WHOOP Podcast - Mental Performance: World-renowned sports psychologist Dr. Jim Loehr discusses energy, stress, and finding purpose

Episode Date: August 25, 2021

Dr. Jim Loehr, one of the world’s leading experts on sports psychology, joins the WHOOP Podcast for an in-depth discussion on mental performance. Dr. Loehr joins VP of Performance Kristen Holmes to share what he’s learned in over 30 years of research. He dives deep on mental toughness, the connection between physical and mental strength, how to manage your energy levels and overcome stress, and the importance of finding your purpose in life. Dr. Loehr discusses mental toughness (2:38), performing in the moment (7:56), preparation and good habits (11:30), the connection between body and mind (17:23), energy (19:54), navigating life (27:08), purpose (31:24), training the brain (34:20), life's choices (42:29),  motivation (52:35), and dealing with adversity (56:20).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Boot Podcast, where we sit down with top athletes, researchers, scientists, and more to learn what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak on and off the field and what you can do to unlock your best performance. I'm Kristen Holmes, VP of Performance. Today's guest is Dr. Jim Lair, the co-founder of the Human Performance Institute, and one of my personal idols, Jim has worked with world-class performers in sports business medicine and the special forces. He has spent his career designing training programs specifically to improve productivity and engagement levels of elite performers. Simply put, he is literally one of the world's leading experts in performance psychology. Jim and I talk about what he's learned over

the 30 years of research in this space. He discussed. this mental toughness, the connection between physical and mental strength, how to manage your energy levels and overcome stress and finding your purpose in life. There's a lot to take away from this conversation, whether you're a competitor or a coach or just a high performer in general. Dr. Lair covers how your identity is not your scorecard and how we can all find a place of deeper fulfillment. And don't forget, you can get 15% off a Woot membership by using the code Will Ahmed. And without further ado, our podcast, with Dr. Jim Lair.

Jim, your career in the field of performance psychology has been epic, to say the least. I have to say that you've had an enormous impact on me personally. As a collegiate and U.S. national team athlete, a Division I coach, and a lifelong student of psychology and physiology, you have actually been my North Star in so many ways. As I frame out this first question, If you can just indulge me for a second, I'm going to try to provide some context. So mental toughness for training for sports, achieving athletic excellence. Jim, was this your first book?

That was my first book. And, you know, it was the result of multiple years of collecting data and trying to synthesize it. And at that time, the words mental toughness didn't really resonate with anyone. and it was like we understood physical toughness, but mental toughness was kind of a strange concept. And I sent the book around to 19 different publishers, and they all rejected it. It's crazy.

It made no sense. And then my dad, who was not a wealthy guy, said, you know, I love it. He was a professional, semi-professional baseball player, and he said, I love it. I think it's really valuable. I'm going to publish a few, you know, a few uh copies and we'll see how it does and uh it took off and picked up by a major publisher and became one of the best selling books in sport uh for a long time and uh so it's you know i guess

you have to have the right timing in order to get if you have a new idea or a new way of looking at something but that was kind of the beginning and um it was all kind of of, for me, data-driven, I did multiple interviews over many years with athletes from almost every conceivable sport and asked them, what do they feel like when they perform at their best? And to use the words, the descriptors, and I found there was so much similarity between even boxers and gymnasts and, you know, the language was so similar. And it was kind of a shock. And virtually no one said they performed best when they felt moderately or a little nervous, which is what the research world in sports psychology was saying was a moderate or low level of arousal due to fear that actually brought, you know, optimal performance forward.

And not a single athlete ever said that. They always progress when they felt relaxed and calm and positive and energized in a positive way. And so the words they described kind of took it into a different direction. But so much of that, I think is still relevant. Totally. And I think that's actually an amazing place to start. And just for some context, you know, this book was published in, I think, 1986. And, you know, as you said, like these concepts were completely novel. And as such, I think this book really cements you as actually the first sports performance psychologist, which is so cool. And it actually happened to be like my Bible for like a good decade. And,

it was actually the first time I was introduced to the concept of like the zone or ideal performance state, which you're kind of starting to circle around. So I guess my question, you know, 16 books later and simply decades of work across the performance spectrum, you know, your research in many ways actually demystifies this concept of the zone in that your work kind of proves that an ideal performance state is actually not that mysterious or unattainable. So I guess as an overall framework for the conversation, I guess I'd love for you to start with kind of a definition of ideal performance state and you're kind of starting to circle around that. And perhaps part two of the question, how is your thinking about this concept? How is it

evolved over the course of the last 35 years since you first published this book? Yeah, the first published was 1979. The first, you know, there's an intrinsic balance that occurs in an athlete when they're performing toward the upper range of what they're capable of. It's very delicate and it's not a one-dimensional construct. So when I got words from the athletes themselves, some of the words were emotional. Some were mental like focus and some were like positive emotional. Some were physical. They felt relaxed. And what I began to realize, this was a very delicate psychophysiological balance that comes and goes sometimes by accident and sometimes, you know, in the really, really skilled athletes, they can bring it when it's

important. But it's a multidimensional construct. And so as I got more and more into this, as more and more opportunities for collecting data in my career, I began to realize that the word mental toughness actually is kind of a misnomer because it actually is much more than that. It's physical, it's emotional, it's mental, and actually in the last couple chapters of my life, the last decade, my last two books have been around the,

the connection that this special place has to who you are as a person, to your sense of connection to others and what I would call kind of a hidden scorecard. It's like it's self-esteem, but it's connected to your treatment of others and how you feel about yourself at a very deep level. I call that kind of a character or spiritual dimension, the energy of the human spirit, And all of those have to be recruited properly in the context of stress and pressure, the ability to execute flawlessly in a high stress venue means you have to learn how to control this very delicate mind-body balance.

And it's probably the most important frontier of competitive athletics is learning to control that because it can be hijacked and derailed if any one of those goes off. You don't sleep, you don't eat properly at the physical level. You're angry or upset and your chemistry changes emotionally. Mentally, you're focused on the outcome. And, you know, in terms of the character dimension, you don't really feel that good about yourself and you're only as good as your last performance. You identify almost solely with your score and that places undue pressure and changes levels

of cortisol and other critical stress, adrenal cortical hormones. bones that actually need to be contained to perform at your best. You know, you kind of mentioned, you know, being really attached to the score. I, you know, it's in my time as a coach, you know, we kind of had this ethos. The score is always zero zero. So we, you know, are never up. We're never down. We're always like simply trying to live our values in the moment with as much purpose,

intention and joy as possible. That was kind of like, you know, our goal was to really embody, you know, that ethos, stay true to it. So we always kind of win, regardless of the score, if we're kind of thinking about that ethos, you know, it's really hard to not think about the score, right? In business, in life, and in sports, how is that kind of an oversimplification? Because I think what you're saying is that's, it's more than that. So I guess like thinking about character and values, like how does that neutralize, I guess,

you know, this pressure of outcome? Well, what you said, Kristen, about your mindset going in to your competitions, you know, recruiting joy, recruiting a sense of really gratefulness that you can have this opportunity to be in the arena, to experience all that you have, even as Billaging King said, you know, pressure is a privilege that you actually have a chance to kind of test your metal and to go in and see what you can do. But it's a challenge. It challenges even the most experience, even though you've been in the competitive arena for maybe decades and have it ascended to the top of the mountain. You're also vulnerable.

If you don't do your work, you can come down with nerves and just can't focus in the present. So it's a never-ending challenge, but there are skill sets that actually are important. And what you're trying to do is to make sure that you are focusing on the things. that you can control. There's so much of this, you don't have a button that you just switch that can take you into this special state. It just doesn't work that way. It's very subtle.

Right. Like, how do you control emotion and this powerful chemistry that bubbles up in the amygdala? And what are the, how do you control thoughts that suddenly come into your head that, oh, my God, if I lose this next point, I'm going to. I'm going to be out of the tournament and I'm going to lose all my friends. What are they going to think that I lose to this person or I've somehow undermined the performance of the team and all this stuff. So how do you control that? Well, what really is involved is creating habits, mental, emotional, physical, and even character habits that you can rely on.

The most important dimension of performance is preparation. And there are preparatory activities that need to be done over and over again. So it becomes almost second nature, but it's never second nature. And the things that you can control in competition are the things you focus on. And you can't control winning and losing. You can't control the score. You can't control bad luck. You can't control conditions, bad line calls and tennis or referees who get a little weird in their judgments and so on, so forth,

coaches who are brutal, teammates that are absolutely condescending and have egos size of Mount Rushmore and on and on. You can't control any of that. The only thing you can control are a couple things. we know that effort what I call managing your energy is largely under your control unless you're sick or there's you know your blood glucose levels are so low or you have some other issues but one of the things you can hold yourself accountable for that you can expect from yourself is to give a hundred percent of your full and best energy every single second you're out there and the other thing is you can have, you can exude a great positivity, that you believe that you show confidence

and you show a sense of, as you said, a sense of joy in being out there, that you exude a sense of positivity and that's in your face, in the way you carry your head and your shoulders and your walk and the way you run. And those two things actually determine pretty much if you have plenty of energy, and it's the best you've got, full and best energy. I call that full engagement. And then you also bring, you know, the very finest emotions you possibly can to the scene. And we have a lot of control over the emotions and our facial expressions and how we deal with adversity and crisis. And if we hold ourselves accountable for that and hold us accountable for how we prepared, did we prepare the best way possible, and then we let the rest

go. And whatever happened, you can sleep at night because you couldn't have done anything else. You can't control a lot of these things that people worry about, that somehow they feel they have. You would never have lost that contest had you had the ability to control the outcome, so you don't. But you do have things you can, in fact, intercept. with intentionality and that's what we have to put our you know our self-esteem our sense of who we are we hold that in spite of the trauma that you're in and the pressure that's on your back you control those factors and you do everything you can to control your preparation and then you let it go And when you start doing that and you continue to practice and build these habits of eating and sleeping and all of the things that actually contribute to the ideal performance date control, you suddenly find yourself in an ability in a situation where you actually can handle competition and people envy the way you're able to deal with the high stress adversity-filled environments that often competition.

put you into. Yeah, that's so beautifully said. I, you know, you bring up, I think, a lot of, you know, really critical, critical points. And I, you know, your book, The Power of Full Engagement is, is absolutely sensational. And this is where I think you really break down, you know, this concept of energy management. And, you know, you talk about the mind-body connection and how critical that is. And, you know, I know just in being inside your work for so long, like how important kind of journaling is and and recording, you know, aspects of your, of your behaviors and, you know, your habits and

your feelings, you know, what would you say, you know, just based on all of the work that you've done, you know, what are some kind of tactical ways people can start to think about, more clearly about this mind-body connection and how that actually might be driving their attention and, and therefore how they might need to think about, you know, their energy management, you know, how they're deploying their emotional, physical, and mental energy and spiritual energy and kind of how that nits back to, you know, their ability to engage in life in a way that feels really good. So this will probably sound a little off center, but what I've come to really believe, and it took a long time, you know, over the years, I've been at this almost

four years and we have this amazing kind of living laboratory at the human performance institute where nearly 400,000 people went through the institute and we in every conceivable high stress arena from Navy SEALs to Hussie's rescue teams, Blue Angels precision flying team. We had 17 number ones in the world. We took them to number one in the world. We had surgeons, physicians. just about every arena of high stress, including the corporate world. And what I came to understand, and again, it will sound a little strange, but the mind is the body and the body is the mind. Yes.

That what is true for one is true for the other. We had a full rehabilitation facility on the campus. I used to go in and watch how the rehabilitation therapy, would rehab, let's say, a torn Achilles or an ACL surgery or a torn bicep or all kinds of issues. And what they would do is they would go in and they would very, very carefully and prescriptively apply doses of very minimal stress after the injury had occurred and they were, that injury was maybe the arm was put in a cast. and it was protected from all stress.

And they would gradually start introducing stress in progressive doses. And then eventually, over time, they would continue to put more and more stress on that damaged muscle or area of the body, and it would grow. And eventually they would hopefully take that area of injury to a level of capacity that exceeded what they were capable of doing before the injury. And what they were doing is basically investing energy in that muscle to get it to grow, the bicep or tricep. And I said, you know, it's kind of what we do in the mental area. You know, it's like, in a sense, all of the things that we're talking about, whether it's character or focusing, these are muscles that have to be strengthened.

and they're strengthened in exactly to say if you have a weak muscle of focus, a weak muscle of positivity, a weak muscle of kindness. If you want that, you can have it, but you're going to have to invest the energy. Energy spawns life. The investment of energy spawns life wherever it goes. And when you invest intentionally, you can grow anything you want, as long as you have the energy, you know exactly what you're trying to grow. So in the world of research, it's called quantification. And if you quantify something and you invest energy in it, it tends to get better over time. And so we began to realize that the single most important resource human beings have is their energy. Energy is life. When you're out of energy, your life is over. It's not time. Time is simply,

we were kind of all kind of hoodwink into believing time was the most essential part of life, the time management folks, you know, in a sense, sold us a bill of goods telling us that if we just know our values, know what's really important to us, carve out time, and invest it in those things and people and causes we care about, we'll have a successful, fulfilling life. And that is absolutely unequivocally not true. time has no valence time has no ability to do anything it's simply an opportunity for the investment of something that actually does have valence and force it has quantity quality

focus and intensity and that's energy and so for the work at the institute it wasn't how long you worked out it was the energy you brought to the time you have aligned with what you wanted to have happen. And we were always asking people to become skillful investors. If you want this, if you want to have a great competitive brain, that's not normal, just like a weightlifter's bicep is not normal. If you want to have that extraordinary capacity, you're going to have to do the work. And you can develop what I would call a designer brain, a magnificent designer brain that enables you to hold your ground and ignite your talent and skill, your ideal performance state in the most brutal conditions.

If you want that, you're going to have to work at it. And it's just like your bicep. If you stop investing in it, you're going to lose your bicep. So as long as you want that capacity, you've got to continue to do the work. And in most, the language we all use is effort. you got to invest effort for me effort doesn't really have the full uh doesn't connect to what i really believe effort is only one dimensional energy is multi-dimensional it is it has quantity quality focus and intensity or force and so it helps us to understand you may you may have very little

quantity, but you've got as much intensity as you can, or the energy is not focused, it's spread all over. So effort by itself doesn't really connect to what I want more specificity, and it aligns with the way energy is actually thought of in the universe. All energy in the universe has quantity, quality, focus, and intensity or force. And as Einstein said, if nothing moves until energy causes it to move. So the most important resource we have as human beings is our energy and be careful where it goes

because you're giving life to whatever you give your energy to. If you give a lot of energy to being a victim, to being for negativity, for sarcasm and cynicism in patience, those can become some of the most dominant parts of who you are. But if you want competitiveness

in a very, you know, enjoy in competition, If you want to have a sense of, you know, gratefulness about all the opportunities you've had to explore the frontiers of sport, you're not going to get it unless you go in and do the work and actually work those muscles like they did in the rehabilitation facility. So we use that model in all of our work at the Institute, and we began to realize that we got the same results they did, and we could quantify it. And so for me, the mind is the body. You can work from the inside out or you can work from the outside end.

Just moving your facial muscles, as Paul Ekman and many others have shown, can change the internal chemistry, levels of testosterone and some of these adrenal cortical hormones can be manipulated by simply moving the facial muscles in a particular direction, maybe towards a smile as opposed to a frown or looking fearful. And so we're fully connected. You touch one side of the system and the whole system reverberates. We're vibratory, we're oscillatory. We are just, you know, every cell in our body, the 10 trillion cells in our body are constantly oscillating to some kind of rhythm.

And we can affect those rhythms. It's all produced by energy. And every cell in our body. has its own energy production plants called the mitochondria. And these little dynamite sticks in the mitochondria produce the energy that makes everything happen. And then we, as human beings, got to decide, well, what should we put our energy into in the time that we have?

And that then opens the door to purpose and spirituality and all the, who do you want to be in life? You can be that as long as you have energy and you want to. understand how to invest it properly. I love that, Jim. Yeah, I think this is an interesting conversation on so many levels. But I think what I always go back to is I think oftentimes folks are unsure how to apply their energy.

You know, it's how do you, what would be your recommendation for someone who is really trying to understand, you know, what actually is my direction in life? What is my purpose? And from my life and the work that I've done, like I, you know, I always kind of start with the physiological because I think that's in some ways more easier to control and it kind of provides a foundation. So I think about my sleep and I try to get that right. I think about my hydration and, you know, because I know that's going to impact my sleep. I think about, you know, how I'm applying, you know, volume and intensity and I track and measure that, of course, with with whoop. And I think that's where, you know, some of these technologies can be really helpful because they understand, they help you.

understand how to apply your effort. Let's say that that might be a place to start and you can say if you think that's that's a good way to apply effort and energy. But then what's the second, what's the part two to that? Like how do I, knowing that, you know, purpose, efficacy, control are absolutely central and our core psychological needs. You know, how does an individual like really grasp onto these concepts in a way that they understand, okay, what, where do I start? You know, where do I begin with this kind of journey? So you've, uh, a lot of really important ideas and concepts. These are really central to, I think, who we are as human beings.

And we're all trying to navigate in life. We're trying to navigate in sport. We're trying to navigate in our relationships with our, if you have children or families. We're trying to, in a sense, metaphorically, we're trying to get home. And home is trying to end up at the end of your life where you want to get, where you want to end up. and there are lots of detours or a lot of false trails that end up not taking you where but they really look fantastic in the moment so when you get in your car and you want to go somewhere

the first thing you have to know or you're not likely to get there you have to know what the destination is what you have to be able to put it in some fairly precise coordinates and that is purpose so there's the big purpose of what's the purpose of your life and where do you want to end up at the end? And I'll call that getting home. Where do you want to be when it's all said and done? And we have all kinds of things that we did at the Institute, and I still do, even with young athletes,

to help them really get a sense of what their life needs to be trending towards. What's the trajectory? We asked them on your tombstone, even a young 9 or 10 or 15-year-old. What do you want in your tombstone when it's all over? Is it trophies? Is it accolades? What is it? And no one ever says, I want to be remembered because I, you know, was a gold medalist four times. You know, nobody's, there's something, that's this scorecard that is so incredible that if this is who you want to be at the end of your life, you're going to have to start investing energy to get there in some way. So we start out with trying to understand what is the purpose of sport if you're going to be involved in sport? What? What is the reason and how does that connect to getting home ultimately in your life? How can you leverage that to make sure that when you pass from this earth, you've accounted yourself well so that in fact the things that are most important to you

and when people, the legacy you're leaving behind is something that in fact you intended. So you need the destination. And the second thing for you to be able to get there is you need to know where you are now. that if you don't know where you are at this moment, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and so forth, if you're not sure where you are right now, you have no idea of how to close the gap between where you want to go and where you are now.

So I call that face the truth. So the first coordinate is purpose. The second is truth. And this is where the WIPP technology is so brilliant because it's a face-the-truth technology. We know that sleep plays a very important, critical role in being able to manage all these complex systems of the body. The more you understand that, the more you're going to realize that this might be a contributing factor to you, having enough energy and having the emotional strength to do what you need to do. But the fact is we need to have some way of getting.

That's why I love video in sports because they can't deny it. Actually, this is a real replication of what you did and what you were all about. So the second stage of that navigate, we need to know where we are now. Face the truth. This is tough on people. We develop all kinds of ways to get people to do this. We have so many filters that we use to conceal the brutal reality from, what is really the truth, I mean, from getting through to our sensitive cells.

And so, but there are ways to do that and to do it right. And then once we know where we're headed and where we are, then we have to produce energy. If you're in your car, you've got to have energy somehow mobilized to close the gap. If you're walking, if you are riding a bike, somehow you have to be able to move. You have to make something move. with your energy or the energy of something that you're actually in control of. And that's the story of life. So we always begin all the training with purpose and try to help people understand.

We are purpose-driven species. The door that opens this treasure trove of energy is purpose. If you get the purpose right, you know, the doors of that energy will open up. and you'll be able to be a big investor, as long as the energy is in the vault. Purpose begins the whole process. Then we need to face the truth about what we are and who we are, and I believe your technology is so brilliant in that respect. And I love science. You're very science-based. And that, to me, science is really mining the truth in an unfiltered, non-political, non-biased way. And that's what we really have to.

have. And then then we got to really use our energy to close the gap. And it's a lifelong journey and it never ends. You know, as it relates to purpose, like I, I, you know, we can go through this. I love the tombstone exercise. You know, I think that really is a, is a great grounding type of thought experiment that, you know, can really help you understand, you know, where the, where the gaps might be and how actually you might need to be applying your effort. I guess my question is, you know, there's so many distractions, you know, like every day. You know, we might have this kind of goal in our life in terms of how it is that we want to be our, you know, how we aspire to be as a parent and a professional or a student or a athlete. And yet there are these distractions that kind of pull us from the path.

Do you have some insight in terms of how do we manage distraction? And I, you know, perhaps it goes back to this concept of just energy management generally, but, you know, are there some kind of practical ways that, you know, can number one make you aware of the fact that, all right, I'm being, you know, my attention is being pulled in a way that is not serving me? And what is that, you know, is there kind of this, an exercise that people can deploy that will help them be a bit more mindful in terms of how they're actually spending, you know, their attention. So, again, this is a face-the-truth issue.

If you're going to, you know, take yourself to another level and the world is filled with distractions, I mean, on every level in a way that probably was, it's just unparalleled in the evolution of man. And we have to have the ability to observe who we are and how we're handling all this. And if we come up short, we don't, we see ourselves. not focused in the present with our children. We're all over the place. We're on cell phones.

We're on email. Our thoughts are wildly going everywhere. And we're never where we really need to be at that moment. That's a face-the-truth issue. And the brain is infinitely trainable. If I've ever learned anything, all you have to do is watch the Olympics. And you look at what can happen with a gymnast

or with any of these extradable. extraordinary examples of the capacity of the human system to do things that are almost magical. You can't even imagine someone learning to do that, but in that sport or with all the sports, what it tells us is it's living proof that our brains are highly trainable, this neuroplasticity of the human system, the ability to myelinate new pathways. As long as we know what it is we want, and we just continue. to pave those very primitive pathways in the beginning, like a four-wheel drive road. But if you pass them enough, you build enough myelin, they become like a highway,

maybe ultimately a six-lane highway. So you can build focus with meditation, meditating for just two or three minutes at a time. And it really is something you realize it's very hard for you. But over time, you could become an extraordinary meditator, holding your focus for a full hour on the present moment and feel a renewal that's hardly imaginable. And we saw evidence of this, you know, centuries ago. This is a century old practice. And monks were able to do things that were controlling their physiology. that almost appeared to be magical,

but they actually turned this awareness into their system. They could read things that no one else could read in their bodies, controlling blood pressure, heart rate. And if you want that, you know, you can have it. But that's a specially trained system. And the brain exists for one reason to give you what you want and need. But it just can't make it happen because you want it. have to do the hard work. Hard work is energy investment, highly specific, skilled investment

of energy repeatedly. And your body says, I don't know what the heck's going on out there, but you keep coming in with the same, same thing. I guess we're going to have to make a neural network to accomplish that. And that's what happens in gymnastics, in tennis, and golf, and all the sports that require this incredible ability to combine the impossible with high stress and people are able to do it routinely in practice and in competition. So I think it's important for people to understand that you can, the brain is infinitely trainable. It's more trainable when you're younger, for sure. We make more myelin much faster in a younger year.

So you want your kids to have something, teach them early. And it's true with character as it is with eye hand coordination. If you want to have an extraordinary tennis player or golfer, start them young. And they'll learn it. And it will be hardly the work involved as long as it's fun. They'll continue to do it. And one day they'll wake up and they have built all these amazing motor neural pathways that they can become really outstanding,

competitors compared to someone who didn't have those early years. But even in the later years, we know that the brain, we know for people who've had strokes and the brain will constantly try to give you what you need as long as you send clear messages. And the ultimate arbitrator of all this is what I call your private voice. The private voice we learned is the power broker in your life, the one that no one hears but you. And that's the one everyone wants control over because once they get that, they actually can influence you in whatever way they want. But you are actually directing traffic with your

energy, with your private voice. And that is the ultimate coach of all coaches. And when you have a great coach in your life, the great coach has actually gotten in touch with your private voice and you begin to coach yourself the way that person coached you. And that is what makes, extraordinary athlete. You play to learn. You become involved in these sports to learn to become a better, stronger human being and then winning the gold medals and everything is icing on the cake. But the whole thing is we are involved to learn, to train our brains to actually help us navigate in life in everything that truly matters and discipline, energy management, constructive thinking, purpose driven, character driven. If the sport helps us do that,

that's a gift for a lifetime. And if we win a national championship with that, it's just icing on the cake. And that to me is the most exciting part. Could you kind of unpack just to go a little bit deeper on this concept of threat versus challenge and then just kind of how that manifests in an individual athlete, you know, who might be pursuing the outcome versus really just the joy of the process. The scorecard society is using for whether or not you're a good coach or whether not you are a good athlete is how much you win. Yeah, totally. And they don't look at some of the other variables that actually are more important in the long run. And what I've learned is if you do it right, you win a lot more than you would if you are obsessed with winning. And I've had

so many athletes over the years that that's all they could possibly. And you're right. What happens is, is that their self-esteem, who they are as a person is connected to whether or not they're winning. When they win, they're happy. When they lose, they are absolutely miserable. And if they win, they're only, that high only lasts for a short time. And then they begin to feel empty again and then they have to win another gold medal or they have to win all that powerful chemistry that's associated with the elation and all the great stuff that comes when you have a great conquest because that is all they have they don't have anything to fall back on that actually tells them wait a minute there's more to this than just winning the medals

and this notion of, you know, your identity as a human being is not your scorecard that society uses. I mean, you might be a star, but you might be miserable and make everyone around you miserable. And so I worked with a lot of folks, as I said, we had 17 number ones in the world in their sport. And many of them were very unfulfilled in their lives. And if they didn't continue to win, they were completely. completely miserable. And they couldn't figure it out. What do I have to do? How many of these do I have to win? How much more do I have to do before I actually feel like a good person or I feel good about myself? And I said, well, there is another scorecard. And that scorecard, you can get to the top of the mountain by walking over dead bodies and just being all concerned about yourself and being a full-blown narcissist. You might be able to get to the top. But I can guarantee you I've been there with folks who have done that. is not fulfilling. I mean, it's great, and they have a great resume. I mean, it's incredible. But the scorecard that actually is the one that matters is the one that you want to have at the

end of your life. A person of kindness who cared about others, it was an inspiration for it. It's all about others. And that's why something I call a self-transcending purpose. Your life, you never did anything to get here. It was nothing that you did to come into this world. you won this lottery of life purely by accident. You know, there's just endless things you didn't choose. You never chose to come into the world. The only thing you can do is you can choose to decide what you're going to do with your life. And we've looked, the research in this now is so intriguing.

And when you look at those individuals who have a self-transcending purpose, they say, wait a minute, I'm here for others. I'm not here for myself. And if I get to the top of the mountain in an individual sport, I'm doing it not by walking over dead bodies. I'm going to be an inspiration to others. I'm going to, as Andre Agassi did in his climb to the top in his second venue, he actually dedicated all of his money and fame to helping kids in a charter school and a college prep school. And it really infused a sense of meaning and really join his life. that was indescribable and that being number one in the world just didn't do it.

And so for whenever I'm trying to help people understand how we work as human beings, and that is without purpose, life is chaos. With a wrong purpose, life is chaos. And if you really understand, it was never about you. It was about what you can do for others. and the more you can help others be happy and understand what life is about and become a better person, somehow it comes back to you a thousandfold. And you're more likely to scale the mountain.

And that's what my last two decades were all about is the connection between character, how you treat others, your moral and ethical character, and how that contributes to sustain success at the highest level competitively. and gives you a sense of fulfillment at the end of your life. And to me, that was kind of the most important part of the story. Yeah, you mentioned Andre Agassi, and I know Jim the other day when we were chatting, we talked about his book, his autobiography open, and just how sensational it is. And it just, it really does grasp onto a lot of these concepts that you're talking about

and I think provide some real tangible ways, frameworks of kind of how to think about competition and performance and relationships and just life in general. So I definitely recommend that. I know you do too. Yeah, it's a great. It's a great book. It's Frank and I had the opportunity to work with Andre when I was a sports psychologist and director of sports science for the Nick Voluntary Tennis Academy. And that was for me worth two PhDs. I collected so much data there and he was there at that time and we have the most prolific period of player development in the history of tennis I think ever and you know to see that how he evolved as a person and how he took the same sport that made him so miserable and his own words kind

of hate the sport and he made the pronouncement that winning changes nothing he still is miserable it doesn't feel like great of it then he repurposes a lot of it then he repurposes a life and went on, became number one in the world again from dropping to 141 in the world. And, you know, it's a fabulous story, and it's a story I have seen lived out in many, many ways throughout the course of my career. So I try to bring that so you don't have to go through what Andre did. Maybe you can short-circuit this and actually get your purpose right in the beginning and understand that the most important part of who you are is you're.

your moral and ethical character the way you treat other people from the beginning of your life. And if we can build that strength, those muscles of character in the beginning, they will carry you throughout the rest of your life. And you will also be a better competitor because you're more secure in yourself. You're not struggling to build your self-value with the society's scorecard. You know, I think some of, you know, your most perceptive insights have come from your observations of professional athletes, not while they're engaged in their craft, but actually in their downtime. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between this intermittent kind of acute stress and recovery and perhaps how it applies, you know, not just to professional

athletes, but kind of take some of those concepts, you know, we have, we work with a ton of surgeons and corporate executives and military leaders and tactical athletes, you know, kind of how some of this work around oscillation and kind of what that actually means between stress and rest. And if you can kind of frame that up to give our listeners some real tactical ways of thinking about their downtime. We are oscillatory creatures in an oscillatory universe. And so I began to realize the power of the pause, the power of the pause. And that this is not downtime is not time for wimps who are not mentally tough. It's simply an opportunity to reset to bring the physiology back into homeostasis so that you can launch again and be in your ideal performance state.

You know, if you want to have high level performance, you have to have the balancing of recovery. Stress exposure is the stimulus for growth and recovery is when growth takes place. And that's when learning takes place is in this default mode, when the brain actually has an opportunity to reflect on what just happened. And it may just be a short time or it may be a much more intensive period of journaling where you actually sit back and reflect in writing with your hand. What is going on and to reflect what went on today and how you thought about it. The brain loves that.

The brain loves to recalibrate and to learn and to. have a chance to integrate what these insights are in a way that's more permanent so that it's stickier. And so we are, we're oscillatory creatures. There's no question about it. And I tried in my career to break this, this crazy notion that rest is for whims. And breaks are for whims. If you're really mentally tough and strong, cut out that used to say that, you know, I remember when I was I played a lot of baseball nine years basketball was a pretty good basketball player to tennis forever and in the early years if you drank water you were considered to be a wimp you know on the field and if you if you really you know needed you know replenishment or glucose stimulation or you know anything like

that it was because you just weren't mentally strong you got to bust through it and we work with SEALs and some of these special ops groups. And the thing that we brought to those cultures is the importance and the value of recovery and healing. If you don't have recovery and healing, all you do is you burn and eventually you burn out. And that's where burnout becomes an issue. You don't value this important recycling period in the human physiology. We spent a lot of time, you know, evangelizing these concepts, of course, around activation and deactivation and what it means to on the system to sustain this sympathetic activation and the depletion of, you know, the stress hormone norm epinephrine and the elevation of cortisol

and, you know, all of that is, um, has profound impacts, obviously on, on your, on your physiology, but, but also to your point on your psychology, right? Like your ability to kind of re-age your task at that point is going to be compromised. And I think people don't necessarily appreciate like how much these just intermittent, you know, bouts of recovery, you know, after these stressors go such a long way, you know, between, you know, to kind of put you in position to actually then effectively be able to reengage your, your task. And, you know, how do we use breathwork to control our physiology so we can bring, you know, our heart rate, you know, down, you know, to kind of induce this rest. state, this kind of healing and renewal that enables us to then re-engage our task. And I think to your point, you know, these are muscles that we can build around, you know, helping us understand. Absolutely. So this balance between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic system. And when you're out of balance, the system loves balance. And you can take it out of balance as long as it knows

you're going to bring it back. And, you know, I use this analogy in the investment people and Wall Street love it because you cannot spend what you don't have. You know, if you want to be a big time spender in life and that's how you may have a big life, you've got to be a big spender. Not by sitting on the sidelines and just watching other people do things and you sit on the front porch sipping a martini, which might be the thought you have when you're going to be retired, but boy, watch out for that because that's a catastrophe. Your system loves to be turned on.

People with a big life spend a lot of energy. but you can't spend what you don't have. So you have to find a way to really replenish in this union of oxygen and glucose, the CREP cycle, to understand how energy is actually produced in the cells of the body. And you have to pay attention to the renewal side of the equation or you end up one day hating what you're doing because your system, when you lose motivation,

What that means is the body is trying to save you because you're starting to spend more, you're going into deficit. And, you know, your reserves get lower and lower and lower pretty soon. You become a crispy critter. You don't think it's clearly. You don't make good decisions. You're sarcastic, cynical. You start really not liking your environment.

Yeah. And care workers, you know, nurses and so forth, because they're always trying to, you know, reach out and care for, their sense of, you know, their empathy circuit is completely on all the time. And that's how they are so valuable because they, they, they, what I call their oxytocin carriers. This is a hormone associated with caring and trust. And it lowers cortisol. And they become really powerful transmitters of oxytocin. And it may, those around them feel at peace, at home, it helps them recover, but it depletes their own reserves. And if they don't have a way of really building that back, they burn out. And that's why

with physicians and nurses and so forth in the health care, the biggest risk is burnout because they're always on. They're always pushing. They're always investing. And they're always taking from their reserves. And some of this, when the more you care about somebody, or something, it just takes your heart away when you realize they're sick or a child and you want to help them. And then suddenly they end up with serious complications that may pass. And now you're on to the next one. And if you don't understand that you have to have an opportunity to renew those powerful resources that the chemistry of oxytocin and of these other hormones that are associated with reaching out, with caring and loving and supporting others,

that's energy out. You need energy in, and it's not selfish, it's preservation. If you don't take care of yourself, you will not be able to take care of others. So the first, it's like when you're on an airplane, an oxygen mask drop, you grab the oxygen mask. You don't put it on your child first. you put it on yourself first so that you can actually help the child actually get this on whoever is around.

But if you don't have, if you don't take care of yourself, you're not going to be of much value to others. You know, we'd be remiss not to not to ask you this question, just given all of your experiences and all the wisdom that, you know, you've accumulated over your life. You know,

every one of us is going to experience, you know, some sort of devastation in our life. You know, something that really destabilizes us mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually. What would be your advice to help someone, you know, we know that devastation is inevitable? You know, how do we, what is the best way to build resilience so we can confront, you know, those moments of devastation with, you know, as much grace and, you know, kind of humility as possible?

So I call it developing a training, a constant training mindset. So we know storms are coming. If you're in a period in your life or your storm free, just love it because a storm is just outside waiting for you to step outside. And that is our stage. Storms are our stage. And some of them are massive storms. I mean, really big. and sometimes unfortunately the storms win and what we want to do is to make sure the storms never win

that we don't have a great life that we're detracted from who we want to be and finish our lives in a way we want simply because we we fail to build the architecture to withstand we didn't build a foundation to handle these storms and lead in these times. of stress when we're most likely needed. So it's like we are in training. It's like the special forces men and women. They're in training all the time. Everything they go involve themselves in,

whether it's directly military-based or in their life. They're always saying, wait a minute, I can leverage this to become a more robustly, resilient, stronger. I can handle things better so that when it really counts, I won't drop the ball. I will be there for, most importantly, others and to complete the mission. And in a sense, that's, I think, our mentality is that we're never finished, you know, growing.

We've got to continue to get stronger every day. And every obstacle, every traffic jam, every insult that someone delivers in our direction, every crisis, every COVID case, every loss of a job. If you actually use that to grow, what you will find out eventually in your life are the things that pushed you the most actually have helped you the most to become an extraordinary force in the world and to lead when people need you. So again, it has nothing to do with you. It has to do with getting stronger for others.

and to actually show that it is possible to have a great life in spite of having calamities occurring all over the place. But if you just walk through life hoping to find happiness and what happens is you end up with these storms that just make you miserable and you cuss and you just demonize the storms, we miss the opportunity that the storm actually provides for you. The storms are really, if you don't have a storm, and I use this example, if I surround you with marshmallows and pillows in your life and make your life so sweet and nice and everything's

perfect, the only thing you're ever going to be happy, the only thing you'll be able to tolerate are marshmallows and pillows. And, you know, that's not how life is. Right. So it's like if you want to, you know, you're going to have to go out into the storm and that's where families who protect their kids too much, they leave them at a terrible disadvantage when they get into the real world and they end up coming home quickly because they can't handle the brutality of life. Life is tough and we have to develop that capacity over time and it starts with young children and eventually you have someone who can handle it. It's not just being tough, it's being able to fulfill this scorecard that actually matters. How do you treat people in the storm?

How do you reach out and help them? What do you do for others when you are, in fact, under siege? How do you maintain integrity and honesty and positivity and the strength of your character when life turns against you? Because everyone is watching. You are always teaching. You're always coaching others, most importantly, those that are closest to you. So a storm is not always just a demon on the horizon that entered your life.

The storm may be a gift, and someday you will someday hopefully understand it. Oh, Jim, you are just the goat. I can't even tell you. That was, I think that's probably like an unbelievable place to wrap things up. This has been such a joy for me, this conversation, Jim. I can't tell you how much I appreciate, and I know our listeners will also appreciate you sharing your wisdom and really giving us your energy today. There's just been so many incredible pieces of insight that I think we can all take away to live a happy or healthy or better life.

So thank you. Well, I appreciate, you know, you obviously are deeply immersed, Kristen, in this area. I love what you're doing, your company is doing. I have enjoyed this. this, and I hope we created some value for all your listeners. I know we did. Jim, is there a place for folks to find you? Are you on the interwebs? Yes, I have. I'm on LinkedIn. I have all, you know, I do a lot of these podcasts and things, and they're all a little different. I'm also Jim dash layer, L-O-E-H-R.com is my website, Jim dash layer, L-O-E-H-R.com.

You can go on and see all the crazy stuff going on there. But it's, I'm always pushing the envelope trying to figure out what's the next most exciting thing we can learn. And I'm always a learner. I never, I'm a slow learner, but I love data and that's all I learned. Data, data, data. I know, Jim, you're like my soul twin. well thank you so much and hopefully we chat again soon great thank you so much Kristen really appreciate it thanks to Jim for coming on the WOOP podcast as a reminder you can

get 15% off a WOOP membership by using the code Will Ahmed find us on social at Woop at Will Amit if you like the Woot podcast be sure to leave us a review or a comment or if you have suggestions for us we love feedback as well Thank you for listening and we'll see you again soon.