Alex Auerbach - Developing the minds of Toronto Raptors

This week on the Sports Initiative podcast, I sit down with Toronto Raptors Director of Wellness and Development, Alex Urbach. He discusses the key characteristics to mental performance and well being. How individuals can challenge environments and leadership to fit their needs, as well as common denominators he's seen in elite performers. As always, if you enjoy this podcast, please make sure you share it with friends and family. I hope you enjoy. Perfect. Alex, really appreciate you jumping on with me. How are things? You're under? You all good?

I'm doing very well, thank you. I have nothing to complain about. Excited about the birth of my baby daughter, so life's pretty good.

Good. And I will say you don't look too tired, which is very. You've done very well there. I'm sure you're masking it well, but in terms of looking like you're doing okay at the minute, which is good to see.

Well, thank you. If you would have caught me a couple days ago, you might not have.

Said the same thing. Perfect. So, yeah, really exciting conversation here. I've seen a lot of your work kind of on social media in terms of tweets and stuff you put out there. A lot of stuff that I guess resonated with me personally and also challenged a little bit of my workings or my beliefs and stuff. So for people that maybe haven't come across you on social media, I guess first you want to give yourself a little plug of where they can find you, but then also go into, I guess, what your role is and what that means from a practical perspective.

Sure. So on Twitter you can find me. AlexAuerbeckPhD. LinkedIn. Same thing. Although I don't write as much on LinkedIn yet. So my role is really, I'm the sports psychologist for the NBA's Toronto Raptors. I oversee all of our mental health, mental performance, as well as our off court player development. So that's things like character development, leadership development, and life skills development. And my background is as a counseling psychologist. I did my PhD in counseling psychology and kind of like a double major basically in sport and performance psychology. And I worked at the college level before I came here and was actually a former Division one football coach as well. So had my hand in several different roles in athletics and really found, you know, my kind of niche, if you will, in this intersection of health and high performance and kind of an emerging, I don't know how to describe it, like space between kind of niche. Right. So understanding the interactions between, you know, player and team, team and coach, coach and organization, team and organization. How the, you know, the dynamic interplay of sport that translates into any organization and figuring out, you know, like, how do these things work together, how can they help or hurt one another? You know, so, and how do we promote kind of health and high performance from the highest level? So that's, you know, the gist of my work. I try to write things that do, do challenge some of the status quo. You know, I don't want to over index too much on pop psychology and try to keep things grounded in the data and be, you know, a rigorous scientist with my own personal bend and critical thinking.

Yeah, no, one of the bits I guess is interesting for me and that pop psychology bit that you mentioned was around the reading of facial expressions and stuff or body language and how that's very pop culture. So yeah, for anyone that hasn't seen that, I definitely recommend it to go and have a look. It's quite interesting. I guess from the top you obviously mentioned kind of two strands of having that council counseling hub initially and then obviously the sports side alongside it. So if we look at from a counseling point of view first, how does that differ, I guess from a practitioner level to what is then necessary for high performance athletes and what strands are the same and carry across?

Yeah, great question. So I guess to back up and sort of give the big picture, the way I view sort of mental health and mental performance is one big continuum from illness to flourishing or high performance, kind of whatever you want to call, call it. And so, you know, counseling and mental health is really about that one side of the continuum, right. Helping pull people out of psychological distress and into a general place of well being and sort of like, okay, right, contentment. And then the mental performance is really about how do we get from there to, to consistent success, consistent peak performance. And in my view everyone is a performer, right? We all have something where we have a goal, we care about the outcome and the outcome is dependent on how we do. That's sort of my definition of performance. So that can be parenting, playing a sport, working. But not everyone cares about sort of reaching peak performance in every domain. And so I'm just lucky to work with some elite athletes who are really invested in that. And so, you know, sort of at the core of that, like the middle of that and sort of how I view it as a pivot point maybe is this idea of wellness. And I believe there are kind of seven core characteristics that live at that wellness intersection that facilitate both well being and high performance can help us sort of stave off psychological distress and maintain Our excellence. And so I try to work a lot in that space. You know, teaching those core skills I think is really important. But the counseling training allows me to work, you know, really deeply with things like anxiety or depression or relationship issues. Right. Things that, you know, even the best athletes in the world are experiencing. And then, you know, the second branch of my training allows me to really do things that optimize the human experience.

Are you able to discuss those seven strands just so we can get an idea and then put you on the spot a little bit here?

No, not, not at all. Yes, I'm happy to discuss them. I just try not to be too long winded. Yeah, so I guess the seven kind of in a nutshell for me, the first is self awareness. So, you know, understanding who we are, what motivates us, what our needs are, you know, knowing what sort of like pushes us in particular directions ranging from how to sleep impact our cognitive functioning to how do I impact other people. You know, humans have obviously evolved this incredible capacity to regulate one another's experience. And so having an awareness of how you impact others and how others impact you, I think is really important. And so that's dimension one. Dimension two is stress management. I kind of tend to think more of stress optimization, but it's this idea that like stress on its own is actually not harmful as long as you leverage some recovery practices. It's consistent stress with no recovery that ends up being problematic. And so when I think of stress management or stress optimization, I'm really thinking about how do we use the stress we feel effectively and how do we do some recovery, which is a perfect lend into the third, which is recovery, right? So sleep, active recovery, non sleep, deep rest, these different things that we could do to restore our energy, restore our focus is really important for both making sure we feel well and also making sure we perform well. The fourth dimension is resilience. So how do we respond to the day to day adversity as well as the big adversities we face in our life? What resources can we draw upon to help us cope with those difficulties? Who in our network can help us manage those difficulties? I think is really important. The fifth dimension is social support. And so that's for me both team support and broader social network. And what I mean by that is like in our performance domains we often work as part of a team, right? So even myself, although I'm not a player, obviously I have a team, I have a team I manage, I have a team I'm part of in the executive team. And how we all function and interact does impact my performance as well as how I feel about going to work. And then I have a larger social network that sort of gives me a boost in other areas of my life, right? Allows me to explore my identity outside of work, offer support or different perspectives, gives me a place to recover and recharge. And so I think that's a critical dimension. The sixth is mental skills. So if I'm thinking solely about the mental performance side of my world, it's these skills that might have ordinarily sort of lived there that actually turn out to be really helpful in our day to day lives. So things like managing our self talk or mindfulness meditation, or practicing imagery or setting goals, these things actually do help us feel better too. Not just perform really well, but also feel better in our life to create a sense of mastery, to create a sense of internal control. These things that are really important. And then the final dimension for me is play. And I've written a little bit about this on Twitter as well. It's just the idea that like, you know, basically once we get to high school, at least in North America, you start to slowly suck the life out of people, basically. Like, you know, it becomes really focused on achievement and outcomes and these other things that are not, not so important in the grand scheme, but feel really important in the moment. And we kind of, the thing we sacrifice is recess, right? We sacrifice time to just go have fun. We turn sports into something where now it's about getting a scholarship to college versus playing for the love of the game. And I think, you know, to maintain both your health and high performance over the long term, you have to have a place you can play, right? Something that you are motivated to do. Something that's self guided, self directed, creates a sense of mastery, allows you to experiment and explore and try new things in a low consequence environment, and is intrinsically motivating and meaningful for you. So some people think of those as hobbies. Might be a hobby, it might be playing with your kid, it might be playing a musical instrument. There's no right answer, but I do believe that's a core critical part of living at that center of well being. So those are the seven perfect.

There's probably three that I want to pick up on, but let's start with the last one there. So around that play, why do you think that we don't play as much emphasis on that as potentially we should? Because I think that you're right in terms of as you get older, people say, well now it's time to go up. You need to stop doing where actually that might be your escapism for a period. You might go for an hour and that's your way to decompress. Or DeWine. People probably don't place as much value on that as they maybe should. Why do you think that is?

I think, I mean, like the really deep big picture answer is capitalism probably, you know, like, right. We're a society that's highly oriented toward productivity, toward achievement, toward doing as much as humanly possible. And play is kind of antithetical to that. Right. Like it's a time where you're not necessarily producing anything. At least you don't need to. You could whether, you know, if you're painting, you might produce a painting, but you're just doing that for the sake of the activity itself. You're not doing it because you're painting and you're trying to be the next Picasso and that's how you want to make a living, right? And so if that's what you were doing, you wouldn't be playing, you'd be working. And so I think, you know, we've kind of like sucked the joy out of that. But then I think there's all these other sort of like lower level than capitalism kind of concepts that I think come into play. So one is our value system, right? Ties into capitalism. But it's just the idea that, like, we don't tend to value as a society, at least in Western culture, we don't tend to value things that don't have a really clear outcome. And we don't tend to value things that don't seem to move us forward materially. So that's why I think sleep also gets kind of like shoved by the wayside. Right. There's not a clear outcome of sleep other than like what we know. The good things happen and your brain are. But people can't see that, they can't feel that or touch that. And so it seems sort of nebulous and not important. And I think play is kind of similar. And then I think as society has gotten, I think, progressively more like competitive and people have come to value certain types of work or roles more than others. I think play has been sort of the thing that's been squeezed out. Right. People have prioritized, again, achievement and valued achievement, whether that's producing something or not. They just value that reaching a higher goal over doing something that's intrinsically motivating. And so again, the things that go by the wayside are the things you can't necessarily like see the real benefit of, but you feel it. And because that it just doesn't feel quite as real, which is unfortunate.

And from a leadership perspective, have you seen any particularly good ways people have encouraged that? So if you're a leader of a particular group, like maybe, I'm not saying obviously an NBA team, but it might be an NBA team. It might be. Actually, we're going to create space every Thursday. Here's a building. Go and fill your boots to whatever you want. Have you seen any particularly good ways for people engage with that principle?

Yeah, I mean, I think obviously sports is like a natural ground to experiment with some of this. But you know, I think there have been things like, you know, making up games. Basically you're allowing free time at practice for players to kind of do what they want to do, to challenge each other to play one on one, because that's what they want to do, Right. Versus walking them through the system or the playbook or trying to get one more rep in like allowing that to unfold. And you see it a lot in your world, in the soccer world, right? In small sided games and kind of like games that happen pick up right down the road. And basketball is very much done like a pickup culture too. And that. So that kind of play I think is great. And I think leaders who sort of make time for that I think do really well. I think from like a corporate perspective, you know, finding opportunities to sort of engage people in novelty without evaluation is a great way to do it. So if you think about, you know, like team building in sort of a concrete way, like whether that's, you know, doing like a retreat and allowing people to kind of talk about their goals outside of work or, you know, encouraging like a painting hour or a pottery class. Like there's a lot of creative stuff you can do that just gets people out of this. Like, oh my goodness, my boss is looking over my shoulder, I got to get something done mode. And into like, man, we're just doing this. And this is like, okay, right? This is accepted. This is part of what we're doing today. And they clearly value that I do something other than work.

No, that's really interesting. I think that leads a lot of food for thought in terms of people that are in those leadership positions. How do you find time for your staff to do that? I guess this links nicely into one of the other principles, things around the stress management piece. So what type of strategies can people put in place to deal with stress? And I guess what are the key factors that Cause someone to have high stress levels. Is there anything that kind of is a common cause, regardless if it's personal or if it's work or whatever it might be? Is there anything that's a key contributor? And then what are some strategies to maybe help people in that space?

Yeah, so I'll answer the key characteristics first and then I'll double back. So I guess to me, the key characteristics or the key things that sort of cause stress are importance, right? So the outcome matters. This is something that you care about. The second is uncertainty. So there's just a lot of ambiguity and you're not clear how you're going to deliver, what it is you need to deliver or how to get done what you need to get done. And then the third, which is the one I think most people are familiar with, is volume, right? We just have too much stuff going on and not enough hours in the day to your last comment to do it. And so the way I think about stress generally in terms of stress management is stress and cortisol. Cortisol is just a metabolic regulator of your energy. It's not a stressful. It's just your body getting you ready to do something effortful. That is all that stress is. It is just your body mobilizing resources for you to do something effortful. Maybe it's achieve that important outcome or resolve some uncertainty or take on some of the volume, right? But we've sort of like created this narrative that all stress is bad. And so I think that's one part of the problem, right? That's one part of the stress management equation that I think we've actually gotten wrong. We've sort of turned stress into the bad guy. And the reality is like, with no stress, you would die, right? We all need some level of energy and activation to do the things that we need to do. And so again, in and of itself, stress is actually not inherently harmful or even something that needs to be managed. But you know, if you let any of these three dimensions run rampant or you don't do any recovery, that's when it gets a bit over taxing, right? So if you think about it from an energy perspective, your body mobilizes, you do the hard thing and then you don't recover and you do the same thing again, right? You mobilize, you do a hard thing. Well, each time, right? You have less and less energy to draw from. It'd be like going to the gym and doing bench press every single day. Like you can do it 5, 10, maybe even 15 days in a Row. But eventually you're gonna tear a pack, right, because you didn't do any recovery. And the same thing is sort of true with like the burnout phenomenon and some of these other things. Eventually you're just not gonna be able to mobilize those resources because you haven't replenished the resources. And so I think it's really important that people recognize recovery is not time away from something you need to do. Recovery is an investment in your future performance. And if you can start to frame recovery in that way, then the biggest thing you can do to manage your stress is just make time to replenish those resources. Right. Eat well, sleep well, exercise, hydrate, spend time with loved ones, journal. There's a lot of things you can do that activate that recovery. Walk in nature, yoga, meditate. Like the list goes on and on. Honestly, like if anything that sort of restores you, works well, but you have to make time to do it. Otherwise the stress gets to the point where we feel like we need to manage it, which is when it's sort of already too far gone. Right. We haven't done the things that we need to do to keep stress functioning for us. And of course there are, you know, outlier events, extreme acute stressors that don't fit into this category. But by and large, like the day to day stress works. Talking about this is sort of the way to do it. And so, you know, I just named for you a number of strategies I think people can leverage to help better manage their stress.

And in terms of high, I guess the high volume piece, which is probably something that can resonate with a lot of people where you feel overwhelmed or overworked, how can you go around having, I guess, that recovery but understanding the, the level of sustainability of that. So if I look at as you've got a deadline, you've got a deadline coming up on Friday, it's unavoidable that I might be doing 18 hour days to get this work in. Is there anything I could do the week before that deadline to give me optimization, knowing that I'm going to go through a heavy period, but at the back end of it actually I can then have a more recovery there. Or is it that you still have to find time in and around that 18 hours to fulfill those bits that you just said?

Yeah, I mean you can certainly do things like, you know, prep for that long week. Right. Like preparation and adequate practice going into that week will help make it a little bit more predictable, you know, and I would encourage prioritizing the sleep in the six hours you have left in your day. Right. So I think it would be important to just make time for recovery after that sprint. Right. You can get through a one week period of pushing really hard. It might not be pleasant, but you can do it as long as there's recovery on the back end. It's doing that repeatedly that, that causes a bit of a problem. But the other thing I would sort of like encourage or push people on, and this is something that comes up a lot in the work I've done in the corporate space is this notion that everything is important. And like the reality is that's just not true. Right. But things, everything feels important for whatever reason, right. Our boss tells us this meeting is critical. Every deliverable feels like it's the end of the world. But in a lot of regards, most of the stuff we do at work is kind of like the work we did in college, right. Like, I don't know about you, not a single person has ever asked me about a grade I got on a test in college. And similarly, I can't think of a time that anyone's really been like, hey, could you tell me about the, you know, deeply the outcome of that project that you did five years ago? Right. Like, people sort of keep moving forward and so I think it's important to keep perspective on that and to really recalibrate around what is it that is really important here and why are you doing what you are doing. And if you can find things to let go in that 18 hour day, so it becomes a 17 or 16 hour day by recognizing like this might not be the most important thing. I think that's also an easy strategy that you can incorporate. And it's really about figuring out kind of where are the opportunities to do good work without doing great work. Right. You want to do good enough without worrying about everything being, you know, taking a 90 to a 95 or a 95 to 100, like don't let perfect be the enemy good enough kind of thing. Be the enemy of good enough. Excuse me. And then I think, you know, in these periods, like you have an opportunity to practice some skills, right? So you've got the chance to think about this as an opportunity to learn something about yourself, to challenge yourself, to leverage your strength, whatever it might be, and working through that appraisal. Right? Turning the stress into a challenge is one good way to sort of keep your energy up and engaged during this more intense period. And then again, you can give yourself the leeway to recover on the back end. But don't convince yourself that when you end this 18 hour daily sprint for a week that you're going to be able to do that repeatedly at a high level. We know scientifically that that is not true. Right? Like, we know that when you start cutting sleep off, cognitive performance declines, your emotional regulation abilities decline, your reaction time declines, like a lot of stuff gets worse. So it's only a matter of time before you sort of like proverbially fall off that cliff. Right. And so you've got to make the time for recovery. But like anything, I believe you can do hard things for a good bit of time before you really need to wind it down.

Perfect. And then coming into the last question, I think this is a little bit more relevant to sport in certain capacities. I'm not going to name a team because I don't think that'd be fair for you. Maybe I'll name a English football team, that might be a little bit easier. But what you do tend to find is that some environments aren't conducive to high performance of their players and or star. I think in terms of, you know, the culture that's created within teams can at times be not helpful and basically creates an atmosphere where one, everyone's fearful for their jobs, or two, no one overly enjoys being there for variety of reasons. It could be particularly individual, it could be the way they set up. How do you go around supporting individuals in that space where actually they're going into a particular area of their life that, let's be honest, work is quite a big proportion of where you are during the day that they know is almost a battleground and is going to be that every single day. How do you support someone with that in that space?

That's a wonderful question. And I don't even think I need to name names because that's very common. Right. That's a common experience in elite athletics for several reasons, right. Pressure, there's a lot of money involved, people want immediate outcomes and gratification, you know, several systemic issues that create that. But I guess there's two dimensions for me when I'm thinking about how can we solve this problem. So the first is, you know, tapping into why you got into the work that you got into in the first place and keeping that top of mind. Right. So most people who enter sport as a coach or as a support staff member, there was a genuine interest and passion for helping athletes get better at the time. That's sort of like the common thread, right. And so if you can tap into that, remind yourself why you're here, why you're doing what you're doing, Step out of some of the kind of political gamesmanship that's inevitable in these environments you're describing where people are just trying to survive and sort of advance their own agendas or needs. I think keeping your why top of mind is. Is critical and you can use it to connect with other people in the same space. Right? So if you're thinking about like, gosh, I got in this because I really care about the athletes, you know, you can sort of like bring that up in conversation, you can share that with other people, you give other people a chance to resonate with something that's sort of a shared experience in the space, regardless of all the bigger stuff going on. The second one is one I've gotten into a lot more recently, and I don't have it perfectly mapped out of my mind, but I'm going to take a stab at it if I. Okay. And it's the idea of niche construction. And the concept comes from like evolutionary biology and cultural evolution. And if the idea that like, organisms in their environment actually can reciprocally influence and change their environment to make it work for them without it having to be these like really sweeping changes. So some good examples are like ants that build hills. Right. Or bees who build hives. They've come up with creative ways to allow themselves to do what they do in whatever environment it is that they're in by simply constructing something new. And I think people do that. We have good data that people do that from the time they're born, right? So you come out and you cry and you see if your parents respond to you well or if they don't respond to you well. And if they respond warmly and kindly and positively enough times, you learn that crying will get you at least one of your needs met. And if they don't, then you might learn over time not to cry and that'll create some different dynamics for you. Right? But that's a very like elementary example of. But as we get older, you know, we've, especially in sport recently, you know, really emphasize like culture and environment. And I think for good reasons, right? Like, the environment does play a huge part in how we feel and perform. But I am starting to worry that we've over indexed on culture and environment as like this sort of like end all, be all nebulous thing we really have to get right. And we might be minimizing the potential for people to figure out how to make the environment work for that. And I want to be Clear that like this is not about cruel optimism. You know, this idea that you can like, you can fix the world by yourself and you know, global warming can all get solved by you recycling. That's, that's not what this is about. But it is to say, you know, you probably have more influence than you think or feel. And so you too can change how you respond to people when they do a certain thing. And you can essentially like reward or punish behavior, right, based on how you respond. You can choose to zag when everyone's zigging. You can, you know, take the extra time to sleep, right, and not, you know, drag yourself in. Someone can ask you to come in at 7 and you can say, Gosh, we got in at 4am last night, do you think we could push that to nine? Like there are things that you can do to sort of push a little bit the environment and the direction that you need it to go. And I think in sport, unfortunately, people just sort of like go along to get along. And so they don't really ever shape their environment for all these fear based reasons we've touched on. But I think, you know, this idea of you can kind of construct your own environment or shape your environment to work for you, I think has tremendous potential, potential to help people.

So yeah, I think a really interesting concept around that. I guess my worst one challenge would be how do you cope with a leader who can be inconsistent? Because if you can imagine over an NBA season, for example, you might act in a particular way or push back in a particular way on the Wednesday after winning or Tuesday night, wherever you have, and then a similar scenario crops up on the Saturday, but you've lost Friday and all of a sudden the feedback you get very, very different. So how do you deal with it in terms of the inconsistency of maybe the leadership and how that can affect the person?

Yeah, it's a great question. And again, like this is where some of the power dynamics in sport and you know, how power makes us less sensitive to other people, kind of, kind of plays a part. But I think there are a couple of things, right? So one is like anything, you got to pick your battles, right? You're not going to win them all. And I think again, like with culture change or environment change, people tend to think about kind of global reform, right? Like we need to change the values and rebuild the culture from the ground up. And like that might be true, but it might also just be that you need to change one thing right now. And so to simplify it, it's like keep the main thing the main thing, right? It doesn't mean it's going to happen 100% of the time. It might happen once and then it might be three months and it happens again and then it happens again. And that's progress, right? And so not to get too bogged down, right. As a support staff member or a member of any organization in the inevitable highs and lows of a sports season, like you take an NBA season has got 82 games, you're probably going to lose, right? And so to react to each of those as though it's the end all be all again, like, I don't think anyone's really looking back to the games that you played in the early season. If you're in the playoffs, if you're not in the playoffs, maybe it's a little different. But even then they're probably still looking at the end of your year, right? People are looking at growth over time and how does it progress. And so, you know, all that's to say, like, keep perspective. You don't have to fight every battle, but don't, you know, be afraid to stand your ground a little bit if you think it's realistic, particularly from a recovery perspective. So I think people are starting to tune in a little bit more to the importance of recovery. People are not machines. And so I think it's about finding the language to be able to have these conversations effectively. Being able to talk about recovery as an investment, being able to talk about maintaining performance over the long term versus trying to grind it out right now and really sort of like tapping into the potential of long term growth over short term comfort kind of thing. And I think if you can do that, you can be successful again. It's not going to happen every time, but that's not the goal really. The goal is to have some small wins, to try to make these subtle changes and to ultimately shape it into what you need it to be.

Perfect. So I think, moving on now, I guess more of a practical perspective. Obviously, as you mentioned earlier, you work with athletes and that will come with a unique set of challenges as well as skills and stuff. So I guess my first two questions are this. How do you remove the person from the athlete? Because I can imagine that it must be very difficult if you're going and working with an individual who's got, you know, millions of screaming fans at him over, you know, winning the NBA championship a few years ago or you know, when it autographs anywhere, sometimes that individual acts actually needs, you know, a level of no I'm just Kawhi or I'm just LeBron or I'm just Russell rather than being this all a dead individual. And then two, how do you get them to reflect on where they are at this moment in time as an athlete within the organization? Because again, you start superstar player on a multi million pound contract is in a very different mental state and mental position or physical position compared to the, you know, 11th, 12th man off the bench who if they make a wrong move or aren't getting a lot of minutes, could potentially find themselves cut with someone else coming in on a 10 day contract. So how do you manage those two things?

Yeah, so for the first one I guess I sort of inverted, right? I don't separate the person from performer or I see them as kind of inextricably linked. And so I start with the person first, right? I start with this idea that like fundamentally the person sitting across from me in a room or standing next to me in a hallway as we're talking has the same needs that I do or you do, right? We all have a need to be in relationship with other people. We all have a need to feel some sense of autonomy and mastery and connectedness. We have often needs for achievement. We have basic needs, right? And so, you know, maybe being an athlete affords you some different opportunities to meet those needs in different ways. But by and large like the needs don't really change, even down to like the need to be liked or cared about deeply, right? Like, and those things actually can get obscured sometimes by being famous, right? Like it can be easy to confuse those things. So I start with that as sort of my foundational perspective because I think tapping into that first is really important for building an authentic, genuine relationship and investing in this person beyond what happens on the court. And so I think, you know, it sort of lends itself to that second part, right? Which is kind of like I do with any support staff member too. You know, the same things that are challenging for any of us working in high performance sport challenge the athletes in different ways, but similar concept, right? So how do I stay grounded to why I'm playing basketball in the first place or playing soccer in the first place. How can I focus on improving? Where did I start and where am I now and what do I want to achieve during my career? What's my role on the team? How am I building relationships? What's my leadership look like? These are all questions that we can sort of explore that are a little bit more person centered. And I think by making them person Centered. You can get a little bit more into that kind of reflective space and less sort of performance focus. And obviously, people come, you know, wanting to address a specific performance thing, like, I struggle to, you know, make penalty kicks, or it's challenging for me when I walk up to the plate. And that's all fine and good. Right. We can address that. But it's important to know kind of who's sitting across from you as well.

Yeah. So I guess one question for me about that, as you're just talking there, is how do you manage that in a group dynamic? And do you think that there's.

I.

Guess, optimal personalities that work together? I. I kind of listen to a lot of different podcasts, a lot of different interviews, and you get some that. It seems like the environment is very much, you know, we talk holistically or we care about the entire person. I'll use San Antonio as an example. San Antonio Spurs. You talk about Tim Duncan, the way you said league. He wasn't a yeller. That wasn't his style. But he had, you know, Tony Parker, Ginobi in and around it. And they seemed to captivate an idea of, we want to know more about the person. It's more about little touches or, you know, contact in different ways. Now, if you had a group of individuals that needed Yellen to perform, that would probably have gone a very different way. Equally, you look at kind of the New England Patriots, another model of high success that seems far more brutal and cutthroat is not as much around individuals like, no, do your job and then you'll be fine here. So do you think there's, like, optimal dynamics of working or personality types that can or should work together to allow optimal performance?

I guess, yeah. So it's an interesting question, and I think my thinking on this has evolved over the last several years, but I'm actually moving away from this idea that there's an optimal personality type, because I think, like, in general, people can actually learn to work together. I mean, obviously there are really extremes where that doesn't happen, but I think people can learn to work together assuming they have a complementary skill set. And so I think what ends up happening is personality on the best teams ends up sort of being subsumed by ability to get the job done. And people figure out how to make it work because the team is skilled enough to compete at whatever it is that they're competing at, even in a corporate setting, let's say. So in my world, certainly, like, obviously, the NBA has really done a great job of Promoting kind of like healthy individualism, which makes it fun. And I think that there's good room for that, honestly. And so I focus less on personality when I'm thinking about how we compose the team beyond kind of like extreme outliers. Right. I think in those instances, obviously, if someone, you know, might actively detract from the team dynamic or might, you know, undermine their teammates or be prone to some behavior that we wouldn't support, then I think, of course, you have to figure out whether or not that's really a good thing to add. But assuming everyone's personality is sort of in like, a healthy, normal range, I moved less toward that, like I said, and more toward, like, let's find the optimal combination of skills and then learn to work together interpersonal.

And how does that get challenged? Obviously, you mentioned there, regarding. Regarding outliers. If you look at, like, Kobe Bryant as an example or Michael Jordan, you know, I think most of us have watched that last dance documentary, and I'd imagine at times he's probably not the nicest person to be around. But ultimately that ultimate goal which they all wanted, probably allowed him to get away with some stuff that an average band might not be able to. Is it important in that context, I guess, to have a skill base that can complement that individual, but also a personality that can cope with that type of individual because, again, the hostile nature of the way they act, I'd imagine for certain players would not. You're just not going to get the best out of them because of the way that they're receiving the feedback.

Yeah, it's a super interesting question and example. Right. I mean, I think, yes, obviously there's, you know, some degree of skill you have to have to sort of back up the way that you're doing things. You know, you can't be Michael Jordan and have the skill of me out there trying to, you know, sort of run people into the ground. But if you're as elite as he is and was, then, you know, maybe you can get away with pushing a little bit harder. But I think there's also, you know, maybe overlooked in the documentary exactly how clear he was in communicating what his expectations were. And I think there's something to be said less for the personality type and more for the way he actually led that sort of allowed him to push harder. Like there was no mystery about what he wanted to accomplish. And so then it became up to everybody else to sort of meet him where he needed them to meet him, for them to win championships. And it was less about in My view, like, do these personalities get along? And more about like, do you as the person who is following this elite player want to get on board with this or not? Because the train is not stopping. You know, Michael Jordan train is, is plugging full steam ahead. And you know, I think we look at like him getting away with things or people talk about him not being a great teammate. I think he might have been a hard guy to work with, but I don't know that that makes him a bad team. And I don't think that having high expectations necessarily means, you know, that it's your, your job to make everyone else feel comfortable. Right. Especially not in these really elite settings. So I don't know, I'm less, I'm less convinced that it was important for, you know, his other teammates to feel or behave a very specific way to work with him because of how he handled things. But it's a really interesting question. I don't have the answer. I'm just sort of thinking.

No, I think it's interesting, the communication piece as well. There's one particular altercation with him and Steve Kerr where he mentions Phil Jackson. Managing the situation like that isn't going to prepare them for when they play the Pistons away in that hostile environment. So I wonder if you caught onto something regarding the communication bit, which is like, yeah, I am being hostile or I am being demanding because this is what that end environment actually needs from us and needs from you and I need to know whether I can trust you. And obviously it got back later on that, you know, the three pointer and stuff, but he ultimately needs to know which people are going to go to battle with me here and which people am I not going to pass the ball to or am I not going to be able to trust in that particular hostile environment? Because that's, you know, our end goal. That's where we're going to need to get through in order to get to NBA championships, etc.

Sure, yeah. I mean, look, I'm sure there are other ways to do it. Like, I think he's doing it in the way that he best knows how, you know, to sort of prepare his teammates. And obviously Steve Kerr has gone on to have an incredible career as a coach, kind of doing it differently, right. Like having a lot of fun and you know, I think they're obviously a highly competitive group of athletes, but he's built a culture on the idea of joy basically. And so I think you can. There are multip ways to get to that point. And I agree with you. I think A lot of it is just, you know, making sure that the people he's surrounding himself with are prepared to deliver when he needs them to deliver. And I think in some ways, you know, it's kind of like maybe a selfless part of him that goes unrecognized, like realizing he actually needs other people to succeed and this is sort of the way that he best knows how to do it. And so, you know, we can call it like a personality type or whatever, but ultimately I think like this is just a highly competitive person trying to motivate in the way he best knows how. And it worked for some people and didn't work for others. And like I said, at the extremes that's, that's going to happen. But when you've got the talent level like that, you know, you can get away with that.

And where do you see this moving to in, in the future? Because I look at all the other elements of an athlete and you look at, you know, physical, we're progressing with, in terms of physical care, Tech tax side has obviously been around with the X's and O' for ages. Where do you see, I guess, the psychological road going? And do you see that there's any pillars that we're able to put in place with, you know, with younger participants that allow them to, I guess one, be more holistic in their approach to sports?

I think that's important.

But two, also provide them with strategies that if they do make it to that top end, they're better prepared mentally to go through the rigors of, of whatever that looks like.

Love, love these questions. I'll go in order. So I think, you know, the future is probably somewhere around understanding the interaction and the space between individual, team and organization. So some people would call that the environment. I think it's like environment plus culture plus this kind of like synergistic interaction effect. Right. But like we're hopefully going to get away from this idea that mental health or mental performance, you know, solely lives within an individual. Right. Like the circumstances and context that we operate in have a really big impact and influence over how we think, feel and behave. And so I think in the future, you know, the best teams are going to appreciate that and then they're going to work to create a culture that optimizes those things. Right. So whether that's, you know, clear communication, setting good expectations, identifying clear values, prioritizing rest and recovery, there are a lot of environmental level interventions you can do that facilitate individual people thinking, feeling, behaving better. But right now there's still a little bit of that idea that this is just your responsibility and you got to kind of make it work however you show up to work. Work is its own thing, the environment's its own thing and it's your job to fit in. And I think the future is figuring out how we make the environment work for performers. And the teams that get to that point first I think will have a competitive advantage in terms of youth sport. And what can people do? I mean, I know we talked earlier about the kind of pillars of wellness. Like that's where I'd start, right? That is sort of the pivot point between high performance and overall well being, that I think people would do well to master those skills. And I think, you know, you see it obviously a lot in sport now like some hyper specialization training all the time. So even thinking about things like how do we infuse rest and recovery into kids sports, how do we give them breaks between seasons, I think would be helpful. But then, you know, education on the basic things too, right? Sleep, hydration, nutrition, all the things that we need to sort of be our healthiest, highest performing selves that don't often take place really until athletes get to college. Right. At least in the States. You know, maybe here, there you'll have an athletic trainer in high school who will educate on some of these things. But by and large the resources to support that don't really exist until that college level. But that doesn't mean we couldn't educate, we couldn't help coaches infuse those practices into what they do. You know, practicing things like mental skills during a practice period versus asking, you know, athletes to do it on their own. These little interventions like that I think could go a long way to making youth sport better and preparing them for the future of high performance for them.

Yeah, I think the idea of almost enabling the coaches to be in a really good spot with that is an interesting one. I know on some coaching courses I've done over here, they've done a little bit of groundwork on that. But I think that, you know, the more those people, because you're not going to get funding to get it entirely down the pathway. But if you can get those people at those base levels, the grassroots are able to support it and understand it to a degree, then hopefully that that will allow that to be a pillar moving forward. So I'm conscious we're at the time we kind of allotted for this. So last question for me, which is, who's the most thought provoking or impressive individual you worked with in this space and why?

Yeah, man, great question. I mean, because my work is confidential. I can't really give you names, names, but I can say I've been really fortunate to be around some of the best athletes in the world now at their sport. And I think what's really cool about this experience is how idiosyncratic excellence is at this level. So there are some sort of shared traits that the great ones have, right? They work hard, they take good care of their bodies, those sorts of things. But then the way that they approach the game or the way they work through their craft is really kind of unique. And it's unique to them, it's motivating to them. They found like their core, right. Like what helps them stay engaged and stay working hard every day. And so I think that's been really impactful for me and been a really cool learning experience to have. Obviously, when you come up trained as a psychologist, you try to put together this theory of how people do what they do and explain sort of like human greatness. Right. Like, that's, that's some of what my role looks like. And I think it's really quite neat to know that part of explaining human greatness is like, you just have to let people be who they are on their own and sort of create the conditions. And obviously you want to promote some core behaviors, but like, ultimately you want that individual self expression of excellence is really pretty cool.

Perfect. As I said, I'm always interested to hear the why on that, but I think that's a fantastic reason why. And allowing people to be unique within your environments, crucial. So, yeah, listen, Alex, a fascinating conversation and yeah, hopefully we can do it again soon.

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for listening to the Sports Initiative podcast with me, Michael Wright. Please remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at the Sports Initiative Podcast and share this podcast with friends and family. I'll see you next week.