September 3, 2024 • 16 mins
What do professional athletes, executives and parents all have in common? They all face high stakes, high pressure moments when good performance and decision-making matters the most. Learn what peformance coaching is and how it helps coachees perform at their best consistently. Coach Alex delves into what skills coachees develop and what are the benefits from this type of coaching. If you are looking to understand how to make pressure a privilege, then tune in today.
Subscribe to ideamix - Coaching, Performance, and Wellness, and stay tuned for new episodes every other Thursday. On ideamix podcasts, we speak with innovators and coaches to help you build the life, business, and career you want. ideamix is the go-to destination for individuals to find their ideal coach. Check out our website at www.theideamix.com. For comments, questions, podcast guest ideas, or sponsorship inquiries, please email info@theideamix.com.
Subscribe to ideamix - Coaching, Performance, and Wellness, and stay tuned for new episodes every other Thursday. On ideamix podcasts, we speak with innovators and coaches to help you build the life, business, and career you want. ideamix is the go-to destination for individuals to find their ideal coach. Check out our website at www.theideamix.com. For comments, questions, podcast guest ideas, or sponsorship inquiries, please email info@theideamix.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Idemics Performance and Wellness, where world leading coaches
and scientists explain how their research can help you achieve
your personal and professional goals. Foster hi It's Sanjayanti, co
founder and CEO of Idemics Coaching. Coaching has played an
important role in my life. It's helped me through my
journey to become a powerful leader, mother and wife. IDMX
(00:27):
coaches help you increase your self awareness, improve your problem
solving skills, and evolve your habits to achieve your goals,
all things I'm grateful to have learned and done through my.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Own coaching journey.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Our easy one minute assessment matches you with an Idemics
coach that best fits your needs and values. Each Idemics
coach is vetted and experienced. It helps clients mad and
achieve their wellness, professional and business goals.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
If you or someone you know could.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Benefit from coaching, visit our website at www dotidemics dot com.
We also know that not everyone can invest in coaching
right now, and that's what we provide free coaching in
our Coach Shorts episodes. If you think someone you know
would benefit from it, please share our podcast with them.
Thanks for listening and see you next time.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Welcome to Coaches to Know, a podcast short designed to
help demystify coaching and help you our audience understand what
coaching is and how it can help you. I'm your host, Jamie.
I am super delighted to be here with Coach Alex
to discuss a very favorite topic of mine, performance coaching.
(01:33):
Coach Alex has been coaching for about ten years, and
in addition to having worked with athletes in the NBA
and the NFL, he's a performance psychologist who holds a
PhD and counseling psychology and an MBA. These clients are
only athletes, but professionals who are at the top of
their game but are still striving to go further. This
(01:54):
includes executives, CEOs, finance professionals, and art and even artist.
Welcome Coach Alex, and thank you for being here with
me today.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Jamie. Thank you so much for having me. I am
excited to be here with you and I love talking
about this, so I'm hoping we get to have a
fun conversation here.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Great. So one of the things that excites me about
talking about performance coaching in general is that I think
historically people tend to when they think about coaching. They
think of it as a remedial tool. And I think
that when we talk about performance coaching and we think
about performance coaching, we're framing it from being a remedial
(02:35):
intervention to an accelerant. So I would like to start
by sort of laying the groundwork today and talk about
what do we mean by performance psychology and performance coaching.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's a great question, and I'm glad you started with
the accelerant versus remedial topic. So I guess broad strokes,
performance psychology is really about helping people be their best
when it matters most. That's the core principle at play
in the work that we're doing now. Sometimes that means
working to solve particular challenges. Maybe it's things like performance anxiety,
(03:08):
or difficulty with public speaking, or even difficulty with leadership.
And at other times we're working on optimizing how someone
shows up to work the way that they do their
leadership things are largely good, but they're interested in getting
a promotion or becoming a top performer in their team,
or just figuring out how they take themselves to their
full potential. So performance psychology is really built around evidence
(03:31):
based principles of behavior change to help people address those
gaps or issues or optimize their performance to be the
best that they can be. And performance coaching is just
kind of an extension of performance psychology. Really, it's about
leveraging those tools and helping people learn the skills that
they need to be as effective as they can possibly be,
(03:51):
typically under pressure or in high stakes, high risk situations,
and in some cases as a performance psychologist, those risks
are like with elite military units, where I've done some work,
for example, helping army rangers figure out how to diffuse bombs.
And in other situations, high risk is you know, we're
scaling a company up, or we have to go through
(04:12):
a big layoff, or we're acquiring a new company and
we've got to integrate culture and we're not sure how
that's going to work. So of course the risks are
on different skills and different consequences, but in both cases
they feel really important. And performance psychology is about helping
you learn the skills that you need to manage those
things effectively, perform well through them, and then again kind
of thrive right, feel good, perform well, and be the
(04:35):
best that you can be.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
That's super interesting. I would you know, I don't know
how you coach people through when human lives are extincing.
That sounds quite intense. Just as a follow up up question,
you know, are there any types of coaching? Performance coaching
gets confused with or how to differentiate itself from other
(04:58):
types of coaching?
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Broadly, coaching is hard to differentiate anyway, unfortunately, for better
or worse. Right, there's lots of types of coaches, and
people also think about coaching with things like mentoring or
other sorts of advising that goes on. So I think
what makes performance psychology and performance coaching a bit unique
is really the focus on peak performance and helping people
(05:21):
be their best consistently, whereas sometimes things like executive coaching
might focus on tactical or operational aspects of a business,
or traditional psychology is focused on fixing mental health problems. Right,
So performance psychology can kind of live in the middle there,
and it's really about the individual as a performer, the
team as a performer, the organization as a performer, but
(05:44):
not necessarily about you know, should we pursue this tactic
or that tactic, or should we execute this acquisition or
should we not execute this acquisition, or what does it
mean to be a new CEO. You know, we can
talk about some of those things, but ultimately, perform coach
is not necessarily designed to address that in the way
maybe executive coaching or mentoring or advising might help with
(06:06):
some of those other issues.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Okay, thank you for that clarification. As the next question,
you know, we talked a little bit at the and
your introduction about you know who your clients are, but
can you tell us maybe give us a little detail
about you know, why should someone should consider this type
of coaching.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
I believe that everyone who's working in a high stakes,
high pressure environment is a performer, and I think there
are actually quite a number of high stakes, high pressure
environments that require good performance. Right, So even things that
people don't typically think about as a performance, like parenting,
for example, I think is a high stakes, high pressure
situation for most people. And as a new dad, I
(06:50):
certainly feel that. And then you've got obviously different challenges
that you're working through, you know, as a CEO of
a company, or different challenges again if you're working in private,
do your venture capital, but ultimately you're dealing with high
risk decisions and high stake situations that require a bit
of skill to be able to navigate it. And so
what I've found is that a lot of the same
(07:12):
things that impact the pro athletes that I've worked with
impact really everybody. And I kind of break my work
down into five or six sort of key buckets. So
the first is what I would call stealth regulation. That's
the ability to control, moderate, direct your thinking, feeling in physiology,
and to be able to optimize your own learning and
(07:32):
become an expert in your own way. So it's kind
of two parts, how you learn and how you control yourself.
The second is leadership, and athletes, of course have to
work on their leadership, regardless of being a starter or
a bench player. The same thing is true with pretty
much every executive or even parents, right you're leading your kid.
Third is kind of relationships and communications. It's kind of
(07:54):
related to that leadership bucket, but it's a little bit different.
Right we all are learning how to work best in
our teams, whether again that's your family unit, your basketball team,
or your investment committee. You have to be thinking about
all the ways that those things come together and how
you operate. Fourth would be decision making. So you know,
obviously decisions happen on different time scales, But ultimately there
(08:17):
is a process that we can all develop and a
set of skills we can all deploy to help us
make more effective decisions. Things like identifying our own biases,
coming up with frameworks around decisions for our values, learning
what information to pick up and wait for or to
build out to make a more effective decision, when to
trust our intuitive expertise, and when to be slow and deliberate.
(08:38):
You know, all these things play a part in how
we perform. And then finally is performance under pressure. And
there's a set of skills that again you need whether
you're diffusing a bomb, shooting a free throw, you know,
giving a big pitch. Right, These same skills actually cut
across the different spaces, and so of course you teach
them in different contexts, but I think ultimately those are
sort of the core buckets are really good pformance coaching,
(09:00):
and again you touch on some of the tangential things
that come with that, right. You know, if you're talking
about leadership, that might bleed into something like executive presidence,
where you're figuring out how you show up and be
more confident, right, and that's again a performance psychology skill.
Or if you're thinking about decision making. You might be
thinking about how you do things like hiring and firing,
which is one type of decision, but it's still related
(09:21):
to the way that you process that information. So you
can kind of see how you feel in all the
core challenges underneath those big buckets. And that's what I
rely on as my framework for the work that I do. Amazing.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
I love how that framework really fits this broad I
love that so how broadly you define performance? First of all,
because you know, for example, I am also a parent.
I don't think of parenting as being a performance, but
it is in a way, right. It's high pressure and
a lot of times the decisions that you make have
(09:54):
long can may have long term implications, right, and you
don't really know in the moment right what those are.
I'm curious as to whether do you coach parents as well.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
I've worked with a few parents. Yeah, And obviously, especially
if you're working with high performers and business for example,
oftentimes those performers are also parents, and your parents is stressful, right, Like,
it's hard, and so if you're if you're in a
stressful situation, again, a high stage environment, there are going
to be some skills from performance psychology that are going
to help you.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Yeah, yeah, I mean the reality is right, is that
our lives are not as siloed as oftentimes we would
like them to be, and of what happens at work
can bleed into what happens at home and so on
and so forth. So I think it's really Again, I
think it's great that this framework helps you address how
you show up generally, whether it is work or home.
(10:49):
So so, what sort of outcomes have you seen from
this type of coaching? And you know, can you can
you share any real coaching stories that are audience be
interested in learning about.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Can share some real stories without sharing some real names
that help to protect the people that I work with.
But yeah, I mean, I think a host of outcomes
that you can kind of associate with performance coaching. I
think some of the more foundational or fundamental things are
feeling more in control, right, having a sense that you
are kind of the agent and author of your own story,
(11:20):
that you have a sense of how to best execute,
you understand how to perform well. I think a second
outcome people often experience is feeling more confident, and that
often comes from that experience of feeling a bit more
in control of themselves or their situation. But it also
changes the way that they show up, the way that
they interact and are personally, the way that they communicate. Third,
(11:41):
I think is feeling more motivated. Right when you're really
tapped into and feel confident in the skills that you develop,
then pressure becomes like a privilege, right. It becomes an
opportunity to perform better versus something to be afraid of,
and that increases motivation. Fourth, I think you would get
improved leadership and communication. And broadly, you know, a lot
(12:02):
of really good teamwork, whether it's sports or business, is
how you talk to your teammates. It is how you
interact with your teammates, and so being an effective leader,
being an effective communicator becomes part and parcel elevating everyone's
game so that you can be successful. So those I
think would be a few of the outcomes that you
could expect. And I mean, gosh, I've now worked with
(12:23):
performers across a range of spaces, but one of my
favorite stories is I was doing some work with an
MBA player who struggled a bit with shooting at the
free throw line, which is you know, for any players
kind of a unique experience because you practice this skill
so much, but in practice you can never replicate, you know,
(12:43):
twenty thousand people staring at you and screaming at you
and hoping that you miss right if you're on an
away game, and so you're kind of out there in
a team sport on an island for a moment, you know.
And so in individual sports things like golf or tennis,
you get used to that performing by yourself, but in
basketball you can mostly perform with everyone else, and then
for a brief moment, everything stops and everyone's staring at you,
(13:05):
waiting to see what's going to happen and how it's
going to impact the game. And so a lot of
players get nervous. And so I had one player who
came and said, you know, I want to work on
shooting free throws. I want to get more aggressive going
to the basket, which is often going to mean I'm
gonna spend more time with the free throw line. It's like, okay, great,
well tell me a little bit about you know, what
you're thinking or what you're feeling when you get up there.
And his original approach was like, I'm just so nervous.
(13:28):
I'm in my head. I started thinking about, you know,
what if I miss, what am I going to do?
What's the right tactic here? What will my teammates say?
And my heart rate increases and my breathing increases, I'm like, okay,
so tell me a little bit about how you deal
with that right now. And his solution was to spend
a lot of time right hoping that it would just
kind of slow down. And what you find often is,
(13:48):
and you know, for better or worse, it's actually quite
a common tactic right across spaces. People are just waiting
for it to stop, versus doing something reactively to address it.
And so we started to think about, okay, well, what
could we do and what would resonate for him? And
it turned out that the most important thing we could address,
which is often true for people who feel a bit
of performance anxiety, is really addressing and reappraising the physiology.
(14:12):
So you kind of have two parts. You have learning
to do something with the actual increased adrenaline if you
will right, learning to control your breathing with techniques like
box breathing. You can practice things like mindfulness meditation that
help you control and direct your attention. Really, learning to
talk to yourself in a way that slows you down,
even slowing your physical movements down, so that you send
(14:34):
the message like Okay, I'm calm, and then you want
to reappraise that stress as something more helpful. Right, So,
we've all been socialized or conditioned into this belief that
stress is bad and that we should all try to
get stress out or away as quickly as possible. But
the reality is, stress itself is not harmful. Stress is
just your brain and body preparing you to do something effortful.
(14:57):
And if you change the way that you think about it,
we have all this data that shows if you appraise
stressors as a challenge versus a threat, then all of
a sudden, the physiology becomes excitement, it becomes focused, it
becomes determination, not oh my goodness, I'm about to melt
down at the free throw line. So we worked on
some of these skills, and then early on in my career,
(15:19):
you know, we were in COVID and so there were
times when we had no fans and times when we
had some fans. But one of the privileges of the
experience was getting to watch, you know, all these basketball
games from up close and personal, and at one point,
this player just looked at me at the free throw
line and winked, and I was like, Okay, he kind
of got it. And so those are the cool experiences
you get to have in my world. Then I've had,
(15:40):
you know, very similar experiences with executives who feel empowered
when they give a pitch or feel like they're operating
with their team at a high level deploying these skills.
And that's what makes this work so fun is you
get to see people in action be the best that
they can be.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
That was That's a wonderful story. Thank you so much
for being here with us today and sharing that story.
And the one thought I would love to leave us
with is this the idea that pressure become a privilege
because you are motivated in the confidence that you have
built by working with Coach Alex. Thank you so much
(16:20):
for being here with us today and to our audience,
if you would like to work with Coach Alex or
one of our other qualified coaches, please visit us at
theidmics dot com. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave
us a review. Find your ideal coach at www dot
viidmix dot Com special thanks to our producer Martin Maluski
and singer songwriter Doug Allen.
Welcome to Idemics Performance and Wellness, where world leading coaches
and scientists explain how their research can help you achieve
your personal and professional goals. Foster hi It's Sanjayanti, co
founder and CEO of Idemics Coaching. Coaching has played an
important role in my life. It's helped me through my
journey to become a powerful leader, mother and wife. IDMX
(00:27):
coaches help you increase your self awareness, improve your problem
solving skills, and evolve your habits to achieve your goals,
all things I'm grateful to have learned and done through my.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Own coaching journey.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
Our easy one minute assessment matches you with an Idemics
coach that best fits your needs and values. Each Idemics
coach is vetted and experienced. It helps clients mad and
achieve their wellness, professional and business goals.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
If you or someone you know could.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Benefit from coaching, visit our website at www dotidemics dot com.
We also know that not everyone can invest in coaching
right now, and that's what we provide free coaching in
our Coach Shorts episodes. If you think someone you know
would benefit from it, please share our podcast with them.
Thanks for listening and see you next time.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Welcome to Coaches to Know, a podcast short designed to
help demystify coaching and help you our audience understand what
coaching is and how it can help you. I'm your host, Jamie.
I am super delighted to be here with Coach Alex
to discuss a very favorite topic of mine, performance coaching.
(01:33):
Coach Alex has been coaching for about ten years, and
in addition to having worked with athletes in the NBA
and the NFL, he's a performance psychologist who holds a
PhD and counseling psychology and an MBA. These clients are
only athletes, but professionals who are at the top of
their game but are still striving to go further. This
(01:54):
includes executives, CEOs, finance professionals, and art and even artist.
Welcome Coach Alex, and thank you for being here with
me today.
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Jamie. Thank you so much for having me. I am
excited to be here with you and I love talking
about this, so I'm hoping we get to have a
fun conversation here.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
Great. So one of the things that excites me about
talking about performance coaching in general is that I think
historically people tend to when they think about coaching. They
think of it as a remedial tool. And I think
that when we talk about performance coaching and we think
about performance coaching, we're framing it from being a remedial
(02:35):
intervention to an accelerant. So I would like to start
by sort of laying the groundwork today and talk about
what do we mean by performance psychology and performance coaching.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's a great question, and I'm glad you started with
the accelerant versus remedial topic. So I guess broad strokes,
performance psychology is really about helping people be their best
when it matters most. That's the core principle at play
in the work that we're doing now. Sometimes that means
working to solve particular challenges. Maybe it's things like performance anxiety,
(03:08):
or difficulty with public speaking, or even difficulty with leadership.
And at other times we're working on optimizing how someone
shows up to work the way that they do their
leadership things are largely good, but they're interested in getting
a promotion or becoming a top performer in their team,
or just figuring out how they take themselves to their
full potential. So performance psychology is really built around evidence
(03:31):
based principles of behavior change to help people address those
gaps or issues or optimize their performance to be the
best that they can be. And performance coaching is just
kind of an extension of performance psychology. Really, it's about
leveraging those tools and helping people learn the skills that
they need to be as effective as they can possibly be,
(03:51):
typically under pressure or in high stakes, high risk situations,
and in some cases as a performance psychologist, those risks
are like with elite military units, where I've done some work,
for example, helping army rangers figure out how to diffuse bombs.
And in other situations, high risk is you know, we're
scaling a company up, or we have to go through
(04:12):
a big layoff, or we're acquiring a new company and
we've got to integrate culture and we're not sure how
that's going to work. So of course the risks are
on different skills and different consequences, but in both cases
they feel really important. And performance psychology is about helping
you learn the skills that you need to manage those
things effectively, perform well through them, and then again kind
of thrive right, feel good, perform well, and be the
(04:35):
best that you can be.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
That's super interesting. I would you know, I don't know
how you coach people through when human lives are extincing.
That sounds quite intense. Just as a follow up up question,
you know, are there any types of coaching? Performance coaching
gets confused with or how to differentiate itself from other
(04:58):
types of coaching?
Speaker 2 (05:00):
Broadly, coaching is hard to differentiate anyway, unfortunately, for better
or worse. Right, there's lots of types of coaches, and
people also think about coaching with things like mentoring or
other sorts of advising that goes on. So I think
what makes performance psychology and performance coaching a bit unique
is really the focus on peak performance and helping people
(05:21):
be their best consistently, whereas sometimes things like executive coaching
might focus on tactical or operational aspects of a business,
or traditional psychology is focused on fixing mental health problems. Right,
So performance psychology can kind of live in the middle there,
and it's really about the individual as a performer, the
team as a performer, the organization as a performer, but
(05:44):
not necessarily about you know, should we pursue this tactic
or that tactic, or should we execute this acquisition or
should we not execute this acquisition, or what does it
mean to be a new CEO. You know, we can
talk about some of those things, but ultimately, perform coach
is not necessarily designed to address that in the way
maybe executive coaching or mentoring or advising might help with
(06:06):
some of those other issues.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Okay, thank you for that clarification. As the next question,
you know, we talked a little bit at the and
your introduction about you know who your clients are, but
can you tell us maybe give us a little detail
about you know, why should someone should consider this type
of coaching.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
I believe that everyone who's working in a high stakes,
high pressure environment is a performer, and I think there
are actually quite a number of high stakes, high pressure
environments that require good performance. Right, So even things that
people don't typically think about as a performance, like parenting,
for example, I think is a high stakes, high pressure
situation for most people. And as a new dad, I
(06:50):
certainly feel that. And then you've got obviously different challenges
that you're working through, you know, as a CEO of
a company, or different challenges again if you're working in private,
do your venture capital, but ultimately you're dealing with high
risk decisions and high stake situations that require a bit
of skill to be able to navigate it. And so
what I've found is that a lot of the same
(07:12):
things that impact the pro athletes that I've worked with
impact really everybody. And I kind of break my work
down into five or six sort of key buckets. So
the first is what I would call stealth regulation. That's
the ability to control, moderate, direct your thinking, feeling in physiology,
and to be able to optimize your own learning and
(07:32):
become an expert in your own way. So it's kind
of two parts, how you learn and how you control yourself.
The second is leadership, and athletes, of course have to
work on their leadership, regardless of being a starter or
a bench player. The same thing is true with pretty
much every executive or even parents, right you're leading your kid.
Third is kind of relationships and communications. It's kind of
(07:54):
related to that leadership bucket, but it's a little bit different.
Right we all are learning how to work best in
our teams, whether again that's your family unit, your basketball team,
or your investment committee. You have to be thinking about
all the ways that those things come together and how
you operate. Fourth would be decision making. So you know,
obviously decisions happen on different time scales, But ultimately there
(08:17):
is a process that we can all develop and a
set of skills we can all deploy to help us
make more effective decisions. Things like identifying our own biases,
coming up with frameworks around decisions for our values, learning
what information to pick up and wait for or to
build out to make a more effective decision, when to
trust our intuitive expertise, and when to be slow and deliberate.
(08:38):
You know, all these things play a part in how
we perform. And then finally is performance under pressure. And
there's a set of skills that again you need whether
you're diffusing a bomb, shooting a free throw, you know,
giving a big pitch. Right, These same skills actually cut
across the different spaces, and so of course you teach
them in different contexts, but I think ultimately those are
sort of the core buckets are really good pformance coaching,
(09:00):
and again you touch on some of the tangential things
that come with that, right. You know, if you're talking
about leadership, that might bleed into something like executive presidence,
where you're figuring out how you show up and be
more confident, right, and that's again a performance psychology skill.
Or if you're thinking about decision making. You might be
thinking about how you do things like hiring and firing,
which is one type of decision, but it's still related
(09:21):
to the way that you process that information. So you
can kind of see how you feel in all the
core challenges underneath those big buckets. And that's what I
rely on as my framework for the work that I do. Amazing.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
I love how that framework really fits this broad I
love that so how broadly you define performance? First of all,
because you know, for example, I am also a parent.
I don't think of parenting as being a performance, but
it is in a way, right. It's high pressure and
a lot of times the decisions that you make have
(09:54):
long can may have long term implications, right, and you
don't really know in the moment right what those are.
I'm curious as to whether do you coach parents as well.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
I've worked with a few parents. Yeah, And obviously, especially
if you're working with high performers and business for example,
oftentimes those performers are also parents, and your parents is stressful, right, Like,
it's hard, and so if you're if you're in a
stressful situation, again, a high stage environment, there are going
to be some skills from performance psychology that are going
to help you.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Yeah, yeah, I mean the reality is right, is that
our lives are not as siloed as oftentimes we would
like them to be, and of what happens at work
can bleed into what happens at home and so on
and so forth. So I think it's really Again, I
think it's great that this framework helps you address how
you show up generally, whether it is work or home.
(10:49):
So so, what sort of outcomes have you seen from
this type of coaching? And you know, can you can
you share any real coaching stories that are audience be
interested in learning about.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Can share some real stories without sharing some real names
that help to protect the people that I work with.
But yeah, I mean, I think a host of outcomes
that you can kind of associate with performance coaching. I
think some of the more foundational or fundamental things are
feeling more in control, right, having a sense that you
are kind of the agent and author of your own story,
(11:20):
that you have a sense of how to best execute,
you understand how to perform well. I think a second
outcome people often experience is feeling more confident, and that
often comes from that experience of feeling a bit more
in control of themselves or their situation. But it also
changes the way that they show up, the way that
they interact and are personally, the way that they communicate. Third,
(11:41):
I think is feeling more motivated. Right when you're really
tapped into and feel confident in the skills that you develop,
then pressure becomes like a privilege, right. It becomes an
opportunity to perform better versus something to be afraid of,
and that increases motivation. Fourth, I think you would get
improved leadership and communication. And broadly, you know, a lot
(12:02):
of really good teamwork, whether it's sports or business, is
how you talk to your teammates. It is how you
interact with your teammates, and so being an effective leader,
being an effective communicator becomes part and parcel elevating everyone's
game so that you can be successful. So those I
think would be a few of the outcomes that you
could expect. And I mean, gosh, I've now worked with
(12:23):
performers across a range of spaces, but one of my
favorite stories is I was doing some work with an
MBA player who struggled a bit with shooting at the
free throw line, which is you know, for any players
kind of a unique experience because you practice this skill
so much, but in practice you can never replicate, you know,
(12:43):
twenty thousand people staring at you and screaming at you
and hoping that you miss right if you're on an
away game, and so you're kind of out there in
a team sport on an island for a moment, you know.
And so in individual sports things like golf or tennis,
you get used to that performing by yourself, but in
basketball you can mostly perform with everyone else, and then
for a brief moment, everything stops and everyone's staring at you,
(13:05):
waiting to see what's going to happen and how it's
going to impact the game. And so a lot of
players get nervous. And so I had one player who
came and said, you know, I want to work on
shooting free throws. I want to get more aggressive going
to the basket, which is often going to mean I'm
gonna spend more time with the free throw line. It's like, okay, great,
well tell me a little bit about you know, what
you're thinking or what you're feeling when you get up there.
And his original approach was like, I'm just so nervous.
(13:28):
I'm in my head. I started thinking about, you know,
what if I miss, what am I going to do?
What's the right tactic here? What will my teammates say?
And my heart rate increases and my breathing increases, I'm like, okay,
so tell me a little bit about how you deal
with that right now. And his solution was to spend
a lot of time right hoping that it would just
kind of slow down. And what you find often is,
(13:48):
and you know, for better or worse, it's actually quite
a common tactic right across spaces. People are just waiting
for it to stop, versus doing something reactively to address it.
And so we started to think about, okay, well, what
could we do and what would resonate for him? And
it turned out that the most important thing we could address,
which is often true for people who feel a bit
of performance anxiety, is really addressing and reappraising the physiology.
(14:12):
So you kind of have two parts. You have learning
to do something with the actual increased adrenaline if you
will right, learning to control your breathing with techniques like
box breathing. You can practice things like mindfulness meditation that
help you control and direct your attention. Really, learning to
talk to yourself in a way that slows you down,
even slowing your physical movements down, so that you send
(14:34):
the message like Okay, I'm calm, and then you want
to reappraise that stress as something more helpful. Right, So,
we've all been socialized or conditioned into this belief that
stress is bad and that we should all try to
get stress out or away as quickly as possible. But
the reality is, stress itself is not harmful. Stress is
just your brain and body preparing you to do something effortful.
(14:57):
And if you change the way that you think about it,
we have all this data that shows if you appraise
stressors as a challenge versus a threat, then all of
a sudden, the physiology becomes excitement, it becomes focused, it
becomes determination, not oh my goodness, I'm about to melt
down at the free throw line. So we worked on
some of these skills, and then early on in my career,
(15:19):
you know, we were in COVID and so there were
times when we had no fans and times when we
had some fans. But one of the privileges of the
experience was getting to watch, you know, all these basketball
games from up close and personal, and at one point,
this player just looked at me at the free throw
line and winked, and I was like, Okay, he kind
of got it. And so those are the cool experiences
you get to have in my world. Then I've had,
(15:40):
you know, very similar experiences with executives who feel empowered
when they give a pitch or feel like they're operating
with their team at a high level deploying these skills.
And that's what makes this work so fun is you
get to see people in action be the best that
they can be.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
That was That's a wonderful story. Thank you so much
for being here with us today and sharing that story.
And the one thought I would love to leave us
with is this the idea that pressure become a privilege
because you are motivated in the confidence that you have
built by working with Coach Alex. Thank you so much
(16:20):
for being here with us today and to our audience,
if you would like to work with Coach Alex or
one of our other qualified coaches, please visit us at
theidmics dot com. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Thanks for listening. Please subscribe wherever you listen and leave
us a review. Find your ideal coach at www dot
viidmix dot Com special thanks to our producer Martin Maluski
and singer songwriter Doug Allen.
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