May 18, 2022 • 34 mins
Performance anxiety and the yips are not the same thing, and feeling unable to perform or compete before a big event is far more common than actually being unable to perform or compete due to the yips. But these ailments share more than a few similarities, and on this episode of Losing Control, host Justin Su’a talks with a concert pianist who has not only performed on many of the world’s great stages, but who has battled–and learned to manage–performance anxiety. And for a perspective on battling severe, debilitating anxiety on the court, you’ll hear from none other than Mardy Fish, the former American number one and former world number seven, who faced severe anxiety at the height of his professional tennis career.
- Mardy Fish, a retired tennis pro and current U.S. Davis Cup Captain
- Gwendolyn Mok, a concert pianist, recording artist, and professor of music who teaches at San Jose State University
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Losing Control is a podcast from Sports Illustrated Studios and
I Heart Radio. When I work with my students or
I talk about performing anxiety, so much of it has
to do with how flexible and willing you are to
adjust to accommodate the situation, because it's not going to
take away from your preparation or your ability, but if
(00:22):
you allow it to, it will. It will destroy whatever
it is that you've prepared and that you want to
bring to the table. I'm justin Sua and this is
Losing Control, a podcast about one of the strangest phenomena
in sports, the yips, or when an athlete or elite
performer suddenly finds themselves unable to do the thing that
they do better than almost everyone else on the planet.
(00:45):
If you're listening for the first time, welcome, but if
you want the full experience, head back to episode one.
Losing Control is a podcast told through conversations with athletes, coaches, neuroscientists,
and more, and it's in order. Each episode features a
first hand perspective that contributes a piece to the puzzle
that is the hips. Along the way, you'll learn about
(01:06):
some of the challenges that high performers face and the
mental work that enables them to do what they do.
Not only that, you'll hear how you can incorporate these tools, strategies,
and mindsets into your own life, because it's not just
about losing control, it's about getting it back. So let's
get started today. On losing control, we're talking about something
(01:28):
a little different, performance anxiety or stage frights, from mild
butterflies in the stomach to much more debilitating physiological symptoms.
It's not unlikely that performance anxiety affects some of your
favorite athletes and elite performers. In fact, you might experience
it yourself. Previously on Losing Control, we looked at dystonia
(01:51):
and how it impacts athletes of the small muscles musicians,
and in the first half of today's episode, you'll meet
one of these athletes, Gwendolen Maa, a concert pianist who
has performed on many of the world's great stages, from
Carnegie Hall to Barbican and who, after an injury, overcame
severe performance anxiety. Later on, i'll sit down with Marty Fish,
(02:14):
a tennis pro who was once ranked first in the
United States and seventh in the world, and who has
faced and beaten many of the game's greats, from Andrea
Agassi to Rafael and the Doll and even Roger Federer.
But the most formidable adversary Marty faced on the court
wasn't a daunting opponent. It was something very different, severe anxiety.
(02:37):
I want to be very clear, performance anxiety and the
yips are not the same thing. And if you've been
listening to Losing Control, you've heard athletes talk about how
when they yip, they don't feel nervous or anxious, or
at least not at first. On the other hand, it
can be hard to know where the yips end and
anxiety begins. But what I can and say is that
(03:01):
feeling like you're not going to be able to do
something before a game or performance is far more common
than actually being unable to do it. And that's especially
true when you're a soloist or playing singles and it's
just you alone in front of an audience full of
people who expect to see you do what you do
(03:22):
at the best of your ability. Here's Gwendolen Mock. Hi.
My name is Gwendolen Mack. I'm a concert pianist, a
professor of music at San Jose State university and it's
my pleasure to meet you. And where was your first
major performance? Can you tell us about that experience. Well,
I went to the Juilliard School of Music at the
(03:44):
age of six, so when you're six years old, your
first performance is your first major performance. And I do
remember feeling very nervous before I walked on, thinking, oh,
do I look okay? Are my shoes shiny enough? It's
like all the little things that a young child would
be thinking about. But as soon as I stepped on
(04:06):
stage and started playing, it was not a problem because
for me, I loved playing the piano. It was like
it was kind of a joyful and like a little game.
For me, it was something that I could do, and
I knew I did it well. I wasn't particularly advanced,
but I enjoyed it so much that once my hands
(04:27):
touched the keyboard, I was totally in my zone as
a six year old. Interestingly enough, as I got older,
I became more self conscious and that sense of joy
and freedom of interpretation and performance was slightly more challenging.
Gwendolyn's performance anxiety began in the middle of her career
(04:51):
after an accident. I had a really serious injury later
in life in my thirties, and right around that time,
I was a atty starting to play with London Symphony Orchestra,
the Philarmonia. I was doing things in New York at
Carnegie Hall. I was recording with various ensembles for major
(05:14):
record labels. I mean, I was really in my element
and I had this really freaky accident. And it was
after that accident where I lost the use of my
fourth and fifth finger on my left hand and my
left leg. They were damaged because it was a spinal
cord injury. When I started coming back into the performing world,
(05:34):
I had terrible, really terrible performance anxiety. So I can
actually mark the time when performance anxiety became a real
problem for me. But that was not until my thirties.
Before she was able to work on her performance anxiety.
Gwendolyn had to face the reality of her injury. It
took me quite a long time to accept the injury.
(05:55):
When you have an accident and it renders you that disabled,
even if it's temporarily, you go through these various stages
of grief and anger and resentment that had happened now
in my case, when the accident happened and it was
very sudden that I couldn't play. I had to go
to counseling because it was my identity that was sort
(06:18):
of taken away from me, and I had to learn
at the beginning how to accept that I had the
accident and that I would never be the same after
the accident as before. So there's always this desire to
go back to the same. In other words, even when
you're performing and there's performance anxiety, some of that is
(06:40):
that you know you could do it in your house,
or you can do it in the practice room, so
when you go on stage, you want to replicate that.
And now I couldn't do it because I couldn't count
on my hand and I couldn't count on even walking
from the stage door to the piano without assistance or
without the use of a cane. And I didn't want
to do that. So at first I went through a
(07:03):
lot of really bad emotional challenges having to do with
grief and rage. And actually, after I started to realize, well,
this is who I am, This will forever be a
part of who I am, and I accepted it, I
then started to move forward in taking the steps that
(07:23):
I needed to actually manage this injury and to try
to recover into a new place where I could function
as a performing artist. I guess in a way, I
took it for granted that my hands would always do
what I wanted them to do, or I could always walk,
like say, to the piano, or walk to the grocery store.
(07:44):
One of the steps that I had to take was
to also ask myself who I am? You know, Am
I actually a pianist musician? Is that all that I am?
Or do I have other things that I can bring
to the table through my passion and love of this
medium that might satisfy me. Fortunately, she was able to
(08:05):
play the piano again, and more than that, to perform again,
but not in the same way she had before the injury.
And when she began performing again, she could no longer
count on her body to do what it once could,
and that's where the anxiety crept in. How did she
manage that? When I started to perform again, I had
(08:27):
to deal with certain things. And I don't know if
you wanted me to talk about the frying pan. Gwendolen's
frying pan method is legendary. One of the things that
I realized that I had to do was to get
kind of this frenzied, chaotic anxiety out of my system
before I walked out on stage. So I was living
(08:50):
in London at the time, and so I went to
like their Woolworth's or their Target, whatever you want to
call it, and I picked up a fairly inexpensive frying
pan and uh, I basically smashed it on the floor
a lot right before I go out to play the concert.
And it started out like in the house because I
(09:11):
didn't want people to call the police and have them
come and arrest me, like there's a lunatic on the
sidewalk with a frying pan. But I found a place
where I could smash it up and it was all dented.
It was hysterical because it had a sturdy handle and
it was one of those tough one frying pans, and um,
I would just bang it on the floor for like
(09:34):
maybe ten minutes and just get it out of my system.
The beauty of it was was I could smash it
with the right hand or the left hand or both.
You know, it can be physical, it can be emotional,
or it can be mental. Finding a safe and healthy
outlet to deal with this surplus of energy that you
might have before a performance. A competition or presentation can
(09:57):
help you get into the headspace that you need to
be in in order to perform at the best of
your ability. One of the most important strategies for dealing
with performance anxiety is preparation. The thing about managing performance anxiety,
which is what I think this whole conversation is really
centered on. So much of it has to do with
(10:20):
the preparation. How do you prepare to deliver something? And
for me, the preparation part of it takes so many
different components. For me, it's about making the music more
important than me, making it more important than my ego.
So therefore I have to learn something about the composer.
(10:40):
What was happening to this composer at the time of
conception of the piece? What was the maybe the historical
things going on. Was there a revolution, was their famine
or was there something joyous? They had just gotten married
and they wrote this piece for their spouse. Do I
have all of the right techno cool things that I've
(11:01):
had to master before I go in? Oh, this is
an important thing too. Passages in the music which are
very complex. Have I tried to play those passages with
different fingerings, so instead of just sticking to one set
of fingerings, have I actually tried to master those passages.
Let's say they're like ten measures in one movement, which
(11:24):
are really really gnarly. Have I tried to figure out
a way to navigate through that gnarliness through maybe four
or five different patterns of fingering so that let's say,
goodness me, you're scared, you go out, you play, you
get to that ten measure and you happen not to
put the right finger on the right note. Can you
still improvise your way out of it with a different
(11:45):
set of fingerings? Have I studied this score? Do I
know the structure of the music? Do I know if
I'm playing with orchestra the orchestra part really well? Have
I taken my shower and washed my hair the night before,
because if I shower and way my hair on the
day of the concert, my muscles will get all soft
and my hands will get rubbery. Have I eaten the
(12:06):
right meal that nourishes me hours before I play? I mean,
there's just so many components that go into the preparation
of performing, and the performance itself may last forty minutes.
With the orchestra may last ninety minutes as a soloist,
(12:26):
or it could be five minutes if you are just
asked to go out and play an a tute or something.
So you know, there's so much mental, physical, interpretive mastery
that has to go on in the preparation process so
that you can manage all these unexpected incidences. When your
(12:48):
big moment arrives, you may start to feel uncertain, to
doubt yourself, and to wonder whether you're ready to do
what you're about to do or not. But if you
know that you've done everything you can to prepare for
this moment, you'll be able to dismiss that uncertainty, to
feel confident that you are ready, and to believe in
(13:10):
yourself because you know that you're prepared. Elite athletes will
extensively prepare before they compete, and even though they've crossed
every tea and dotted every eye, some will still question themselves,
and as a jick or just in case, they'll even
say the things they didn't do in order to help
(13:31):
themselves relax. And that's partly because they need to be
mentally ready to adapt. They couldn't have possibly prepared for everything,
and they remind themselves that even if they haven't prepared
for it, they trust their ability to adapt and embrace
whatever comes their way. One of the things I think
(13:52):
that is so essential to managing performance anxiety is the
word flexibility. I think if one can adjust two different
circumstances or scenarios or not the ideal piano or performing environment,
if you can somehow find a way to flex with that,
(14:17):
you will navigate performance anxiety so much better than if
you're rigid. Like I had a student who was having
a lesson with me, and she said, I'm really sorry,
I'm not in the right headspace for this lesson. You know,
it's been chaos in my house and family, this and that,
blah blah blah. I mean, she went on and on
about it, and I finally said, look, if I could
tell you how many times I was about to play
(14:38):
a concert and before I walked out on stage, or
even the day before, something tragic happened or something terrible happened,
or I had a chaotic situation, you know, the show
must go on, and you just have to flex with
that situation. I think when you get anxious, it's it's
when you're rigid and you have to have everything perfect.
(14:58):
You have to have the perfect shoes, you have to
have the perfect temperature, you have to have the perfect dress,
the perfect environment, the perfect cab ride to Carnegie Hall,
or these things they don't happen. So what are you
gonna do? Are you going to let that get to you?
Are you going to flex with it? So when I
work with my students or I talk about performing anxiety,
(15:21):
so much of it has to do with how flexible
and willing you are to adjust to accommodate the situation,
because it's not going to take away from your preparation
or your ability, but if you allow it to it
will it will destroy whatever it is that you've prepared
and that you want to bring to the table. So
(15:42):
to me, that is a big part of my story
is that here I am injured, marriage ended, living in
a foreign country, couldn't really walk much or play at all.
So I had to flex with that. I had to say, Okay,
this is the circumstance. I'm going to allow my self
a pity party for a period of time, but then
(16:03):
I'm going to have to get up and really figure
this out, not necessarily reinvent myself, but figure out what
am I going to do so that I can continue
to inspire and share the love and the joy of
what I do. What's your perspective on perfection. I have
(16:24):
a lot of students who are like eighteen or who
are twenty two, and I always say this to them.
I say, when you're forty two or you're fifty eight,
you're going to be playing this piece a lot differently
than when you're eighteen and twenty two. And the worst
thing that you can do is to try to strive
to play it the same way when you're forty eight
(16:45):
or fifty eight as you did when you're eighteen or
twenty two. Because so much of what we bring to
our interpretive skill is life experiences. So if you've never
lost somebody who was really dear to you, you will
not really understand what grief feels like. And so when
you play the show pen Sonata, the funeral movement of
the show pen Sonata, that moren't have as much meeting
(17:08):
for you than if you had just lost your grandma,
let's say, and you felt incredibly grief stricken. It will
you'll bring a new level of interpretation to that. So
for me, perfection seems like a waste of time, and
so I try not to use that word with my students.
I'll say, you're you're playing this to the best of
your ability at this time of your life, and in
(17:30):
ten years, when you're even more advanced, you'll play it
even better. So it comes back to the original part
of our conversation, which I think is a nice way
to maybe even conclude this conversation, which is that you
have to accept who you are at that moment of
your life. So if let's say you're unlucky as I was,
(17:52):
to have this horrible accident which I didn't ask for, well,
that's who I was at that time of my life,
at the age of thirty seven, and I found myself
in a foreign country, living alone, without the ability to play,
and my marriage in pieces. So you have to accept that.
(18:13):
And I think, to be more positive, I think when
we perform as musicians were always learning and always evolving.
I don't play the same pieces with orchestra that maybe
I played when I was eighteen the same way anymore.
I just recently got to play the chopin concerto with
an orchestra, and I never felt good about that last movement.
(18:34):
I struggled with it so much, and suddenly I figured
out how to play it, and I thought, Wow, this
is this is great, this is progress. This is incredibly
delightful for me that I now know how to play
this section that gave me headaches and nightmares for years.
So that means that I'm still learning and I'm still growing.
(18:56):
I'm not dead yet, you know, And for me, that
is as close to the ideal as I can get.
We'll be back with Marty Fish after this. I'm justin
sua and this is losing control. Marty Fish was one
of the best American tennis pros of the two thousand's
(19:19):
and in the early two thousand tens he became the
American number one and was counted among the top tennis
players in the world. Today, he's still very much involved
in tennis and it's currently Davis Cup captain for Team USA,
which if you've never heard of it is basically the
World Cup of Tennis. But there's another side to Marty
(19:40):
story when you may be familiar with. If you saw
the Netflix documentary on Marty called Untold Breaking Points, it's
a documentary about Marty's battle with anxiety, and that's what
we're talking about. On losing control today. To get started,
I asked Marty about the yips? Are they yips of
(20:00):
familiar concept in tennis? Sure? Yeah, you can have the
yips on your on your serve. You can have you
can get it. It's prevalent, happens, uh, and it's happened
to some of the some of the best players in
the world. How would you, whether they described it to
you or from experiencing it yourself, what does it feel
like to have the yips on the serve? Not everybody
(20:23):
has had it. So I was lucky enough to where
a I never had I never got super tight or
nervous or or had the yips per se on any
of my shots. Where I struggled was before matches, like
the night before or the morning of. UM. I would
(20:44):
get really really nervous, like anxious to play, stressed out,
couldn't put food down, couldn't keep you know, or not
necessarily keep food down, but I couldn't, you know, just
didn't really feel like eating. Stomachs and not stomachs tight
whatever here, So every every athlete is different. I was
really really bad before before matches, but once the our
(21:08):
name was called and we sort of walked out to
the court. That was my comfort zone. Some listeners may
hear what you just said and think, wow, I cannot
imagine being under that amount of pressure. And in some ways,
elite athletes like yourself do live very different lives from
the rest of us. But pressure is pressure. Can you
(21:31):
talk about that. Each person's world is different and not
tougher or harder than anyone else's, but there you know,
their bubble is is their world, right, And like it
doesn't matter if you, you know, build houses for a living,
or play professional tennis, or or do podcasts for sports illustrated, right,
(21:52):
Like everyone has stresses and anxieties in their life that
they deal with, and when those become too much to handle,
something like what happened to me happens. To be clear,
what Marty Fish is about to describe is not the
same as what Gwendolen Mock talked about earlier, and that's
because there are different forms of anxiety and because people
(22:15):
use the word anxiety to refer to different experiences. As always,
if what you hear sounds familiar, it might be worth
talking it over with a professional. Marty Fish was playing
some of the best tennis of his career and dealing
with some of the worst anxiety of his life. For
(22:35):
those who aren't familiar with the story, what happened. So
what happened was I try to make it as sure
as I can, which is still going to be pretty
long as I had severe anxiety disorder. I had severe
anxiety in that part of that time in my life,
which was brought on by a heart issue that I
had called tachacardia. Tachacardia is a heart rate over a
(22:56):
hundred beats per minutes, and it's often totally harmless. However,
some tach of cardias are caused by or related to,
more serious conditions. I had that fixed with a procedure
called an ablazon. But when I was having these episodes,
my heart was beating at two beats, and so naturally
(23:17):
you can imagine it's pretty uncomfortable and you can't stop it.
You don't know when it stops. It can last fifteen
minutes and the last forty five minutes, and the first
couple of times that this was happening, I didn't know
what was going on, and so I I thought I
was dying right like, I thought, Okay, my heart's going
to explode, and which I didn't know that that couldn't happen.
(23:38):
Um so I so I realized after the fact that
that doesn't necessarily happen where you heart just explodes, but
I thought it was going to, And so off of
those sort of experiences, I developed anxiety from it that
was anxious about my body, how I felt, how I
feeled before and after matches, and things like that. I
didn't have a history of mental health. I didn't have
(23:58):
any issues with anyone around me having mental health issues.
Me and I personally never never had any, so I
didn't know really what was going on. This was May
of twelve, and Marty Fish was among the top ranked
players in the world after a successful procedure which fixed
his heart rhythm. He told USA Today quote, I want
(24:20):
to stress that I'm good now. I'm fine. They fixed
the problem. I'm still in the top ten in the
world and still the number one American. This is still
a very fun time for me, but the anxiety was
still there. Fast forward to the US Open that year,
which is, you know, a couple of months later, I'm
in pretty bad shape in terms of how many anxiety
(24:42):
attacks I'm having, and uh, you know, at that point,
just trying to sort of get through the US Open
and finish the summer series so I can get to
hire a doctor and find a good psychologist or psychiatrist
or whatever to to prescribe me some medication and things
like that. The US Open, Marty Fish was set to
(25:03):
face Roger Federer in a fourth round match, and it
all came to a head. In that fourth round against
Federer was really the uh, sort of the spot that
I had worked and sacrificed so hard to get to
write like I mean, I had played Roger in a
few different a few big matches, and played some of
those big boys in a few of those big matches,
but this one felt a little different because it was,
(25:24):
you know, a part of my career where I was
playing some of my best tennis. I just played him
the week prior in Cincinnati, and and and fair fairly well.
We had a really close match. I felt like I
had a good shot at him. But was I going
to be able to uh to compete at any level,
let alone high level to um you know, with this uh,
with this, with these anxiety attacks happening every thirty minutes
(25:46):
of every day. Despite everything he was going through, Marty
still intended to play that day. Luckily, as I drove
to the to the courts that day, not understanding how
I was going to play, but you know, obviously knowing
that I've got to play, I had my My wife
was in the car, and I'm so thankful that she
(26:07):
was there, obviously, but also someone that didn't grow up
in the lifestyle that I grew up in, meaning that
we've been trained or I've been trained at such an
early age too, you know, never show or or you know,
never show or or or talk about weakness or fear
or anything like that, and you know, just get through
(26:31):
it and and keep fighting and don't worry about it
kind of thing, and you'll, you know, you'll you'll be
fine and and don't tell anybody about it and and
you know, be uh, you know, be tough and and
just show no weakness, show no fear. Right. And she
didn't grow up like that, you know, she didn't grow
up in that in that type of world. So she
sort of leans over to me as I'm crying in
(26:52):
the car, and again I'm not an emotional person um
at all, and she says, she leans over and says,
you know, you don't have to play, and right, then
you know, kind of half a second later, I sort
of this weight just lifted off my shoulders where I'm
just like, wow, you're right, I don't have to play.
And it's ironic that it worked out like that, because
(27:17):
I never if she wasn't there, I never would have
thought that in my wildest dreams, because it just wasn't
ingrained in my mind to quit or two, um, not play.
I don't know if quits the right word, just not play,
just not have to go out there. I just never
would have thought of it, for better or worse, you know. Um.
And so I'm so thankful that she was there to
(27:38):
sort of say, look, you it's okay, you don't have
to play. And and so I didn't, and uh I
put my mental health first. Um. You know, this was
nine years ago, ten years ago almost so nine and
a half years ago, and mental health wasn't really on
the forefront of anyone's mind. And so, you know, pulling
(27:58):
out because had anxiety was unheard of. And so I
just pulled out because of an injury of some sort.
And uh, I didn't talk about it at all, and
and uh, you know, eventually got home days later because
I wasn't able to travel right away because I was
in such bad shape. So so that in a nutshell
is the short version of the story of me not
(28:22):
playing on that day in two thousand and twelve. Why
did you decide to go public and share your story?
I did because I wanted to be a success story
for others. I wanted myself, who went through this, uh
you know, a similar thing or went through the same thing, um,
to to show people that it can be. It can
(28:45):
get really bad, but you can beat it, and you
can it may be a part of your life forever,
but you can win every day, and you can beat
it every day. And um, you know, I'm a big
sports fan. I love sports. I watch all sports. I'm
a fan of all sports, and I'm a and I'm
a fan of the athletes of all of those sports.
I respect other athletes like crazy. And so I didn't
(29:08):
have one of those success stories that I could lean
on and go, Okay, here's someone who was you know,
it was good at their craft, h was taken away
from them, and then they got back into the arena,
into the fire, and we're able to compete at a
high level again. And I wanted to show people that
it was possible to do that. I wanted to give
(29:28):
people on you know, at least an athletic side, that
um that that was, that that was possible and and
I hope that I hope that I did. Three years later,
in Marty Fish was back in the US Open and
played the final match of his career in the second
round against Feliciano Lopez. And that's not all. Like I
(29:51):
mentioned earlier, in Marty Fish was named the US Davis
Cup Captain, and in addition to this role, he's come
to be an known as a major public advocate for
mental health. If there's one thing that's been helpful for
you in your battle with anxiety that listeners can take
away with them today, something that everyone who's listening to
(30:12):
this that they can incorporate into their lives, what would
you suggest? I would say, first and foremost, understand and
know that you will beat it. You will. If you're
feeling bad today or bad listening to this, I promise
you that you will come out on the other end
and be okay. You will get your life back. You will,
(30:35):
you know, be able to go hang out with your
friends again and have a beer and hang out and
play golf and do all that you know. For me,
that was what it was. It was like, I just
can't wait to get my life back. I can't wait
till this is behind me. Um. It may take longer
than you want it to or that you think it will,
but I promise you that you will if you work
towards it, if you if you develop the tools necessary
(30:57):
to to learn how to change the raative on your thoughts,
change the mind. I call it changing the channel on
negative thoughts. If you're just UM, if you learn how
to do that through UH, meditation, through therapy, through UM
through a doctor's help. UM, if I learned it, Hell,
anyone can. I'm not I'm no Rhodes scholar. So I uh,
(31:18):
I didn't even finish my junior year of high school.
So it's just playing, playing playing sports and playing tennis.
So if I can do it, anyone can do it.
And I promise that first and foremost that if you're
not feeling well, that if you develop a good support system,
if you're vulnerable and open and honest with your loved ones,
if you find a great doctor or someone that can
(31:40):
help prescribe medication or or help with therapy and meditation
and things like that that's really important. And then and
then if you if you just trust and know that
you can and will come out the other end a
better person and you know, less judgment on others and
and learning having a whole new perspect dive on what
(32:01):
mental health is. Um. I promise you'll get there. Um
and uh, And I think that's maybe you know some
of the most important things right. You're in the moment
and you're in it, and you're just like, well, I
don't know if I can ever get out of this,
and I promise you that you will. On the next
episode of Losing Control, we're looking squarely at the feeling
(32:21):
that all athletes and elite performers must sustain in order
to succeed confidence. Next time on Losing Control, a sincere
thank you to our guests Marty fish Are retired tennis
pro and current U S. Davis Cup Captain, and Gwendolen Mak,
a concert pianist who has appeared with orchestras and ensembles
(32:44):
all over the world. Thank you so much for listening,
and don't forget to rate and subscribe. I'm justin Suah,
your host, and you can find me on Instagram and Twitter.
At Justin Suah, that's j U s T I N
S you A. You can also check me out on
the Increase Your Impact podcast. Losing Control is a podcast
(33:06):
from Sports Illustrated Studios and I Heart Radio. Original music
by Jerem Sua. Michael McDowell is our producer, editing and
mixing by Will Stanton. This episode was fact checked by
Zoey Mullock at s I Studios. Max Miller is supervising producer,
and Brandon Getchus and Matt Lipson our executive producers at
(33:26):
I Heart Radio. Sean ty Toone as our executive producer.
Special things to Emily Gaddick. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast does not
provide medical advice, and nothing you here on this podcast
is intended or implied to be a substitute for professional
(33:48):
medical consultation, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of
your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions
you may have regard in your health. Never dis regard
professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of
something you have heard on this podcast. H
Losing Control is a podcast from Sports Illustrated Studios and
I Heart Radio. When I work with my students or
I talk about performing anxiety, so much of it has
to do with how flexible and willing you are to
adjust to accommodate the situation, because it's not going to
take away from your preparation or your ability, but if
(00:22):
you allow it to, it will. It will destroy whatever
it is that you've prepared and that you want to
bring to the table. I'm justin Sua and this is
Losing Control, a podcast about one of the strangest phenomena
in sports, the yips, or when an athlete or elite
performer suddenly finds themselves unable to do the thing that
they do better than almost everyone else on the planet.
(00:45):
If you're listening for the first time, welcome, but if
you want the full experience, head back to episode one.
Losing Control is a podcast told through conversations with athletes, coaches, neuroscientists,
and more, and it's in order. Each episode features a
first hand perspective that contributes a piece to the puzzle
that is the hips. Along the way, you'll learn about
(01:06):
some of the challenges that high performers face and the
mental work that enables them to do what they do.
Not only that, you'll hear how you can incorporate these tools, strategies,
and mindsets into your own life, because it's not just
about losing control, it's about getting it back. So let's
get started today. On losing control, we're talking about something
(01:28):
a little different, performance anxiety or stage frights, from mild
butterflies in the stomach to much more debilitating physiological symptoms.
It's not unlikely that performance anxiety affects some of your
favorite athletes and elite performers. In fact, you might experience
it yourself. Previously on Losing Control, we looked at dystonia
(01:51):
and how it impacts athletes of the small muscles musicians,
and in the first half of today's episode, you'll meet
one of these athletes, Gwendolen Maa, a concert pianist who
has performed on many of the world's great stages, from
Carnegie Hall to Barbican and who, after an injury, overcame
severe performance anxiety. Later on, i'll sit down with Marty Fish,
(02:14):
a tennis pro who was once ranked first in the
United States and seventh in the world, and who has
faced and beaten many of the game's greats, from Andrea
Agassi to Rafael and the Doll and even Roger Federer.
But the most formidable adversary Marty faced on the court
wasn't a daunting opponent. It was something very different, severe anxiety.
(02:37):
I want to be very clear, performance anxiety and the
yips are not the same thing. And if you've been
listening to Losing Control, you've heard athletes talk about how
when they yip, they don't feel nervous or anxious, or
at least not at first. On the other hand, it
can be hard to know where the yips end and
anxiety begins. But what I can and say is that
(03:01):
feeling like you're not going to be able to do
something before a game or performance is far more common
than actually being unable to do it. And that's especially
true when you're a soloist or playing singles and it's
just you alone in front of an audience full of
people who expect to see you do what you do
(03:22):
at the best of your ability. Here's Gwendolen Mock. Hi.
My name is Gwendolen Mack. I'm a concert pianist, a
professor of music at San Jose State university and it's
my pleasure to meet you. And where was your first
major performance? Can you tell us about that experience. Well,
I went to the Juilliard School of Music at the
(03:44):
age of six, so when you're six years old, your
first performance is your first major performance. And I do
remember feeling very nervous before I walked on, thinking, oh,
do I look okay? Are my shoes shiny enough? It's
like all the little things that a young child would
be thinking about. But as soon as I stepped on
(04:06):
stage and started playing, it was not a problem because
for me, I loved playing the piano. It was like
it was kind of a joyful and like a little game.
For me, it was something that I could do, and
I knew I did it well. I wasn't particularly advanced,
but I enjoyed it so much that once my hands
(04:27):
touched the keyboard, I was totally in my zone as
a six year old. Interestingly enough, as I got older,
I became more self conscious and that sense of joy
and freedom of interpretation and performance was slightly more challenging.
Gwendolyn's performance anxiety began in the middle of her career
(04:51):
after an accident. I had a really serious injury later
in life in my thirties, and right around that time,
I was a atty starting to play with London Symphony Orchestra,
the Philarmonia. I was doing things in New York at
Carnegie Hall. I was recording with various ensembles for major
(05:14):
record labels. I mean, I was really in my element
and I had this really freaky accident. And it was
after that accident where I lost the use of my
fourth and fifth finger on my left hand and my
left leg. They were damaged because it was a spinal
cord injury. When I started coming back into the performing world,
(05:34):
I had terrible, really terrible performance anxiety. So I can
actually mark the time when performance anxiety became a real
problem for me. But that was not until my thirties.
Before she was able to work on her performance anxiety.
Gwendolyn had to face the reality of her injury. It
took me quite a long time to accept the injury.
(05:55):
When you have an accident and it renders you that disabled,
even if it's temporarily, you go through these various stages
of grief and anger and resentment that had happened now
in my case, when the accident happened and it was
very sudden that I couldn't play. I had to go
to counseling because it was my identity that was sort
(06:18):
of taken away from me, and I had to learn
at the beginning how to accept that I had the
accident and that I would never be the same after
the accident as before. So there's always this desire to
go back to the same. In other words, even when
you're performing and there's performance anxiety, some of that is
(06:40):
that you know you could do it in your house,
or you can do it in the practice room, so
when you go on stage, you want to replicate that.
And now I couldn't do it because I couldn't count
on my hand and I couldn't count on even walking
from the stage door to the piano without assistance or
without the use of a cane. And I didn't want
to do that. So at first I went through a
(07:03):
lot of really bad emotional challenges having to do with
grief and rage. And actually, after I started to realize, well,
this is who I am, This will forever be a
part of who I am, and I accepted it, I
then started to move forward in taking the steps that
(07:23):
I needed to actually manage this injury and to try
to recover into a new place where I could function
as a performing artist. I guess in a way, I
took it for granted that my hands would always do
what I wanted them to do, or I could always walk,
like say, to the piano, or walk to the grocery store.
(07:44):
One of the steps that I had to take was
to also ask myself who I am? You know, Am
I actually a pianist musician? Is that all that I am?
Or do I have other things that I can bring
to the table through my passion and love of this
medium that might satisfy me. Fortunately, she was able to
(08:05):
play the piano again, and more than that, to perform again,
but not in the same way she had before the injury.
And when she began performing again, she could no longer
count on her body to do what it once could,
and that's where the anxiety crept in. How did she
manage that? When I started to perform again, I had
(08:27):
to deal with certain things. And I don't know if
you wanted me to talk about the frying pan. Gwendolen's
frying pan method is legendary. One of the things that
I realized that I had to do was to get
kind of this frenzied, chaotic anxiety out of my system
before I walked out on stage. So I was living
(08:50):
in London at the time, and so I went to
like their Woolworth's or their Target, whatever you want to
call it, and I picked up a fairly inexpensive frying
pan and uh, I basically smashed it on the floor
a lot right before I go out to play the concert.
And it started out like in the house because I
(09:11):
didn't want people to call the police and have them
come and arrest me, like there's a lunatic on the
sidewalk with a frying pan. But I found a place
where I could smash it up and it was all dented.
It was hysterical because it had a sturdy handle and
it was one of those tough one frying pans, and um,
I would just bang it on the floor for like
(09:34):
maybe ten minutes and just get it out of my system.
The beauty of it was was I could smash it
with the right hand or the left hand or both.
You know, it can be physical, it can be emotional,
or it can be mental. Finding a safe and healthy
outlet to deal with this surplus of energy that you
might have before a performance. A competition or presentation can
(09:57):
help you get into the headspace that you need to
be in in order to perform at the best of
your ability. One of the most important strategies for dealing
with performance anxiety is preparation. The thing about managing performance anxiety,
which is what I think this whole conversation is really
centered on. So much of it has to do with
(10:20):
the preparation. How do you prepare to deliver something? And
for me, the preparation part of it takes so many
different components. For me, it's about making the music more
important than me, making it more important than my ego.
So therefore I have to learn something about the composer.
(10:40):
What was happening to this composer at the time of
conception of the piece? What was the maybe the historical
things going on. Was there a revolution, was their famine
or was there something joyous? They had just gotten married
and they wrote this piece for their spouse. Do I
have all of the right techno cool things that I've
(11:01):
had to master before I go in? Oh, this is
an important thing too. Passages in the music which are
very complex. Have I tried to play those passages with
different fingerings, so instead of just sticking to one set
of fingerings, have I actually tried to master those passages.
Let's say they're like ten measures in one movement, which
(11:24):
are really really gnarly. Have I tried to figure out
a way to navigate through that gnarliness through maybe four
or five different patterns of fingering so that let's say,
goodness me, you're scared, you go out, you play, you
get to that ten measure and you happen not to
put the right finger on the right note. Can you
still improvise your way out of it with a different
(11:45):
set of fingerings? Have I studied this score? Do I
know the structure of the music? Do I know if
I'm playing with orchestra the orchestra part really well? Have
I taken my shower and washed my hair the night before,
because if I shower and way my hair on the
day of the concert, my muscles will get all soft
and my hands will get rubbery. Have I eaten the
(12:06):
right meal that nourishes me hours before I play? I mean,
there's just so many components that go into the preparation
of performing, and the performance itself may last forty minutes.
With the orchestra may last ninety minutes as a soloist,
(12:26):
or it could be five minutes if you are just
asked to go out and play an a tute or something.
So you know, there's so much mental, physical, interpretive mastery
that has to go on in the preparation process so
that you can manage all these unexpected incidences. When your
(12:48):
big moment arrives, you may start to feel uncertain, to
doubt yourself, and to wonder whether you're ready to do
what you're about to do or not. But if you
know that you've done everything you can to prepare for
this moment, you'll be able to dismiss that uncertainty, to
feel confident that you are ready, and to believe in
(13:10):
yourself because you know that you're prepared. Elite athletes will
extensively prepare before they compete, and even though they've crossed
every tea and dotted every eye, some will still question themselves,
and as a jick or just in case, they'll even
say the things they didn't do in order to help
(13:31):
themselves relax. And that's partly because they need to be
mentally ready to adapt. They couldn't have possibly prepared for everything,
and they remind themselves that even if they haven't prepared
for it, they trust their ability to adapt and embrace
whatever comes their way. One of the things I think
(13:52):
that is so essential to managing performance anxiety is the
word flexibility. I think if one can adjust two different
circumstances or scenarios or not the ideal piano or performing environment,
if you can somehow find a way to flex with that,
(14:17):
you will navigate performance anxiety so much better than if
you're rigid. Like I had a student who was having
a lesson with me, and she said, I'm really sorry,
I'm not in the right headspace for this lesson. You know,
it's been chaos in my house and family, this and that,
blah blah blah. I mean, she went on and on
about it, and I finally said, look, if I could
tell you how many times I was about to play
(14:38):
a concert and before I walked out on stage, or
even the day before, something tragic happened or something terrible happened,
or I had a chaotic situation, you know, the show
must go on, and you just have to flex with
that situation. I think when you get anxious, it's it's
when you're rigid and you have to have everything perfect.
(14:58):
You have to have the perfect shoes, you have to
have the perfect temperature, you have to have the perfect dress,
the perfect environment, the perfect cab ride to Carnegie Hall,
or these things they don't happen. So what are you
gonna do? Are you going to let that get to you?
Are you going to flex with it? So when I
work with my students or I talk about performing anxiety,
(15:21):
so much of it has to do with how flexible
and willing you are to adjust to accommodate the situation,
because it's not going to take away from your preparation
or your ability, but if you allow it to it
will it will destroy whatever it is that you've prepared
and that you want to bring to the table. So
(15:42):
to me, that is a big part of my story
is that here I am injured, marriage ended, living in
a foreign country, couldn't really walk much or play at all.
So I had to flex with that. I had to say, Okay,
this is the circumstance. I'm going to allow my self
a pity party for a period of time, but then
(16:03):
I'm going to have to get up and really figure
this out, not necessarily reinvent myself, but figure out what
am I going to do so that I can continue
to inspire and share the love and the joy of
what I do. What's your perspective on perfection. I have
(16:24):
a lot of students who are like eighteen or who
are twenty two, and I always say this to them.
I say, when you're forty two or you're fifty eight,
you're going to be playing this piece a lot differently
than when you're eighteen and twenty two. And the worst
thing that you can do is to try to strive
to play it the same way when you're forty eight
(16:45):
or fifty eight as you did when you're eighteen or
twenty two. Because so much of what we bring to
our interpretive skill is life experiences. So if you've never
lost somebody who was really dear to you, you will
not really understand what grief feels like. And so when
you play the show pen Sonata, the funeral movement of
the show pen Sonata, that moren't have as much meeting
(17:08):
for you than if you had just lost your grandma,
let's say, and you felt incredibly grief stricken. It will
you'll bring a new level of interpretation to that. So
for me, perfection seems like a waste of time, and
so I try not to use that word with my students.
I'll say, you're you're playing this to the best of
your ability at this time of your life, and in
(17:30):
ten years, when you're even more advanced, you'll play it
even better. So it comes back to the original part
of our conversation, which I think is a nice way
to maybe even conclude this conversation, which is that you
have to accept who you are at that moment of
your life. So if let's say you're unlucky as I was,
(17:52):
to have this horrible accident which I didn't ask for, well,
that's who I was at that time of my life,
at the age of thirty seven, and I found myself
in a foreign country, living alone, without the ability to play,
and my marriage in pieces. So you have to accept that.
(18:13):
And I think, to be more positive, I think when
we perform as musicians were always learning and always evolving.
I don't play the same pieces with orchestra that maybe
I played when I was eighteen the same way anymore.
I just recently got to play the chopin concerto with
an orchestra, and I never felt good about that last movement.
(18:34):
I struggled with it so much, and suddenly I figured
out how to play it, and I thought, Wow, this
is this is great, this is progress. This is incredibly
delightful for me that I now know how to play
this section that gave me headaches and nightmares for years.
So that means that I'm still learning and I'm still growing.
(18:56):
I'm not dead yet, you know, And for me, that
is as close to the ideal as I can get.
We'll be back with Marty Fish after this. I'm justin
sua and this is losing control. Marty Fish was one
of the best American tennis pros of the two thousand's
(19:19):
and in the early two thousand tens he became the
American number one and was counted among the top tennis
players in the world. Today, he's still very much involved
in tennis and it's currently Davis Cup captain for Team USA,
which if you've never heard of it is basically the
World Cup of Tennis. But there's another side to Marty
(19:40):
story when you may be familiar with. If you saw
the Netflix documentary on Marty called Untold Breaking Points, it's
a documentary about Marty's battle with anxiety, and that's what
we're talking about. On losing control today. To get started,
I asked Marty about the yips? Are they yips of
(20:00):
familiar concept in tennis? Sure? Yeah, you can have the
yips on your on your serve. You can have you
can get it. It's prevalent, happens, uh, and it's happened
to some of the some of the best players in
the world. How would you, whether they described it to
you or from experiencing it yourself, what does it feel
like to have the yips on the serve? Not everybody
(20:23):
has had it. So I was lucky enough to where
a I never had I never got super tight or
nervous or or had the yips per se on any
of my shots. Where I struggled was before matches, like
the night before or the morning of. UM. I would
(20:44):
get really really nervous, like anxious to play, stressed out,
couldn't put food down, couldn't keep you know, or not
necessarily keep food down, but I couldn't, you know, just
didn't really feel like eating. Stomachs and not stomachs tight
whatever here, So every every athlete is different. I was
really really bad before before matches, but once the our
(21:08):
name was called and we sort of walked out to
the court. That was my comfort zone. Some listeners may
hear what you just said and think, wow, I cannot
imagine being under that amount of pressure. And in some ways,
elite athletes like yourself do live very different lives from
the rest of us. But pressure is pressure. Can you
(21:31):
talk about that. Each person's world is different and not
tougher or harder than anyone else's, but there you know,
their bubble is is their world, right, And like it
doesn't matter if you, you know, build houses for a living,
or play professional tennis, or or do podcasts for sports illustrated, right,
(21:52):
Like everyone has stresses and anxieties in their life that
they deal with, and when those become too much to handle,
something like what happened to me happens. To be clear,
what Marty Fish is about to describe is not the
same as what Gwendolen Mock talked about earlier, and that's
because there are different forms of anxiety and because people
(22:15):
use the word anxiety to refer to different experiences. As always,
if what you hear sounds familiar, it might be worth
talking it over with a professional. Marty Fish was playing
some of the best tennis of his career and dealing
with some of the worst anxiety of his life. For
(22:35):
those who aren't familiar with the story, what happened. So
what happened was I try to make it as sure
as I can, which is still going to be pretty
long as I had severe anxiety disorder. I had severe
anxiety in that part of that time in my life,
which was brought on by a heart issue that I
had called tachacardia. Tachacardia is a heart rate over a
(22:56):
hundred beats per minutes, and it's often totally harmless. However,
some tach of cardias are caused by or related to,
more serious conditions. I had that fixed with a procedure
called an ablazon. But when I was having these episodes,
my heart was beating at two beats, and so naturally
(23:17):
you can imagine it's pretty uncomfortable and you can't stop it.
You don't know when it stops. It can last fifteen
minutes and the last forty five minutes, and the first
couple of times that this was happening, I didn't know
what was going on, and so I I thought I
was dying right like, I thought, Okay, my heart's going
to explode, and which I didn't know that that couldn't happen.
(23:38):
Um so I so I realized after the fact that
that doesn't necessarily happen where you heart just explodes, but
I thought it was going to, And so off of
those sort of experiences, I developed anxiety from it that
was anxious about my body, how I felt, how I
feeled before and after matches, and things like that. I
didn't have a history of mental health. I didn't have
(23:58):
any issues with anyone around me having mental health issues.
Me and I personally never never had any, so I
didn't know really what was going on. This was May
of twelve, and Marty Fish was among the top ranked
players in the world after a successful procedure which fixed
his heart rhythm. He told USA Today quote, I want
(24:20):
to stress that I'm good now. I'm fine. They fixed
the problem. I'm still in the top ten in the
world and still the number one American. This is still
a very fun time for me, but the anxiety was
still there. Fast forward to the US Open that year,
which is, you know, a couple of months later, I'm
in pretty bad shape in terms of how many anxiety
(24:42):
attacks I'm having, and uh, you know, at that point,
just trying to sort of get through the US Open
and finish the summer series so I can get to
hire a doctor and find a good psychologist or psychiatrist
or whatever to to prescribe me some medication and things
like that. The US Open, Marty Fish was set to
(25:03):
face Roger Federer in a fourth round match, and it
all came to a head. In that fourth round against
Federer was really the uh, sort of the spot that
I had worked and sacrificed so hard to get to
write like I mean, I had played Roger in a
few different a few big matches, and played some of
those big boys in a few of those big matches,
but this one felt a little different because it was,
(25:24):
you know, a part of my career where I was
playing some of my best tennis. I just played him
the week prior in Cincinnati, and and and fair fairly well.
We had a really close match. I felt like I
had a good shot at him. But was I going
to be able to uh to compete at any level,
let alone high level to um you know, with this uh,
with this, with these anxiety attacks happening every thirty minutes
(25:46):
of every day. Despite everything he was going through, Marty
still intended to play that day. Luckily, as I drove
to the to the courts that day, not understanding how
I was going to play, but you know, obviously knowing
that I've got to play, I had my My wife
was in the car, and I'm so thankful that she
(26:07):
was there, obviously, but also someone that didn't grow up
in the lifestyle that I grew up in, meaning that
we've been trained or I've been trained at such an
early age too, you know, never show or or you know,
never show or or or talk about weakness or fear
or anything like that, and you know, just get through
(26:31):
it and and keep fighting and don't worry about it
kind of thing, and you'll, you know, you'll you'll be
fine and and don't tell anybody about it and and
you know, be uh, you know, be tough and and
just show no weakness, show no fear. Right. And she
didn't grow up like that, you know, she didn't grow
up in that in that type of world. So she
sort of leans over to me as I'm crying in
(26:52):
the car, and again I'm not an emotional person um
at all, and she says, she leans over and says,
you know, you don't have to play, and right, then
you know, kind of half a second later, I sort
of this weight just lifted off my shoulders where I'm
just like, wow, you're right, I don't have to play.
And it's ironic that it worked out like that, because
(27:17):
I never if she wasn't there, I never would have
thought that in my wildest dreams, because it just wasn't
ingrained in my mind to quit or two, um, not play.
I don't know if quits the right word, just not play,
just not have to go out there. I just never
would have thought of it, for better or worse, you know. Um.
And so I'm so thankful that she was there to
(27:38):
sort of say, look, you it's okay, you don't have
to play. And and so I didn't, and uh I
put my mental health first. Um. You know, this was
nine years ago, ten years ago almost so nine and
a half years ago, and mental health wasn't really on
the forefront of anyone's mind. And so, you know, pulling
(27:58):
out because had anxiety was unheard of. And so I
just pulled out because of an injury of some sort.
And uh, I didn't talk about it at all, and
and uh, you know, eventually got home days later because
I wasn't able to travel right away because I was
in such bad shape. So so that in a nutshell
is the short version of the story of me not
(28:22):
playing on that day in two thousand and twelve. Why
did you decide to go public and share your story?
I did because I wanted to be a success story
for others. I wanted myself, who went through this, uh
you know, a similar thing or went through the same thing, um,
to to show people that it can be. It can
(28:45):
get really bad, but you can beat it, and you
can it may be a part of your life forever,
but you can win every day, and you can beat
it every day. And um, you know, I'm a big
sports fan. I love sports. I watch all sports. I'm
a fan of all sports, and I'm a and I'm
a fan of the athletes of all of those sports.
I respect other athletes like crazy. And so I didn't
(29:08):
have one of those success stories that I could lean
on and go, Okay, here's someone who was you know,
it was good at their craft, h was taken away
from them, and then they got back into the arena,
into the fire, and we're able to compete at a
high level again. And I wanted to show people that
it was possible to do that. I wanted to give
(29:28):
people on you know, at least an athletic side, that
um that that was, that that was possible and and
I hope that I hope that I did. Three years later,
in Marty Fish was back in the US Open and
played the final match of his career in the second
round against Feliciano Lopez. And that's not all. Like I
(29:51):
mentioned earlier, in Marty Fish was named the US Davis
Cup Captain, and in addition to this role, he's come
to be an known as a major public advocate for
mental health. If there's one thing that's been helpful for
you in your battle with anxiety that listeners can take
away with them today, something that everyone who's listening to
(30:12):
this that they can incorporate into their lives, what would
you suggest? I would say, first and foremost, understand and
know that you will beat it. You will. If you're
feeling bad today or bad listening to this, I promise
you that you will come out on the other end
and be okay. You will get your life back. You will,
(30:35):
you know, be able to go hang out with your
friends again and have a beer and hang out and
play golf and do all that you know. For me,
that was what it was. It was like, I just
can't wait to get my life back. I can't wait
till this is behind me. Um. It may take longer
than you want it to or that you think it will,
but I promise you that you will if you work
towards it, if you if you develop the tools necessary
(30:57):
to to learn how to change the raative on your thoughts,
change the mind. I call it changing the channel on
negative thoughts. If you're just UM, if you learn how
to do that through UH, meditation, through therapy, through UM
through a doctor's help. UM, if I learned it, Hell,
anyone can. I'm not I'm no Rhodes scholar. So I uh,
(31:18):
I didn't even finish my junior year of high school.
So it's just playing, playing playing sports and playing tennis.
So if I can do it, anyone can do it.
And I promise that first and foremost that if you're
not feeling well, that if you develop a good support system,
if you're vulnerable and open and honest with your loved ones,
if you find a great doctor or someone that can
(31:40):
help prescribe medication or or help with therapy and meditation
and things like that that's really important. And then and
then if you if you just trust and know that
you can and will come out the other end a
better person and you know, less judgment on others and
and learning having a whole new perspect dive on what
(32:01):
mental health is. Um. I promise you'll get there. Um
and uh, And I think that's maybe you know some
of the most important things right. You're in the moment
and you're in it, and you're just like, well, I
don't know if I can ever get out of this,
and I promise you that you will. On the next
episode of Losing Control, we're looking squarely at the feeling
(32:21):
that all athletes and elite performers must sustain in order
to succeed confidence. Next time on Losing Control, a sincere
thank you to our guests Marty fish Are retired tennis
pro and current U S. Davis Cup Captain, and Gwendolen Mak,
a concert pianist who has appeared with orchestras and ensembles
(32:44):
all over the world. Thank you so much for listening,
and don't forget to rate and subscribe. I'm justin Suah,
your host, and you can find me on Instagram and Twitter.
At Justin Suah, that's j U s T I N
S you A. You can also check me out on
the Increase Your Impact podcast. Losing Control is a podcast
(33:06):
from Sports Illustrated Studios and I Heart Radio. Original music
by Jerem Sua. Michael McDowell is our producer, editing and
mixing by Will Stanton. This episode was fact checked by
Zoey Mullock at s I Studios. Max Miller is supervising producer,
and Brandon Getchus and Matt Lipson our executive producers at
(33:26):
I Heart Radio. Sean ty Toone as our executive producer.
Special things to Emily Gaddick. For more podcasts from I
Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast does not
provide medical advice, and nothing you here on this podcast
is intended or implied to be a substitute for professional
(33:48):
medical consultation, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of
your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions
you may have regard in your health. Never dis regard
professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of
something you have heard on this podcast. H
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