PNTV: Raise the Player, Not the Pressure by Brandon Guyer

Look, you can't make winning the focus. You got to make becoming a winner. If we focus on helping our kids become winners in life, then they can win on and off the field much more frequently. Try to be the best you. If you can be the best you, if you can be a winner on and off the field, you have a shot at being the best at your position. Same thing with his coaching staff. Same thing with everyone in the organization. We need to focus on the ultimate game. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV. Today we've got another great book, Raise the Player, Not the Pressure, by my dear friend Brandon Geyer, subtitled The Parent and Coach Playbook for Confident, Happy Athletes. Tiny little book, Brandon is a former Major League Baseball player. He was hit by so many pitches during his career that during the World Series one year, an announcer called him La Piñata. Brandon and I have been trading texts every single morning for years with another dear friend of ours, Shawn Casey, another former Major League Baseball player. Brandon now runs Major League Mindset, which is a program that develops mental toughness and the ability to win on and off the field for young athletes and their parents. That's right. He's also the former mental toughness coach for the Los Angeles Angels, Hall of Famer from the University of Virginia where he's their current mental toughness coach. Again, great book. As always, check out the Philosopher's Note. You can get it for free in the show notes, uh, the PDF and the MP3 in which I unpack the ideas we are going to cover right now. We've got 700 and, I don't know, 75 Philosopher's Notes, ancient wisdom, modern science to help you optimize every area of your life so you can show up as your best today. I want to help you transform your life, moving from theory to practice to mastery together today. So let's get to work. By the way, our last episode was on The Daily Dad by Ryan Holiday, another great book on parenting. Other episodes and Philosopher's Notes I encourage you to check out include 10 to 25 by Dave Yeager. And we've got a bunch of, um, Other notes you can check out, um, in the app. I've got a class called Fatherhood 101. My wife taught one on Momahood 101. That's all I've got for now with the intro. Raise the player, not the pressure. Let's start at the top with the ultimate game. So Brandon has gone through our coach certification program and done a ton of work with us, and he uses different frames for some, some of the stuff that we talk about. And one of them is this. He says we Look, you can't make winning the focus. You gotta make becoming a winner. Now, of course, we all wanna win, right? But in order to win, winning, it's not that that isn't important, but we want to focus on becoming a winner. If we focus on helping our kids become winners in life, then they can win on and off the field much more frequently. And one of the stories that I talk about in the note It's about the opportunity I had a couple years ago, almost exactly 2 years ago as I filmed this. I helped Marcus Freeman, the head football coach of Notre Dame football, invited me in to day 1 of their preseason the year they went to the national championship a couple years ago, right? Day 1 preseason, I come in and I talk about the things we talk about in these little episodes and in the Heroic app and everything else I do. How do we forge antifragile confidence? How do we show up as our absolute best when it matters most? Well, as it turns out, some of the stuff that I taught the kids helped them— kids, these guys, their necks are bigger than my legs. I'm looking up to these guys. They're just awesome human beings— helped these football players at Notre Dame create just an incredibly inspiring season, right? And at the end of the season, the journalist said, hey, how'd you bounce back from your early season loss? And some of the kids were gracious enough to mention my work with them on day 1 of the preseason. And then the same journalist asked Marcus Freeman about me in a press conference in one of their bowl games leading up to the national championship. And I share that because his answer to the question of what I taught the team is the best description of the idea we're talking about right now. So Marcus basically said— we'll link this in the show notes so you can check it out, and I talk about it in the notes— Marcus basically said that what I taught his team was, and him, was you can't try to be the best. He said, look, I can't try to be the best head coach in the country. I've got to try to be the best Marcus Freeman I can be. If I can be the best Marcus Freeman, I have a shot at being a great coach. Same thing with every single position player. You can't try to be the best quarterback or cornerback or whatever it is. Try to be the best you. If you can be the best you, if you can be a winner on and off the field, you have a shot at being the best at your position. Same thing with his coaching staff. Same thing with everyone in the organization. We need to focus on the ultimate game with our kids, which is why, as I discussed in the Daily Dad episode and note. Every single time I go to a chess tournament with Emerson, my son, and now Eleanor, my 9-year-old daughter, I ask them the same question, what do you want? And they give me the same answer, I want to be a good person, a winner, and for Emerson, he wants to be a grandmaster. I say, good answer, good order. Start by winning the ultimate game, be a great person, then you have a shot. At winning all the other games we set up for our kids and ourselves in life. And I should say, this book is great whether your kids play sports. My kids play chess, right? But whether your kids are into sports or into chess or into debate or into— I was trading texts with a dear friend of mine who happens to be an admiral. His kids are marching band. There's competitive marching band. Awesome. This wisdom applies to all that, and it all starts with winning the ultimate Game. And as Ryan says, you got to teach your kids character equals fate. You got to teach them the cardinal virtues: wisdom, discipline, love, courage. Win that game, you have a shot at winning all the other little games. Second big idea here is you got to know that when kids quit their sporting activities or whatever else, the number one reason is they stop having fun. The number one reason why kids play sports is not winning. That is the number 48th reason, according to some seminal research in the area, the number one reason kids play sports or frankly do anything is it's fun. They have fun playing sports. Imagine that. Yet somehow, as they get older, we squeeze out the fun. And Brandon says that's a huge mistake. The fun needs to be the foundation, and it is the foundation of excellence. Always goosebumps as I say that. And in our own house, you know, with our kids, when Emerson was getting into chess, I brought in a little bit too much of the structure too early on, and some of the fun kind of got let out of the room, right? Well, Mommy is often wiser than me, and she said, no, no, keep it fun, keep the joy, right? So we made sure that— and Emerson just loves chess. And again, all the research shows, not just that study, but Carol Dweck, the great researcher who came up with the whole idea of the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset, The best in any field love what they do, absolutely love it. The ones who try to win and they're not really in love with the thing they're doing don't tend to perform as well as the ones who just love it so much, and they wind up winning a lot more. So keeping joy, keeping fun central for our kids is huge. That's how you raise the player, not the pressure, etc. Another thing I share in the note is Magnus Carlsen. Again, we're into chess. So the greatest chess player of all time Is Magnus Carlsen, perhaps tied for first with, uh, Garry Kasparov, who we featured not too long ago, who is his era's greatest chess player, right? But Magnus— there's a great documentary called Magnus, highly encourage you to check it out. It's a great documentary in general, and particularly if you're into chess at all. But if you watch that, you'll see, which we watched right at the same time I was starting to push a little bit too hard with the structure. Magnus Loved chess. Took a very untraditional path to becoming as great as he could be, and you could just feel the joy. You can feel the fun in his family as he participated in elite competition, etc. So remember that the fun factor matters. Then there's the pressure paradox, and this is pretty obvious when I say it out loud, but the more you increase the pressure, the more you're decreasing the performance. Now, of course, there's going to be a certain level of pressure, but we as parents need to do our jobs to reduce that pressure pressure, to focus on being a winner, to focus on— and we'll talk about it in a moment— winning or winning, and to be— I'll actually go to the next idea immediately— to be a signal for them. In The Daily Dad, we talked about the importance of embodying the traits and the qualities we want our kids to embody, right? A little fellow is following you was our first idea in that episode, a John Wooden poem and picture that he received from a friend reminding him his job as a parent was to remember that a The little fellow was watching him, following him, modeling him. So we need to model the qualities we want to see in our kids on and off the field. I'll actually go back here for a moment. If we don't get the pressure paradox right, we're going to create worriers— worriers with a W-O-R-R-I-E-R-S— instead of warriors. We want to create warriors, not worriers. The way you do that is to integrate these ideas to keep the fun alive and to teach them some of this wisdom we'll cover in a moment. But you're a signal when you are with them before, during, and after their competitions. You are a signal. The question is, what are you signaling? And Brandon gives us some wonderful wisdom. And I literally, I read this book on a Saturday. Again, it's a real quick reading, less than 100 pages. I read it while watching the kids play chess or being there at a chess tournament with them, and I applied the wisdom the same day I was reading the book. And, some of the most powerful wisdom for me was what to do before a competition, during the competition, and after the competition. So, you got 3 phases, right? What are you doing before? Gotta make sure we get the chalkboard in today, right? Before, during, and after. So, what do you do before? Now, Emerson and I— my joke to my friends is there's never been a A chess player. I don't care if they're a kid or an adult who has a more consistent protocol before their matches. That person— I'd love to meet the person who, uh, who may have a more disciplined approach. We do the same thing every single time. We, uh, process the prior game if it's the second game of the series. Um, then we go for— we do some movement. We do 33 burpees. We're talking about, um, what's coming up and all this different stuff. But Brandon says before the competition, What do you do right before they take the field? And what his dad did for him, I'm now doing for my kids. He said his dad— and again, Brandon was an elite baseball player and football player in high school, then played baseball in college and professionally, right? Before every game, his dad would tell him 2 words: trust yourself. Trust yourself. And with Emerson, we do a little bit of strategic thinking. He's working with his coaches, and they've got certain things that they want him focusing on. So I'll quickly Ask him, hey, what's your intention for today? Oh, I'm going to trust and crush. Oh, okay, cool. And what specifically are you working on right now? On my time management, or I want to make sure I'm seeing what my opponent might do. Whatever lessons his coaches wanted him to have in mind, we'll quickly talk about that. But then the last things that we talk about, now it's 2 words. Literally, I tell him, trust yourself, buddy. Go in there, have fun, trust yourself. Goosebumps. What do you tell your kids right before they take the field? Trust yourself. What a great way, great way to empower our kids. And again, our son's named Emerson after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Well, I got Ralph Waldo Emerson's heroic portrait in my office staring at me. What did Ralph Waldo Emerson say? He said, trust thyself. Every heart vibrates to that iron string. We have an intelligence within us. And if you're participating in chess or baseball or football or basketball, Trust. Whatever you did to get to that game, all the training you did, was one mindset. Gosh, who was it? John Elliott. John Elliott wrote a great book called Overachievement. We'll link to those notes as well. Overachievement. In that book, he talks about what makes elite performers truly elite. And he says you've got to have 2 mindsets. You've got to have your training mindset, which is when you're thinking and you're trying to analyze, you know, maybe how you're hitting a pitch or how you're playing a chess game or whatever it is, right? You're training. You're in a certain mindset where you're thinking. Your prefrontal cortex is training your subconscious mind to get a skill, right? That's a very different mindset than the mindset you need to have when you're competing. When you're competing, you better not be thinking about what you're doing. Your little prefrontal cortex cannot do the things that your, your subconscious mind, your underlying intelligence can do. One scientist says it's like a Post-it note of intelligence versus a NASA supercomputer. You got to move from the training mindset to the trusting mindset. You got to let it rip. If you step up on the first tee on a golf course, for example, yeah, yeah, you did all your training, but whatever you brought to that first tee is what you brought. Now it's not time to train, it's time to trust yourself. So that wisdom, that advice before a match— trust yourself— is incredibly powerful. That's the before tip there. Then we've got— so we got trust. Yourself. Last things we say before we, uh, our kids take the court or take the, uh, the field of competition, whatever that is. During, during the competition, who are you? When the kid— when your kids look up at you in the stands, what do they see? What do they feel? Brandon says they should only feel one thing from you. Which is basically, they're looking at you not to see, you know, oh, I wonder if he's got some good coaching advice for me. They're looking at you to check in and see, am I safe? Am I still loved even if I'm not playing well? I get emotional saying that. Now, I don't usually get to watch my kids play chess. Chess is usually played in a closed environment. Parents are not allowed in, right? They're in a huge ballroom, one kid playing another kid, hundreds of boards, and that's just what they're doing. Now, last weekend, I had an opportunity, which I get a few times a year, to go inside the ballroom and watch. And I watched 15 hours of chess. And I told my kids, reflecting on the same wisdom, because they look at— they'll look up at me every once in a while. I'll walk back and forth from Emerson's board, which is at the top, and then Eleanor, who's in the lowest division. Top division, lowest division. You got to walk all the way across the ballroom. And I sit there and I watch them. And I said, I want you to know there's one thing I'm thinking about When I'm watching you play and you look up at me, and then— because they look up at me, right? I want you to know I'm only thinking of one thing. I'm thinking, I love you. I love you. I just absolutely love you. That's what I'm doing while I'm watching you. And it's true. Sounds good. My coach Phil Stutt says, that sounds good, and it has the added benefit of being true. Right? And I know enough about chess to know, you know, at least with Eleanor's games, how she's doing. But it doesn't matter how. Emerson's doing or how Eleanor is doing. I love them. And when they look at me, they get that signal from me that they're safe. And when I told them, hey, I want you to know that every time you look at me, I'm thinking one thing: I love you. I could feel them soaking it up. Um, it was awesome. That's what I do during. You can choose to do obviously whatever inspires you, but remember, you're a signal. Before, trust yourself. During, signal of positivity and safety. And then the final thing is after. What do we do after? We'll talk a little bit more about this winner-win-win. But Brandon gave some great advice here as well that I immediately applied. He says the first thing that you want to say— don't analyze their performance. Again, we got to establish safety with our kids. We'll talk about that in an episode on Dan Siegel's wisdom. Safety is the most important thing you can give to kids. Kids crave safety. You do not want to be the source of their psychological Lack of safety. It can't look at you and feel threatened by your presence. You need to be a signal of, no, no, you're safe. You can go out into the world that isn't always going to be safe, but you can know you've got a safe harbor with me. Tears in my eyes, goosebumps again. That is a fundamental aspect of Dan Siegel's attachment parenting, secure parenting style. Your kids need to feel that you are, he says, a safe harbor. They can come to you in the midst of life's challenges. You don't solve their problems, but you can give them that safe harbor, and you're a launching pad, right? So you give them both. You give them the safety to know that no matter what happens, they've got you, they've got that safe, secure base. Boom. Then they can go out and explore courageously, fearlessly, etc., knowing they can always come back and get your support when they need it. But anyway, afterwards, what do you do? Brandon's advice is to say, I love watching you compete. And I said that after every one of the matches. And it's, again, it's true. I love watching my kids compete. They're tough, sitting there, and they got way more mental toughness than I had as a timid little frightened kid. You watch Emerson play chess, you watch Eleanor play chess, they're fierce. Emerson's first opponent last tournament said, you freaked me out the way you moved your pieces. You moved them with such confidence. That's what literally what the kid said. I had a Grandfather— Eleanor's 9 years old, tiny little blonde-haired girl that wears a purple sparkly New York Yankees hat. I had a grandfather she played in a tournament where she made $53, became a professional chess player by being the top-ranked female in the tournament, tied with 2 other girls. Anyway, a grandfather came up to me and said, your daughter freaked me out the way that she stares at me from across the board. All that to say, I love watching you compete. It's the first thing we say to them. We don't analyze their performance. I love watching you compete. Then you can get into how you translate what might have been a tough performance with some lessons that can be integrated. But always start with the safety again. Start with positive words before, during, after. I love watching you compete, etc. Now, last idea. Brendon talks about antifragility. Again, we've done— he's done some of the work we've done together and has integrated the idea of antifragility into his work. Right? So how do you use life's challenges to get stronger? Literally, you don't break when you make mistakes or make errors or whatever it is in your domain. And you're not just resilient, you're actually antifragile. You're the opposite of fragile. You use life's challenges, life's mistakes and losses to get better. Then you can literally win or win. I've been blessed to do some work with, with some elite special forces operators and General Fenton, the 4-star general who actually introduced me to Marcus Freeman, Notre Dame grad, He introduced me to Marcus. He invited me out, General Fenton did. Had the privilege of serving over 1,000 of his top commanding officers, teaching them some of these similar ideas on antifragile confidence. And when he introduced me, he said that Brian takes this wisdom off the bumper sticker. So it sounds nice on a bumper sticker to win or win, or all these other ideas, but how do you operationalize that? How do you operationalize Winning or learning, and learning is winning. And Brandon talks about how we can do that. I'm going to share some ideas quickly with you. This is really important to master this. I talk about it in the note. I link to some other content I have where I teach these ideas. It's in my book, Arete. We've got to get really good at helping our kids win or learn, and then if we learn, we win in the future. Therefore, we win or we win. So Brandon's approach is first you always focus— I'll tell you my approach, then Brandon's approach. We talk about 1-2-3, and I got it from Lanny Basham, the gold medal-winning, uh, rifle shooter who wrote With Winning in Mind, one of my all-time favorite mental toughness books. We teach this to our Heroic coaches after every performance, whether it's your kids or your own. You want to 1-2-3 it. We do it with our company Heroic. Oh, I do it with my kids. I do it with myself. 1-2-3. 1, you always start with the Brandon says, what went well? That's what I ask my kids. What was awesome? What was awesome about that game? We don't talk about what they need to work on first. What was awesome? Emerson played a grandmaster last week. Well, that's awesome. I don't care what the outcome is. You're sitting across from a grandmaster. You're at a level where you now get to compete with grandmasters. He lost, but it was a great game and he got to play him. Awesome. What did we learn? So one is what was awesome. 2 is what Specifically, in chess it was, what specifically would you do differently next time? Right? So what needed some work in that game? Maybe it was time management, or maybe it was, ah, I made a trade I shouldn't have made in chess. Whatever it is in baseball, football, basketball, whatever your activity is. What was awesome? What needed work? Then what specifically will you do differently next time? So Brandon says, well, better What will you do better next time and how? Right? So what went well? What will you do better next time and how will you do it better? So for Emerson and Eleanor, if they make a certain mistake, well, what are we going to do specifically to learn from that such that we win in the future? And we've done this countless times with Emerson. Countless times. You know, maybe his opening a year or 2 ago, his opening wasn't very good. You got to know openings in chess. So we needed to learn that. And he literally downloaded a bunch of opening classes on a site called Chessable on a drive home from Houston to Austin over 2 and a half hours. He downloaded 3 different classes, started them, and he mastered his openings after getting destroyed in a tournament. That sucked. He lost points. It was a tough weekend, but he immediately turned it into an opportunity to learn, and he literally learned from that. And now he wins way more than he ever would if he didn't learn that lesson, and certainly way more than he ever would if he wasn't having fun, and if we didn't teach him that you have to be willing to make mistakes if you want to get better. All of his best chess coaches— he's only had a few— but they always all start with the mistakes. They ruthlessly go out after the mistakes so they can learn from them, so we can quit making those mistakes, so we can get better. So teaching our kids the importance of making mistakes is the hallmark of the growth mindset. Eleanor, last weekend, she hadn't played chess in like a month. She lost her 2 first games. She's 0-2. Right? She was ahead and then she didn't win them. And she literally told Emerson, I'm going 6-0 this weekend. I'm going 6-0. Why? Because she knows she's going to learn. Win or learn, baby. Her attitude on this, again, I wish I had that perspective at 9. I'm still working on it at 52. Let's go. Win or learn. We learn, we win in the future. Let's go. She wound up going 3 wins and a draw. She closed out real, real strong. Anyway, win or win, think about that. Think about before, during, and after. Trust yourself. I love you, Safe Harbor. I love watching you compete such that we can win the ultimate game. Winning, of course, is important. We want to win in life, but we want to become winners. Be the best version of you, then you have the best shot at winning all the other games you want to win. Remember the fun factor. It's the number one reason people, kids, And people, um, play sports or quit sports. Look at your life. Do you have fun? Do you love what you do? Do you have joy in what you're doing? If so, awesome. Create even more of it. Show your kids how you get paid doing something you love to do. If not, how do you get more of it? How do you bring more fun into your life? Remember the pressure paradox. You want a certain amount, um, but don't turn your warriors into worriers. W-O versus W-A-R-R. IORs. Remember that you are a signal. Be a signal of positivity. Be that safe harbor. Be the launching pad. Raise the player, not the pressure. Great book. Appreciate you, Brandon. And I hope you enjoyed today. I didn't get to plus one. Plus one! What's the one thing you can take out of our time together today? Life-changing ideas are only life-changing if you live them. How are you going to move from theory to practice to mastery? Let's do it together. Let's do it today. Always an honor to spend time with you. Look forward to sharing more soon. See ya. Hey, this is Brian. Thanks for spending a few minutes with me today. If you enjoyed it, please hit subscribe so that the best of the show keeps landing in your feed. Then head over to heroic.us— that's heroic.us— where you'll find the full library of wisdom I've created over the last 20 years, as well as the app, advanced training programs, coaching, and everything else we've built to help you optimize your life, actualize your potential, and live heroically. It is day one. We are all in. Let's go.