Interview - With Winning in Mind with Lanny Bassham

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living 101 interview series. Today I am thrilled to be chatting with Lanny Basham, who is an Olympic gold medalist, the third most medals in US Shooting history. And he's been working with, as he likes to say, and Skype message here, turning competitors into champions since 1977. So for almost 40 years, Lanny's been working on what he calls his mental management system, which I'm really excited to chat about today. And his book With Winning in Mind is literally one of my favorite books I've ever read. And I've read a fair number of books at this stage. This one is not only a great mental training book, but just a great book in general. So whether you're an athlete or or not, this book has a lot to offer and I'm really excited to unpack some of my favorite big ideas. And Lanny, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat today.

I'm happy to do it.

All right, well, let's jump straight in. One of the ideas you talk about throughout your work is the fact that peak performance is 90% mental, yet very few of us spend any time on that.

Can you talk to us a little.

Bit about what that means, that it's 90% mental, and how that kind of influences how we should structure our lives and what we strive to get a little better at?

Well, it's just interesting to me that when you ask any PGA Tour player, any Olympic athlete, or any elite performer what percentage of your sport is mental, they're going to give you a big number back. The most common number I get back is my sports 90 to 95% mental. And then you ask them the second question. Well, if your sports 90% mental, since you've been doing it, have you spent 90% of your time and money on the moon day? And they'll all say no. And so, okay, what percentage of your time do you think you have spent on it in terms of lessons and investigation and teachers and all that? It ends up being a very, very low number. Now that just doesn't make sense to me. If something is 90% of the game and you almost ignore it, that's just not, that's just not logical. But that's exactly the way most people approach the middle game. I know that's the way I did when I first learned how to shoot my first, all my years of college, my first three years on the US Scene. Somebody asked me, is the middle game important? I would have said, oh sure it is. But the conventional wisdom back then was that, and to most people today is that the middle game is something that you just got it or you don't. I mean, some people get it, some people don't get it, but it's not something that can be taught. And that's just not true. And it's interesting in where I live here in North Texas, football is key. High school football. And every school's got a football team and every football team's got coaches and all those coaches are working on form and teaching technique and all that good stuff. But there's not one mental coach in the entire state. And yet all those sports say that it's the most important thing. So I just think the paradigm of most people operating under that, the middle game, is really important, but we're not doing anything about it is the wrong paradigm. And I'm doing everything I can to try to change that. Because what happened to me was that when I actually started studying the middle game and made it a priority and applied it with at least equal attention to form, I started dominating my sport.

Unbelievable. Well, we're going to talk about some of the ways that we can put more attention to it and I just love the way you articulated it. And so tell us about your mental management system. I know you've been working on this for basically 40 years at this stage. Is that right? Can you tell us about that?

Sure. I mean, you know, to start with, there's a big difference between mental management and sports psychology. Sports psychology is based on psychology and mental management is not based on psychology at all. I think, I think I took one psychology course in college and that's about the extent of my study of psychology. My program is a competitor based program. In other words, I've studied, spent a lifetime studying people that win and try to find out what they're thinking about and what do they know about the middle game and what are the things that are common among winners. And so that if we could understand these commonalities and these things that lend themselves to making principles of them, then if they can be taught to the rest of us, then maybe we can operate at the top of our technical ability. Whether you happen to be an Olympic athlete or you're just trying to beat your brother in law in a game of golf. You know, there's, there's just so much that people just don't know. And people that are in the middle of the leaderboard will if they don't learn this they're going to stay there. But if they were maybe more knowledgeable in some things, they could perform a lot better. So first of all, it's a competitor based program. Secondly, it is a, it's based on some principles and it's, it's create, it's designed to create a system, a mental system. Now if I can just briefly tell you what a mental system is so that people can understand where I'm headed. When I was in college, in my first three years on the US Team, I had no mental system. I always thought when I was competing, whatever thought popped into my mind, that's what I thought. There was no commonality to it, there was no uniformity. It just. If I shot a good shot, I thought one way. If I shot a bad shot, I thought another way. And there was nothing consistent about my thinking. When you're running a mental system, what's different about it is that we try to determine what's the optimum thing to think about before, during and after a task. If that task is shooting a shot or hitting a golf shot, what's the optimal thing to think about before, during and after a golf shot? If you knew what that was and you thought about it all the time, you could, you could approach consistency. And so what we're looking for in running a mental system is to develop consistency. And the reason consistency is so important is that in a sport like golf, and golf is a sport of variables, there's probably more variables on a player than on any other sport I've ever coached. In a sport of variables, anything you can make a constant gives you a huge advantage. Now in rifle shooting, which is a sport of constants, especially Olympic air rifle shooting, which is one of our events, we shoot that inside, there's not even any wind on the shooter. So it is a sport of constants. Well, in a sport of constants, if you introduce a variable, it's a huge disadvantage. So consistency, mental consistency is something that I think all athletes strive for. But you can't have mental consistency if you don't run a system. If you don't determine and define in advance what's the optimum thing for me to think about before, during, after, shot, and then train that, you'll never even get close to mental consistency. So what we try to do in mental management is to teach people how to do that and to give them some principles that they can use to help them understand not only what to do, but how to do it and why they're doing it, so that if they get even one degree off center in a tournament, they'll recognize that they're off center and they can. And they have the tools to be back. And I think that's really what athletes want to know. They want to know they're interested in that Rah, rah, smoke and mirrors. That happens so much. And some of the books, by the way, I'm all, I'm all for reading books. I've had as many as 800 books and positive motivational books in my library one time, and I got something out of all of them. But what, what I think those books are short on is the how tos. They're, they're pretty. Do a pretty good job of telling you that you should do something, or here's what you need to do, I think where they come up shortest. Well, just tell me how. And the problem is an awful lot of those writers have never done it. Never, never done it. So if you've never really done it, I don't know how you're going to tell me how to do it.

That's a lot of theory. I like how you articulate that of your education, if you will, came through the competitive nature of the Olympic Games, you know, and just to be able to perform at that level and to truly not only possess that, but then teach that is one of the reasons why I find your wisdom so compelling. Great overview. Thank you for that. And I love the idea of consistency. And of course, this applies to everyone who may not be in an athletic situation now, but we have so many variables in our lives. The more we can find consistency with certain ways of showing up throughout our day, in certain circumstances, we're going to perform at a higher level, which is a core part of my work as well. I'd love to talk about process. And one of my favorite stories in the book, and again, one of my favorite stories in any book I've ever read is your story about Ben Crane, the golfer you coached, and his commitment to making process primary. Can you walk us through whether you want to tell that particular story or just the general idea of process being primary vis a vis outcome? Can you, can you talk to us about that?

Yeah, sure. Here's the big issue over trying is a major problem with a lot of athletes. It was a huge problem for me. I didn't know. I didn't know it was a problem. See, we buy into the idea that you got to give something 110%, you got to give it all you got. Do the very best and, you know, parents will tell their kids this I want you give it 110%. Just go out there and give it 110%. There's a problem that when I was doing that and I wasn't winning and I was practicing and my scores were practice scores were as high as anybody in the world. But I get in the tournament, I drop about 10%, my scores fall about 10%. Tournaments. And until I started interviewing Olympic gold medalists to find out what they were doing, I didn't realize that over trying was my problem. But they did. They told me right quick that everything you do in life has a certain amount of effort to give it. You give something 1% more effort than is required, your performance drops. If you give it too little effort, it's called careless, being careless. You give it too much effort, you're being careful. And all of us have seen people who have overdone it. You see singers over singing, they're yelling at you, and you see salesmen are overselling or pleading with you, please buy my stuff. You know, it's very, very easy to give something to try instead of to over try. And that's what I was doing. Now, here's the problem with over trying. If you are in a tournament that means something to you, it's very important to you. You really must have a, a feeling of the compelling, of the pull of the tournament to get you to think about outcome. It's huge. The bigger the tournaments, probably the greater the pool. Now, here's the problem with outcome. Outcome is a variable. It's always a variable. And every score is different. Every tournament is different. And when you're thinking about outcome, thinking about your score and scores of a variable, then what happens is you can't have mental consistency if your middle game is a function of a variable. So in the two issues here about thinking about outcome is one, it's a variable. Number two, it caused you to probably cause you to over try in a really big tournament. That's what was happening to me. My I would get a big tournament and I would over try. And now I'm trying to give it something extra. And I found out from these, talking to these Olympic champions is that they told me, you don't want to try as hard as you can. You want to try this hard enough that the optimum level of mental effort is not as high as you're giving it. And if you would find a way to find that optimum level of mental effort and do it all the time, you would do better. Well, so now I'm faced with a dilemma. I Know what my problem is? I'm over trying. But how do you. How do you reach that level of optimum level of effort? And I tried several things. It didn't work. I'll give you two. The first one is I thought, I'm going to treat practice like a tournament and tournament like practice. In other words, when I was in practice, I was. I would rehearse and that I was in a tournament, try to make it be as like a tournament as I could. I mean, I'm going to do all this rehearsal, I'm in this tournament, and I've got to make this shot and all that and put in a lot of effort, go to tournament, have the same result. And the second one, I thought, well, I'll dial it back. I'm. I'm over trying, so I'm gonna just dial it back. How do you. How do you try a little bit less hard? I couldn't find the dial. Finally I got the idea that, well, I'll tell you what, I just won't care. I mean, I go, I'm carrying too much, so I just won't care. Well, when I did that, I got careless. I mean, none of that worked. And it was just about out of ideas. And so finally there was a tournament that I was in and had all the best shooters in the world were there. And so my home range and I thought, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna change the rules. Instead of grading my effort based on outcome score, I'm going to change rules. Score doesn't matter. Working with other, trying to beat my competitors doesn't matter. All that matters is process the execution. The, the way that I make the shot, the percentage of time I run my mental system correctly, and percentage of time I run I make. The shot I want to make is, I want to grade that very much subjectively instead of relying on result as being the measure of success. And so I shot that tournament only thinking about process. My whole idea was to focus on execution, not on outcome. In other words, process, process, execution, same thing. Well, when I did that, I set a national record that stayed in my national record in my country for 14 years. And what I discovered on that day is that when you make process primary, the pull of outcome doesn't have a hold on you anymore. When you make process primary, you can just execute in a big tournament and you don't have this pulled over try. And it's the only solution I've ever come up with that I've ever seen that really, really works in Big tournaments is that you've got to care more about the, how you execute the task than you do the results of the task. And when that happens, you can, you can have a much more consistent performance. And that's really what I was telling Ben Crane is when I first started working with Crane, he was so sensitive to outcome that when he got a little bit behind a tournament, he would try to do something extra to catch up. And that would get him in even more trouble because then he was prone to over trying. So what I was trying to teach him is, Ben, I don't want you to care where the ball goes. I want you to care how to get it there. I don't want you to not change how much you care. I want you to change what you care about. I want you, instead of caring about outcome, I want you to care about process. And when I did that, Crane was able to play an entire, entire tournament not really worrying too much about outcome. And he ended up going to the last hole in the tournament. Now, he knew he was playing well. He knew that he was in the final group and had a chance to win, but he was not thinking about winning or outcome. When he made his last putt on hole 18 in that tournament and he went over to pull his ball out of the hole and other players came up and shook his hand like they always do, he didn't realize that he'd won the tournament because his focus was not on winning. His focus was on, was on execution. And it works.

It's amazing. He didn't know until his wife ran up on the green. Right.

Well, that's how you know for sure because you've just earned about $1.6 million, which he's really happy about that the rent is gon get paid this month, Jack. And so it's, it's. Now, is that easy to do? No, it's not easy to do this. But I will tell you, it pays huge dividends. And so that's what we try to teach our players and people who work with it. You've got to buy into that because if you don't, then you're going to be trying instead of trusting. And now if you don't train very well, you don't know very much. You don't have much to trust, and I understand that. But if you spend a lot of years to get to master something, you would really like to trust what you've mastered. And I talk about three keys to consistency. The first one is you have to carefully choose your primary. Then you got to figure out what is the optimum. What's the optimum way to hold a club and what's the optimal swing. What's the optimum way to think? And once you determine your primary. Your primary way of thinking, then you master what you're chosen, which is you got to train so hard into. You know, amateurs practice till they get it right, and professionals practice so they can't get it wrong. So you got to practice so you can't get it wrong. And then you can trust it. Then you can trust it. Then you go into tournaments not trying to win, but trusting that you will. And that's really where we all want to be.

That's such a cool distinction. Amateurs practice until they get it right. Professionals practice until they can't get it wrong. That's awesome.

I wish that was original with me. It certainly it's not. I don't know. I don't know who said that, but the first time I heard it, I just. I just think it's a great definition of mastery, you know, how do I know if I've mastered something? Well, you know, if you've mastered something is when you even forget to do it. You do it.

Yeah. That is amazing. So much goodness in there. Changing what you care about in the process of making it primary and over. Caring, careful versus careless. Just a ton of wisdom in there and so many different directions we can go. I want to go to. While we're talking about process vis a vis outcome, you. In your book, with winning in mind, you say that you Let me just find the actual passage. You said, I won the Olympics thousands of times in my mind before entering the competition in Montreal in 1976. I just want to hear you describe. What were you imagining in your mind? Were you imagining being on the podium with the anthem playing, or were you imagining the execution of flawless shots? Or was it some combination of the two?

I'm sure that once or twice, or maybe more than that, but certainly not a significant amount of time. I probably rehearsed being on the podium, but that really wasn't the thing that. That excited me about paying the price to win the Olympics. Standing on the podium is kind of. It's a cool, temporary little deal that you get to do. They give you a medal and you get your picture in somebody's paper. I'm not saying that's bad at all. That's great. But that's not what I. What motivated me. What motivated me was that I wanted. The guys I competed with were all world champions, and were some of them were Olympic gold medalists. I mean, I was on a four person team, was one of those four. And two of those, even before I won my gold medal, two of those already had Olympic gold medals and they belonged to a club that I wanted to belong to. I guess what motivated me more than anything else was to. Was to join an elite group that you can only really join if you haven't been world champion or if you haven't been Olympic champion. I mean, the world championships and rifle shooting are held every four years, just like the Olympics are held every four years. And so it's not like, you know, you've got a world championship every other day to go to. Is. A tough club to be a member of. Now, I'd won the world championships before the Olympics in 76, but, you know, there's still one place to go. I mean, when you have a silver medal Olympics, you're really motivated to get the gold medal. So that was for sure. So what I was rehearsing all those years was probably more being in the Olympics, show shooting. Well, and running my program and rehearsing running my program under Olympic pressure and seeing, feeling the shots, seeing good sight pictures, feeling the rifle go off at the right time, looking in the scope, seeing tims. You know, it's like me to do this feeling comfortable, feeling in control, being able to handle a little bit pressure so much differently than I had in 72 when I was scared to death and shaken up there. And so I think that was probably what I rehearsed the most. And then, then there was an awful lot of how good is it going to feel when, when I have other Olympic gold medalists come up to me and say, hey, welcome. Welcome to the club.

That's amazing. So again, your focus was on the process. It was execution mechanics and just rehearsing it so many times until you couldn't get it wrong kind of thing with a little extra pleasure on the podium and on, more importantly, the club, but really focused on the mechanics. So kind of the Ben Crane model would be. He wasn't fantasizing about cashing the $1.6 million check and, and winning in that regard. He was focused on mechanics and obsessing about those.

Yeah, now where's, where's my $1.6 million check? I want to know about that. Back when I was competing, I was, I was a, I was a amateur athlete. If I took one nickel, I lost my understanding.

All right, So I love all of that. And one of the things I want to chat about is self image. So My understanding of your mental management system is that there are three components. Your conscious mind, your subconscious mind, and your self image. Can you tell us about the importance of the self image as it relates to that triad?

Sure. You know, the conscious and the subconscious are pretty obvious for folks. Conscious minds, what you think about, and we all know that's real important. You change what you think about and everything changes. But your subconscious, where your skills are and actually there's two kinds of skills. There's conscious skills and subconscious skills. Conscious skill is something you have to think about to do it. Subconscious skill is something you don't have to think about to do it. Well, most elite tasks, the kind of thing that you get a medal for, you're going to do subconsciously because you've done them so many, so many times that they've become subconscious. But even if you think the right things and have tons of skill, and there's lots of people like that, and they don't even win because they don't have the third one. And the third one is self image. Self image makes you act like you. Self image is your habits and your attitudes. And one way to look at this is if you believe you can do something or don't, that's self image. Like if you and I are in a playoff together. Sure. Playing golf and we're in a playoff together, win a tournament and you think you can beat me, and I think you can beat me, it's over for me. That's self image. Another how important self Image is is 95% of all winning is accomplished by 5% of participants. Now that's an incredible statistic, but it's true. What's the difference between the top 5% who did 95% of the winning and the next 5% who never win or rarely ever win? Well, if you look at everything that you can observe, everything that you can think about or talk about, there's no difference between the top 5% and the next 5%. The next 5% have the same equipment, same training, the same passion for the sport, same dedication, same number of hours experience that the top 5% have. They've got everything the top 5% have. Except the way the top 5% are thinking differently than the second 5%. The top 5%, the second 5% hope to win and the top 5% expect they will. There's a huge difference between hoping and expecting. I mean, you're about to get on a couple airplanes, you got your choice which airplane you want to get on, and one pilot says, you know, I Expect, I hope that we can land this plane. I hope I can land this plane. And the other one says, I got this. I expect, I expect nothing else. But I'm letting this point, which, which one are you going to get in? I'm not going to flower a guy hoping to win, hoping we'll have a point. And so that's the difference that the self images is whether you believe you can do something or believe you can't. You know, Henry Ford said whether you think you can or can't think you can't. You're right. Everybody's heard that, that quote, it's great quote. And that's that self image. The interesting thing to me about self image is that people hear that term and okay, I kind of know that, that, but they, they're clueless as to how self image changes. And when I discovered that, I, I thought, wow, this changes everything because self image changes through imprinting. And so the self image that you have is based on the imprints that you have allowed yourself to experience up to this point. And you can change when you change the imprinting, you change the self image. For example, every time you think about a problem yourself, image shrinks every time you think about solution yourself, and it grows every time you think about doing something improve, you improve the probability you're going to do it whether you like it or not, whether you, whether it's good for you or not. If you're worried about something going wrong, you just improve the probability it's likely to make it go wrong just because you're worrying about it. And if you're, every time you think about doing something, you improve the probability of doing it. Every time you think about a solution, you move toward the solution. Every time they tell you about the problem, you move or toward the problem. And I can prove this this way, is that in every sport I've ever had anything to do with it, except one, and I'll tell you what that one is. But every sport I've ever had anything to do with is the people in the middle of the leaderboard, the people that are not at the top 5% when they come off the course and you ask them how's your do? What do they talk about? They talk about what went right or what went wrong first.

What went wrong.

Okay? Now every time you do that, you improve the probability that's going to go wrong again because you create an imprint in your self image and you're becoming what you imprint, you're becoming what you think about. You're becoming what you talk about, you're becoming what you write about. Now, the, the top 5%, then 95% of the winning, tend to think an awful lot more about solutions than they do about problems. They tend to think an awful lot more about what they want to have happen instead of what they're afraid might happen. And that's one thing that separates these guys from the other. The others, now, rifle shooters are terrible. You ask a rifle shooter, you know, how'd you do? He'll tell you, I dropped three. You know, he'll tell you how you drop. But three dropped, I dropped them. And golf is the same way. Gosh, golf is so negative. It's a negatively charged culture. Almost every sport that I've taught, the people in the mud that are not doing it really, really, really well are carrying baggage that they don't need to carry because they are constantly talking to each other about what went wrong. And parents are guilty of this. Parents can cause their children to picture the problem and thereby damage their self image. And they don't mean to do it, but they do it all the time. I'm writing a book now for parents, especially parents of competitive youth, because parents are mental coaches and they're not trained to be. And most parents blow it. And the way they do it is one of the worst things that a parent can ask a child is after they come off from tournaments, how'd you do? That's a very innocent sounding question, but it's an open ended question. And I guarantee you that most sports have a natively charged culture, so it's become normal for people to talk about what went wrong first. And by asking an open ended question, you might as well have asked him what went wrong first because that's the way they're going to answer. So you're causing them to picture a negative imprint. A better question would be, what did you do well? What did you enjoy? What was what went well? Get them talking about what they did right, because they did a lot of things right. Let's have that kind of an imprint now. I asked my athletes three questions and Ben Crane played the, playing the tournament this week, made the cut, made some money. And after the tournament I talked to Ben. This is how it went. Ben, what'd you do well? And the second question was, what'd you learn? The third question was, what are you gonna do about it? Those are three good questions parents all ask for kids.

Those are genius.

And so this, everything that you do should be done to build your self image and build a self image of the People you care about. And so my favorite principle of self image is that I call it the principle of reinforcement. The more you think about, talk about, write about something happening, you improve the probability that thing will happen. So think about what you want to have happen. Don't worry about what might go wrong. Talk about in a humble way. You don't have to brag, but talk in a humble way. But the things that you liked about what you did and keep a performance journal and then a performance journal you spent a lot of time writing about. Here's what I did, right? Here's what I learned, here's what I'm going to do about it, and your self image will grow. Now, I think there's two kinds of people, two kinds of parents, two kinds of athletes. There's solution based people and there's problem based people. And problem based people tend to spend all the time trying to figure out, well, here's what's wrong with this. And solution based people is, gosh, how can we make it better? What's the solution? So surround yourself with solution based people and you'll yourself image your growth.

I'm taking notes. This is good. So self image imprints. Those three questions are remarkable. What'd you do? Well, what'd you learn? What are you going to do about it? Just constantly imprinting and not having a discussion going on about the bad shots, which was one of the other things I wanted to hear you reflect on. You kind of just did. But I love the story you share and with winning in mind, about the time that you shot 598 out of 600 and the reporter or whoever was in there, maybe it was you were talking to other shooters who admired you. And one of them asked, but what happened with the two shots you missed? And your response was just genius of, why are you asking me about that? Ask me about the ones I hit.

I don't remember the ones I didn't hit. About the 58 that I hit. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, I was good. I was going to tell you before I go out totally off the other subject. What's the one sport that doesn't seem to be so negative? I find it interesting that the people that I've worked with in martial arts don't seem to have that problem. I don't know why, but the martial arts teachers tend to be very, very good at telling their students, here's what you need to do, here's what you need to do, here's what you need to do. And not so much of here's what you're doing wrong. They tend to be extremely respectful of the mat. They bow on and off the mat. Their senseis are called Mr. Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith or whatever who it is, or Mr. Lee. And, and you know, you get, people get to call you Mr. Somebody when you're a black belt. And so the, it just seems like the lingo there and has more of a self image building issue than I see in other, other sports. And, and I've had the chance, the honor to work with some, some relatively high level martial arts athletes. And I just see that as a, that sport kind of being a little different from most of the other sports that I work with in that area.

Hmm, fascinating. Very good. Well, okay. One other thing I want to chat about and I think this is tied again to our self image and perhaps the subconscious as well. But this whole idea of rehearsal. Well, this is actually, I know it's more self image that's like me routine and the time that you wanted to shoot a perfect score and you rehearsed it. But also, if I understand correctly, there.

Was a time when you were in.

The army where for two years you actually didn't shoot live except for two times. And those were both competitions that you won. But somehow you practice in this virtual manner. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, I mean, you know, the army was. Made it possible for me to. I'll say the army may be a little bit more accurate. The taxpayers of the United States of America made it possible for me to compete in the Olympics. I want to thank you taxpayers for all your paying your taxes so that they would pay my salary as an army officer. But so I spent my first three years on the US Team at the United States Army Marksmanship unit. And then the way the army works doesn't make a lot of sense, but this is just the way it is that if you're an officer and you spend three years someplace, they're going to move you out to do something else for a while. And so I had actually gone on after the Olympics in 72. I'd gone on and done other military duty. And then I got back to marksmanship here for about six months before the World Championships in 1974. I won the world championships and established myself as number one ranked shooter in the world. And what did the army do to me at that point? Immediately transferred me out of their own Washington chip. I mean I'm, I'm number one in the world in what I do. And they won't Let me do it. They've got 22 guys on the team trying to teach them to do something I can do, they can't do it. And the one that can do it doesn't get to do it because they want to send me someplace else. So. So between 1976 and 1978, I was at a base that had no opportunity to compete. No Olympic shooting range within hundreds of miles of me. But I still had aspirations to repeat as world champion and Olympic champion and all that. So between 1976, after I won the Olympics and 1978, I only went to the range six times in two years. And those six times were the National Championships in 1977 is a three day shoot. So I took leave and shot three days, won the National Championships in 77 and then I did it again in 78 and so in. But you have to, you don't do that by just not shooting at all. You can't. We've got the best shooters in the world, Americans. So you've got to continue to train. But when you can't go to the range, what do you do? So what I did was I had a bedroom that we weren't doing much with in our house. And so I would come in from work and I would have dinner with my family and do something with them for about 8 o' clock. And then I would go in and put on my gear and dry fire with my rifle in positions for about three hours. Probably three, three hours, maybe four or five nights a week. And I did that for two years. And I got really good at doing the things that I could do. You know, lot of times people won't attempt something because. Because their situation's not perfect. Okay, it's not perfect. But can you make what you got as good as you can? Well, what I had was I put my equipment was there. This is quite. When I was going to go, I could practice prone standing and healing. I couldn't pull the trigger on a live shell, but I could dry fire and I could, I could simulate and I could do a lot of imprinting. And I did that for those two years. And when I came back to World Championships 1978, I had no problem winning gold. Med.

You didn't miss a shot for two years?

I haven't missed a shot for two years. That's right. That's right.

That's amazing. And I love just using what we have. And again it's. Are we problem focused or are we solution focused? Right. How do we make it work? That's so good. I want to hear your thought on one more topic. Pressure. So in the book you talk about how pressure is good. Can you tell us about that pressure?

Well, if you really study pressure for what it is and not for what it's trumped up to be, you really understand that pressure is essential for us to reach up high levels. If you had no pressure at all, you wouldn't operate anywhere near as high a level as you're capable of doing. I mean, you need a little bit of stress to get you to work hard enough in training to even get close to your potential. And then when you get a tournament, the match pressure in a tournament, actually, if you look at what's really happening to athletes is that they're going to feel different. Sometimes you're going to feel different in a tournament than you feel at practice when you feel the physical effects of pressure. Now let's look at the study those physical effects of pressure. What's really happening? If you can say that adrenaline is something that occurs. So what happens to the human body on the adrenaline? Sensory perception increases, your endurance increases, your strength increases. Now, to some sports, this is a big advantage. I mean, I've worked quite a bit with swimmers over the years and they tell me that boy, count on that pressure to make them swim faster and give them more endurance and more power. Now, for a rifle shooter, it can be a little bit of a problem because you can actually see the pulse rate in your sights in prone and kneeling. And we, you know, rifle shooting is really the only sport in Olympics where we're trying to make the body stop. And so I say rifle shooting. So there's some pistol and archery sports that are similar. But the problem with us is that I can make everything stop, except you can still see the pulse beating up in your sights. And when I was competing, I would jog three miles a day to keep my resting heart rate under 60 beats per minute. So I'd have a full second between beats to line up the shot, shoot. But when, when adrenaline hits, one of the things that happens is that heart rate goes up. And that's not a really good thing for rifle shooter. I had to learn to shoot with a higher heart rate and I learned to do it. But here's some misconceptions about pressure. I think that some people think that when I feel something like my tummy turns over or something, that something's wrong. And then when that happens, my performance is going to drop. And that's not true. Most world records are held under pressure situations. I mean, you know, if it caused your performance to drop, then we would never, Nobody would ever do as well under pressure as they do in practice. And that's just not true. I mean, I've got hundreds of clients that tell me that I actually do better when I feel the pressure. And I think there's a, there's. Personally, I don't think that pressure itself causes your performance to drop at all. I think you're, you're attitude about governance. If your attitude is that I'll shoot better, I'll perform better, if I feel some pressure, we probably will. If your attitude is I'll perform worse, well, you probably will. But it's not. Pressure's not doing that. Your attitude about it. So your self image is driving that. So I just feel like that the best way to deal with this problem, if you, if people can understand this. One thing that most of us who have had long careers and been very, very successful, I think would say the same thing to you, is that everything that happens to you in a tournament, good or bad, is supposed to happen. It needs to happen. If you do well, you don't need any mental lessons to how to act when you win a tournament. You know, take the congratulations, you'll feel good. You should feel good. Maybe you need a little help and how you're supposed to handle it when you don't do well. But when you don't do well, that's a learning opportunity. And if you respond appropriately to that learning opportunity, it's a good thing. So if you realize only two things can happen to you, you either win or learn. There's no winning and losing. There's winning and learning. And we don't learn very much when everything goes well, I'm not against that. When that happens, that's great, but I don't want it all the time. And the reason is because you don't learn anything. You learn and struggle up the mountain, not standing on the. So problems are not the problem. Problems are great. Problems are opportunities for you to overcome, to grow. And so many times in life things happen. And at the time you think that something's happening to you, when in fact something's happening for you. I didn't make the baseball team when I was little. I was slow, short and uncoordinated. If I'd have been an average baseball player, I never would have won the gold medal in the Olympics when I was in sixth grade. We're studying the Olympics in school. The teacher makes a statement in class. You know, it's possible somebody in this class would be Olympic champions someday. I wanted to have the best chance. This little boy sitting next to me jumps right up and says, teacher, I don't know who got the best chance, but I know for sure got the worst. Chancellor, I'm so glad that happened. At the time, I thought something was happening to me. Something was actually happening for me. My Olympic dream was born that day I won a silver medal Olympics instead of a gold medal in 1972. That was. I was terrified. I was so frustrated. I was so disappointed because I choked in the Olympics. I thought something was happening to me. Thought I let my country down, let my family down, let myself down. Just didn't get the job done. I look back on that. Oh, that's a precious metal to me. That silver medal gave me this business. It wasn't something that was happening to me. There's something that's happening for me. You know, we just don't learn much. If everything goes easy is easy. People appreciate things in direct proportion of the price they pay for them. And so if you're not paying a price, you don't appreciate it very much when you get it. So I hope you're having a little problem. As a matter of fact, if you're not having a ton of problems, your goals are too darn low.

So good.

Thank you, Lanny. This is just so packed with wisdom. I really appreciate you taking the time and I like to wrap these chats up with one final question, which is what's the one thing that you would hope people would kind of get? What one piece of wisdom would you want to share with our community that's passionate about optimizing their lives and actualizing their potential? Just one thing. If you can only share that one thing.

Oh, one thing. Well, I think the, the thing that I have learned that has made the biggest difference in so many different areas of my life, that the most important non spiritual thing, your relationship with Lord is still primary. But in terms of performance and all that, the one thing that seems to be the most important to me is how you feel about you. Do you. Do you build yourself? Do you. Is the imprinting that you're doing, what you're saying, what you're writing, what you're thinking, is it moving you toward your goals or is it moving you to only see the problems that are standing in their way? Everything we do in life, every step we take is fraught with obstacles. But right beside every obstacle is an opportunity. And I think there's two kinds of people at hand. People that see the opportunity and people see the problems. And I just would think that when you start focusing on the opportunity and what I can do to overcome my obstacles and be stronger for them, accepting those and seeking the opportunity to to get better. But that's probably the most important thing.

Fantastic. Thank you sir again. So appreciate your wisdom and everything you do is fantastic. With winning in mind. Freedom Flight another great book. I'm going to talk to Troy tomorrow in his great book Attainment. Love everything you guys are up to. Where can people go to learn more about you and your work?

Well, you can go to mentalmanagement.com which is our corporate site, which give you a little bit more information on mental management. Mentalmanagementstore.com is where all of our products are and mental management courses.com have some online courses that people can take or if you may be interested in taking a look at some of the articles that we've written. We have a little premium website that you have access to. All the articles that we've written and all the newsletter articles that we've had in the last 10 or 15 years are all available there. So there's plenty of plenty of inexpensive ways to learn more about middle management. And if you want to do something more with us personally, well then give us a call at our office and we'd be happy to visit with you.

Fantastic. Thank you. Look forward to talking soon.

You're welcome.

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