The Parent's Role: How Parents Impact Their Child’s Performance with Coach Dr. Bobby Low (Part 1)

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Welcome to Finding Noble, a podcast where we climb into the world of young people's mental health and where we provide support for the adults who support them. I'm your host, Carly Red.

Welcome to another episode of Finding Noble. Today we are talking about the parent role in performance, how parents can hinder hurt or help performance. We have Dr. Bobby Lowe with us and we have Eric Red with us today. Hi, Eric and Bobby.

Hello.

Hi, Craig.

Hi. Dr. Senor cannot be with us today. We're very lucky to have another wonderful co host, Eric Red. Now, before we get into this, I'd like to tell you guys more about Dr. Lowe. He earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at BYU and where he was a two time Mountain West Conference champion and NCAA All American pole vaulter on the BYU men's track team. And then he went on to complete a master's degree in sport and performance psychology, an education specialist degree in counseling psychology, and a doctorate of philosophy in sport and performance psychology from the University of Missouri. Am I getting this all right so far?

Yeah.

I thought this was really interesting. Dr. Lowe's dissertation explored the lived experiences of Olympic medal winning athletes and the attributes that help them navigate critical moments and contribute to winning medals. He's worked as a mental strength coach for varying universities and athletes at every level, from high school up to the professional level. And he's worked in management consulting for years, consulting and coaching executive leaders and teams for many Fortune 500 companies. And now is this right? Are you still continuing all that other work? And you're located now at byu, working there as an assistant director of Mental Pract Performance.

Yeah. So I'm here at byu. I work in the athletic department. And my job and my responsibilities here are to help the athletes learn how to think while they're on the field or the track or the court when they compete. We know that. We know that there's lots of things that come into our minds as players or as athletes that interfere with our performance, that block our performance, that inhibit our performance. My job is to help them unblock all those things and teach them the correct thinking patterns so that they can unlock their performance and perform their best. I still do a lot of executive coaching, just as on the side as I've built relationships over time. So as coaches and leaders, or as executives and leaders want to improve their thinking and their skills inside of their domain, which, you know, call them a corporate athlete. Right. They're working in a business environment and they still want to maximize their skills and their abilities through thinking. Right. And Then I have a project I'm working on to help give world class mental skills training and tools to athletes at the high school level. We built a software product, we built a tool to help deliver that to players and teams at the high school level. We know that high schools don't have access to this kind of training. They also don't have the budgets for this kind of training. And so we wanted to try and build a tool to then give back to the younger players, which we might all agree is the most influential and the most important time to kind of start learning those mental skills to help them perform their best. You know, when they usually get to the Division 1 level or even the professional level, a lot of times it's a little bit late in the game to start learning and developing those skills. Or at least it would have been more helpful if they had started to learn it earlier.

Wow. I definitely feel that way. And I wish our son had had that going through high school. He's a senior this year and that would have been really helpful for him and for us as parents too. I'm really interested in learning about not only what's helpful for the kids, but also how parents are influential in our kids cognitive health. And I'd love for you to talk more about this. I know that you talk about it as comprehensive mental strength training. What does that mean? Comprehensive mental strength training? Yeah.

So that's one of the ways I like to just look at it as I think about my training, my research background, my experience and kind of what led me to this point. Right. But we got to go back in the history of psychology a little bit. Right. So if you take psychology and you put it on a continuum or mental health on a continuum, and on one side you have completely mental healthy. Right. We'll call it the health side. And then the other side you have the unhealthy. Right. Going back hundreds of years, psychology researchers, philosophers, psychologists really spent most of their time studying what is wrong with people, what is wrong with people, what causes them to be mentally unhealthy, and then trying to give them tools and skills and even medication and treatments to help them move from the unhealthy side to normal. Right, Right. And it's really been only the last 30 or 40 years that psychology has shifted from only studying and researching what's wrong with people and what's causing them to be mentally unhealthy and helping them get back to normal to. To also studying, well, what's right with people, what is causing mentally healthy people to. To Help them be healthy and flourish and be resilient and tough, right? Like, what are they doing? And how do we bottle that up and turn that into skills and training and then help everybody who's maybe on this end, or even neutral move up the continuum? The continuum to become mentally stronger, Right. I think about mental health, and I think about the antidote of any mental health disorder or mental challenge as mental strength, right? Just like, we gotta build our physical bodies, and we do all the physical exercise and the physical training, and that includes nutrition and sleep. And, like, we gotta build strong bodies, we also have to build strong minds. And so comprehensive mental strength training for me is more about. And you could say I've been influenced by a lot of researchers out there, but Mark, Dr. Martin Seligman out of the University of Pennsylvania was really like the guy who flipped the switch for me on this whole idea of study what people are doing well and what's working for them, and then let's teach everybody else those things. So a lot of my research and a lot of my background in training has been focused more on that side of things. And so we. A lot of my research has led to building a framework and building a model that. That I use in my individual practice here at BYU and also with clients and in the tools that we've built using technology. But there's really eight mental strengths column. We'll call them mental strengths, right? But there's eight categories that kind of build up our mental strength. Within those eight categories, there's 50 or 60 individual mental skills. And when I say mental skills, this could be directing your attention or building your confidence or even managing your emotions and your anxiety in different ways. Right? And so there's a lot that goes into it, but that's been the model that, through my research and my studies, and even what we've learned as we've worked with hundreds and hundreds of players leading to this is what high performers are doing consistently day in and day out. That's leading to great outcomes. Winning championships, becoming an NBA mvp, winning conference championships, NCAA championships. So we've. We're seeing great results with it, right? So I call it comprehensive mental strength training, but really it's building the skills, the mental strengths that help us perform our very, very best.

Wow. I love that. So much of it is reliant upon mindset. I think as parents, we spend so much time and money helping our kids physically in their skill training, and we get them all the right coaches and all the right additional training, whether it be strength training or technical Skills or even in the fine arts, music training, all different coaches in that area. I wonder how many of us as parents are really helping our kids with the mental strength training side of it, which, I mean, obviously I don't want you to give a percentage, but how important is that in conjunction with the physical?

Yeah. So I, I, yeah, just to answer the question, right. It's low and not intentional. I, I think most of us, like, it's easy to look at the physical side and get kind of immediate feedback, right? Like you put a kid through training, they develop skills and you're like, wow, they got better. Right. But on the mental side, it's a little bit more difficult to see the immediate feedback in the results. Right. Also, I think just broadly, not a lot of people know exactly where to look or what to go and get. Right. Like, I can go and get, I mean, both of you come from basketball families. Like, I can go and find a basketball trainer, right. And I know exactly what I'm going to get from that. When you look at the mental health world, because there are specialists all the way through that continuum, it's hard to know exactly where to find the right skills to help a player at different places on the continuum. Right. Because we work with players here who have eating disorders and major depression and generalized anxiety disorder. Right. And we have specialists here that help them with those specific needs all the way to the other side, which is a lot of what I do is more focused on just the performance side and helping them think while they're competing. Right. But, but here's what I'll say. You're exactly right, Carly. We spend so much time and energy and money on the physical side and we sort of ignore or neglect or forget that we also gotta do it on the mental side. I learned from Dr. Keith Henchin is, is one of my mentors and he, he was at the University of Utah and he worked with the Utah Jazz during their heyday, right. So he was a good friend of Jerry Sorone. He was right there with Karl Malone and John Stockton and the team. You know, I won't bring up the trauma from Utah losing back to back.

Every year.

But he shared with me something that's always stuck with me. He says, look, the, the physical side of the game is 90, 95%. Right. Can't ignore that. The mental side of the game is 5 to 10%. Right. But the mental side controls and governs all of the physical side. I'll add this. If you develop or even have all of the physical abilities and all of the physical skill sets, they essentially are useless if you don't have the right mental skills. Help them, Let them come out right. If you can't make great decisions on the court and focus and be confident, like, you could have all the best skills in the world, and they just won't come out. And. And unfortunately, we see that with players that will climb all the way up to the top and maybe bust or wash out or give up, because a lot of that has to do with the mental side that controls all of the physical side.

So. Dr. Lowe, I don't know if you read Ryan Holiday's work at all. He writes about stoicism, so Marcus Aurelius, his meditations, all those kinds of stuff.

Very cool.

So there's a quote that came to mind, and in the world of stoicism, the quote says, we don't rise to the occasion. We fall to the level of our training is what it is.

I've heard that. Yep.

Anyway, I would love your perspective on that as it relates to just general performance and maybe as you see it from a mental performance standpoint.

Yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah. What I'll say there is. Most of us players, parents, executives, most of us never fully maximize our potential, right? So if there's three pieces that go into the equation of high perform, high performance, right? You got the potential. Like, to play basketball, you just. You kind of have to be tall. You have to have some abilities, right? Like I washed out early because my 510 frame was just not gonna carry me very far. But you have to have the potential. And then you have to put in all of the training, right? You have to train and develop the skills, and then you gotta figure out or learn how to remove the interference. And that third piece is where the mental training comes into play. So I'll say a lot of players and a lot of people just in generally never fully maximize their potential because we never get really good training or understanding on how to control the mental side and remove the interference to allow our physical abilities to come out. I'll share a study with you that sort of echoes this. So endurance running is one of the sports where you can really measure this. And there's a study out there where they broke two groups, and they said, okay, we're going to give you an endurance test. And I don't know the exact details of the test, but it's basically, we're going to have you run for 10 miles, okay. And they measured their energy output, they measured their fatigue levels, and they did a pre Test. Right. They had them all run and then they broke them up into two groups. And one group, they just let a few weeks go by and they had them do the test again. Right. That was a control group. Do it the first time, do it the second time. And they didn't find any gains. Right. That was the baseline. And then they took the second group and they just taught them how to talk to themselves while they run, using proactive instructional self talk. Right. And then they said, this is what you say to yourself while you're running. So during the endurance test, just say these things. And they gave them a whole bunch of cues and a whole bunch of language to use during that test. And they found that the runners in that group exhibited 22% more energy output and, and a reduction in their fatigue levels. Right. So they basically ran faster and ran further just because they learned how to talk to themselves in the correct way when compared to their pre test and the control group. So just to put it into perspective, most of us don't all the way know what our true potential archery limits are there and how high we can go if we can really dial in the mental side of the game.

I'm so curious to know what are some of the things that they told themselves that helped them?

Yeah, I need this for my treadmill workouts because my setback is like, what's wrong with you? Why are you so out of shape?

Why is this so hard? So, Eric, I love that you even brought that up. Let's dive in a little bit to the neuroscience on this first. So our brains, and actually I'll call it our mind because our brain is full up of, is full of blood vessels and cells and tissues, and that's the more structural part. Right. But the mind is both the conscious side and the subconscious side. The subconscious side is full of our habits and our muscle memories and our behaviors. And that's a big part of the mind. It's 90% of the mind. It's basically a big storage bank of everything we observe, everything we've learned, all the environmental things that we've picked up. So that's the subconscious mind. Then you have the conscious mind, which really is responsible for like our decision making, our emotional regulation. And it's all of our thoughts. Right? It's all of our thoughts. Now, my research and what I've studied, really the mind, the conscious mind, is a hundred percent governed and controlled by the words you put into your mind. Even if you want to create a picture like imagine an apple or imagine a banana or Imagine the Mona Lisa. You have to use words to create that picture. And then your mind is magical, right? Like it'll create an image. But it all starts with the words that we put in our mind. And you just described to me what you say to yourself when you're on the treadmill. You said this. This is horrible. I hate doing this. Why is this so hard? My legs are fatigued. My legs are tired right now. A couple of pieces to add is that the mind is objective. So a couple things. One, it can only handle one or two thoughts at a, at a time. It can handle millions of thoughts in rapid succession. So we can think and think and think. And our hand, our. Our mind will handle a lot of those thoughts really, really fast. But it can't really handle more than one or two thoughts. The other piece that's really interesting is its objective. It doesn't really understand do's and don'ts, right? Or it doesn't really understand what thoughts are helpful or what thoughts are harmful, but it understands the object of the phrase and that it's an instruction. So when you say things on the treadmill like, wow, this is really, really hard, or my legs are really, really tired, your brain doesn't know that's a harmful thought. It just interprets that as Eric is saying this. So that must be important. So I'm going to store that in the subconscious. And then the subconscious sends a signal to our body that gives the instruction. So now your body physically starts to become more fatigued. It physically starts to get tired because of those thoughts that we were saying in our mind. All of those thinking patterns we call neuropathways, we can create those neural pathways and those thinking patterns, they can either be positive or they can be negative. But again, the brain doesn't understand the difference. We only understand the difference because of how it affects our performance. So, Carly, going back to your question about what were those runners saying to themselves when it. It really had a lot to do with, hey, I got this, I can push a little bit further. I feel calm, I feel relaxed, I feel great, I feel energized. Right? And so a lot of those phrases are now sending instructions to the body that actually enhance performance. It's allowing them to push a little bit further. It's allowing them to exert a little bit more energy.

When that's so fascinating, I feel like even just knowing that scientifically, if I tell my brain this, I can trust, if I'm saying this to my brain, I actually will start running better. I will actually start Running harder, longer, faster, whatever that is.

So great.

I feel like I can fall back on that. I'm sure that becomes very circuitous as time goes on.

Yeah. So a lot of the times here in our work here with the players will get really specific on individual tasks that they can say to themselves at different points in a game or in a match or in a race that then sort of enhances the performance instead of limits it. So a great example comparing this to your, your treadmill running. We work with the cross country team over here and they're running 8,10ks as their race and at different points in the race they'll get to places and they'll start to say to themselves, oh man, my legs are dead, I am so tired. Or they'll be part of the lead group and they'll drop off of that lead group and they'll say, man, I stink cause I can't hang with that lead group. All of those thinking patterns just drain their energy and drain their performance. And so we work with them to say, hey, when this happens, what's the proactive, what's the instructive thought that you're going to say to yourself? And we actually build that language. And they practice those skills. Right, they practice those skills in their training when they're out on their 10 or 20 mile or a hundred mile runs. And so they start to program their mind to say the correct things in those moments. So there you go, little free performance training for you next time you get on the treadmill.

Yes. So we have little kids and so we're very well versed in little kid movies. But one that comes to mind is Nacho Libre. When they're massaging Ramsey's legs and arms and they're saying his legs are number one and his arms are number one. So I'm going to adopt new mantras of my legs are number one and my is number one.

It's, it's interesting. I'm gonna, I'm gonna add to that a little bit cuz it's interesting you use the, the language of, of my legs are number one. Are you guys familiar with Dr. Carol Dweck's research on growth mindset? Mindset, yeah. Anyways, tons of studies that came out of Stanford University. But one of the things that has always stuck with me and that we try to train here is when we are one talking to ourselves but also praising other people, it's really important to praise the task or the effort rather than the trade or the outcome. So one of their big findings in their Research was they did a study with kids and they broke them up into two groups and they said, we're going to praise these kids and we're going to tell them, you guys are so smart, you guys are really intelligent, really smart. And they were praising the trait. Right. And then they took the other group and they said, you guys work really hard. You guys know how to learn and know how to study. And they praised the activity, they praised the task. And what they found when they started to test these two different groups is that the group that was praised for their effort and their the tasks ended up enduring and staying with challenging puzzles and tests longer. Right. And they ended up learning better because they were being praised for the process rather than praised for the trait or the outcome. So if you were to meet with me and you were to tell me that phrase, I would say, that's a good phrase, but let's switch it from the outcome or the trait to what are the specific tasks that make your legs number one. And then you would give me the specific language there. And then that would be how we would coach you there on the specific process.

I'll do that. Maybe I'll adopt a Lightning McQueen. I am Speed instead.

Yeah, that's good. But it goes back to Carly. I know one of the questions is, how can parents help their kids with performance? This is one of those things, right? Instead of saying, wow, you're so talented or you're so gifted as a basketball player or a track and field athlete or a soccer player, instead of praising the trait, we need to praise the process. What made you become a great basketball player or soccer player? Well, it was the training and the practice and the effort and the repetitive skills and drills that you put in that helped you learn and develop those skills. Right. I coach an eighth grade basketball team, a bantam basketball team for one of my boys and we win some games and we lose some games, we're like right in the middle. I'm trying to break above that 500 level in win loss record. But every time after we lose a game, I'm always saying to the guys, I'm saying, okay, now what do we do? Well, we go back and we train and we develop the skills and we get better. And the more we can do that, the more like we are going to win. Right? And then we're going to go and we're going to win some games and then we're going to still come back and say, okay, what are we going to do? We're going to go, we're going to train. We're going to get better. We're going to develop the skills, we're going to master the skills. And it's this ever evolving growth. You win or you lose and then you go get better. Right. And then you win and you lose and then you go get better. Right. And so this is a place where parents can really help direct the attention of their kids or their players onto the process rather than the outcomes or the traits.

I have another question because as you're talking, I think one, how wonderful would it be to have you as one of my children's coaches? That would be fantastic.

We. I'll tell you this, Carly, we are so mentally tough. We've got to get better with the skills. We've got to get better with the skills.

But that being said, we've encountered this quite frequently with our own children and we see it all around what happens when you aren't presented with a coach or a teacher or a leader who creates a healthy environment for growth. And what happens when your child, who may be mentored at home to think these thoughts or think this way, but then they encounter a coach who is tough, a really tough coach, which I would say is more the rule than the exception. I don't think it's very often that you encounter a Coach K. We watch Coach K's masterclass and are like, well, this is what a coach could be. But most of the time, their parent volunteers, they don't. They. They coach the way they were coached and they don't have a lot of information on how to best bring out the best potential in their players. It is something we frequently talk about. The potential is there, the skill level is there. And yet, like you said, because of the mental breakdown that occurs, so many of them don't perform to the best of their ability. And as a parent, I cannot say anything more frustrating than that when I'm watching not just my child, but kids I've known who've played forever freeze or get angry or scared or just completely shut down because they're afraid of some coach or even a parent that might be putting pressure on them.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, what you're describing, there is a huge need. Right. We are just parent volunteers most of the time. And we do end up resorting back to the old habits or the old programs that we either grew up with because that's how we were coached or that was the behaviors of strategy of the coaches that we had. And I think it's a huge need. Coach education is a huge need. But we're in the situation that we're in. And so what I would share with parents and specifically with players, the mental skill here is being able to direct your attention onto the specific, relevant table tasks. And so we really tell them, control what you can control and think about the specific tasks that help you play. Great. So here's a great example. Let's imagine end of the game, we're down to kids at the foul line. He's got to make. He or she's got to make two foul shots to win the game. So often we hear coaches throw out a phrase, something like, hey, don't miss these shots. Because if you were going to lose the game, right, Kid knows that, the kid knows that. The kid knows that they're standing in the line knowing, hey, I want to make both of these shots, and if I miss both of them, we're going to lose the game. So in that moment, if I can go and coach the coach, I would say give them the specific task, help direct their attention. What coaches often miss, and even parents, is when you say a phrase, it imprints on the mind of the kid. They will hear that. And so if you say something like, don't miss, remember what we talked about with the neuroscience? The brain only hears the objective party. Here's miss. And then it's thinking in a reactive way, which then impacts our muscle tension. It makes us a little bit more tight. Our anxiety spikes just a little bit and mostly imperceptible to us, right? But it spikes a little bit. And then what does the kid do? He shoots it up there. He hits it right off the front eye. Instead, a coach should be going out there and saying, hey, you got this. Focus on your specific tasks. Just follow through and put it in the net. Now, if you're not going to get a coach like that, what do I teach the player? The same thing. Okay. You now just need to focus on your specific task to help you execute a great free throw shot. What are they? Oh, if I balance my feet and I push through my legs and I follow through my shot, that's going to help me shoot the best shot. Okay, perfect. Regardless of if it's the beginning of the game or the end of the game, that doesn't matter. You're just going to focus on those specific tasks and then say to yourself, I'm the best free throw shooter in the gym. I can make any shot anytime, anywhere. And then focus on those cues and let the free throw go. Now, is it perfect? Will it always lead to two made baskets and Winning of the game, not always, but you're going to give yourself a better chance and the probability will be in your favor more often than if you go out there and think, don't miss. Right? So if I could coach the coach, I would, right? Let's go fix the coaches out there and help them do that.

Can you give up, please? Can you just go do that?

And even the parents, right? Like how many parents yell from a stands, hey, Billy, don't miss this shot. You're walking home right away. You're just killing that woman.

So I guess a follow up question would be, let's assume you have a coach that way and they have a system. They run and it's a difficult system and maybe the coach can't communicate in the way that you know that you're talking about. What can we as parents do at home to alleviate that pressure when they're in that moment? What can we do to help prepare them in that way?

Parents again, going back to the neuroscience, we build these positive neural pathways and really they're just thinking patterns. So a good thinking pattern is, I'm the best free throw shooter in the gym, I can make any shot. And these are the specific skills that help me make any shot. So parents at home, if they can reinforce those thinking patterns, that's going to help build what we call that mental strength. That's going to build that mental strength. Now let's say a coach will be sharing the opposite types of language and words and phrases like, hey, don't miss this shot or you're going to, we're all going to run suicides until my legs fall off. Like they're going to have that. It's really important for a player to develop the mental strength so they can manage that interference. Because in that moment that is a distracting, interfering thought. So they need to be able to go, okay, I hear what the coach is saying. The coach is really just saying, make the shot. Great, I can translate that. And here's what my mental strengths are. I'm the best free throw shooter or golfer or runner. Here are my skills that help me execute the task well. This is what I'm going to focus on. So parents need to be helping to build and reinforce those thinking patterns that a player can do on their own in those moments. And then we say, hey, just control the things that you can control. And you can always control your thoughts, you can always control the words. You allow to sit in, you allow to occupy that conscious part of your brain. Right?

I like that especially too because as you're clouding out any of the other stuff happening you talked about. It takes intense focus, and your brain can only focus on. What did you say? Two things at a time. If that's what they can focus on the task at hand, the free throw shot, the defense slide, whatever it is, putting their hands up, does that essentially crowd out the rest of the negative pressure that's happening outside of the moment?

So the brain will wire in. It will wire in the things that we say the loudest, the things that we say the most with the most detail, and the things that we say the most often. Okay, so if you're saying to yourself, I am a horrible free throw shooter, I miss every time I get to the free throw line, your brain is wiring that in and it's starting to believe that. So we have to build the opposite neural pathway there. Here's a great question. If you're thinking about the specific task and you're occupying your mind with those specific tasks, what are you not thinking about? If the brain can only handle that one thought or two thoughts at a time, it's not thinking about, don't miss, or it's not thinking about, man, I'm going to let the team down. Or it's not thinking about, coach is going to punish us if we don't get this right. Like, it's just thinking about the specific task.

Okay, say that again. So it's the loudest, the most detailed and the most often. What do you mean by most detailed?

The brain loves specificity. So here's a good example. If you just say, think positive, what is positive? Brain doesn't really know what positive is. But if we start to break down, what is positive thinking? Well, it's built up of, well, there's gotta be some confidence building thoughts, which is me saying, hey, I am great at something. So the brain, rather than just saying, think positive, we want to think specifically and use specific words. So the brain responds better to me saying to myself, I am a great pole vaulter and I know these specific skills help me jump really high. So when we teach people, okay, don't just think positive. It's gotta be more specific than that. We gotta have the confidence building part and then we gotta have the specific tasks. So, Bobby, what makes you a great pole vaulter? Well, if I hold the pole this way, and after I leave the ground, I row the pole and then when I go upside down, I pull really hard. Those are the three things that are going to help me jump high. Great. Think that. So when we say think Positive, it's really means think with specificity. The brain loves details. And so when I work with players, we work specifically to get down to those unique tasks that help you execute a skill better. Right. So a good thing in basketball, if you want to be a great defender, what's like the. The most basic fundamental task you have to do to be a good defender? Well, it's move your feet. You just have to move your feet whether it's right or left or forwards or backwards. Like, just move your feet. So if we can get players thinking all the way down to that specific task, that's going to be more helpful to them than just, say, be mentally tough or think positive.

Okay, so what happens when we're doing all that and we still mess up or that still messes up? How do you come back from that? How do you continue with the growth Mindset? I think the word is resiliency. Right. Like, how do you not let that alter or affect your performance in the next quarter?

Yeah, so. So one of the things that we help people understand, your brain has three time zones in it. So if we drew a line here and. And on the bottom of the scale, we put the. The past, the present, and the future. Like, those are the three time zones that our brain often will jump between. And then on. On this side, we put low performance and high performance, and then we drew sort of a rainbow or a inverted, uh, across that bottom line. You would have low performance when our brain is in the past. You would have low performance when our brain is in the future. And then you would have optimal performance when our brain is focused on the present moment. And so, Carly, what you described is, well, let's say you get to the free throw line and you miss those two shots, but there's still a few minutes in. In the game, and, and. And you want to still win. If we let our brain go to the past, what do those thoughts look like? Oh, man, I just missed those two shots. We're going to lose the. Well, actually, what happens is it'll usually jump to the past and it'll jump to the future. Oh, man, I just missed that shot. Now we're going to lose the game. So now my brain has jumped to the future, or now we can't come back. Oh, I feel so bad. I feel guilt and shame. I'm a horrible teammate because I just missed those two shots. Right. I let everybody down. Now we're not going to win the game. So the. A lot of times our words will cause our mind to jump from the Past to the future, past the future, past the future. And if we're doing that, our performance is going to stink. Because remember, if those are the thoughts that we're occupying the space with, what are we not thinking about? Well, what the very next play is. If there's 30 seconds on the clock, you've got to get back on defense and you've got to make a stop. You've got to get a steal or foul and so you can get them to the foul. Right. Like we see all the game strategy, but as an individual player, our job is to direct our mind onto the very next specific task that helps us play great. So that would be get back on defense. Go, go make your assignment. If I relate this to pole vaulting, so maybe I'll come back and tell my story about pole vaulting. But I was a pole vaulter. That's what I did all the way from junior high up to the professional level. And if I would miss a jump, I'd run down the Runway, jump over the bar, I'd miss it, I'd knock it off the very next jump. What am I thinking? Well, I'm thinking the exact same specific thoughts and specific cues that help me jump my best. I have to immediately let go of that previous jump. Now I want to learn from that previous jump. Okay. If there was a specific reason of why I knocked the ball off. Okay, I want to learn from that, make the adjustment. But I got to bring my mind right back to the present moment. So we call this present moment thinking. But on top of that, it's task oriented thinking as well. So players in every sport experience this skill. You make a mistake, what do you do next? We've got to focus on the specific cues. The specific what do you do next? The very next moment. And then if your brain jumps to the, we're really good, we're up by 20, we're going to win this game. And they'll start to think, oh, we're going to win this game. And then what do they do? Well, they let off. How many 20 point loss comebacks have we seen in sport? It happens all the time. Lose focus, lose your focus. That's exactly right. So it, it happens whether we think we're going to lose a game or win a game. But when the brain jumps to the future, it's not focused on the present and a specific task that helps you play great.

So you called that what present? What Thinking?

Present moment, thinking. On top of that is task oriented thinking.

Okay, I really like that, Eric. I was thinking about Ted Lasso and what did he always say about the goldfish?

Speed. Goldfish. 10 second number.

Yeah. Join us for more in part two of this episode.

You've been listening to Finding Noble. I'm Carly Reddy. Follow Finding Noble on all available podcast directories and find out more on our website, findingnoble.com that's finding noblen o b l e dot com and if you or anyone close to you are looking for further resources on young adult and adolescent mental health, Dr. Skinner and a host of other leading professionals working in the mental health world share courses and even answer your questions, all on parent guidance.org that is parent guidance.org brought to you by the Cook center for Human Connection.