WHOOP Podcast - Powerful Strategies To Improve Human Performance with Expert Rachel Vickery

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

What separates good from great in high-pressure environments? On this episode of the WHOOP Podcast, WHOOP Global Head of Human Performance, Principal Scientist, Dr. Kristen Holmes, sits down with Rachel Vickery, world-renowned performance consultant. Having spent decades working with elite athletes, military operators, Fortune 500 executives, and emergency physicians, Rachel has cracked the code on understanding and regulating the nervous system to ensure optimal performance when stakes are high. Dr. Holmes and Rachel explore how physiology, behavior, and mindset intersect, and why mastering the nervous system is the key to unlocking peak performance. From breathing mechanics and physiological control, to cultivating curiosity and trust under pressure, this conversation dives deep into the science and skills you need for taking on your next challenge.(00:48) Rachel Vickery on Human Performance(01:41) WHOOP Podcast Rapid Fire Q’s (02:50) Essential Breathing Techniques To Use Under Pressure(11:38) Keeping The Body and Mind Calm: What To Do and Why It's Important(15:56) Navigating Fear and Maintaining Positive Self Talk(21:04) How To Train Your Physiology To Aid a Positive Mindset(27:03) Where Data Comes Into Play: Measuring Performance Traits and Habits(34:29) Maintaining a Solid Foundation: High Performance No Matter The Occasion(50:40) Co-regulating: Maintaining Your Cool in a Team Environment(57:10) Advice For Athletes & Coaches: Easing Physiological Effects in a High Pressure Environment(01:11:25) Operating with Trust: How Does This Benefit High Performers?(01:14:57) Learning From Common Traits Relating to Performance AnxietyFollow Rachel Vickery:WebsiteRelated WHOOP Podcast Episodes:Podcast 245: Mental Toughness with Elite Performance Coach Rachel VickeryPodcast 319: Daily Practices to Reset Your Mind, Body, and Identity with Dr. Rangan ChatterjeeResources:Study: 'Cyclic sighing' can help breathe away anxietySupport 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

It is very predictable what happens to humans when we put them in high pressure, high stakes environments. But the cool thing about that predictability is that we can train for it. I think we just have to have more of the conversations. This is why it happens and here's how we train for it. It gives us a lens to look through when we're critiquing performance, not only focusing on what went wrong from a technical or tactical perspective. We've got that next level down to go, okay, but why did that happen?

Like, why did you fumble the ball? What actually was going on? and that starts to give people the language or the framework or the understanding that they can dig a little bit deeper to the point that they can get to, oh, my arousal state got out of control in that moment, and that that's not perceived as being a weakness. That doesn't mean you're not cut out for these environments or you don't have what it takes to do hard things.

You just need to train it. Rachel Vickory, welcome. Thank you, Kristen. Great to be here. Back again. Yeah. It's because our first conversation was so amazing. I was like, we need to have Rachel back on and continue the conversation.

So we're going to go deep. We're going to go into all sorts of areas. You are a world-renowned, high-performance consultant. And I think you're kind of known as an expert in, I'm going to say breathwork, just because that's what our listeners understand it to be. But you call it breathing. Okay. Yeah.

So we're going to talk about the distinction. And I think that's what you're, you know, kind of known for in some ways, but your expertise kind of spans really a broad spectrum of human performance. So I really want to get into some of the other areas that you are our world expert in and just some of the work that you're doing currently with military and elite teams. You know, you're doing some fascinating work and having a massive impact on folks who are trying to manage pressure, trying to manage stress in environments that are really unforgiving. So we're going to just dig deep.

You ready to go? Awesome. Yep. We're going to start with a little icebreaker. And this is kind of for our social segment. So it's going to be their yes or no or true or false. You ready? Ready.

All right. True or false. Breath is more important than mindset under pressure. True. All right. You're going to have to say more. Not yet. We'll come back to that.

All right. Yes or no. You can train your body to stay calm in a boardroom like you would in a championship game. yes true or false elite performance always requires pushing harder false yes or no how you breathe can affect how people feel around you yes true or false leaders who ignore physiology leave performance potential on the table immensely true amazing well i want to dig into these questions let's start with the first one. Breath is more important than mindset under pressure. Why do you unpack that? You said true. I did say true. But you'll notice I had a huge pause too. Yeah, there's some

caveats there, I'm sure. There is because the two are so closely, you know, intertwined as well. And it's hard to know which is the cause and which is the effect, right? And I would say for so many people, and, you know, you framed it so beautifully right from the get-go about breathwork versus breathing. And so the differential I always make with that is to me, breathwork. is almost a conscious practice that someone does when they're thinking about their breathing. You know, it might be a set period of time, five minutes, three minutes of a counted rhythm or a focus when they're working on a specific rhythm, rate, depth, you know, those sorts of things.

My work and backgrounds and why I differentiate that is breathing, being how are you breathing when you're not thinking about breathing, right? And so that's why I paused on that answer to that question because under pressure, the last thing you're probably going to be thinking about is your breathing. You're possibly for most performers more aware of what's going on in your mind. The caveat to that, though, is that how you're breathing when you're not thinking about breathing has set you up with a foundation

for whether you can handle that moment of pressure or not. So actually the foundation that you've already front-loaded, the foundation that you've already set with, how you're breathing is your default mechanics, you know, your brainstem breathing pattern as opposed to a conscious breath that you might be taking. That's why, in that short answer, I said it's more important than mindset. You come into contact with the most elite performers in the world. When you first come in contact with them, how would you rate their default breathing mechanics? How would I rate it or how am I looking for, how am I assessing it?

I guess I'm curious, you know, you kind of assume, oh, these elite performers, they're all have perfect, you know, breathing patterns and, you know, have this, you know, really well-established kind of foundation. What do you find when you get into these environments? Probably quite the opposite. So, and that usually is because people are in high-pressure environments, right? And so one of the things that will often change when people are in a high-pressure environment over a long period of time is their default breathing pattern will change and adapt and adjust to being more of an upper chest breathing pattern as their default way of breathing, as opposed to ideally it's diaphragmatic, it's an outthreat of the nose, it's very smooth, it's very rhythmical,

there's an end expiratory pause. And that breathing pattern is usually from a neurophysiology perspective hardwired more with a parasympathetic nervous system. But if someone is in high pressure, high stakes, high consequence environments over a long period of time, they're often operating in sympathetic drive, so more of that fight and flight nervous system. And as a consequence of the fight and flight, it will naturally cue upper chest breathing because it's a preparatory response to running or fighting. Now, even if someone's sitting at a computer terminal all day, you know, if they're under the pump and they've got that sympathetic drive, it will still cue upper chest breathing at a deep primal level. And because there's so many other

adaptive processes that the body has to compensate for by, you know, shallow upper chest breathing over a long period of time, eventually the brain decides, you know, to use layman's terms, I guess, to reprogram itself to just accept that this is your new normal. You're always going to be an upper chest breather because then it doesn't have to compensate for that continuously if that kind of makes some sense. So someone might not perceive that they have breathing problems. They won't perceive that there's anything wrong with their breathing. But when I look at them, when I eyeball them, all of their breathing is just subtle up into their upper chest. Now they'll get away with that if they're just sitting, you know, sitting still and not having to move hard

and fast. But if it's a, you know, performer who needs to, you know, suddenly increase the amount of breathing, what we call minute ventilation, so the breath in and out of their lungs in a minute, if they're already an upper chest breather, they don't really have the same ceiling to push into from a performance perspective. So you reduce your ceiling, yeah, performance potential. Yeah. By being a shallow breather. Being a shallow breather, yeah. And so because of typically the environments that I work in, you know, whether that be elite military, high performance, sport, you know, trauma medicine. I don't think I've ever met, you know, I don't think I've ever met an emergency room doctor who actually breathes well, you know, as an example.

Most people in those environments are poor, poor breathers. Yeah. I think if anyone has aspirations of kind of performing to their potential, what is that ceiling that's created actually, what are the consequences of that ceiling? It really depends on what environment that performer is actually in. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, there's all sorts of things around, you know, CO2, exchange you know you can talk right down into the cellular exchange level the metabolic you know the perfusion to the yeah there's all of there's that that whole side of it which is obviously really important there's you know if you tend to over breathe more than what you need to from the

metabolic demands of what you're doing you know then you're breathing off more CO2 so effectively you're hyperventilating by medical definition so breathing an excessive metabolic demands so that can cause all sorts of you know changes to nerve firing you know you see People get pins and needles in their hands and feet and numbness and poor blood supply of the brain. You know, one of the things that always fascinated. I mean, this is part of the, you know, the connection from when I started as a respiratory physio working in the ICU, you know, is if we had a head injured patient, we would actually turn the vent, or I wouldn't do it, but the, you know, the smart people would turn the ventilator up. So the respiratory rate was higher to intentionally decrease blood supply of the brain, right?

So they do that intentionally to decrease blood supply of the brain in someone who's got head trauma. Imagine the change to blood supply to the brain if you're just, you know, breathing faster than what you need to be doing just in your normal routine day to day, right? I think there's so many different authors that have covered that side of it, you know, in terms of the CO2 exchange. And, you know, I think some of that stuff's been done to. Yeah, I think some of that stuff's been done to death, not done to death, but I think we don't need to go down that, you know, that rabbit hole for this. conversation. We'll make sure to link to some resources on just how to become a more capable of breathing from the diaphragm. Yeah, beautiful. As opposed to the, so yeah, we're not going to get into that. Yeah, perfect. We'll put some good resources in place so people can refer back to that.

Wonderful, yeah. I think the piece that's still missing in so many of the performance environments is what changes by mechanically. Yeah. Right. And so there's two pieces in there. If someone is already an upper chest breather at rest like what we were just talking about, then, they don't have the, they might still only need five and a half or six litres of air in their, in and out of their lungs in a minute, just sitting still, but let's say it's a high-performance male athlete or, you know, someone who's in a military environment, someone who needs to move hard and fast, that might go up to 180, 190 litres of air in and out of their lungs in a minute, would be what they would potentially need to push into.

And at rest, it's how many? It's depending on their size, but anywhere from five and a half to six weeks. in a minute, right? So that's a huge change. Yeah, so if someone's naturally diaphragmatic at rest, then when they need to increase that depth and speed to get that 180 liters, they'll start using their upper chest as well as their diaphragm and they'll revert to mouth breathing so they can shift that volume hard and fast.

But if someone's already an upper chest breather at rest, then when they try to pull, you know, deeper, harder and faster, they effectively don't have the space in their lungs to put more air into because they're already breathing right at the top of their lungs. Yep. Does that kind of make some sense? Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And so they'll experience, like, they're trying to suck for air, but they feel like they can't get their air into their chest.

So there's that side of it just in terms of then what happens where the brain effectively puts the brakes on and says, it feels like you're breathing, you're working way too hard from a breathing perspective, I'm going to pull you back on physical output. So it's another way that the body and, you know, the mind and everything tries to make sure that we don't explode, you know. But then there's also the biomechanical piece where if you're doing anything with your upper limbs from an execution perspective, so think about a basketball or with, you know, someone who or someone who's, you know, firearms or kayaker, any sport where there's an upper limb component, there suddenly becomes a competition between,

am I using those muscles to breathe or am I using those muscles because they're the same muscles, accessory muscles. Am I using those for stability, for power, for physical output, and the brain suddenly has a competition? Am I breathing or am I creating power? And so that starts to compromise performance in that perspective as well. You know, we talked about keeping the body calm. When we're mobilizing energy for a task, you know, obviously that mobilization of energy is very adaptive and can be functional. How do you help an individual who struggles in that moment where they get over aroused and find themselves kind of getting disoriented and not be able to put their thoughts together, you know, what is kind of happening there? Because I think

we've all probably felt it, you know, where we're just like, we can't quite get our thoughts together, right? Like we get kind of sweaty. We get really nervous. Our hearts racing. And there's just a point where it's really functional and then a point where it's not anymore. How do you help kind of get people back to that point where it's, you know, an adaptive level. level of mental, physical, emotional arousal so they can perform. Yeah, awesome. And I think, you know, I'm glad that you asked that question. And, you know, because I know when we started this chat, you're like, you know,

one of the things you're renowned for is breathwork and breathing. And I have always been so nervous about getting pigeonholed into that space because what I do is actually so much more than that, you know, but it is this area of, you know, having been a respiratory physiotherapist and then, you know, building from there, my master's research was an optimizing performance and competitive cyclists with optimizing breathing mechanics, and that was one of the first pieces of research back in 2008 that was actually done on that space. So it is a really deep area, but the challenge in the shiny world of performance these days is everyone's a breathwork expert, you know, and so I have pushed hard on that.

Most of what I do is around arousal state control, which is very much that nervous system from a deeper, you know, sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic, how do we trade those two off, what feeds into that? and it's so much more than breath. And so I just, you know, want to make sure that we are keeping that awareness quite broad. So people don't think breathing is the only thing that's going to set you up or derail you from performance in that space. Having said that, you know, one of the things in terms of, you know, what's going on in that situation, I think often what sets someone up for crossing that threshold, you know,

and I think we've spoken in the previous podcast that you and I did about squiggly lines and red lines. and about, you know, squiggly line being someone's arousal state and the red line being their threshold and basically as long as their arousal state is staying below whatever their threshold is, it doesn't derail performance. But as soon as someone's arousal state gets to a point that they are too up, you know, and it starts to cross their thresholds, they start to lose their smart thinking, you know, or their breathing pattern just gets to a point where it's just continuing to drive sympathetic nervous system, right? Or they lose peripheral, you know, vision or auditory awareness.

or, you know, all of those critical pieces that we need for dulled in high performance, you know, in those critical moments, it's like it leaves that person, all right? And then the person's like, oh, no, now I, you know, I've lost my fine motor skills or my smart brains offline. I can't think this way through. So in that moment, I often talk about needing a get out of jail card, right? It's like, what can I do to immediately pull myself back under my threshold so I can pull my smart brain online, then I can think my way through that situation.

So the get out of jail card being, tapping into three things that differentiate the parasympathetic from the sympathetic nervous system that we've always got control over, which is where we breathe to, where we look and what we think. And so I'll put that together where the little technique, you can learn to do it in five to ten seconds where it's a breath out and we want to lengthen the exhale so we maximize the slowing of the heart rate, you know. Ideally then taking two breaths down into the diaphragm,

I don't care how many times, you know, what you count on the breath in or breath out. Let's just keep it really simple. But also to look up at the same time, look onto the horizon or just be aware of what's in the periphery and have a front-loaded thought that is something to do with opportunity or gratitude or curiosity that will intentionally, you know, turn that part of the brain on, you know,

and you can get really good at putting those three things together, five to ten seconds, even faster than that if you're well trained. And all that does is it just pulls your arousal state just under your threshold enough that now you can start to pull your smart brain back online. Yeah, and I feel like this technique, like if you think about like the states of arousal, you know, and maybe you want to just talk about, you know, kind of what the spectrum looks like when you're trying to perform and you feel like, you know, you're over aroused, like you, you know, might think kind of underprepared or I'm not going to nail this,

you know, whatever kind of negative self-talk is going through your brain. You're basically afraid. Yeah. Right. So that arousal state is one of fear. Maybe just talk a little bit about the thinking part and how you can actually talk yourself into a better future in that moment using things like gratitude and curiosity. I feel like that's kind of under leveraged, you know, in these moments of high pressure where we're like, I need to perform. And then you just, you kind of, when you think about it from the standpoint of like, I'm just going to try, I'm just going to get curious about whatever's in front of me, you know, it does take the pressure off a little bit.

I agree. Yeah, 100%. And I think rather than defaulting to just using a get out of jail strategy, which effectively is saying, let's wait until you stuff it up and then try to recover from that, you know, I think if we understand that put any human being in an environment where there is, you know, one of a few characteristics, there might be a high degree of uncertainty or unknown, you know, there might be a high consequence of outcome, there might be you're outside your comfort zone, you might be in a scenario where you've got all three of those.

and then when you're an athlete there's also a degree usually of a high respiratory load and so that, you know, is a physiological stress or in and of itself. And when I'm talking arousal state, I'm always talking about, you know, the physiological stress response, not the mental or emotional perception of stress because I think often our true high performers, you know, they are mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually resilient human beings. They can do hard things, right? but the physiological stress response can still go nuts underneath the surface to the degree that it will derail performance.

And often that sneaks up almost through stealth mode because people will make that assumption, but I'm strong and resilient and I can do hard things because I do all of these hard things. They don't understand that sometimes there's that front-loaded piece of work in the physiology that's actually really important. And so given to your point that that physiology is often triggered by fear or a version of that, It's also understanding that it's usually a very deep primal fear, right? It's a fear of failure ultimately at the deepest level because failure as a primal human was a death sentence, right? If I fail at the task of running away from the thing that's trying to kill me or if I fail

to get that food source, it's all over for me. And so many performers in the modern world will come into a hard and difficult thing, framing something in some version of, you know, don't stuff it up, right? Don't fail at this thing. You know, we hear coaches say to a team, hey, you know, You've, you know, make sure that we've got to win this game because if we don't win this game, we're going to, you know, not make playoffs. So, you know, as an example, right now, that framing in the lead up to something, if it's

framed in that any version that there's a chance of failure is going to turn on that threat response, which has someone tighten up because, you know, their breathing tightens up. They're operating in a higher heart rate for many hours before they come into their performance arena, you know, their thoughts are starting to spiral, you know, all those sorts of things, right? But as soon as we flip that and, you know, you used gratitude or curiosity, I think that is such the critical turnaround or flip for people is starting to think about how can we, how can I do this thing cleanly? I wonder how well I can play this thing to, do you know what I mean?

It's like keeping curious, keeping open. And I'll do it with a room of people where I'll, you know, I'll give them the more negative, you know, version and have them with their eyes closed and just get them to notice what they feel in their body as they hear that or as they frame it in that way that is something. version of don't stuff it up, you know, basically. And then I flip it where it's some version of a curiosity or an openness or a gratitude. And the common feedback is I feel more open, I feel lighter, I feel more fluid. And then I'll say to people, which version of you do you think would actually perform better right now if you had to go out and execute? And of course it's

going to be the one that feels more open, more relaxed, you know, the breeding is slower, the heart rate slower, those sorts of things. So I think it's knowing when you're coming into a big moment, you know, I did some stuff with some military guys where, you know, they're having to jump from heights and, you know, jumping from heights fear, you know, inducing for the best of us, you know, and one of the guys in particular was terrified of heights and he was always thinking, you know, that negative version. But as soon as he was, he flipped that to think, I wonder how calm I can stay at height, you know, how can I turn, I wonder how good I can get at this thing. And he just got to a point where, you know, he was able to execute

that really cleanly. what's up folks if you are enjoying this podcast or if you care about health performance fitness you may really enjoy getting a whoop that's right you can check out whoop at woup dot com it measures everything around sleep recovery strain and you can now sign up for free for 30 days so you'll literally get the high performance wearable in the mail for free you get to try it for 30 days see whether you want to be a member and that is just at Woop.com. Back to the guests. I feel like there's a real tension in terms of like our mindset and what's actually happening

physiologically. And it sounds like you can train. You want to train the physiology first to then be able to have the mindset. I think sometimes we do it the other way around where you've got the mindset like how I guess how do you how do you teach cultivating this mindset of openness and expansiveness and gratitude and curiosity like I that that seems to be the sweet spot for performance but it seems very abstract so you've got this this foundation of breath right where you've become a competent breather um and then that sets the tone for a lot because when you when you understand your breath control your breath have good baseline breathing you then can be in a position to control your state to a degree, right?

So I guess I'm wondering, foundationally, you know, to what degree can we actually talk ourselves into a better future if we don't have these, these like basics in place? Yeah. I think it's a lot harder. I think we made the job harder for ourselves if that is the case, but it's not just breathing. Right. And I think, you know, we often think, hey, that in this modern world, we are these crowsy, crazy smart beings, right, who happen to just carry a body around, you know, because so many

people operate in their head, you know, most of the time. They're always thinking, they're always, you know, and they just, unless you're an athlete where you're really embodied a lot of the time, you know, you're not necessarily always thinking about that, more head focused. But, you know, biologically, we are, you know, feeling beings that think, not thinking beings that feel, right? And so I think our thought processes are driven more by our physiology than we actually like to give ourselves credit for, right? And so if you are operating in sympathetic drive and so that, you know, that fight and flight nervous system, now there are so many things that will turn that on from sleep deprivation, chronic pain, TBI, you know, some of the practical things, high sugar diet, caffeine, you know, all of those traditional things, right?

Yeah, keep going down the laundry list. Yeah, it's a long one, right? Yeah. But then you start getting into things like fear of failure, fair of success, fear of not being good. enough, you know, fear of other people think. Is that exasperated when this laundry list of things you just read it off, outlined? Yeah. I guess I always think that, you know, if we're underslept, underfed, overfueled, dehydrated,

you know, our ability to access the mindset you're talking about is diminished. 100%. Yeah. And that's where I was starting to go, right? So any or all of those things, you know, especially when there's many of them. So, you know, the term elesthetic load is probably a term. I know you're very familiar with it. And I'm sure, you know, the listeners are.

starting to become more familiar of it if they're if they're not. But all of those multiple different things that will feed into the physiology over time, you know, that's physiological stress is absolutely, right? Any one of those things on their own is not a problem, but it's how many of those things have you got stacked on top of each other and over what period of time. We'll have the accumulation into the physiology that, you know, in my model of squiggly lines and red lines, you know, we'll have someone with their squiggly line sub-threshold all of the time, right? Now, I think when you're operating in that sympathetic nervous system, when that's turned on because of that accumulation of the allostatic load stuff, it's very hard

to, in inverted commas, think positive if you're trying to run away from a line that's trying to kill you, right? And so I see this with, you know, well-intentioned leaders or coaches when they will say to people, oh, just, you know, think positive, like try to frame this positive. And it's like, but if your nervous system is so in the fight and fly, you know, for whatever reason, to your points, in that fear-driven version, then unfortunately you can try to tell yourself, oh, I can win this game or I know I can do this hard thing, you know, but often you're effectively lying to yourself and the worst part is you know that, you know, your subconscious is like, oh, I'm not actually sure that I can do that,

but you're asking me to go and do a really hard thing and you're not giving me the foundations or the framework of actually how to do that. So now I'm going to trust you even less, right? And I think one of the best things we can do is if we're feeling fear or, you know, when we're about to go into a hard thing is we actually acknowledge, I'm actually really afraid of this thing and here's what I'm going to do to execute it cleanly, right? So that we're not then trying to lie to ourselves that we're not feeling what we're feeling in that moment, you know, but then we're giving ourselves that really clear pathway of

and here's what we're going to do. So coming back to your point, I think, you know, sleep. Sugar, I think, is a terrible one, isn't it, for messing with people's thought processes, like how many people think more negatively or, you know, have sort of more anxiety and those sorts of things with a high sugar diet, you know, and so it can be. So I think that's why in the space of human performance, and this is, you know, again, I keep repeating this about, you know, I don't just do breathwork right, because you can't take any piece of a human being and pull it out from the whole human and make that thing better without actually realizing that all of the pieces of us as a human. human are so integrated, that all of the pieces have to fundamentally work at the same time and understanding that if this thing's off, then it's going to impact, you know, this other piece of the puzzle over, you know, on the other side. But similarly, there's a third piece

and, you know, we're complex humans, which is actually what makes us so magic. But that's why I am always really nervous when I hear anyone putting anything out there, especially in the performance space, where it's a paint by numbers, you know, follow this routine or regiment and it's going to work for you. And I think that's why we're so much better when we speak about first principles. And we understand some of the deeper, deeper themes and concepts. You know, I was just at a presenting at a summit just in the week, actually, the NBA Players Association Performance Summit.

I was really privileged to be invited there. And then afterwards, you know, a lady was asking a lot of questions. And she was starting to get quite caught up on, you know, And what do you see in the numbers and the data and the whatever, you know, and what do you want to optimize to with performance? And how do you know if someone's getting to the point of, you know, their arousal states getting out of control? And to start with, I was answering some of her questions.

And then I actually paused and I was like, well, I think the most critical thing is, is it impacting performance? Because I think someone's going to have a slight, you know, someone might have a change in heart rate. Of course I're going to have a change in heart rate and high pressure moment. That's only a problem, though, if it actually derails performance. Does that make sense? And I think we can get really caught up on numbers.

And I'm not saying that we shouldn't care about the data and about the science and those sorts of things. But it always has to have that so what once it actually hits the cold face of are we setting this human up for better performance or is it detracting from performance? If we're trying to use in-game data to say anything, we're not thinking about the data clearly. We should be looking at seven-day rolling averages, right? Absolutely. And that's where I, where the high-performance. environments get it very wrong, you know, is they're looking at these acute fluctuations. And that's really not where a lot of the insight is. You know, it's over seven-day period generally. And, you know,

obviously proactively managing volume intensive largely off of how players feel. And then being able to kind of look at the demands of the week and understand and look at the physiology and the metrics against that. Absolutely. And then reprogram accordingly. I agree that we, you know, for thinking about like in-game and trying to pinpoint. how hurry might be responding and how that's correlated with the outcome. To your point, it only matters if it actually matters. Yeah, 100%. And I, you know, you've heard me use this expression often, but, you know,

having buffer in the system, right? And so I think what we see in a game, what we see in a high pressure moment, what we see in, you know, a shoot house, what we see in an ER, I think that is just, that's the tip of the iceberg, right? And so it's less about what the person's doing in that moment. And I think, unfortunately, there is so much focus on, in inverted commas, optimize performance in the arena, without enough consideration of actually that person's ability

to perform under pressure in that moment is more set up by how they're doing everything else in life rather than what they're actually doing in that moment. I mean, there's a couple little things you can change, but usually by the time someone steps into their performance arena, they've got bigger things to be thinking about. Yeah. You know, I either task at hand.

No doubt. I know we go back and forth in this all the time, but just the competitive advantage being in the downtime. Absolutely. That's where you create buffering the system. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, because you need it, right? Because there's always an uplift and arousal state at go time.

Yeah. And I think we're in agreement that that's not a problem. The uplift and arousal state at go time is a really helpful thing. as long as it's in the sweet spot for a performer rather than its crossing threshold. And the more buffer you have, the more capable you will be to modulate that arousal based on whatever the situation in front of you is. Build, respond and adapt to it in a way that is optimized. Because you want to have maximum cognitive bandwoods, right, so you can make those really smart

decisions or you can read that situation exceptionally well. And usually in a critical moment or a critical event, it's not often worth. one thing, you know, that's going to be that a one moment, you know, it's a one moment. And then 10 minutes later, there's another one moment, you know, and each of those is going to escalate the arousal state, you know, and so the more buffer you've got, or more importantly, the more you have the tools in your tool bag at will to upregulate, downregulate, actually on the go, you know, I think that is the control that a performer really has. I think that's when you get someone who can consistently perform in those high pressure moments

no matter what the moment actually is, as opposed to someone who's just done a thing a thousand times and it's become their comfort zone, but put them into any other situation, and suddenly they redline because they actually haven't got tools in their toolkit to know how to regulate their system at will. They've just turned that performance arena into their comfort zone. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Say more about that.

Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, I think, you know, given that, as I said, you know, one of the three things, that will turn on the threat response is being outside of comfort zone. And let's say we take, whether it's a, you know, we could take someone, it depends which population we want to talk to, right? Whether we're talking sport or whether we're talking, let's say, elite military as an example, right? Is it often an NBA basketball, you know, by the time someone's made it into the NBA,

the court is usually their comfort zone, right? And so maybe there's more of a threat if it's an NBA final versus it's, hey, like it's, you know, the first couple of games of regular season and there's nothing really writing on. comfort zone versus not, you know, but relatively it's a comfort zone or someone who's in a military environment, you know, in a sort of a tactical situation. Over time, they get, that's what they're trained for, right? That's the environment is that they thrive in. But it's amazing how many times I'll talk to someone, it might be, you know, let's say it's a military operator and we're talking about what are your high pressure, high stress situations. And it's not what most people

think. And so far as, you know, any sort of combat scenario, it might be going home to the six-month-old screaming baby, you know, or it's the time that they need to put on a suit and be acting more in a diplomacy role or, you know, they need to de-escalate a situation and they haven't got a firearm they can rely on. And that makes them really uncomfortable because it's not their comfort zone, right? And so they get that threat response kick in, you know, high heart rate, high breathing, smart brain goes offline. And they haven't, they've misinterpreted, and same with athletes, they've misinterpreted that because those comfort zones means, let's say it's a, you know, that basketballer, right? And

That's their comfort zone because I've had thousands of repetitions of that. It's really easy for them to misinterpret that that means that they know how to handle pressure and then get them into a scenario where now you're playing a final and things are going, you know, that other teams come out and they've forced you to make a whole lot of unforced errors or, you know, whatever. If you don't have a recovery strategy because you've actually learned how do I recognize in myself when I've redlined and what are my tools that I've got in my toolkit to immediately de-escalate that? then you've got a problem.

But a lot of organizations, and I've seen it, you know, literally in a championship winning NBA team where they were on a role, they had a phenomenal regular season, they misinterpreted that as we know how to handle pressure until they ended up in a final for a game that they should have won

and been defending champions, and they didn't have a recovery strategy from that. Do you think that's a, you know, I find this kind of aspect of performance fascinating, And I think this is one of the reasons why the teams I coached, you know, I can kind of one hand the amount of times we underperformer or, you know, lost to a lesser talented team. And the reason why was solely based on exactly what you just said. Like we were always thinking about our appraisal or our perception of the game ahead. If I perceived it as easy or I've been there, I know it, you know, like there's almost like you can almost get kind of into this easy zone.

where you don't actually have the arousal levels you need to perform commensurate to the task. So you end up underperforming. And this is why so many teams underperform is they perceive the task as easier. And as a result, they don't come to the match or the game with the appropriate levels of mental, physical, emotional arousal. They don't get the right response. So they kind of end up in kind of this more complacent state, which obviously yields an underperformance. And that's like the whole kind of notion of like a trap game right so i find this aspect really like it's it's fascinating to me because it's completely unavoidable you know and if i were to think about like high performance environments like that is a crack in your foundation if you're losing to lesser

talented teams yeah there's nothing that makes me more annoyed i would i could not because it's completely unavoidable it is like yeah and i said you know i sat in this in the stadium watching in this particular the NBA final, right? And I watched this team implode, and it cost them a championship. And it was, you know, it actually had a conversation completely, completely. At an individual level. Individual level. But I also think at individual level, and, you know, I've worked with a couple of different

teams when I've been called in usually when they've made playoffs or finals a couple of times but failed to win the championship, right? And then it's like, oh, we need the edge because we get so far and we can't quite crack it. And it's interesting when we chat with the players afterwards. A common theme is we thought we'd won it. We deserved to win it. And I hate that term in sport. We deserve what I deserve.

Like to me, I'm like, you don't deserve anything. You've earned the right to make it to the final. But now you've still got a job to do in terms of processes. But often there's a common thing where athletes will, you know, almost make an assumption that as long as everybody else brings their A game, we're going to be good. And the problem with that is nobody brings their A game. Diffusion responsibility. 100% yeah but I also think so often it's you know when we see failure for performance under pressure

a lot of the blame goes on the athletes in the arena right but I also think this is and I know you and I you know have spoken about this recently but how is that whole organization set up literally from front office right through to the players on the court you know if we if we just use basketball as an example but it replies to any sport because team ownership front office execs, you know, how they communicate, how they communicate trade. There's so much around communication, strategy, you know, flights. Like there's so much that an organisation, I think, doesn't have an understanding that they are significantly contributing to or could offset that allostatic load piece.

You know, the stuff that actually has a coach who's coaching from a fear-driven state because they're afraid of losing their job, as an example, right? That coach is going to coach their team in a very different way. They're going to use language that's more, whether it's, whether it's. it's intentional or not, it's more outcome focus, it's more fear-driven, again, without realizing it's going to be a version of don't fail, you know. Just even how they hold their face, how they emote, how they extract, you know, like it's all impacted. All of that, you know, and I think that we see the end point is, you know, the performance

under pressure or failure to perform under pressure will show on the scoreboard, right? But actually the cause of those symptoms is often removed from that. And that's not to take the responsibility away from the people in the arena who have to do their job, but they are only part of it, particularly in a really high performance environment. You know, one of the things I often see is working in high performance environments is there's a lot of people who aren't actually high performance human beings themselves, you know, in terms of how they show up, how they communicate, how they, they're toxic energy or all and training and absolutely, all of that stuff, you know, but I think coming back to what we were saying

just, you know, maybe five minutes ago about that complacency or the exposure in the, the the comfort zone. I think the opposite is that if we're relying on let's just, you know, let's say it's a rookie, right? And it's like, well, you know, eventually they're going to get comfortable. So, you know, maybe we'll give them a couple of years or whatever it is, right? I think if we're relying on that thing becoming someone's comfort zone, we're delaying the use of our talent. You know, we could actually, if we actually train them how to handle pressure sooner at a physiological level, not just send them to the psychologist or the mental skills trainer and go and learn some mindset techniques, right? I think if we could actually really architect into their

human system, right? Here's what happens in your physiology. Here's actually how we train it so that it stays regulated with all of these different pieces, not just breathwork, all of the pieces that you know, we talk about when we're doing this stuff. Then we're actually giving that human who we're then putting into that high pressure moment, we're giving them the maximum cognitive bandwidth to make the smart decisions. We're keeping their fine motor online. We're keeping their gross biomechanics online in the way that they've actually trained for. So we actually get the performance from that person a lot sooner, you know? I'll often say it's like, because they know how to manage it. Because they know how to manage it. Yeah. I mean, I was working with a,

with a, you know, elite tactical team. And they were talking about when they first start training for their combatives training, they might do BJJ, so Brazilian Judgency, right? And they're like, eventually, you know, it takes the guys quite a long time to get comfortable and then learn the techniques and be able to know how to apply their techniques and then maybe we'll think about, I'm going to use a breathing technique in this example, but then maybe we'll actually teach them how to control their breath. And it's like, actually, if you actually, it's totally in the wrong order, because if you can actually have them regulating and slowing their breath down right from the beginning, and again, not breathwork, first principles of what happens to breathing

under load as a moving human being, right? Let's just teach them the mechanics of that. As they are learning to roll and do those different, you know, techniques. Funnily enough, they'll actually learn so much faster because they're a lot more present. They don't go straight into panic in their mind and then they're just trying to survive, right? They're going to learn a lot faster. So we're going to maximize a use of our talent so much faster rather than, you know, often say it's like throwing humans in the water and yelling at them for drowning, but we've never taught them to swim, right?

It's like some people are going to naturally stay afloat, but I think we could maximize a lot of talent a lot sooner if we actually gave them these tools right from the get-go, but that takes normalizing the conversation, that it's like, hey, it's really normal when you put a human in a high-pressure high-stakes environment, their nervous system is going to, you know, out-regulate. That's really normal. It's no different than if you don't eat for a period of time, your blood sugar's going to drop. Why don't we accept that that's normal, but more importantly than trained for that? Yeah. Yeah. Do you think I care about this topic? Yeah, I know. I know. I know. you're invited to join the wait list for whoop advanced labs advanced labs delivers clinician reviewed lab results

right into your whoop app for the most complete view of your biomarkers and biometrics and the most comprehensive understanding of your health unlike other tests whoop integrates your lab results with your whoop data see how your habits and behaviors influence your biomarkers and get clear guidance on what to change to improve your results to join the wait list visit our website or the Health tab in the WOOP app. I mean, I'd love to get your thoughts on, I think you and I both have been inside a lot of high-performing environments,

you know, in different roles and incapacities. And I think that they're all kind of missing the same thing. And it's very much related to kind of what you just described, but I'd love to hear what you think is the biggest missing piece from these high-performance environments that you're operating inside of. And in the end, I would say that there are a few missing pieces, and they determine whether or not you can reliably perform night after night, right? Like, these are the things that, like, you know, when you're wondering, you know, why is performance such a mystery? Like, why is there so much guesswork?

To me, that there's an... It shouldn't be, right? To me, it's actually really, it's actually very predictable and very trainable. It's not rocket science, right? It's really not. But they're, you know, and then you think you alluded to it. It's obviously there's a complex network of front of it. office and you've got, you know, all sorts of high performance folks who have no control over

anything, really. You've got players who are making millions of dollars who are getting advice from all sorts of different people. So there's, I'm not saying it's not complicated. But I feel like there's a way to put this together that's, to me, doesn't seem that complex. I'd love to get your thoughts. I think it's often lack of knowledge and awareness, often in some of the decision makers right that they don't understand perhaps some of these pieces um they don't understand or they or they think it's a one percenter you know or they think it's a marginal gain yeah and it's not right it's it's actually like all of this all of the stuff like the arousal state training now if you think about almost all of those things we talked about right sleep diet you know injury management chronic pain

tbii um you know gut microbiome and then the and then some of those other thought processes it's fear of failure, the fear of letting teammates down, whether that be, you know, military teammates or sport teammates, like that deep human stuff, you know, I think that all of those things contribute to, into the physiological stress response, right? It's kind of a, that's not a bolt on, right? That's actually what we're operating from as a human being. And it's so central to everything in terms of our decision-making, our ability to do those tasks that we're trained for? Can we do them repeatedly? Can we do them under pressure? Have we got

the ability to, you know, deploy a few more de-escalation strategies because it's a much more complex, high-performance, high-pressure moment? Or maybe we need to upregulate because, to your point, it's like, oh, we're playing a team. If it's a sport example, we're playing a team that, oh, you know, we should win this because whatever. Cool, but you're going to have to up-regulate then. So just having those skills and techniques, right? But I think that often the performers in the arena are starting to have a really good understanding of that, whether that be the athletes, whether it be the operators, you know, I get to work with many sort of younger operators that are coming, starting perhaps their elite military track. And they are hungry for this knowledge.

You know, they will be proactively seeking it out, you know, often because they're not getting it from, you know, leaders or whatever. I think it's still too siloed. You know, it's like there's a human performance piece. You've got the mental skills. You've got the strength and conditioning. You've got the athletic medicine and they're all operating independently of one another without a lot of And it has to be integrated, you know, that's where the magic is, right? Is that I think about some of the stuff that I'm getting, you know, more and more, you know, privileged to do it for the likes of, you know, in a military environment where it is really integrated, right? Because the instructors are trusting it. So they're like, awesome, you know, we want you in the house.

We want you to work with our instructors and integrate this stuff as the guys are moving because that's where it gets real, you know. I suddenly have an operator who's, you know... And you can see where the breakdowns are happening, and then you can... Absolutely. And more importantly, they get a real world change. You know, if you're working with someone on the range who, you know, suddenly as a result of doing a few things, they can, you know, they're a lot more accurate and they feel and sense that in real time, right?

That's a good win for them, you know, as an example without getting into too much detail with some of that. But I think it's the decision makers who are often having to fund some of the stuff or giving them enough, you know, the teams that are on the grounds who might need to be doing the doing, the decision makers don't have an understanding of how important this work actually is, you know, that pressure is, you train for it. It's very, you know, it's very predictable what's going to happen, and it's very predictable in what you need to do to make sure that your people have the skills to manage those environments, but they don't understand it, you know,

And so it's harder for them to spend money or to integrate some of the techniques or to think about, well, maybe we do need to fly in somewhere a day earlier so that our people can, you know, recover. Simple things like that, right? They just say there's a line item on a budget as an example. Or they don't see the human cost for that decision, right? I think, you know, let's say if you're actually in a, you know, frontline and you're a military leader and you're making a decision that in real time someone's going to walk out and at

might cost them in their life. You see that immediacy of the impact of that. But if between the time you make a decision to the fallout from that decision is weeks or months, you don't see that there's immediate cost to the decisions that you've made or you haven't made in terms of from a performance perspective. I mean, the obvious costs are injury, illness, burden. You know, like, I mean, the less you tend to the human system, the more vulnerable you are. And so it's always surprising to me that that's not I think folks generally like yeah we need to get sick less to get injured less and that's going to obviously improve our chances of you know realizing our goals as as individuals and teams and but really laying a foundation where we're reducing

that burden in a very intentional way I don't see that happening but but maybe I'd be curious in a way that is accounting for all the variables that actually make us vulnerable. You know, and you think about things like sleep consistency and opportunities for sleep. And I understand military operations is a different beast, right? I think it's just their, you know, but I think with sports, and there are, you know, travel constraints, there's obviously things to consider, but I don't see that being tended to in a way that that is, move of the needle in the way that it could. Where do you think that that needs to change?

You and I down in the field, I understand the human cost of that, right? But unfortunately, if you are a team owner and you're more worried about, you know, the commercial side of your business, I think the argument or the value proposition to use that term, it needs to be positioned differently. It's like we get the result through stealth mode, right? Which is we get healthier, happier humans who can, you know. But I think the conversation. often needs to be put forward to go, okay, but what is losing a major championship

mean to your team in terms of millions of dollars or whatever, sponsorship or fan base or whatever, right? And I think sometimes maybe the people that are in the human performance arena aren't that comfortable having that conversation in those terms. So they haven't learned the language that they need to speak to appeal to people who just think about money. People who think about money. And that sounds awful to say that. But because you and I know that that's actually not, you know, the cost of a human life or whatever is worth more than that, right? And I'm not saying that those team owners don't believe that there's a cost to that, but they, but they, they, they, they have a business to run or a, or whatever.

So I think it's about getting better at being able to articulate what is the cost of not making these investments, you know, or, rather than what is the cost of making these investments. So, but I also think being able to have an easier, conversation. I mean, it's disappointing how often I'll be invited into high performance organizations where even the team around the team are not a high performance team in and of themselves because they don't know how to have difficult conversations or they don't know how to set that example of, you know, we know how to handle pressure and stress. The number of times

I'll have athletes or even, you know, young people in different environments say, oh, our coaches are always saying that we need to bring the right attitude and we need to be able to stay calm under pressure or we need to be able to do all this thing and we look at our coaching staff but we're completely losing it sideline or you know you know so that I think that's an important piece too how important is that modeling and that co-regulation and talk a little bit about about that yeah I think that co-regulation piece is something that we often don't think about how energy transfer I think is another way to frame it and you know just how you carry yourself you know so you as a human if you are you know if you come off a phone call it was stressful right

and you haven't actually pushed reset on yourself right you carry that shoulder tension that tense door the tight breathing into that next engagement that person is going to pick that up through your body language and immediately think that you must be frustrated or pissed off with them you know but also you know anyone anyone human in any sort of team environment who brings just that negative toxic energy, you know, that victim mindset or that just that negative vibe will have a tendency to pull people down. But similarly, you can reverse that and flip that, you know, but I often say that the strongest, the strongest energy is going to set the state, but that's not necessarily a good thing, you know, especially if you've got a loud vocal person who's a winger

or who's negative or who's whatever. It's amazing how that, that bickering or that negative, you know, mind will start to diffuse through the whole team. But similarly, you can have someone who steps in and immediately catches that and can reverse that and push it back the other way. How do you screen for that? You know, I feel like if you're, you know, trying to put a team together, you know,

selecting a team, to me that's really important because of how it actually can impact results. Just curious kind of how you advise leaders to think about co-regulation and, you know, what if you're in a scenario where just someone is just always has like the bitch face or like, you know, I mean, how do you, how do, can you train yourself out of that? I think it can. I think it takes though people around that person to have the courage to tell them the impact that they're having on the team. I think in terms of it takes a lot of individual like self-awareness which you might not, you know, your body's

taking over in ways in your mind that you're not even aware. I've worked with a coach who had no idea that, you know, he used to sigh a lot, right? Just because that was just, he was a terrible breather. And one of the things that he would do often is he'd just do these regular sighs, right? And he had a, one of his athletes actually said to me at one point, oh, I think my coach gets really frustrated with me all the time. And I said, why is that? And it's like, because every time I'm standing next to him having a conversation, he's

constantly sighing, you know? And I just, and I said to the athlete, I said, not at all. I said, this is what the coach, this is why he does it, and, you know, and then told the coach, and the coach was so relieved to understand that because he had no idea that that was how it was being outwardly interpreted, right? So something really simple like that. I think, how would you screen for it? You know, simple little things like just watching how people handle adversity, you know,

like if something doesn't go to plans, something's not quite perfect, let's say the bus is late, or this happens, or, you know, you can actually manipulate and create some scenarios just to just to mess things up just a little bit, to see, how do people handle that? Do they default to blame and do they default to victim and do they, you know, or let's say it's been a team training session and there's kit that's left out, you know, just notice who helps put everybody else's stuff away. Who's grabbing the garbage and the bench. Absolutely.

Simple little things like that, I think, in terms of deep character you see a lot about people. I mean, everyone's going to have a bad day sometimes, you know. But I think your team is going to give you a lot more grace if you only sometimes are the person who, you know, has that bad time. But, you know, I think we often underestimate, too, hey, just coming back to the co-regulation stuff, the impact that a coach or a leader in a high-pressure moment has in terms of how calmly they can control themselves.

I worked with a professional football, so AFL team down in Australia. And it was a coach who would often have a tendency to, you know, lose it with their players, you know, either halftime or from the sideline. and to the coach's credit he was as open to learning all of these same techniques about controlling himself under pressure as he was when he brought me in to help the players and at one point they had a game that they played a terrible first half in the scoring system for this particular code of sport similar to basketball so really

high scores and at halftime they're about 30 points down and you know the commentators had written them off and there was almost like no way that they were going to come back and the coach actually phoned me they the team did. turn the game around and they won it. Wow. And the coach phoned me on the drive home and he was like, right, she goes, you know, some of the senior players said to me afterwards, coach, don't know what you're doing. But please, whatever it is, do more of it because you came in at half time.

You didn't even touch the first half. You were very calm and in control of yourself. You gave us three really clear directions of what we needed to focus on in the second half and that if we did those things, we were giving ourselves the best chance for success to turn this around. You didn't give us a false bravado or if we can win it, you know, any of that, to the point we're talking earlier about how do we frame things, you know, you gave us a very clear direction. You were in control of yourself. We trusted you in that moment that you could get us out of this situation if we follow that

stuff. And of course, they did. Now, there's plenty of time to do the, you know, the debrief of the messy first half, right? But you do that on Monday morning when everyone's like in a deregulated state. They're not going to have absorbed it. And it makes no difference anyway, like, because you can't do anything about the first half, right? But he would take that time when he was walking from sideline into the locker room, not thinking about what am I going to say or not getting himself all worked up about how poor

the team had played. He just did literally that get out of jail card. Like he would breathe. He would just lift his vision. He would de-regulate himself. He would be thinking about thinking forward, you know, the next action we can do. He was so in control. And I think, you know, possibly leaders and coaches forget that, like the impact that they actually

really have when their team is spiraling or losing, that we need that strong, calm leadership and presence in those moments to trust and, you know, feel safe. You said it so nicely, so often that heightened nervous system is driven through fear, right? So what do we want? We want the opposite. We want sometimes in those moments. We need safety. We need to know who is control, in control, are they in control? Are they leading? What's the clear direction out of here? What was happening in that moment to the physiology of the athletes? Because that's the that's, coaches might not understand that connection of how they show up and how that actually impacts literally the physiology, not just the psychology of the athletes, but actually the

physiological level. I think the physiology gets impacted, then the brain gets impacted, right? Like, you know, they're connected obviously, but it's the nervous system, then the brain that is then making appraisals and, you know, and perceptions of what's going to happen next. Yeah. I'd say in the first half of that game, you know, it was very intense, of course. And so, you know, the escalation of, you know, now we're making mistakes, right? So any change to, you know, increased heart rate, increased breathing, decreased peripheral vision, decreased auditory awareness, muscles tightening up and brain, smart brain going offline. Now, any combination of those things.

So they're above that blue line, above the threshold. Totally, by that point, you know, I would imagine so. And, you know, the players often describe it as going to, you know, a whiteout state in their head, you know, and the washing machine is another frame, you know. But they literally lose peripheral vision, right? And so when they were in, if they were in a calm estate, they would see the wide open player who they would instinctually pass the ball to or they would hear the call, you know, or they would remember the gameplay that they had practiced, you know, how many times during the week in practice, you know, but once their arousal state has crossed their threshold, all of that goes out of the window, right? They've crossed their thresholds. And so yelling at them or, you know, telling them more times, you know, it's not going to help.

it's more likely to push them even further across their threshold. And I'll watch coaches sometimes, you know, in a timeout. They'll bring their team in, they'll give them, you know, in quite an animated state. They'll talk through what the next play is going to be or whatever. And the athletes will often give a verbal yes. They'll say, yep, you know, and the coach will often misinterpret that. That means that the athletes actually understood it. They might have heard the words, but it didn't, they weren't in a cognitive state

that they could actually recall what was said, right? Does that make sense? Yeah. So then they'll go out on field and immediately, make the same mistake and then the coach kind of, you know, blows up and gets frustrated. And it just spirals from there without having either the coach or someone having an awareness in that moment to go, actually, I've got a team of players right now. That's almost so far gone.

I actually need to bring them down before they, I give them that moment. Or maybe I don't even need to give them any instruction except to pull them in for a timeout, just let them decompress for 10 seconds to de-escalate themselves and then send them out. They'll actually remember exactly what we need. to have them do in practice, you know, or their preferrisions come online and they can see the player or whatever. Talk a little bit about safety. In what perspective? Well, we know psychological safety is a thing, you know, teams that have it perform better.

And psychological safety define, of course, is, you know, just your ability, you know, the feeling safe to show up as the truest version of yourself, mentally, physically, emotionally. We know that those teams that have strong psychological, say high, psychological safety, make more money, you know, are happier professional fulfillment, you know, index scales or, you know, or they rate professional fulfillment higher. So I guess I'm wondering, you know, what, what role do you see in elite teams safety playing from a performance perspective, nervous system perspective, you know, just the, well. And are the things that you do to cultivate that? Yeah. I mean, the reason I'm here studying and pausing, right, is because it's

almost instinctual that it should be a woven in thing, right? Like when you're optimising and setting a team up for performance in high pressure environments, you're wanting to do everything to be turning on the calm and nervous system, right? And not because we want, you know, we're talking crystal waving and that's going to have someone totally zen and that's not what I'm talking. But it's like if something's not turning on someone's calm nervous system is turning on their threat nervous system, right?

So really anything that is, you know, whether it be abusive language, whether it be shutting people's ideas down, whether it be fear-driven coaching styles, you know. To me, that's, you know, it's almost like it's not rocket science, that that's not going to have, that's not going to bring the best out of your performance, right? So the fact that we even have to talk about psychological safety being a thing, to me, just doesn't even almost make sense. I know. If we're intentionally setting up for high performance, right?

I think this is becoming less prevalent because I just, I think coaches nowadays who adopt those tactics of, like, screaming and yelling at, players, you know, they're one viral moment and it, you know, it would ruin their career. But I even think about how, you know, in my younger days of coaching, I mean, I said some really horrible things, you know, and that I regret deeply. But, you know, I would definitely yell at my players sometimes in ways that were, did not create a safe environment. So I guess I'm wondering how, and you might not get invited into those environments, because I think the people that probably invite you to be a part of their organization are kind of probably a little bit

more open-minded. There's some selection, you know, bias going on there. But I guess how prevalent do you think is it in high-performing teams? Is kind of psychological safety at the default? I think it's the characteristics that therefore go on to make a team psychologically save are the characteristics that I'm going to make them high-performing. Yeah. Yeah, and I don't know which way around that actually goes, you know. Yeah, because you lived it as a gymnast. I was literally just going to say, yeah, because as you were asking the question, I was trying to think, you know, what does that feel like as the athlete to be on the receiving end of that, you know,

and I think, you know, obviously a psychologically unsafe environment where an athlete is so driven through fear of making a mistake. There's tapping into that neurophysiology again is that don't fail, which is death sentence, which is sympathetic nervous system, which means everything tightens up, right? So the performance is absolutely going to go south because I'm not going to be able to physically execute the thing if I'm tighter, you know, with my physical technique

and my biomechanics or my smart brains offline or my heart rate's too high, all those same things that we've talked about. And I remember so often, whether it be competition or in practice, you know, I'd often look across to see where is my coach? Is she looking at me? And I would only do a move that I was, especially in practice, if it was a move that I hadn't quite nailed yet and I was still working it out. And the challenge as a gymnast is the only way you get good at something is you fail

at it a whole lot of times before you work it out, right? And so, but I'd be making sure she wasn't watching before I would give something an attempt often because I was afraid of making the mistake of what was the, I was going to get yelled at or sent out of the gym or, you know, whatever. whereas whenever she wasn't in the gym environment, everyone just felt happier, you know, everyone performed better, you know? It is amazing, like when the head coach isn't there all of a sudden, you know, everyone's loose and like having fun.

Yeah. And I think that's a sign. I was going to say, that's a great sign, isn't it? It's almost like if you're the head coach and you walk out of the environment, is it better or worse without you there? I think, you know, that's a really good litmus test. Unfortunately, probably the self-aware coaches are not that coach in the first place. And the ones that don't notice that or wouldn't even think to do.

that that probably the problem ones when you think about performance what is missing from the discussion i think from what i see in performance there's too much not too much often there's a default to thinking that that means strength and conditioning right that it means the physical side of performance yeah rather than the gray you know the stuff that overlaps the stuff that we often don't give awareness to. We love to try to give things a label or a box or a number, and I think as humans we're so magic that a lot of the performance can't be defined and it can't be measured. What do you think?

That's missing? I mean, I think it's really empowering the athletes with an understanding of what actually moves around their ability to show up every day. To me, like that, that's really fuzzy out there. You know, like, and I, you know, and I kind of have God's view of the data here at Whoop, you know, where we can see very clearly, you know, the stuff that really moves around performance metrics that coaches care about and athletes care about. So we're, you know, talking about the, you know, free-through accuracy and penalty kicks

and, you know, just the performance, hard performance. metrics, you know. So I think to me, I don't know that it's being communicated as clearly as it needs to be to the athletes. Yeah. And that's really interesting that you say that, right? Because I think that's why maybe I struggled to answer that because that's the stuff that I do in performance. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and maybe I do it because I realize it was missing. Yeah, yeah. And so it's, it is about having that broader intertwined conversation. I'm pulling all of the narrative together in a way that the athletes or the end user

for one of a better word understands the whole. Yeah. And then it feels accessible. It feels accessible and it feels doable. Yeah. And that it becomes business as usual as opposed to, oh, this is more stuff that we have to do. Yeah.

And maybe that's where I think, you know, and say what's missing, maybe that's on the people who are working in the human performance and high performance space is that it's on us, the collective, to do a better job at making it accessible and integrating it into other parts of how that person is doing their thing. Yeah, exactly. You know, I think there's almost a naivety or an arrogance,

and it probably falls somewhere in the middle. Yeah, yeah. That is an assumption that, well, because I'm as interested in the cool thing, that the athlete should be as interested in the cool thing. So, of course they want to do their mobility, or of course they're going to do their, you know, get their, sleep or whatever, because we teach it from the wrong lens as opposed to how is this relevant to what's important to you, you know, so many professionals make it about what's important to them

as opposed to how is this going to make this person's performance better or whatever we need to tap in for them. Yeah, yeah. What do you, when you think about it from the athlete's lens and you work a lot with individual athletes, what do you, if you could just wave a magic wand, like what do you wish every athlete would kind of understand or have access to. First of all, I wish they would understand. Where does the anxiety come in, you know? I wish that they had an understanding that so much of their performances in their control. Yeah.

Right? It's that they don't have to just leave it to hope that they show up, you know, that the performance shows up. It's so predictable, you know, and it's, there's a lot more in their control. Like, I wish I knew what I knew now when I was a different. gymnast like so much should have been different um having said that i probably wouldn't be doing what i was doing if it was all different so you know yeah yeah maybe i'd still be playing if i knew what i do now no maybe not as a gymnast but you know no no yeah um yeah i think

even just having that deeper and patience i think too like you know is that a lot of this stuff does take time you know is that you don't just learn it apply once and then write it off just because it doesn't work straight away. And I think just that belief in themselves, you know, the most powerful thing I see consistently work for athletes because it's not just mindset, but it impacts on physiology. And I wouldn't just say athletes. I would say anyone who's trying to do something big and difficult, right,

is that flip between whatever the version is don't fail to the how do I succeed version, you know. And I think any time I've seen anything get derailed under pressure, when we reverse engineer it or hot wash it, the thinking was usually a version of don't fail, you know. For mesogynist, don't fall off the beam, you know, for someone who's doing a, I don't know, clearance of a house, don't miss the tripwire.

Like, you know, don't stuff it up, like whatever. But that doesn't by default give you how to succeed on the thing. But as soon as you can flip that to, what do I need to do to succeed on it, it opens up curiosity. You know, it keeps the calm nervous system online. It keeps, you know, just there's so many trickle-on effects that come down from that. And that reframe. Yeah. But it's not having that false confidence we talked about before about the, oh, I can do the thing.

You know, it's not false positive self-talk. It's just the real stuff. Yeah. Yeah, building the efficacy around that specific task or whatever. And don't be so hard on yourself. That would be the other thing I wish high performers would understand. You know, excellence, not perfection. Yeah.

Yeah, I was so hard to myself as an athlete. Weren't we all? Yeah. God. Why is that? I don't know. I think fear of failure for so many people, right? So the opposite is, well, if I'm perfect, you know, then I'll be enough.

You know, that's a big thing, hey, a common thing, that fear of not being good enough. Yeah. What is the second and third order effects? of that, you know, like, how does that manifest and how does that limit potential? Because you can be so talented that even if you have that kind of fear as a default, like, you could still be very good, you know, but I think, you know, there's a consequence to operating with that as a default. And many athletes do. I mean, you've seen it, right? Like, I mean,

if I could waste my magic wand, that would be my, you know, is to get rid of the fear, because I think that is one of the greatest limiters on our potential is is is operating from a place of fear um as opposed of a place of trust you know and and so i guess i'm wondering you know from from your vantage point you know i suppose what is the opportunity maybe a better way of saying it from operating from a place of kind of trust as an athlete what do you what do you open up what can what can athletes expect there's two lies to that isn't there there's trust of self and in this trust of the people around you who maybe are guiding you or telling you what to do, you know. I think the first one, if we're talking about the trust in people around

you, you know, coaching staff, that sort of stuff, you know, if you've got that deep trust that they've got your best interests at heart, you're more willing to take risks of putting yourself into, you know, not dangerous situations, but you will allow them to reach you beyond. what you think your potential is because you trust that they can see you give them benefit for the doubt you think well they they see what I'm capable of I might not necessarily have the confidence to do it yet but as we know confidence only comes after you've done the thing not before so sometimes you have to rely on that external trust and that can bring out the best in your coach too when you kind of offer that that's your I think sometimes the athlete always expects the coach you know

to kind of create that environment but I think the athlete has more control over how a coach might treat them. Absolutely. You know? Yeah, absolutely they do in terms of how they show up as an athlete. Absolutely. But I think that trust in self, you know, oh man, we would do a whole podcast just on this. I mean, I think the depth of identity stuff too starts to really tap in to that one,

doesn't it? You know, because often you flip that where you started, which is, well, often where does that come from, that fear of not being good enough. And therefore, usually it's, you know, I need the external validation from the results. or from achieving or what does that time mean or what does that place mean or what does that metal mean that means I'm enough you know or I'll get validated for that because for whatever reason I don't feel good enough at a deep level of being a human being yeah and I need that external validation I don't feel worthy you know all that sort of stuff and I think if someone can

you know to get to that point of trust in themselves I trust I am enough you know and I get to that place by doing the work, you know, either the deep work on myself or it's the work on learning my skills, if it's, you know, whatever it is, that I learn to trust that, you know, I have got control of that. I am responsible for my, you know, like that, that's a life skill, you know, that I think in terms of what's the benefit of that. When you can get to that point that you trust yourself, you trust that you can do the hard work, you trust your integrity that when you say you're going to do something, you do it. You know, it's the easiest way to break. You know, it's the easiest way to break trust with yourself, isn't it?

On Monday, I'll start eating well and then on Monday runs around and you don't do it. Or if it's an athlete, you know, next week I'll make sure I show up to practice every day and then you don't. You know, that's the fastest way you break trust with yourself is when you're out of integrity with yourself. But it really is our life skill, I think, in terms of going, I am enough that I'm not reliant on the external validation for other people to, you know, and I've learnt that the hard way from being a gymnast, you know, it was very much an external

validation as to whether I was good enough or not. Yeah, yeah. And head to, you know. First place you look is over your coach, you know, that's like just the default for a gym. Yeah. So interesting. Or when you're competing, it's the, it's the judge that holds the score up, right?

Because their opinion at the end of the day is what determines whether you win or lose a competition, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Well, is there anything that, anything that we didn't talk about that you want to make sure our listeners learn about performing under pressure? and stress and navigating these environments that are challenging and hard. No, I think, I mean, we've covered it, you know, for the most part. I just want to reiterate, though, just that point that it is very predictable what happens to humans when we put them in high pressure, high stakes environments.

But the cool thing about that predictability is that we can train for it, you know, I think we just have to have more of the conversations. So it is like, hey, this is what happens, this is why it happens, and here's how we train for it. Because what that also then does is it gives us a lens to look, through when we're critiquing performance, we are not only focusing on what went wrong from a technical or tactical perspective. We've got that next level down to go, okay, but why did that happen? Like, why did you fumble the ball? Why did your smart brain go offline? What actually was going on? And that starts to give people the language or the framework or the understanding that they

can dig a little bit deeper to the point that they can get to, oh, my arousal state got out of control in that moment. And that that's not perceived as being a weakness. That doesn't mean you're not cut out for these environments or you don't have what it takes to do hard things. You just need to train it, right? But if we don't have visibility on it and we don't have language and we don't even look for it, we can't solve for that problem, which means it's just going to keep showing up. And we try to fix the problem in the wrong arena, right? It's like, oh, just practice the skill more times.

You know, it's like, it's not going to solve the problem. Well, I feel really hopeful that you're out there influencing teams. and coaches and athletes, individual athletes, they're, yeah, very lucky to get to work with you. And, yeah, I'm excited to see kind of your work continue to expand and grow. Thank you. I really appreciate the conversation today. So thank you. Absolutely pleasure.

Thank you for having me. Yeah. If you enjoyed this episode of the WOOP podcast, please leave a rating or review. Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question was answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at Woop.com. call us 508-443-49-2. If you think about joining Whoop, you can visit Whoop.com, sign up for a free 30-day trial membership. New members to use the code Will, W-I-L-L, to get a $60 credit on Whoop accessories when you enter the code at checkout.

That's a wrap, folks. Thank you all for listening. We'll catch you next week on the Whoop podcast. As always, stay healthy and stay in the green.