Live Inspired with Dr. Don Wood - Episode 1

Hello and welcome to live inspired with Dr. Dawn Wood. I'm Karen Seltz. I'm here with Dr. Dawn Wood of the Inspired Performance Institute. Today we're going to talk about maximizing your athletic performance. Whether you're a beginner or world class athlete, there's another level you can access. Find out what affects your performance and how to level up. Welcome, Dr. Wood. It's great to be here with you.

Hi, Karen. Great to be here with you, too.

Thank you. So tell us, you know, what exactly is it? What's that secret that is affecting people's performance?

Well, what we've discovered is that if we have unresolved trauma and what I mean by trauma, it doesn't have to be the big T trauma. It can be any kind of trauma in your life that is affecting the way your mind is operating in the present. So if we can't stay present and in the moment because our mind continues to loop through these resources, it's going to affect our performance not only mentally but even physically. So if the resources, if your energy is being drained because your mind is focusing on things that happened five years ago or 10 years ago, then that's going to affect the way your mind is operating now. And that's going to take attention, focus, energy away from your current performance.

Wow. Could you give us an example of that?

Yeah, just as an example and I use a lot of it with sports, but this is something that just came up the other day and I like using it because it made sense. Somebody goes on a show like American Idol and they are talking about how nervous they are, how scared they are to go on stage. When then when they get on stage, they start singing and you're going, oh my gosh, they're like an angel. Like, that voice is incredible. What was making them nervous? Well, it really wasn't going on stage. What it was was they've had experiences in their life where maybe they didn't sing that well or maybe they sung poorly and they got criticized. And so their mind is actually using those resources, thinking about what's happening now. Then the reason they're being nervous is not because of their ability to sing, but it's their ability to recall that old information. And that's what's giving them all those nervous butterflies.

So are the nervous butterflies a good thing to have performance?

No. I just had this discussion with somebody a couple weeks ago and they said, you know, well, those nervous, that nervous energy before they're going to perform is really good. It gets you ready. And that doesn't make any sense. Why would you want to drain energy away from what you're doing now? So I always say if I could sing the way some of these singers sing on an American Idol show, the last thing I would be is nervous. I would want to be out there performing. And if you take the best athletes in the world, you take a Tom Brady. Tom Brady can do amazing things. He's not nervous, he's in the moment. And as long as he's in the moment, he's going to perform at his best. That's why he can stand and get ready to throw a ball with a 280 pound player running at his face, because he knows he's got his job to do and if he gets nervous, it's going to affect his ability to deliver that pass.

That's amazing. So you've mentioned this concept of cellular energy because before to me, and I was wondering how that plays into all of this.

Yeah. What we've discovered is that when we have this nervous energy that we're talking about or we have things that are taking our mind out of staying present by the mind thinking about something that happened five years ago or 10 years ago, that's actually compromising the energy within the cell, the ATP. So the mitochondria, the cell itself has energy. If that is compromised because the cells are in a cell danger response based on being in a fight or flight mode, some of that energy is not available. And if that, if you have 90% of your energy or 80% of your energy available and the athlete performing next to you has 100%, that's going to make a difference between winning or losing.

Wow, that's amazing. And that reminds me of the athlete that you just helped win the Spartan race. Can you tell us about that?

Yes. I worked with him and he's obviously a great athlete anyway, so I didn't make him a great athlete. What I was able to do was keep his mind calm. So I gave him some tools to get his nervous system to regulate and when his nervous system is regulated before he starts the race, as he's racing, he's staying in a very present, very relaxed state. And so what ended up happening is that he ended up winning the world championships. Now he's obviously still a great athlete. So like I said, I'm not taking credit for his athletic ability, but if I gave him. I worked with a gentleman who's a pastor now, Pastor Tim Johnson, who won a Super bowl with the Washington Redskins, played 10 years in the NFL and what he said to Me is he went through the program and his staff went through the program. And what he said to me, he said, this is incredible because if you can give a world class athlete that little edge over the competition, that's huge at a world class level. Sometimes the difference between winning and losing. So at the Spartan race, Rob Killian was actually, he won the race by about a minute. And a minute at that level is very. Is very big. It's the same thing with Marco Chisetto. I worked with Marco, who's a potential Olympic hopeful. He's a marathon runner. He lost both his legs below the knee to frostbite. So he runs on the blades. And so before he came to see me, obviously he had the trauma of losing his legs and other traumas as well. He's from Kenya, and so they wanted him to come to see me to see if we could improve his performance. So after he went through the program, nine days later, he ran in his first marathon. He took 15 seconds per mile off his time, which was again, a major change. And then the second race he ran in, which was a couple weeks later, was the Boston Marathon. And he actually broke the world record for amputees in that race. So the way he explained it was. He says, it was all in my mind. So having that extra energy available allowed him to run faster. He didn't do anything different. I didn't do anything in terms of a training. All I did was be able to get him to keep his mind in a very calm, relaxed state. And that was the difference.

Wow, I love that. So you're talking a bit about trauma here. And I'm curious if you could just tell us, what do you mean by trauma? Does it have to be something huge or could it be something else?

Yeah, trauma is relative. So some people, trauma could be losing a job, you know, so, Karen, you could lose your job and you just go get another job. I lose my job and I fall apart. So that would be. I would say, oh, I had a trauma. You would say, what are you talking about? Just get another job. Right. So your situation would be different than my situation. So it can be big T trauma, big, or it could be small T trauma. Maybe a bully at school or a teacher that was harsh on you or a boss that is very critical of you. Those can be traumatic to the individual, depending on how they're responding on everything else that happened in their life.

Wow. So the people that come to you have all experienced some type of trauma, whether they call it that or not, Is that right?

Correct. So everybody has something. So even the Highest performing athletes, CEOs, executives, right, are all dealing with something. So I, for example, I worked with a major league baseball player who in a critical game, right, when he really needed to perform, he had runners at first and third and all he needed to do is either hit a sac fly or hit a, you know, a ball into the outfield, they scored a run and he popped up. So every time he got into that same situation at first and third in an important situation, right, he started to get nervous because his mind was going back into that time when he popped up and the coach was mad at him. So that can be a trauma and that's going to affect his performance. And it did. Because every time he got in that same situation, I worked with another golfer, a golfer who at one particular tournament there was a par 3. And it's a fairly. Not routine, nothing's routine for those guys, but Fairly simple par 3, but there was water all around it. And every time he played in that tournament, he hit the ball in the water and he said he would practice the same kind of shot in a different kind of situation. But when he got into a tournament, all of a sudden his mind would go back to every time he hit the ball in the water. And that's what he ended up doing.

So what happened after he worked with you?

Unfortunately, he injured his back and so he was on the disabled list. So he'll be back up next year. But.

So he never got a chance to play in that particular tournament again. So I'm looking forward to him going back to that particular hole again and seeing how he performs this time.

I'll bet he is. So what if somebody says to you, like, I'm already performing at the top level. What could you possibly do for me?

There's always another gear. Even the best athletes in the world have another gear. And so that's the whole idea. So when you're performing at that kind of a level, if you get a 1%, 2% advantage. So if I look at, you know, for like Rob at the Spartan race, if I gave him 1%, that's probably the minute, minute and a half that he won by. So it doesn't have to be a huge. Because they're already performing at such a high level. So we're not taking a guy who's, you know, you know, a sub average athlete and helping them win world Championship. That's not what the program can do, but it can improve him from 50 to 60%. So the gap up depends on, you know, the level you're at. So a high performer may be looking for that 1 to 2%. A person who's just, you know, an average could be jumping 20, 30%.

That's huge at any level, I would imagine that's huge. So we're not taking the place of someone's conditioning or natural ability. It's just getting them to that point where they can access that extra gear that you speak of.

Exactly. So staying more focused, more present in the moment. And then for example, Tim Burke, who's a professional long drive golfer, when he went through the program, he made. So he did that this year, the start of the year, the first tournament was in Phoenix and he went to that tournament and won it after going through the program and he made the finals of every single tournament all year long, ended up number two in the world. Now, he was already a great golfer, so I didn't make him a great golfer. But what he said was, I've never been so calm playing golf. So he stayed in the moment. And what he said to me is, in the first tournament he said, I know I probably wouldn't have gotten through to the finals because he says in one of the rounds he started to struggle a little bit, hit a couple of wild shots. He says now before I would have been focusing so much on what I was doing wrong instead of hitting the next ball. And he says that would have always led to me getting knocked out of the tournament. But he didn't because he could then go to the next shot and just hit the next shot. And it's a cliche in sports. You know you can only hit one shot at a time. Right. But it's true if you are thinking about the shots you missed instead of the shot you're hitting, it's going to affect your focus, it's going to affect your energy, and that's going to change the outcome.

Absolutely. So that's the choking under pressure that you could prevent by going through this program. That's incredible.

Absolutely.

So what would you say to people? How do they find you? How do they find out more about your program?

If you go to the inspiredperformanceinstitute.com one of the best ways is to watch testimonials. You'll see so many of the people who are telling about their experiences with the program and it's life changing, whether it's you just want to feel better or you want to perform better and even feeling better. So for people in a relationship, you know, if they're struggling in the relationship because they've had a lot of trauma in their life then if you can calm all that down, they have a better chance of staying in that relationship. But if they are constantly filtering through all their trauma, it's going to affect the way their mind is operating. It's going to affect the relationship. So check out the site, look at the testimonials and there's testimonials all the way from people who have suffered Big D trauma, addiction all the way to executives, CEOs and world class athletes.

Yeah, it's pretty incredible. I've looked at it and there are so many on there and I love the way you have them laid out where you can just choose a subject and it's right there. Phenomenal. So we will be doing this show every week, so stay tuned. If you have questions, post them in the feed and we will be sure to answer all of them. Thank you so much Dr. Wood. This has been fantastic and very informative.

I thought next week just to add to this what I want to in my book. I put this in because I worked with a professional golfer and I asked him do you think you need to be confident to play good golf? And so I'm going to basically change the way you look at confidence and we'll talk about that next week.

Perfect. Well, I like the little teaser there. So be sure tune in next week and we will see you then. Thank you for watching.

Thanks Karen.