INT ep 62 - Teamwork! What Elite Athletes Can Teach Us About Mental Health

The following program is a peer to peer advice show and does not diagnose mental health conditions. If you're seeking social services, Please call or text 211 or go to 211 CA. Hello listeners around the world on radio, streaming and podcast services. This is It's Not Therapy. I'm Leanna Kerzner and I am not a therapist, but I am your source for navigating the madness of mental health using my top 10 sayings for checking in with your best self this week. Okay, I had no theme planned before I interviewed the guest. I had the opportunity to speak to Alex Auerbach, performance psychologist for the Toronto Raptors, and I took it. But the conversation got me thinking about teams and team dynamics. So that's what this show turns out is going to be about. When I was in school, like back in the day, long time ago, I hated group work. Totally despised it. Group work, I realize now, was presented all wrong. Instead of teaching us to define roles, set milestones, and have a system of accountability, it was there's four of you. The project is due in a month, figured out, and someone, namely me and maybe one other person, ended up doing the work of four people because the two of us that did the work didn't want to get a bad mark. I personally believe this sets us up for failure and burnout as adults. It teaches us all the wrong things. As humans, we're wired to want to belong to groups, but the skills required to navigate groups have to be learned, and a lot of us end up unlearning a lot of bad habits we pick up as children and teenagers as adults. Furthermore, you can do absolutely everything right in a group setting and still be ostracized. All it takes is one narcissist targeting you and toxic group dynamics. By the time I sought treatment for PTSD at that point I'd actively associated groups of people with danger. Crowds will never be my favorite thing. They never have been my favorite thing. And I still have to prepare myself for that inherently unsafe feeling. Whenever I'm in groups of people, you know the thoughts that someone could start verbally or even physically abusing me and at best I can't do anything about it. At worst I'll get told it was my fault and that I deserved it. Now, rationally, I'm aware that the risk of this is quite low. Like very low. But with history, I know all too well that it's not zero. And as much as I put in the work daily to understand and reduce these gut level anxieties at the end of the day, it's just about a big heaping wad of distress tolerance. When large groups are involved, especially large groups where there is someone there I know isn't great. Now when I can control who's around me, when I can set proper boundaries is completely different. If I know the people who are going to be there are considerate, conscientious, honest, self aware groups are amazing. I actually love groups under these conditions. But groups like that don't happen on their own. They take a lot of work to create and maintain. And you constantly have to do not tests, but just little accountability checks to make sure everyone's on the same page. A lot of people think common interests are what lead to good friendships and colleagues. But you know this is one of my top 10 phrases, right? Core values are more important for relationships than common interests. Yeah, some very terrible people share any hobby or area of interest you could possibly think of even an interest in mental health issues, especially mental health issues. There are unfortunately a lot of predators in this space. In my experience, the thing that will kill a group dynamic faster than anything is resentments. Too often people try to sweep things under the rug thinking it's for the good of the group. But that just leads someone who still feels wronged to see everything through the lens of that building resentment. Everything the other person says is torqued. Every possible implication is seen as a nefarious one. And that's why I'm a huge believer in solving problems instead of just trying to move on from problems. And proper apologies are a huge part of that. I have been meditating a lot on proper apologies lately. It's amazing how many people still don't know how to effectively apologize. You may have seen Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis in the news lately. If you haven't, here's a short version. That 70s show actor Danny Masterson was sentenced to 30 years in prison for raping two women. Now during the sentencing process, it turned out that his former co stars Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, among others, wrote letters of support to the judge to try to get Danny Matheson a reduced sentence. Now yes, they wrote character references for a convicted rapist, but on top of that, Ashton Kutcher's involved with anti sex trafficking charities. Yikes. Well, people got upset as you could imagine. And so Ashton and Mila made a video with a half baked apology of the form. We support victims. We never intended to retraumatize anyone. It if anyone was hurt, we're sorry. Which only made Things worse, they're only making the video because they knew people were angry and hurt. The word if strips what would otherwise be apology of accountability should be we intend to support victims. We. We never intended to re traumatize anyone. And therefore to the people who were hurt, we're sorry we didn't consider not if no conditionals. That's not accountable. Accountability is a core, essential value for group success. A person who prefers to wriggle out of trouble is not going to get along for very long with someone who believes in people taking responsibility for behavior. That's common sense. You see that through. But I've never personally seen an example of a group where people wriggling out of trouble was the norm. I've never seen a group that was terribly productive or happy that was comprised primarily of people who wriggle out of trouble because someone in those groups always needs to be to blame. And the person who ends up being to blame is the person who does actual work. And so the people who do actual work rapidly burn out and either become less productive, leave or both. Now, I used to play basketball when I was in middle school about the same time I was hating group work with a passion. I wasn't good at basketball. Okay, I was good enough to make the team in like grade seven, but I wasn't, you know, good. But I didn't need to be a top scorer. My job, because I was fairly short on the team, my job was to get the ball to a top scorer, which I was great with because I knew that I wasn't one. I had no aspirations to be a top scorer. I wasn't that good. The reason I keep focusing on I wasn't that good because basketball at the time was one of the few places where I didn't have to be the best at something. I was never going to get a basketball scholarship, right? I could just be a member of the team. And being allowed to be average was so nice. That was the difference between basketball and academic group work. There was no way for someone on a basketball team to to get saddled doing all the work. The best players couldn't get the ball to themselves. The structure wasn't set up so that a couple people were doing all of the work. It was awesome. Now I realize what the point of academic group work is supposed to be. It's supposed to frame, force us to learn to deal with other people. But that doesn't work. The idea that I was somehow supposed to make other group members be more motivated or competent or that I was supposed to Persuade them. I was supposed to have sweeping rhetoric that's not reasonable to expect a 13 year old nerd to do. I'm pretty sure that the actual result of school group work is to make you hate group work. And that's bad because it's a missed opportunity to teach actual functional group skills in real life. Because in real life groups have authority figures the same way basketball teams have coaches. You should go to the coach if there's a problem. You know, not to narc on somebody, just to figure out how to solve the problem because you don't have the skill yet. You need to learn, right? The coach is there to give you guidance. That's why they're the coach, they coach. But when I went to the teacher about group work, even good teachers, they had curriculum guidelines, right? So it's nope, can't help you. You'll have a chance to do peer review, peer marking. And here's the thing. Peer marking was supposed to be you grade the other members of the team based on how well you thought they did or didn't do. But at my school, no one ever gave anyone a bad peer review score. The smart kids did not narcissist on the tough kids. And you know, the tough kids were like, if, you know, if you just let me do nothing, I'll give you a good peer review score. It was a completely messed up system. That's not, I mean, I know 360 performance reviews are a thing. Does anybody like them? Is anybody totally honest in them? No. Because of office politics and bad experience from group work as a kid. I do not believe that school group work sets a good foundation for group work as an adult. A lot of us end up in toxic work environments in early jobs because we were primed to accept this faulty paradigm so we don't try to make it any better. We don't know it can be any better from the time we're like what, 10? We, we know group work sucks and we're going to get stuck with all the work and somebody's going to get off easy and they're going to get the same grade that I did. Even though they didn't do anything or next to nothing. Right? We're primed to accept lousy conditions as adults by nonsense school group project and families where no one ever really solved problems. That's part of the reason I was so excited to talk to a performance psychologist for a professional sports team. I wanted to talk to someone who coaches elite athletes when results matter because that's where we get the Good stuff, right? So after the break, I'll talk to Alex Auerbach, performance psychologist for the Toronto Raptors. So excited. After this break on if that Therapy, I'm gonna wiggle in my chair in anticipation. Stay tuned. The following program is a peer to peer advice show and does not diagnose mental health conditions. If you're seeking social services, Please call or text 211 or go to 211 CA. We're back at It's Not Therapy. I'm still Liana Kerzner. I'm still not a therapist. And it is time for the interview. Everybody's favorite part, if it's not therapy. Okay, my favorite part, if it's not therapy. And this episode of Super, Super Stoked, we've got Alex Auerbach, who is the performance psychologist for the Toronto Raptors, as well as a whole bunch of other things. Alex's credentials are very, very long. I'm super stoked to have him on because I am a Raptors fan. So, Alex, thanks so much for coming on. It's Not Therapy.

Thank you for having me on. It's Not Therapy. And I'm going to do my absolute best to keep up with the energy you're bringing this morning. This is incredible. I'm very excited for this.

I've had so much coffee. Okay, so we think motivation creates action, but that's wrong, isn't it?

Well, it depends on how you think about motivation. But I think where I hear you going is we have this notion that generally people are motivated or they're not motivated. And so when people say they're not motivated, what we often think of is, like, sitting on the couch or laying in bed and not doing anything. And I think that's where you're going with this idea that motivation creates action. But the way I think of motivation is that people are never actually not motivated. This state of, like, total absence of motivation doesn't exist. Instead, people are differentially motivated. And what I mean by that is if you're sitting on the couch, it means you are more motivated to engage in the behavior of sitting on the couch than you are to be doing whatever it is you think that you should be doing. And so oftentimes, when you are coaching people or working with people, or if you're a manager or you're a leader thinking about getting more out of your team. You know, one of the things people often immediately default to is, well, they're just not motivated or we need to motivate them more. And really what we need to understand is what's motivating them to do the thing that appears unmotivated, right? What's motivating them? What's motivating them to disengage? Why are they driven toward that behavior? All behavior is motivated. It just may appear motivated by things that we don't value or seem disconnected from the behavior we want someone to engage in.

Right. Because sometimes people are motivated by not failing anymore and so they don't try. Just as an example, one bad habit I really had to break when I was, you know, I was a point guard in middle school playing basketball and I was a competitive dancer and all of us played hurt because it was the don't be lazy, don't be lazy. Push, push, push. Now you're a pro, how do you handle that with, you know, people have a ton of pressure, they have to perform at a high level. How do you handle things like injuries, when to play, when to rest?

Well, for us, we play an 82 game season, so it's a very, very long marathon really. And I think a lot of times when people play hurt, it's sort of in service of sprinting and trying to do something really quick and often driven by fear, you know, not your spot or not maintaining your playing time or whatever. But of course, you know, at this level, the risk of doing something like that far outweighs the reward, right? If you play on an injury and you continue to hurt yourself, all you're doing is delaying the inevitable, right? You're delaying the timeout, you're prolonging how long you're going to be out once that happens. And so for us, you know, we often think about things like recovery not as time away from the game or time that you're not playing, but as an investment in your future performance. And so it's not about, you know, sitting when you're injured is not about, oh my gosh, you're not tough. Sitting when you're injured is about this is me investing in my long term future and my long term career. And if you, you know, spend enough time around players who have been in the league, you know, 12, 13, 14, 15 years, this pattern starts to show up pretty regularly where they have a real good sense of when's it time to push, right? So in the playoffs or, you know, finals, you might push yourself a little bit more because the season's going to end soon and you're going to have a chance to recover. But if it's game and we've got whatever, 69 games left to go, if my math is Right. You know, that's probably not the time to be trying to grind through an injury. And so we try to balance all that, right, with what is it that each individual player needs? How can we help them get back on the floor as quickly as possible? Ideally, how do you prevent them from getting hurt at all? But, you know, basketball, it's a tough sport and there's a lot of contact and all that stuff. So it's just sort of part and parcel of the game. So we try to help our players really think intentionally about the long term.

Benefits of taking care of themselves now about that competitiveness. Right. We see sports as achievement driven. You know, the Raptors won the playoffs, everybody went crazy. But sometimes you're good, the other team's just better. How do you handle coaching a team through a setback like that?

Well, it's always hard. You know, there's no, never really one right answer. But I think, you know, some of the general principles around coping with failure or coping with adversity are things like first allowing yourself to actually process or deal with whatever that is. You know, sports in general, broadly speaking, has a real kind of push toward, like, onto the next thing. Onto the next thing. And I think in principle that's probably right, but there's sort of a time and a place and a way to do it, right? You want to give people the chance to actually process the experience, to sort of reflect and learn and then ultimately move forward. So when we deal with any kind of adversity or setback, a lot of what we're trying to do is really a few things, right? One is recognize and sort of acknowledge the feeling that we have once we can get through the emotional phase. Starting to look at what lessons can we extract from this, you know, so what can we learn from the experience we just had? And sometimes it's, it's very, very hard to learn from failure. Generally you want to try to time that for when people are in an emotional space and a cognitive space to really learn something rather than right away. And then we try to identify sort of a container for how long are we going to deal with this before we move on and start thinking about the next season or the next game? Um, you know, fortunately in the regular season for us, right, you, you often play two games in a row or two games in three days. And so you, you are sort of forced to move on quickly. But I think if you deal with it properly, you have a real opportunity to learn and sort of aggregate and accumulate learning over the course of a season. So that by the time you get to the playoffs, by the time you get to the big games, you've got a lot of really good data to show how you can perform better and what the team needs to do to be successful.

Now one of the things the, the team needs to do to be successful is enjoy the ride, right? It the idea that, oh, I'm going to achieve all those things and then I'll be happy never works. So, you know, an 82 game schedule is grueling. How do you keep people's. You know, we talk about focus and, and diligence of putting in the work and doing the tough stuff, but we don't talk about enjoying it or feeling happy. And that's important. What's your advice for that, for enjoying the ride?

Well, I think you're summing up the advice really nicely in the way you're framing the question, right? Which is how do you lean into appreciating the journey and making meaning of the process along the way? Big picture. Culturally, there's sort of two ways. Scientifically, there's two ways we think about happiness. Culturally, we're really over indexed in the west, at least on what people would consider hedonic well being. Right. It's this idea that if you achieve more and do more, eventually you'll arrive at some magical place where everything is great and anyone who's ever achieved anything really significant in their own life quickly recognizes that that is not the case. Right? You get that job, you get that promotion, you achieve something new, you reach a new milestone. Most of us celebrate that for 30 seconds or less. And then we start thinking about all the problems that have now shown up because we got a new job and we have to manage a team twice the size of what we're used to or whatever it is, right? And the same thing is true for athletes, right? It's, you know, you win a championship and it feels great, hopefully for longer than 30 seconds, right. But ultimately, what you realize at a deep, deep level is the championship is probably not a substitute for your overall feeling great about who you are as a person. And so it doesn't mean don't compete or don't chase those big achievements. It just means recognize the limitations that achieving those things is really going to have on your long term happiness. I mean, most of us have basically a happiness baseline that's pretty hard to reset, which is both good and bad, right? It prevents us from getting too down when something really bad happens. But it also means that when something great happens, we don't tend to appreciate it as much as we could. The second school of thought is what we'd call eudaimonic well being. And it's kind of this idea that life is really meaningful or what brings people well being is extracting meaning, making meaning, deepening relationships, building connection, and enjoying the journey essentially, rather than achieving something significant. And so what we try to do a lot with our players is really work on things around Eudaimonic well being. Right. So who are you as a person? What value do you have and how do we align your behavior with those values? What brings meaning to you in playing basketball that you can tap into every day? You know, those things become much more sustaining sources of joy, engagement and well being over time than making the next shot or winning the next game, because we all get desensitized to that a little bit. Right. And so you need something deeper that you can tap into and connect with that'll really allow you to sustain over time.

Wow, that is an amazing answer. And I think that's a good time to go to a break so people can like just that and come back and we'll talk about change after the break. Stay tuned. You're listening to Alex Auerbach, performance psychologist for the Toronto Raptors, with us on it's not Therapy. Stay tuned after the break. Any questions? Comments? Liana nottherapy show.com not therapy show her website not therapy show Twitter, Instagram.

Oh God.

X Instagram. Back after the break. More with Alex Auerbach. The following program is a peer to peer advice show and does not diagnose mental health conditions. If you're seeking social services, Please call or text 211 or go to 211 CA. We're back on it's not Therapy. I'm still Liana Kersner. I'm still not a therapist. And we're still talking to Alex Auerbach, performance psychologist for the Toronto Raptors. And I want to pivot from before the break, we were talking about happiness. I want to talk now about change because part of playing professional sports is roster changes and the Raptors have had some big ones. Is that Idaonic? Well, being a way you handle both broad strokes, I know you can't talk about individual players or anything like that, but in big pictures, when someone is going through change, is that the way to make the change easier? Working with new people, having to deal with new challenges, learning new systems?

Well, I think there are a few factors you want to leverage when you're going through any big change or changing systems or trying to adjust A culture. Right. But I think you're absolutely right that one of those factors is meaning, purpose, values, these kind of deeper, higher level organizing constructs that help us understand what we're doing in the world and why it matters to us. When something happens that you don't feel happy about or it's not quite as comfortable as you like, you can sort of remind yourself of why you're doing this. Right. So, you know, for someone like me, a lot of the work I do is driven by my family and the care that I have for my daughter. And so it's like when things are hard, it's reminding myself like, okay, there's a purpose here, there's something I'm doing that's bigger than myself that can, I can use as a source of well being and resilience to help me get through this sort of difficult stretch here. But then you also want to think about like, how do you recreate the values of the new group of people who are here? Right. If you can't just rotate people in and hope that the culture sustains. Right. Culture is an emergent property of the people that you have. And so if you change the people, you're going to change the culture. How do you help everyone sort of synthesize and regroup around whatever this new identity is, I think is a really critical part of, of managing this change. And then I think the third bucket is kind of looking optimistically at the future. Right. I mean, all these changes in sports happen for a reason. Right. Players opt out or teams choose to go in different directions. You know, all decisions well above my pay grade. But you know, for me, when I look at that, it's okay, what's the opportunity we have now with this new group of people to make a really significant impact and a significant difference here with who we have?

Yeah. Then I mean, sometimes it can just be a player wants to play closer to their family. When you've got. Because basketball's a funny sport in that it is a team sport, but we're obsessed with the star players. People have that at work too. Right. It's all based on achievement and sales targets and all that stuff. And the, the guy who makes other guys better. Guy being a gender neutral term, tends to get overlooked. What are some strategies for either being that guy who is a great amplifier but doesn't get any credit or rewarding that team spirit, rewarding everybody doing better instead of just rewarding the stars?

Well, I think it's always hard in the NBA, but really in any performance culture. Right. I mean, a lot of what we do at work is driven by outcomes. And so there's always a tendency to sort of overvalue or over index on people who have the greatest impact on those outcomes. And to a degree that. That's probably right. You know, like some. Some people do. We know this is true at work, for example, like, some people do have 100 times the impact or on the outcome than other employees. And so we shouldn't shy away from that reality necessarily. But I think what you're saying is there's also these kind of hidden players that maybe allow that 100x person to actually get to that point that we otherwise wouldn't know about. And so I think one of the things we can do is look for those kind of collaborative, cooperative team behaviors that may not clearly, you know, get to the bottom line, but we know conceptually and pragmatically are linked. Right. So if you're on a sales team, for example, and you have a rockstar salesperson, chances are there's a handful of people supporting that person when they're on the road or helping them prepare documents or whatever it is. Right? Like, those people deserve a little bit of reward, a little bit of praise. And in general, we can be more giving with our praise and encouragement that we. We tend to be. But then I think what you want to do with that person is help them tap into the real value of those signature strengths that allow them to be the glue person and help them understand the impact of their role. Right? So I think that's where the disconnect comes in, is oftentimes management or leadership is not rewarding that glue person for all the glue they're. They're providing. And if you help them appreciate the real and recognize that as a significant role, it's often really encouraging of that person continuing to be the glue. But you've got to slow down enough to sort of see that and think about all the integrated pieces, right? I mean, even in the NBA, you've got superstar players. But the reality is like, there. I can't think of a team that's won a championship with one single superstar.

Right?

You know, there. There's always several people who are contributing, playing a significant role, who are allowing this to happen. It doesn't mean that some impact isn't disproportionate to others, but it does mean no one's doing it in a vacuum, and the best leaders are trying to figure out who's really helping contribute to everything and how to reward everyone for winning or competing. Well, together versus reward the one person for all that they've accomplished.

Yeah. I think one of the things we don't talk about with star players as well is, I mean, this was an issue this spring with the Raptors. The abuse that gets focused because, you know, they're the face, they're the noticeable one. People underestimate how much that stinks. There's no way, unless you've gone through it to really understand the psychological toll. People go, oh, you play basket for basketball for a living. You know, the whole shut up and dribble quote.

Yeah.

People don't realize one the pressure, the constant pressure and then someone just does something awful. How do you get broad strokes again? Yeah, what's your advice when. Because this is becoming more and more of a day to day reality for people. Somebody can be minding their own business and a tweet goes viral. So how do you stay forward looking when that kind of awfulness is hitting a very high profile person?

I mean, the starting point can, if we can get there, is staying off social media, right?

Okay.

It's not, it's not reading or sort of tuning out to that stuff. It's also recognizing that, you know, it's much safer for people to lobby comments from behind a Twitter platform or an X platform or whatever it is now than it is to say anything directly. Right. And so, you know, we try to sort of contextualize all the feedback as best we can. Right. And sort of zoom out and not, not over index or even really listen to people's opinions who don't, don't matter. You know, not everyone's a big Dabo Swinney fan and you can take or leave some of the stuff he does, I'm sure. But he had a great quote a couple years ago that was basically, why would you take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from? And I think that rule kind of applies for any, you know, high profile performer taking advice from the average fan. And this is not to knock any average fan, but I mean the reality is most people have nowhere near the appreciation of just how incredibly difficult it is to be this elite at what you do. And so, you know, chances are your opinion is far, far more inaccurate than you ever perceive. And so, you know, we try to sort of couch it generally, but I think on the F side, you know, what I always try to encourage is to be respectful, right. Like would you want your kids or would you want to receive these kinds of messages about your work or the things that you do and almost you Know, universally, people say no when they've, when they've realized that they've sort of stepped out. And so, you know, we also try to help our players kind of see that side and understand that sometimes people get out over their skis, so to speak, and not take it too, too personally. But it is really hard. And I think people just forget that at the end of the day, these, these players while we watch them on tv, like they're real people with real feelings, with real families who have real needs and real concerns. And we all do well to recognize their humanity.

Yeah, they're. They're not, they're not machines. Right. Somebody screams something awful, try to psych them up from a free throw that can stay in their head. So, last question. What's a simple, not easy, but simple piece of advice that you can give for people to take away about how to be happier and therefore more successful instead of chasing success?

Ooh, that's a tough one. Advice I would give people to be happier or more successful and. Well, can I give two? Is that okay?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, cool. So the first one would be to really take inventory of what's going on in your environment. I think people generally drastically underestimate the influence their environment has on their behavior. Right. So environment being physical space, but environment also being social support your network, your circle, the people who are closest to you. These people have a real, real impact on your overall well being and your performance. Right. It kind of goes back to that idea that if you have one superstar player and four duds, you're probably not going to win. It doesn't mean superstar is bad. It just means the environment's not conducive to that person being successful. So that's one. And then I think the second thing is to sort of think about and recognize which game you're playing. Right. So are you playing a short game or a long game? If you're playing a long game of success, you know, chances are you probably need to prioritize things like your well being, your relationships, your resilience, your self awareness. Much more than just performing regularly and kind of grinding it out. So my second piece of advice is to make sure you leave yourself time to recover and recharge because those are incredibly important pieces of sustaining excellence over time.

Amazing. Alex Auerbach, performance psychologist for the Toronto Raptors. Alex, thank you so much for your time and expertise.

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

When we come back, I want to talk more about some of the things Alex dropped in the interview. Competing views of happiness. Kind of unpack a lot of that stuff because it was deep. I'm super excited. I think that went very well. Nottherapy show.com if you want to leave a question or comment or you can email directly liannaoththerapy show.com or X Instagram threads. Ottherapyshow I got it right. I didn't call it Twitter. I just called it Twitter. Back after this break. The following program is a peer to peer advice show and does not diagnose mental health conditions. If you're seeking social services, Please call or text 211 or go to 211 CA. We're back on. It's not therapy. I'm sorry.

Still.

Liana Kurzner I'm still not a therapist. We still have about seven and a half minutes left to this show, so I want to unpack those competing theories of well being that Alex Arabach talked about and how that ties into what he mentioned about social environment. Wasn't he a great guest? He was such a great guest. The term eudaimonic well being comes from the Greek word eudaimonia, eu eu meaning good and daemon, not demon. It means lesser God or guiding spirit. Aristotle, the great philosopher, considered eudaimonia as humanity's highest good. Now Aristotle also thought that women had fewer teeth than men, even though he'd been married twice. So take from that what you will. Basically, eudaimonic well being involves authenticity, meaning fulfillment. Fulfillment being your best true self, hedonistic well being. But more people know what hedonism means. Desire, fulfillment, pleasure seeking, most instant good feelings, least instant pain. And this is where I get into my concept of happy math. Because you should pursue eudaimonic well being at the expense of hedonism is a cheap fake. Smart answer. No, you can't only pursue eudaimonic well being all of the time. Sometimes you just want to eat lasagna, get drunk and experience the pleasures of life without a deeper meaning or larger goal. And that's healthy as long as it's not hurting anybody. This is why I say you're crazy is only a problem if it's hurting you. Eudaimonic happiness is the stuff that certain self help gurus like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson attempt to deliver via life sucks, get tough messaging. But the public communications of these two men read increasingly like their brains are devouring themselves. Jordan Peterson's ex feat has become misery haiku. Eudaimonic well being allows us to roll with the punches and enjoy the ride of life because we have a general Idea of where we want to go and we're going the right way to get there. Social status, credentials. The envy of your peers is not the goal of eudaimonic well being. Living in accordance with your values is. This is where lasting happiness is rooted and how you increase that baseline happiness that Alex talked about. But hedonism is fun every so often. For God's sakes, I'm a gamer. I love my hedonism. Proper rest is a big part of seeking pleasure. And proper rest, as Alex said, is essential to high performance. So where does performance fit in this dual ways of well being model well, when I worked in television, the misery of the industry prevented me from enjoying the work. I liked the work. I did not like being part of systems that abused and exploited people. There's a reason I ended up doing work now that gives people strategies for resisting exploitation. If you're not balancing eudaimonic well being those values with instant gratification, hedonism, you're not going to feel fulfilled no matter how many achievements you rack up, how many awards you win, how many people praise you. And if you avoid any unpleasant feelings, you're going to end up hurting other people. It's a question of balancing that, seeking meaning and just feeling good. Now it's doing it in balance and in harmony. Do things that feel good without violating your core principles. Right. And that's where the social environments Alex talked about come in. And why I hate school group work. Yes, we're going back to that. I feel strongly. About a month ago, I noticed a team member had gotten really quite quiet. It turned out there was an unresolved conflict between them and another member of the team. This person had been legitimately wronged, and I understood that it had been handled. No, it hadn't. So I apologized to this wrong team member for not checking in sooner and for the fact I allowed this behavior on my team. I asked them what would make it right. We worked out a game plan for resolution, and this team member followed the instructions I'd given them. I told the other person to apologize, focusing on behavior, not feelings, as I had done, I explained to them why what they did was wrong. I instructed them to not over talk. Use as few words as possible. Well, this person did the exact opposite of everything I told them to do, then accused me and the other parties involved of setting them up to fail. That's the short version. And that person isn't too happy with me right now. But the team member whose performance had declined is now back in the game and I want that team member on my team because that person worked with their teammates. The other person blamed their teammates. I think that they were trying to avoid bad feelings. They played not to lose instead of doing the right thing, which would have been playing to win. So we'll see what happens there. Not in accordance with this team's core values. I told them that if they'd actually done what I told them to do and then it went badly, then they'd have a fair claim that I set them up to fail. But as is, they were a star player that didn't listen to their coach, tried to win the game all on their own. And as Alex said, that never works. You don't have to be the most charming, persuasive superstar. God knows I'm not. You do have to find a team that you trust, and you have to invest in your teammates as well as your own individual success. Now, high school group work teaches us to invest in projects, not people. And that goal, which is essentially academic hedonism, immediate pleasure in a. In the form of a good mark, teaches us to be bad team members. That chasing marks, as I've said in a previous show, is all about the destination, not the journey. You will burn yourself out and you will sell others out if you are too focused on goals you can't control. Top 10 phrase. Healthy goals are based on things you can control. Have I mentioned that I hate group work? Oh, do I hate group work. Because at one point, I was that person who, thanks to school group work training, tried to be the star player all on my own. I didn't want a team. I didn't need a team. I probably acted like as big a jerk as the person I recently had to reprimand. I probably didn't seek out good advice because teachers would never help resolve group issues. We were told to handle it ourselves. I'd been primed to anticipate rejection and a feeling of powerlessness. So I played not to lose. Yes, when you work with teams in real life, some people will sometimes let you down. That's true. We'll work on dealing with disappointment and rejection in coming weeks. But human beings are not designed to be lone hunters. We're cooperators. If you're in a team that doesn't share your values and keeps putting you in the wrong roles that don't play to your strengths, look for a new team. I'm serious. Look for a new team that goes for jobs, friend groups, even family. You can be selective with what family you see as an adult. Because if you're never allowed to do things that you're good at that you also enjoy. Every day is going to feel like you're dying while you try not to explode. The right people around you will build you up and set you up for success. And if you're so convinced that the people around you are setting you up to fail, why are you there? Trust is earned, yes, but trust and distrust are also learned skills. If you live in accordance with your principles, eudaimonic well being, the backstabbing and selfish harmful hedonism of others, will not be as catastrophic. So it's easier to gradually build trust. If you communicate your core values and you live in accordance with them, you'll eventually find people who truly have your back. If you've been with me so far, hopefully you trust me enough to believe that. Because you have to have, as Alex said, a certain positive hope for the future to let that process work. It's not going to happen on its own. It does take effort and it's hard at first, but it's so worth the short term unpleasantness, pain, hurt and even loneliness for that long term sense of a life well lived. All right, that's our show for this week. Again, contact information Ottherapy show on x Instagram threads nottherapyshow.com if you want to fill out our contact form or email me directly. Leanna nottherapyshow.com I'm probably gonna take next week off just to get some guest bookings lined up that I haven't had time to do because oh my God stuff. But we'll be back after that. Work on this stuff. Work on. Listen to the show again and again. Go back to back episodes. There's 62 episodes now. Wow. I am just filling time. So this show comes into time. This is what we call stretching. Yeah, this is going crazy and you know what's coming. Your crazy is only a problem if it's hurting you. See you next episode. Take care of yourself until then.