Kwik Brain Episode 33: Developing Grit with Olympian Dr. Jeff Spencer

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Show me. Welcome back, Quick Brains. So here's your question in this episode. It's All about grit. What is grit? How do you develop it? What is its importance to your goal achievements? And to help you on your Kwik Brain success journey, we're bringing back the champion, Dr. Jeff Spencer. Thanks for being with us, Jeff.

Oh, Jim, it's such a pleasure. Thank you.

I appreciate you coming back. We had really amazing response from your previous 2 episodes, and I encourage everyone to be able to listen to those first if they haven't listened to it. First, we started— this is the natural progression, right, Jeff? We started first with how do you define the right goal? How do you choose the right goal? And then once you have the right goal, what is the champion's mindset that's going to help propel you there? And then when you roll up your sleeves, you're in the daily grind, right? And you're going through peaks and valleys. And how do you develop a grit, a level of perseverance and persistence to be able to go through those difficult times, which we know are inevitable? And what I love about your work is, as people have heard me in previous episodes, is that you are the corner man. For 5 decades and a half, you've been the corner man and a champion yourself, Olympian, helping champions of all backgrounds around the world achieve their highest level of success, literally gold medals, not as a metaphor, but maybe it can be metaphoric. What do we do when we want to give up? What do we do when we need to develop? We hear about the importance of grit. We talk about it in our podcast about how it's important to have a growth mindset and develop grit. Where do people start?

Great question. I think first and foremost is that we need to be mindful that in any goal or any endeavor that we're capable of achieving, that there will be a place that I call the daily grind. And you just need to know that it's coming. And the daily grind is a place where you just sort of feel like, you know, I'm not getting as much back or anything close to what I believe that I deserve from the time and effort that I put into this. And so, then the boogeyman starts to go inside your head and starts to make you think, well, maybe I should get out while I got something left. Maybe I can't do this. Maybe it's the wrong goal. I was too ambitious or I was too quick. You know, these usual characters that pop up at critical moments.

And these usually show up right after you set the goal, right? Because you're in this kind of honeymoon phase that you talk about where it's all dreamy. It's like, oh, I have this really amazing, alluring goal here and it's just going to just happen through the law of attraction.

Oh, that's it, man.

Absolutely. But what about the law of action? Or the law of reality?

You know, I, I just feel like we just need to be mindful that this is going to happen. And again, it's not something you drew into the universe because you said a bad word, or you didn't choose it on the other side. I mean, this is just part of reality, and you got to know that it's coming. And at that point is really where you're showing up every day, day in and day out, and you're a bit frustrated because things aren't moving quite along as fast as you think that they should be moving along. And everybody starts to wonder, yeah, is this really a good idea? You know, that traditional stuff that we should expect. But the point is with this, Jim, is that once we enter this, know that it's for real. It's not going away. If you're going to quit, this is where you're going to quit. And you need to fortify yourself to understand how to play the game and stay in the game when you're virtually at your limit. And so, with this whole concept of grit, grit is really developing a core competency of skill and belief in self. It's really what we're talking about. As we're doing that, going through this process where we're experimenting a bit with ideas, we're applying things for the very first time that we've had theoretically in our back pocket, but we'd never experientially actually put it into action. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we fail. Just know that that's part of it. And for me, the most important thing is to have some key things that remind us that there aren't necessarily going to be these big leaps and bounds right now, because that's not what this is about. This is about competency building. It's like building pressure in the magma chamber of a volcano. A couple things, if I might just suggest a few things to be very mindful of in advance. Number one, Make sure that you recognize that when things get tough, that that's supposed to happen. It's not something that you didn't do, but it's just a natural evolutionary process. And there need to be metrics that you have that are measurements of things to look at that are evidence that progress is actually happening. For example, in the Tour de France, which is not a friendly place if you like recreation and fun, it's a difficult place. And, you know, as long as you know that you're climbing at like 10 miles an hour and you see it on the speedometer, though your body may feel like you're just crawling, as long as you see 10 miles an hour, that's a metric that you can trust, that you know if you're going that speed, you're going to get there. And so, we need metrics, whatever that is. Opt-ins, it could be registrations, it can be income levels. There need to be metrics that are appropriate for the goal that we're pursuing that we look at and we look at it on paper. So, there's no illusion. And if it's holding ground and making appropriate ground for what's relevant for where we are, that's a really good sign because you got to stay in the game. Other things that you need to do is that when you're in the daily grind, you've got to make sure that you don't forget who you are. Because, you know, we don't change that much from day to day, but our perception of ourselves does. And so, we need to be mindful of how we got there, what our skills are. That does not change. Our perception does. We need to make sure that we have protocol that we follow, that we keep intact through policy, because that's when we may get a little bit loose on things because we start to lose a bit of confidence here and there. We want to start to give people slack, but you don't want to do that. You really want to hold your ground on policy so the integrity of the team stays together. Another thing is to make sure that we got a reasonable amount of sleep and effort and good nutrition and some level of recreation so that we're not digging a biologic hole for ourselves where we lose chemical energy. Because our brain is 2% of the body mass, it consumes 20% of the body's energy. And if the brain doesn't have the nutrients to stay vital, then we start making amateurish mental mistakes that can take us out of the game literally in an instant. And we, we also need to show leadership by Telling the team that this is the place where we really need to fight for our win. And the metrics show us that we are making appropriate progress and that we may be literally one step away from our breakout. But I've seen people one step away actually quit prematurely because they get into this place of belief they can't do it. When we can name the daily grind, because the evidence is there through the criteria that we just talked about here, if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, watching the metrics and executing The plan steps that are required to move the ball forward towards goal achievement, one day you're going to get up different and you're going to get up and it's like, I believe I can do this. And you just have to hang in there long enough by doing the right stuff and watching the metrics and being faithful and not being conditional about when you show up and what you do to get to that point where you have belief. And at that point, that's when the silver lining of the cloud is going to part the clouds and you're going to believe that you can actually do it.

So my quick brain is totally lit up right now, and where it's going is I would love our listeners to have an example of what this looks like.

Yeah, the daily grind, it's, uh, it's not pretty. And probably the most obvious experience that I've had, you know, I've done 9 Tour de Frances, uh, it puts your mind and your body at the most extreme limits that it can endure. And whatever weakness you have, it's going to ferret it out, and you can't hide from it. And I just know you're pumping up a hill and you've Been on the bike for 5 hours and your legs are screaming like they're on a rotisserie spit. You're just gasping for air and like you're breathing through a straw and you're just thinking about ice cream cones and massage and beaches and you're just at your limit, you know? And, you know, how do they stay in the game? It's like, number one, they continue to put one foot in front of the other. For example, we had an athlete that had an injury and he had to get up the next day and he had to ride, you know, rain or shine, sleet or snow. You get up and you go to work, put your clothes on, you go to work. And it's like, so how is he going to stay in the game? with this. And what I told him, I said, look, first off, you can't avoid this. You have to step into it. And the one thing I want you to do is that when you're out there on the bike today, you only think about one thing. You don't think about the finish line, because if you think about the finish line, you're going to talk yourself out of it. But if you think about putting one pedal stroke in front of the other, just one at a time, that becomes like your metronome. And putting one pedal stroke in front of the other is your absolute guarantee that you're going to get to the finish line. Which he did. And, and as a result of that, he became a legend in his own time. And what it also taught him, and something that's important for us to be mindful of, is that there is always a way to the finish line, and you have to stay in the game long enough to be able to find it. And you don't decide what it is in advance, because if you rely on your human nature to decide what that is, you're going to talk yourself out of it virtually every time. So you remember who you are, And how you got there, you put one foot in front of the other and you keep things moving until you have your breakthrough, until you get to the finish line, because you will. And this guy became a legend. He competed for another 10 years. But that one moment when most people would have stopped and quit, we've all been there where we just can't take it. We're at our limit. You always got one more pedal stroke in you and you just keep putting one foot in front of the other and you just keep watching your metrics. And that's how he did it. A similar example is, you know, working with like U2. You're on an 18-month world tour. That's 18 months going to bed at 2:30 at night, a different venue every night. That's like 18 freaking months, man. Talk about wear and tear on the mind and the body. It's like almost inhumane, actually. And these guys can't afford to make a mistake, but yet they're like us. It's the same stuff. So the thing is that you got to know that there are no exemptions. There are no free passes from Anybody from the daily grind. But if you want to create something that's extraordinary, that's at your capacity, you have to be willing to face it. And you've got to know that it's coming. And you've got to be able to keep putting one foot in front of the other until you wake up one day and you have that magic moment of belief. You just got to stay in the game. That's the promise.

Jeff, I saw this quote at the gym today when I was working out. It said, never let weakness convince you that you lack strength. Because we could all remember that time where we didn't think we could survive, right? I know I did, you know, going through things. And, and well, we did, and we could do it again. And when you have those moments of weakness, you want to be able to take that breath and really honor how far we've really come. You know, your history proves to all of us that you are stronger than you think. And don't forget who you really, really are. And ultimately that they got it, right? They got this. 'Cause they're superheroes, they're champions. And I wanna thank you so much for joining us. I really see these— this 3rd episode as kind of like the 3rd installment to this goal achievement, like, academy that you're doing. I highly recommend listeners listen to the first 2 episodes with Dr. Jeff Spencer. And also, how, Jeff, can people find out more about all the amazing things that you're doing as a corner man to the world's best?

Well, thank you, Jim. The best access to me right now is my website, which is www.jeffkwik.com. drjeffspencer.com. That's drjeffspencer.com.

And I encourage everybody to go to this site and also post your big ahas from this episode and make sure that you post it on social media because when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. So sharing is caring and post it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and make sure you tag both of us there because we'd also love to be able to follow your progress as always, because your success is our success. So thank you again, Dr. Jeff, for joining us and thank you everyone for listening.

Thank you, Jim.

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