EP. 64: Athlete Psychology and Mental Skills w/Coach Patrick Smith, PhD

A conversation with coach Patrick Smith, PhD. Coach Smith’s passion for sports was paralleled by a desire to revolutionize how we approach mental performance. With an undergraduate degree in marketing and a doctorate under the mentorship of Dr. Steven C. Hayes, a pioneering figure in psychology, he has dedicated his career to merging the most advanced behavioral science with the world of sports.  

We talk about everything from mental skills, the benefits of meditation to athletes and even touch on concepts of the efficacy of hypnotism. Coach Smith gives his perspectives on balancing social influence with athletes and the impact of AI.    

About Coach Patrick Smith, PhD:
https://www.coachpatricksmith.com/patrick-smith-phd  

Coach Patrick Smith’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/patrick_smith_aware/  

Follow Us: Facebook: https://Facebook.com/EventHorizon.Tv Twitter: https://twitter.com/EventHorizonTv Instagram: https://instagram.com/eventhorizon.tv YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/EventHorizonTv  

Support Us: https://Patreon.com/Endurance

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The intersection of endurance, sport, health, fitness, and life, following
the evidence where it leads with the science of self
propelled motion. This is the Endurance Experience.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Podcast, powered by Event Horizon dot TV and hosted by
Tony Rich.

Speaker 3 (00:21):
Thanks for listening to the Endurance Experience Podcast. I'm Tony Rich.
Thanks for keeping up with me. As many of you know,
I was away and I was competing in the World
Marathon Challenge, the seven seven seven put on by a
run book and you know, settling back into the real world.

(00:48):
And as many of you know, I was fortunate enough
to complete the event. And I'm excited to follow this
podcast up with another podcast very quickly where you'll get
some information about how that event. Excited to share some
of the news and really some of the high level learnings.

(01:10):
On this podcast, I have a conversation with coach Patrick Smith.
He's a PhD in psychology. I think you'll find the
conversation very interesting. Coach Smith has a broad background and
started in professional paintball and then made his way to

(01:33):
endurance driven challenges like ultra distance trail running, triathlon, cycling,
and his broad range in sport is extraordinary and in
his doctorate and his broad experience in psychology. He has

(01:56):
dedicated his career to merging the most advant's behavioral science
with the world of sports. So we talk about a
range of things, including what's ubiquitously called mental skills, and
I get Coach Smith's professional experience on when he's trying

(02:20):
to work with athletes what is he trying to so
solve for with respect to mental skills. We talk about
meditation and whether or not there's really any known benefits
to athletes with meditation, either for performance or recovery. And

(02:43):
then I talk with Coach Smith about his opinion on
hypnotism and whether or not it's empirically viable and can
you hypnotize an athlete to perform or eat better, mitigate vices, etc.
That was a very interesting exchange. And I talked to

(03:07):
Coach Smith about social influence and from a professional like himself,
how would he navigate the positives and the negatives of
social influence or should I say balance the positive and
the negatives of social influence the benefits versus the distractions,

(03:32):
for instance. And I also get his opinion on technology
neuroscience as well as the impact of AI. It was
probably one of the most thought provoking conversations I've had
about athlete psychology and mental skills. So I hope you

(03:53):
enjoy my conversation with Coach Patrick Smith. I am on
with Coach Patrick Smith. Thanks for coming on to the podcast.

Speaker 1 (04:07):
Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
Tony all right, I am just getting back into the
swing of coming back from seven to seven seven And
I know we had connected before I left, and so
I'm glad I got a chance to sit down with
you and talk various things that I want to talk
to you about in the area of psychology. Your wheelhouse

(04:34):
meant everything from mental skills to meditation to things like hypnotism,
and you know the future of psychology, and you know
your thoughts on neuroscience and AI social influence. So many
things that I want to talk to you about. But

(04:55):
before we get into those, I wonder if you can
tell listeners about you your background, your experience, and whether
or not you have any particular underlying philosophies or you know,
coaching mantras that you adhere to. Take as much time
as you want for that one.

Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, I guess I'll just start with the background. I
guess most of your clients probably don't know me, so
they don't know that I'm I'm about to turn forty
and I just finished my PhD a couple of years ago.
So I took a little bit of a garden path
that that point. And that garden path started out towards

(05:42):
the end of high school getting into a very niche
sport of paintball, and I got introduced to it. I
very quickly was like, Wow, I'm good at this. I
really like it. I really like the community around it.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
It was kind of a.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
Brotherhood, and I ended up spending them Jordy in my twenties,
chasing a professional career in paintball and traveling around the
country and going to some pretty cool places and doing
some pretty amazing things with some of my best friends
in that sport. And there came a point where I
was like, well, this is this has been amazing. And

(06:19):
I've been living paycheck to paycheck and keeping a job
outside the industry, and it's not a niche sport, is
not something you build a savings off of. And so
at a certain point I was like, all right, I
got to go back get my college a degree, and
I think I'm interested in psychology. I've been I've been
training and coaching in sports for a while, and I

(06:41):
think maybe that's the next step, And so I did
an undergrad that included a psych minor, and then towards
the end of that I was talking to a lot
of mentors about like, how do I how do I
keep carrying my experience into the next thing and keep
helping more people, because part of that experience of going
back to school at like twenty seven was I went

(07:04):
from being really really good at this really obscure thing
to being really bad at something that so many other
people were actually pretty decent at. And also like a
decade younger than me, it was like my world flipped
upside down, and it took a lot of work for myself,

(07:24):
and it took a lot of work working with therapists
and coaches and mentors to realign my skill set to
do well in college. And so I wanted to become
that resource for other people to help them translate skills
from sports to other success and sports psychology seemed like

(07:45):
the next thing, and I had a unique opportunity to
get into a PhD program with one of the highest
impact experimental psychologists in the world, who was also the
founder of one of the most modern psychological therapeutic methods,
acceptance and commitment therapy, and so I chased it and

(08:08):
I ended up doing my master's degree in my PhD
in a wing of psychology called behavior analysis, and under
my mentor Steve Hayes, where I got a really cool
opportunity because his lab was this like hybrid of clinical
psychology and behavior analysis, two different training wings, clinical obviously

(08:30):
focusing on like the therapeutic stuff, and behavior analysis being
a little bit more like experimental human behavior. And so
I got clinical training and I got experimental scientist training
and continue to carry this question of like, what is
the psychological skills that contribute to an athlete doing really well? Right?

(08:53):
And that ultimately turned into a a dissertation experiment that
focused on really really theoretical fundamentals of language and how
athletes and non athletes can learn to detect nuance or novelty.

(09:14):
I demonstrated that most of us are really really bad
at noticing when we don't know something, and so we
have a tendency to just fill in the gaps and
make assumptions and apply previous knowledge to novel situations, and
we can actually teach people to detect those novel situations

(09:38):
to be like, WHOA, this is a moment where I
don't know something. Maybe instead of just knee jerk automatically
filling in the blank with something that I think fits,
I can take a moment to explore this and see
what about it is novel and how I might better
take advantage of this situation. And the high level thinking

(09:58):
behind exploring this whole phenomena of like detecting novelty and
knowledge gaps is I suspect that there is a difference
maker for athletes between the athlete that is really good
at the like strict rule government practice, but not very
good in competition, and the athlete that's really good in

(10:19):
competition but okay at practice, And that difference is the
athlete that's really good at competition is able to notice
when the situation has changed and to kind of do
a micro bit of exploration of that novelty and take
advantage of it quickly to turn it into a competitive advantage,

(10:41):
whereas those that are really good at the practice side
have a tendency to just apply rules of practice to
competition even in moments where those rules don't totally apply,
and so they miss out on that competitive opportunity, right, Yeah,
So so that was my dissertation. It was obviously I

(11:05):
get super nerdy about it, but I thought it was
a really interesting thing.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
And astonishment parlaid into a book. Yet I've heard many
PhDs say that their dissertation is just a stone straw
away from a book.

Speaker 2 (11:19):
Have you.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
There? There are almost two hundred pages worth of writing
that could be turned into a book. It hasn't yet.
Life has a Shortly after I finished my PhD, my
partner got a job offered opportunity at another university and
they wanted her so much that they gave me a
professor position. And so I was like, well, okay, I'll

(11:44):
be a professor. Turns out academia is not really for me,
Like there are elements outside the classroom of academia the
I didn't find as satisfying to work with as working
directly with athletes and with coaches. And so after doing

(12:08):
that role for a year, I switched to full time
private practice coaching coaches and coaching athletes on mental skills.
And so will the dissertation become a book? Very possibly,
But building this business is priority number one. So like

(12:28):
that's the long story of the background you asked about,
like coaching philosophies. Yeah, and obviously this is shaped from
my training as a as a specialty field of behavior analysis.
But at the end of the day, my coaching philosophy

(12:48):
is it's the action that ultimately matters. Like, yes, we're
talking about mental skills, Yes we're talking about psychology of
the athlete, but they can think all they want. If
they don't do, they're not even going to get across
the start line. And so throughout this conversation, as I'm

(13:13):
thinking about these what we've talked about prior to the recording,
I'm almost always going to try and bring it back
to like and that's how we end up with effective
action or this is why we want to decrease that
particular behavior. Still talking about psychology, but we I try

(13:35):
to put it in terms of actual behavior.

Speaker 3 (13:38):
Yeah, that's very interesting. I would definitely like to see
more information in a book if you ever get to it,
because I've seen those athletes that absolutely love the training,
they love the training process, but when they get to
the actual competition they have a shortfall. And then I've

(14:01):
seen the exact opposite. I've seen, you know, some athletes
sort of you know, cobble together some training, whether it
be with a coach or on their own, and then
they do unbelievably in an event. And you know, I've
seen that before, and so you know, trying to bridge

(14:26):
that bridge that gap between good consistent training and also
execution in the moment I can see to be you know,
potentially very valuable. So you know, let's talk about.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
Some of that. I mean, mental skills.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
We hear that a lot, and every coaching program I've
been a part of has some form of, you know,
some mental skills component. But from the perspective of you know,
someone like yourself, if an athlete comes to you for

(15:08):
help or coach comes to you for help. With athletes,
how do you solve for in a conventional way is
called mental skills? What are you trying to solve for?
And what are some of the biggest opportunities that you
see with athletes?

Speaker 1 (15:31):
I mean, at the end of the day, what I'm
trying to solve for is how can we get the
athlete to do something that is meaningful action to them?

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Right?

Speaker 1 (15:40):
You know, for for a stereotypical athlete, meaningful action is
probably going to move them closer to the podium or
higher up on the podium, but that's not all athletes.
And like you and I have both coached. While I
was in grad school, I coached try athletes and cyclists
as an endurance coach, and now I'm doing the mental

(16:01):
skills stuff. And we know that a lot of our clients,
especially age group clients, it's not about the podium, it's
about doing something really challenging for them. And so their
race and their meaningful action is it's very unique to them.
So ultimately I'm trying to solve for the individual and

(16:25):
facilitating them to engage in more meaningful behavior. How that
comes about on a very general level, A lot of
times it has to do with building an ability to
be what we call psychologically flexible. What brought me into
grad school beyond just the sports psychology, What turned me

(16:49):
on to training under my particular mentor was this phenomena
that we call rule government behavior. If we think about sport,
it's maximizing our behavior within a set of rules. Do this,
not that, do this not that, do this not that.
And if we think about practice, we're doing a combination

(17:11):
of stressing our physiology in order to be able to
perform to the maximum within those rules and practicing how
to operate at the edge of those rules, the behaviors
around that. Yeah, the sometimes, like most of the time,

(17:33):
learning rules and behaving by rules is super efficient. You know,
you tell a swimmer, hey, take three strokes and breathe.
That way you'll be breathing on both sides. You can
also cite every third breath you know, that way you'll
keep going straight. And you can tell them that very
early on in then learning how to swim, and they

(17:55):
will swim more effectively instead of just throwing them in
the pool and say swim and learn. As you do it,
you know, you'll get people that never breathe.

Speaker 2 (18:05):
Right.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
I don't know if you've seen this, but the new
athlete that comes in and says I want to do
an iron man, You're like, okay, let's see you in
the pool. And they jump into the twenty five meter
pool and they get to the far end and they're.

Speaker 2 (18:15):
Like, yeah, absolutely. You know.

Speaker 1 (18:20):
So like rules help us move more effectively than learning
by doing. But sometimes we can start to apply these
rules in places and context where it's at best neutral,
like nothing happens because we did it, and at worse,

(18:41):
it's like destructive to us. For most people in that
worst case scenario, they look around and they go, well,
that didn't work, and they try something different. But for
some people they look around and go, that didn't work.
I'm going to try it again and again and again
and again, and the accumulation of those destructive consequences starts

(19:01):
turning into like we get chronic fatigue, we get training
while injury, we get like fear of failure. All kinds
of stuff starts blooming out of this rigid rule government behavior.
And so as somebody who's training mental skills, I'm going
to look for during assessments, during conversations, all that kind

(19:22):
of stuff, I'm going to look for rigidity. I'm going
to look for somebody that's like, I have to do
it this way all the time, every time, and I'm
very quickly gonna be like, Okay, at what points did
that not work?

Speaker 2 (19:35):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (19:38):
And one of the interesting places that I'm seeing in
working with athletes and working with coaches is rigidity around
what psychological skills are. Psychology as a field, as an
applied field, has gone through a number of what we
would describe as waves or or themes, so to say,

(20:02):
you had early like early early behavioral stuff, and then
you had what might be considered like Freudian things. The
Freudian stuff. You hear this all the time, like the
ego got in the way. That's Freudian terms that have
been taken way out of context. Then you got into
like cognitive behavioral revolution mid twentieth century and then the

(20:27):
neuroscience revolution, and somewhere in that time, sports psychology started saying, Okay,
this cognitive behavioral revolution says we should challenge our thoughts.
We need to be in an optimal state, and we
need to think right to do right. And somehow that

(20:54):
has stuck around since like the seventies, Yeah, fifty years now,
and I see a lot of rigidity around, like you
have to visualize, you have to have the right thoughts,
you have to be in a perfect state of physiological activation.

(21:14):
And that's all that mental skills are. And what we're
learning in experimental psychology, in therapeutic you know, clinical psychology
is it turns out that's not really the case, and
it's much more individual than that.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
Oh yeah, much more individualized.

Speaker 3 (21:36):
Yes, you take something like something that I come across
a lot, and that is and you can tell me
how you deal with just to unpack that a little
bit more. The desire for silver bullet or immediate results.
This is something that some part of this is a

(21:59):
part of just about every athlete I come across. You know,
you take something like you talk about swimming. Okay, most triathletes,
for instance, are non swimmers or swimming as their limitter.
So they'll come to the coach. Oh, you know, coach

(22:21):
Tony is going to teach me the maneuver or the
drill that's going to turn me into Michael Phelps in
three months. Right, So there there's that. You know, how
do you control for something like that? As as a
psychologist sports psychologist.

Speaker 1 (22:42):
The simper bullet mentality is everywhere in sports. Like, you're
totally right, but and and I think I think we
might be a little bit more accepting of this and
saying that, like, everybody that comes into sports has a
fantasy of what they want out of it, and it's
quick and they're gonna yeah, and that's cool because they're
willing to dream and they're willing to aspire to something.

(23:05):
But it does become an impediment to training if they're
not willing to accept ambiguity and grind and nuance, and
so in those situations like if there's if I'm working
with somebody who's like, no, there absolutely has to be
a silver bullet. There's a lot of rigidity around the
like there's going to be one thing that makes me

(23:27):
ten times faster. I'll actually start trying to build their
ability to sit with ambiguity, to sit with discomfort, to
simply exist in a moment when their brain is screaming

(23:50):
at them that they have to solve something. Yeah, and
we have we have different ways of doing that, and
so I try to tape that practice to the athlete
that I'm working with or to the coach that I'm
working with, but ultimately, ultimately the target behavior there is
to build their ability to accept that we're going to

(24:13):
dream and we're going to idealize, and we're going to want,
and while having those experiences and hearing those voices in
our mind that say there could be a silver bullet,
going up to practice, putting in the miles, putting in
the laps, getting in the pool when you're not sure
whether your stroke is quite right, you know, letting things

(24:36):
be imperfect, but continuing to engage in the behaviors that
are going to move us towards that meaningful outcome.

Speaker 3 (24:45):
Yeah, I mean everything. You know, every time you turn
around on social media, there's a new gadget, and athletes
love to spend money on gadgets that that's going to
be the next big thing improve their performance. And so
you know, spending a lot of time on the myth

(25:05):
busting and and just you know, generally, I think people
confuse the difference between what's true and what they want
to be true, which are two very different things.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
I think, and I.

Speaker 3 (25:24):
Know one of the present certainty that this works because
I did it and it had a profound impact on
me immediately, and it's it's a head wind. It's a
headwind for coaches in the in the mental skills space,
and I think there's opportunity here for professionals to come
in like yourself and provide provide a framework of dealing

(25:48):
with it. Let's switch over to if we could with meditation,
because I hear a lot of people talking about meditation.
I don't know a lot about it, and I always said,
you know, I really speak, was an expert in psychology,
to really feel ask whether or not there's any there's

(26:12):
any benefit from a performance standpoint or recovery benefit on meditation.
I tried it once and didn't have anything impactful. It
didn't impart anything impactful on me. I didn't really get
anything out of it. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's
not valuable. So what is the latest science meditation for

(26:38):
sport performance?

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Yeah, meditation, And what tends to go hand in hand
with that is this concept of mindfulness. It's it's kind
of like that Freudian ego concept where it has really
jumped the shark. It's moved into popular conversation and been
used in ways that don't reflect at all the science

(27:04):
or even the like Eastern traditions around it. So when
I'm talking about meditation, and I'm specifically talking about a
regular and intentional practice of building one's ability to stay

(27:24):
connected to the present moment, and that might sound a.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
Little bit.

Speaker 1 (27:30):
A little bit woo woo, but well, let me give
you a case study. There's this really interesting paper that
came out a couple of years ago. Came out of
China Olympic Olympic target shooter who, after a very poor
result in one Olympic year undertook a very intentional and

(27:54):
guided meditation practice as part of their sports psychology training
program for the next Olympic year, and their entire practice
was around counting. And what they would do is they'd
set a side time, just like you said a side
time to go do your running or go do your laps.

(28:15):
They'd set a side time to sit down and simply
start counting, and they'd count to ten over and over
and over again, and they would only count until they
had they noticed some sort of thought or feeling or
emotion that took them out of that present practice of counting,
and then they'd stop and they'd mark down how long

(28:37):
they were able to go. They'd have a time or
going and at first, you know, it was rare that
they could even count to ten before they thought of
yesterday or tomorrow or their partner or whatever it may be. Like,
we are constantly having thoughts and feelings and emotions that
are anchored in a time other than the present. And

(29:02):
over a series of weeks and months, this practice of
counting meant they could get to they could complete one
cycle of counting to ten without a disruptive thought, or
with the disruptive thought being present but not cooking, and
then two cycles and then three cycles, and then ten cycles,

(29:25):
and then it was a half an hour of counting
and then an hour of counting where they were able
to stay within the intentional, like present moment act of
counting while experiencing the thoughts and feelings and emotions without
those experiences taking over their attentive focus.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
Wow, okay, so.

Speaker 1 (29:47):
That's still that That still sounds really simple from like
a sport performance. You're like, Okay, cool, this guy can count.
But while the form of it is cool, this guy
can count, the function of it is this person has
now built their ability to sit with their thoughts and

(30:11):
feelings and emotions and engage in something right here and
right now for a very extended period of time, which
translated to engaging in all of the things that they
would need to do for their shooting practice while having
their thoughts and feelings and emotions without their thoughts and

(30:34):
feelings and emotions taking them out of that moment. And
the critical part of that goes back to our discussion
about like detecting novelty and engaging in effective action when
as an athlete we are in the heat of competition,
if we can be one hundred percent in that moment

(30:57):
and see what our competitors are doing, No notice what
our body is telling us. We have a tendency to
be so much more able to compete and take advantage
of the opportunities right in front of us. We may
notice that our competitors are sweating more, or maybe they
stop sweating. Okay, this person over here is dehydrated. I

(31:19):
am definitely hydrated. Properly, I can push a little harder
and crack them right. But if if in that same moment,
like those signals are still there, You know, if we're
running shoulder to shoulder with our competitor and we can
we're close enough to smell their bo and see their sweat,

(31:39):
and yet our mind is thinking about yesterday's last training
run or tomorrow's recovery meal, we might miss the details
that are right in front of our face right now
and lose that competitive ad. And so the science of

(32:03):
meditation does that when we build our ability to stay
present during competition, we have a tendency to engage in
effective action more frequently, which cumulatively can result in very
competitive like outcomes.

Speaker 3 (32:22):
Yeah, I can see that. Having concentration and not being
distracted recognizing things in the moment those are all things
that sound very palatable to me to an athlete. But
I think some of the stuff that I think it

(32:44):
seemed a stretch to me is that you know, this
idea that you're you know, you can sort of stop
the thoughts that are going on in your head, which
was really hard to do. I mean, there's always something
in your head popping in.

Speaker 1 (33:04):
Let me riff off that just a little bit, because
I want to highlight a distinction that you just brought
up that what I was saying about that like nineteen
seventies sports psychology, psychological skills. Yeah, there's something in there
that raises the hackles on the back of my neck.
And like my business partners, my mentors, all that thought

(33:27):
stopping right. There have been so many scientific papers published
in the field of psychology on what we call ironic
backlash or the white bear effect. If I tell you
not to think about a white bear, the absolute instantaneous
first thing you're going to think about as a white bear.
If I tell you to not be anxious on the

(33:50):
start line, the first thing you're going to do is
be like, oh, I should not be anxious right now.
I should not be anxious right now. I'm on the
start line, I should not be anxious right now.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
Right.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
The concept of thought stopping or emotional regulation as a
psychological skill comes out of a basic assumption that we
have that level of control over our psychological experience. And

(34:21):
this is where my training and my perspective differs from
a lot of people that are in the sports psychology
space right now, because that is use my language, absolute full.
We have demonstrated so many times that we don't have
that kind of control. And so the most effective strategy

(34:46):
for performance outcomes and engaging in meaningful behavior is not
to fight our own thoughts like playing with a Chinese
finger trap. It's learning to engage in meaning full behavior
while having our thoughts and.

Speaker 2 (35:04):
Feelings, got it. So that's the difference there.

Speaker 1 (35:08):
Yeah, And so the meditation as an intentional practice of
engaging in a behavior that keeps us in the present
moment while having our thoughts and feelings builds that basic
ability to have thoughts, to have feelings too, to have

(35:31):
a psychological experience and have like protected bandwidth to be
here and now and take advantage of the opportunities that
are right in front of us without our thoughts and
feelings yanking us into the past or into what is

(35:53):
yet to come.

Speaker 2 (35:54):
Yeah. Interesting.

Speaker 3 (35:57):
Let me ask you about something that is also a
bit mysterious with the mind hypnotism. So I had once,
I think it was a few seasons ago, I had
a a podcast on hypnotism. I was very curious about
this and if anybody has ever gone to a hypnotist show,

(36:24):
a performative show on hypnotism, it's a bit it's a
bit mysterious, although I can't explain it scientifically. And on
that podcast, I told the story about how when I
was in college, I went to a local hypnotist show
and one of the people that we came with got

(36:47):
hypnotized in the audience. So it's a bit mysterious. And
I'm curious, from a professional who has a background in
the mind the brain, what are your thoughts about hypnotism
if if there's any way that I know that there

(37:09):
is sort of clinical approaches where people try to stop
people from smoking or drinking and they use hypnotism, So
is there anything that is there anything there with hypnotism,
and particularly if there's efficacy, could this be used on athletes?

(37:35):
Could I hypnotize an athlete, for instance, to have more
confidence or be more consistent, or think that they're the
the they're not afraid of, you know, open water or
something like that.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
What are your thoughts?

Speaker 1 (37:57):
So I want to be a little bit careful about
this because first of all, none of my researcher training
has come up against hypnotism. So I can't speak as
an authoritative bigger on this. I'll just I'll just put
that out there right there. My my theoretical background is

(38:20):
fundamentals of language, how it works, and my kind of
pragmatic background is there can be useful things in many
different forms.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
And so.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Me twenty years ago, I had a similar experience, went
to a show. I actually was one of the people
who got pulled out of the pulled out of the audience,
sat in a lineup with like fifteen other people, tried
to engage willingly, and I was one of the ones
that got kicked out during the like filtering process.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
Yeah, I got kicked out as well. I just couldn't
do yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
Yeah. And so that's honestly the extent of my experience
with hypnotism. But if I look at it through the
lens of my training and background, which is how language
impacts behavior, I could see an avenue where somebody may

(39:27):
see material changes in how they their psychological experience hooks
or does not hook them. Right. When I say hook,
I'm like, sometimes sometimes we have a thought that we
don't even notice that that thought has carried us out
of the moment. It has just grabbed us and taken

(39:48):
us with it. And my background, my training is that
thoughts and feelings and emotions are all linguistic products. They're
linguistic behaviors. And so the premise, as I understand it
from a naive point of hypnotism, is somebody is talking
to you in a way that's intended to material materially

(40:13):
influence how you think about something, right, change your language
about a thing. So if there is a kernel in there, yeah,
I think it's possible it. The one thing that my
training and research has demonstrated is that language is we

(40:39):
have decades of interactions on a linguistic level talking to people,
talking to ourselves. It's kind of telling our own story
and retelling our own story, and twenty minutes or fifty
minutes with one person talking to us is for the

(41:04):
most part, a drop in the bucket of linguistic history.
So I have some skepticisms as far as significant influences go.
But at the same time, I've also written papers on
how we can have transformative cascades from very very small interactions,

(41:28):
Like if you conceptualize the therapeutic or the coaching dynamic,
it's the coach and the athlete having a conversation that
may be no longer than thirty minutes, and yet the
athlete's behavior being materially impacted outside of that conversation because
of language. It's not like it's not like you're the

(41:52):
one that's carrying them out of bed and throwing them
in the pool. You're just saying something and they're getting
up at a time, and they're showing up at a
pool and they're engaging in a stroke in a way
because you said something or you wrote something.

Speaker 4 (42:05):
Yeah, So we can when we communicate in a way
that athletes are receptive to it usually framing our instructions,
our rules, our guidance in terms of how they can
achieve meaningful outcomes, it can have a transformative impact.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
And so if hypnotism has an additional layer of reaching
that meaningful kind of note, then sure it could be effective.
But I can only speak to it on a theoretical level.

Speaker 3 (42:48):
Yeah, interesting, because I'm a skeptical of everything until I
see empirical evidence. But there's some mysteriousness behind it, right.
I don't know how you can put a human being
under and put them under and then make them forget things,

(43:09):
make them forget their own name.

Speaker 1 (43:12):
Well, let me as you talk about putting somebody under,
let me describe an approach that I've been trained on.
We have this, We have this approach that we call
creative hopelessness. A lot of times on the clinical side,
when when somebody's coming in saying I am suffering, I

(43:35):
need help, they're already aware that they're suffering, and they're
already aware that they need help because they've actually shown
up to get something right. But they're in a place
where they're not sure. Many times, they're not sure why
they're suffering. They just know suffering is happening to them,
and they're not sure why the thing that they're trying

(43:58):
to do to alleviate the suffering isn't working. And creative
hopelessness is a process.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
Where we.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
Talk the client through, like what have you done to
try and address this in the past, how well has
it worked? Okay, what else have you done? How well
has it worked? What else have you done? How well
has it worked? And it's this process of guiding a
client to connect with the consequences of their actions, right

(44:34):
because a lot of times when we go back to
this rigid rule government behavior, we see a disconnect. Somebody
is following a rule because following a rule is good,
not following a rule because following a rule is effective,
and so there becomes this disconnect between action and consequences.

(44:56):
And so creative hopelessness is the process of reconnecting the
client consequences and getting them to a place where they're like, oh,
I've tried a lot of things that have really not
worked for me. I'd like to try something that works.
And that's the creative part. The hopelessness part is a
lot of things haven't worked for me, and the creative
part is I am willing to try. And then the

(45:18):
conversation goes from there about what are the things that
are going to help you move towards meaningful behavior. So
I could see a potential pathway for hypnotism to induce
a similar state, a state of like I'm willing to try.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
Something, Yeah, susceptibility, and.

Speaker 1 (45:43):
There is before we move on to the next thing.
There's one other thing that comes to mind about hypnotism,
and this is kind of a maybe this is just
my own little thing, but in my naive perspective, hypnotism
strikes me as walking a really fine line but in
active consent.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
Yeah, yoh.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
Whether whether we have an athlete coming to us saying
we want to be a better athlete, or or somebody
coming to us saying we're suffering and we want help,
there is an active and ongoing consent process going on
about like would you like to continue to engage? Absolutely?

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Yeah, And.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
From my naive perspective, I have anxious thoughts about like
hypnotism might has the high potential for crossing the line
where it's no longer active consent. If it has this
potential for putting somebody in a very very susceptible position. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
but nuance is lost when when one is naive to it.

(46:45):
So that that was just something that came to mind.

Speaker 3 (46:47):
Yeah, and that's what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about
if somebody says, my main thing is I'm nervous when
I see really fit athletes, I can really nervous about
the competitive part and if I say, well, I can
hypnotize you, if you're willing, I can hypnotize you to
feel confident when you're in the presence of strong athletes

(47:11):
something like that, if that is possible. And I just
don't know if because your body is not going to
do something that it can't do and your yeah, but
maybe I just don't know enough about about it.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
So so here's something. Here's an alternative. You know, if
I had a if I had an athlete coming to
me saying, hey, I'm nervous when I see other fit athletes,
I suddenly have a lot of thoughts about like I
haven't done enough preparation. There's so much faster than me,
and it and it tends to like kneecat me before
I even start the race. I tend to approach that

(47:46):
from this, uh, this side of like the accuracy of
what our thoughts and feelings stay to us is fuzzy
at best. The way that we learn that we're going
to go step back for just a second. The way
that we learn to tell somebody that we have a

(48:07):
migraine or a stomach ache is we do something that's
publicly observable, like we hold our head or we hold
our stomach and somebody else says, oh, you have a
stomach ache, And that happens a couple times, and eventually
we go, hey, I have a stomach ache or I
have a headache. But it doesn't mean that the thing

(48:29):
that we feel internally is the same thing that they
feel when they report having a headache or a stomach ache. Right, Yeah,
that extends to emotions as well. When we get what
some athletes describe as anxious, our physical experience has a

(48:51):
tendency to be like elevated heart rate, slight sweating, a
little bit of muscle tone. But that same physical experience
is also being excited or being aroused. And so we
can we can look at a moment of anxiety and say, okay,

(49:14):
you're having a moment of anxiety. Maybe this is simply
a signal from your body, a real fuzzy signal saying
this is an important moment where you have an opportunity
to do something meaningful, right, and so you're excited and
and that's the way I describe it as a little
bit brute force. A lot of times there's an exploratory

(49:36):
conversation that uncovers, like what is the meaningful action that
is available to you in that moment where you're having nerves,
and through that exploratory conversation, we can transform the function
of elevated heart rate a little bit of sweating muscle
tone from like performance debilitating anxiety to performance enhancing excitement.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah makes sense.

Speaker 1 (50:06):
Yeah, And we don't need any hypnotism for.

Speaker 2 (50:09):
That, right. Yeah, it's like I get it.

Speaker 3 (50:13):
It's it's like a sledgehammer approach versus uh, you know,
a scalpeld approach, right, something like that. Okay, And I
know this is a little bit of a jump around,
but I only have so much time with you. I
want to make sure I get everything. A social influence,
so athletes coaches have different strategies with this, Right, So

(50:35):
when you go out on social media, you see performative
competition among athletes, right Strava people typically recommend athletes don't
use it, don't don't because of it. Yeah, just some
of the issues that occur with social influence and social

(50:59):
media and performing for the peanut gallery of social media.
How do you approach this topic with an athlete or
is it individualized?

Speaker 1 (51:13):
I can't get away from saying that it's individualized because
that's the core of my approach. But in general terms,
this goes back to what we were talking about earlier
of building an ability to sit with discomfort because as
humans we are a social species and social interaction is

(51:35):
this extraordinarily like what behavior analysts would call reinforcing kind
of experience. You know, if we do a thing that
results in social contact, we're going to do that more often.
And social media has created a like ivy drip of
social contact for engaging in the peanut gallery performative behavior. Yeah,

(52:01):
and so my approach in working with athletes is a
tendency to be like, Okay, yeah, that's going to produce
that little drip, but is it actually workable for the
big thing that you're working towards. Yeah, And building the
ability to sit with the discomfort of withholding the drip

(52:23):
and to engage in behavior that moves them towards the
most meaningful outcome also has a tendency to inoculate them
to a lot of these social influence kinds of sources.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
That's the cats, the inoculation well it looks like this
person is doing more work than I am, you know,
things like that, and the performance people, well, this person
rode one hundred and fifty miles this weekend. Well I'm
going to ride two hundred miles this weekend, right, and
it's against coaches orders. There's a lot a lot of

(53:00):
that going on.

Speaker 2 (53:01):
And then.

Speaker 3 (53:03):
And then there's the you know, there was one quote,
may you may your life be as magnificent as you
make it appear on Instagram, right, everyone is, you know,
showing the best parts and everything. Everything looks like it's
rosy when you're looking on social media, and then the

(53:27):
athlete is not seeing all of the trials and tribulations
going on behind the scenes, and that trying to have
them strike the balance between the inoculation and but also
you know, the positive aspects that they may get from

(53:47):
being you know, an influencer, right, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:53):
Yeah, And when I when I say inoculation, that that
metaphor is most giving them the ability to choose when
to engage in the performative behavior. Yeah, because going back
to going back to that whole like control versus acceptance thing,
none of us can ever stop the thoughts and feelings

(54:16):
around like oh, well that person did a hundred extra
miles today, or that person did ten thousand yards in
the pool this week. Yeah, and we can't stop those thoughts.
So building the ability to have those thoughts and do
the thing that is meaningful to us as an individual
instead of to the peanut gallery is what we work towards.

Speaker 3 (54:41):
Yeah, and that that's another thing. The other thing is
the I always have to prove to my people that
I'm fast.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Right.

Speaker 3 (54:52):
I had an athlete one time who was racing, was
not really having a good race for a range of
different reasons, but then took a phone out in the
middle of the event and started front running to their people,
I'm not having a good race. This is happening. That's happening.

(55:13):
Oh that this is wrong, this is I'm having this
issue at my foot. And it was almost like something
going on that I need to front and run this even.

Speaker 2 (55:23):
Before the race is over.

Speaker 3 (55:26):
And so these are the things that I think are
that some of the traps that I think are that
are out there with social influence, And this is really
one of the athlete psychology things that I think if
you know, someone could put together a framework that'd be
very interesting.

Speaker 2 (55:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
I mean that that immediate access to social contact when
something really really aversive is going on. You know, I'm
having a bad race, I'm going to live stream and
I'm going to start talking about people that are going
to give me thumbs up and send me hearts and
otherwise gauge with me to some degree, is freaking awesome.

(56:06):
Like to be able to connect with a community in
a meaningful way right away, that's so cool. But on
the other side, that can definitely become that like Heroin
drip of undermining behavior that's not workable in the long run.

Speaker 3 (56:20):
And to me, it's like there's something going on there
that the athletes felt like they had to do that
in that moment, something else that had to sit down
and explore and try to exercise. I don't know, or
change or I don't know. But before I get to
the end of your time, what are your thoughts on

(56:42):
the future of whether psychology or athlete psychology itself. I'm
curious to know. There's some people that think that psychology
will be completely usurped by neuroscience. And then of course
there's the March of AI and do you have any
particular opinions or thoughts there on where the future is going.

Speaker 1 (57:06):
I do, and at the risk of coming off as
an anti technologist, I'll share a hot take that was
pounded into my head by a try coach of mine
during my undergrad and it was it doesn't matter what

(57:29):
wearable you have on. It doesn't matter what AI you're
talking to. It doesn't matter how many billions of dollars
of research have gone into nurowimaging. None of those are
going to get you out of bed and move one
foot in front of the other to put in the
reps to make you stronger and faster.

Speaker 2 (57:46):
Yeah. Like I.

Speaker 1 (57:50):
My try coach when I was racing collegiate try We're
out on a run one day, cruising downhill and I've
got the latest in the great is wearable that's given
me heart rate and lap times and your barometric pressure whatever. Yeah,
cruising along at his shoulder, and he looks over at

(58:12):
me and just checks his like twenty five year old
TIMEX like barely a digital watch, puts it down to
his side and goes from running like a five point
forty five mile to like a five point fifteen mile

(58:33):
and just put me into the hurt locker.

Speaker 2 (58:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
Like that moment right there just really has stuck with me,
as like technology is amazing and I could be totally
wrong in the long run. But at the end of
the day, you still got to do the workout, You
still got to practice the skills. You still got to
put in the intentional motion and action, and so those

(59:04):
those things can be really helpful, they can be really assistive,
and they're getting better every day. But without the action itself,
we're not even getting across the start line.

Speaker 2 (59:18):
Yeah, agreed.

Speaker 3 (59:20):
All right, Wow, we touched some great topics. I'm glad
that we were able to get through to the mall. So,
if someone wants to reach out to you for your services,
how would they How would they reach out to you?

Speaker 1 (59:39):
The easiest way is email Patrick at Coachpatricksmith dot com.
Pretty straightforward. They can also find me on Instagram Catch
me you know Dmy Patrick Underscore Smith Underscore Aware. I'm
part of a small group of psychological skills coaches at
Aware Performance Group. We work with all kinds of different athletes.

(01:00:02):
Like I specialize in endurance athletes, cycling, running, trathlon, but
like my partner Billy Ryan, he he does volleyball and
golf and military athletes. And Trevor Jones is a former
European pro golfer that focuses mostly on golfers. So yeah,
we are available at a weird performance group or I

(01:00:26):
am directly available at coach Patricksmith dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:00:29):
Awesome.

Speaker 3 (01:00:30):
Awesome, and then you do the range not just at
psychology but also coaching as well.

Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
I do not I intentionally stepped away from the endurance
coaching because I want to work with endurance coaches. I
don't want to be a competitor to you. I want
to help facilitate you and your athletes.

Speaker 2 (01:00:48):
Awesome. I'm good to not have another competitor. Well, awesome.

Speaker 3 (01:00:53):
Thanks coach Patrick, and then make sure you guys go
follow them on social media.

Speaker 1 (01:01:01):
Thanks again, Thank you so much, Tony.

Speaker 3 (01:01:06):
Thanks again to coach Patrick Smith. Hey, you can jump
right over into the show notes and get the complete
information about coach Patrick Smith all of his experiences in
his background, as well as you can go follow them
on Instagram as well. Were you able to get some

(01:01:28):
nuggets out of that that helped you in your mental
skills and your planning, your process, your approach, I hope,
so thank you for listening.

Speaker 1 (01:01:42):
Follow Event Horizon and Durance Sport on Instagram, Facebook, threads,
and x for training and nutrition programs and on demand
learning to become a member of our Endurance Institute, or
for compus Eat.

Speaker 4 (01:02:00):
Archives of podcasts, log on to our website, event Horizon
dot tv