303 The Three Mindsets of Mental Performance | Dr. Alex Auerbach, Toronto Raptors

So when I started TOC in 2016, I set out to learn as much about culture and leadership as possible. I wanted to know anything, everything that could help me develop a high performing culture. And while the start of that journey was reading a lot of coaching books and some of the traditional leadership books, really over the last, I'd say five years, my study in learning has kind of organically shifted into areas of mental health, neuroscience, psychology, personal development, character development, things like that. And a lot of people might wonder, you know, what does the brain or what does mental health have to do with team culture? And the reality is everything, like all these things are connected. Culture is made up of people and you cannot separate the human being from the athlete, the human being from the coach. And that's why I think it's so incredible. The Toronto Raptors, just before COVID hit, they hired Dr. Alex Auerbach as the senior director of Wellness and development. Now, they didn't just put him in an office where players and coaches could come and talk to him if they were struggling, right? They gave him a role as off court development for leadership and character so he could proactively work with athletes and coaches and everyone in their building on their development. But they didn't just stop there. They gave him a seat on their executive leadership team. They knew his perspective and insights would be critical to the overall culture of the Raptors. And that's who we are very fortunate to have on the podcast in our next two episodes. In today's episode, we'll be breaking down the three mindsets of mental performance. In our second episode, he is going to give us a whole bag of tips on mental health and performance for athletes and coaches. He's a great communicator, very practical, offering a lot of applications or protocols for us to put in place within ourselves as leaders and our team. Welcome to Coaching Culture Podcast. I'm your host JP Nurbin and I'm joined by my friend and co host Nate Sanderson. The mission of this podcast is to help you become a better leader and build a better culture. In addition to this podcast, I'm the founder of toc, which provides one on one coaching and consulting for leaders. Learn more about us@toc culture.com this episode is brought to you by the TOC Newsletter every Thursday. Our newsletter includes two things you don't want to miss out on. Firstly, the notes to that week's podcast episode. Whether you're listening while driving the car out for a run or doing the dishes, we don't want you to miss the biggest takeaways from each episode. Secondly, each newsletter is a short article from myself or Nate on leadership and culture. These articles are designed to inspire, encourage, and provide practical insights and into leadership and culture building. Our content is a perfect fit for anyone who wants to stay up to date with the latest trends and insights in culture building. You can subscribe to the newsletter@tocculture.com or by clicking on the link in the details of each episode.

Well, your breadth of experience here. We're going to try to tap into a couple different fields and you had a relatively recent thread on Twitter and we listened to you talk on another podcast about the three mindsets that you kind of think are most important for performance. And we kind of just want to walk through those one at a time here first, just to get a little bit of background for the listener that maybe isn't as familiar and then maybe digging in a little bit as to what that might actually look like on the ground for coaches that are listening. But the first one that you talked about was growth mindset, and obviously that's become almost cliche now after, you know, the work that was done. And as much as we hear about it in education and we hear about it in coaching and we hear about in know, there's no other way to be successful, Alex, than to have a growth mindset. But you throw in there a little pinch of fixed mindset as well. And I think that perspective is an interesting one to to share with our audience here.

Yeah, I'm glad you're bringing this up because this is like a soapbox I can wax poetic about forever. So please, please interrupt me if I'm getting too long winded. But you know, essentially like you hit on the high points. Right? So this idea for me is not about growth mindset not being important. I think that's a very like, important starting point. Right. Like, I do believe people should be thinking about their outcomes in terms of effort and persistence and hard work. Like those, those things are important. I don't think you can be maximally successful at what you do without those things. And I also don't think you can be maximally successful without recognizing your special talents and without leveraging those two. Right. And so that's what the fixed mindset piece is for me. And I think in popular spaces, social media, the way growth mindset been written about, talked about, and even Carol Dweck talks about this herself. Like people have painted it as though growth mindset and fixed mindset can't coexist. Like there's no world in which those are, are overlapping. And the reality is, is, you know, from a science perspective, they're orthogonal concepts. Right? Which means you can be high on both. You can have a lot of fixed mindset and a lot of growth mindset, and the two don't preclude you from having the other one. And so when I think about really elite performers, what I'm most interested in and what I have seen is there's this incredible amount of confidence which comes from a bit of the hard work, but also comes from recognizing that like you have something special here. Like there is some unique skill, strength, ability you bring that you should probably double down on and that that's going to carry you to kind of the highest level. And if you pair that with really hard work and effort and persistence in the face of failure, you'll fully max out. So to me, that's what that mindset is about. It's about recognizing that there is something special about you also and that your unique strengths can really contribute to your success. And that success is not solely a function of working hard. I think that's like a myth that we probably should move away from because one, it's replicable by everyone. So if everyone could just work hard and they would be successful, that's what we would all be doing. And it's clearly not the path to the answer. Right. So we just have to look at reality and recognize that like everyone working hard at basketball doesn't end up in the NBA. Right. So there, there must be some special separating factor and that the people who end up in the NBA don't end up here without hard work. And I think that nuance is really important.

Yeah, I absolutely love this point and I think there's so much value in it and I think that I kind of see it as a polarity. We feel like it's got to be either or. And then typically it's like, oh, we really have to be all about the growth mindset, I guess. Could you help maybe illustrate a little bit more of what it looks like when somebody has a greater tendency to be focused more on the fixed mindset and maybe what it looks like when someone is more on the growth mindset within an athlete or even a coach and then how you as in your role might be able to help that individual move more towards both fixed and growth in a healthy and healthier balance there? Yeah.

So I think what you would see if you were watching someone who is a little bit over indexed on the fixed mindset to the point that it was unhelpful would be things like quitting early, withdrawing from competition, not putting forth maximum effort. These things are, are generally signals that someone is behaving in a way that's trying to kind of like self preserve, right? So the kind of, you know, typical downside of the fixed mindset basically is you start behaving in ways that don't allow for the confirmation of the fact that you're not good enough, right? So it's a convoluted statement, but basically you end up hiding, right? You're trying to just hide so that you don't get found out. And so I think if you saw some of those things as a coach, right, the player who misses a shot on the court and then goes and hides in the corner every offensive possession, or the guy who has to be taken out right after a mistake, you know, these things can be signs that there's a little bit more of a fixed mindset present. Although I'd encourage any coach to be like curious about those things first, right. And not, not make assumptions. I think on the other side you might find someone who's a bit overindexed on our growth mindset if their only solution to something like loss or failure is to just go like grind it out, right? And there's a lot that we know about that approach that's not maximally effective for performance, right? Namely, it undermines recovery, it undermines kind of like psychological detachment, this ability to sort of like reset mentally and come back fully engaged. And so that's not to say don't work hard after you've made a mistake. It's just to say, to find kind of the sweet spot, right? So you'll hear stories in the NBA of guys who, you know, I think it was a popular Giannis story maybe like a year ago, right? Guy misses a game winning free throw and just stands out there while they're taking the court down and they put the ladder up and they're taking the nets down. It's like, okay, like this is probably a little bit too much, right? This is a little too much hoping that the hard work is going to solve your problem right now. And again, doesn't mean you shouldn't work hard. It just means there's probably a more deliberate, structured, practical way that you could go about it than shooting until 3am while they're taking everything down around you. And so I think what you want to do in either situation is one, like, peak performance is a lot of a function of doubling down on strengths and sort of not ignoring but mitigating weaknesses or limitations, right? So if you want to promote more of that, like, little bit of fixed mindset, you should be talking about what people are really good at. And that doesn't mean they shouldn't work hard at those things to be better, but it does mean you should be giving that feedback, right? Like, hey, you know, and I've heard some coaches do this, where I think this is like a really powerful piece of feedback, is to say something like, you know, player X, like, you're really excellent at this. And if you keep working hard, you could be one of the best in the league. You could be one of the best to ever do it, right? And what that coach is doing is really saying, like, here's a unique strength you have, right, that you should double down on. And if you compare that with really good work, like, you could be elite. You could be incredible. So I think giving that structured, kind of, here's what you're good at. Praising the positive more than we often do in coaching, I think is really important. There's a lot of data that shows like five positive comments for every one criticism. Is the right ratio in elite sport. I don't think I've ever been around a coach that's hit that ratio ever, because it's very hard. It's not our natural inclination. Our natural inclination as coaches is to correct and to provide critical feedback. So I think that's one change I'd make. And then the second is to be really mindful with your language and how you're describing outcomes. So if you want to promote more of a growth mindset, you should be talking about things like effort, persistence, trying again, taking risks. And so it's like when we lose, right? It's more helpful to explain that in terms of, hey, like, maybe our effort wasn't exactly where we need it to be. Let's focus on coming back and giving great effort, making the corrections that we need to make and kind of moving forward. So you want to balance that. But a lot of those mindsets are really shaped by feedback in the environment you're in.

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I want to move on to the second thing here because I think all of these are obviously interrelated and you've already sprinkled some breadcrumbs as to where we're going next year. But the second point in your three mindsets here is that stress is enhancing, I think so often, you know, especially with young people. I've been a high school coach for, you know, for 20 years here. There's this. There's this tendency to want to avoid things that are uncomfortable, avoid things that get us out of, you know, something that pushes us into the unknown, ask us to learn something new. And, you know, that vulnerability can be a little bit scary. It often is just labeled as being stressful. And then, you know, too often we try to avoid that rather than leaning into it and seeing the value in being in that place. So can you speak a little bit to kind of this a little bit of a challenging philosophy that stress really can be beneficial for us?

Yeah. So the starting point here is understanding what stress actually is. Right. And at a kind of fundamental level, stress is just your brain and body preparing you to do something effortful. And from there, what you make of stress is what determines the impact that it has. So we've all kind of been socialized in Western culture in particular to think about how we could just get rid of stress all the time. And so our default mode is to appraise stress as negative, as though the ideal outcome is to be in this place where you're just never stressed. It just is not something. And then the sort of like underlying theory behind that is if you're never stressed, you're always happy. Right. Which is like a whole nother convoluted story. But you know, so. So I think the starting point is recognizing that, right? This is just, again, your brain and body preparing you to do something comfortable. And so then what influences how you use the stress is really your mindset. And one subcomponent of that is kind of your natural appraisals, right? So people typically appraise stress in one of two ways. The first way is as a challenge, right? This is an opportunity to learn something new, demonstrate a strength, try something, or as a threat. Oh, my goodness. Like, what is this? I'm not ready. I'm not going to be able to perform. I'm totally out of whack. Like, I need to shut it down, right? And then the second is these mindsets, and there's four of them that we've kind of unpacked and researched, right? So the. We'll go in reverse order so we end with the good one, right? So the. The first is this idea built on the kind of social, cultural norms we have around stress. It's the idea that stress is debilitating. And so if you have this mindset that stress is going to undermine you or hurt you, you tend to behave in ways where that's in fact the case, right? You start to pay more attention to how fast your heart's racing or how sweaty your eyebrow is or what the other team is doing, and less attention to what you actually need to be focused on to perform well. And so if you believe that stress is debilitating, it's likely to debilitate you, and you're likely to sort of, like, clam up and sort of come into yourself, in essence, to protect yourself from this bad thing that you're experiencing. So that's one stress mindset possibility. The second mindset stress possibility that we see a lot in sport and elite military and even some in business is this idea that stress is just something you gotta, like, push through, right? And so you hear a lot of coaches emphasize. Emphasize things like, you just gotta keep digging, push through, work harder. And what's interesting about this is that holding this mindset about stress doesn't really undermine your performance individually, but it undermines your performance as a teammate. Because when other people are not able to do the same thing, you start to wonder why they can't just will their way through it, too. And so you end up in this sort of weird, isolated performance zone where you might individually be fine, but because of this belief that you hold, you're not really capable of helping other people that might need it through it because you're just sort of disconnected from the way that they manage. The third possibility is kind of connected to growth mindset, which is another reason I'm less excited about growth mindset or less super hot on growth mindset as the solution to everything is this idea that failure is a learning opportunity. And so one of the things that people will do when they're stressed is they'll start to just think about the worst case scenario and how they will cope with that. So you get to this point where it's like, oh, I'm stressed out, but you know what? Like, if we lose today, it's okay. Like, I'm going to learn a lot from this. Like, it's going to be fine. Oh, we're two minutes left in the game, we're under pressure. But like, you know what if, if James Harden hits the game, winning three again, like, it's okay. We'll, we'll learn, we'll come. There's always a game five. And it's like, sure, on one level maybe, but in that moment, under stress, under pressure, I don't really want you thinking as a performer about how much learning you're going to have from this failure. Like, this is not going to help you right now. And it doesn' mean you shouldn't try to learn from failure. Although the data suggests learning from failure is actually very hard, much harder than we think that it is. Which is another reason why this mindset might be limiting. But it does tend to sort of promote some of this same kind of stuff, which is just sort of like, essentially you kind of take your foot off the gas, right? You don't max out because you're sort of in this place where it's like, well, it's okay if I fail. And in a lot of situations, that is not really that helpful of an attitude to have. It's very fine to have that attitude in a learning situation. It is much, much harder to execute well with that attitude in a performance situation. So in practice, if you're going through thinking, like, yeah, if I fail, it's okay. Like, that's fine because there's no consequences here. But if you're in a game, game seven, and you're like, well, you know what, we can come back next year. Like, yeah, maybe, maybe you can, maybe you can't. Like, we don't really know. And so that attitude's not helpful. And so then the fourth one is where we want to end up, which is this idea that the stress is enhancing. And it's really about seeing stress for what it is. It's the energy that your body is giving you to execute. And so that means thinking of this stress as a challenge, as an opportunity to demonstrate a strength or showcase a skill or elevate your performance. It means recognizing that all the physiological signs and symptoms you're experiencing is just that. It's just your physiology tilting you in the direction of being able to execute. And if you want to take it one step further, it means to sort of like, lean into the stress, right? And say, like, okay, I'm going to narrow my focus in on really crushing my goal, right? And what we find is that if people who can really focus on, like, a specific goal and thing that they're working on and they make this challenge appraisal, they tend to activate that kind of like, clutch state that you hear about, right. When someone performs in a clutch way, it's from this, right? It's recognizing, I'm under pressure. I can use this to help me. Here's what I'm going to do with it, and here's the goal I'm after. If you have those things in place now, you can really perform well. And so that's what we're after when we're thinking about performing with stress.

I love the way that you presented that we recently had this year. Dr. Kelly McGonigal on the podcast also talking about how stress can be enhancing. And you've really laid out for a way that I think really identifies probably the three big traps that today's athletes can fall into. I'm curious, you know, from your perspective, what would you say is. And maybe you're just guessing at this, and that's fine guess, but is the more common trap that people would fall into out of those three other mindsets within, you know, the common athlete today? And in your professional opinion, what's your, you know, prescription? What's. What's for the coach to be able to lead the athlete through that? Or maybe it's the prescription for the coach themselves. Because we're going to talk about later today, you know, coach performance and coach wellness as well. So, you know, what's the more common one? And then maybe what are one or two prescriptions you might have?

So I think the most common one is the stress is debilitating mindset. And I think it's important to recognize that a lot of mindsets that we have, which are just like a set of beliefs about a particular concept, right? A lot of them are formed and shaped by cultural norms, right? And so I think, to me, this one is hard because it's sort of like it is the norm that we have in North America, at least, right? Like, that you should just try to get rid of all stress, that stress is bad for you, that if you're under stress and if it's chronic stress, you're going to fall apart and the whole world is going to come crashing down and you're not going to be able to do anything. And that's going to be it. Your world is going to be over and you're going to have to just shrink, and that's it. And so we're all kind of inundated with this idea that stress is just tearing you apart all the time, right? And you should be avoiding it. And so I think that's the default, right? That's where most people start, because that's what we've been raised in. And so I think the way to get out of that is to first start to practice reframing the stress that you experience, right? So I think a really easy one is this idea that stress is a sign that you care about, right? Most people don't feel stressed about something they don't care about. And so if you start to feel nervous before a game, coach or player, right? This is just a sign that this is actually important to you. And, like, that's great. Like, that's. That's why you're here, right? That's what this is all about, is to be engaged in something that you care about, that's important to you, that's meaningful. And so that simple reframe from, you know, oh, my goodness, like, I'm about to melt down to, like, no, this is my body telling me that this is really important. This is my brain reminding me this is something I care about. That's a big shift in the engagement. And then the second one I'd suggest is to practice some mindfulness around what is actually happening in your body, in your brain, when you start to feel stressed. Because oftentimes we kind of compound these experiences into more than they are. And so if you have some sweaty palms or a little bit of nervous butterflies or a racing heart before a race, that in and of itself is all just gonna help you. Like, it's just energy, right? It's energy that you could be channeling into your run or your race or your basketball game, whatever it is. But we tend to tell ourselves stories about it, right? We tend to tell ourselves, like, oh, my goodness, what does this mean? I might fall apart here. Oh, I'm too nervous. Well, if I'm too nervous, I'M not gonna be able to run fast enough or I'm not gonna be able to do this, or I'm gonna be tight and if I'm tight, I'm gonna get hurt, right? And like, you just go down this rabbit hole where all of a sudden these really simple physiological signals are made out to be catastrophic impediments to performance. And if you can just catch yourself doing that, right? And just come back to like, okay, what is the reality of this experience? Like, yeah, I'm a little bit. I have some butterflies right now. Like, okay, cool. Then you can push yourself back into that reframing, back into that reappraisal. Like, okay, what are these butterflies? How can they help me? Right? How can this nervousness be used in a good way? Oh, maybe I'm not nervous, maybe I'm excited, right? Those kinds of simple things, if we can catch ourselves.

Well, I do have one follow up question to that and I'm curious on your perspective on this. This is a conversation that JP and I had a couple of weeks ago where I think, and maybe it's different at the high school level as an example, but how do you coach somebody to find the proper perspective for winning and losing? Because on the one hand, you know, my high school kids are playing a game and five years from now, and I'm catching up with them as alumni, it really isn't going to matter if we, you know, beat Edco on a Tuesday night in the middle of December back In, you know, 1996, whatever it was, like, it really doesn't matter in the big scheme of things. And I think there's some freedom in that. But at the same time in the moment, like, it needs to matter for us to be able to get to a place to perform at our best. So you touched on that a little bit. But from a coach's perspective, how do we properly frame the idea of winning in outcomes to really prepare our players to perform at their best?

I think it's important to help people recognize that you can care about something without it defining you. And I think to me that's like the core of this sort of challenge is we often conflate performance on a basketball court or a basketball game with value as a person, right? So you're a winner or you're a loser is like one of the simple things that we do, right? And whether or not we like recognize the power of that language, you're sort of like attaching an identity and a value judgment to an outcome. And so I think it's Kind of like trying to exist in this place where both can be true. Right. Which is that this can really matter to you. You can work hard at something and care about how you do. And at the end of it, it doesn't have to be the sum total of who you are. And so we talk a lot about like, you know, the simplest way to get at this is just stuff guys like outside of basketball, Right. Because it helps sort of spread their identity out a little bit. But I think, I think for coaches it's really being mindful of the language that you use when you describe the outcome of a game. And I think it's also aligning your behavior around the real significance of the outcome.

Right.

So I've been around high school coaches. I was once a college football coach who did some recruiting and stuff. And like, you'll see high school coaches lose their marbles over Game 2 of the preseason of it's just like, this is so absurd and your behavior is so far out of touch with the reality that it's almost hard to take you seriously. And I'm all for people caring, I'm all for people being emotional. Like, sport is a great avenue for expressing yourself. And I think like a lot of high performance is just like this amazing time to be fully expressive. And that behavior sends a really odd signal to players who are like, what is this? Like, oh, if this is how you're going to behave every single time we lose, I don't want to see that again. Like, that's embarrassing for me. So what am I gonna do? Like, I'm gonna freak out. I'm gonna freak out about the possibility that I'm gonna have to watch that again when we're losing. I'm gonna do all these things. My behavior is gonna change to avoid you behaving that way. Right. And so I think coaches have to be super sensitive to the messages that they send. And look, the reality is, like, at any level of sport, some games really do matter. And like some people's lives, livelihoods do depend on this. Right. Like college sports, I think is a really unique space where you've got 99.2 or whatever percent of athletes will never become professional. So the perspective for them should be kind of moderated. And yet you got 15 coaches whose entire family livelihood depends on these 18 to 22 year old kids getting it together for three hours on a Saturday. You know, like, it's a very, very hard place to be. And I empathize with that. And it's hard for me to find a really good argument that the freakout is going to facilitate performance. And so I think you've got to just try to strike that balance as best as you can. Which means, like, look, if you're a coach, that means doing that, venting to someone that you trust, right? Whether that's a partner, whether that's a coach you have for yourself, whether that's a psychologist. Like, it's expressing those fears in the right place so that it doesn't trickle down to your athletes. It's reminding your athletes that it's possible to both care about something and not be defined by it. It's talking about how games matter and how they matter more as people than the game outcome itself. If you can find those things, I think you can manage that kind of perspective.

And, of course, a coach has to figure that out for themselves, too. I mean, there are some inner work that has to be done there before they can make that contagious to others. They've got to find that healthy balance for themselves. And we could probably do a whole nother podcast on. On that whole process as well.

Let's do it.

All right, I want to bring you to the third mindset here. And I'm going to paraphrase this in my own words, so I apologize if I butcher this, but to me, when I read through this and listened to it, it seems like, play hard and recover hard. And I think sometimes we do the first part, you know, we. We play hard and we forget about or we don't value as much the recovery piece. Why don't you speak a little bit about that?

I like your reframing of my third one. The language I used was recovery is an investment in future performance. But I kind of like, play hard, recover hard, so I might borrow that for the future. So, I mean, I think this is just kind of going against the typical sport notion that more is always better, right? More facilities, work harder, do more time in the weight room, more time watching film, more time at practice. And it's just like, no, there's no science to support this, really. More is not always better. But really what this is about is recognizing that recovery time, it's not time away from the game. It's not time away from sport. It's not time away from getting better. This is the whole, like, you know, while you are sleeping, the enemy is working kind of concept, right? And it's like, fine, let the enemy not sleep. They will make worse decisions, be less regulated, perform worse over the long haul, suffer endlessly. After two days of sleep deprivation, like, that's what we want. We want the enemy to not sleep and we want to do the sleeping. And so I think if you can get to a point where you're thinking about recovery activities as an investment in your future performance, you've now changed the narrative from, oh, time away from the facility means the guys aren't working hard or the guys aren't doing what they need to be doing to getting better. We should be in here in the gym grinding it out and shifting that narrative to like, no. While the guys are recovering, what they're actually doing is making sure they're fully ready to lock in and deliver tomorrow. And we just know that that is really important for all sorts of performance things, right? Like, we know sleep is kind of the number one performance enhancer. We know sleep improves your ability to make good decisions, improves emotion regulation. We know it actually improves on court performance in basketball, for example, right? Like if you sleep more, you shoot better free throw accuracy, better three point accuracy. But then we also know other types of recovery are really important for performance. So there's really interesting data now that shows, like, if you meditate at halftime, for example, you report less mental fatigue in the second half. You report better decision making and more engagement in the second half than if you watch film, right? Because you're giving yourself a chance to recover and detach in the moment, and that restores engagement. And so I think this is just about taking a more nuanced approach to thinking about work hard versus recovery. And I think really what we want to do is what you said, right? Play hard, recover hard. Because the more recovery you have that's effective, the better your performance is going to be over the long term. And ultimately, what we're after, like in the NBA, for example, we're looking for 82 games of good performance. I'm not interested in five games where you perform at your best and 77 games where you're kind of like, yeah, you know, like that's, that's probably not going to carry you to the championship, you know. And so I think that's what this is about, is really investing in yourself in a way that allows you to perform well consistently versus assuming that the only way you can get there is by grinding it out.

I love the way you framed it because obviously, and we've talked about this extensively in the podcast before this, you know, we wear this lack of sleep as like this badge of honor. You know, staying up late, like that's just such a cultural thing that coaches have to get over. And so Much of that. I think it comes down to control, though. It's like, well, I, I maybe not can't control the outcome, but I can control how many hours I put into it. But here I think it's. It's not just, hey, you just gotta take a break from it and turn off, you know, watching film or practicing or spending more time in the gym.

It's.

It's active recovery, you know, is what you're talking about there. And I mean, you, you touched on a few of them, and I know, you know, the huberman talks about those extensively. I love, you know, his are, I think, sleep, light, nutrition, exercise, and social connection. I mean, you could put meditation maybe in there is really, really important. I guess my fear as a coach and a leader is like, if you give your players a day off or you give your people time off, is that they go out and they do things that are unhealthy for recovery. Their nutrition maybe is poor. They're not sleeping, they're staying up. Like, they're probably not investing in social connections. They need to. Maybe it's just hours and hours on video games, though. Maybe there some evidence that shows that there's value in that to some extent. So I guess I'm just curious from your perspective, how you promote active, healthy recovery in the organization that you're not just saying, all right, it's a day off work, right? See you guys, you know, 24 hours. How do you. Is it just education or is there things that you do to encourage, you know, good recovery?

So it is education, but it's also a philosophical shift, which is, you know, and I hear a lot of coaches who have that same kind of fear that you're expressing. And to me, that really boils down to trust and control, which is, do you trust your players, like, at this level, right? Do you trust the guys to be professional? That's really what it's about. And when you don't give them that time because you're worried they're going to go out partying, like, I got news for you, man. If you don't give them the time to go party, they're just going to go do it when you don't want them to do it. Like, they're. That's how it goes. The same thing is true in college, right? Like, well, we're not going to give them a day off tomorrow, because if we give them a day off, they're going to go out and rage tonight. And it's like, they're going to go out and rage Tonight, either way, because they're 21 year old kids and that's what they want to do. Like, that's just, that's what this is, that's what this life is. And so like these, these, most athletes are not going to forego having like a balanced life in exchange for following some incredibly rigid set of rules that coaches think is helping them, you know, So I think it comes down to like, can you trust them to make good decisions? Can you provide them with the resources to do that? Right, so that's education, that's maybe putting plans together. But actually what I think you'd find is the coaches who kind of build this stuff into the plan, who acknowledge like, you know what, Saturday night after a game, after a football game, that's a great time to go out, you should go have fun. What you're going to find is that the players then don't feel motivated to go do that other nights because they know they're going to get a chance to do it some other time. So instead of you worrying about a guy going out drinking on Friday night because he's not sure what he's going to have on Sunday and so he's just going to wing it because his buddies are going can just say, hey, you know what, like, I'm not going to go out tonight because I'm going to have time tomorrow. And so I think you can build some of that kind of. It's almost like parenting in a way, right? Like if you tell your kids, hey, you just can't do any of this stuff, they just go find ways to do all these things that, and not tell you about it. You know, it's not like they don't, it's not like they don't do it. And so I think it's that kind of mentality shift where it's like, look, I trust you to be a responsible adult. I trust you to be a professional. I trust you to put the team first. I trust you to put your own health and performance first. And I'm going to empower you to do that. And if you demonstrate that you can't do that consistently, then we'll have a conversation about what needs to happen for you specifically as an individual to put you in position to be successful. But I'm not going to punish the whole team because five guys can't figure it out. And I'm not going to tell you I don't trust you at the beginning and make you earn my trust by not doing a bunch of things. I'm going to give you the trust. I'm going to let you demonstrate that you're worth it and then we'll be in a position where we can be successful.

All right, that's it for today's episode. Next week, we'll be back with some mental wellness and performance protocols for coaches and athletes. You aren't going to want to miss it. This episode is brought to you by the TOC Community Looking for ways to take your coaching to the next level? Our community offers a wealth of resources designed to help you transform your team's culture and drive success on and off the court or field. With access to our online courses like the Culture System, Online, the Competitive Cauldron and Playing Time System, you'll gain the skills and knowledge you need to take your coaching to the next level. And that's just the beginning. As a member of the TOC community, you'll also get access to hundreds of digital resources, including team building activities, player, coach and culture assessment surveys, and other documented methods and processes to help you build a winning culture. But it's not just about the resources. You'll also get to connect with other coaches from around the world through our group chat and participate in multiple book studies and roundtable discussions each month. If you're ready to take your coaching to the next level, join the TOC community today by visiting tocculture.com.