Cultivating A Gold Medal Mindset with Apolo Ohno | #BossTalks | Salesforce

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Boss Talks, a series featuring candid career advice from some of the best in the business. Today we're going to focus on cultivating a high performance mindset, and there's so much we can borrow from the world of sports. When it comes to business, our career journeys are full of change, and developing skills like grit, resilience, and all those things can help us to better adapt and navigate uncertainty. To help me out, I've invited an actual gold medalist to unpack this topic. Apolo Ohno is America's most decorated Winter Olympian of all time. He's also an author, a speaker, and he's on a mission to help you reach your full potential in health, work, and life. Apollo, welcome to Boss Talks.

Thank you for having me.

Apollo, a lot of your philosophy is rooted in what you call a gold medal mindset. So tell us more about that. I know that's composed of five golden principles, so tell us what they are and why they're important for us to have.

Yeah, absolutely. So a gold medal mindset is heavily rooted in your own personal beliefs, your foundational values, the things that you know are prerequisites to you being and maximizing your best performance, regardless of whatever career path or trajectory that you are heading down. The first one is gratitude. And I think that through us kind of spending time and expressing our gratitude through a daily practice, two things happen. One, we maintain perspective. And maintaining perspective is very, very important as we zoom out. Two, we cultivate empathy. And empathy not only for what we have today, the most simplistic of things, but also in terms of how we interact with those who are around us. And three, being grateful and expressing gratitude alleviates stress in real time. You cannot be angry, you cannot be sad while you're in that present moment of having gratitude deeply rooted. And so that's how I start my routine on a daily basis. The second is giving. So how do we give selflessly to others, both in terms of our time, resources, attention, and give not only ourselves the best possible chance of having success, but making sure that we can transcend the limitations that have been imposed on us by the internal egos that sometimes restrict us or paralyze us from being our best? Number three is grit. I think everyone knows our own definitions of grit and what that looks like. So when we develop the mental stamina to create resilience and mental toughness to persevere beyond these really difficult times and challenges, what happens? We grow stronger, we adapt to those environments, and we realize that we can embrace change and we can embrace these things versus bracing for change and bracing for impact. You know, those big differences in terms of what that looks like. The fourth is gearing up. Now what do I mean by gearing up? Okay, well, preparing ourselves mentally and physically for the challenges ahead. Right. We're communicating in this mind body mechanism. So we need to be able to level up our expectations of performance, not only of our peers and coworkers and micro teams, friends and family, but also for ourself. And so we know that the only way to make drastic sharp pivots and moves is by demanding more from ourselves. The last and final is go. And what is go? Well, it's pretty simple. Just go and get into action, right? Go take the shot. Sometimes we suffer, at least I did for many, many years in my career, this kind of paralysis by analysis mechanism, right. I was so worried about not releasing this technique or this, you know, my full self until I ripped open the curtain because I wanted perfectionism. And I think perfectionism is great if you're able to lean on it as a lever. And it keeps this insatiable desire to always want to grow and be your best, but also recognizing at times that failure isn't always what we thought it once was. And I think the more that we can make a habit of picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves off, recalibrating that focus and then trying again makes for a much better approach towards, I think, the direction that we really want to head towards.

I know you've mentioned that you grew up with resilience and grit instilled in you. And it's such a gift to develop these qualities really early on in life. But it's also never too late. So what's your advice for learning to exercise some of these muscles like resilience and grit?

So growing up, you know, my father was very, very keen on trying to make me and mold me into this warrior like mentality, right. Waking me up at 3:30 or 4:30 in the morning when I was 12 years old, driving me to empty school and church parking lots when there was like no lights and my, you know, the lights on in our car and he would, he would tape a miner's light, strap a miner's light to my helmet, and I would just kind of skate around these parking lots and my rollerblade at like the age of 12, like that was pretty crazy. And what I didn't realize at the time was he was, he was really kind of, I would say, embedding this idea that hard work, resilience and everlasting consistency can really be incredible, powerful tool when you compound those micro changes and improvements over time. At the end of the quarter, at the end of the year, you've got this incredible breadth of consistency that is really, really powerful. But again, it is rooted in your ability to kind of understand the five golden principles and interact with them in the best way that it suits your life and your situation.

So I want to bring up burnout because I think it's really relevant to this conversation. And we get a lot of questions. Boss talks about it. And I've been writing a lot about high functioning anxiety, which is a mental health issue really brought on from behaviors like perfectionism and overworking out of just fear. And I love what you said a moment ago about just taking the time to breathe in and breathe out, slow yourself down. What are your tips, though, for making sure we take care of ourselves?

For so long, we have been told that you'll sleep when you're dead. More work is better, keep going seven days a week, keep grinding. And I think the reality is, look, there's some people who are superhuman. They have the ability to do those things, but we're not all that person. We're very unique and different in our own ways. And most of us require periods of hard work followed by periods of recovery, periods of hard work. And this cyclical nature that exists is the exact identical routine and ebb and flow that we have during physical training in the Olympics. And your body and mind need these moments of recovery and regeneration, not only from a physiological perspective, but psychologically. And so when you're taking a break, take the break, right? It's a big difference between fully connected as a cyborg to your device and thinking you're taking an hour off or 20 minutes off when you've actually not done any of that. And your brain needs to disconnect for a period of time to actually allow those memories to web into these spindles that actually create this amazing, amazing, beautiful catalog of what's actually happened throughout the day. And so I think many of us turn towards caffeine as a primary means of kind of keeping the wheels going. And eventually burnout is very real. When you are facing burnout, when you feel tired and fatigued and exhausted and you go to sleep exhausted and you wake up exhausted, take a look at the four foundational pillars. How are you sleeping, how are you eating? How are you moving? And how are you thinking? We're not striving for perfection here. We're striving for progress. And so how do you sleep how do I tweak that a little better? How am I eating? How do I tweak that a little bit better? How am I moving my body? It can be a walk and talk. It can be just moving around. It can be just stretching in the morning, whatever. It might be breathing. And then how am I thinking both in terms of myself, my true north, the things that I value the most, and then my interactions with those other humans around me. And I promise you things will change pretty quickly.

So you're all about action. It's so inspiring, and it's infectious even. What happens when we're feeling stuck, though? What are your tips for motivating yourself to make that first move?

Something that I do on a daily basis is I put my days up for review on a daily basis. And so I'll give you my routine, right? In the morning, I kind of have the three things that I like to write down that I'm grateful for. Then I like to say three things or four things that I would like to have happen today that would make today amazing, right? It can be things that are, I don't know, they could be like, just tasks that I want. It could be the way that I am dealing with food, right? Or with my workouts or with my focus throughout the day. And I look at these things, I keep them front and center. I write them down physically, I believe the tactile experience is very important. And then I have this kind of thoughtfulness, this manifesting component where I say, who am I? Who do I desire to be? What do I want? What do I want to glow with energy, right? Like, how do I want to interact with all of you today? My intentionality today is by leaving you with some sense of inspiration, motivation, and reaffirmation that you have the answers they contain between your own self. They're actually between your own two years, right? The world's greatest asset or the world's best, strongest prison? It's right between here. At the end of the day, I have another category, and I do the following. What were three things today that happened, that were spectacular, that were amazing, that made me feel alive? What were those three things? And the last is improvements. What are things that I can improve upon? What are things perhaps that didn't go my way, or maybe I fell off the wagon, or maybe I reacted in a way that wasn't best suited for what I overly what I actually really wanted? And how do I do those things a little bit differently for tomorrow? And they keep it simple, right? The simplicity is what makes it easy to adapt. Don't give your mind a vote. So when you're feeling stuck, start to retrain it and say, oh, there it is again. I feel stuck. How do I both analyze this, put myself up for review on a daily basis and start to make small incremental changes and tweaks in order to try and experiment beyond to break free from this little chasm that I've been living in.

We have come to our final question, but it is my favorite question to ask everyone and I cannot wait to hear what your answer is. So Apollo, what is your superpower?

I believe my superpower is in the ability to connect with people and help them see that light that already exists within themselves.

That's amazing. Motivational speaker there, Apollo. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing more about your experience and your journey. And I just love all the helpful tools and tips that really are going to help us become more like athletes in the workplace. So thank you again for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

I hope you all enjoyed today's conversation. And to watch more episodes of Boss Talks, check out the new Salesforce plus. And to continue those boss building skills, head on over to trailblazer.salesforce.com to join millions of trailblazers who are learning relevant skills, connecting to fellow trailblazers, and giving back with the Trailblazer community. With that, thank you for tuning in to Boss Talks and I'll see you all next time. Sam.