029: Dr. Alex Auerbach | From Individuals to Teams - Psychological Cohesion & Team Dynamics

Alex, what's happening, man? Thanks for coming on today, Adam.

Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here with you.

Yeah, this will be exciting because most of our guests that come on the show live in the physical space when it comes to when we think about high performance. But you yourself, living in the space of sports psych and mental wellness and health, you know, you're only the second guest to come on to really highlight this area that is so critical and important for those in high performance. So excited to share your knowledge and your perspective in that space. But before we do that, let's. Let's just set the stage, give people an idea of who you are, where you came from, and kind of what's Alex's origin story?

Sure. Well, thanks for letting me be sports side guest number two, man. It's an honor. The short version is I'm a counseling and performance psychologist by training. Got my PhD in counseling psychology with basically a double major in performance psychology from North Texas. Spent the last four years as the performance psychologist for the Toronto Raptors before going out on my own and now doing some independent work with high performers across spaces. But we were joking around about the origin story pre show, and I think. I don't know if my story is unique and I'm going to date myself a little bit here, but I really got into sports by picking my undergrad institution. So I came here to Tucson University of Arizona and had the opportunity to work with the football program. They were the only program in the country that I had applied to that would actually allow me to work for them. And so that was sort of my first start. But my real start in sports came when I hand wrote letters to every owner, president, GM, head coach, offensive coordinator, and defensive coordinator of every NFL team in every D1 program in the country. And at one point, the personal assistant to the owner for the then St. Louis Rams, and I'm really dating myself, happened to be in Tucson when I was in school, and he called me. I was like a random blocked number. You know this, how this goes in the sports world. You get the call from blocked or no caller id. Id. You're like, okay, this might be something going on here. I get the call, I answer. He says, I'm up at this restaurant. It's called Shlomo and Vito. So I don't think it even exists anymore. I'm up at this restaurant. I'm finishing my bill. I'm going to be here for 20 minutes. If you can get here before I leave, I'll sit and Talk with you about an opportunity to work for the St. Louis Rams. And if you don't make it, the door is closed. And I left my book bag with my then roommate, like everything in the classroom, computer, everything. I was down on campus in this auditorium called Berger Auditorium in the education building. I was in, got in my car, sprint, dead sprint, you know, drove 20 minutes uptown and got this guy, I kid you not, as he's walking out of the restaurant. Only way I would have known was the St. Louis Rams. Hat ended up sitting and talking with this guy for probably two hours. And at the end of that, he introduced me to the people who gave me my first opportunity in pro sports. And that was really the catalyst to everything from there. Did a summer internship with the St. Louis Rams and you know, from there bounced around as first a football coach and then became a performance. Psych.

That is so cool. I am so happy you shared that story. Cause you were like, ah, do I share this on air? I'm like, absolutely share the details of that. And the reason I think it's so cool is like, it's just you never know where you're going to get your first opportunity and you never know how it's going to come about. And I think even as I'm like younger listeners here, like the idea of writing a handwritten letter, you know, you know, we just live by our thumbs on our phone. Like, I just think that's so cool and genuine that you took the time and effort to do all that. And just to highlight that, I think you're the first person that landed their first job that I've spoken to after writing the handwritten letters to get a response. So it's just everyone's got, everybody's got their unique way of getting into sport and you certainly are probably topping the charts on that one. So thank you for sharing that story.

Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity. It was fun. I had no idea it was going to map out that way. But here we are.

Hey. And here we are. So then here we are. Now you're down at Tucson. I'm out here in Scottsdale. So you're at the University of Arizona. You spent some time in the NBA in Toronto, so let's. Since we both have some NBA ties, I'd love to highlight some of the work you did in Toronto before we expand upon some bigger concepts in the, in the realms of health and wellness, mental mental skills and sports. Psych. So could you just share some light into what the roles and responsibilities and what you created with the Toronto Raptors.

I appreciate the opportunity to do that. So I was hired by the Raptors right after their championship run and my contract actually started 11 days before. Rudy Gobert ran around and tapped all the microphones and joked about COVID which was actually a game against the Raptors. That was my first road game with the team on my contract and the NBA season shut down. I was brought in to kind of stand up a holistic mental health and mental performance program and to oversee player development or what some teams call player engagement, that kind of off court lifestyle development for players. So I had the opportunity to build a team. I had the opportunity to provide direct clinical services. I served as a member of our executive team helping make decisions in the draft or trade deadline, worked with our coaches, worked with our front office, worked with our players. Really about everything, health and high performance from the mental side. And my role was to make sure that part of what we did as a program was really as high class as we could. It didn't mean I had to provide all the direct services. You know, I had the opportunity to build a great resource network for people who are specialists in other areas. I hired a couple clinicians who offered skills or, you know, identities or other aspects of care that are really important that I just didn't have that were really important for our players, coaches and staff. And then I had the chance to build out a more holistic program around off court development that introduced some mental skills and mental health frameworks, but was really about them becoming the best people they could be, developing their business opportunities, personal branding, all of that sort of stuff. So it was a really cool opportunity to build a really robust program at a high level.

What do you think, looking back on it, what do you think were some of the greatest successes you had in started from scratch and then to kind of how you, how you left the program.

I think the biggest success was getting to a point where people inherently seem to understand the value of wellness as it relates to promoting high performance and the role that the mental game plays in people's and players success on and off the court. And I was lucky to follow a really talented consulting psychologist who had kind of laid the groundwork but hadn't had the bandwidth to build a whole program that impacted things like when should we travel to promote optimal sleep or what's the best way to handle this difficult conversation with a player or when we're drafting someone, what are the characteristics we should really be looking for to understand if not they're an NBA player, but if they are an NBA player for us, if they're a Toronto Raptor, if they're, in your case, a Phoenix sun. Right. Understanding those things, those are all opportunities I had to sort of stand up. And so I'm really proud of the fact. Fact that when I left, it wasn't a question of whether or not this role was valuable. Right. It wasn't a question of whether or not we would continue. It was like, oh, of course we're going to do this. Can you help us bring this in? And I had some incredible opportunities as a function of the work that I did. You know, I got to help hire our new head coach on my way out, which was unique for someone in my position to be involved at that level. Had the opportunity to, like I said, work on, you know, four drafts, four trade deadlines, all those things, and then for them to say we should keep that going, I think is probably the highest compliment you can get.

I certainly would agree. I mean, that definitely is probably one of the largest compliments you can get. Just knowing the work that you created and the foundation that you laid following the person before you, just continuing that success just goes to show not only the investment that the organization wants to put into it, but you've done it at such a high level. It's hard for them to say, oh, I can't imagine life without this.

Yeah, that's a big compliment. And look, I was really lucky to work with some talented people who had that kind of foundational belief, but. But didn't really know what it could be. Some people didn't believe in it at all and became believers. And I think it takes a whole effort in my space to really make this a cultural shift. And I think there's a lot of credit owed to the people who continue to carry that torch forward there surrounded by some good people.

There's. There's one thing I want to double click on, and some of the time that you had in Toronto, and let's just keep in general, let's not get into specifics, but, like, there was this one category that you were speaking upon. It looked like I would label it as talent identification or even character identification. When you talk about being involved with hiring a new head coach, being involved in the draft process, being involved in, should we acquire this player at the trade deadline, where we always, like, from my field, we always look at, okay, what's their physical qualities? Like, can they, you know, how high can they jump, how quickly can they sprint? You know, do they have the right body composition? Are they at the right playing Rate that we want them to be in. Right. All those things that are physical and you know, and you layer that in with the medical history of, hey, what kind of injuries did they have? Have they had any surgeries? But you're the first person I've talked to that has been involved in the process from a, like I said, character and talent identification from, let's just call it from the neck up. So I'm really just curious into if you can share any insight. And by all means, please, I want to respect the privacy of the work that you did there. But just. And from a general perspective, how. How did you attack that project when it came to acquiring talent or acquiring players or coaches?

It's a great question. I love the opportunity to talk about this stuff, so I'll unpack this all day long. But you know, this was an area I'd had the opportunity to work with a different franchise as a consultant for part of the draft. And that was sort of my first entry point into that work where you're trying to understand like who is this player and you know, what the draft process looks like in the NBA, right. It's 20 minute interview, like, good luck understanding everything you can about a guy in 20 minutes. And so when I got to Toronto, it was basically almost immediately draft time. Right. It's mid March. We're getting ready. The season's now going to go on hold old. And so they kind of had a free for all, basically. Right. We don't know when the season's going to resume. We're going to start doing zoom interviews and all this stuff. And so I started with this point of just figuring out what are the key psychological or cognitive components of performance that are predictive of performance long term across high performance spaces. And it turns out there are some pretty consistent things, whether you're talking about surgeons or pilots or athletes. There's kind of like concentric circles that have different levels of predictive validity as far as understanding how someone is going to develop over time or what's likely to make them successful. And the single most important factor across these spaces, the best predictor, is intelligence. And so in Toronto, we use this test called the Athletic Intelligence Quotient, or aiq, to understand how players see the court, how quickly they process the game, how they make decisions and how quickly they learn. And that was really important because it gave me a look into that part of the puzzle. Right? And so that was one bucket that I was really felt was important because especially, I mean, you know, this space, right, when you've got players who have maybe some quirky personalities, which they all do at the highest level. Right. And we all do at that level too. You'll kind of deal with some personality stuff if they've got the performance stuff down. Where you won't deal with personality stuff is if the performance stuff isn't there either. And so understanding that performance, perspective, understanding, okay, these abilities are not necessarily going to make or break a player, but they help us understand how does he do what he does. And then if we bring him in and we want to put him in this specific position, does he have the cognitive profile that, you know, intelligence abilities to deliver on what we think he can deliver? And the test is really designed to say this person's a genius or this person's not. It's just designed to get you an understanding of how they process the game. So that was kind of bucket one. Then the second layer of concentric circles is what we call personality. And that's what we typically think of when we're thinking about interviews or job hiring, right? It's characteristics like conscientiousness, you know, how dutiful is someone in the work that they do. So you might think of things like grit or growth, mindset, right? These kind of characteristics. And so I developed an assessment there. I won't share all the things I put into that one, but that measured some of the things that the data shows are most important, like that conscientiousness, like grit, and a few other ones that are again, predictive of performance across spaces and can tell us something about how a person behaves in different situations. And then the third bucket was really about culture fit right in the draft. You're not asking the question, is this player good? When you're evaluating 60 NBA players or 120 NBA players, like, they're all good basketball players. Of course there's different levels between them. But if a player is being considered, you've already answered the question, is the player good? The real question is, is this player good for us? And that comes down to culture, system, people, you know, all these things. And so we developed a key set of eight characteristics that were kind of like the most critical, non negotiable things of what we felt was really important to our program. And that was developed across specialties. So it was me, the vice president of sports medicine, gm, assistant GM coaches giving input. And I tried to use interview data to sort of rate players on those dimensions so we would understand, okay, like, here's something he said that relates to this characteristic. We care about can we get a real understanding of who he is in that way? And so I kind of factored in those three things to help us understand who are we drafting, what are we drafting, and if we bring them in here, how do we best set them up for long term success?

That is so cool because I've never spoken to someone or experienced someone that's been able to comprehend what the realities are, but also at an intellectual level with your skill set, be able to apply it at the same, in the same breath. And I'm just over here writing notes and questions down because there's so many things I want to explore more based on this. And so let me just start from the top of my list that I have. Like, this is awesome. Where do you think people make the most failures? And we don't want to label it as failures, maybe mistakes when it comes to hiring staff members. Staff members being medical, healthcare providers, coaches, or even on the aspect of when we're talking about roster building, acquiring personnel, and I want to preface this question or follow this question up with, you were talking about is this person a good fit for us? And we're willing to deal with high talent, poor character, but we're not willing to deal with poor talent and poor character at the same time. Right. It's like these are kind of the things that you were talking about that wanted me to provoke this question. So let me just ask that question one more time. Is like, where do you think we miss the boat when it comes to hiring or acquiring personnel on the staff side?

I think where we miss most is going too fast. Right. So you've heard probably in the business world this idea like hire slow fire, fast sports is kind of the opposite of that. It's like, oh, this job is open, let's just move somebody up. Or this job is open, hey, I know a guy. Let me call them. They've got everything. Look at all the rings they won, look at where they've been before. And look, that's, that's all fine, right? But it doesn't tell you a lot about what it's going to be like to actually work with this person on a day to day. So I think that impatience, that like urge to get it over with quickly and keep moving forward is probably the single biggest mistake people make. Because it's really hard to know what you're buying in just one interaction. Right. There's lots of really fascinating data on this. Like in interviews, people form their first impression in under 10 seconds and then the rest of the interview is usually spent just confirming what you already believe. Right? So you need multiple data points to get a good sense of who these people really are and what's going on with them. So if you're forming your impression right away and you're just going from there, like, yep, seems good, right? You're likely to make a mistake. I mean, the second thing on the personnel side that people don't do enough of is what's called job sampling, Right? It's this idea that you put someone in a role, you ask them to do something related to the job, and you see how they do. And it opens up a whole world of opportunities for doing things like giving feedback and seeing how they respond to feedback, seeing how they even frame the problem or question in their mind when they get started. It gives you insight into the way that they actually work and the way that they actually think. And it turns out this is also one of the best predictors of subsequent job performance. That, again, we just kind of skip in a lot of personnel decisions in professional sports. We assume that, oh, you were an athletic trainer somewhere else or you coach somewhere else, you must know what to do. But the reality is, like, these things are really complicated. And how we did it in Toronto might be different than how you did it in Phoenix or how they do it in Philly or whatever it might be. And so you want to see how someone is in your environment, in your space with your tasks, to get a sense of how they deliver. So I think those are probably the two more common ones on the personnel side. On the player side, I think the most common one is what I would call the fallacy of geography, is this idea that if you come here, we will fix you and our system won't be as bad as that system. And we've got some special sauce here that's going to make you a different person. And. And those are wonderful thoughts to have. And I do believe culture can make a difference in how people behave. I mean, environments, a huge, huge influence over people's behavior. But if at the core, this is who this person is in multiple locations, it's probably not going to be much different when they show up to you. But teams get this level of arrogance is probably too strong, but confidence, right, that, hey, we've got great people here. All true. We've got a great environment here. All true. So we think if we put this guy here, he's going to be special. And you can see across teams and across players how that is just not the case. Right. We have lots of data that shows when you move a player around, they still end up doing kind of the same thing. Right? And so I think that's probably the biggest mistake people make on the talent kind of player side is just assuming your space is going to fix it.

I will echo a few points in my experiences and the first one that comes to mind is when you talk about the expression you used of fallacy of geography, I believe is what you labeled that as. Seen that time and time again. Oh, there's an expression I want to say. It's the night coming in on the white horse. They're going to come in and they're going to save it. We're going to fix this person. And sometimes you just gotta say, guys, this dude's 28 years old. He's been in league for seven years. He played three years in college. Like, this person is who they are. Like, I don't think what we have here in this organization is gonna change them all that much. Maybe we can make them 5% better or nip a few bad habits, but like you said, they are who they are at that point. From a character perspective, there's very little that, not very little, but I think we're a little bit, like you said, confident in our abilities to change some of that to fit your system. And then the second thing that I heard and I want to just echo is just the idea of taking it slow when it comes to hiring personnel. And that's something when I had the opportunity to create a lot when I was brought out to Phoenix alongside some really good people and we did a really good job taking it slow in some instances. And then there was moments where we had to move fast just because there's this pressure of, oh, you're, you got it, you got to make this move now. Like, we need that person here yesterday. And the ones where we took it slow, they've worked out really, really well. The ones where we took it fast, they may have worked, but they didn't work as well as the others looking back at, in hindsight. So I just wanted to echo that from a practical perspective from someone that's had to hire numerous people in the health and performance space, from consultants to full time employees to the W side to the NBA side, I will echo that, that notion that when you, when you take it slow and you get to understand someone and put them in those situations to understand how they think, because ultimately you're with those people every single day. So it's really hard to just say, oh, we're going to do this one interview, we're going to do this one zoom interview, we're going to do this one in person interview. And oh, yeah, you've been in the league for six years, so you must be good. It's like, no, that doesn't mean you were good or not. Just means like, you've survived the chaos of what the league may have been. So I just bring to light some of the similar experiences because someone that's lived it in a different space in the same industry, it does exist. So I just appreciate you highlighting that.

I appreciate you double clicking on it, man.

There's something else that I've observed in both the soccer space and the basketball space, and it's tying into this idea of character and talent identification. And we often consider associate a lot of the wins and successes for teams. Let's just stick to the basketball since we both know that space really well recently, like your top five, your top seven players, and we just think, man, we take care of those top five, those top seven, our roster is going to be great, our culture is going to be great. But what I've observed has been a part of the teams that were super successful. It's like the 11 through 15, those are the guys that are helping build your culture, supporting the leadership and whatever it may be, putting in the work despite not playing. And I almost just call them like the culture building crew, like, they are the ones that help drive some of that when it comes to being a culture fit. So I just, I wanted to share that and kind of get your perspective on that. If you observe the same way and maybe from your lens of sports psychology, why it is at the bottom of the roster from that perspective. Maybe not from a monetary and talent perspective, but when you talk about character and culture, how important that is when it comes to the greater good of the team and the organization.

I love that you're thinking about it this way. And I have observed something similar, you know, and there's lots that goes into this, right? There's issues around, you know, making your best players a captain, which can shape maybe what the culture feels like. There's also issues around how you treat those 11 through 15 that shape what the culture feels like. But as a psychologist, what I think about is just this fundamental kind of like psychobiological process that happens between people. And what happens is we have like evolved, you and I and everyone here, right, has evolved to regulate each other's nervous systems. That's what we do with our presence, with our language, with how we show up with each Other. And everyone has had this experience intuitively. I'll give you like a great example. At some point you dated someone in your life and you sent or received a text that said, we need to talk. And you're immediately like your heart dropped, right? You're, you start sweating, you know, everything's like, oh man, what did I do? I'm gonna fly default. Like, this is bad, right? This is bad news. And it shows you how four words can completely change your entire physiological response sometimes without even seeing another person, right? You just get a text message, you're reading words on a screen is like fundamentally what's happening? And then you internalize that text and now all of a sudden you're dysregulated. Well, if you've got 11 through 15 showing up every day in a bad mood, unhappy to be here, talking crap about the coach, talking crap about their teammates, talking crap about the organization, that impacts 51 through 7, that impacts 8 through 10, that impacts everybody there, right? And that's kind of the underlying issue around like what we would call toxic cultures, right? That's why people don't like negativity is because it's actually dysregulating. And it's very, very hard for you as one person to pull yourself out when four or five people are not engaged in a positive way. And sometimes, unfortunately, in high stress situations, even neutral is perceived as negative. And so even when people aren't speaking poorly, the reality of NBA sports, any pro sport, right, is this is high stress, high stakes environment. Your neutrality is going to be perceived negatively. It's going to be perceived as, you don't care, you're checked out, you're not invested in your teammates, whatever it might be. Well, all that is again, helping to in this case, dysregulate, right? Those top performers are the people who are playing. In contrast, if you pump people up, if you say nice things, if you're encouraging, if you bring not necessarily toxic positivity, right, but good vibes basically into work, you get a positive upward spiral, right, where people start to feel better. You can actually pull people out of being kind of feeling low, right? Or being demotivated or being worn down. And if you're playing 35 to 40 minutes a night, you're going to be fatigued and you're going to need a little bit of that energy from other people to help kind of pull you back up. And so those players are in the best position to be kind of even keel, right? They don't have the same necessarily like physical Demands so they don't have to ride the highs and lows of the winning and losing as much. And they can focus on being culture builders like you're talking about. They can focus on being positive. They can focus on creating that upward spiral. And if they do it really well, you're going to have a great culture.

And Amen. Amen, man, I appreciate that response and that perspective is it. I can distinctly remember this one year where we had success. We went to the championship game and I look at that roster and I said, man, we had some talent, like one through five, we had some talent, but, man, it was 11 through 16. That, man, those are the guys that you miss, and those are the guys you just enjoy kicking it with. Right. They're the ones that are in there early, in there late, and they're a joy to be around. So I just. I appreciate you speaking on it more in a positive light from your field, because I want to say it validates, but it gives me a different perspective to consider how to include that. But also, there was something you said, too, about the good vibes versus toxic positivity, because I think it's important to distinguish between the two. And I'm sure I can learn a little bit from you here on really, like, what is toxic positivity versus how do you just bring good energy to the situation? So could we double click into that, like, kind of similar but different phrases when we talk about bringing the good energy versus toxic positivity?

It's a tough one. And I'm not sure I have, like, the exact right answer here, but this is kind of how I think about it, so. So to me, the toxic positivity is really. It shows up more as a fear of being honest than anything else. Right. So what happens is it's always like, oh, we just got to keep going. We got to keep it moving. You know, everything's great. You know, you keep working hard, like we're going to be fine. And at an emotional level and an intellectual level, sometimes you know that that's bullshit. Like, you just know that that's not true. And so if you kind of ignore it or sweep it under the rug, you create that kind of toxic positivity where it sort of undermines the actual validity of the real positive things that you're saying. Right. It's like kind of the opposite of the Boy who Cried Wolf, basically. Right. If everything's positive all the time and we never address the hard truths, we never talk to each other about what's really going on or when something doesn't work, you create a culture where actually nothing can really be talked about honestly, which is problematic. And then people start looking for, well, like, is that true? Is that not true? And they start kind of checking out the good vibes is not about not being honest or not even not about providing constructive criticism. Like, those things can be done in a helpful, constructive, even positive way, right? If you say something like, hey, I'm coming to you with this, Adam, because I really care about you and I want to see you be as successful as you can be. I've got a little bit of information that might be hard to hear, and then I'm going to help you figure out how we work through it. Like, you can position messaging in a way that does not tear someone down, and it doesn't take a whole lot longer than just going straight in at them. And that can help create those good vibes. Right? People feel cared about. So when I say good vibes, I don't only mean like rainbows and butterflies and sunshine. I mean like feeling a sense of belonging. I feel like feeling a sense of care. Feeling that, yes, this is a place that I want to show up to work. There are people here who motivate me and who are invested in me. That's, I think, what it means to have good vibes versus that toxic positivity, man.

As you were, as you were describing this, I'm thinking, oh, that's, that's how I would label that coworker. That's how I would label that teammate, you know? But it's so true because it's almost like there's this. You don't want to bring bad energy to the team, or you don't want to bring bad energy to the culture, but sometimes just gotta call a spade a spade and say, hey, this shit sucks. This, this is not fun to be right now. Like, we're losing 10 games in a row. Hey, like, we've got some off the court issues. We've got external media kind of paint us in a negative light, whatever it may be that comes with working in a. The spotlight and working in high pressure, high stakes situation. I think it's okay to acknowledge some of those things in the sense of, like, I look at it from a perspective of if everything's so good and dandy, then how do you acknowledge when things are down and not dandy?

Right?

It's like it's. You have to almost. You need the tough times to appreciate the good times, so to speak. And I really appreciate the kind of even Just like, the simple words that you just chose. And I picked up on like, oh, man, I'm gonna use that right away. It's like, hey, man, I really care about you, but there's just something. I want to talk to you because I think it can just make us better. And just framing criticism and framing feedback in that manner does bring, like you said, the good vibes, but it just helps everybody continue to move forward. Man, I'll put my hand up and say, man, I'm more the. I grew up in the Northeast. I'm more of just like, hey, I'm gonna call a spade a spade and come right directly to the point. And I've gotten the feedback of saying, man, Adam, you're just too direct sometimes where it comes in kind of harsh. And I'm like, oh, I thought I was. That's what people just want to know. It's like, ah. Like, don't cut around. You know, don't beat around the bush. Just get right to it. But in actuality, hearing you say it and frame it that way, just like, I know walking away, it's like, oh, man. Like, I'm gonna use that tomorrow. Because I certainly have failed in conversations as a leader or manager in certain situations, and I know I could. Could have benefited from some good vibes around the criticism side of things.

Look, we all do it, right? We all struggle with delivering that feedback. And there are a couple things you mentioned that I think I want to just put some additional emphasis on, right? So the first is this idea of acknowledging when things are going poorly. What I think is really important about that is if you actually, there's a saying in psychology, you gotta name it to tame it. So if you speak honestly about, okay, look, it is not fun losing 10 games in a row. We are not doing well together as a team right now. You don't have to go so extreme, right? Like, we suck. We're terrible. This is the worst, you know, like, which is what people's tendency is, right? When you're in that space, you can just name it. Hey, it's disappointing to lose 10 games in a row. It's hard. We're all working, working really hard. When you put the problem out there like that, now all of a sudden you can rally everybody around solving that problem. And so, like, you can start to think about it collectively as a group. But if everyone's just sitting there having to pretend like everything's fine, we've lost 10 games in a row, and we're on game six of a seven game road trip, and we're tired. Like, that's actually driving down people's ability to, like, engage in a positive way, right? They feel like they're lying to them themselves, which is very, very hard. The second thing that you mentioned, that I think is also hard in this space, but that could contribute to some good vibes in sports. Across sports, really, we have a tendency to criticize a lot more than we congratulate. You know, when we win a game, we're like, hey, good job. Keep it moving. That was awesome. You know, when we lose, we spend three hours dissecting every loss. And this goes back to, like, when we were kids, right? You turned in a paper and all you got back was your grade circle and the red ink at the top and everything you did wrong. Like, that's kind of the culture that we all grew up in. And the data shows you need about five bits of positive feedback for every one bit of criticism that you give. It is very, very hard for people to find five things they like about what someone has just done. But if you can challenge yourself to do it, it's incredibly powerful. And you see it all the time when, you know, young staff are giving a presentation, right? Boss comes in, hey, you know, next time, you got to be clear on this slide, and you need less text here and blah, blah, blah. Just slow down 30 seconds and just. I really like how you organize that. It was awesome to see your pace and tone. You're really engaged with the audience. I felt like you really landed that message here. And, you know, next time, as you're thinking about it, it would be great if you could put a little bit less text on the slide. Like that kind of messaging now, it's like, oh, yeah, cool. I have one thing to fix versus here's 30 things I better go do differently. Makes people feel a bit more positive. And it takes training, it takes practice to get to that kind of five to one ratio. Like I said, it's really hard. Hard for me too. But that's sort of the magic formula for getting people to actually respond well to that direct feedback you need to give.

There was two specific examples. I want to just provide some context. What you just talked about, the idea of just coming in and saying everything that's bad. I just think the classic coach that comes into the locker room and just starts going in on everything that went wrong in that loss. Because that's all we can think about right now. Because we to want just played so poorly, right? Like, that thing comes to mind. The other thing I Wanted to highlight is. I was. It was validating. Just hear you say it's five to one. Right. Five positive to one criticism. In my undergraduate. And I remember this from. Maybe it was motor learning or maybe it was just basic, you know, coaching education. We were taught at that time, back in, what was it, early 2000s, it was for everybody, negative criticism or error, quote unquote error that you want to fix in movement or skill acquisition. You got to deliver three positive ones. So I came up on a three to one. And maybe it's just changed with the research or whatever, how we advance a little bit better. But I'm happy to hear that that still is the norm. Because you're right. If all you hear is negative criticism, you get the red mark on your paper and everything just redlined and underlined. It's almost like elementary school teachers and middle school teachers need a red marker and a green marker. It's like, this was really good. This is what we need, a little bit criticism. And almost there should be more green than red. And I think that's important to. To highlight for us in the sports space, because you're right. We always want to focus on the things that we are doing wrong because we have that instantaneous feedback of a loss. But when things are going well and we're doing a good job, it's more so like, okay, just stay the course, guys. We're doing a Good job.

Yep, 100%. And I didn't know that about 3 to 1. So I like learning something while we're here together.

Yeah, I think it came out of the literature around when you're trying to. I think it was like my phys ed class, it was, you know, you're trying to teach an elementary school kid, you know, how to throw a ball or how to swing a bat. And it was, hey, make sure you have this three to one ratio. And I think it was even like per minute you, like, you're trying to do it. Like, don't overdo it, don't underdo it. You know, kind of, you need this cadence of positive to constructive criticism.

It's a good formula to have.

There's. There was something else that you had mentioned earlier when we were elaborating around character identification, especially in the draft process, and you had brought this idea of, hey, like, I went back to the interviews and I analyzed interviews and hey, this. This person mentioned this, and this related to this type of character trait. And so I think in the. Not. I think my experience working with those in the sports psychology mental Health space and even those that are even unfamiliar with it. The question or the I don't want. I just, maybe just the existence of the industry is adamant. It's just really hard to measure what you can't see. It's just really hard to measure what people are saying or feeling like. It's. I don't know if I can buy into that. I just don't know where it fits in if we can't measure it. And then to hear you come back and say no, we can go back to an interview, pick up on key words, and we know that these words or phrases or expressions associated with these.

Type of character traits.

So I wanted to double click on that because I think it's just such an important thing to highlight of some of the work that you did. But it also sheds light to folks in my industry that solely focus on the physical and skill side of things. Let's just leave it at those two categories that even in the conversations you're having with them, I think we can learn to pick up on some of those cues that you're referring to to help us manage those conversations or even manage some situations that we may be in. So if we could double click. How do you analyze an interview? Analyze a conversation to give you the objective information that may not be as easily understood to the naked eye.

It's tricky, but you're really looking for patterns. And what happens is you first have to start from this place of believing the words are data. Whatever someone is saying is giving you insight into what's going on in their head. And it's not perfect. Right? But even measuring physical traits is not perfect. So we have to let that go for a minute. And then what you start to do is you start to like put pieces together almost like a puzzle, right? So someone says something about a and then as the interview goes on, they kind of touch on it again and you try to tease it together and understand how do these two things fit. And oftentimes it's like the follow up question or the bridging of the gap that gives you kind of like triangulating a database point. Hey, this guy said the word confidence 17 times in his interview and talked about how he doesn't have any. Like, okay, we can't measure that on a scale right now, but we can count that he said confidence 17 times. And 11 of the 17 times when he was talking about it, he was saying how he doesn't really have it or he had to work hard to develop it. I'm not saying he's doomed to never be confident. That's not the outcome there. The point is, if you buy this guy, you're probably getting someone who needs some help with confidence. And if that's not something you're willing to invest in or willing to help with, or your coach isn't in a position to help build that up, right? Or the players in your locker room aren't going to build that up, you should probably think about that because that's going to impact how this person thinks, feels and performs in your system. You could also think about causal events or linking events together, right? So unfortunately, you do have interviews with players who have had some off court or off field issues before they get to the draft process. And you can ask questions like, how did you work through that? What did it look like for you to recover? How were you thinking about dealing with the punishment or the consequences? And if someone answers you and says, I really didn't have to deal with it very much, like, that's good information for you to know. You can't measure it per se, but it's relevant to know, hey, gee, this guy really didn't learn anything from this, right? And again, consequences are something we all understand intuitively, right? If you're a parent, you punish your kid and when they do something you don't like, you reward them when they do something you do like, right? So we know consequences matter. If someone doesn't have some, like, there's a chance that there was no learning that took place. So you can start to use conversations like that and you can do all sorts of more intense technical things, right? There's really good data on things like natural language processing, showing how key phrases link to specific personality traits. You can create like word clouds, right? And see what are the things these people are talking about most often. Might be interesting for you to see, like, do they talk more about their team? Do they talk more about themselves? How do they talk about their coach? Is it positive or negative? Right. That's all data that lives in the language that you actually can measure. It just takes one or two additional steps of work that people often don't want to go through to actually capture that information. The other criticism that you're not really raising directly here, but I think is related to this is sort of like the step that comes between, which is also people are like, well, it's all self report data, right? It's all, this guy's rating himself on that. Like it does matter what people think of themselves. It does. And we've all had this Experience too, right. When you show up and you don't feel confident, how do you, how's your performance personally as an athletic trainer, as a physician, as a front office person?

It's not great.

It doesn't feel good. Right. So if this person's rating themselves low on confidence sure is not the most accurate prediction of their confidence of all time. But it probably matters to know they're not feeling confident or if they're super confident and their performance does not match what that is. That's also good data for you. Like, hey, maybe this person lacks some self awareness. Like anything. You have to make some educated inferences on what's going on here. You have to look for patterns, you have to try to surface information, you have to do some due diligence and try to link things together. But there is information embedded in this process. It just requires, like I said, a little bit more looking and a little bit more comfort with ambiguity. But like anything really, the front office and draft process, like it's a game of odds, right? And if you look at the research around this stuff, like most people miss. Yeah, it's just a reality, right. Every NBA draft, I think the status something like, you know, there are three to five all star level players, you know, a handful, maybe 12 who kind of like stick it in the league for a little While in the first round and then 10 who fade out completely. And at some point, whether you did the psychological part of the evaluation or not, someone thought that guy was good enough to be in the mpa, right. So we're all going to miss some. This is no different. I was of course not perfect in what I did, but this allows you to at least look at one other piece of information that helps you understand what's going on here. And this is also why that intelligence component was so important to me, because that's the one objective cognitive performance measure I could get right. The one thing that didn't really involve them telling you what they thought about themselves and did have hard data and hard numbers to back it up, which helped round out the whole profile.

Do you think as you're talking about the word clouds and word associations, the thought that came to mind is maybe it wasn't there when you were with the team during this process, but now with the influx of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, large language models, machine learning, is it possible to record those interviews, throw it in through one of these systems that I just referenced, and then you teach the system, hey, when you see this phrase or this language, tie it to this characteristic Are you aware of anyone? Or maybe not aware, but you think that's where we're headed with the influence of some of the technology and advancements we're having with software to be able to do some of those things, to then help those steps to be a little bit more easier than maybe you taking a manuscript and underlining. And I don't, I don't know what your process was, but if you were willing to write letters to everybody, I imagine that's what pen and paper is kind of your go to.

I took a lot of notes, that's for sure. Yeah, I mean, you obviously could do that, right? You could train a model in GPT4 or whatever, right? Upload your information about what you think is most important and then start uploading transcripts. But the next step you could take that would probably help you is to look for the data on natural language processing and look for what are the key words or phrases that actually do predict some level of like emotional valence or personality. And there's lots of stuff out there, I mean, there's stuff out there on people's Twitter profiles predicting their personality with some degree of accuracy. Right? So you can look for that information, you could train a model on that data and then for sure upload some transcripts. I mean, look, if I had the infrastructure and I was doing this right now, I'd probably do something like that because it would at least give me another data point. What I wouldn't do is say like, yes, you know, OpenAI is the right answer, you know, because we know AI makes mistakes. It's going to miss some things. You're in the room with like real human feel. So it's not a replacement of what the person is doing or the data you detect as a, you know, provider clinician, someone studying the talent. But it can certainly speed up the process of understanding. Hey, you know, in this 40 minute transcript or 20 minute transcript, pull out the number of times person said X, highlight any sentences that talked about why. You know, it can help you certainly speed that up. And I think it would be super interesting to build something like that as.

We'Re going this back and forth of pen and paper. OpenAI the scenario that's playing in my head is the movie starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, Moneyball. And it's like back at the Oakland A's. And I just think it's like, oh, where, like, is this, is this what we're headed? Like the. You got the old school guys that are emotionally invested. Oh, this guy moves so well. This guy shoots really well. And then you got Alex over here saying, yeah, this guy just doesn't have confidence. No, he's super confident. He's got a hot girlfriend. I remember like that scenario from the Moneyball scenario. It's like, no, like these are the words he's saying. So I share that perspective from a mainstream media movie and Moneyball because the Oakland A's were successful with that for a short while. To bring to light here with what you're, what you had did and what you're trying to do is do you think that is where we're going in the space of, hey, like words and emotions matter to some extent, but not overshooting on the emotional side because of personal bias or beliefs. Like how do you balance, when it comes to the acquisition of talent, hiring personnel, balance the emotional feel. Like you just said, you're in the room with the person. You can't ignore what you feel sometimes when you have that interaction or the way they communicate. Because we know a lot of what we, how we communicate is non verbally versus verbally. So really just curious, I don't even know what the question I'm trying to ask you here, but I really just want to know how do you balance that emotional feel or pull to someone versus like, nah, this is just kind of what the information is telling us. We gotta kind of stick to that. Like where, where do you sit in the middle of that? Or how do you balance the two?

So I'm going to answer two questions here and you can hold me to it. One is going to be how do you balance it? But the other one is like, where is it going? Because I have some cool ideas about where it's going to. But on the field side, there's this really famous paper from my world around decision science called Conditions of Intuitive Expertise. A Failure to Disagree. And it's written by two world famous psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, both coming to science of decision making from two totally different lenses, right? Gary Klein's is all about expert decision making under pressure. And like, you know, how does the firefighter show up and immediately know what room to go into? And Dan o' Connaman's research is all around like people's propensity to avoid loss and the biases that we have. And so you can see how like, well, if you got a lot of biases and you make really quick decisions, that's probably problematic, right? And what these two researchers agreed on and aligned about was actually there's a very specific subset of conditions where feel or intuition is more likely to be right and should be trusted in a set of conditions where it should be ignored. And the set of conditions where it should be trusted are when you are an expert in that, right? So when you're a firefighter and you've done 20,000 hours of firefighting and you show up to the next house on your list of firefighting houses, like, yeah, you should probably trust yourself, right? And go with it. If you're a brand new firefighter and you firefight one house, you're probably not there yet, right? And you should look for and listen to the people around you. Now, where this gets complicated is if you've had 20 years of scouting, but you never really thought much about the character side of things, you're not really an Expert. You have 20 years of scouting and you're great at whatever you are really interested in, right? Measurables, physical ability, shooting, those are places for you to have expert judgment. If you've watched for 20 years, really broken it down, really studied it, but if you've discounted the psychological part for that whole time, you haven't really developed a deep model or deep expertise around that. If you've thought really critically about that like a psychologist has, then your intuitive expertise might be a bit stronger here. And what we know is this intuition is really built on a strong mental model developed over time that allows you to make accurate predictions about what's going to come next. And that's how our brain works at a sort of like neurobiological level, right? Your brain is issuing predictions about what it thinks is going to happen when in the next moment, based on past experience and based on accumulated expertise. So if you've got that expertise in this space, then yeah, you can rely on your feel and feel fairly confident about it. And an interesting adjunct to this is oftentimes that gut instinct is sort of your brain, like jumping to a conclusion and drawing closure around something that may or may not be ready to be closed. And so your gut is really a signal. It's a sign that there's something to pay attention here. And if you're an expert, you should probably follow that or at least give it really good attention. If you're not an expert, your gut's probably tricking you into thinking you know more than you do. So that's how you know, like when to trust, feel and when to think about it a little bit more. And when in doubt, talk it out, right? Like, hey, there's multiple people in these interview rooms. What did you think what did you think? What was your perspective? And you can kind of synthesize data, but just like any other situation, you kind of have to weigh people's credibility, right? Like, I wasn't in the draft room talking about shooting ability because I got no sense of what it looks like to be great at shooting. I developed a sense over four years, but it's nowhere near as good as the talent. People I worked with who had watched 300 games in the last 30 days, those guys are going to be much better than I am. And so I trusted their intuitive judgment around that. And I think it's just getting people to trust the intuitive judgment around feel or how it is to be in the room with someone from a trained expert. Now where it's going, I think, is towards some of this, like, AI stuff. But I also think you're going to start to see some really cool, like, behavioral analytics. And if you start to tease apart the data, and this was something I've started to work on a little bit, you can start to look for, like, psychological characteristics in the context of a performance. And we've all kind of seen this, right? You've seen, like, the player miss the shot and they hang their head. And, you know, in that moment, something happened in that player. Something is going on that represents their psychology. Now, it's very hard to capture. We don't know how long it's going to take for them to snap out of it, but there's probably something there, right? There's probably something going on. And so I think you're going to start to see people look for those kinds of cues and things like, how long does it take for them to snap back into it? Right? What would it look like for them to, you know, if they pull themselves immediately out of the game, what does that say about them and what does that lead to? And there's a lot of work to be done here. I mean, there's like, we're nowhere near any real level of sophistication around any of that. But there are some papers that are starting to come out that talk about some of these things, and I think that's really the future.

Man. There's so many more questions I want.

To ask you here.

And like I told you about the show, like, we didn't even. We haven't even tapped into, I think, what do we have 22 questions here. I'm only on to Matt, maybe one of them. Okay, so that was really helpful in the balancing the emotional and expertise space. One scenario. I just want to hear Your perspective on. Because I struggled with this, that's many aspects of my career when, especially when it came to return to play in rehab. And you're talking about clearance to play and readiness to play. But you're also like, we can't, we can't not say that professional sports is a business and an entertainment space. So there's always that those industries play a role in that decision making process as far as the return to play and readiness to play. So just really curious from your perspective, I'm kind of going to leave like a very general open ended question like what advice do you have for folks that are in that decision making process from whatever industry you're coming from, whether it's healthcare, performance, business, entertainment, front office, how do you balance the, like you said, the intuition of some of those experts in that space when it comes to that type of a situation, it's hard.

But obviously like the default expertise I think should be to the medical staff, right? The people who have seen this injury, this thing over and over and over again and how long, reasonably based on their model and good data, how long it's going to take for this person to come back and be able to not only be ready to play but actually be ready to participate, perform, right? Which is really what like people like you I think care most about, right? There's like, yeah, he can go back on the court but like he might run three times. Like, you know, that's what people think of when they think ready to play, right? Oh, he's good to go, he can start running around, he can practice again but like it's going to be a little while before he gets to performance. And so I think we should lean on the medical experts for that insight into how long it's going to be. And some psychological experts, right, how much fear is likely to accompany this injury? Like is there going to be a fear of re injury and how are we going to work through that? What are the different pressures and circumstances? And I know the best people in your field are thinking about that, right? Hey, we're going to play a game in his hometown and it's one or two nights before, like his scheduled six week period to come back, like maybe if we do a little extra rehab we can get him back and he'll give him a little extra juice to come back. All those things are things you have to factor in based on your own expertise. And so that's sort of where I lean. I think the other recommendation I guess I'd make is to be more comfortable with ambiguity. Because one of the things that often happens is people seek closure and then they want to move to the next thing, right? So player hurts his ankle. Go to the VP of sports medicine. How long is he going to be out? Oh, he's going to be out six weeks. And then two days later he goes and gets an mri and it's not as bad as he thought. Oh, it's going to be out three weeks now. And then he starts walking on it again, and it turns out he doesn't feel comfortable. It's like, you know what? He needs two more weeks now. And all of those conversations, to me are really more about seeking closure and reducing ambiguity than they are about actually making a good decision. Right. It's just, hey, we don't really want to have to deal with this right now, or there's a lot of uncertainty, you know, what the best answer might be. We really don't know how long it's going to be for him to be back. Like, he should be physically ready to go in five weeks, but mentally it might be another three or four weeks. That's very hard for decision makers to hear. Right? That's hard for front office coaches, people who are planning games around someone's availability. So I totally get that and I totally respect it. And all that back and forth also isn't helping anybody. Right. It's also creating other issues. Right. It creates mistrust. It creates losing credibility. It creates different experiences of pressure from, you know, people in sports medicine, for example, who don't want that pressure. I mean, and I remember, like, when I was at University of Arizona working for really closely with our sports medicine staff and the pressures we would all get around, how quickly is someone going to come back? And same thing. In the NBA, you have that too. It's hard. And that pressure also creates an urgency to give an answer that may or may not actually be the best informed answer. It's just probably the most available answer. Top of mind. It's like, ankle six weeks, knee eight weeks. That's not the right data. And so I think slowing down, giving people the time to make a thorough, accurate assessment, to gather the data that they need to actually form an opinion is the most helpful thing. And that, by the way, doesn't mean that the person doing the evaluation in the locker room at the game is not an expert or not informed by what they're doing. But if they're saying, hey, look, we should get some imaging done, we should have one or two more days to kind of see what this looks like, really what they're saying is, I'm so expert at this that I don't have enough information to make a good judgment right now, and I need more information to get this right, and you should trust me. But people often interpret that as you don't know what you're doing. And so we've got to fight that urge to get to that closure and clarity as quickly as possible.

I feel like we should just mic drop and end the episode. That was absolute gold because I lived that. Right. Like, there was so many times where, like, you just said, like, an injury goes down third quarter. You got. Everybody comes into the training room post game. Oh, how bad is it? Well, how long is he going to be out for? What? Guys? I don't know. What do you mean you don't know? Like, aren't you. Aren't you evaluating him? Like, what's. Like, what, what? Guys, I need 24, 40 hours just to see how this injury is going to run its course. And I think it's funny you say ankle sprains, because that would. That ended up being my default. It's like, I just need 48 hours to let the human body do its thing to see how severe this is. Like, it's crazy. Sometimes it's not swollen after the game. They come in the next morning, that thing is a balloon. And now, I told you yesterday, oh, he's going to be out 7 out of 10 days now he comes in, he's like, oh, man, this is going to be three to four weeks. And they're like, adam, you know what you're talking about. How can you go from seven to 10 days to three to four weeks? And I just echo like this. That just, like, hit to my soul. I was like, oh, Alex, I needed you, like, these last five years. Like, where were you in my life? But to your point, I think what's really, really hard is we live in a. That, like, the world of pro sports are just high pressure, high stakes. A lot of people get involved, A lot of people may. And no fault to anyone. Everybody just cares so much about the people that are on the roster, about the team. They only want to help. They only want to make sure they can provide the best environment, best care. And so people just want to know so then they can figure out, where can I fit in to help? And sometimes that just ends up murking it up a little bit more muddy in the water. Excuse me. Muddying the waters a little bit. And. Yeah, yeah, there's just so many thoughts I have as you explain like, oh, yep, I live that. Yep, I live that. Yep, I live that. Remember that situation. So I just say thank you from your perspective, someone that understands that piece of it at a much higher level than I do. You just did such a great job elaborating on that and how we can as an industry as a whole, as a high performance in sport, just health and performance teams everywhere, like, this is how we can all come together to say, hey, let's be a little bit more comfortable with the ambiguity and give some grace to those when, hey, this is what I said first. You know what? We've gotten all of our information now we kind of actually got to double. Double back and say we got to take a little bit slow or vice versa. No, we can go a little bit faster here. So I just appreciate your perspective and just hit home on so many points.

I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. Look, I empathize with people in your role, right? I mean, I've watched it. I've seen it up close and personal, too. Like the strain that comes with having to make those calls and make those decisions. So kudos to you guys for navigating that, man.

I always said it's just going to prepare me to be a great dad one day because when I have a teenager, I think it's going to be even harder.

I think you're probably right on that one. You got a few years to go, though.

Well, hey, man, as always, I never get to any of the questions that I send pre show because you guys, you just did a great job bringing to light so many things I was really curious on, things I weren't even aware that you were a part of, which were just so cool to hear and listen. I certainly learned a lot. So I'm just going to hit pause on this and maybe in the future we get you back on to dive deeper into some more in the weeds, like specific topics around wellness and mental health and mental skills. Because I know there's a lot of buzzwords around that, and I think people do a disservice when they talk about it or your industry. Your field just understands at such a higher level. So let's put a pin in those questions and conversations. And so without further ado, I always love to ask these two questions to all of our guests because I think it's super important. And it's this idea around maintaining optimism and finding our small wins. And so just really curious. Obviously, someone that understands optimism at a high level and what it's like to endure difficult Journey, how would you define a small win in the space of high performance?

Oh, man, I love this question and I'll come back anytime and talk about all the other stuff you want to. So this is, this is a ton of fun for me. I mean, to me, a small win is really anything that goes your way that you didn't expect, you know, and I think that happens a lot of times, right? I think like winning a game in general is an odds based event, right? Performances are all odds based events. It's like you can't guarantee what the other team's going to do. You never have 100% certainty, right? And so you have a lot of micro moments where like, man, the plane got in 10 minutes early. I didn't really expect that. But now we get to be in bed at a reasonable hour. You're like, yeah, that's a win, man.

That'S a win when you've been on.

The road for a week, right? But I think we, we, those are the moments that we, we take for granted, right? It's the player who comes back a day early who's able to push forth, you know, from your world, right? Like, spends a couple more minutes on the court than we expected, right? Or in MySpace is a little bit more confident taking a free throw, right? And just kind of like overcoming some, you know, predefined set of expectations or odds and reaching a different level. I think that's, that's a win we're celebrating.

Love that. That was awesome. And then the, the double click on that in the sense of, you know, listen, we're all trying to be successful, whatever it is that we're doing, whether it's, you're a parent, whether it is, you're a therapist, an athletic trainer, right? It's very easy to relate to wins and success because most of us listen to this podcast or guests that come on are affiliated with sports teams. But we all have had exposures of what success looks like and how to upgrade what we're doing to achieve that success. So someone's listening to this podcast and wants to learn. Hey, I've got a great sports psych on here. Like, I would love to ask them, hey, I'm trying to make a little bit of a change in my lifestyle, my health, my own performance. I just want to be better at what I do. What's the first step that you would advise them on taking on how to live a more successful upgrade a little bit to achieve high performance of whatever it is that they're doing?

Man, this is a Tough question, but can I give you a few answers? Does I have to give one?

You can give me as many as you like. Because I'm sure you got a couple nuggets for us.

Okay, well, I thought a lot about this, and I have my own thinking about what it means to be successful over the long term. But if you're talking about one simple, like, lifestyle change, something you want to do, maybe you want to exercise more, maybe you want to be on your phone less, maybe you want to eat healthier, the starting point for me is always understanding what's, like, the deeper thing that that links to, right? So why do you want to eat healthier? Like, you might have to push past the original reason why I look better in that T shirt I just bought and get to, like, I want to be alive until I'm 95 so I can see my great grandkids. Like, okay, that's a pretty good reason, right? Then the second step is to figure out, okay, like, what's the identity underneath that? Right? So it's being the healthiest father I can be. It's being the best coach I can be. It's being the best person I can be. And then the third step is, okay, what's the single simplest, smallest step I could take today to bring that identity to life? And oftentimes what gets in the way is just people see this gap, right? Oh, man. For me to eat healthy and exercise more, like, I better start going to the gym seven days a week. And right now you go zero days. Like, no, one day for five minutes is better than nothing. And so just find that single, simple, small step to take. And that's a vote toward, okay, I'm becoming that healthier dad. I'm becoming that better parent. I'm becoming more present. And as you stack those things and you keep taking those small steps, you're going to get closer and closer. And that gap between zero days of working out and seven days of working out, all of a sudden it's going to be six days, and that's going to be five days. And so that's where I would would start. The other recommendation I would give, though, is to think about what's in your environment and who you surround yourself with. So we talked about this a little bit earlier, but there's some interesting data out of the English Institute of Sport that shows that about 70% of behavior in a high performance environment is shaped by what's going on in the environment. Right? It's a lot. And now we have some cool neuroscience to Back this up, right? So we know, for example, that like when you go in your car, you get in your car to drive to your favorite bar, your brain actually starts producing chemicals that will stave off drunkenness at your favorite bar. It's predicting that you're going to drink a bunch of alcohol here. And so it's starting to protect you from getting too drunk too fast, right? If you go to a new bar, it doesn't do that, so you'll actually get drunk quicker, right? Now, if you expand that out to work environments or you expand that to your home environment, when you get in your car and you drive to work, if that environment's promoting your high performance, if it's promoting healthy decisions, if it has the right food out, if it has exercise equipment visible, if it's encouraging standing at standing desks, if you are in an environment like home and you put your phone away, right? Like all these little environmental manipulations interventions, they're going to have a big impact on your behavior, right? The best way to not eat junk food is to not buy junk food. It's not to put it in your freezer and hope you don't eat it, right? And so little things like that can also go a really long way to those sustainable lifestyle changes you want.

I appreciate the nod to environment because I think it's often overlooked. I've had a prior guest say he works in MLB and he had said, man, like, if you're trying to go to the gym more, I think it was really atomic habits. He said, then sleep in your gym clothes. So when you wake up in the morning, you're already ready to go. So I just appreciate you not in the environment because I don't think many people have either experienced what high performance environments are or what successful environments, how impactful they can be on you shaping your behavior. I mean, the junk food one's a classic one. If you don't want to eat it, don't buy it. Right? I think that's an easy one. But I think some of these other things, like you said, maybe going to the gym, trying to read more, be on your phone less. Well, how do you set up the environment to allow you to do that? So kudos and great job for acknowledging that because it's important to highlight.

Yeah, it's a big one. It's one I believe in.

Well, hey, man, this was fantastic. We're definitely going to do another one. I don't know when, but we will. But if people, in the meantime, until you come back on here, until we talk more about some of the mind health, wellness, sports, psych, deeper topics. Where can people connect with you and find more about what you're up to?

You can find me on all social platforms X or what was Twitter but might be Twitter again? Alex Auerbach, PhD link LinkedIn same thing @ alexhourbackphd. Also write a newsletter called Perform. You can find it at perform.alexhourback.com I actually wrote a newsletter article called how to Be Successful based on my experience in sports. It's a little bit of a longer read, but might be interesting here and I appreciate the opportunity to share that and add up. This was awesome. So always fun to have a conversation with someone who's been in the same spaces, lived the same experiences. It just brings something different.

Out. I appreciate man, this was great. Thank you for coming on.