#315 Dr Alex Auerbach - The Pursuit of Excellence

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Welcome back to the sports Site show. Thanks so much for joining me today. I'm delighted to welcome back to the show Dr. Alex Auerbach. Alex, how are you?

Dan? I am great. Thank you for having me back on the show. It's always fun to spend some time with you and it's an honor to be here.

No, well, it's a, it's an honor to be joined by you. You. I always love learning from you and always enjoy looking down your ex timeline with all your fantastic tweets. There's really some insightful stuff there and I think you've probably brought all of that wisdom together and written your first book and we're going to unpack that today. So I'm really excited. But before we get started, tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us about your work.

Sure. So I am a counseling and performance psychologist by training. So I have a PhD in counseling psychology with basically a double major in sport and performance psychology and have spent the last 10 years working with high performers across spaces. My main gig, if you will, was as the sports psychologist for the NBA's Toronto Raptors for several years, where I was involved in everything we did as an organization, from selecting players to trading players to working directly with players to working with coaches, working with staff, helping hire a head coach, all sorts of fun stuff. Since that time, I've become more of a consultant of sorts. So I'm working with a WNBA team right now going through some of that process. I've done a bit of work with Army Special Forces on things like live demolition training and jumping out of planes and diffusing live bombs, which has been a lot of fun and worked a fair bit with collegiate and Olympic athletes as well. So that's, that's a bit about me in a nutshell. Before I became a psychologist, I was a American football coach in a former life too. So I've got a little bit of a different lens, I think, when it comes to sports psychology and in particular working with coaches and have tried my best, as you mentioned in this book, to sort of synthesize some of the things I think I know as I, as I get into this next phase of my career.

I think last time you were on. We spoke a lot about the, that former career as an American football coach and how it's impacted your psychological practice. Intrigued to hear that you've gone into the army and done some work with them, the US army, jumping out of planes. Did you actually jump out of a plane? And if you did, did you use all of your techniques on yourself to enable you to do that?

Thank goodness I did not have to jump out of any planes, but I spent some time with a unit that their, their kind of primary role is to, you know, be flown into an area and diffuse improvised explosive devices or IEDs. And so as you can imagine, you know, these young, young men and women are, you know, between 18 and 25 or 26 years old and have to do something incredibly nerve wracking and then calm down enough to figure out how to actually diffuse something like that, which is just requires a level of concentration and self regulation and stress management and all sorts of mental skills that quite frankly probably exceed anything that would go on in professional sports just from the actual consequences on the line. But it's, it's an incredible group to spend some time with both because you know this from working with some of the world's best performers too. Like when you, when you spend time with people like that at the cutting edge of what they're doing, the intensity that they bring to their performance and to their craft is really, it's like something to marvel at. And so this, it's a very special group to, to spend some time with.

Knowing what I know from the language that we tend to use in sports psychology, we talk a lot about focusing on the process and perhaps some of us speak to the idea of letting performance take care of itself and certainly letting the outcomes take care of themselves. Not being too outcome oriented or ego orient, we might use that kind of language, but it feels like that environment there. It's kind of important to consider the outcome because the outcome could be death as opposed to in sport where hey, it feels, having been a pro golfer, it feels pretty bad when you play badly, but you know, there's not that imminent threat of death. Did you feel as you were as you joined those troops, did you feel that the psychological techniques, the mental skills that you use on a day to day basis with sports competitors really translated well into that field?

I did and I think for me a lot of the fundamentals sort of stick around. Right. And a lot of what I've written about I think is pertinent. There's still a need to control your arousal, direct your Attention, use good cognitive strategies to figure out how to navigate whatever's going on in your head. Right. Whether that might be unhelpful self talk or really extreme nervousness. Right. All things that might disrupt kind of peak performance. And so in many ways, I think the focus on the process is still right. I think what I found to be different is sort of the sanctity around what it is you're doing and kind of honoring the fact that there are just different levels of consequences here. It doesn't mean that we should be thinking about the outcome or be, you know, hyper focused on that because again, I think like anything that would disrupt performance, but I've always believed the outcomes matter. Even though it sounds good to say focus on the process and don't worry about the outcomes. And I think that's sort of right for getting your headspace right, if you will. But I think to pretend that the outcomes aren't important or somehow will just show up on their own by only focusing on the process I think is a tad misguided. And I also think that, you know, in really extreme outcomes kind of situations like this, or even, you know, incredibly extreme sports, right, where you have people doing big wave surfing or other things like that, I think there's, there's a different level of appreciating the potential consequences and at least recognizing the possibility there, honoring that without letting that overtake you, but avoiding it as you know, has its own consequences. Right. So you've got to balance that.

Alex, we're here to talk today about your new book called To Greatness, your personal playbook for the pursuit of excellence and, you know, first things first. Many congratulations on this. Absolutely fantastic. I've. I've loved going through it, as always, learned a lot from you, and will definitely shamelessly steal some of your ideas from this book. But I'm looking forward to diving in and, you know, letting. Letting our audience understand a little bit about your thoughts and your work here. Tell us a bit about the genesis of the book. What sowed the seeds of writing this, this particular book?

There are really two kind of big things that came up for me that sort of spurred on the writing of the book. The first was my experience as part of the NBA draft with the fourth overall pick back in 2021. And the idea was, you know, we're about to draft a franchise changing player at 4 overall. We don't know who it's going to be, but whoever it is, we better get it right. You know, like half of it is making the right pick and then half of it is figuring out once they're in your ecosystem, what is it that you need to do around them for them to be successful. And so I went on a bit of a search, right, to figure out, like, what should I be doing? What is the actual best way to take this at the time, 40 ish million dollar investment, which has now become a several hundred million dollars investment, and make sure that this player has the tools that they need to be successful. And I was really discouraged by what I found because there wasn't anything that was comprehensive enough to sort of speak to all the different things that would go into actually helping this player succeed throughout the course of an 82 game season. And I think people have done some great work in this space, but I felt like it was a little bit sort of siloed in the way that it's been put together, right? There's people have their lines of thinking in the research or the stuff that they're very interested in. And of course they get really deep in that area and so there's a ton of value there, but they don't always link that to say, another process or principle that might be just as important, right. And so I started to think about what would a comprehensive plan look like for someone like this. And I don't know how you felt about this, but I know for me, when I've looked at the sport, psych research in particular, there's sort of like two broad paths, right? There's the mental health angle, which is obviously very important, and then there's the peak performance angle, which I think is also important. But the peak performance angle tackles a lot of like, what to do, you know, when the game's on the line or in big moments, but not really like how do you function when you go to practice or what does it look like on the day to day to be great. And the mental health angle talks a lot about wellness and wellbeing, but really doesn't overlap much and talk about how this leads to peak performance. So this first experience was sort of like, okay, I better put together some plan that I feel good about that science back that gives me some insight into a formula I can follow because that's what everybody else is, is doing around this young man, right? Like sports medicine has a plan for how they're going to take him from draft day to put on muscle and sort of progress him to becoming a great player, right. And I needed to feel like I had a plan to do the same thing. So that was sort of the first experience and coupled with that was as I was thinking about that was sort of like, man, it's kind of sad that like there isn't really anything out here like this. You know, there's, there's nothing that exists. I went back to my graduate school reading list from my, my doctoral advisor and found nothing that was sort of like speaking to me. And I'm like, okay, well maybe this could be the book that I wish I would have had in graduate school. And there's definitely some other books out there that I think, you know, speak to some of peak performance and have some great ideas in there that I do draw on and like a lot. But I felt like this would be sort of a bridge there. So that was the genesis of the book was sort of like, write the book I wish I had in graduate school plus write the book. I feel like I need to actually do a great job. Taking this young man from fourth overall to NBA all Star.

A meshing of the peak performance side of things with the mental health side of things. How have you structured this book? When somebody opens the book, what are they confronted with?

The first thing you're going to find is that I've broken the book into two parts and defined two different types of performance. And this was actually a concept I stumbled on in the research while I was doing some of this. Was this sort of differentiating between typical performance and peak performance. And honestly, like, it wasn't something I had ever heard before I started reading about it. And I was like, man, this makes so much sense, right? Typical performance is how do you show up on a day to day basis and do your best, right? But if you're an NBA player, let's say like that's a practice day, right? Or that's shoot around, that's not game time and that is different, right? How you figure out how you maximize practice or maximize the days between games does have a material impact on what happens on game day. So you definitely can't, you know, slack off and do nothing on those days, right? You need some kind of framework for progressively getting better at your typical performance and doing what I would call like raising your baseline, right? Making yourself better and better over time so that as you get into competition, the leap to peak performance isn't so high and you have some skills that you can deploy that sort of get you into that place. So that's part one is all about this sort of building your foundation and baseline for a strong typical performance. And if you think about life outside of sports, you know, this is if you're the CEO, right? This is your showing up to work on a day to day basis and running your meetings and being a good leader. And then the part 2 is about peak performance, which is what I think most of us think about when we think about sports psych, right? It's, you know, how you perform under the biggest pressure and brightest lights. Two minutes to go in an NBA game, like what are the things you need to be doing to win? And of course those skills are also really interesting and really useful. But peak performance doesn't happen all the time, right? And you're not always going to have an opportunity to even play. Like if you're an NBA player, sometimes you're going to sit games out, right? And so you've got to know how to sort of get yourself into the zone and into high performance when you do get your opportunity. And that's what part two is about. And so again, to finish the CEO thread, right, it's, it's your big board meeting or your pitch for an investment or something like that. These moments that have an outsized importance in the outcomes you're working toward that do require a different set of skills to really deliver. And so I tried to separate the book into sort of longer term baseline foundational development things in the typical performance section and then a small subset of skills on the peak performance section so that people could actually apply what they learn here.

So those reading the book who aren't either professional athletes or developing professional athletes or developing elite level athletes and day to day they are in the workplace, they can take some of these ideas and utilize them in their work environment.

That's the idea. I tried to write something that would be as universal as I could make it, right? I am a person who believes that regardless of what your performance is, you know, whether it's sports or running a business or even something like parenting, you know, there are still a small subset of foundational principles that will matter for doing a great job at that. And I wanted to give people basically a sequence of steps they could follow, much like this 4th overall pick in the draft, to help themselves consistently be better at whatever it is that they care about.

I love that. Let's unpack part one, the qualities of typical performance. Let's go through each quality and give us some, some, some nuggets from each chapter, from each quality. So chapter one, Quality one, Adaptation. Talk to me a little bit about adaptation, Alex.

So quality one is built on this principle of what's called adaptive capacity, right? It's basically your Ability to take on progressively higher, harder challenges. And so if you think about the concept of adaptive capacity, it really boils down to this simple idea of, you know, progressively more hard things. So stress, right? Plus a bit of recovery, right? And what you get is growth in some way, shape or form, right? So to draw a physical parallel, right? You go to the gym, you stress your muscles, you take a day or two off, you come back, you're a little bit stronger. The same thing is sort of true from a mental perspective, right? You put yourself in challenging situations, you work through it, you process, you reflect, you rest, and then you come back with a slightly greater skill set for handling something a bit more challenging in the long term. And so I chose to start here because I think this is for me the foundation of what it means to progressively get better and better. Like, people talk about getting 1% better all the time, and if you get 1% better every day, you know, you're 37 times better at the end of the year and like, look, that all sounds great. So how do you actually do that? Right? That, that's a nice, that's a nice thought. What does it mean to get 1% better? And to me, getting 1% better is finding a place where you can stress yourself or challenge yourself a little bit more than you did yesterday, taking the time to rest and reflect on that, synthesizing what you've learned and iterating and going through it again. And so I unpack in this chapter, essentially the different facets of adaptive capacity that you'll need to be successful. So I start with kind of a foundation of well being. I talk about skills that I think both of us would agree are pretty important for long term performance. And they're not super flashy, right? But they're, they're still foundational nonetheless, right? It's things like sleep or getting your nutrition, right? You know, talking a little bit about like hydration, even relationships, like just again, the foundational elements of being able to manage stress and take on progressively higher, harder challenges. You need these things if you're going to do that well. And I think sleep is probably the best example, right? If you deprive yourself of sleep or you have two small children like me and you don't sleep super well at night anymore, right now your ability to, to manage stress is going to be a bit depleted, right? And so sleep just does become really important for whether you're an NBA player or an executive leader. Being able to manage your emotions, your thinking, recover from whatever stress that you've got going on. And then from there you can see how all these other things connect. Right. Like relationships are such a big part of rest and recovery, and social support, for example, is the best predictor we have of resilience and things like that. So I'm happy to get into any of these sort of subsets here, but that was sort of the idea behind chapter one.

I'm probably not going to formulate a question just in the nod of agreement back at you. In as much as what I love about what you've done here in chapter one is help people to make sense of the link between this notion of fundamentals, as you said, like diet, nutrition, sleep, rest, make sense of the link between those principles, those, excuse me, those fundamentals, and subsequently your capacity to engage in stress that is then going to lead to some growth. I'm not too sure very many people kind of make sense and link those, connect those together. And I think that's an absolutely crucial connection. Alex.

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I worked hard to figure out how to draw that connection for people, so I'm glad it resonates. And I think that's exactly right. You know, I think oftentimes we sort of think of these fundamentals as like, you either have them or you don't, and if they're there, you just kind of take it for granted and it has no bearing really on, like, what goes on next. You know, we sort of like minimize these things and it's like, oh, it's all about mindset, or it's all about, you know, did you practice hard enough? And it's like, look, that stuff matters too. But if you practice really hard and you eat like crap, it's still going to be bad, you know, or if you practice really hard and you don't sleep right, your. Your capacity is going to be diminished in some way. You're not going to maximize what's possible here. And so I think, I think that's a great call out because I do think, honestly, I think getting these fundamentals right is a huge, huge part of being able to sustain excellence over, say, the course of an 82 game NBA season or several years of running a company or raising your kids. And if you don't take these seriously and you don't sort of unpack how each of these things do or do not help you, you're leaving an opportunity to get better on the table. And ultimately, you know, that's what I believe this is all about, is figuring out how you become the best version of yourself. And Each of these things are of course, part and parcel of that.

It feels seamless that that would move into chapter two, Quality two Mental strength. There seems like a strong link between those first two chapters.

I think that's right. I mean the, the short version of it would be I think your strength is diminished if your capacity is, is low. Right. So, you know, the more that you can build your adaptive capacity, the more quote unquote, mentally strong you might be. And of course this was a tough chapter to sort of think about, right? There's like the ideas of mental toughness and people like mental strength. And so I'm like wrestling with sort of, of how do I, how do I frame this for people, but ultimately landed on kind of like borrowing the sort of physical fitness kind of parallel here because I think there are, you know, interesting ways of thinking about how, how mental fitness or mental performance mirrors kind of physical performance. Right. And so the way I think about mental strength or, you know, in the beginning, I open with a quote about mental toughness. But it's just this idea of really being able to sort of like stay confident, feel like you can deliver, overcome your fears. And a lot of that is built on your progressive experience, building your adaptive capacity, right. And seeing those yourself overcome higher, harder challenges builds confidence, builds that sense of self belief, builds this idea that you're going to be able to reach your goals, deliver at the highest level. And I think that you need that if you're then going to persist at anything, right? If you're, if you're ultimately going to become good at whatever it is that you do, you need a little bit of fortitude. So you need to believe that you're going to be able to deliver it. You need to believe you can reach your goals. You need to believe in yourself. And that has to be built on a foundation of past success. Otherwise it's all smoke and mirrors.

Fortitude, persistence, belief. Are these the qualities of mental strength?

Yeah, I mean, the way I tried to break it down in the book was really around sort of different subsets of self belief ultimately is what I boiled mental strength down to. So fortitude, I think is kind of an example of that. But I really tried to break down the science of confidence, right. So I looked at things like self efficacy, right? And you and I would both be, be familiar with that. But essentially like, do you believe that you can deliver on a specific task in a specific situation? Not this kind of global confidence that people often feel like they need to be successful. And then I tried to break into different types of self belief that I think help people perform consistently well. So the first is this belief in your ability to reach your goals. And the idea here is, you know, you've, you've talked a lot about desirable difficulty and this idea that things need to be sort of at this 85% sweet spot, right, where there's a, a good chance that you can succeed, but a small chance that you'll. Well, to even set that kind of goal, you need to believe that you can, you can reach it, right? And that you've got the tools to sort of be successful. And so I think having that belief in your ability to reach your goals and to be successful, yeah, I think is pretty critical to this idea of mental strength and your ability to again, persist or overcome your fears or keep working on something that's important to you. And in this chapter I also break down, and we talked about the process earlier, so I break down kind of process goals, performance goals and outcome goals. So you can sort of see what kinds of goals you need to believe in and how they layer into each other. And then I talk about. I found this really cool line of research around sporting genius. And the idea in here is that, you know, you need a little bit of creativity and risk taking and this sort of belief that you're unstoppable to reach the highest, highest levels of whatever it is that you do. But I actually think that that's a foundational skill set, right? I don't think this belief is something you can call upon like say in Wimbledon. I think you need to be building this belief before you get to Wimbledon for that to be impactful. And that's why this belief shows up here in chapter two. And so the second belief I list out is the belief in your qualities that make you unstoppable. And I believe that everyone has something special about them, a signature strength or set of skills that they can uniquely deliver. And it doesn't mean that you shouldn't also work hard. I know we can talk forever about growth, mindset and fixed mindset, right? So I have to be careful about that. But it is this sort of idea that I think the best performers in the world do recognize. They have something really special about them and they work really diligently at enhancing whatever that signature skill is for them to reach their, their full potential. And so I think of a guy like Steph Curry, for example, who recognized fairly early that he could become one of the greatest NBA shooters of all time. It doesn't mean he didn't work on Anything else. But it means part of what has allowed him to sustain his excellence over time is this consistent development of his shooting ability and this belief that he can deliver in that specific role. And then I talk a little bit in the chapter about self control. And you know, a lot of this research comes from the marshmallow test and you know, Walter Mischel's research, but around this idea of being able to sort of delay gratification, persist and push yourself to do something that's a little bit harder, recognizing the rewards that will come down the line. And again, I think that is a function of believing that you can do it. Right. You're not going to engage in self control if you don't believe there's anything for you on the other side. And so you've got to sort of pair these things together for you to be maximally successful. And then I closed the chapter with this idea of the sort of inner drive to succeed. Right. You might call it like passion, harmonious passion. Right. But you know, you really have to want it. And I think, I know that sounds a little bit trite, but I think the foundation of mental strength is this sort of obsessiveness, in a good way, a healthy way, about what it is that you're working toward. And again, that's built on this foundation of believing you can actually succeed and having some evidence of, of, of that, so that you can sort of layer in this insatiable will to, to get it done. And I think if you pair those together, you get your mental strength.

Absolutely fascinating stuff, Alex. And the word that emanates as you're speaking to me is optimism. Rightly or wrongly. I mean the, that quality of optimism as a consequence of believing that you can reach your goals, setting those big goals, as you say, goals that perhaps that you'll find stressful and tough to achieve, but you believe you can reach them. And the other thing that comes to mind as you're speaking is that link between. And they're going to be. Sound a little bit geekish here, but that, that, that link between self efficacy and motivation. I think it is a truism to suggest that if you don't experience high self efficacy, then it's very possible that your motivation is going to drop. Because if you don't believe that you've got the skills to achieve in a specific task or a specific activity or game, then over time, you know, your will to commit to any kind of improvement process is probably going to diminish. And then just towards the end there, just mentioning it was researcher Valeron's idea of harmonious passion. I love the fact that you've dived into that as well. So optimism, motivation, harmonious passion, just absolutely fascinating stuff, mate.

Well, thank you. And you're jumping into chapter three. You're there already. I started draw some getting ahead of you. These same, same links for you and you. Actually, I talk in chapter three about motivation intensity theory, which is sort of this idea you're, you're mentioning, like if you don't believe that you can do it or you don't want it bad enough, you're not really going to persist and stay motivated. We talk a lot obviously about intrinsic motivation and I think that's, that's fine and good, but there's also some, you know, use some of it. You just have to believe you can do it and it has to matter to you otherwise the intrinsic motivation is not going to matter so much. But anyway, we can get into chapter.

Three when you're ready, let's do so now. Dive in. Perfect segue.

Yeah. So I mean, chapter three is all about endurance, right? And I, I think for me, the way I thought about this is endurance in sort of two timescales, right. The first is getting through a specific season. You know, you've been around high level sports, so I know you've heard this phrase, but you know, it's, it's a marathon and a sprint, right? And everyone's sprinting all the time. And you're like, well, let's just like figure out how we do a measured sprint. Then you know, you're not going to be able to always go 100% for all 82 games of an NBA season. You're certainly not going to feel 100% every single game over the course of your 15 year career.

Right.

And so you've got to have some level of willingness to endure essentially difficulties, ups and downs, waxing and waning of your success for you to sort of continuously make progress on this Quest to get 1% better. And so chapter three is really about the building blocks of like psychological endurance. How do you sort of keep yourself persisting? And so you hit on some qualities, I labeled them a little bit differently, but I think optimism would for sure fit in here. So I talked about in this chapter kind of grit, resilience, motivation and purpose. So grit. You know, I break down into the traditional Duckworth framework, right? Passion and perseverance for long term goals and talk a little bit about harmonious passion versus obsessive passion. And for me this is sort of the foundation of endurance. You know, people talk about loving the game as, as really critical. I think this is really what they mean when they talk about loving the game is sort of being appropriately obsessed with becoming the best version of yourself in the context of whatever it is that you're working on. And so I think that's a foundational element and I think to do that well you also have to have a bit of a hard headedness about you, a persistence and a willingness to sort of push to where people think is a little bit unreasonable. I don't really know any all time great performer or even elite performer who's not a bit unreasonable. And I think that that's, that's good. Not, you know, being unreasonable for the sake of being unreasonable alone, but for believing that if they kind of keep working at it and keep hammering away, they're going to be able to achieve something and they kind of see it it before even sometimes other people see it. So I talk about how those, those two things fit together here to sort of form a foundation of being willing to persist over the long term. I talk about resilience because obviously no, no journey to greatness is without its fair share of setbacks, you know. And so draw on some of the research from guys like Mustafa Sarkar who have done an incredible deep dive and unpacking of what actually helps people respond well to adversity. So I talk in here about one of my favorite concepts, kind of the challenge mindset and managing stress effectively and seeing stress as enhancing as sort of foundational elements for being willing to persist and overcome the stressors that you have. I talk about motivation. So we've talked a little bit about motivation, intensity and sort of just the baseline of wanting to be successful as sort of a critical factor for being willing to engage in any kind of goal directed pursuit. Like you have to believe that you can do it and it has to actually matter to you. And then we can talk about intrinsic motivation, right? And feeling really rewarded, connected, like you have autonomy, like you're making progress, right? Like all those things are obviously very important, but they're, they're only important in the context of something you actually want to be successful at. And so I think sometimes we talk about intrinsic motivation like it's this sort of like the only thing that matters for being great over the long term. And like if you just focus on becoming intrinsically motivated, everything will be fine. That's like, that's. First of all, we know that we need a little bit of extrinsic motivation to sustain success. Over the long term. So it can't all be intrinsic. And we also have to have a couple other elements here for this to really be successful. And so the final element is, is purpose. Right? And the way I talk about purpose in here is really the ability to make meaning and make sense of what it is that you're going through and sort of be able to link that back to the passion that you experience. Experience on the front end. So passion kind of drives you forward. Purpose is sort of this reflective process where you're constantly staying connected to what matters most to you and you're using that as fuel for showing up the next day.

You mentioned there Dr. Mr. Fosaka, who's been on sports like show quite a few times now, and it makes me think of his framework, as you kind of alluded to there, high challenge and high support. High challenge and high support, which I always really, really love. And just, you know, thinking about that continuum of motivation from extrinsic to intrinsic. And obviously it makes us think of self determination theory, D.C. and Orion. And I don't know if you agree with me, Alex. I always think of if we can have as many drivers and rewards as possible, as many extrinsic and intrinsic drivers and rewards as possible, at least those that are, as you mentioned, relevant and meaningful to us, that gives us a greater chance to retain that sense of motivation. Day by day, week by week, month by month, season by season, you know, our careers slip by, as you say. I think an exacting look across that continuum is absolutely critical.

Yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, as I dug into the research there, like, I don't know, you're familiar with kind of like the interjected motivation concept, but this idea that it's sort of like central to your identity and you don't want to let that down or disappoint this sort of core part of who you are, like, I think that also fuels some of this greatness. And so I think you're exactly right. You need to look at the full kind of intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation continuum and really figure out what level levers you pull at any given point in that continuum to help yourself. And everyone's sort of like formula is going to be a little bit different, right? What moves you might be a little different from what moves me. But to say it's all going to be intrinsic, I think is actually a recipe for ultimately burnout and some unhealthy kind of obsession. Right? Because you end up sort of only focusing on the internal and not so much seeing any benefit outside. And I think we just all need that. We all need a little bit of pats on the back or monetary rewards or whatever it might be to keep going. And so I think finding that balance is exactly right.

I love what you're saying there. And it reminds me of an episode going back about seven or eight years to one of the very first sports site show episodes, a wonderful episode with Lara Mossman, who took us through self determination theory. And she talks about flavors of motivation, which I, you know, for me, you're reminding me of that there. Moving on to chapter four, which unpacks quality for which is flexibility, which is definitely something I'm thinking about every single day with my clients. Talk us through how you approach this idea of flexibility.

Well, first of all, I'm just impressed that you can remember a podcast from seven or eight years ago. Like, I'm having a hard time. I'm having a hard time remembering what I had for breakfast yesterday. You're pulling this out. You're putting me to shame a little bit. The foundation of chapter four is really the concept of psychological flexibility from the acceptance and commitment therapy school of thought. And again, in my research, as I'm looking at how do I figure out creating and supporting this incredibly talented player that we drafted, I stumbled upon this great paper called Psychological Flexibility as a Fundamental Aspect of Health. It's an epic paper. It's like 50 something pages long. There's a huge summary of all these different outcomes related to psychological flexibility. But what they found was essentially that this quality, this sort of matrix of skills that underpin psychological flexibility leads to better mental health, better physical health, better ability to manage stress, better work, life integration, more healthy goal pursuit. And I'm like, holy cow. And I was trained pretty deeply in acceptance and commitment therapy in graduate school, so I already had a little bit of a bias to sort of think about things this way. But then seeing that I'm like, man, this, this is too important to not account for in what we're doing here. And so chapter four is really an unpacking of the six psychological processes that underpin psychological flexibility from acceptance and commitment therapy. And the simplest way to sort of frame it for the audience, right, is it's your ability to be present, your ability to engage with your values and your ability to essentially accept or manage your thinking and feeling in a way that facilitates the pursuit of your goals and values. And so oftentimes when I think about peak performance just as a, or high performance, broadly, some very simplistic view for a minute here, but bear with me, is like a lot of it is just identifying internal obstacles that block you from getting toward what you really care about. At its, at its core, that's what I think a lot of what we do is. And we all have different tools or techniques we leverage to help people manage whatever these internal obstacles are. And this just happens to be a framework I really like for managing those internal obstacles because it helps you clarify your values and what it is that you're working toward long term. It allows you to connect your goals to those values and your behaviors to those goals to those values. So you form this really nice link between what you're doing today and who you want to become in the future. And then it provides you with a set of skills that facilitate overcoming whatever internal obstacles you might face in pursuit of those. Those goals and values. And so I think kind of the, the way that this chapter is framed is really kind of around four internal obstacles, right? The first is thinking, right? It's your unhelpful self talk. It's your, you know, critical self beliefs, right? Or negative schemas, whatever language you want to use, right? It's the thought that you're not good enough or that you don't know what you're doing. It's imposter syndrome. It's all these things, right? The second is difficult emotions, right? It's feeling nervous and backing out, right? Or thinking about avoidance as a core process. And you know, when the pressure gets too high, you sort of of quit because it's easier to run away and avoid the discomfort than it is to find ways to manage it, right? And so that's again, another internal obstacle that I think people have to deal with to be able to perform effectively. Then there's the ability to be present, right? So I think again, one of the obstacles that inhibits high performance and sustained excellence is thinking about the past or thinking about the future. Our brains are really good at this, as you know, right? I think the data says somewhere like 48% of our thoughts are in the past or future, which is, is an absurd amount of time to not be here. And so the more that you can sort of figure out how to be, be present, be in the moment where performance is happening, I think the better you can be. But I think oftentimes thoughts about the past or the future are really ultimately distractions that sort of inhibit your ability to deliver, whether it's a regular performance, typical performance, or a peak performance. And then finally, there's an element of identity Here. Right. And I know I talked about identity and introductory motivation. I do think identity really matters. And I think of identity as is something that is quite important for being a high performer. Like, I do think you need to see yourself that way if you ultimately want to be great at what it is that you do. But we don't want to hold onto it so tightly that we sort of live and die with every outcome. Which is honestly quite common, particularly for young NBA players, let's say, right, to come in and all they've known is basketball. And they've really built their sense of self worth around being a great basketball player. And for many of them, they've been the best player on their team until they get to the NBA. And then you're like the 10th the best player on the team. And now all of a sudden everything that you believe about yourself and how great you are is sort of like thrust into question. Right. And you really have to examine that. And I think that again, is an internal obstacle that you have to figure out how to overcome. And so the processes in chapter four are giving you the tools to manage those kinds of obstacles.

Well, if you're impressed that I can remember a random podcast from seven or eight years ago, I'm impressed with your deep dives into Google Scholar or whatever resources that you've been using and finding these fantastic, if slightly obscure, research papers that you can use for your book. But you know, look, we've had quite a few episodes dedicated to ACT Acceptance Commitment Therapy. And whilst I absolutely love so many different frameworks, including rebt, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, which might seem like the converse of act, I do actually think they could potentially be used hand, hand in hand. But the point being, I've definitely grown in interest with Acceptance Commitment Therapy. I just think there's some to speak to your last point there. There's some wonderful tools in this approach, act, that can help people to diffuse from their internal distractors, if you like, you know, to use a similar term to what you've been using to be able to execute actions and behaviors in a certain way, irresistibly perspective of the thoughts, emotions, feelings that we're having. I mean, that flexibility is absolutely critical, isn't it, Alex?

It is. And it's funny that you mention revt and some kind of, you know, schools of thought that people I think at once viewed as sort of antithetical that I think actually do fit quite neatly together. And ultimately the way I think about flexibility is, is it's just a set of skills or Tools you can use. And so REBT skills or tools would also fit with a flexible mind mindset. Right? Like if you know, whatever skill works for you in a specific situation, that's okay. And sometimes you're going to have the time to do the challenging of your own automatic negative thoughts and look for evidence and all these things that are sort of core to traditional cognitive behavior therapy. And sometimes you're going to have to just let it go because you don't have enough time. Right. And so knowing how to do both I think is going to be, be useful. And just to go on sort of a brief tangent about obscure research for a second, I don't know how much you, you've sort of read and followed the sort of evolution of act, but there's this whole kind of new school of thought around process based behavior therapy. And I think for me ultimately as a practitioner, that's, that's really where I find myself gravitating. Because I think ultimately if we can find sort of a core set of, I think there's 21 kind of evidence based principles that we can deploy at any time. Having a nice framework like ACT is, is great. But just knowing whatever tool you can use and being able to draw several different options I think is probably the most helpful thing we can do for the performers that we work with. And so, you know, to your point, there are some kind of core REVT principles that show up in that work and they've done a great job fitting something like challenging core beliefs with diffusion, let's say. Right. So there's this sort of like either path works, let's figure out what works for you.

I think you've given me my next deep dive. Process based behavior therapy. Absolutely fantastic. Complete part one for us by taking us through chapter five. Quality five Self regulation.

Yeah. So I mean, when I wrote the book, this was originally chapter one. And then after a fair bit of editing and restructuring as I know, you know, goes on in the process, sounds.

Like my process of writing the last chapter, chapter becomes the first chapter and the middle chapter goes completely all that kind of stuff actually.

Well, funny enough, actually what, what ended up being part two of the book was originally part one of the book. So you know, you can see how it always flies, how it all moves around. But ultimately this, this chapter is the bridge between the two. Right. It's so self regulation. I broke it down really into two, two parts. The first is broadly the ability to sort of manage, control, direct your thinking, feeling, physiology and behavior. Right. Essentially the ability to like Control yourself and persistently work in pursuit of your goals. Right? So all the skills I cover before chapter five are all part of this sort of puzzle of self regulation. And then I introduce some other tools and tactics that you can use here, right? So things like breath work, I talk about things like broadening out your repertoire behaviors, I talk about getting, getting feedback and learning from yourself. But ultimately I think you've got to be able to first, regulate your nervous system in some way. Second, direct your attention in some way. Third, deploy some strategies to make your mind work for you effectively. What we would call cognitive strategies, right? So this first part of self regulation is about those, those three steps, right? Can I get my nervous system under control consistently? Sort of be, be what I would call poised, right? So it's not necessarily calm or relaxed, but it's also not too jacked up. It's kind of like in, in the zone of optimal functioning for you, right? Poised and under control. Second, can I put my attention where it needs to be, right in the present on whatever task it is I'm doing? And then third, can I use whatever augmenting cognitive strategies like good self talk or imagery or whatever it might be to facilitate the pursuit of my goals? The second part of this chapter is about self regulated learning, which is a slightly different concept, but I had to find a creative way to lump them together here. And this is really the ability to plan and set goals, monitor and evaluate your progress and adjust and iterate as you go. And I know you know this from the work that you've done in elite soccer, but this skill, this ability to take yourself through this self regulated learning cycle underpins deliberate practice, it underpins the development of elite skills and ultimately I think is foundational from separating the best from the rest. And what I love about it is it requires that first part of self regulation, right? Like you've got to be poised, you've got to be present, you've got to know what you're up to. And then if you layer those into this sort of cycle of self regulated learning where you're working towards your goal, you're evaluating, you're iterating, you've got a really good formula for becoming pretty good at whatever it is that you're doing. And so I tried to sort of unpack that, that in this chapter here with the idea being that if you can take yourself through this self regulated learning cycle, you'll develop the elite skill that you need to ultimately get into part two where you're going to perform at your peak. And so I talk a lot about some of the basics of self regulated learning to close out part one, because again, we know that this skill separates the best from the rest. And I love it because it's, it's actually quite simple, you know, but I think most of the things high performance are not all that sexy and actually pretty simple, you know, don't require like crazy ice baths or you know, standing on your head for 30 seconds to let the blood rush to your head for you to become great at something kind of deal. I chose purposely to end with something simple that anyone could use to help themselves become better.

Well, you mentioned my work in, in soccer and I think if someone was to ask me what's the difference that can make the difference for a young player trying to, to progress their career, an ambitious young competitor trying to progress their career in soccer, and this applies to any sport, I would probably say self regulated learning, Alex. So I completely concur. You know, other sports psychs might have, you know, a different answer, but I just think it's absolutely critical. I'd like to move on to part two, the principles of peak performance and start to unpack this, this will be exciting to unpack. We move on with chapter six. And this is principle number one. Preparation. A word used all the time by coaches and by sports psychologists. But you know, how do you interpret preparation when it comes to peak performance?

So I broke preparation down into two parts. The first was physical preparation and the second was psychological preparation. And you know, to speak to kind of the second, second reason for creating the book, right? One of the things that I found, I don't know about you, Dan, because I think we trained in very different places. But in my graduate school training I got essentially zero training in skill acquisition, you know, basically none. And it's like this is such a core part of what I end up being asked about and spending my time on as a sports psychologist in the mba. And so it was very, it was a very big gap to bridge from, you know, basically a really deep amount of training and mental health work to hey, how do we actually like help this player shoot threes better? You know, and some of it was intuitive for me in that like, you know, you watch NBA players go out to practice and they shoot 3,000 uncontested threes from the same spot, you know, just like clockwork. And you're like, okay, this is probably helpful to a point, but this definitely isn't the way we're going to get better at shooting threes with a hand in Your face and two minutes to go in the game. Like, there's got to be some other ways that we could be preparing to get people ready. And so part one was like me learning about skill acquisition and figuring out how do you actually physically prepare for something? And so I broke that sort of subset of chapter one here, principle one, into repetition, variation, and representativeness. Right? So I talk about the times in which you should be just practicing a skill over and over again. And that's typically when you're trying to get the basics down, right? And just sort of get. Get yourself up to a level of proficiency with delivering or executing on a specific skill. Then I talk about variation, which is essentially messing with some of the constraints under which you're executing this skill so you can learn different ways to do it. There's all sorts of, as you know, really fascinating research from, you know, ecological dynamics and all sorts of other places around how this plays out. But for the sake of the book, I tried to keep it very simple and just think about essentially, how could you try this skill that you've just, you know, developed some competence in under different conditions so that you can see how it works for you. One of the examples I talk about a little bit in the book is a CEO I was working with where I had him practice his pitch under a bunch of different conditions. One was climbing up a mountain, one was in his grocery store. He actually chose that one on his own. He just grabbed the mic at a grocery store and gave. Gave his pitch until they kicked him out kind of thing. I'm not suggesting you have to go to that level of extremes, but it is helpful to sort of have. Execute the skill under different situations and see what holds up and then be able to refine. And then I talk about representativeness, which is essentially, can you practice this in conditions that as closely mimic the performance as possible? Right? And so sports has obvious examples of scrimmages, right, or preseason games that are essentially one giant block of reputation representative practice. But I think oftentimes when we think of developing skill, most of the time we just think about repetition. And I think I at least think about my youth sports experience. That's where I spent most of my time, right? It was like, you know, practicing the same thing over and over and over again and not really emphasizing these other two dimensions. And so the first element of principle one here is about having high quality practice, because I think ultimately without that, the rest of the stuff doesn't really matter as much as I'm a mindset guy and A sports psychologist at heart, right. If you can't execute the skill, we're not. There's no amount of self talk I'm going to give you that's going to help you deliver. Like if you can't shoot, you can't shoot. Right. And we got to fix that first before we talk about the self talk that you need to have when you're going out there and shooting. Right. And then the second part of principle one is about good psychological preparation. And I would never claim to have the exact right formula for doing this. So I just shared what I thought has been helpful for the peak performers I work with. And so I talk a bit about pre performance routines, imagery, goal setting, some of, again, the kind of very foundational, almost basic elements of peak performance, but things that I do think actually help people get ready to perform under high pressure moments. And so I walk you through how to create your own pre performance routine, for example, or how you can set a goal for a particular performance or for a season so that you can create a good context for pursuing your goals and sort of have all that preparation, physical preparation, be working something.

Well, I love everything you said and I love the fact that you haven't been shy about incorporating skill acquisition into this book. I think use that word, shy. We can be far too shy and support psychology to celebrate our contribution to skill acquisition. And so many great scientists in this area are also psychologists and function as sports psychology psychologists. So I think we've got a great deal to add and we can contribute in organizations and to governing bodies and with coaches and players themselves in this area. And you know, we've had countless people on the support site show to talk about skill acquisition principles like you've mentioned, such as representativeness, desirable difficulties, challenge point, and so on and so forth. So I think that's absolutely fantastic. Moving on to principle two in part two, chapter seven, immersion. I love that word immersion. But how have you treated immersion?

Immersion here, the simplest way to explain it is like a very deep focus, right? That's, that's sort of how I've treated immersion. It's a, it's a deep presence. And my belief is when you look at the world's best performers and people who are doing it, you know, say in the NFL playoffs right now, they are fully in it. And I think everyone kind of knows what that feels like, right? People have used the word flow, for example, to describe what, what immersion might be. And I think that's really what this chapter is about. It's about being fully committed Being fully present, being all in on the performance. And so this chapter unpacks. How do you actually do that? Again, gives you some simple tools you can deploy things like mindfulness training to enhance your attention. We know that there's plenty of research that supports something as simple as 12 minutes a day for mindfulness training for six weeks, improving your ability to focus and pay attention. You know, so I think there's, there's a lot in this chapter about really getting into the moment and being present. And ultimately, again, I said this earlier, but for me, like peak performance happens here and now. You've got to be fully locked in and fully ready to go if you actually want to get the most out of yourself. And so I touch on some other kind of elements of this throughout the chapter that either help or hurt your ability to be fully immersed. Right. So I talk about the idea of awareness and, and are you aware if you're, you're here or not? Right. And oftentimes, you know, if you practice mindfulness, you'll catch yourself when you're drifting. Right. Or when you're not fully present. And can you redirect your focus and attention back where it needs to be? I talk about managing distraction. I know you're familiar with this too, but there's some great research that shows that for high level athletes like Olympic basketball players, the thing that most disrupt. Disrupts performance is distracting thought thoughts. Right. And inhibits kind of clutch performance. And so it's like, how do you manage distractions? How do you stay focused? Right. We all talk about things like controlling the controllables and I think that that's good. What does that actually mean? Right. And how do you focus your attention on what it is that you really can control? How do you guide your focus to where you need it to be to perform well and stay attuned to whatever that is over the course of the game? And then the final thing I talk about that I think, think is sort of, I guess unique in the way that I was thinking about immersion here was this idea of kind of going all in or being fully committed to the performance. And I think that this is something that we take for granted often when we send say five NBA players out onto the floor. But we all know what it looks like when someone isn't fully committed to the, to the team, right? Or they aren't fully committed to whatever is going on in the game plan. Right. It's the guy who's like off doing their own thing or kind of checked out or makes silly mental errors. Right. Or is unwilling to take any risks or push them themselves to sort of the limit. And so for me, if you really want to be great at what it is you're doing, if you really want to have a peak performance, you do have to be all in. There's no kind of like, well, if it doesn't work out today, like, it's okay, you know, like, yes, of course that's true. Right. We've got 82 games. So I'm not asking you to pretend like this is the most important game you've ever played when it's, you know, game 44, but you've got to be just as locked in on game 44 as you do in game 82. Right. Otherwise, you know, it's, it's, it's not going to work. And so the example I've thought a lot about since I published the book, unfortunately I didn't get to write this in there, but is, is how football teams treat the fourth quarter in North America. And so there's this idea, and this happens in basketball too, right? There's this idea that the fourth quarter is the most important quarter and it's like, well, why, why is that? And there's all sorts of psychological biases at play that sort of suggest that there's, this is the most important 12 or 15 minutes that we have. And commitment is the opposite of that. Right? It's, it's being fully locked in all 48 minutes that you're out there, not just locking in for the final fourth quarter that everyone thinks is most important. Right. And so I talk a little bit about how you sort of push yourself into being fully locked in, fully committed, giving your all, whatever your all is that you have to give. It's essentially effort at that point, right? And being willing to push yourself to that place instead of showing up and being like, well, I don't have 100% so I'm not going to try that hard today, or we're not running the game plan that I like, so whatever, it doesn't matter. Or oh, it's not the fourth quarter yet, so it's cool for me to take some time off. All those things undermine peak performance.

It's amazing what thoughts emerge and dissolve in even the very best players minds. It really is extraordinary. And as you said, they've got to immerse themselves in, in their process, in their performance in order to overcome any, any of those thoughts that emerge and ignore them and keep executing actions. In principle three of part two, we're back to this word Again, adaptation. Talk me through this.

Yeah, so I mean, there's now you're going to start to see, you know, some sort of, of parallels between part one and part two. Right. And I think the reality is there does need to be some sort of overlap or pivot points where typical performance bleeds into peak performance. I think to treat them as completely separate things is sort of a little bit misguided and too siloed. Right. We were talking about that offline before we clicked record. But just some of the different ways that our work sort of manifests. And so Principle 3 is kind of like psychological flexibility in the actual model. Moment of peak performance is essentially what this chapter boils down to. So I've talked a lot about what goes into psychological flexibility from long term performance standpoint and how you stay committed, you know, over the course of 82 games or 14 years or whatever, and stay psychologically flexible and deploy different skills. This chapter is really about, okay, what does that look like in the moment of high performance? Right. And so you think about dealing with stress and pressure, for example, Right. Like, well, you could ignore that and fight that away. Right. You can engage in some suppression or avoidance. Right. Or you can engage in acceptance. Right. And what does it actually look like to accept or be willing to experience the pressure and still try to perform? And so I talk about the concepts of, you know, committed action, like showing up in a way that's consistent with your team's values and with your personal values, even when things are uncomfortable. I talk about learning to let go of unhelpful thoughts or distracting thoughts like we just talked about in critical moments, so that again, you can stay fully present and agile, really in the context of whatever is going on in your performance. Right. I mean, you know as well as I do no plan survives first contact. So whatever you've prepared for in peak performance, you're going to have to change a little bit of what goes on. You're going to deal with some discomfort, you're going to have to experiment and try something new. And this chapter is about how you get yourself into a mindset that allows you to do that without getting too hung up on all the preparation or training you did or too caught up in how it should be, and is really about being again, present, open to what's going on, engaged in your values and committed to the performance at hand and giving yourself the freedom to perform in the way that is called upon in the actual performance itself, not how it was prescribed before you got out there.

Principle for an area I'M just so interested in, and I think we don't make enough, enough of a fuss about this area. I think it can be quite subtle. Energy optimization, Talk me through this with relation to peak performance.

So this, this concept really came to me pretty early in my career in the NBA. I had, before I was with the Raptors, I had spent a lot of time working with, with college athletes, and honestly, this specific situation really hadn't come up much. But when I got to the NBA, one of the things that happened a lot was players came to me to talk about managing their energy, getting on and off the bench. And I was like, that is such an interesting thing to navigate. What a, what a unique place to try to optimize, right? Like, I had never, honestly, I had never thought about it before then, but it was as simple as this idea. Like, man, if we could get this guy in the game and fully present and ready to perform as quickly as possible after having sat for 30 minutes, what kind of advantage could we have if we just minimize the amount of time it takes for him to get fully into the game, right? And similarly, when someone comes out of the game, if we can speed up the process to recovery, right, so that they're actually taking advantage of the rest time that they have, what kind of advantage would that, that create for us, you know, and, and we've all seen this, right? You've seen the player who makes a mistake and gets pulled by the coach and then spends the next 10 minutes with a towel over his head, you know, or her head, sort of wallowing, for lack of a better word, right? Like all of that is delaying recovery and ultimately hurting your energy efficiency and ability to perform the next time you go out there, right? And so that was the sort of genesis of this chapter was like, there's, there's gotta be something we can do here about managing the ebbs and flows of your emotion, your energy throughout the course of your performance to really maximize how much you have in the tank at any, any given moment. And this went from as simple as, like, how do we take little breathers when you're actually out there on the court, right? Like, you know, if you, if the play is drawn to the other side of the floor, how do you actually, like, you know, check out for a second and check back in so you can get just a little bit more energy when you, you come off the bench, how do you get in as quickly as possible? And when you go to the bench, how do you let stuff go that's gone on in the game so you can engage in recovery a bit. And so this chapter is really all about that. It's about finding little moments for recovery. It's about figuring out how you control your physiology so you can wind down or wind up as you need to. Right. One of the biggest challenges I found in the NBA was role players coming in. And basically you have two minutes to try to execute whatever your job is. Often it's like, like shooting big time shots, right. Well, if you spend that first minute like getting warmed up because you haven't played, it's going to be hard to execute and you're probably not going to play much more than two minutes. Right. And so I needed to figure out like, how do I get you ramped up and ready to go as quickly as possible and get you immersed? Right. And a big part of that is ramping up your energy. We often think about calming down, but ramping up and getting fully locked in I think is just as important. And then like I said, I talk a little bit about how do you sort of calm yourself down recenter and come back to the bench essentially and calm down. And so in this context, I introduce simple skills like reframing, for example, where like if you've made a mistake, you can easily reframe it or recategorize it so that it's a little bit less impactful. I talk a little bit about allowing mistakes to be dealt with after the game instead of in the game. I talk a little bit about training your attention to be, you know, here now again to sort of pull on that thread of presence throughout. So when you come to the bench, for example, you're not still dwelling on a past mistake, you're fully engaged in your recovery. And then I talk a little bit about other ways that you can, if you're a corporate performer, do some things to help manage your energy. If you're say like too jacked up, I talk about, you know, engaging in exercise, for example, to help manage your, your energy or breath work so you can calm down before the big pitch. So I try to introduce some other skills here outside of sport that could be helpful too.

A final principle. Principle 5. It's a word we've used a few times already today. Resilience. Close things out for us here, Alex, by taking us through resilience. And then maybe after just give us some final thoughts for some takeaways from, from the book.

Sure. Well, Dan, thank you for walking me through this too. It's been a lot of fun. So I mean I, you know, again, we, we've got the kind of overlap, right, between typical performance and peak performance, but this was one I didn't feel like I could let out. We've already referenced this, right? But the reality is you're going to make mistakes in the game, right? You're going to make mistakes in the pitch, you're going to make mistakes when you're playing parenting. Like, all these things are going to be kind of part of what goes on for you. And so fundamentally, you've got to be able to let that go as quickly as possible and return to the game, learn from it, and then be able to get back into whatever performance is going on. And for me, you know, this idea, again, to reference what happened in my time in Toronto was, was sort of born out of one of the research questions I asked when I was with the Raptors. I was essentially trying to figure out, is there a material difference in how quickly some players respond to mistakes, right? With the idea being that, like, if you, if you execute something poorly, you make a mistake and it hurts the team's performance, how long before you do something that positively contributes to the team's impact? Again, because again, I'm thinking about small places of competitive advantage, right? If we can get you to go from, say, 20 seconds off wallowing in your mistake to 10 seconds off wallowing in your mistake To 5 seconds, that'd be pretty useful if we're. Everything's happening in a 24 second shot shot clock, you know, like that's a full defensive possession where you might be a little bit more locked in, right? That we just got back in the game. And so ultimately, I think a lot of that boils a little bit down to kind of who you are and the way you think about mistakes and the work you do on the front end to sort of prepare yourself for that and think about contingency planning and all that. And then a little bit boils down to things like as simple as self talk or challenges, appraisals that allow you to sort of see mistakes or setbacks for what they are as an opportunity to learn and grow and get better, rather than some sign that you're not good enough or that you should give up or quit early just because it's not working your way. And so chapter five, your principle five here, is really all about the skills you can deploy to help yourself be a bit more resilient after you've had a setback in the game. And so I think about resilience both over the long term. Like, how do you stick with something even when you do have major setbacks. You know, if I think about major life events, right, the passing of a family member or something like that, like, these are all adversities you have to navigate that will impact, say, the games that you play, but probably impact you for months on end too. And that requires a bit of resilience. And then you're going to have much smaller setbacks in the context of performance, like missing a shot or making a turnover that you're going to have to be resilient and respond to. And so I guess to close you out here, Dan, first, thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit about this. It's been. Been a lot of fun. And second, I wrote this book ultimately to help as many people as I could become the best version of themselves. And as you know from reading a million sports psychology books like me, there's so many things that you can do. Like, there's a lot of places to get started. There are a lot of things that you may read in here, mirror here and here, that you're like, man, I could get a little bit better at that. Or that really resonated for me. And so I guess being the behaviorist that I am, I'll leave with one final word, which is to just pick something. Pick. Pick one of these qualities or one of these skills that you want to get better at and stay focused on working on that for a bit of time. This book is designed to be used like that, where you're working on one thing at a time and really trying to get better at that specific area before you move on to the next thing rather than trying to work at all ten things at once. And I'm confident that whichever you pick, there's no right or wrong. So wherever you pick to start is going to be helpful for you and that if you work on it diligently enough with what you've learned in here, you will actually become better at what you do.

I love it. I love it. Great advice at the end there, Alex. Thank you so much for this. Absolutely awesome. I really enjoyed reading the book. Fantastically laid out and covers the complexity and the nuance wants and the challenges of ambitious competitors and people who are ambitious in the workplace as well. So fantastic. How can people find you, follow you, get in contact and more importantly, or as importantly, I should say, find your book.

I'll answer the last question first because it's easier. So the last question, you can find the book anywhere books are sold. Amazon is the. Is the easiest one, I think we're on all Amazons internationally, which is cool. And then finding and following me. I'm on the Internet at alexauerbachphd. You can find me on x lexauerbachphd, LinkedIn at alexauerbachphd at my website www.alexauerback.com.

Alex, thank you so much for today.

Thanks, Dan.

Well everyone, I really enjoyed that episode and I'd love to hear what you, the listener, think. So please do get in touch via or Facebook or through my website, danabrahams.com to tell me what you think of the show. And if you do have any suggestions, I'd be delighted to hear them. I'm already looking forward to next week's episode. Bye for now.