September 17, 2025 • 50 mins
On this episode of Sports Doc Talk, host Will Sanchez and orthopedic surgeon Dr. Grant Garcia welcome elite performance coach Gary Chupik for a deep dive into the mental side of sports.
Gary shares his journey from pastoral leadership to becoming a sought-after performance coach for professional athletes, executives, and teams. He reveals how mindset, identity, and self-leadership shape recovery, resilience, and peak performance both on and off the field. From NIL distractions to the CAPE method, this episode is packed with insights for athletes, coaches, and leaders.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
• Why mindset is the “missing link” in recovery and performance
• The CAPE method (Control, Assess, Plan, Execute) for thriving under pressure
• How NIL deals and constant distractions impact today’s athletes
• The role of self-leadership and “perfecting the simple” in long-term success
• Real coaching stories that show how unlocking mindset transforms performance
Gary’s insights go beyond sports, they’re lessons in leadership, resilience, and living a high-performance life.
Sponsored by The Recovery Shop, your trusted source for athlete recovery tools and rehab innovation.
For more episodes, transcripts, and to connect with us, visit sportsdoctalk.com.
Chapters:
00:00 – Welcome & Recovery Shop Shoutout
04:30 – Gary’s Journey: From Pastor to Performance Coach
09:00 – Self-Leadership as the Foundation of Elite Mindset
14:40 – Managing Thoughts: Why Less Is More
18:00 – NIL, Distractions, and the Modern Athlete
22:00 – The CAPE Method: Control, Assess, Plan, Execute
27:00 – The Leadership Pyramid & Building Habits
33:00 – From Coping to Thriving: Mental Health vs. Mental Performance
39:00 – Unlocking Mindset: The Equation of Experience, Belief, and Behavior
46:00 – High-Performance Lifestyle & Game Plan for Life
47:30 – Gary’s Dream Dinner Guests & BBQ Philosophy
50:00 – Final Takeaways & Closing Thoughts
#SportsDocTalk #SportsMedicine #PerformanceCoaching #EliteMindset #AthleteRecovery #SportsPsychology #Orthopedics #InjuryRecovery #AthletePerformance #MindsetMatters #HighPerformance #SportsInnovation #RehabAndRecovery #MentalToughness #LeadershipInSports
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:16):
Welcome to Sports Doc Talk. Do not adjust your sets.
I am Will Sanchez, along with our orthopedic surgeon and
sports medicine specialist, Doctor Grant Garcia.
Doctor Garcia, this is a topic and a conversation that we have
wanted to have for quite some time, so I'm really excited
about our guest today. We've talked about the mental
(00:40):
mindset, that the mindset of theathletes, and we have the
perfect guest. To talk about the elite mindset
there. You go the elite.
Mindset it's and before we get into that, you had the elite
mindset just recently, you know,at your competing and swimming
and and I I, I have to bring it up because I know you don't like
to bring it up because people don't realize that you are AAD
(01:03):
one athlete. You love your swimming, you love
competing. So it's not just what you do,
you know, with your surgery and and everything else and but the
guidance with your patients. But you know, your dude that
gets out there and you want, youknow, you want some.
So how was that? Well, I would tell you that I
make a joke that people, I'm notvery competitive, but everybody
knows that there's a, it's like I'm a type AAA personality, I
(01:26):
call it. So a little bit competitive.
I try not to pawn it off too much on my children.
So I get to have, I keep it to myself, which is good.
So, but again, it was good. We did a swim for our club or
local club that I used to coach as a kid.
And now it's full circle becausemy kids swim there and then I
actually swam there as a kid. So it's pretty awesome.
So it's a full circle moment. And then I got to do something I
(01:49):
really enjoy, which is swimming in the lake.
But it was a little harder than I remember the last time.
So I got. To work on my old.
You know, it's, it's great that you didn't get hurt because you
know, we have some friends that would have taken care of you at
the recovery shop. Let's give a shout out to Mike B
Tell the audience about the Recovery Shop and all the things
that they do for us. Yeah, well, First off, I love
(02:11):
our new flashy yellow. This is awesome.
So anyhow, thank you again to Recovery Shop.
You know, they've been our sponsors for a long time.
I mean, just the other day I hada patient that got injured and
they're like, hey, I want the same thing that your other
player got. Like I want that nice machine.
I want to be, I want that accelerated recovery program
that he got and I'm like, no problem, I'm happy to do this.
It's, it's funny, I actually hada friend's family member in the
(02:32):
middle of the country just called me and they're like, hey,
my, your, my sister had surgery with you.
She did awesome. Can you just give me, you didn't
operate on me, but can I have your thing because I can't get a
hold of it. So he was able to go to the
recovery shop and use that. So this is something that's
really good for you to have at your fingertips as a surgeon.
It'll help with the physical aspect.
There is no mental recovery aspect of this area, which we're
(02:53):
going to go to the second part of that in a minute.
But the goal here is for surgeons to offer all the latest
things for our patients to get them back to what they need.
Before we jump in our next topic.
I think it's really important. We have brought up so many times
and behind the scenes, we have so many checklist items of
things we want to show to our toour listeners.
But the one biggest one has beenthe mental aspect of injury.
(03:15):
And we've talked about it. I get it all the time in my
office all the time. I was just talking about today,
I had it right, but we don't have anybody.
It's always hard to find an expert and then we happen to
cross paths with one of the elite sort of mental aspect for
athletes in all levels. And so I'd really like to
introduce Gary Chovic for his and I'm really looking forward
(03:38):
to hearing more about this from the elite mindset.
So thank you so much for coming on.
Yeah, thanks for having me, fellas.
We're all Seattle guys, huh? Yeah, it's nice, but sometimes,
a lot of times we have East Coast guests and and it's tough.
We have a six 7:00, you know, show based on our schedule and
things that we're busy. You know, we, we've got people
(03:59):
coming on nine, 10:00 at night and sometimes.
They're tired. And Doctor Garcia just rambles
on and on and on. So we go really late, you know,
so we always thank them. So it's nice to have someone on
the West Coast that we know thatwe're hopefully not being too
intrusive with your time. And once again, as Doctor Garcia
mentioned, you know, thank you so much for being on the show
(04:21):
and, and sharing your, your knowledge.
So, Doctor Garcia, why don't youkick us off and talk about, you
know, let's get on top of it here.
Well, again, we're this is we always jump around, but
obviously we have an expert here.
So will you go? Will you just initially, First
off, introduce yourself, tell usabout this elite mindset that
you've enveloped, you know, brief game plan and kind of how
(04:42):
you became a mental coach. It's such an important thing,
but it's actually kind of hard to find someone that's really
good at this. Yeah, it really is.
It's a really interesting field.So I grew up a pastor, believe
it or not, for 28 years, and I'moriginally from Saskatchewan,
Canada, so I just. I'm a Prairie boy at heart, but
I've. Been another Canadian, yeah this
is awesome. Yeah, and, and I got married to
(05:05):
a girl from Seattle, WA. And so love brought me South.
And I've been here 33 years now and it's, it's been a wild ride.
There's a lot of interesting dynamics between what it's like
to live in Canada and what it's like to live in America.
But, but I grew up a pastor. I've kind of been a reluctant
leader all of my life. And I, so I'm an ordained pastor
(05:25):
in heaven for 28 years. And then in, in 2017, I had a
burnout and I just hit a wall and I didn't know what to do.
And I think when you're in an industry for so long, the
language becomes so familiar, especially when you're on the
helping side of things. And I, I think I just needed a
different framework. And so I ended up studying
sports psych for about $1000 forthe next couple of years, just
(05:48):
trying to figure out how to get out out of this exhaustion phase
that was in, in my life. And, and then I had a, a friend
that I had met who knew Trevor Moad.
And Trevor Moad at the time was Russell Wilson's mental
performance coach. And I read his book, It Takes
What it Takes. And then this friend said to me,
would you like to meet Trevor one day?
And I said, well, of course I would like that.
(06:09):
Who wouldn't want to meet someone who was at the top of
their game? In fact, at that time he was on
ESPN, he was on NBC. He was like top of the food
chain in our industry. And and then to be mentored by a
guy like that, it was just a, a once in a lifetime opportunity.
And so one day he said to me, Gary, if you were to help a
professional athlete, tell me your process, well, how would
(06:30):
you help them? What, what process would you
take them through? And so he said, 30 days from
now, I want you to show that to me.
And so 30 days went by and I wasprepared and showed him the
process that I had come up with.And he hired me on the spot.
And so I worked with limitless minds for the next couple years
and then went out on my own the last five.
So it's been a wild ride to get here.
I just would have never thought that in my lifetime that I would
(06:52):
be doing what I was, what I'm doing.
But I can't imagine doing anything else right now.
And in fact, in many ways I livea dream life, partly because of
the clients that I get to work with, but also just my, my
challenge to other people to live life to the fullest and
make sure their head is in the right place, in the right spot.
And so I now I work with professional athletes, TV
(07:13):
celebrities and businesses all over the area in the country,
and in fact have started travelling internationally.
And so it's just been a lot of fun.
And yeah, I just, it's a wild ride and I, I just can't imagine
doing anything else. And then will you kind of go
into, I mean, I'm, I imagine there's probably different types
of ways you have to structure it.
Or do you have the same sort of similar structure for an
(07:35):
executive or, you know, like or a surgeon or an athlete or is it
kind of all different? Like how do you break that down?
Yeah. For me, it's about 80%
commonalities between whether it's sports and business or
different fields. I would say 80% of it's the
same. I would say 20% of it's
different and you got to learn the 20% because it's pretty
(07:55):
crucial. And so I often find myself
having to call up other mental performance coaches that are
experts in that particular sportand learn all that I can.
ChatGPT can be helpful, but one of the shortcomings of ChatGPT
is it doesn't understand sequence and, and how to teach
someone how to, you know, get get control of their thoughts
and their mindset. There's an actual sequence to
(08:17):
it. It's like baking a cake.
You can have all the right ingredients, but if you don't
know how to sequence it, you're not like not going to get the
intended result. And so teaching someone how to
sequence all the mental skills is actually really, really
crucial. You know, I, I love kind of
where you're going with this because a lot of us know what
we're supposed to do, but getting to do that or acting
(08:40):
upon it and, and taking those steps, that's a whole other area
that a lot of people struggle with, you know, So what are some
of those things or, or how do you communicate that to someone
that knows what's happening or knows what they need to do, but
you help them, you know, see it clear clearly and start them to,
to, to get on that right path. Yeah.
(09:02):
So sometimes you do a crisis intervention, right?
Like you're going to step in andand rescue some wonders or
something. And there is a time and a place
for that. And so they're in crisis and you
deal with that issue. But if you have a little bit of
time, that's when you can reallylay a really solid foundation.
So for me and, and the way that I think it in my world, for me,
(09:24):
motivation is not the Holy Grailof all performance.
I think it's helpful to have it.It's almost like an icing on top
of the cake, but it's really notthat necessary.
What really is I think the Holy Grail of all mental performance,
if you have the time to teach it, is self leadership.
And so the self efficacy of someone understanding their life
and getting to choose the thoughts that they think, like a
(09:46):
lot of people think that they don't have a choice to think
what they think. You know, they kind of feel
like, you know, it's kind of like a bird landing on your
head. You know, someone once said that
you can't stop a bird from landing on your head, but you
can certainly stop it from building a nest there.
And your thoughts are really quite similar.
You can have all types of crazy thoughts and thank goodness we
don't act on all of them, but wecan kind of police them and we
(10:07):
can kind of say or reject some thoughts and accept and receive
others that are more productive for us.
Is that kind of the thought in the sense that like, oh, I'm in
my own head, but I, you know, I can't fix that.
Like that's just me. I'm kind of like a, you know, I
would say there's certain different surgeon mentalities.
Like, you know, hey, like I'm just anxious for this case
because it's a tough case, right?
Like that's just, I'm just nevergoing to get over that.
(10:28):
That's just the way it is. And, and what you're saying is
that's a wrong, that mindset already is the wrong thing,
right? That's I'm making that up in my
head. Yeah, it's really strange.
Like I I, you know, one of the things that I've been teaching
recently in my business is that it's made a lot of sense to me
is having your thoughts be outside of yourself.
Because when you're so introspective and we just live
in this dage of analytics now, like, I mean, there's wearable
(10:51):
tech, people are looking for data, I mean, and it's just the
information's everywhere. And So what happens is that we
just intend to internalize everything and we overthink
everything and then it paralyzesus and it causes us to hesitate.
And hesitation, whether it's in sports or business or in the
medical field can be quite costly if you're not confident
enough to, to remove the hesitation.
(11:13):
So the issue really is in, in myview, is limiting the amount of
thoughts that you have so that you can be successful at the
things that are the most important.
For example, I think thoughts are like calories.
If you have too many calories that you don't expend, what
happens to you? You get slow and lethargic.
In the same way, thoughts are like that.
When you have an abundance of thoughts that you can't expend,
(11:35):
then you just kind of eventuallycarry them and they get really
weighty. And so you have to figure out
what thoughts are producing something good in you and what
thoughts are not so helpful. Is this kind of like the idea of
over extension? You know, it's the the idea that
like, hey, listen, you know, a lot of us are going different
directions and these athletes are getting, you know,
sponsorships and then they're getting told performance and if
(11:57):
they get hurt, they're told recovery.
And like it's kind of is that the idea of like you just have
too many things coming at once. You need to focus on the high
efficiency directions or what isthat?
Just to clarify. Well, both.
So internally you can have too many thoughts that you have to
be able to narrow down. I mean, Steve Jobs would talk
about signal, the signal and anddistortion ratio, right?
(12:20):
Would like or signal to noise ratio.
So you have to like focus on thethings that are the most
important in that moment. And then outside of yourself,
yeah. I mean, athletes are more
distracted than ever with socialmedia and with the opportunities
that are coming their way. And then and now with NIL, it's
like just focus on the game. But you know, young athletes
(12:40):
can't even barely do that anymore because they're looking
for sponsorship deals and they're looking for
opportunities to get paid. And so there's is so much
distraction in our world today for athletes.
And I'm not sure it's that much different for the rest of us in
different vocations where the the distractions are so immense
and your ability to learn and know things are just immense.
(13:02):
But there's a difference betweenknowing something and
experiencing something. So we might be book smart with
something, but in terms of like actually getting to know
something intimately, it's just very different.
And there's no way to really know things until you experience
them. But if we're spending so much
time in the knowledge arena and inside of our own heads, or
(13:24):
we're, you know, studying something on our phones or using
ChatGPT, that's not really knowledge per SE.
It's information, but it's not really, you know, intimate
knowledge of something. Do you have an?
Exercise you use. Oh, sorry, Will.
No, no good. Finish that and I'll jump in.
Go ahead. Do you have an exercise like
what would you do for for that player, right?
So like, let's say you're kind of saying, hey, you have to
(13:45):
experience, right? But if your experience is like
you have to experience winning the game, right?
They're not going to win the game to experience.
Like the whole point of what you're doing is hoping that they
can win the game because they'reclear and their minds clear.
Like how would you get them to get that experience or knowledge
rather than just seeing it on chat, CPT or the Internet or
talking about it? Yeah, I mean, there's no way to
(14:08):
help a player by teaching them and adding on to what they
already know without removing something.
So there's got to think of it like a cup, Like you can only
pour so much into a cup where you have to say, OK, listen,
what do you, what thoughts do you need to let go of?
Like what do you need to subtract from your life?
I remember being a leader in a non profit in the church for
(14:29):
many, many years. I let on a local, national,
regional and national level. And my wife would always say to
me, like, Gary, you know, for everything that you take on, you
have to let go of two things. I'm like, there's no way I can
do that. Like this is such a great
opportunity. And but she would just sort of
ground me and say, no, no, no. Now you've got to let go of two
things because it has to be thatimportant.
(14:50):
I think in the same way, thoughts just have to be poured
out of your head. There has to be some type of
subtraction so that you can perform at a high level.
And in fact, I call it intentional naivety.
You have to like choose to be naive about something or not
know something so that you can become really excellent at what
you do. So in some ways I like to teach
you is perfecting this simple. So it just perfect the simple
(15:13):
things, perfect your thought process so it becomes so
instinctual that you don't really have to think about it.
But there's no way to do that without getting in the mental
reps and the physical reps so that you can you can perform at
a high level. I want to go back to the NIL
and, and it's clear now that your wife is the original elite
mindset master behind all this because she has set the
(15:35):
guidelines, giving you the toolsfor you to share with the rest
of us. So we want to thank her in
advance for everything that she has done to get you where you
need to be going back to the NIL.
Obviously, this is all brand new, right?
And we're seeing kids. It's remarkable.
I think I saw recently this weekthat another athlete is changing
(15:58):
school. This is the sixth time in their
college career that they have moved on.
What is some of the some of the conversations you're having or
maybe some of the advice becauseyou said something really
important there with having too much information.
And maybe they're getting that from parents, coach, agent,
where they're not really enjoying or fulfilling their
(16:22):
obligation to themselves to having a sustainable college
career. And they're, they're looking for
the next thing and they're moving around What what have
what, what are some of the concerns when you have athletes
that are going through somethinglike that?
Well, it's interesting how important environment is and in
order to be successful we have to be in an environment long
(16:43):
enough. But we live in this day and age
now where, where you're right, you know, players are moving
back and forth and now what they're doing is signing one and
two year contracts because within college, because they
want to, they want the freedom of after a year or two to be
able to go somewhere else. And the, and the colleges with
the really good players are asking them to commit to longer
contracts. And so we're just in territory
(17:05):
that we've never been in before.And it's incredibly confusing
and, and everyone's just trying to keep up with the changes.
But in order to be successful atsomething, you really do need a
level of consistency and, and, and repetition and rhythm.
Like a lot of people don't like to talk about discipline and
habits and that kind of thing. But even in terms of like being
in one place for a given amount of time can be so valuable.
(17:28):
In other words, you can take an athlete that's really good in
one environment, change the environment and he's not very
good or she. And in the same way, you can
take an athlete that's really struggling in one environment or
on one team and change the team and all of a sudden they start
to thrive because of the system or because the players that are
around them or because of the culture.
But you don't ever really get a chance to grow roots in the
(17:51):
system or process or environmentif you're not there long enough.
So it's a crazy world. Like I don't even know, like,
like I have a couple of baseballplayers I'm working with right
now. And this is his third team in
three years and and he just doesn't feel like he's getting
the plane time he wants. And he was a stud in high school
and a slut in his first year. And so when you're a stud in
(18:14):
your first year, you want to go to a bigger and better school,
but you might be sitting on the bench at that school.
It wasn't what you were expecting.
Whereas if he would have stayed with the program that he was in,
he could have very well. You know, he knew the system, he
knew the process, he knew the coaches, but that
disgruntledness is always their thinking that the grass is
graded on the other side of the fence, and often times it's not.
(18:37):
Is this something now that you're, do you feel like this is
something that's trickling down on a professional level?
Like obviously the pros are making still more money, but
there's a lot of money in NIL. Do you feel from your experience
working with some of the professional athletes, like is
this something that's already been there and kind of like for
you, is this harder now to deal with the NIL players because of
your, or is it you're like, OK, now I already have this, I have
(18:58):
these in older players, right? The ones in the professional
level and I kind of have the framework.
Or is it a different framework you're dealing with?
Because obviously they're they're younger and they still
have parental advising, advisingand things like that.
So it's a little bit more challenging and the school
things different than the teams.Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a
lot of it's the same. There are differences, but a lot
of it's the same. In other words, like I'll never
(19:19):
forget, I was in Buffalo watching the Bills play the
Dolphins, and I'm sitting with aplayer agent and the player
agent is watching his defensive end play.
And Buffalo would score a touchdown.
Well, probably the other team, No Buffalo would, would get a
sack, but it wasn't his player. And it let's say he's rotating
(19:40):
in and out. So let's say every, let's say
every drive, they rotate. Well, the, the guy that was
rotating in, the other guy that was rotating in that was not
this agent's player. When he got a sack, he would be
so angry and frustrated because it would make his player look
bad. And so it was just like a world
that was like so foreign to me that I it was hard to even
(20:03):
comprehend. And so this is the day and age
that we live in where those agents, when they get to the
players. At a really young age, they can
take advantage of them. They can at least that pro
player sort of has been around alittle bit and they kind of know
in addition to a player agent, they also have a player manager.
And those managers are going to become more and more popular at
(20:23):
the college level. In other words, you have these,
they're not really an agent. Well, in addition to the agent,
now you have a player manager who's managing that player's
life. So it's like it's brand deals,
it's not done by the agent, the nil agent, it's done by the
manager of that player. So that if that manager isn't a
(20:44):
really a great person with high integrity and high character,
they control so much of that player's life where they go,
what they do and what they save that player and their
interaction. So it is it is a very difficult
world and I'm 56, like I've beenaround a little bit.
So, you know, lived a little bitand you see a lot of things when
you're, you know, even an NFL player seems really young to me,
(21:07):
right? Like they're, they're just 2020.
I feel so old. And but they're in so many ways,
they're so young. But when you start talking about
college players, they're huge human beings.
Like they're a massive and you and you think that they're older
than they actually are. And when in reality, they're
just, they're 22 year old, you know, young men.
(21:29):
I think talking about the players, can we go into this
next slide Will too? I don't want to get, I love
tearing all the Gary's information.
I want to make sure we talk about, you know, will you
describe this little bit to us? Is this sort of like something
you use in terms of your initialassessment or how does this work
for you? Yeah.
So this is something I created and I've taught it to obviously
(21:50):
professional athletes. I've also taught it to the FBI.
I've also taught it to you know,you know, you know, law
enforcement and fire. It's just been so helpful in so
many different ways. I've also talked to businessmen.
And so I created a four step process that brings the best out
of athletes and high performers when the pressure is on.
(22:12):
So I call this Cape like a Superman Cape Cape.
So C stands for control yourself.
A good example to use in all of this is baseball.
But if but we can change the vocation later and we can even
change it to your vocation as you're going to do something
that requires a lot of attentionand focus.
So C stands for control yourself, the universal side.
(22:32):
To relax and slow down your breathing is just to take a deep
sigh. OK, So when you play tense, you
don't play as well. And I think in the same way with
other professions, it's the samething.
When you're more relaxed, you'remore limber.
For example, I saw a tennis player play recently, a pro
tennis player who as the match went on, he became more tense
(22:53):
and he started to tighten up hisswing.
And I could see it happening because he was feeling the
pressure instead of being reallyjust kind of loose and flowing.
So C stands for control yourself.
So in baseball, let's take that deep side, right?
Look around, look up, look in the stands for a second and then
focus back. So it's C stands for control
yourself. So that definitely has.
(23:15):
There's also some, there's also some hormonal aspects to what
we're talking about when you take that deep side, but really
it's getting your breathing under control.
So it's C stands for control A stands for assess the situation.
Now, this is the one, one of themost interesting things to me in
the entire world. Because if I said to you, you
know, look behind you just for like half a second and then look
(23:37):
back into the camera, you don't really realize it, but you could
probably tell me 50 or 60 thingsabout your surroundings in that
one second. That's how fast neurologically
your brain functions. It's like faster than the
fastest computer. It's unbelievable.
So the amount of information that your brain can assess very
(23:59):
quickly is remarkable. In baseball, the the average
time between a pitch is like 13 to 16 or 17 seconds.
So that baseball player, that pitcher's assessing all types of
things, where the runners are inbase, what's the pitch count?
You know what the he's getting the the signal from the manager
(24:19):
where the pitch. Clock.
Yeah, I mean, there's pitch clock, there's catcher throwing
signs, like it's just remarkablehow much information that he's
assessing. So that's assess the situation
and there's a limit to it though.
You can't keep assessing. You got, you got to cut it off.
Then P is you got to make a plan.
So not only is it what happens if the ball comes to me, it's
(24:40):
like what happens when the ballshit to the shortstop?
What happens when the balls hit to the first baseman?
What happens when there's all these different dynamics.
So you got to make a plan. And then E is is stands for
execute, which is trust your plan, trust your training and
trust your instincts. Because we know that when an
athlete trust their training andthey play instinctually, that's
(25:03):
usually where their best performance is.
So the overthinking piece and the too many thoughts come into
play here. But we do really just want you
to play instinctually. But you got to, you got to put
in the work though. You got to, you got to do the C,
you got to do the A, you got to do the P, you got to understand
the plan, you got to trust your training.
But we do want you to play instinctually.
And that's where your money is made, is is your instincts.
(25:25):
It's funny you mentioned our control and the famous story for
me is in the Super Bowl, I guessthe Cincinnati Bengals, Joe
Montana is on the game-winning drive and everybody's kind of
feeling real tight and he's looking around and he's like,
hey, you see that And it's John Candy that he's hanging out in
the end zone and the players around him looking at it.
Are you serious? We're trying to win this game.
(25:47):
We're we're on the Super Bowl drive.
He's like Joe Cool was the perfect nickname for him.
He's hanging around looking around.
So where he's assessing, right? He's looking around on the time
now pointing things being under control.
So I, I, I think there's a lot to it, especially when we see
the elite athletes where there'sa Joe Montana, Brady, some of
(26:08):
these other athletes, they just find a way to control Andrew,
Andrew Huberman talks about breathing control and taking
that deep breath and that extra sniff and then and the double
breath and how to reset your body and what you're doing.
So there's so many things that are resonating when you talking
about this Kate program that that you're you're utilizing to
(26:31):
help people navigate through allthis.
So anyway, go ahead Darth and. And Gary, would you say for
this, like how would you approach this sort of timeline?
Obviously the an acronym's great, the title's great,
everything's great. But how does that kind of work?
Would you have a plan? How do you do, I know you have
sort of a plan you listed as sort of like a way that you go
through this with athletes. Like, how would you do this for
(26:52):
an athlete if they came in and they're like, hey, we're going
to do this for a, you know, a week period, a month period.
How does that work? Yeah, it's very interesting.
So again, if I have a little bitof time, I can go through my
process. So think of it like like a
pyramid with a circle in it and in the and the core of that
circle is self leadership. Your ability to lead yourself is
(27:12):
it's everything. Whether you are playing a sport,
whether you're in your vocation and you're, you're, you know,
you're, you're about your craft,your ability to lead yourself
even when you don't feel like itis everything.
So if you don't get the self leadership piece down, you're in
big trouble. So I teach something called the
leadership pyramid. It was something that I came up
(27:32):
with years ago that every time that I, I don't do it, I regret
it on so many different levels, especially if you ever hired
anybody. It's such a great analogy.
So the bottom layer is self leadership.
If you mess up on the self leadership at at the bottom or
the foundation of the pyramid, you're in trouble and, and your
(27:55):
actions and, and the lack of your integrity and self
leadership is going to cause theentire pyramid to fracture.
And you'll see why in a moment. So that bottom layer self
leadership, it's everything and it never ends.
It's always present. So you investing in yourself,
you taking time to recover, you having integrity and character
(28:18):
as a leader and and being self let it just never ends.
So the bottom layer of self leadership, the next layer is
couple leadership, but I don't necessarily mean romantic.
It's just you think of like, youknow, being an example to
somebody else or coaching somebody else or mentoring
somebody else or leading somebody else.
So when you do self leadership, the next in the sequence is that
(28:39):
you can do couple leadership. And why shouldn't you lead
another person if you don't leadyourself?
Well, you're being a bad example, right?
You're bringing in all this baggage into this relationship
and it's actually not helpful tothe person you're trying to
help. The next layer is group
leadership. But we all know that a great
group leader is mentoring the next in line, right?
So the whoever's next in the bullpen.
(29:01):
But you can't do that if you've never LED at the couple level.
So we want you to lead at the group level, but you need to
have at least had couple experience and self leadership
experience. You have to be able to
demonstrate that you are capableof leading a group by the
previous 2 levels. And then you have area or
(29:21):
department and then ultimately you have organizational
leadership. So when you put somebody in
leadership at the group or area department level that has never
done group leadership or couple leadership, you're in trouble.
So they might have, you know, they might be charismatic or
have charisma, but they actuallydon't know what they're doing.
So when we hire people as leaders in our businesses or
(29:44):
people that we associate with, if we don't have them go through
those steps or that pyramid where it's really to our
detriment and our organization'sdetriment.
Because when you have a leader, let's say an organization
leader, that doesn't show good self leadership, it affects
everything, the entire organization, the entire
(30:05):
structure. All of a sudden people don't
know that, you know they're supposed to be accountable for
their actions or what they say. People will lie to one another
and be dishonest. I mean, it doesn't take, doesn't
take a pair of binoculars here in the Seattle area to see which
companies really have struggled by passing the buck and which
ones take responsibility for them.
So I think in the CEO or a business leader who takes
(30:26):
responsibility is a great self leader.
So I've said all that to say self leadership in that
leadership pyramid is if you have time, is to teach people
that there's nothing more important than you leading
yourself even when you're not motivated.
And then you can reinforce that by a next concentric circle with
(30:46):
your habits and daily rhythms that you have in your life.
A lot of people are viscerally moved when I say the word
disciplines or habits, but just think of rhythms.
So now that you have self leadership, you want to
reinforce that with rhythms in your life that put you in the
best position to succeed. So one of the things I say in my
business all the time is you can't control outcomes, but you
(31:08):
can always put yourself in the best position to succeed.
So let's work on the best position to succeed.
What does that look like when you wake up every day?
What puts you in the best position to succeed?
And then you have different parts of the inside of that
triangle now in the corners. And to me, mental imagery and
having or knowing your personal philosophy and having domain
(31:28):
management is are the three keysto, you know, causing this, you
know, this paradigm or this thisentire image work.
Because if you don't have control over the different
domains of your life, it affectsyour play on the field or
affects your craft at work. In other words, we can all point
to athletes that when they get, whether it's distracted or
(31:50):
they're struggling in a different domain of their life,
it totally effects their gameplay.
It totally. And it, and it affects, you
know, even for me, it affects mylife when things aren't going
well with this, you know, wonderful woman called Molly in
my life. If I'm struggling in my
marriage, it totally effects my craft.
So the domain management is justas important as, as anything.
And so when we talk about helping an athlete, what we're
(32:13):
really trying to do is #1 we're trying to put out the fires.
So there's a, there's a image that I have that you guys have
there. It's the mental health.
Bridge. Bridge assessment.
So if there is a crisis going onin their life, or let's say that
they're really struggling in an area of their game, let's say,
(32:34):
and well, the idea is to put outthe fire and, and figure out the
crisis as quickly as possible. And then we can help stabilize
them, simplify the complex, you know, give them the support that
they need. So, and then help them create a
short term plan and then again, remove any of those unhealthy
thoughts or stimuli that's in their life to help them go from
(32:55):
crisis to coping. So coping is super helpful
because we can give them tools to be able to help them get out
of that crisis. And if they can implement those
tools on their own and we can teach them how to use those
tools, then they, they don't always need, you know, someone
who's performing surgery on themall the time.
But this is the big fault of mental health in our society is
(33:19):
that we almost always stop at the coping and prevention level.
It is one of the really the one of the great tragedies of our
day and age where we pour all this money and time and energy.
Even at the school, elementary school, high school, middle
school level, we just stop at prevention and we don't actually
teach kids how to thrive and transcend.
(33:41):
There's, there's in fact, when we're thriving or transcending,
we're almost distracted by all the best things in life and all
the good things in life so that we're not even thinking much
about crisis and coping. We've already like decided that
we are going to be the very bestwe can be.
So I think we just, we stop at the coping and prevention pillar
(34:02):
and we just don't go far enough.It was like me walking into a
professional football facility and the coach and I are walking
around the facility and we walk by the training room and I said,
Hey, coach, you know, that's a lot of what mental health is all
about is, you know, getting bandaged up and taped up and
getting iced. But mental performance is like
the gym. And so we walk into the gym and
(34:23):
we hear the clank of the weightsand guys getting stronger and
there's a lot of energy and a lot of excitement in the room.
And that's what I feel like I doas I help the athletes to thrive
and and elevate their game. So is there a place for crisis
and helping a player that's really struggling with
something? 100%.
And the job, my job is to assessthat as quickly as possible.
And sometimes we can do it. Sometimes it's easy to do.
(34:45):
Like I had one defensive tackle that said, Gary, can you make me
2/10 of a second faster? And I was like, Kayla, I'm on
it, let's go. And I had about two or three
sessions with him and he was 2/10 of a second faster.
He was on one of the ended up being on one of the best
defenses, an integral part of one of the best defenses in the
NFLA year and a half ago. So sometimes you can do that.
(35:06):
If the player knows exactly whatthey want and I can help them do
that, then let's go for it. Other times, you know, you're
sort of slow dripping your mental performance, so they get
a more well-rounded view of, of performance.
That's awesome. So you're So what you're Stacy
is saying is that, you know, most of the time these athletes,
you know, they they got crisis, they have coping, but really
(35:26):
sometimes any of those are the ones that are recovering from
some sort of major injury, etcetera.
But there are a lot of times many athletes are they're fairly
healthy, right? And so they need to go to more
of the thrive to thrive and whatever the other slide the
other part was. Transcend.
And that's kind of where that transcend that's that's where
you're stepping in in majority of the cases, right.
So you're saying that you could cover all the areas, but in a
(35:48):
lot of times these for the higher level athletes, you
don't. You only need to go to those
next two steps to get them to the next level.
But it's also less covered. Yeah.
I mean, yeah, that's often the case.
But there's a lot of players who, let's say, I mean, every
player gets in a slump, they don't perform as well and you
don't always know why and nor dothey, because if they knew they
(36:09):
would fix it right away. So sometimes it takes a little
like I, I, I mean, I, I like it to digging for treasures.
It's like I'm, I'm going to go dig in here and find out what
the pain points are and figure out how I can help this player.
And it might take me a while. Like I, this is really
embarrassing to say because it'snot, it's not really, you know,
(36:30):
it doesn't reflect well on me, but it took me a year to figure
out a player one time, an entireyear.
And once I figured it out, I waslike, oh, like I'm connecting
all these dots. I'm meeting with them four times
a month or three times a month. And I just, I couldn't figure it
out. I couldn't figure why he was
just sort of plateaued in his performance.
But after a year I was like, oh,I started to connect the dots a
(36:52):
little bit. It's like, it's kind of like
staring into the sky, looking atthe stars and all of a sudden
seeing a constellation. You're like, OK, now it all
makes sense. OK, this is what we need to work
on. And then we, we really spent the
next 4 weeks working on this oneissue.
It solved all the problems. Like I mean.
I don't. Think, I think, I think that the
best leaders like you mentioned can admit that they're not
(37:15):
always perfect and that they'll take someone longer for certain
aspects. I mean, I'll be honest with you.
I have patients come in. I have patients occasionally
that I'm like first time I see them, I know exactly what they
need. It could be crazy complex.
I know the exact surgery they need and sounds like patients.
I'm like, I don't know what you need and it takes multiple
visits, right? So you're, we're supposed to be
the experts, but the expert expert doesn't always mean fast.
(37:36):
It means we're going to be we'regoing to do our best and use all
of our knowledge to figure it out.
So I mean, the fact is that you didn't give up.
I think that's probably the mostimportant aspect.
I'm not trying to mental health coach you, but I'm just saying
that's a great, that's a really.That's a great aspect that you
brought up, Grant. I mean, there's, there's
pressure, right? Like you get hired to do a job
and it's not working. And so you just kind of go, wow,
(37:58):
like I got to figure this out. And you start reading books and
talking to people and replaying the conversations.
And then we're talking to one oftheir friends or their loved
one. Like you're trying to, you're
going digging and it just takes a little bit of time.
And you know what, sometimes theclient isn't aware of what the
problem is. Like it's subconscious for them
and they don't even know what itis.
So it just, it takes a while andthe patience is really helpful.
(38:20):
And, you know, at one point I was thinking like, well, maybe
they need to get a different mental performance coach because
it's not I, I don't see it. Like I'm, I'm really having a, a
struggle trying to find out whatthe, the issue is and what the
cause is. But sometimes, you know, it, it,
it takes a while. And you know what?
There's a definition of mindset.There's, there's like a generic
definition of mindset, which forme is, is too generic.
(38:41):
It is a condition set of beliefsthat drive behavior.
Well, yeah, but where do your beliefs come from?
Like where did where does that come from?
And how do we form thoughts and and beliefs about things?
And so it took me 7 years to figure out what I'm about to
tell you 7 years. But it was really helpful for me
in deciphering what was going onwith this athlete.
(39:03):
So my definition, it's kind of like a physics equation.
My definition is you have an experience.
Could be it happened to you or you initiated it.
You just have an experience. So think of your own kids,
right? Like they have an experience,
maybe they're playing a sport and they have an experience.
And then you have thoughts and feelings and brackets.
You have thoughts and feelings associated with that experience.
(39:26):
And they could be positive, theycould be negative, and you don't
know. They're just, they are thoughts
and feelings. Sometimes you're aware of them,
sometimes you're not. But if you go inside of that
parentheses or those brackets and then you get to choose a
response. Now, when you're older, you
probably get to choose your response.
When you're younger, you don't often don't get a chance to
choose your responses. So you might not even be aware.
(39:49):
Your response might even be subconscious.
So for example, when I was younger, I was in Geo trade
class. I don't know anything about Geo
trade. Like that is not my strength.
But I was in Geo trade class. And so I would go to this class
and my teacher would embarrass me because I didn't know the
answers. And he was kind of a fun guy.
He was a hockey fan. I was a Bruins fan, he was a
Canadians fan. So we kind of were bantering
(40:11):
back and forth and and whenever,you know, the Bruins would when
he would be extra mean to me. But he made a put, sort of put
me on spotlight and embarrassed me.
So my response to being asked a question he knew I didn't answer
was to be the funny guy. So I would just like say, well,
yeah, the answer is 3.7168942312.
The entire class would laugh andI'm not a funny guy, but I
(40:35):
didn't. That was my response in that
moment because I didn't know howelse to respond.
Your coping? Your coping mechanism.
Totally was a coping mechanism. So out of the experience,
thoughts and feelings, my response?
Now I have a belief. So you form a belief.
That's the next part of the equation.
You form a belief about yourself.
Well, what do you think My belief was about myself?
(40:58):
I wasn't very smart, all right? I wasn't a smart kid, right?
So I just figured I, I wasn't really going to do much in my
life and I just had to get used to it.
So my mindset was no school for me after high school because I
wasn't smart enough. I was going to swing a hammer.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I just figured
for the rest of my life I was going to have to use my hands to
(41:22):
make a living. And so when I decided to go to
college, you know, my grades weren't very good because I
believe that I wasn't very smart.
Well, what's really interesting about this was that I ended up
graduating in my master's degreewith high honors.
Not to brag, but just to say I barely passed high school.
But it's when I dialed in and I took the right subjects that
(41:42):
were more up my alley. I ended up killing it.
And I came to realize that if I could go back to my former self,
to my 16 year old self or 15 year old self, and if I could
whisper, if I could coach myselfin the moment when my instructor
was making fun of me, you know what I'd probably tell myself?
I'd probably say, hey Gary, you know, what did you know?
(42:02):
There are 9 different kinds of intelligence and Geotrade's not
yours. Well, I, I wish I could have
told myself that, but in that moment, I just believe that I
was stupid. You know, there's spatial
intelligence, there's linguisticintelligence, there's musical
intelligence, there's kinetic intelligence, there's
philosophical. I mean, there's all these
(42:23):
different kinds of intelligence,but a couple of the subjects
they didn't teach in high school, it was psych and
philosophy. And those are my 2 best
subjects. But they did, I didn't get to
take that in high school. So it was only when I went to
college that I figured out, hey,wait a minute.
I have an aptitude for these kinds of arenas of knowledge.
So the, the where a mindset comes in.
(42:44):
And that's how you form a mindset.
In fact, Andy McKay from the Seattle Mariners, he taught me
Gary, you just can't end with mindset.
So you have your experience, thoughts, feelings, your
response, your belief that formsyour mindset.
But he said Gary, you can't end with your mindset.
It always has to result in new and improved behaviors, which is
kind of like a new experience, right?
(43:05):
So this is how like it cycles back to experience.
So you start to give yourself new and improved experiences
with new and improved thoughts and feelings, with new and
improved responses, with new andimproved beliefs that create a
new and improved mindset. And it keeps cycling over.
And so that's how you build a mindset.
But sometimes you have to go back to that experience.
And it was really funny because I didn't think that I had
(43:26):
anything in my past that and people always say, you know, are
you going to go back in your past and figure yourself out?
Whatever, I'm like, I don't know, I don't have anything.
But when I took the time to really slow down and say, oh,
you know what, that classroom, that Geo trade class was very
formative in my mindset for many, many years and it had a
huge impact. And that's how I put together my
(43:50):
equation. So I think you can build a
mindset. I think you might have to do a
little digging sometime with a client.
Hey, what happened? And sometimes I'll just say like
somebody is like a player is struggling with something or a
business owner is struggling with something.
And I'll just say, hey, what happened?
They're like, what, what do you mean?
What happened? I'm like, yeah, what happened?
Well, what are you talking about?
(44:10):
Like, you're stuck here, right? Like tell me about something
that happened in your past whereyou're really struggling with
something, you know, that was really painful or hurtful.
All of a sudden, no one, no one's ever asked them that
question. And all of a sudden you start
digging up junk or stick or digging up garbage, but you kind
of got to get there. And it might take a little while
because you don't know how hidden that treasure is.
(44:32):
But once you find it, it unlockspeople.
And so that's what I do is I unlock performance.
Sometimes I got to find out where that treasure is.
Sometimes it takes me a little while on a wild goose chase, but
I can do it pretty quickly normally.
What I know we're going to take a time for your time, but what
percent? Maybe one of our last questions,
(44:53):
what's your percentage of these players with slumps?
Do you find that a lot of this is the, you know, you're
unlocking something, right? It sounds like to me, like I
keep bringing up in the show is like there is a it's it's
everywhere, right? I mean, how frequently you
getting asked to help a player and then you realize that, like,
your job is the most important thing, right?
(45:13):
They've done all this stuff. They've had the doctors check
them. Everything else is good.
And now it's your turn. Yeah.
It's. It's it's so weird.
Like I remember Tom Brady, the Tom Brady said after Bill
Belichick, the head coach, the most important coach on the team
was the mental performance coach.
I was such a telling Pete Carroll told me one time, Gary,
(45:34):
the best always want a coach. They always want.
And Trevor Mobad, my mentor, said, Gary, I talked to Russell
365 days a year. Like get out of here.
Like, what is there something sowrong with Russell?
Well, no. He just wanted to keep sharp all
of the time. And I just, I respect that so
much. And so Trevor would always say
(45:55):
you don't have to be sick to want to get better.
And if for those of us who are, you know, if you're looking, you
know, especially an athlete, you're looking for that constant
competitive edge to be better because everyone is good at that
level. You're always looking for that
competitive edge. So, you know, I think living a
lifestyle of high performance now kicks in and comes into
play. So the question is, is can you
(46:16):
live a high performance lifestyle?
So I have something called the game plan for life, which is so
I have my elite mindset stuff, my process.
But what I learned was was that if I can teach someone how to
live a high performance life is is you get to live on those two
last pillars that's thriving andyeah, elevating or transcending
pillars. And if you can kind of live
between those two pillars, you live a totally different life.
(46:40):
So I think the best players always want to get better.
But it's the players, and Pete Carroll told me this, it's the
players who don't think they need coaching are the ones that
need it the most. Gary and I know we got to let
you go, but before we do, I knowyou are a foodie guy, right?
(47:00):
You. I know it.
You love it. How did you know this?
I, you know, I got to do my research here, so we'll pose one
question here. OK, So if you can have dinner,
you can have an, an athlete, a coach and maybe a, a spiritual
advisor or someone from faith, since we know that's part of
(47:21):
your background. If you can have these three
individuals come to dinner, who would they be and what are you
cooking? Oh man.
OK, so I would probably start upmy smoker and I would be doing
probably beef ribs. OK, my favorite.
I was doing pork ribs forever, but beef ribs, I was going.
(47:41):
Dry rub What's going? On I would say definitely dry
rub that yeah, like I like to enter competitions with my
smoking. And so definitely that's the
that is the tell tale sign that it's a that that that person's a
good smoker. So I would say, I would say, you
know, brisket and, and, and beefribs and the three people who
they would be. Wow.
(48:04):
So I'm a big fan of Saint Ignatius just because I think
we're body, mind, soul and spirit.
And he really focused on the soul part of so like where your
emotions come from, where your personality comes from.
So he would probably be one another one would probably be
Sigmund Freud. He was so instrumental, I think
in, in this field of psychology.And then, you know, besides my
(48:29):
Christian faith in being, you know, saying something obvious,
I would say Tom Brady would be fascinating, just his mentality
to be around him. And I think most athletes pay a
real cost. Like, I think there's cost to
thinking. There's a cost to thinking well,
(48:50):
and it it doesn't come free. Like if you're going to be an
elite athlete at at that level, you're probably going to burn a
lot of bridges. It's going to be really tough.
Like you just, you just sort of expected the great Thomas
Sowell. Maybe he would be another one if
I can invite 4. The historian said everything in
life is a trade off. And that has been such an
(49:10):
amazing phrase for me because now I can think to myself, well,
yeah, I mean, I want something, but what?
What's it going to cost me? Well, it might cost me something
that I I really enjoy or I really like, but that's the
cost. So we call it the illusion of
choice. It's like, if you want to be
average, you have lots of choices.
Think of the menu at The Cheesecake Factory.
You want to be an average eater,pick anything you want.
(49:32):
You want to be a good eater, youhave to really limit the amount
of choices that you have. But if you want to be an elite
eater, you have no choice. This is just how you eat.
And so Thomas Sowell, I think would be another one because it
just, he really impacted my life.
He has like, you know, his top 10 greatest quotes or things
like that, They're just mesmerizing.
So I think it would be Thomas Sowell as well.
(49:54):
Gary, thank you so much for yourtime.
Garcia. Last words here as we wrap it
up. I've just, I'm motivated, I've
cleared my mind, I am ready to crush my cases tomorrow.
This is going to be awesome. So no, I really appreciate it.
Thank you. I think this is really good.
This will be something we can pop back on and discuss other
times as well and jump back to this episode and this will be
(50:16):
really great. I think that listeners are
really going to appreciate it, the athletes listening, the ones
that are recovering from surgeries.
So thank you so much for your time and it's really awesome to
have Someone Like You on here. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Gary Chupic, founder of Elite Mindset, thank you for your
time.
Welcome to Sports Doc Talk. Do not adjust your sets.
I am Will Sanchez, along with our orthopedic surgeon and
sports medicine specialist, Doctor Grant Garcia.
Doctor Garcia, this is a topic and a conversation that we have
wanted to have for quite some time, so I'm really excited
about our guest today. We've talked about the mental
(00:40):
mindset, that the mindset of theathletes, and we have the
perfect guest. To talk about the elite mindset
there. You go the elite.
Mindset it's and before we get into that, you had the elite
mindset just recently, you know,at your competing and swimming
and and I I, I have to bring it up because I know you don't like
to bring it up because people don't realize that you are AAD
(01:03):
one athlete. You love your swimming, you love
competing. So it's not just what you do,
you know, with your surgery and and everything else and but the
guidance with your patients. But you know, your dude that
gets out there and you want, youknow, you want some.
So how was that? Well, I would tell you that I
make a joke that people, I'm notvery competitive, but everybody
knows that there's a, it's like I'm a type AAA personality, I
(01:26):
call it. So a little bit competitive.
I try not to pawn it off too much on my children.
So I get to have, I keep it to myself, which is good.
So, but again, it was good. We did a swim for our club or
local club that I used to coach as a kid.
And now it's full circle becausemy kids swim there and then I
actually swam there as a kid. So it's pretty awesome.
So it's a full circle moment. And then I got to do something I
(01:49):
really enjoy, which is swimming in the lake.
But it was a little harder than I remember the last time.
So I got. To work on my old.
You know, it's, it's great that you didn't get hurt because you
know, we have some friends that would have taken care of you at
the recovery shop. Let's give a shout out to Mike B
Tell the audience about the Recovery Shop and all the things
that they do for us. Yeah, well, First off, I love
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our new flashy yellow. This is awesome.
So anyhow, thank you again to Recovery Shop.
You know, they've been our sponsors for a long time.
I mean, just the other day I hada patient that got injured and
they're like, hey, I want the same thing that your other
player got. Like I want that nice machine.
I want to be, I want that accelerated recovery program
that he got and I'm like, no problem, I'm happy to do this.
It's, it's funny, I actually hada friend's family member in the
(02:32):
middle of the country just called me and they're like, hey,
my, your, my sister had surgery with you.
She did awesome. Can you just give me, you didn't
operate on me, but can I have your thing because I can't get a
hold of it. So he was able to go to the
recovery shop and use that. So this is something that's
really good for you to have at your fingertips as a surgeon.
It'll help with the physical aspect.
There is no mental recovery aspect of this area, which we're
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going to go to the second part of that in a minute.
But the goal here is for surgeons to offer all the latest
things for our patients to get them back to what they need.
Before we jump in our next topic.
I think it's really important. We have brought up so many times
and behind the scenes, we have so many checklist items of
things we want to show to our toour listeners.
But the one biggest one has beenthe mental aspect of injury.
(03:15):
And we've talked about it. I get it all the time in my
office all the time. I was just talking about today,
I had it right, but we don't have anybody.
It's always hard to find an expert and then we happen to
cross paths with one of the elite sort of mental aspect for
athletes in all levels. And so I'd really like to
introduce Gary Chovic for his and I'm really looking forward
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to hearing more about this from the elite mindset.
So thank you so much for coming on.
Yeah, thanks for having me, fellas.
We're all Seattle guys, huh? Yeah, it's nice, but sometimes,
a lot of times we have East Coast guests and and it's tough.
We have a six 7:00, you know, show based on our schedule and
things that we're busy. You know, we, we've got people
(03:59):
coming on nine, 10:00 at night and sometimes.
They're tired. And Doctor Garcia just rambles
on and on and on. So we go really late, you know,
so we always thank them. So it's nice to have someone on
the West Coast that we know thatwe're hopefully not being too
intrusive with your time. And once again, as Doctor Garcia
mentioned, you know, thank you so much for being on the show
(04:21):
and, and sharing your, your knowledge.
So, Doctor Garcia, why don't youkick us off and talk about, you
know, let's get on top of it here.
Well, again, we're this is we always jump around, but
obviously we have an expert here.
So will you go? Will you just initially, First
off, introduce yourself, tell usabout this elite mindset that
you've enveloped, you know, brief game plan and kind of how
(04:42):
you became a mental coach. It's such an important thing,
but it's actually kind of hard to find someone that's really
good at this. Yeah, it really is.
It's a really interesting field.So I grew up a pastor, believe
it or not, for 28 years, and I'moriginally from Saskatchewan,
Canada, so I just. I'm a Prairie boy at heart, but
I've. Been another Canadian, yeah this
is awesome. Yeah, and, and I got married to
(05:05):
a girl from Seattle, WA. And so love brought me South.
And I've been here 33 years now and it's, it's been a wild ride.
There's a lot of interesting dynamics between what it's like
to live in Canada and what it's like to live in America.
But, but I grew up a pastor. I've kind of been a reluctant
leader all of my life. And I, so I'm an ordained pastor
(05:25):
in heaven for 28 years. And then in, in 2017, I had a
burnout and I just hit a wall and I didn't know what to do.
And I think when you're in an industry for so long, the
language becomes so familiar, especially when you're on the
helping side of things. And I, I think I just needed a
different framework. And so I ended up studying
sports psych for about $1000 forthe next couple of years, just
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trying to figure out how to get out out of this exhaustion phase
that was in, in my life. And, and then I had a, a friend
that I had met who knew Trevor Moad.
And Trevor Moad at the time was Russell Wilson's mental
performance coach. And I read his book, It Takes
What it Takes. And then this friend said to me,
would you like to meet Trevor one day?
And I said, well, of course I would like that.
(06:09):
Who wouldn't want to meet someone who was at the top of
their game? In fact, at that time he was on
ESPN, he was on NBC. He was like top of the food
chain in our industry. And and then to be mentored by a
guy like that, it was just a, a once in a lifetime opportunity.
And so one day he said to me, Gary, if you were to help a
professional athlete, tell me your process, well, how would
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you help them? What, what process would you
take them through? And so he said, 30 days from
now, I want you to show that to me.
And so 30 days went by and I wasprepared and showed him the
process that I had come up with.And he hired me on the spot.
And so I worked with limitless minds for the next couple years
and then went out on my own the last five.
So it's been a wild ride to get here.
I just would have never thought that in my lifetime that I would
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be doing what I was, what I'm doing.
But I can't imagine doing anything else right now.
And in fact, in many ways I livea dream life, partly because of
the clients that I get to work with, but also just my, my
challenge to other people to live life to the fullest and
make sure their head is in the right place, in the right spot.
And so I now I work with professional athletes, TV
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celebrities and businesses all over the area in the country,
and in fact have started travelling internationally.
And so it's just been a lot of fun.
And yeah, I just, it's a wild ride and I, I just can't imagine
doing anything else. And then will you kind of go
into, I mean, I'm, I imagine there's probably different types
of ways you have to structure it.
Or do you have the same sort of similar structure for an
(07:35):
executive or, you know, like or a surgeon or an athlete or is it
kind of all different? Like how do you break that down?
Yeah. For me, it's about 80%
commonalities between whether it's sports and business or
different fields. I would say 80% of it's the
same. I would say 20% of it's
different and you got to learn the 20% because it's pretty
(07:55):
crucial. And so I often find myself
having to call up other mental performance coaches that are
experts in that particular sportand learn all that I can.
ChatGPT can be helpful, but one of the shortcomings of ChatGPT
is it doesn't understand sequence and, and how to teach
someone how to, you know, get get control of their thoughts
and their mindset. There's an actual sequence to
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it. It's like baking a cake.
You can have all the right ingredients, but if you don't
know how to sequence it, you're not like not going to get the
intended result. And so teaching someone how to
sequence all the mental skills is actually really, really
crucial. You know, I, I love kind of
where you're going with this because a lot of us know what
we're supposed to do, but getting to do that or acting
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upon it and, and taking those steps, that's a whole other area
that a lot of people struggle with, you know, So what are some
of those things or, or how do you communicate that to someone
that knows what's happening or knows what they need to do, but
you help them, you know, see it clear clearly and start them to,
to, to get on that right path. Yeah.
(09:02):
So sometimes you do a crisis intervention, right?
Like you're going to step in andand rescue some wonders or
something. And there is a time and a place
for that. And so they're in crisis and you
deal with that issue. But if you have a little bit of
time, that's when you can reallylay a really solid foundation.
So for me and, and the way that I think it in my world, for me,
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motivation is not the Holy Grailof all performance.
I think it's helpful to have it.It's almost like an icing on top
of the cake, but it's really notthat necessary.
What really is I think the Holy Grail of all mental performance,
if you have the time to teach it, is self leadership.
And so the self efficacy of someone understanding their life
and getting to choose the thoughts that they think, like a
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lot of people think that they don't have a choice to think
what they think. You know, they kind of feel
like, you know, it's kind of like a bird landing on your
head. You know, someone once said that
you can't stop a bird from landing on your head, but you
can certainly stop it from building a nest there.
And your thoughts are really quite similar.
You can have all types of crazy thoughts and thank goodness we
don't act on all of them, but wecan kind of police them and we
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can kind of say or reject some thoughts and accept and receive
others that are more productive for us.
Is that kind of the thought in the sense that like, oh, I'm in
my own head, but I, you know, I can't fix that.
Like that's just me. I'm kind of like a, you know, I
would say there's certain different surgeon mentalities.
Like, you know, hey, like I'm just anxious for this case
because it's a tough case, right?
Like that's just, I'm just nevergoing to get over that.
(10:28):
That's just the way it is. And, and what you're saying is
that's a wrong, that mindset already is the wrong thing,
right? That's I'm making that up in my
head. Yeah, it's really strange.
Like I I, you know, one of the things that I've been teaching
recently in my business is that it's made a lot of sense to me
is having your thoughts be outside of yourself.
Because when you're so introspective and we just live
in this dage of analytics now, like, I mean, there's wearable
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tech, people are looking for data, I mean, and it's just the
information's everywhere. And So what happens is that we
just intend to internalize everything and we overthink
everything and then it paralyzesus and it causes us to hesitate.
And hesitation, whether it's in sports or business or in the
medical field can be quite costly if you're not confident
enough to, to remove the hesitation.
(11:13):
So the issue really is in, in myview, is limiting the amount of
thoughts that you have so that you can be successful at the
things that are the most important.
For example, I think thoughts are like calories.
If you have too many calories that you don't expend, what
happens to you? You get slow and lethargic.
In the same way, thoughts are like that.
When you have an abundance of thoughts that you can't expend,
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then you just kind of eventuallycarry them and they get really
weighty. And so you have to figure out
what thoughts are producing something good in you and what
thoughts are not so helpful. Is this kind of like the idea of
over extension? You know, it's the the idea that
like, hey, listen, you know, a lot of us are going different
directions and these athletes are getting, you know,
sponsorships and then they're getting told performance and if
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they get hurt, they're told recovery.
And like it's kind of is that the idea of like you just have
too many things coming at once. You need to focus on the high
efficiency directions or what isthat?
Just to clarify. Well, both.
So internally you can have too many thoughts that you have to
be able to narrow down. I mean, Steve Jobs would talk
about signal, the signal and anddistortion ratio, right?
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Would like or signal to noise ratio.
So you have to like focus on thethings that are the most
important in that moment. And then outside of yourself,
yeah. I mean, athletes are more
distracted than ever with socialmedia and with the opportunities
that are coming their way. And then and now with NIL, it's
like just focus on the game. But you know, young athletes
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can't even barely do that anymore because they're looking
for sponsorship deals and they're looking for
opportunities to get paid. And so there's is so much
distraction in our world today for athletes.
And I'm not sure it's that much different for the rest of us in
different vocations where the the distractions are so immense
and your ability to learn and know things are just immense.
(13:02):
But there's a difference betweenknowing something and
experiencing something. So we might be book smart with
something, but in terms of like actually getting to know
something intimately, it's just very different.
And there's no way to really know things until you experience
them. But if we're spending so much
time in the knowledge arena and inside of our own heads, or
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we're, you know, studying something on our phones or using
ChatGPT, that's not really knowledge per SE.
It's information, but it's not really, you know, intimate
knowledge of something. Do you have an?
Exercise you use. Oh, sorry, Will.
No, no good. Finish that and I'll jump in.
Go ahead. Do you have an exercise like
what would you do for for that player, right?
So like, let's say you're kind of saying, hey, you have to
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experience, right? But if your experience is like
you have to experience winning the game, right?
They're not going to win the game to experience.
Like the whole point of what you're doing is hoping that they
can win the game because they'reclear and their minds clear.
Like how would you get them to get that experience or knowledge
rather than just seeing it on chat, CPT or the Internet or
talking about it? Yeah, I mean, there's no way to
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help a player by teaching them and adding on to what they
already know without removing something.
So there's got to think of it like a cup, Like you can only
pour so much into a cup where you have to say, OK, listen,
what do you, what thoughts do you need to let go of?
Like what do you need to subtract from your life?
I remember being a leader in a non profit in the church for
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many, many years. I let on a local, national,
regional and national level. And my wife would always say to
me, like, Gary, you know, for everything that you take on, you
have to let go of two things. I'm like, there's no way I can
do that. Like this is such a great
opportunity. And but she would just sort of
ground me and say, no, no, no. Now you've got to let go of two
things because it has to be thatimportant.
(14:50):
I think in the same way, thoughts just have to be poured
out of your head. There has to be some type of
subtraction so that you can perform at a high level.
And in fact, I call it intentional naivety.
You have to like choose to be naive about something or not
know something so that you can become really excellent at what
you do. So in some ways I like to teach
you is perfecting this simple. So it just perfect the simple
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things, perfect your thought process so it becomes so
instinctual that you don't really have to think about it.
But there's no way to do that without getting in the mental
reps and the physical reps so that you can you can perform at
a high level. I want to go back to the NIL
and, and it's clear now that your wife is the original elite
mindset master behind all this because she has set the
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guidelines, giving you the toolsfor you to share with the rest
of us. So we want to thank her in
advance for everything that she has done to get you where you
need to be going back to the NIL.
Obviously, this is all brand new, right?
And we're seeing kids. It's remarkable.
I think I saw recently this weekthat another athlete is changing
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school. This is the sixth time in their
college career that they have moved on.
What is some of the some of the conversations you're having or
maybe some of the advice becauseyou said something really
important there with having too much information.
And maybe they're getting that from parents, coach, agent,
where they're not really enjoying or fulfilling their
(16:22):
obligation to themselves to having a sustainable college
career. And they're, they're looking for
the next thing and they're moving around What what have
what, what are some of the concerns when you have athletes
that are going through somethinglike that?
Well, it's interesting how important environment is and in
order to be successful we have to be in an environment long
(16:43):
enough. But we live in this day and age
now where, where you're right, you know, players are moving
back and forth and now what they're doing is signing one and
two year contracts because within college, because they
want to, they want the freedom of after a year or two to be
able to go somewhere else. And the, and the colleges with
the really good players are asking them to commit to longer
contracts. And so we're just in territory
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that we've never been in before.And it's incredibly confusing
and, and everyone's just trying to keep up with the changes.
But in order to be successful atsomething, you really do need a
level of consistency and, and, and repetition and rhythm.
Like a lot of people don't like to talk about discipline and
habits and that kind of thing. But even in terms of like being
in one place for a given amount of time can be so valuable.
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In other words, you can take an athlete that's really good in
one environment, change the environment and he's not very
good or she. And in the same way, you can
take an athlete that's really struggling in one environment or
on one team and change the team and all of a sudden they start
to thrive because of the system or because the players that are
around them or because of the culture.
But you don't ever really get a chance to grow roots in the
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system or process or environmentif you're not there long enough.
So it's a crazy world. Like I don't even know, like,
like I have a couple of baseballplayers I'm working with right
now. And this is his third team in
three years and and he just doesn't feel like he's getting
the plane time he wants. And he was a stud in high school
and a slut in his first year. And so when you're a stud in
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your first year, you want to go to a bigger and better school,
but you might be sitting on the bench at that school.
It wasn't what you were expecting.
Whereas if he would have stayed with the program that he was in,
he could have very well. You know, he knew the system, he
knew the process, he knew the coaches, but that
disgruntledness is always their thinking that the grass is
graded on the other side of the fence, and often times it's not.
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Is this something now that you're, do you feel like this is
something that's trickling down on a professional level?
Like obviously the pros are making still more money, but
there's a lot of money in NIL. Do you feel from your experience
working with some of the professional athletes, like is
this something that's already been there and kind of like for
you, is this harder now to deal with the NIL players because of
your, or is it you're like, OK, now I already have this, I have
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these in older players, right? The ones in the professional
level and I kind of have the framework.
Or is it a different framework you're dealing with?
Because obviously they're they're younger and they still
have parental advising, advisingand things like that.
So it's a little bit more challenging and the school
things different than the teams.Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's a
lot of it's the same. There are differences, but a lot
of it's the same. In other words, like I'll never
(19:19):
forget, I was in Buffalo watching the Bills play the
Dolphins, and I'm sitting with aplayer agent and the player
agent is watching his defensive end play.
And Buffalo would score a touchdown.
Well, probably the other team, No Buffalo would, would get a
sack, but it wasn't his player. And it let's say he's rotating
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in and out. So let's say every, let's say
every drive, they rotate. Well, the, the guy that was
rotating in, the other guy that was rotating in that was not
this agent's player. When he got a sack, he would be
so angry and frustrated because it would make his player look
bad. And so it was just like a world
that was like so foreign to me that I it was hard to even
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comprehend. And so this is the day and age
that we live in where those agents, when they get to the
players. At a really young age, they can
take advantage of them. They can at least that pro
player sort of has been around alittle bit and they kind of know
in addition to a player agent, they also have a player manager.
And those managers are going to become more and more popular at
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the college level. In other words, you have these,
they're not really an agent. Well, in addition to the agent,
now you have a player manager who's managing that player's
life. So it's like it's brand deals,
it's not done by the agent, the nil agent, it's done by the
manager of that player. So that if that manager isn't a
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really a great person with high integrity and high character,
they control so much of that player's life where they go,
what they do and what they save that player and their
interaction. So it is it is a very difficult
world and I'm 56, like I've beenaround a little bit.
So, you know, lived a little bitand you see a lot of things when
you're, you know, even an NFL player seems really young to me,
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right? Like they're, they're just 2020.
I feel so old. And but they're in so many ways,
they're so young. But when you start talking about
college players, they're huge human beings.
Like they're a massive and you and you think that they're older
than they actually are. And when in reality, they're
just, they're 22 year old, you know, young men.
(21:29):
I think talking about the players, can we go into this
next slide Will too? I don't want to get, I love
tearing all the Gary's information.
I want to make sure we talk about, you know, will you
describe this little bit to us? Is this sort of like something
you use in terms of your initialassessment or how does this work
for you? Yeah.
So this is something I created and I've taught it to obviously
(21:50):
professional athletes. I've also taught it to the FBI.
I've also taught it to you know,you know, you know, law
enforcement and fire. It's just been so helpful in so
many different ways. I've also talked to businessmen.
And so I created a four step process that brings the best out
of athletes and high performers when the pressure is on.
(22:12):
So I call this Cape like a Superman Cape Cape.
So C stands for control yourself.
A good example to use in all of this is baseball.
But if but we can change the vocation later and we can even
change it to your vocation as you're going to do something
that requires a lot of attentionand focus.
So C stands for control yourself, the universal side.
(22:32):
To relax and slow down your breathing is just to take a deep
sigh. OK, So when you play tense, you
don't play as well. And I think in the same way with
other professions, it's the samething.
When you're more relaxed, you'remore limber.
For example, I saw a tennis player play recently, a pro
tennis player who as the match went on, he became more tense
(22:53):
and he started to tighten up hisswing.
And I could see it happening because he was feeling the
pressure instead of being reallyjust kind of loose and flowing.
So C stands for control yourself.
So in baseball, let's take that deep side, right?
Look around, look up, look in the stands for a second and then
focus back. So it's C stands for control
yourself. So that definitely has.
(23:15):
There's also some, there's also some hormonal aspects to what
we're talking about when you take that deep side, but really
it's getting your breathing under control.
So it's C stands for control A stands for assess the situation.
Now, this is the one, one of themost interesting things to me in
the entire world. Because if I said to you, you
know, look behind you just for like half a second and then look
(23:37):
back into the camera, you don't really realize it, but you could
probably tell me 50 or 60 thingsabout your surroundings in that
one second. That's how fast neurologically
your brain functions. It's like faster than the
fastest computer. It's unbelievable.
So the amount of information that your brain can assess very
(23:59):
quickly is remarkable. In baseball, the the average
time between a pitch is like 13 to 16 or 17 seconds.
So that baseball player, that pitcher's assessing all types of
things, where the runners are inbase, what's the pitch count?
You know what the he's getting the the signal from the manager
(24:19):
where the pitch. Clock.
Yeah, I mean, there's pitch clock, there's catcher throwing
signs, like it's just remarkablehow much information that he's
assessing. So that's assess the situation
and there's a limit to it though.
You can't keep assessing. You got, you got to cut it off.
Then P is you got to make a plan.
So not only is it what happens if the ball comes to me, it's
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like what happens when the ballshit to the shortstop?
What happens when the balls hit to the first baseman?
What happens when there's all these different dynamics.
So you got to make a plan. And then E is is stands for
execute, which is trust your plan, trust your training and
trust your instincts. Because we know that when an
athlete trust their training andthey play instinctually, that's
(25:03):
usually where their best performance is.
So the overthinking piece and the too many thoughts come into
play here. But we do really just want you
to play instinctually. But you got to, you got to put
in the work though. You got to, you got to do the C,
you got to do the A, you got to do the P, you got to understand
the plan, you got to trust your training.
But we do want you to play instinctually.
And that's where your money is made, is is your instincts.
(25:25):
It's funny you mentioned our control and the famous story for
me is in the Super Bowl, I guessthe Cincinnati Bengals, Joe
Montana is on the game-winning drive and everybody's kind of
feeling real tight and he's looking around and he's like,
hey, you see that And it's John Candy that he's hanging out in
the end zone and the players around him looking at it.
Are you serious? We're trying to win this game.
(25:47):
We're we're on the Super Bowl drive.
He's like Joe Cool was the perfect nickname for him.
He's hanging around looking around.
So where he's assessing, right? He's looking around on the time
now pointing things being under control.
So I, I, I think there's a lot to it, especially when we see
the elite athletes where there'sa Joe Montana, Brady, some of
(26:08):
these other athletes, they just find a way to control Andrew,
Andrew Huberman talks about breathing control and taking
that deep breath and that extra sniff and then and the double
breath and how to reset your body and what you're doing.
So there's so many things that are resonating when you talking
about this Kate program that that you're you're utilizing to
(26:31):
help people navigate through allthis.
So anyway, go ahead Darth and. And Gary, would you say for
this, like how would you approach this sort of timeline?
Obviously the an acronym's great, the title's great,
everything's great. But how does that kind of work?
Would you have a plan? How do you do, I know you have
sort of a plan you listed as sort of like a way that you go
through this with athletes. Like, how would you do this for
(26:52):
an athlete if they came in and they're like, hey, we're going
to do this for a, you know, a week period, a month period.
How does that work? Yeah, it's very interesting.
So again, if I have a little bitof time, I can go through my
process. So think of it like like a
pyramid with a circle in it and in the and the core of that
circle is self leadership. Your ability to lead yourself is
(27:12):
it's everything. Whether you are playing a sport,
whether you're in your vocation and you're, you're, you know,
you're, you're about your craft,your ability to lead yourself
even when you don't feel like itis everything.
So if you don't get the self leadership piece down, you're in
big trouble. So I teach something called the
leadership pyramid. It was something that I came up
(27:32):
with years ago that every time that I, I don't do it, I regret
it on so many different levels, especially if you ever hired
anybody. It's such a great analogy.
So the bottom layer is self leadership.
If you mess up on the self leadership at at the bottom or
the foundation of the pyramid, you're in trouble and, and your
(27:55):
actions and, and the lack of your integrity and self
leadership is going to cause theentire pyramid to fracture.
And you'll see why in a moment. So that bottom layer self
leadership, it's everything and it never ends.
It's always present. So you investing in yourself,
you taking time to recover, you having integrity and character
(28:18):
as a leader and and being self let it just never ends.
So the bottom layer of self leadership, the next layer is
couple leadership, but I don't necessarily mean romantic.
It's just you think of like, youknow, being an example to
somebody else or coaching somebody else or mentoring
somebody else or leading somebody else.
So when you do self leadership, the next in the sequence is that
(28:39):
you can do couple leadership. And why shouldn't you lead
another person if you don't leadyourself?
Well, you're being a bad example, right?
You're bringing in all this baggage into this relationship
and it's actually not helpful tothe person you're trying to
help. The next layer is group
leadership. But we all know that a great
group leader is mentoring the next in line, right?
So the whoever's next in the bullpen.
(29:01):
But you can't do that if you've never LED at the couple level.
So we want you to lead at the group level, but you need to
have at least had couple experience and self leadership
experience. You have to be able to
demonstrate that you are capableof leading a group by the
previous 2 levels. And then you have area or
(29:21):
department and then ultimately you have organizational
leadership. So when you put somebody in
leadership at the group or area department level that has never
done group leadership or couple leadership, you're in trouble.
So they might have, you know, they might be charismatic or
have charisma, but they actuallydon't know what they're doing.
So when we hire people as leaders in our businesses or
(29:44):
people that we associate with, if we don't have them go through
those steps or that pyramid where it's really to our
detriment and our organization'sdetriment.
Because when you have a leader, let's say an organization
leader, that doesn't show good self leadership, it affects
everything, the entire organization, the entire
(30:05):
structure. All of a sudden people don't
know that, you know they're supposed to be accountable for
their actions or what they say. People will lie to one another
and be dishonest. I mean, it doesn't take, doesn't
take a pair of binoculars here in the Seattle area to see which
companies really have struggled by passing the buck and which
ones take responsibility for them.
So I think in the CEO or a business leader who takes
(30:26):
responsibility is a great self leader.
So I've said all that to say self leadership in that
leadership pyramid is if you have time, is to teach people
that there's nothing more important than you leading
yourself even when you're not motivated.
And then you can reinforce that by a next concentric circle with
(30:46):
your habits and daily rhythms that you have in your life.
A lot of people are viscerally moved when I say the word
disciplines or habits, but just think of rhythms.
So now that you have self leadership, you want to
reinforce that with rhythms in your life that put you in the
best position to succeed. So one of the things I say in my
business all the time is you can't control outcomes, but you
(31:08):
can always put yourself in the best position to succeed.
So let's work on the best position to succeed.
What does that look like when you wake up every day?
What puts you in the best position to succeed?
And then you have different parts of the inside of that
triangle now in the corners. And to me, mental imagery and
having or knowing your personal philosophy and having domain
(31:28):
management is are the three keysto, you know, causing this, you
know, this paradigm or this thisentire image work.
Because if you don't have control over the different
domains of your life, it affectsyour play on the field or
affects your craft at work. In other words, we can all point
to athletes that when they get, whether it's distracted or
(31:50):
they're struggling in a different domain of their life,
it totally effects their gameplay.
It totally. And it, and it affects, you
know, even for me, it affects mylife when things aren't going
well with this, you know, wonderful woman called Molly in
my life. If I'm struggling in my
marriage, it totally effects my craft.
So the domain management is justas important as, as anything.
And so when we talk about helping an athlete, what we're
(32:13):
really trying to do is #1 we're trying to put out the fires.
So there's a, there's a image that I have that you guys have
there. It's the mental health.
Bridge. Bridge assessment.
So if there is a crisis going onin their life, or let's say that
they're really struggling in an area of their game, let's say,
(32:34):
and well, the idea is to put outthe fire and, and figure out the
crisis as quickly as possible. And then we can help stabilize
them, simplify the complex, you know, give them the support that
they need. So, and then help them create a
short term plan and then again, remove any of those unhealthy
thoughts or stimuli that's in their life to help them go from
(32:55):
crisis to coping. So coping is super helpful
because we can give them tools to be able to help them get out
of that crisis. And if they can implement those
tools on their own and we can teach them how to use those
tools, then they, they don't always need, you know, someone
who's performing surgery on themall the time.
But this is the big fault of mental health in our society is
(33:19):
that we almost always stop at the coping and prevention level.
It is one of the really the one of the great tragedies of our
day and age where we pour all this money and time and energy.
Even at the school, elementary school, high school, middle
school level, we just stop at prevention and we don't actually
teach kids how to thrive and transcend.
(33:41):
There's, there's in fact, when we're thriving or transcending,
we're almost distracted by all the best things in life and all
the good things in life so that we're not even thinking much
about crisis and coping. We've already like decided that
we are going to be the very bestwe can be.
So I think we just, we stop at the coping and prevention pillar
(34:02):
and we just don't go far enough.It was like me walking into a
professional football facility and the coach and I are walking
around the facility and we walk by the training room and I said,
Hey, coach, you know, that's a lot of what mental health is all
about is, you know, getting bandaged up and taped up and
getting iced. But mental performance is like
the gym. And so we walk into the gym and
(34:23):
we hear the clank of the weightsand guys getting stronger and
there's a lot of energy and a lot of excitement in the room.
And that's what I feel like I doas I help the athletes to thrive
and and elevate their game. So is there a place for crisis
and helping a player that's really struggling with
something? 100%.
And the job, my job is to assessthat as quickly as possible.
And sometimes we can do it. Sometimes it's easy to do.
(34:45):
Like I had one defensive tackle that said, Gary, can you make me
2/10 of a second faster? And I was like, Kayla, I'm on
it, let's go. And I had about two or three
sessions with him and he was 2/10 of a second faster.
He was on one of the ended up being on one of the best
defenses, an integral part of one of the best defenses in the
NFLA year and a half ago. So sometimes you can do that.
(35:06):
If the player knows exactly whatthey want and I can help them do
that, then let's go for it. Other times, you know, you're
sort of slow dripping your mental performance, so they get
a more well-rounded view of, of performance.
That's awesome. So you're So what you're Stacy
is saying is that, you know, most of the time these athletes,
you know, they they got crisis, they have coping, but really
(35:26):
sometimes any of those are the ones that are recovering from
some sort of major injury, etcetera.
But there are a lot of times many athletes are they're fairly
healthy, right? And so they need to go to more
of the thrive to thrive and whatever the other slide the
other part was. Transcend.
And that's kind of where that transcend that's that's where
you're stepping in in majority of the cases, right.
So you're saying that you could cover all the areas, but in a
(35:48):
lot of times these for the higher level athletes, you
don't. You only need to go to those
next two steps to get them to the next level.
But it's also less covered. Yeah.
I mean, yeah, that's often the case.
But there's a lot of players who, let's say, I mean, every
player gets in a slump, they don't perform as well and you
don't always know why and nor dothey, because if they knew they
(36:09):
would fix it right away. So sometimes it takes a little
like I, I, I mean, I, I like it to digging for treasures.
It's like I'm, I'm going to go dig in here and find out what
the pain points are and figure out how I can help this player.
And it might take me a while. Like I, this is really
embarrassing to say because it'snot, it's not really, you know,
(36:30):
it doesn't reflect well on me, but it took me a year to figure
out a player one time, an entireyear.
And once I figured it out, I waslike, oh, like I'm connecting
all these dots. I'm meeting with them four times
a month or three times a month. And I just, I couldn't figure it
out. I couldn't figure why he was
just sort of plateaued in his performance.
But after a year I was like, oh,I started to connect the dots a
(36:52):
little bit. It's like, it's kind of like
staring into the sky, looking atthe stars and all of a sudden
seeing a constellation. You're like, OK, now it all
makes sense. OK, this is what we need to work
on. And then we, we really spent the
next 4 weeks working on this oneissue.
It solved all the problems. Like I mean.
I don't. Think, I think, I think that the
best leaders like you mentioned can admit that they're not
(37:15):
always perfect and that they'll take someone longer for certain
aspects. I mean, I'll be honest with you.
I have patients come in. I have patients occasionally
that I'm like first time I see them, I know exactly what they
need. It could be crazy complex.
I know the exact surgery they need and sounds like patients.
I'm like, I don't know what you need and it takes multiple
visits, right? So you're, we're supposed to be
the experts, but the expert expert doesn't always mean fast.
(37:36):
It means we're going to be we'regoing to do our best and use all
of our knowledge to figure it out.
So I mean, the fact is that you didn't give up.
I think that's probably the mostimportant aspect.
I'm not trying to mental health coach you, but I'm just saying
that's a great, that's a really.That's a great aspect that you
brought up, Grant. I mean, there's, there's
pressure, right? Like you get hired to do a job
and it's not working. And so you just kind of go, wow,
(37:58):
like I got to figure this out. And you start reading books and
talking to people and replaying the conversations.
And then we're talking to one oftheir friends or their loved
one. Like you're trying to, you're
going digging and it just takes a little bit of time.
And you know what, sometimes theclient isn't aware of what the
problem is. Like it's subconscious for them
and they don't even know what itis.
So it just, it takes a while andthe patience is really helpful.
(38:20):
And, you know, at one point I was thinking like, well, maybe
they need to get a different mental performance coach because
it's not I, I don't see it. Like I'm, I'm really having a, a
struggle trying to find out whatthe, the issue is and what the
cause is. But sometimes, you know, it, it,
it takes a while. And you know what?
There's a definition of mindset.There's, there's like a generic
definition of mindset, which forme is, is too generic.
(38:41):
It is a condition set of beliefsthat drive behavior.
Well, yeah, but where do your beliefs come from?
Like where did where does that come from?
And how do we form thoughts and and beliefs about things?
And so it took me 7 years to figure out what I'm about to
tell you 7 years. But it was really helpful for me
in deciphering what was going onwith this athlete.
(39:03):
So my definition, it's kind of like a physics equation.
My definition is you have an experience.
Could be it happened to you or you initiated it.
You just have an experience. So think of your own kids,
right? Like they have an experience,
maybe they're playing a sport and they have an experience.
And then you have thoughts and feelings and brackets.
You have thoughts and feelings associated with that experience.
(39:26):
And they could be positive, theycould be negative, and you don't
know. They're just, they are thoughts
and feelings. Sometimes you're aware of them,
sometimes you're not. But if you go inside of that
parentheses or those brackets and then you get to choose a
response. Now, when you're older, you
probably get to choose your response.
When you're younger, you don't often don't get a chance to
choose your responses. So you might not even be aware.
(39:49):
Your response might even be subconscious.
So for example, when I was younger, I was in Geo trade
class. I don't know anything about Geo
trade. Like that is not my strength.
But I was in Geo trade class. And so I would go to this class
and my teacher would embarrass me because I didn't know the
answers. And he was kind of a fun guy.
He was a hockey fan. I was a Bruins fan, he was a
Canadians fan. So we kind of were bantering
(40:11):
back and forth and and whenever,you know, the Bruins would when
he would be extra mean to me. But he made a put, sort of put
me on spotlight and embarrassed me.
So my response to being asked a question he knew I didn't answer
was to be the funny guy. So I would just like say, well,
yeah, the answer is 3.7168942312.
The entire class would laugh andI'm not a funny guy, but I
(40:35):
didn't. That was my response in that
moment because I didn't know howelse to respond.
Your coping? Your coping mechanism.
Totally was a coping mechanism. So out of the experience,
thoughts and feelings, my response?
Now I have a belief. So you form a belief.
That's the next part of the equation.
You form a belief about yourself.
Well, what do you think My belief was about myself?
(40:58):
I wasn't very smart, all right? I wasn't a smart kid, right?
So I just figured I, I wasn't really going to do much in my
life and I just had to get used to it.
So my mindset was no school for me after high school because I
wasn't smart enough. I was going to swing a hammer.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I just figured
for the rest of my life I was going to have to use my hands to
(41:22):
make a living. And so when I decided to go to
college, you know, my grades weren't very good because I
believe that I wasn't very smart.
Well, what's really interesting about this was that I ended up
graduating in my master's degreewith high honors.
Not to brag, but just to say I barely passed high school.
But it's when I dialed in and I took the right subjects that
(41:42):
were more up my alley. I ended up killing it.
And I came to realize that if I could go back to my former self,
to my 16 year old self or 15 year old self, and if I could
whisper, if I could coach myselfin the moment when my instructor
was making fun of me, you know what I'd probably tell myself?
I'd probably say, hey Gary, you know, what did you know?
(42:02):
There are 9 different kinds of intelligence and Geotrade's not
yours. Well, I, I wish I could have
told myself that, but in that moment, I just believe that I
was stupid. You know, there's spatial
intelligence, there's linguisticintelligence, there's musical
intelligence, there's kinetic intelligence, there's
philosophical. I mean, there's all these
(42:23):
different kinds of intelligence,but a couple of the subjects
they didn't teach in high school, it was psych and
philosophy. And those are my 2 best
subjects. But they did, I didn't get to
take that in high school. So it was only when I went to
college that I figured out, hey,wait a minute.
I have an aptitude for these kinds of arenas of knowledge.
So the, the where a mindset comes in.
(42:44):
And that's how you form a mindset.
In fact, Andy McKay from the Seattle Mariners, he taught me
Gary, you just can't end with mindset.
So you have your experience, thoughts, feelings, your
response, your belief that formsyour mindset.
But he said Gary, you can't end with your mindset.
It always has to result in new and improved behaviors, which is
kind of like a new experience, right?
(43:05):
So this is how like it cycles back to experience.
So you start to give yourself new and improved experiences
with new and improved thoughts and feelings, with new and
improved responses, with new andimproved beliefs that create a
new and improved mindset. And it keeps cycling over.
And so that's how you build a mindset.
But sometimes you have to go back to that experience.
And it was really funny because I didn't think that I had
(43:26):
anything in my past that and people always say, you know, are
you going to go back in your past and figure yourself out?
Whatever, I'm like, I don't know, I don't have anything.
But when I took the time to really slow down and say, oh,
you know what, that classroom, that Geo trade class was very
formative in my mindset for many, many years and it had a
huge impact. And that's how I put together my
(43:50):
equation. So I think you can build a
mindset. I think you might have to do a
little digging sometime with a client.
Hey, what happened? And sometimes I'll just say like
somebody is like a player is struggling with something or a
business owner is struggling with something.
And I'll just say, hey, what happened?
They're like, what, what do you mean?
What happened? I'm like, yeah, what happened?
Well, what are you talking about?
(44:10):
Like, you're stuck here, right? Like tell me about something
that happened in your past whereyou're really struggling with
something, you know, that was really painful or hurtful.
All of a sudden, no one, no one's ever asked them that
question. And all of a sudden you start
digging up junk or stick or digging up garbage, but you kind
of got to get there. And it might take a little while
because you don't know how hidden that treasure is.
(44:32):
But once you find it, it unlockspeople.
And so that's what I do is I unlock performance.
Sometimes I got to find out where that treasure is.
Sometimes it takes me a little while on a wild goose chase, but
I can do it pretty quickly normally.
What I know we're going to take a time for your time, but what
percent? Maybe one of our last questions,
(44:53):
what's your percentage of these players with slumps?
Do you find that a lot of this is the, you know, you're
unlocking something, right? It sounds like to me, like I
keep bringing up in the show is like there is a it's it's
everywhere, right? I mean, how frequently you
getting asked to help a player and then you realize that, like,
your job is the most important thing, right?
(45:13):
They've done all this stuff. They've had the doctors check
them. Everything else is good.
And now it's your turn. Yeah.
It's. It's it's so weird.
Like I remember Tom Brady, the Tom Brady said after Bill
Belichick, the head coach, the most important coach on the team
was the mental performance coach.
I was such a telling Pete Carroll told me one time, Gary,
(45:34):
the best always want a coach. They always want.
And Trevor Mobad, my mentor, said, Gary, I talked to Russell
365 days a year. Like get out of here.
Like, what is there something sowrong with Russell?
Well, no. He just wanted to keep sharp all
of the time. And I just, I respect that so
much. And so Trevor would always say
(45:55):
you don't have to be sick to want to get better.
And if for those of us who are, you know, if you're looking, you
know, especially an athlete, you're looking for that constant
competitive edge to be better because everyone is good at that
level. You're always looking for that
competitive edge. So, you know, I think living a
lifestyle of high performance now kicks in and comes into
play. So the question is, is can you
(46:16):
live a high performance lifestyle?
So I have something called the game plan for life, which is so
I have my elite mindset stuff, my process.
But what I learned was was that if I can teach someone how to
live a high performance life is is you get to live on those two
last pillars that's thriving andyeah, elevating or transcending
pillars. And if you can kind of live
between those two pillars, you live a totally different life.
(46:40):
So I think the best players always want to get better.
But it's the players, and Pete Carroll told me this, it's the
players who don't think they need coaching are the ones that
need it the most. Gary and I know we got to let
you go, but before we do, I knowyou are a foodie guy, right?
(47:00):
You. I know it.
You love it. How did you know this?
I, you know, I got to do my research here, so we'll pose one
question here. OK, So if you can have dinner,
you can have an, an athlete, a coach and maybe a, a spiritual
advisor or someone from faith, since we know that's part of
(47:21):
your background. If you can have these three
individuals come to dinner, who would they be and what are you
cooking? Oh man.
OK, so I would probably start upmy smoker and I would be doing
probably beef ribs. OK, my favorite.
I was doing pork ribs forever, but beef ribs, I was going.
(47:41):
Dry rub What's going? On I would say definitely dry
rub that yeah, like I like to enter competitions with my
smoking. And so definitely that's the
that is the tell tale sign that it's a that that that person's a
good smoker. So I would say, I would say, you
know, brisket and, and, and beefribs and the three people who
they would be. Wow.
(48:04):
So I'm a big fan of Saint Ignatius just because I think
we're body, mind, soul and spirit.
And he really focused on the soul part of so like where your
emotions come from, where your personality comes from.
So he would probably be one another one would probably be
Sigmund Freud. He was so instrumental, I think
in, in this field of psychology.And then, you know, besides my
(48:29):
Christian faith in being, you know, saying something obvious,
I would say Tom Brady would be fascinating, just his mentality
to be around him. And I think most athletes pay a
real cost. Like, I think there's cost to
thinking. There's a cost to thinking well,
(48:50):
and it it doesn't come free. Like if you're going to be an
elite athlete at at that level, you're probably going to burn a
lot of bridges. It's going to be really tough.
Like you just, you just sort of expected the great Thomas
Sowell. Maybe he would be another one if
I can invite 4. The historian said everything in
life is a trade off. And that has been such an
(49:10):
amazing phrase for me because now I can think to myself, well,
yeah, I mean, I want something, but what?
What's it going to cost me? Well, it might cost me something
that I I really enjoy or I really like, but that's the
cost. So we call it the illusion of
choice. It's like, if you want to be
average, you have lots of choices.
Think of the menu at The Cheesecake Factory.
You want to be an average eater,pick anything you want.
(49:32):
You want to be a good eater, youhave to really limit the amount
of choices that you have. But if you want to be an elite
eater, you have no choice. This is just how you eat.
And so Thomas Sowell, I think would be another one because it
just, he really impacted my life.
He has like, you know, his top 10 greatest quotes or things
like that, They're just mesmerizing.
So I think it would be Thomas Sowell as well.
(49:54):
Gary, thank you so much for yourtime.
Garcia. Last words here as we wrap it
up. I've just, I'm motivated, I've
cleared my mind, I am ready to crush my cases tomorrow.
This is going to be awesome. So no, I really appreciate it.
Thank you. I think this is really good.
This will be something we can pop back on and discuss other
times as well and jump back to this episode and this will be
(50:16):
really great. I think that listeners are
really going to appreciate it, the athletes listening, the ones
that are recovering from surgeries.
So thank you so much for your time and it's really awesome to
have Someone Like You on here. Yeah, thanks for having me.
Gary Chupic, founder of Elite Mindset, thank you for your
time.
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