that seems to work for them. Like nobody taught them to do this or said they should explore this. Yeah. And just like that experiment was for him, that's why I get excited about talking about the idea of people because it can be used for many different things. I mean, there's a story that I have. I didn't put it in the book, but it's because the story didn't come out until afterwards. But have you seen Mr. Rogers documentary?

No, I haven't. That's at the top of the list of the documentaries. It's so good. I know everybody's talking about it. I don't want to ruin it for you, but probably a third of the movie is talking about Mr. Rogers alter ego. I didn't know that. Yeah, his hand puppet, the cat. And his wife is talking so beautifully about how the hand puppet was his actual alter ego, but really was the most true representation of who he was at his core. The alter ego allowed his core self

to truly show up for people, which was this like truly loving and kind and that self that was showing up for kids. And it was just being transmuted through this hand puppet, but it's a beautiful story. People have to watch it. Well, that goes to the center of really your core thesis, which is the inversion of the idea of the alter ego.

The alter ego is actually the authentic self given permission to express itself uninhibited. And you kind of open the book with this question of like, in the context of Superman, who's the alter ego and everybody says, well, Clark Kent, you know, or Superman's the alter ego, but no, Superman is the real guy. Clark Kent is the alter ego, right? Similarly, the hand puppet is the true authentic Fred Rogers. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So I like that idea. Yeah. And so I say that because when I go home at night, do I need to bring, well, I don't wear my glasses around my kids,

not because- You don't wear a hand puppet? Yeah, exactly. I walk in the door and I go, I- What was that Mel Gibson movie where he had a hand puppet? Was it Lethal Weapon? No, no, no, no, no. It was more recent. I think it was directed by Jodie Foster. I can't remember. Blake, do you know what I'm talking about? The Beaver, yeah, The Beaver. Oh no.

There's something about that too. Oh, geez. Anyway, you should look into it. Yeah, so, but when I go home, I stop at the doorway and I actually kind of talk about this with people is there's certain trigger points that we can use to actually, you know, just stop for a moment and just think about, okay, intentionally, who do I want to bring at my core to this moment? And doorways are a

fantastic triggering point for people to use. So anyways, I get home and I live in New York City. And before I walk through the threshold, I'll just stop because so much of us, so many of us who do work hard, like I love my business. I love the work I get to do. And we can expend a lot of energy throughout the day. And then we go home and our families get left with whatever is left. And that's not what I want for my kids. I'm super fortunate right now that I've got, they're all really young and they all like me right now. So a few more years and it could be a different story. But that kind of idea of who I want to show up

is someone who shows up a lot more like Mr. Rogers. They don't want smart, articulate, confident, and decisive Todd showing up. They want playful, fun, get on the floor and roll around with them and give them piggyback rides. They want that version of whom, and he lives inside of me. Absolutely, that's inside of me.

But I'm being very mindful and resetting myself saying, if I can be just a little bit more like Fred Rogers, because I am a hard charging person and I could maybe have the tendency to amp up myself more than my kids ever need. But what would Mr. Rogers do? Well, he's always going to get down on one knee and go eye to eye with his kids. So I'm always going to try to embody that and develop those characteristics and be intentional.

So when I go through the door, my glasses aren't on. I have a little bracelet that my daughter Molly made for me that's sitting on a little hook right there. And it's the first thing I do is I grab that, I put it on and I snap it because that snapping sound. And that's the talisman to trigger you into Fred Rogers mode. Yeah, into, yeah, dad mode.

Yeah, it's just who it is, it's just dad mode. And again, does that mean it happens 100% of the time? I'm not talking about perfection here, but if we can be 10% better because of it. 10% is huge. Huge. I mean, you deal with elite Olympic professional athletes. If you get a 1% incremental gain, that's massive.

Massive, yeah. So yeah, so I always, when I first became a dad, that was the first person that I went to about who I wanted. And then when I saw the movie, I was like, oh, thank you so much for honoring this idea as well. Right, well, all right. Well, now I gotta go see that movie right away. I would imagine that you probably spend a lot of time

unraveling some bad coaching, right? There's a lot of not so good, perhaps well-intentioned. Now you've just triggered me. Not so good coaches out there. What are the mistakes that these well-intentioned, let's presume they're well-intentioned, well-intentioned coaches are making? Because there's, listen, there's athletes listening to this. There's coaches that listen to this. Yeah. Like, what do you see out there that you're like, come on guys.

Like, if you would just do it this way instead of this way, the results that you're seeking would be much more accessible. Yeah. Well, I think one to go to right away is the idea that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You know, well, this is who I am as a coach. And so they only have one way to coach people.

And it's gonna resonate with about 20% of your athletes. Like I'm a hard coach, that's just who I am, as opposed to being more nuanced in how you approach athletes. So that's just one thing. Like case by case, like a response would be, well, look, I got a 50, 60 players on the field here. I can't, you know, adapt for every single personality trait. Sure. But when

you're doing things one-on-one with them, like you're going to have a way that you're going to be coaching the group of people, right? But when you're having and pulling a kid off to the side, being a little bit more nuanced in your approach to that kid. Like, um, there are some people like I'm a challenger type. You can challenge me and I'm going to rise to the occasion. You can call me names and I'm going to, it doesn't bother me in the least. Um, talking to me softly and like, you know, this doesn't, it doesn't work for me, but for another athlete, just like yelling and screaming at them doesn't work because they might have someone at home who yells and screams at them all the time and it just

triggers them. So, you know. You have to have a level of emotional intelligence though to figure out what approach is going to work for what individual. Yeah, yeah. And that's not, I don't think that's a big ask of people at all in just any walk of life is to have a level of emotional intelligence, right? Another one is understand like the level of the people that you're working with right now. Like if you're only focused at winning when you're working with eight-year-olds, you're so out of sequence. It's not even funny. Like this is a developmental mode. I laugh, but this is an epidemic. Oh, it's, it's, I mean, I grew up in Canada where, you know, parents beating on the glass because their kid isn't being played or something like that is an epidemic up here. And you got shows down here in

the United States that glorify football coaches working with, you know, pop Warner kids, you know, making them run sprints constantly because they made a mistake and they lost the game. It's just like, you know, this kind of pop culture mentality to create a great reality show is just, it's ridiculous. Right. It doesn't serve. So that is important. Like if they're in developmental mode, you're there to help foster growth. It's like, again, intrinsic motivation. If a great

litmus test on whether or not you're a good coach is how many of the kids on your team came back to play the sport next year, right? If it ain't high, well, that's a fantastic mirror on your ability to get kids excited about that sport that you had them with you last year. So that's one. I will say coaching for some people, good coaches, it's a thankless, it can be thankless. There's a great, there's a story that's out right now of a young lady who won the national championship with the Nebraska Cornhuskers,

went back to her alma mater in Texas to coach the volleyball team. And at the end of the season, just a few weeks ago, quit, handed her resignation because the parents were being completely ridiculous with just all the politics and the bureaucracy and the threats of what they'll do

if she doesn't start playing her kid more or whatever the case is. So again, it's like most things, it's very complex to try to navigate this world right now. But I think if coaches would spend more time understanding the role that they're supposed to be playing with this age of group that they're with right then, it would probably help them a lot more than just the idea that winning isn't everything. It's the only thing. Well, A, that's such a bastardized quote pulled from someone that there was a lot more context built around it. And they love to just refrate or people just like to trot out those things all the time as this, you know, fantastic. Well, that's exactly how successful people become successful.

Well, you know, I hung out with Jerry Rice when he was with a bunch of other younger wide receivers when Jerry Rice was retired and he buried them when he was 45 or 46. And these kids are 21 and 22. And he stayed on the field for another hour and 15 minutes longer than they did doing the work. And it internally- So, what do you make of that? Oh, just process. He knew that you just couldn't outlast him. His process, his focus on the process was just elegant. And that's what made him so special. I mean, when you can literally use a protractor device to draw out the routes that he ran in football, he was so exact. It was just inspiring. Yeah. Well, what's really cool about what you're doing is that it's expanding and exploring this final frontier terrain of the mind. And I think for a long time, we sort of danced around the importance of the quote-unquote like mental game.

And at the highest levels of achievement, whether it's in sport or business or what have you, you have very talented people who are all working to their utmost capacity. And the differentiator is gonna be what's going on in between the ears. Yeah. And that's mysterious landscape.

And it's something that I think we've all understood we need to better master, but we're only now really learning the fundamentals about how to do that. But it isn't just something to add to your toolbox. In my opinion, it's the whole thing. Like the whole game is going on in your head. It's not an afterthought, like here, do your training. And then we'll like talk about like the mental aspect of it. Like the mental aspect has to come first and foremost, because if you don't have that sorted out, it's never going to work. You'll reach a certain level of proficiency, but you're never going to be at your

absolute potential or peak. So I think what you're doing is super important. It's inspiring, whether you're a high-performing athlete, whether you're an executive, or whether you're like a soccer mom who's just trying to better understand what makes you tick and how to build a little bit more fulfillment and purpose into your daily life. So as we kind of close this down,

I think it would be really helpful to share. So as we kind of close this down, I think it would be really helpful to share a message for that kind of individual. I mean, listen, most people who are watching this or listening to this, as much as we all want to believe we're headed to the Olympics or we're headed towards that IPO or whatever it is, most of us are just trying to live a little bit with a little bit more fulfillment, contentment, purpose, direction, sense of satisfaction, calmness, mindfulness, these things, you know? So, to that person out there, how do we begin this process? Like, they can't hire you or, you know, maybe a coach isn't in the cards for them, but what are the tools that this person can start practicing? Well, as a tool, I mean, I'll go back to mindset as a way to direct the intention and the action for people.

And the one thing that I wanted to remind people throughout the book was, even though the way that I had to find this was through something that was traumatic to me, that's not everybody. Everybody doesn't come from that. And I want to just remind people in the book is be playful with this. Like it's the, this idea of our creative imagination being something that's truly unique to us is so powerful. And we have to honor that fact. And in it, if you do, you're going to find a completely new gear that you can go to that isn't about revving the engine faster, but just tapping into that you can be playful with this. And it's normal. This is not about, you know, you're doing this and it's going to be like 5% of the people who've used it. No, this is an innate human skill. It's an innate thing that's built into the genius of, you know, how we operate and, and roll with it, play with it. Cause you don't know what's waiting for you on the other side

of you stepping into it. And what I do know from people who do step into it is that typically what is on the other side of it is maybe 5% more of that heroic version of who you are sitting on the inside. And this isn't about some Pollyanna view on life or anything like that, but I just know the impact it's made on so many people. And then the dominoes that get created know we we oftentimes bottle ourselves in and we define who we are and what we're capable of but if i can just get someone to do 10 more and they enjoy 10 more it opens up and expands their comfort zone of what it is that they think that they can do and from there i don't know where it leads someone so right um just as an idea and as a tool is start with, if we can all act with a little bit more playfulness,

then I think it makes all of us at least five or 10% better. Yeah. So put that sock puppet on your hand and start channeling a little Fred Rogers. Why not? We need that. I mean, I definitely know that I need that.

And look, man, life is short, right? It is. Let's enjoy ourselves a little bit more. Absolutely. And look, man, life is short, right? It is. Let's enjoy ourselves a little bit more. Absolutely. Right? Thank you so much. You're a champ. Thank you.

Powerful, powerful message today. Perhaps transformative. Really appreciate what you're doing and the positivity and the tools that you're putting out into the world. So, everybody, please go pick up this book, The Alter Ego Effect. It comes out February 4th? 5th. 5th, right go pick up this book, The Alter Ego Effect. It comes out February 4th, 5th, right? Exciting times, man. We're recording this a little bit before that, but yeah, it's going to be, there's going to be a lot of activity around this book, right? Well, you can't miss the high letter yellow cover on it. So.

Yes. That is, this is the trend, right? Like bright yellow colors on these books. I hope not. I hope mine is the only highlight of it. Well, it definitely stands out. And it's a great book. Great job. Thanks, Rich. I know the heart and soul that you poured into this.

So thank you for sharing it with us here today. Appreciate it, man. If people want to learn more about you, toddherman.com. Dot me. Oh, dot me. The guy who got toddherman.com registered registered it. He was like the 39th person who read. Yeah, it's crazy. There's also like a pretty hardcore,

like right-wing talking head personality with your name too. No, exactly. So, don't be confused. I am not that guy, but what's awesome is I own about the first two pages of Google. So, if you did a search for Todd Herman, my website, toddherman.me will come up. But yeah, I'm not the right wing. He's not like the pundit. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, toddherman.me. And of course, I'm all over the social media channels like everyone else, but that's my home base is toddherman.me. And what about book events? Are you going to be doing some public stuff where people can shake your hand, get a book signed, or hear you talk?

I don't have actually anything planned. I mean, we're talking about doing something maybe at the Barnes & Noble, the largest one, which is in Union Square. Union Square. You should definitely do that. That's awesome to do an event there. Yeah. So, I mean, if people went to the website, we will definitely have it on there. So, yeah.

I mean, it's fun. I'm excited to get it out in front of people. Awesome, man. And I'm going to work I mean, it's fun. I'm excited to get it out in front of people. Awesome, man. And I'm going to work on my alter ego. I'm going to report back to you. I'll help you. All right. I think I need it. I'm not conceptualizing it right now. I'm going to put some time into it though. All right. Cool. Cool. Peace. Peace. I thought that was a great podcast. Super helpful, informative, informational, packed with all kinds of nuggets and teachable moments. Really hope you enjoyed it as well. Please do me a favor and let Todd know

what you thought of today's conversation by hitting him up on Twitter and Instagram at Todd underscore Herman. Don't forget to check out his book, Pick It Up, The Alter Ego Effect. And please check out the show notes on the episode page on my website to take your experience of Todd in this conversation beyond the earbuds. Speaking of setting and achieving goals, if you're trying to dial up your nutritional game, come on, you guys, you gotta check out our meal planner.

Go to meals.richroll.com. You will find everything you need to make your diet goals stick. Thousands of plant-based recipes, totally customized based on your personal preferences, unlimited grocery lists, grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas. We have amazing customer support from a team of experienced health and diet coaches on the ready, seven days a week, and it's all available to you for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. It's actually an incredible bargain and deal. So for more to learn more,

sign up, go to richroll.com and click on the meal planner on the top menu, or just go to meals.richroll.com. For even more goal setting and achieving, we've got to get DK on track, my man, David Kahn. He's going to come back soon and update us. He's got some goals in mind to get him sorted for 2019. I appreciate all of the tweets and all of the social media messages that you guys are sending. It's been really motivational and inspirational for him. I talked to him the other day and he's excited to come back and share where he's at with all of this with us soon. So you have that to look forward to.

In the meantime, if you have an idea for David Kahn for his 2019 goals, you can share that on Instagram or Twitter with the hashtag DKGoals. If you would like to support the work that we do here on the podcast, there are a couple ways to do just that. Just tell your friends about your favorite episode when you're out to dinner or out to drinks. Share the show on social media. Take a screen grab and put it on Instagram or wherever. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify. We're now on Spotify now, really trying to build the audience there. So that's a great place to listen, especially if you're on Android. We're also putting all the shows up on YouTube. We're filming the podcast for those of you who might not know. And of course, Google Podcasts.

Leave a review on Apple Podcasts and you can support the show on Patreon at richroll.com forward slash donate. I wanna thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiola, again, congratulations for completing your 200th episode. I look forward to 200 plus more with you. Appreciate it. Jason Camiolo, again, congratulations for completing your 200th episode. I look forward to 200 plus more with you.

I appreciate it. You are my audio engineer, production, show notes, interstitial music, everything behind the scenes. Thank you, Jason. Blake Curtis and Margo Lubin for video and editing. Jessica Miranda for graphics. DK for advertiser relationships and theme music as always by Annalema. Thanks for the love you guys.

See you back here next week with a great episode with Australian animal activist, James Aspey. It's a really good one. I've been sitting on that one for a very long time. We did that interview way back. Oh my God, so long ago. So very excited to finally share that one with you guys. Until then, may you explore your

inner self. May you discover your secret identity. Don't tell anyone and start working on that alter ego to unlock true potential. All right. Peace. Thank you.