PNTV: The Champion's Comeback by Jim Afremow (#305)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes.

Tv.

Today we've got another great book, the Champions Comeback by Jim Afromo. The Champions Comeback subtitle How great athletes Recover, Reflect and Reignite Jim Affromo is one of the world's leading sports psychologists and consultants who works with some of the elite performers in the NBA, Major League League Baseball, NFL, PGA Tour, basically everywhere. And this is his second book. It's kind of the second in a series. The first book was the Champion's Mind, right? All about the mindset of a champion. This one is the Champion's Comeback, all about how to deal with adversity, the inevitable setbacks we all experience in pursuit of creating an extraordinary life. How do we deal with that? And of course why I focus on these sports books is it's not just about sports. Sports are just a great metaphor for life, which is we can apply this wisdom to every area of our life and sports provides such a cool context for it. In this book, Jim has some great stories of individual comebacks, team comebacks, a chapter just on Michael Jordan and how he relates to the seven Ls of the comeback code that Jim has in the book that we talk about in the note. A bunch of my favorite big ideas, five of them here. Let's start with the first most important idea. Challenges versus threats. Jim says that a contender views setbacks and all these things that can go wrong as threats, whereas the champion views those exact same setbacks as challenges. We talked about this in the Upside of stress by Kelly McGonigal. The scientific look at stress and how it can affect us differently depending on our mindset towards stress. If you see setbacks as a threat, McGonigal basically says that when you see it as a threat, you think you can't deal with whatever stress is coming at you. You feel overwhelmed. Wow, this is too much for me. I can't deal with it. It's a threat to my well being. You're going to have a different physiological and emotional response than people, the champions in Jim Afromo's language, who see every setback as a challenge. I've got what it takes. This is just going to make me stronger, right? There's a huge difference between those mindsets and this all comes down to, as I talk about in the note, that ultimate deepest sense of confidence from the root of the word confidere, right? Intense trust with intense trust is what confidence means. We talk about it a lot in confidence 101, one of my favorite masterclasses. We've done. You need to know, absolutely trust yourself, know that you have what it takes to deal with whatever life throws at you. Then you can see setbacks as challenges, champion style, rather than as threats that are going to cripple you. So if you're facing challenges or setbacks in your life, see them as challenges rather than as threats. Be antifragile about it and see how you can use this challenge as an opportunity to get better, not as a sign that something's wrong with you and is threatening your overall well being and all that stuff. That's our first big idea. If you're going to make a comeback, you got to see the setback as a challenge to come back even stronger.

Second big idea.

Contract. You want to outperform your contract. So I mentioned the seven L's that Jim has. One of them is to basically he calls it labor. Seven Ls. So one of the Ls is labor. £ the rock. You need to approach your work and your life like a stone cutter, right? Who just hammers away. Hammers away. Gregg Popovich, the great NBA coach, has a quote that Jim shares in the book. Reed says whenever he gets to a point where things just aren't quite clicking, he remembers the stone cutter. The stonecutter can hit a rock a hundred times and it looks like nothing's happening, not even a crack in it. And then that hundred and first hit cracks the rock open, Right? The same thing with our lives. We might be working really hard and really hard and really hard, not seeing any immediate results. We need to remember the stone cutter who on the 101st swing breaks the rock. But was it the 101st swing or was it the hundred that preceded it that did the trick? Obviously took the 101st, but it was the hundred preceding it that prepared the stonecutter to have that ultimate success. So we need to continue to pound the rock day in and day out, be willing to go through those plateaus that I talk about with George Leonard and his idea of mastery. It's really fun when things are awesome, right? So you're crushing it and whoa, yeah, I'm seeing all these results. Then you hit the inevitable plateau where you don't see results. Well, you need to keep on hitting the rock, hitting the rock, hitting the rock, knowing that eventually you'll make another breakthrough and then you're going to hit another plateau, etc. That George Leonard says is the biggest part of mastery, is being able to embrace the plateau and just showing up and doing the work. Now back to outperforming our contract. J.J. watt, great NFL player, says that his ideal, his standard is outperform your contract. Whatever it is you do, whatever job you have, outperform your contract. Work so hard that people look at what you do and say, wow, that guy's underpaid. He's working so hard, he's doing such a great job. Give that person a raise. Outperform your contract. Begs the question, are you outperforming your contract? Not just in sports, if you play a sport, but he says, are you the hardest working person on your team? If not, get on that and in your life and in your job and in your family. You have a contract with your significant other. Are you outperforming that contract? I know there's a lot of space for me to continue to improve outperforming in that part of my life. It's exciting. We want to step up, outperform our contract. Another word for it we use often is to astonish, to strike with lightning. Make people say, wow, with the value you create in their lives. Contract outperformance. Third big idea is to practice. So this is part of the labor idea as well. Or it might have been part of the learn, which is another L. Right. This idea of practicing. The contender, the average performer, practices until they can do something right. The elite performer, the champion, practices until they can't get it wrong. Practice until you get something right. Oh, I got it right. Okay, I'll move on to the next thing. I'm a stud now. Right? Or you practice until you can't get get it wrong. You reach such a high level of mastery that it becomes effortless for you to do it right every single time. Jim says, put effort in and then it's effortless out. We look at these world class performers and whatever they do and they make it look easy. But the only reason they made it look easy is they did all the hard work before. So the question for you is two questions. One, what's the skill that if you mastered it, would have the most positive benefit in your life? It might be a fundamental habit of eating, moving, sleeping, concentrating. Right? What is it for you? Or it might be a certain specific thing you could do in your creative or professional or athletic performance arena. What is it? What's the most important thing you can master? Think about that. Identify it. We'll put it right here, number one.

Bap.

There it is. Now ask yourself the question, do I practice that like a champion, like an elite performer? And do I do it again and again and again? So much with so much intention and intensity and focus that I just can't get it wrong. I just do that thing as well as I possibly can or do. I kind of sort of just put in enough so that I can do it right, you know, once in a while, right? We want to think about that practice till we can't get it wrong. That's how elite champions show up. Fourth big idea is kind of just a fun, simple one. One of the key aspects of a comeback, obviously, is having optimism, learning optimism to go into those L's, learn optim. Well, the study that Jim shares to bring this point home is a fascinating one. One of the little ideas he shares. Anyway, imagine this, 1952 baseball cards, right? Baseball cards in 1952, the baseball player was looking right at the camera. You know, they weren't swinging or throwing a ball, they were looking right at the camera. And so researchers went in and studied whatever, 100, 250 or something like that. Baseball players in 1952 who had this card and they looked at them and said, okay, which ones were smiling, right? Like a full smile, like, yeah, life is awesome. Or kind of sort of smiling, right? Or actually just sitting there and no smile at all, right? So no smile, kind of smiling. Super big smile, right? The group that didn't smile lived until something like 72.9 years old on average. What would you guess? The group that smiled lived until 79.9, 79 years, called 80 years versus 73 years. 70 year difference between the group that smiled on their baseball card and the group that didn't. That's crazy. There's other research that we talk about in the note that talks about this. Robert Emmons, one of the leading researchers on gratitude, shares a story in his book thanks where you can simply bring people into a lab and give them a pencil to hold in their mouth. You tell half of the group to hold the pencil between their teeth, which forces a smile, and the other half to hold it between their lips, which basically creates a frown. The group that was forced to artificially smile but to use the happy muscles in their face felt happier. Simply inducing, not even knowing you were actually smiling made them happier than the group that had the other expression on their face by holding the pen in their lips. That's nuts. Obviously, smiling isn't everything to optimism. You need to have a functional optimism. Know that your future will be better than your present, and a willingness to do what it takes to make it so. But smiling is a simple, powerful way to boost your mood and overall well being. Think about Smiling a little more today. And then the fifth big idea is our three P's. So Jim tells us that when you're in. When you're in the heat of performance, you're going to make mistakes, Your mind's going to drift. You're not always going to be in the zone. The trick is, can you notice it faster and get back to a place of equanimity? Marcus Aurelius talks about the same thing. Right. Can you regain your equanimity when you get knocked off? Boom. I'm knocked off. Get back on. I call that the equanimity game. We have a micro class on it. I just love the idea. Aurelia says habitual recurrence to the mean increases your mastery of it. The more you practice bouncing back to an equanimous state, the easier it is for you. Jim has three P's on how we can go about doing that. Here they are. So let's say you're performing right and something goes wrong. It's not that the thing went wrong that's the problem. It's how you respond to it. How you respond to your inevitable mistakes is what's important. Not never making mistakes, because of course you're going to make mistakes. So when the mistake happens, how do you respond? Three P's. The first P is you want to be present. It says you need to let go of the brick. So if you actually shot a brick in basketball, let it go. Whatever the mistake is that you made, it's in the past. Focus on right now. That's the first P. The second P is to be positive. 1, 2, and 3. The second piece to be positive. Think about the things that are going right. Yeah, you could obsess about the thing that didn't go well, but what's working right now, Focus on that. Be present and be positive and then be process oriented versus outcome oriented. You don't want to be thinking, oh, my God, if I keep this up, I'm going to lose the game or I'm going to do whatever negative thing you don't want to have occur. Outcome focus isn't helpful when you're in the moment. You need to. When you're in the heat of whatever it is you're doing, you need to be process oriented. What needs to happen right now? Now you're present, you're positive, and you're process oriented. What's the next step that's going to allow the outcome to be a byproduct? I'm not going to obsess about the outcome and stress myself out. So there you go. Embrace the fact that you will make mistakes. Be positive, be present, be positive and process oriented. Go ahead and smile as well. And remember you want to practice until you can't get something wrong, not just until you get it right. And you're going to think about your number one thing that you can dial in. Outperform your contract. Hit the Rock the Stonecutter if you're not seeing what you want to see quite yet in your work, step back. Maybe you need to adopt your strategy, but hold onto that champion mindset. See it as a challenge and then keep on doing the work on what you believe is the most important for you to crush it. We are not threatened by setbacks per se because we have what it takes.

To deal with them.

We're going to get stronger in the process and make a champions comeback. That is a quick look at this fun book. Jim, thank you for another great book. Looking forward to setting up our time to chat. We're going to set up an interview on this book and the other one. Look forward to sharing that for now. What was your favorite big idea? Think about it, reflect on it, and most importantly, figure out how you can make it a bigger part of your life starting today and make today another awesome day.

See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode.

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