EP 52: Alex Auerbach, Sr. Director of Wellness and Development at Toronto Raptors

All right, welcome, everyone. We have a special guest today. He's Alex Auerbach. He's actually a good friend of. Let's give Joey some crap here. But my cousin, I guess, technically cousin in law, my former roommate, too. So Alex is. I'll actually let him introduce himself because he's got a really cool background. He's very credited in what he does, but I'll let him tee it all off from there.

Thanks, Max. Happy to be here. And we'll find some way to give Joey a hard time in the course of the time we're spending together. So I'm the senior director of wellness and development now for the Toronto Raptors, which is just code for sports psychologists overseeing mental health, mental performance, and what we call off court player development. Things like leadership development, character development, and then very practical skills, public speaking skills, communication skills and things like that. Before I was here, I was doing something similar at the University of Arizona in the athletic department and had stops at North Carolina and TCU and stuff like that beforehand. And before I became a psychologist was actually a college football coach. And so I've lived a couple of lives professionally and I'm enjoying the work that I'm getting to do here with the Raptors.

Oh, that's not many people. I think this is a huge, broad brush, but I think it's. I think it's accurate. From I've entertained. A lot of sports psychologists are embedded naturally in athletics now, whether it's from their upbringing or even, like you said, as a college coach, which is higher than most people get to be regardless of their background. It's an area that is so tightly related to athletics. But as a strength conditioning coach and a sports scientist, it's an area I almost like never engage with, just based on the foot traffic patterns essentially of that area. Like you go on social media. I don't want to start off with this. We'll save this for later. But the. There is no. I say no. There's very little beacons of scientific tools and understandings of sports psychology. It's often, let's just yell at you and do things that are clickbait. And because of that, I think a lot of the mainstream associates sports psychology with Jocko Willick posting a picture of his watch and yelling at you to go work out because it's 4am, which is not A, a useful tool, and B, practical, because that becomes the formation in an athlete's mind or my mind or whatever it is that is sports psychology. And then we think the great Dunning Kruger Effect. We know sports psychology because I've seen enough of it on social media and the breadth of it is very minimum and the depth of it is shallow on social media. So therefore I'll just yell at athletes and not engage with a sports psychologist. So with that being said, tell me, what is a sports psychologist?

Well, first, like, I appreciate the attention you're drawing to this because I think you're right. I mean, social media has like, there's a whole lot going around now just about psychology generally and sort of like therapy, TikTok and all these other things because, you know, people sort of like have one positive experience or read something on the Internet and feel like they're now qualified to motivate you. And, you know, it's a little bit scary for several reasons that we won't dive into now. But at its core, you know, sports psychologist is leveraging the behavioral principles of psychology, things like reinforcement, punishment, and then bigger conceptual things, motivation, cognition, emotion, to change an athlete's behavior and promote positive health and performance. That's my own kind of loose definition off the cuff here, but I think a few things you mentioned are really critical. So one is, you know, real sports psychology. Good sports psychology is evidence based, right? We have a robust now like, you know, hundreds and hundreds of studies showing what effects there are from sports psychology interventions, what effects there are from psychology interventions broadly. We also now have sort of a replication crisis in psychology. So we're learning what originally worked that didn't work. But we're constantly uncovering, you know, real things that people can do to make their health and performance better from a psychological standpoint. And it's not as simple as, you know, write affirmations on your mirror and lipstick and hope that you feel better tomorrow. You know, there are real things that you can do and so.

And what, what are some of those real things? Because I will go into the rest of that after, but I just want to hear while we're. You've touched on it.

Yeah, sure. I, I mean, I, I tweeted about this not too long ago, but there's a really good article that sort of distilled the, the main effects of sports psychology through a meta analysis. And the big ones that came out were things like mindfulness meditation, goal setting, group cohesion and team cohesion, task cohesion, things like managing anxiety and arousal regulation. And so you can get into like the specific tools and strategies, right? Things like imagery or visualization, progressive muscle relaxation, goal setting, implementation, intention. There's a whole laundry list of things you can leverage to improve your health and performance. But at its core, it's much deeper than, you know, rah rah in your head.

And do you think one of the biggest obstacles, this is an assumed obstacle, but I think I'm right with sports psychology is the fact that we are all cognitive creatures. And so like, even by the smallest of defaults, we've all had to at least engage in of one of ourselves. And because of that, we now think we're all proficient in sports psychology of some sorts. And that is that where a lot of like these murky waters of opinions get in the way of science, especially in the social media realm. Would you say that could be a contributing factor?

Yeah, I think it's a great point and I think it is a contributing factor because what happens is, you know, you have your own experience that you can draw on and you know, what worked for you or didn't work for you. And so then it's easy to extrapolate and assume, you know, this kind of thing might work for someone else. I mean, even today I was engaging a little bit in a debate with someone about like David Goggins versus, you know, Steve Magnus new book. And obviously both of those guys are talented people and have found things that work for them. And Steve just wrote a great book called Two Hard Things that I think sort of illuminates some of the science behind, you know, fake toughness and those sorts of dimensions. But you know, David Goggins, for all that he has done, that's really remarkable. Like, his books are essentially like, this is what worked for me and you can do it too, and that's fine. But like, nobody else is David Godheads. So probably not. But that's not to say that we couldn't like extrapolate some good lessons. It's just to say there's probably more universal principles we could pull on that would work for more people.

Gotcha. And I admittedly am very much not versed in sports psychology at all. I've taken no classes on it. I have no formal education. I guess the closest even to psychology I did take a psychology class I didn't pay attention to would be sociology. And that's not psychology. But it has some overlay, to an extent, at least, influencing variables. One of the things I've always wondered, and this is something I get into with athletes, is the grind mindset, like the mental toughness thing, and, oh, I want to wake up at 5am and get shots up. And they always say, Kobe did this or someone did that, and it's that obsession with the N of 1. And 1 of the things I've noticed is just, it's a distortion of value appraisal. Like if your goal is to actually get better at basketball, what actually makes you better at basketball? And when you break down the variables that are influencing it, you can appraise which things you might sacrifice for certain things. Oh, I do need to get shots up. I have a limitation in time. So when I'm in high school, maybe the only time I can go shoot is at 5am so I'm sacrificing some sleep. But as a professional athlete, those limitations aren't there anymore. So I'm curious about, from the cognition standpoint, how much does appraisal of those variables, like if someone says mental toughness, and this is why I'm bringing this up, it's kind of a long winded question, so I apologize. They always just default to some level of motivation, get up and do something. This is the social media realm, that is. And don't sit on your ass and go, go be about it. Right? Kind of thing. And what's the real reason why people are, are not motivated? Essentially, I said it's not perfectly versed in this area. So I'm curious. That's even a fair enough question. It might be too broad, but I'll give you a shot at it.

I appreciate it. I'll take a swing. So I guess you got, you got a few threads rolling here. So one is mental toughness, which is just this like drastically overplayed term, right. I think the last paper I read, there's something like 76 different definitions of mental toughness. But it sounds really good, right? Even though we can't really like tell you what it is, I think in general what we're talking about is like persisting in the face of difficulty, which now people are thinking about as like resilience and persistence and grit and all these other things. But at its core, like, I do think there's something there, right? And the idea is just like, how do you respond to difficulty? And that's where sort of this appraisal element comes in, right. Do you think of difficulty as a challenge? Is that an opportunity to rise to the occasion, showcase your skills? Or is this a threat and now you have to sort of play not to lose? So I think that's one dimension that you're talking about when you're talking about motivation specifically. I personally am a person that, that believes that we don't ever lose motivation, we're just differentially motivated. Right? So when someone says like, oh, I'm not motivated to go to the gym, really what they mean is like they're more motivated to stay in bed or more motivated to eat cereal. Right. It's not like it's not so black and white like you lost the motivation. And we all have sort of at our core, at baseline, basically like low lying energy that needs to be directed somewhere. Right. Our bodies are constantly, our brains are constantly running a budget, an energy budget for our body. And so what feels like a lack of motivation might actually be your brain's way of sort of suggesting the best thing you can do right now is recharge. And the last thing I'll touch on is the grind set, which is like my least favorite of social media phenomena. But it's interesting because to your point, we've taken people who have been really successful operating that way and we just assume that that's generalizable to everyone else. Right. Which is like one of the core cognitive analyses we might have. And I think, you know, you raise a great point. Like it's, it's really about figuring out if you want to optimize your mind. It's about figuring out what things refuel your energy, what drains your energy. Right. And how can we then leverage those activities to be the best performer we can be. So for most people, cutting sleep short is not a good idea. Right. For most people, spending four hours working on something is not a good idea. It doesn't mean you can't do it. It just means that there's going to be a diminishing marginal return on that activity at a certain point. And there are better ways that you can optimize that. And really the goal is to be the best that you could be. The goal is not to try to be Kobe. And so I think the more people can push toward that versus trying to replicate this one thing they saw, I think the better off they'll be.

Interesting. So I want to touch on a couple of those, kind of circle back into, um, the idea of mental toughness. And I want to get into the appraisal thing after because that's something I, I, I really enjoy and find like you have to with athletes when they become that professional level, you have to just really be like objective and say like, why are you working out for three hours? What are you doing? And why not just take a break and come back in two hours? There's an example I've heard of Kyle Korber once walking to a gym, shot a ball, didn't like how it Felt I don't know if the story is true or not, didn't like how I felt and left. He's like, yeah, what am I going to do? Get worse today? And I don't know if that's a true story or not. But I thought it was hilarious because he's already so proficient at it. If he's not in the right state, what's the point? But I want to get back to the mental toughness thing because as strength conditioning coach World likes to do, we like to pretend that we can build mental toughness in the weight room. And I've always understood mental toughness as an athlete to be hyper contextual. All right, Mental toughness, if you want to have some loose definition to it that we can have that's operable, I like to think of it in terms of minimal deviation, almost like a delta in performance relative to the magnitude of stressor psychologically applied. So if I'm in a basketball game and it's a quote unquote high pressure situation, again, that's an ill defined thing in itself. But am I going to have some deviation performance that's not physiologically influenced? So it would be isolated to my capacity to mitigate the pressures that are. An example would be like getting backdoor cut. When I know a backdoor cut is coming and coaches say, oh, that's mentally weak. I can never in the right mind of me believe that that is the same mental toughness as squatting out one more rep or being mentally tough to wake up on time to make breakfast for your wife and kids. I don't understand the corollaries. So I'd love to hear maybe some, a couple definitions that you might have on this topic of mental toughness and then some ways that we could practice and build mental toughness. And also whether or not my definitions even in the ballpark of correct.

I like your definition. I think it's interesting. So I'll start there. I mean, I think, you know, there's probably what I hear you talking about is more like consistency, right? And the ability to maintain consistency of performance under pressure. And so, you know, if you want to call it mental toughness, actually I think it works because you're talking about some outside force, right? Some adversity being applied or some constraints being applied. And now this person has to find a way to persist in the face of that adversity, which is sort of where I started. I mean, that's how I think of mental toughness is really your ability to sort of maintain or elevate your performance or persist in your performance in the face of, you know, increased pressure, adversity, stress, whatever you want to call it. And then I think, you know, it's interesting to your point about, you know, a player getting back cut. Right. Like, I think one of the things that's made mental toughness from our world really difficult to figure out is it does end up meaning different things to different people. So, you know, what you described him being back hut, like, I might just call that a mistake. Right. Like, or a, you know, a lapse of focus. Right. Something like that. It's not really about not being mentally tough. It's not about not being able to persist. It's about, you know, change in attention and change in focus. Right. And there are so many factors at play in a high stakes, high pressure, you know, performance and competition. So that influence things.

I'm going to interrupt you because I'm going to try to better define what you're saying here so I can make sense of it because I'm selfish. Podcast, you're almost treating mental toughness as almost like a, a physical unit. So imagine a train is moving at X velocity, and when you have obstacles that occur that maybe would otherwise slow one train down, you're able to maintain your set velocity because it doesn't get in the way of slowing you down versus it being a single acute event, like someone getting back door cuts. I think as a consumer of media, like, you hear like a false start. They weren't tough mentally or as a classic example here in football, or they didn't dive on the basketball. It almost sounds like when you're into talking about this, it's like someone had I missed a free throw to win the game, how am I going to respond? Or I had, I've been lose my starting position, how am I going to maintain my inertia and, or my velocity and not have a large delta and deviation in it, despite the confounding variables that might otherwise deviate me. Is that correct? Kind of, yeah.

I love, I loved how you summed it up and I think the examples you keep giving, you know, I just, I would just put them in different buckets. Right. Like false start, back cut. All that stuff to me is an attention issue. You know, that that's a misdirection of attention from whatever cues you should be looking at. Right. And it might be due to the same thing. Right. It might be pressure, you know, causes you to look different places or read different cues. But ultimately to me, it's not really mental toughness. It's more of a decision making, cognition sort of element. There.

Got you. So the grinding out one last rep doesn't even fit into the category of mental toughness. Because, again, we're not. It's not like you went and missed your PR and then someone stole your bench press from you, and now you have to find a way to persist. Right. It's almost like the. The ability to just exert effort at its highest level. That is what we're applying there. And to think, again, like the hilarious correlaries people try and make. It's like if you squat one more rep, you're gonna be mentally tough and not have a false start. You. Yet neither of those two fall under the umbrella definition of mental toughness. Yeah. As a sports psychologist, I'm surprised you have a full head of hair still. Because I feel like I would go on social media and just throw my phone at the wall.

It's going gray on the side, so it might be gone soon enough. I mean, I think, like, you know, if you guys, if you want to think about ways you can build mental toughness, I think really what you're talking about is coaching people to respond with greater effort when the constraints or task changes. Right. And so it's sort of balancing out like this obstacle in front of the train, responding to that with more versus less effort. Right. And so I, you know, I'm not a strength and conditioning coach, so I couldn't tell you what that looked like in training, but it might be something. If I'm just, you know, throwing stuff at the wall, it might be thinking about, you know, at the last minute changing, you know, what the metric is that you're looking for and seeing if someone responds with greater effort. Right. Or helping people think about, like, Carol Dweck's work around mindset and growth mindset, thinking more about the value of effort and the outcomes they're achieving versus, you know, I'm just naturally strong or naturally gifted. It's like, well, you know, what would it be like if you gave 100%? What would it be like if you, you know, maximized what you were putting out in this training session? I think those things can actually make a difference.

Now I'm gonna go. We might try to avoid a weird path. We might go down a weird path here.

Okay. It's okay.

In my head, I'm kind of. It's almost like a human mistake is emotions at times. Like, emotions are what confound mental toughness. I'm a very analytical, objective guy, despite being very Emotional at times I can like toggle between the two and when I hear of like I got. I lost my starting spot as a junior in college. I didn't get it back. But retrospectively looking on it, a lot of it was poor planning. I think people have ill definition of what they're trying to accomplish. And like the. We kind of joked on air before, not on air, off air about Apple developing a product. Right. No matter the emotions of the aggregate whole of Apple, no matter their sales are and their product development is a emotional like it's disassociated from any form of emotion because it. There is no personification of Apple. The company itself does not have feelings. It's like a Bayesian engine. Its emergent pattern is. And so in that sense I feel like at times myself when I have to like either persist harder or whatever. Like the, the Carol Weck. Is it Weck or D. Mindset. Dweck Mindset book. Which great book. I've read it. Wonderful Eustress distressors. Understanding how to, you know, make things failure is kind of exciting. Essentially. It's almost like how can we remove the emotional biasing of the information of failure and simply use that in terms of an analytical process of how to say okay, failure occurred. How does that change our plan? And so that's one of the things that's really helped me. I'm not sure if that's reasonable but it's almost like at times removing the emotional association with failure or success and just looking at as an input of a quantifiable number as if I were an AI system essentially how would that affect my feedback loops to make a better plan versus painting it with the brush of emotion like oh, you know, my dad's going to be disappointed in me or I've let myself down or hours of work have happened versus being pragmatic and looking at whether or not what I was doing before was actually sustainable to keep me in my role. I wanted to be. So I'm curious of what your take is on that, you know, smorgasbord of antidotes. But I kind of curious as a sports psychologist what you would say.

So I mean it's interesting but I'm not a person. I mean there's good data to support me in this, but you're actually never doing anything absent of emotion.

Right? That's fair.

Yeah, there, there's, there's always almost there is always emotion in what you're doing. Right. We're all feeling some baseline levels of pleasure, pain, comfort, discomfort, whatever and that's just like a natural process that our brain is constantly modeling for us as we move through the world. What I would argue is you might have constructed for yourself a mental model that teaches you more effectively how to internalize that emotion and channel that energy in the face of a failure. Right? So your model might look a little bit like using emotion as information, which is really productive and helpful, whereas for other people, emotion might be seen as a barrier debilitator. And some of it does come down to, again, like this mental model you have of how you use that data. But it's not really at the end of the day, Right. All of these sensations are really just inputs into your brain. Right. And it's all information you can choose to leverage or sort of serve as a blocker. And I think the best performers, they're not really removing emotion. So I don't think you're really removing emotion. I think what you're doing is using that information more effectively than other people might.

Could an AI system be mentally tough?

Now we're getting super meta. I don't. I don't know, man.

I don't. I don't know. I was trying to avoid that question by basically. I basically laid it out through myself. I was trying. I'm kind of curious. Could an AI system be mentally tough? And would you define it as mental toughness? Would you define as something else?

No, I probably wouldn't define it as mental toughness because it's missing effort. Right? Like an AI system doesn't have the human idea of effort. It just got this sort of like.

So what is effort then? Because maybe I'm not understanding that.

I'm curious.

This has become a podcast of me just asking you questions.

It's great. So the way I think about effort is sort of like the effective use of the energy that your brain and body produces in response to an increased demand or an increased need for that energy.

Right?

So, like, cortisol is a great example, right. People think cortisol is a stress hormone. Cortisol is actually a mobilization hormone. It's just getting you ready to do something. It's not actually telling you, like, this is a really stressful situation. And stress. You appraise a situation as stressful, and now your body produces cortisol. That's not how it works. Like, cortisol comes before the appraisal even happens. It's just we tend to associate those physiological changes with cortisol with stress, distress, anxiety, and all these things that. That becomes sort of the way our brain's operating. And so energy or effort are really similar. Right. Like it's just your body and brain mobilizing you to do something effective. And effort is really like the deliberate choice to apply that energy towards your goal in a really like intentional way versus, you know, scaling it back.

Right.

Which might be evolutionarily advantageous.

Right.

Like sometimes it's better to quit than persist from an evolutionary perspective to keep you from dying, but most of the time in our world today, like, you're not at risk for dying by trying harder. And so it'd be better to make that choice to give the effort and keep pushing.

I don't know. I guess a computer could have an effort scale, a scalar use of energy. And assuming it's not infinite, assuming it can appraise and measure the amount of energy it's deriving from a resource and it's not infinite, I suppose it would produce and operate at some level of biological efficiency in the same way we would. Where you're not going to have like your HPA response relative to a negotiation. The car salesman might be very different than presenting for your master's thesis or playing a basketball game. Versus, I suppose if you had infinitesimal amount of energy because you would have maximum efficiency of dumpage because your restoration processes would be instantaneous, essentially. So we'll, we'll, we'll bypass this artificial intelligence debate. It's interesting though, because again, you can start to, it is like you can start to really see how as coaches and sports psychologists, the overlapping of things in, in terms of why understanding like the endocrine system is so important, understanding arousal states and understanding how like someone appraised the situation. That's even like in motor skills learning, there's a thing called, oh my gosh, I'm going to forget differential learning. And basically you do a bunch like a really weird shit, basically, while you're learning a skill, for lack of better words, to not go down the rabbit hole of it. But you have to be careful what athletes you use it with because it's easily frustrating. So if someone has a mindset that they easily get frustrated with versus like a growth mindset where someone views it as explorative and every failure is an opportunity versus someone who's like, oh, I get really mad when I fail. You can't. Differential learning might not work that well because they just get really, really frustrated. And so it's actually very interesting that had some research on motor skill acquisition, the appraisal of someone's belief as to whether or not they're getting better. And they did blocked versus randomized. And the people in the blocked skills training thought they were getting better. And the randomized skills, they felt like they weren't getting better. But in the final task, the randomized skills actually got better upon macro collection of the data. And it's really interesting because it questions like how accurate our biological appraisal of things are because I think a lot of times we bias ourselves being like, oh, your body knows best, like a lot of times. And that's quite a bit for quite a lot, to be honest with you, especially in training, like, you're sore, don't buy sometimes you don't need to go, or you're tired, go to bed. But we fool ourselves into thinking like this is the best route of success because our mindset probably can't deal with such a macro view of skill because skill is such a robust concept that it only sees task A and that is the completion of making a shot from 15ft away versus taking 30 random shots, where someone constantly misses on 30 random shots. But it's more data and more errors and therefore the brain can actually take it in and make it a better, more robust skill. And the athletes who are in that group didn't realize they were getting better. They actually thought they had worse scores. It was really interesting. From a Motor skills and psychology overlap. Pretty cool. So he, Rob Gray is a great guy to listen to, very curious about that kind of stuff. He has a perception action podcast which is just phenomenal. Cool. Yeah, very cool. So cool. So we talked about some of the mental toughness and the disasters that transpire over social media. I want to hear some just tools. If I'm an athlete, I'm a coach. I work with athletes. I don't have access to sports psychologists. I know people say you can't practice sports psychology, you can't practice strength conditioning. But we are humans at times, and there's going to be situations where a kid might come to you and seek advice and whatever it might be. So I'm always, you know, encouraged by people to have at least some tools of you that they can provide, even if it's like, hey, maybe look at this area or here's some things that might make sense to you versus like totally ignoring it. Because totally ignoring something can also be kind of dangerous too, from a lot of different levels. So what are some tools that you use and some. What are some tools that maybe a strength coach or performance coach can go read more about, learn more about so they can better handle situations that they otherwise wouldn't be able to.

Yeah, great. Great question. So, I mean, I touched on this earlier, but I, I'd recommend like a mindfulness meditation practice for, for most people, there's, you know, a small subset of people it's contraindicated for, but athletes don't fall into that group. So I think about just a really simple breath meditation. We have good data now that after about just 100 minutes of practice, the connections in your brain start to change and we can see notable differences in your activity.

And what the heck is breath meditation?

Yeah. So literally close your eyes, sit there in a dark room and just pay attention to your breathing. And then when you get distracted, which is just the normal human process, and you start thinking about lunch or walking your dog or that text you sent to your partner that you wish you could take back, like refocus on your breathing, right? So that's the action. The actual mechanism of change is focusing on the breath, losing focus, coming back, right. The more you come back, the more you're engaging that neural circuitry that helps you focus in the present moment. And so the intervention is really an attention intervention. But attention is where all action and decision making stems from in sport, right? Like you can't actually do something that you're not paying attention to, right? Like you couldn't squat by not looking at the squat rack. It just doesn't happen. And so this is one way to sort of train that control of your, your attention. So I'd recommend that, I think a really helpful tool that every coach can implement with their athlete. I'd call balance critique. It's, you know, a really non judgmental way of evaluating performance. So it's asking three questions, right? What did I do today that I want to keep doing? What did I do today that I want to do differently? What did I learn? And just repeat these questions, right? And what you're really engaging is a skill called self regulated learning. It's just the idea that you can become your own best coach, right? You can figure out what it is you need to constantly refine and work on and what you need to persist with. Because we know from a performance perspective, right, the, the people who perform best are those who actually leverage their strengths. They're not the people who focus on minimizing the downsides of their weaknesses. And so it's okay to not be great at everything. What you should do is really double down on the things that you identify as keep doing right, and see if you can take those things that you feel like should be Done differently and sort of fold them into the keep doing strengths bucket. Right. And then you want to constantly focus on learning. I think setting goals is a really easy one. Right. So what is it that you want by the end of the season? What are the specific benchmarks or milestones we need to hit to know we're on track and what does that look like on a daily basis to make sure we're making real progress toward that goal? You know, I think it'd be helpful and then a sort of subset of that interventions, what's called implementation, implementation intentions. It's just identifying obstacles and what you'll do with if then rules if those obstacles come up. So for example, say, you know, my goal is to dunk on a basketball hoop by the end of next July. You might tell me here the things we need to hit. You know, three milestones we need to hit on the way to you dunking. And every day that means we need to train jumping. And if for some reason I'm not in a location where I have a box to jump on, let's say, then I'm going to do this exercise. Right. So you start to troubleshoot in advance what might be the obstacles or things that slow somebody down and figure out the rules you want to apply if you hit those obstacles. So those would be some real simple ones people can, can use to help themselves. And then if you want like a big picture one that, that can be fun and pretty impactful for people, it's building your own confidence. Resume, right. So go back through your career, your life, and think about the times where you performed best and write down like what was happening in your state of mind. What are those like personal highlights for you that you can sort of draw on as experiences you have that sort of highlight, like what are you really good at and what do you have to be confident in? One of the best sources of confidence or self efficacy is past success. And so tapping into that as a resource I think can be really helpful. So again, super simple, like lightweight interventions. I mean we can keep going on plenty of them, but those would be places to start.

Now that makes total sense. I'm going to walk through a couple, see if I understand them all. So for the breathing one, it's kind of like as if you had a flashlight and it's hyper focused on one area. We're just going to turn the flashlight off and that's like the breathing portion. And so then we can refocus that light on maybe a specific area that's not fixated on Constantly. Is that kind of what it is? Essentially, is there some level of fixation that's occurring with most people? So you have to have the ability to disassociate, so you focus on your breath, and then when you re engage with attention, it's not necessarily stuck in that fixation loop. Is that somewhat accurate?

Yeah, I think you're onto it, right? So what you're really talking about is you want to start with your focus on one object, right? So the object we choose is the breathing. And then inevitably, like, the human mind spends 48% of its time or something like that in the past or future, Right. It's a lot of time that we spend thinking about something that's not happening here and now. Now, Right. And so whenever that distraction comes up, that anxiety, that rumination, that sort of thinking pattern that draws us into a repetitive loop, as soon as we notice that, we then let that go. Right. And we come back to the breath. So you can imagine if you take your flashlight metaphor, your flashlights on the breath, inevitably it kind of like, wanders away to this, like, thought cloud over here about, I don't know, what you had for breakfast or that training session you did earlier, whatever it might be. And as soon as you notice your flashlight's misdirected, right. You want to bring it back to the focusing on the breath.

Gotcha. And so that teaches and acquires the skill to toggle that attention. You said after 100 minutes, you have new neural pathways that get developed. So it's actually a skill of being able to toggle in and out of present versus past and future thought.

Exactly. I mean, obviously, like, performance happens in the present, right? So we want to train our brain to be as present as possible as often as possible. But this is a skill, right? Directing your attention is a skill. In fact, like, most of the things that happen in sports psychology are all skills, right? Even things like sleep are skills. It's all about practice, concrete behavioral routines that you can do, and you can develop that repertoire over time. The same way you can develop a shooting repertoire.

Well, that's important you say that, and I wish I softballed you that earlier, because I think a lot of times there is a nebulous aspect to sports psychology where people don't think of it as a skill like this ability to actually work on something. In the same way that you are able to train your eyesight to be better or train your muscles to be better, you can train your psychology to appraise or like you said, the attention aspect go back and forth and the lack of tangible skill, right? Muscle's easy, people. You see it and lift something. It's multidimensional in the sense it acts and can act upon. But often no one's going to walk up to you and be like, hey, Alex, your sport, your psychology is looking good today. You know what I mean? Like, it's going to be. It's a weird, like you said, very meta internal kind of appraisal system, which we are not innately built for because we seem to be able to see things and judge things with our eyes. We're not seeing ourselves in the same observational manner. Like you can look in the mirror and see are your muscles getting bigger. But you don't always have that appraisal. And I think because of that, it doesn't get put into the skill department. I think from a majority standpoint. Now, I know obviously you sports psychologists would all, you know, of course, Max, we all think it's a skill, but I think the mass majority of people, this psychology realm and the tools you can do, they don't always associate it as a skill. And the more you associate as a skill, it becomes a tangible entity or domain that you can improve upon. And I think the improvement factor is the key word. So I'm going to ask you about that to finish this up. When you're working with someone or an athlete or whomever it might be, how do you actually measure improvement of, you know, for gosh, the lack of better words, sports psychology qualities?

Yeah, it's a really good question. So two answers for you. So one is, you know, the subjective sense that things are getting better really matters, right? So in strength and conditioning, we look for like numbers, differences, right? We look, does your bench go from 135 to 155? And we can say that's a real improvement. And we don't ask you like, well, did you feel like you got stronger? Right? We just know you did or you didn't get stronger. But in my world, it actually really matters for you to feel like you are mentally stronger, if you will, to draw a parallel, right? So that's one simple way for us to know things are getting better is you, Max. The person using these skills say, you know what? My sleep is improving. My ability to coach myself through failure is improving. My ability to stay focused is improving. You are a perfectly valid source of that data to tell us whether or not it's actually working for you. And if it's not working, then we can go in and unpack, like, okay, well, what, what do you feel like is missing when you say your sleep isn't getting better, what's happening? And we can start to troubleshoot those little points. So I wouldn't overlook the sort of subjective nature of what it is, but I'll give you the exciting stuff. We're in part two, which is, you know, I recently received a little bit of grant money to start to look at behavioral markers of psychological characteristics and game data. And so we're going to start to look at things like what is resilience? And do resilient players respond differently than non resilient players in terms of how much time elapses between things like mistakes? And so that might be a way, I don't know, we'll find out. But it might be a way to quantify some of this stuff. But in general, I think the subjective way of looking at it, especially if you're working one on one with someone, is really important.

Awesome. And any, any final takeaways you want to give the audience?

Yeah, I think, you know, the most important thing to me for any of this is there's really good resources available for coaches to use evidence based tools with their athletes in the absence of a sports psychologist. Right. So not every organization is going to be the Toronto Raptors and can afford to pay a sports psychologist to be on staff full time. But that doesn't mean that you should just give up and not train your brain. So there's a really good book called Sports Psychology for Coaches that will walk you through really simple ways you can apply some of these skills and techniques. And then there are more popular books that I think would fit that are also resources coaches could use. I know I mentioned Steve Magnus book Do Hard Things. He and Brad Stolberg wrote a book called Peak Performance. There's Scott. Barry Kaufman wrote a book called Transcend. Steven Kotler wrote a book called the Art of Impossible. All of these books have concrete tools and techniques that you can leverage in the absence of a sports psychologist to help your athletes train better. And if you're working at the highest levels of sport, like me or some of the clients you work with, like, we know that the sort of like distribution curve of these athletes is really narrow. Right. And so finding ways to separate athletes is important. And your mindset and training your brain is one way that you can do that. So I would just encourage people to engage with this. And then the second one is, you know, I hope through this conversation we can make mindset training a little bit less scary. Right. Psychology still has some stigma around it, I think, in large part because people feel like they're going to get Jedi mind tricked or they don't know what they don't know. But the reality is most of us are remarkably similar, and we're getting progressively closer to identifying a core set of 25 to 30 principles that apply to all human behavior that we can leverage to promote real change. And I think you should have some training to do those principles and techniques, but it just means that you can't really hide from it anymore. There's nothing so unique and special about you as a person that means these things wouldn't work for you. Right. Some things may work and some things wouldn't work the same way that some people can train for endurance better than they can train for sprinting. But by and large, like, there's still a benefit of training. And so my hope is, you know, people feel like this stuff can be a little bit more accessible and can be woven in. Because we also know that, like, for Major League Baseball players, for example, there's data that suggests those who work with a mindset coach stay in the league two years longer than those who don't. And so we can't tell you definitively, like, this is exactly the outcome you're going to get. You know, you're going to bat better, you're going to shoot at higher percentage, whatever. But we can tell you you might be in the league longer. Right. And so for athletes at any phase, like staying engaged in sports, super important. And so, you know, again, just would encourage people to engage with these skills and to approach it in a constructive, positive way.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Alex. I appreciate you having on. I have some questions off air. I'll ask you when I'm done recording this, but as always, thank you. Appreciate you. Take care, my man.

You too.