Lived Experience Luncheon Series - Dr Alex Auerbach

Hi everyone. I would like to begin by acknowledging that the land on which we gather is the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation. My name is Joanna Pizzulo and I'm the director of the Mental Health and well Being Research and Training Hub, also known as Meworth, here at Carleton University. On behalf of Meworth, I would like to welcome all of you to our presentation today. This presentation is the first in our Lived Experience Luncheon series for the 2022, 2023 academic year. It is great that so many of you could join us today. To start off, I would like to introduce Carleton University's President and Vice Chancellor, Dr. Benoit Ton Bacon to provide a few opening remarks.

Well, thank you so much, Joanna. Hello everyone. I hope you can hear me well. Bonjour, tout un mon j' espin que savo bien. I hope everybody's well and enjoying the incredible energy of the fall term this year. Let me start, Joanna, by thanking you for bringing us together today and also to thank you for getting us started in a good way with a thoughtful land acknowledgement. This is important and everyone, we're making significant progress across the university on the implementation of our Kinamaguan Indigenous strategy. And I do invite everyone to have a look at the comprehensive progress report that is posted on our website. It's so great to be here today at the Lived Experience Lunch. This is a truly, truly great initiative by the Mental Health and well Being Research and Training Hub Meworth. And I do want to congratulate and thank everyone involved. This is really, really fantastic. You've heard me say this before. I think it bears repeating. It's so, so important to have open and honest conversations about mental health, about well being. And I would add that after two years in difficult conditions due to the pandemic, it's more important than ever to make sure that our connections to the community, our connections to each other remain strong. Because the links with the people around us are a big part of mental health and well being. Because they do make us all stronger. Some of you might remember that I've shared my own story of mental health and substance use at similar events in, in the past. And my goal was to help to create a space where people at Carleton, and perhaps even in the broader community would feel a bit less alone, would feel empowered to reach out. I think that's especially important so that they can get the help that they need and deserve, whether from our own networks or from professionals. Because no one has to suffer alone. No one has to suffer in silence. And healing is always, always possible. So I'm very, very proud to see that Meworth has created this important forum where people can come forward and provide insights into how we can all get better as individuals and as a community. It's really amazing to see people from across the Carleton community and external community members too. Welcome. Join us. It's amazing. Thank you for being here today and for taking part in this important conversation. Briefly, as many of you will know, striving for wellness is front and center in our strategic integrated plan at Carleton. And I think, and I think you will agree that Carleton can really lead the conversation on mental health and wellness nationally. And today is part of these efforts and two recent examples of the work that we do. We were named top employer in the region for the eighth consecutive year and and the jury recognized in particular our healthy workplace and mental health at work frameworks which are truly, truly outstanding. And we continue to get better for our faculty and staff. And last year we also fully updated our award winning student mental health framework. Truly important work to support our 31,000 students. So I'm so happy. Let me end there. I'm so happy to be with you today with my lunch. I hope you have your lunch too. This is designed as a luncheon, so I follow your instructions. Joanna, I'm ready to go and I'm hungry. I can't wait to hear Alex and to learn from him. Alex, it was great to chat with you backstage. Thanks so much for being with us today. Really look forward to learn from you. So I'll turn it back to you, Joanna. And again, all my thanks to you and the great team at Meworth for bringing us together today. Enjoy the event, everybody. Mere sib beaucoup.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much for that. Benoit. Thank you. It is now my pleasure to introduce Dr. Alex Auerbach, who is the Senior Director of Wellness and Development for the Toronto Raptors. He is responsible for all things mental health, mental performance and off court development for players and staff. He joined the Raptors after serving as the Director of Clinical and Sports Psychology for the University of Arizona. Dr. Oyerbakh is a certified mental performance consultant, a licensed psychologist and a member of the United States Olympic Committee Sports psychology registry. Today, Dr. Oyerbakh will talk to us about getting your head back into the game. Wellness Foundations of high performance. Welcome Dr. Oyerbakh. It is our pleasure to hear from you.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and to share some of my work with the Raptors. And I'm going to basically give you my step by step guide to how I think about creating a healthy and high performing, sustainable, successful life for yourself. Yourself. And hopefully it's helpful. I'm really excited to share with you and look forward to taking some questions at the end. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen and walk you through what I've got here. I just know I have to click like several buttons to get into presentation mode, but I should be good now. So, like Joanna mentioned, I'm Alex Auerbach. I'm the director of Wellness and Development for the Toronto Raptors. I've been here since March 1, 2020, so 11 days before the NBA season shut down due to Covid. And so it's been quite the journey figuring out how we help all of our players, coaches and staff move through Covid and then back to a sustainable, healthy and high performing lifestyle. And so the first thing we are going to start with is curating your niche. And I want to introduce you to my newest favorite person. I can't see you all, but if I could, I know there'd be a lot of oohs and ahhs. This is my 3 week old baby daughter, Zosia. And she serves several purposes here. One is if you hear a baby crying in the background, you know that it's her. And so please forgive that in advance. That's the nature of the work from home. Two is to win you over immediately because she's way more awesome than I am. And three is to talk about this step one. So when babies are born, they immediately start curating their niche. And you can think about curating a niche as sort of designing your own environment. So typically when we think about a work environment or a performance environment, we think about the conditions created around us and we think about the environment as something that we step into. But in reality, curating your niche or creating your own environment is a bidirectional process. And so when I'm working with any high performer, one of the things I'm thinking about is how do I help this performer? Or in this case, how can you help yourself? Curate an environment in a niche that works for you to facilitate your own health and high performance. So for you, when you were a baby like Zosia, you might do things like cry and see how responsive your parents are. Or as you move around a little bit more, you might explore and see what's dangerous or not dangerous. And now as you're an adult and you're a high performer, you have to start thinking about what are the conditions and parameters I need to put in place to help myself be successful over the long term. So this might be things like moving the TV remote from your living room to your dining room so it's a little bit harder to turn on the TV and cut down on your screen time. It might be things like leaving your running shoes near the front door so you're more likely to exercise. It might be like surrounding yourself with loved ones more regularly to re energize yourself and recharge. But these simple steps we can take or are part of curating your niche and creating an environment for you that facilitates your health and high performance. And so when I'm working with any performer, these are the four key things I'm thinking about as we're talking about curating their own niche and making the environment work for them. So the first is coming up with their own set of values, standards and norms, right? What's really important to them, what do they stand for and how does that show up concretely and behaviorally in the work that they do and what do they expect back from their environment in terms of those values? So for example, if you're someone who really values hard work, you then need to turn that into a standard, right? That means I'm going to put forth X number of hours of practice on a regular basis and I expect myself to show up on time, to come with good energy and to be fully engaged in practice, right? These simple examples of value, standards and norms are some of the things we work with again, our players with and some of our staff with, and figuring out how do we create those. A culture, an environment, a niche that really facilitates and produces health and high performance for all of our players. The second key feature is prioritizing the long term over the short term. And so of course in sports there's pressure to deliver right now, and most jobs there's pressure to deliver on a near daily basis. And that pressure unfortunately can blind us to the shortcuts that we take in an effort to basically quickly resolve, whether it's tension, stress, anxiety, whatever it might be. But over the long term, those sort of short term hacks don't really move us toward this place of sustainable health and high performance. So we need to think about our long term growth and development and prioritizing, pushing through those difficult moments as best we can with some acceptance and some self compassion to really prioritize our long term growth over the short term, problem solving. The third is optimizing nudges so I touched on little things you could do already, right? Moving your CV remote or putting your shoes out. But this might be things like tapping into a key person in your household to sort of remind you of something that you want to get done, or writing a note to yourself that you post on the refrigerator, on your mirror. These little things that just remind you of what you're working toward and help you create a system and an environment that promotes the changes that you're really looking for for yourself. And then finally, everyone needs kind of a supportive mentor or a coach, right? Coaching is the single most impactful intervention for human performance that we have. And so find finding someone in your network for. Obviously for our players, it's baked in, right? We have an incredible coaching staff, but for our staff, it's figuring out who on staff or outside of staff can mentor you. Or for someone like myself, what other sports psychologists can I work with to help me keep getting better? And you too should be considering who's a mentor or a key person I can have in my life that would really help me move toward my goals. And so without this first step, it becomes really hard to put the rest of this health and high performance plan into practice. Because the environment has an outsized influence over what we do behaviorally, right? There's some data that suggests that up to 70% of our behaviors are determined by what's happening in our environment or in our niche. And so without this, it's going to be really, really hard to sustain the rest of the change. And so we start here and now I'm going to introduce you to some of the next foundational pieces that I take our players and staff through to really promote this long term health, high performance and flourishing. The second piece is building your foundation of wellness. And that really looks like these seven things. And I'm going to go into each of them a little bit more. But without any one of these things, for us as an adult, it becomes easy to tip into things like burnout, unmitigated stress, unhealthy relationships crumbling under pressure, right? And these are all just natural consequences of not taking care of ourselves. And so for anyone to sustain health and high performance, we really have to focus on building this strong foundation and leveraging these things to help us be our best when it matters most. So the first is self awareness, right? We already touched on our values, right? So figuring out what's really important to us, what motivates us, what are we working towards? Understanding what it is that we're after as a high performer is Critical to keep us motivated, to keep us sustaining effort as things get more and more challenging to bounce back when we, you know, are confronted with a setback. Understanding what's moving us forward is really important. Secondly is knowing our strengths and limitations. Right? So we know that as a high performer, it's actually much more effective to double down on your strengths than it is to spend time focusing on mitigating the impact of your weaknesses. Right. We all have weaknesses and things we're average at, and the return on investment for working on those things is generally pretty minimal. Right. So what we can do is sort of figure out how do we mitigate the downsides there and then spend our time doubling down on making our strengths really work for us. But to do that, we have to understand what our strengths are. Third, we have to understand what our impact is on other people. Right? So humans have an incredible capacity to regulate one another's energy efficiency. And if you're not sure whether or not that's true, I can tell you, like, if you have a significant other or partner and you want to test this out, you should send a text message to them that just says, we need to talk. Most people that receive that message instantly feel a little bit more stressed. Their heart may start racing, their palms may sweat, their brow may sweat because their body is energizing them to respond to a perceived threat. And humans have evolved this amazing capacity to impact each other just by our words. And so it's really important for us to understand how we impact others, because the impact we have on other people is also going to drive back the energy that we get back. There's great data that shows, for example, doing something kind for somebody else actually restores our own energy efficiency. And that's in large part because of this reciprocal, dynamic interplay and relationship that people have with one another. And then finally, it's understanding what you don't know. Right? We all have things that we don't know about ourselves. So just being aware that there's a pocket that we may need more help or that we might not understand something allows us to avoid stepping into situations where it may not be best for us or it may be really hard to overcome whatever it is we're working to. And so that might be a place where our coach can step in and provide some guidance, or we can just strategically avoid to not hurt ourselves in the long term. The second piece is stress management. I've already talked a little bit about our brain regulating our body's energy efficiency, but essentially, that's our brain's evolutionary function for any healthy high performer. We have to constantly be thinking about what we're putting into the universe. What energy are we expending and how are we restoring that energy doing things like managing stress. Stress is just our body and brain preparing us to do something effortful, figuring out how we can manage that effectively by engaging in restorative tasks, using our resources. These are really helpful things we can do to maintain a healthy level of stress. It's not possible to get rid of stress completely, nor would we want to, because our brain and body wouldn't be energized or motivated to do what we need to do. But what we really want to do is figure out how do we keep that stress in a helpful high performing place where we can use that to facilitate productive action. And then finally is this idea of psychological flexibility. So some of you may be familiar with things like acceptance and commitment therapy, but this is just the idea that we can sort of be aware and open to our thoughts and our feelings and aware of what's impacting us while we keep moving toward our values. And what we find is that people who stay engaged and true to their core values tend to feel better about the experience they're having as a person in the world. Their subjective well being is better, their ability to engage in relationships is better, and all of these things help us manage stress in an effective way way. Third is using mental skills, right? So as a sports psychologist, I'm constantly working with our players and coaches and staff on leveraging the power of our mindset to help us work through either performance pressure situations or bouncing back from a difficult challenge, or competing with a really good team. And so these are just some examples of four kind of cardinal mental skills you could introduce in your own life to help you be your best when it matters for us. Right? So we talked about goals in terms of self awareness. But constantly setting goals and adjusting goals is really critical for us making progress and feeling a sense of growth in our life. We can use things like arousal regulation, whether that's breathing or simple grounding exercises to help us manage our anxiety in the moment. We can use things like imagery to imagine our ideal future self and reaching our goals, or to imagine a relaxing place to help us settle down. And we can talk to ourselves in a way that's helpful versus harmful to really facilitate that health and high performance. And we're all constantly talking to ourselves all the time, right? And so using this last skill in particular is really important for helping ourselves move through difficulties, manage the day to day things that we have going on and really optimize our performance. Right. So a good rule of thumb is talk to yourself like you'd talk to somebody else. Most of us tend to be much more critical of ourselves than we are of other people. And so when I'm working with any high performer, it's figuring out how do we turn our self talk into a conducive, productive inner coach. Next is resilience. So everyone is going to be confronted with difficulties. Right. Adversity is just a natural part of life and figuring out these sort of four buckets can help us move through those difficulties a bit more effectively and maintain that sort of baseline set of sense of wellness. So the first is just appraisal. Right. Is this a challenge or a threat? You want to train yourself to see the possibilities and opportunities in the experiences that you're having. Right. So we have some really interesting data that suggests it's not actually possible to learn from failure. But we also know that you can see the things that you're working through as an opportunity to demonstrate some skills or try something new. And leveraging that sense of appraisal into a challenge. Right. Thinking of these adversities as challenges or opportunities does all sorts of great things for our physiology. It helps us engage in a little bit more of a productive way and make the most of the stressful experience we're having. The second thing is tapping into our values, right? Reminding ourselves why we're here, why we're doing what we're doing can allow us to just respond more effectively to this adversity. Right. Versus questioning why is this happening to me or what's going on? That kind of thinking tends to be pretty unproductive for our long term wellness. The third is focusing on what we can control. So often with players, one of the things I'll introduce is a strategy called Win. It's just what's important now. Focusing on what it is here and now that we can do that we can narrowly control. And doing that to the best of our ability. Right. A lot of times when we're going through something difficult, there's a lot that's happening outside of our control. But really honing in on what it is that we can control and manage allows us to perform our best and bounce back from that adversity more quickly. It allows us to understand what we could have done better differently or what we want to do the same next time. And it helps us let go of some of those things we can't quite control so that we can Perform our best. And then finally is this technique of a balanced critique. And this is something I would encourage anybody to do who wants to continuously get better and become a healthy high performer. You're simply asking yourself after a difficult moment, right, what did I do that I want to keep doing? What did I do that I want to do differently? And a third question I'd throw in there is, what did I learn? And the more that you can practice the simple activity of reflecting, the more you're going to learn from these difficult experiences that you have. And you can certainly leverage the skill for after things like successes or big moments, right? There's no limit to where this simple intervention can apply. But this is one of the main things I work with a number of our performers on to help them better understand who they are, what their strengths are, how they want to adjust as they move through difficulty. And it allows us to have a really productive focus and a next goal to work on for whatever that next stressor is that we encounter next is relationships. I've already talked about how people exist in a really dynamic, kind of interdependent way. But we need social support, we need teamwork to be the best best that we can be, right? So nobody is an island, right? In basketball, you've got five players, you've got 15 or so coaches. Everyone's working together as a team to try to produce the best outcome we can possibly produce. And having that sense of teamwork is really important for us feeling good about what we're doing as a performer. So if you're thinking about yourself in the work context, it might be the people you share an office with or the people you're collaborating with on a project. But I'm sure, you know, like, if that person isn't pulling their own weight or it feels like your team isn't functioning well, that really impacts your sense of well being at the workplace. And similarly, for any healthy high performer, like athlete that I'm working with, the relationships amongst teammates are really, really important. And so spending time cultivating these relationships, helping them work for you, I think is a really important step to take and then beyond your immediate team, right? We all need other people in our lives to help us feel good, right? So this might be family members, it might be friends, but people that help us feel a sense of belonging, that remind us we're a part of something bigger than ourselves, that remind us of our unique value. These relationships become one really important way and simple way, honestly, to restore our body's energy efficiency, to keep us balanced and to allow us to continue moving forward and performing. So often when we experience a difficult game or a loss, one of the things that happens is we all call our family and friends and we talk about it. That opportunity to just get some support from someone outside the immediate environment and feel like grounded and connected to something outside can really allow us and help us to keep moving forward and keep feeling connected to what it is that we're really after. And so relationships play a key part in this foundational set of experiences that we need to cultivate wellness. Next is play. So most people just don't have fun anymore. Like recess ends when you're, for some people as early as ninth grade. But we really need to as adults especially make sure that we have opportunities to play in our lives, right? So play is a self guided, self directed activity where we're just working on something that's meaningful and intrinsically motivating to us. It doesn't have to be something we're trying to get better at. It doesn't have to be anything we're working on. It can just be something purely that we enjoy. But this sense of play does a number of things for us that are really important and keep us unlocked and able to operate at our best, right? So it increases our creativity, restores our energy, helps us feel more grounded, it reduces stress, it helps us create unique connections between concepts we're learning about. And it also helps us feel connected to this sort of like inner child experience that we all have. And so I'm sure you know, for those of you that have kids, right, Playing with your kids is one simple way you can unlock this. But there are other things you can do, like coloring, taking an arts class, playing an instrument, right? There's a number of things that you can do to infuse play into your life. But bringing more play into your day to day experience is a really important way to help yourself stay well. And then finally is rest and recovery, right? So if you're not well, you just can't perform. So for our players, for example, like if you had a broken leg, we couldn't send you out there on the court, right? If you're not well, recovered mentally, we also can't really send you out there to be the best that you can be. So there's several things that you can do. I realize here that I have like a leftover slide, so just ignore that. But things like yoga are great, right? Rest and then sleep. Of course. Like if you take nothing else from this presentation in terms of facilitating your own Health and high performance. Please prioritize sleep. Sleep is a great way to clean your brain. It helps you learn, draw new connections. It does a lot of things that really allow us to restore, you know, better regulate our energy, our emotion. All of that stuff is really important outcome of getting a good night's sleep. But if you're not sleeping well, you know, make sure that you address that because without that, it's really, really hard to get to this next level of peak performance. So the next step, right, assuming you're well, you, you're, you're doing the best you can, you're optimizing those seven or so items, what can you do to now enter the realm of peak performance? What I find is that there are basically three mindsets that these elite performers leverage to help them be their best when it matters most. And these are my kind of packaging of some of the data out there, as well as my experience in working with some of these elite performers, both athletes. But I've also worked with some elite military members, some Fortune 5 companies. So this is sort of some themes I've drawn that I think are really important. So everyone's heard by now about the importance of a growth mindset, right? It's the idea that effort is the primary determinant in our outcomes that we can learn from failure. And growth mindset is good, right? It has some benefits, but I think we've over indexed a bit on the value of a growth mindset. And so what I like to tell people is yeah, you want a growth mindset, but you also need a little bit of a fixed mindset. You don't want to be afraid of failure, you don't want to try to not learn, you don't want to not think effort's important. But as a peak performer, as an elite performer, you also have to appreciate what it is that you uniquely add to this puzzle that allows you to be great at what you do, right? So for an NBA player, it might be something as simple as my three point shot, it might be my work ethic, it might be my leadership. But there are a number of sort of key qualities that these people have that have allowed them to reach this level. And the same is true for you. And so that's not to say don't have a growth mindset, it's just to say to really take the time to appreciate what role your natural talent plays essentially in your performance. So, and so you can leverage that to help yourself be the best that you can be. And it turns out actually in this next bucket here where stress is enhancing. That having purely a growth mindset with none of that fixed mindset is actually a little bit limiting when you want to really optimize for performance. So the second bucket is this idea that stress is enhancing mindset. Right. So believing that stress is something that makes you better is a key differentiator between performing or crumbling under pressure. And you've got a few alternative mindsets here that people tend to have beyond this sort of stresses enhancing idea. And I'm going to touch on those briefly just so you can compare and contrast and perhaps think for yourself about like what mindset do I typically bring to stressful situation? So the first that I'll touch on is this idea that stress is debilitating. Right. So certainly popularly in the media and in psychology over the last decade or so, there's been a lot of talk about how harmful stress can be for you and that cortisol is the stress hormone and all stress is bad. And the reality is that's just not true. Right. Cortisol is not the stress hormone. Cortisol is just a metabolic regulator that's helping your body energize to do something effortful. And we can choose to think of it as harmful and that will bring about some harmful effects. Our mindset has incredible power. That's why something like the placebo effects works. But it doesn't have to be that way. And so I would encourage you, if you tend to think of stress as something harmful or damaging, see if you can play with that mentality a little bit. In what ways has stress actually positively helped you? In what ways has that energy been used effectively to help you perform? Well, I think is really important. The third is this kind of like will my way through mindset. So there are a lot of particularly popular people who have come out with this idea that you just got to like keep working hard. And I'm not going to name names, but you've got people who, you know, take pictures of their watch at 4:30 in the morning as a sort of badge of honor for how hard they're working. Or people who talk about running until their feet are falling off. And that's like fine, right? These people actually do perform okay. But where it is a drawback or where it hurts them is in their relationship with other people. So what the data shows is that people who disbelieve that they can will their way through stress tend to not really understand why their teammates can't just do the same thing. And so what ends up happening is these people who have this will my way through mindset end up disconnecting from their teammates, and they underperform simply because they're not leveraging the group's resources or their team's resources. And then finally is this idea that comes from the growth mindset, which is that failure means I can learn. I've already said that we do have some really interesting, fairly new data, actually, that shows it's really hard for people to learn from failure, in large part because we're doing things like protecting our ego or trying to explain that failure away. These are all natural human reactions to failure, but it does make it a little bit harder for us to learn. But the other place where this comes in is in this idea of growth mindset. And so when I'm working with our athletes, for example, we always want to have a growth mindset, but when there's two minutes left in the game and we're down five points, I don't really want you thinking about what you can learn from this possible loss, right? I want you thinking about how you can perform under pressure to deliver us a win. And so, you know, when we're talking about developing more of that clutch mindset, what we're really thinking about is three factors, right? Increasing our effort, seeing this as an opportunity, and identifying a clear outcome. And in this case, the clear outcome we don't want and certainly in the MBA and likely several other places, is losing. And so thinking about failure as an acceptable outcome actually ends up undermining our performance at this stage. And then finally is this idea that recovery is an investment. So certainly in western cultures, we've glorified the grind, right? There's a ton of stuff out there, memes now about the grind set and this idea that we just have to keep constantly pushing and recovery is for the week, and you should wake up at 5am and by the time you're 30, you should only have friends that talk about, you know, making money and getting rich and whatever. And like, that's all fine and well to espouse, but it's actually not true, right? We know that people need time away from work to recover, to be their best self. And so when I'm working with any of our players or high performers on staff, we're constantly talking about this idea that the time that we're spending away from work is not time where the enemy is working and we're not working. It's not time where someone else is getting better and we're getting worse. This is time that we're taking for ourselves to invest in our future performance, right? So an NBA season, for example, is an 82 game season with the playoffs. It is 100% a marathon. It is not a sprint. But the worst teams are the teams that treat it like it's just a series of 82 sprints, right? That's incredibly exhausting, right? We want to think about times where we can coast a little bit, we can use the drag, we can refuel, we can stop at the water station and grab what we need. These little things, right? Taking time to really invest in our recovery ends up separating these peak performers over the long term and allowing them to be their best when it matters most. And so again, I'd really encourage you, if you're a person who, and I'm certainly guilty of this, when I was a college football coach, had someone tell me that I could sleep when I'm dead. And so I sort of embraced this idea that like, oh, I should just keep pushing and keep working and keep working. And of course like all sorts of bad things happened, right? My cognitive performance declined, my ability to regulate my emotions and my energy declined. And ultimately it made it actually really hard to be a high performer over the long term. And the same I'm imagining is true for you. So if you find yourself just constantly pushing and pushing and pushing, I really encourage you to find ways to think about things like sleep or spending time with your loved ones or going out with friends on a Friday evening. Those are investments in your opportunity to perform better in the future. And again, you too are running a marathon. Your career lasts 30 plus years for most people. And so thinking about how you stay great over the long term is one of the key pieces of being a healthy and high performer. And then the last piece I want to touch on is some really interesting data actually done by someone here in Canada, Joe Baker, and then a couple other folks in Europe have done some research on this idea of self regulation. And this is really what we find separates the excellent performers from the elite performers. And it's simply the ability to set your own goals, actively monitor your progress, review and adjust, and constantly kind of iterate and constantly get 1% better at whatever it is you're doing. And so that performance journal, that balance critique I introduced just a few slides ago, is one really simple way to work on your self regulation. It's just the idea that you too can monitor your own progress. And what we find, for example, is that these athletes who use this skill of self regulation and self regulated learning end up doing things like making more Money, making more national team appearances, performing better at the biggest levels. And so this true too is true for you, right? The more that you can self regulate your own learning and the more that you can understand your own thinking, feeling your physiology as you perform, the better you're going to be at delivering in these peak pressure moments. And so certainly would encourage anyone who's working on becoming the best that they can be to think about how they leverage these simple steps, right? Setting your own goals again, evaluating and monitoring your progress and adjusting to help you be your best, one that matters most, right? This is the way that you can learn the skills that you need to deliver time and time again. And then the final step is to go out there and do it, right? So every performance has three phases and underneath here you'll just see like some key little buckets that I think are really important for, you know, what you have to do in each phase. So the first is preparation, right? Readiness is just how much you practice by how much you prepare psychologically. So good preparation includes both practicing rehearsal, but it also includes some psychological preparation, thinking about what you might encounter as you go through a particular performance, or thinking about the obstacles you might hit and coming up with some if then plans for when you're there. The second phase is execution, right? So performance happens here and now. So being present focused is really important. Being process oriented, thinking about the simple things that you can do at each moment of your performance to deliver is much more effective than thinking about the outcome that you want. And then third is adaptable, right? Constantly staying tuned into the bits of feedback you're getting from your environment to make sure you're adjusting effectively is really important. And then finally, on a big scale, you can debrief, right? So win or lose, making sure there's time, whether it's individually or with your team, to review what's gone on, reflect on the experiences that you had is a really important way to facilitate your performance. And so I'm going to pause there because I want to make sure we leave time for questions, but please keep in touch. I know there are a lot of people on here and I wish I could see everyone's face. Um, but I'm, I'm hopeful that you'll reach out if you need anything, you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn. And then I'm also running a course on Maven, which is like an online learning platform beginning next week, touching on some of these same skills. So it's marketed a little bit towards executive and leaders, but really if you're a practitioner or person who's interested in health and high performance at all, whether it's for yourself or the people you work with or the clients you have. I think this course can be tremendously helpful. And I've created a discount code, and I think we're going to share that link with you as well. If you want to sign up for the course, I'd love to have you. And certainly don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions with that. I'm going to pause. If it's okay, I'm going to stop sharing my screen so I can maybe see some faces as we go through Q and A and we'll go from there.

Thanks very much, Alex. That was fantastic. Lots of great information. We do have a few minutes for questions. I will invite the audience to use the Q and A function at the bottom of their screen and type in the question and type in their question. And I'll read out questions as they come in. But in the meantime, I've got a few questions. One thing that struck me is motivation to change. And sometimes getting that motivation to actually make some change, take some necessary steps. Steps to, you know, maybe get to a better place, a more functionable place is hard. Can you think of maybe one or two strategies you would recommend or that you use when motivation is. Is a little low and you. You need to make a change?

Sure. So I guess I have probably two or three things that. That I do in this situation. So I know I've touched on values several times in the presentation, but number one is leveraging the values that this person has. What can we tap into that's connected to this change that would be really meaningful? So, for example, if I'm working with a player who wants to become a better teammate, we want to understand the why. What's important to you about becoming a better teammate? And how can we use that then to tie these new behaviors back to that value? So, for example, you know, if you want to become a better teammate, and that's really important to you because you ultimately want to be a leader, and leadership is something you believe in, how can we connect these behaviors? We're asking you to change to that leadership so that now you're seeing a real direct consequence between the change that you're making and what it is that you really value. And that alone is often enough to jumpstart people into making that change. The second is to think about the consequences of not changing. So, you know, to think about, like, what will happen if everything stays the Same. Right. All people have a bias toward the status quo. Change is really hard, but there are often a number of consequences associated with just continuing to do things the way they've always been done. And in fact, like for sport coaches in particular, for example, one of the reasons coaches tend to get fired is a failure to adapt too quickly. Right. And so thinking about how you can tap into that for your own life. Right. What will happen if I don't make any of these changes and really think long term, often people will say, well, nothing bad is going to happen tomorrow. Sure, that might be true, but in a year or two, what are the possible consequences of not changing? And the third is from this paper I actually just read recently that I think is really interesting, that despite the fact that we have this status quo bias, it turns out that people who do make a significant change actually feel much happier and better after they've made that change. And so the thing that we fear most, it turns out, is like remarkably unlikely. And so just thinking about what that means for you as an individual right now, thinking about what are the positives that could come if I do make this change, how will my life be better or different? I think are three simple ways again, that you could leverage or overcome that sort of inertia around changing. Excellent.

Thank you. We've got a few questions around failure. And how do you respond to constant failure, even with the strategies that maybe you've tried to implement?

Yeah, I mean, gosh, constant failure is really hard. So I'm thinking about people like salespeople who, you know, just get no's all the time. And I think the key is to focus on what it is that you can control and to stay really dialed into that. So even things like shooting a basketball, right. It's really an odds based thing, as are all performances, really. It's very rare that we have 100% control over the outcome. And so I think it's important to stay dialed into what is it that I have ownership of, what is it that I can control and how am I doing at those times? Things. Right. Really keeping track of our progress and our growth and the areas of things that we can control allows us to stave off that sense of failure a little bit. Right. Ultimately, people tend to respond negatively to failure because it feels like it's a sign that no growth has happened. But I think figuring out where you're making progress on what you can control, even if you're not getting the outcomes that you want, is one way that you can balance that out. And I noticed a couple people asked about learning from failure. And so I think again, the data we have just shows that it's really. Failure is a really emotionally charged event, right? And so when something happens that we don't like, it's not really our natural instinct to be like, well, what can I learn from that? And how can I evaluate this in a non judgmental, unbiased way? The natural human instinct is to like push that away or come up with reasons why that failure isn't my fault, or to think about the all the possible things that could have impacted this. And in doing that, we actually protect ourselves. Right? So that's okay, but it also obscures the reality of the situation. And now it becomes really hard to figure out what it is that we actually could do better, what it is we actually could have learned from that situation. And so a simpler way or maybe a more effective way to think about how you can learn something is like to take from the business lingo to do something like an AB test, right? So to test two alternatives and see which is more impactful is a better way to facilitate learning than trying to reflect after a failure and figure out what it is that didn't work. Well, of course, I believe in the balance critique that I introduced, right. So if you have the ability to quickly, you know, before you get into the emotion of this failure, which is really, really hard to think about, like, what is it that I want to keep doing, what do I want to do differently and what do I learn, right? These non judgmental, non evaluative ways of thinking about our performance, those are some ways we can facilitate some learning from failure, but it is really, really hard, right? So it's nice to think that failure is a learning opportunity. It's like a great buzz line and tagline and I wish it was more possible, but I just don't think that it's quite happening at the speed we think it is.

Excellent. Thank you. Would you be able to give some examples of grounding techniques to manage anxiety?

Sure. So I think maybe the most popular one I've used is called 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. It's just engaging all of your senses, right? So picking out five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell, one thing you can taste, right? Engaging your physical senses, bringing yourself back into the body is a really effective way to ground. Other things you can do are a quick body scan, some deep breathing, that really deep diaphragmatic belly breathing is a great way to do some Grounding, you can push your feet into the floor and notice the contact between your feet and the ground. But anything really that brings you back into your own physical body I think is the best way to go about it.

Excellent. Thank you. How do you get staff to take the necessary steps to implement some of these great ideas? We often get pushback, that staff are too busy, yet in the long term, they will benefit enormously from embracing some of these ideas.

Great question, and it's hard, but I think maybe two things. So one is to, like, stack whatever the change is with an existing thing that we have. Right. So if, for example, we want to, I don't know, we want to start getting people to meditate for two minutes a day, we might just tag that meditation onto an existing thing that we have. And so it might be like, we're going to end this meeting two minutes early to meditate for two minutes. Right. Something that doesn't necessarily take more time, but is instead reshuffling the priorities without a major loss and whatever it is we were doing. So that's one one way we would do it, and then the second thing is to start with the smallest step possible and track the benefits. Right. So often when we're thinking about making these changes for wellness, people think about things like, well, we've got to have a wellness week and we should take a whole week off or we should give people a mental health day. And don't get me wrong, I am fully in support of those things. If you are ready to pull the trigger on that, please do. But if that seems scary, maybe just try a day with no meetings or try one hour where people can leave early. You don't have to go from 0 to 100. You can can go from 0 to 1. And taking that first little step, I think, is just one simple way that you can get people to change. But I think the most important piece of all of that is making sure people are actually reflecting on what's better or different after the change has been made. And so you might hear this in things like the language people use, like, are people talking differently or are they saying things like, I'm more mindful of this or I'm aware of that. Right. Things that are indicative of an actual change of that's taken place. Or do people just tell you like, hey, this is a lot better when we do it this way. Right. Those things, once you get some support and success in that, I think can help sustain that change over the long term.

Excellent, excellent. Thank you. What is your view on Willpower and its role in high performance situations.

Willpower is like a really interesting one. You know, the competing theories about willpower. There's like the ego depletion theory, which is just the idea that like, the more willpower you use, the less you have and you can restore it by like eating a piece of candy and up your glucose and you'll be better. And then there are other things that say that maybe that's not the case. In general, I think willpower is important. I think probably its adjunct of discipline is like a little bit more important. So I think people often think about willpower as just like this, pushing through or continuing to persist. And the reality is for a lot of people this is going to sound like harsh, but don't take it the wrong way. Like it is better to quit. For a lot of people, it is better to stop than it is to just continue persisting in whatever it is that you're working on with no real progress. And so I think like there's. You're trying to find that balance, right? But I think it is important to understand, like, how could this time be better spent elsewhere. And so I think willpower is really important in that if this is something really meaningful and important to you, you're going to have to tap into that resource, you're going to have to push yourself a little bit farther, you're going to have to work a little bit harder to get the outcome that you want. But if it's not that important to you, needlessly persisting actually might be harmful for you. And so thinking about places where you can sort of scale back so you can save that willpower for something else that's really important I think is critical. So for high performance, I think if you're an NBA player, for example, and you've got to deliver that willpower to show up for practice and continue to persist is really important because this is your living. But if you know, in some instances, right, like they don't need the willpower, for example, to like persist in their video gaming so that they can get a twitch sponsorship. Like for some players it might just be better to quit that and try something else. And so I think it's about finding that sweet spot for yourself and figuring out where doubling down on your effort makes sense and where doubling down on your efforts not really leading to anything materially beneficial.

Excellent. Maybe just a couple more questions. You mentioned adrenaline as the metabolic regulator. How much does cortisol affect the optimization of the mindset?

Yeah, so I guess, sorry, maybe I Misspoke. But it's. Cortisol is a metabolic regulator. Adrenaline is also a metabolic hormonal thing. But I mean, essentially, like, it's just your HPA access, basically, like your body is ramping you up to do something effortful, right? And all these things happen sort of fairly instantaneously, right? We're learning more and more that the brain is like a predictive mechanism. And so your body is already energizing all of your resources, already mobilizing all of your resources to do something, often before we're consciously aware of that. And so I think where it becomes really important is making sure you've structured your mental models essentially around what you can do with this energy that you feel, right? So when you notice these signs that your body is changing, right? You are narrowing your focus, your heart rate's increasing, you feel a little bit more tension that you know that this is a sign. My body is preparing me to do something effortful. What can I do right now to use this in an effective way? And then at the end of that, whenever we've expended that energy, thinking about what is it that I can do right now to recover? And if we have those two steps, we can actually make all of our physiology work really well for us because you can learn almost from anything stressful as long as you've used the energy productively and recovered. The key is the. And recovered. If you don't recover, you won't learn. It's going to be harder to put forth that energy moving forward. You're going to feel burnt out, like all these things that we're trying to guard against. Right? But if you take the time to recover, then you've sort of found that sweet spot, and you can get a lot out of that.

Excellent. Thank you. Maybe we'll end on one. One last question. Can you describe for us what is a typical day in your life?

Yeah, I wish I could say there was a typical day, but I break my life down into seasons, just like the NBA season, right? So in the off season, we're working on things like the draft and summer league. And so there's a lot of opportunity to do things like watch workouts and attend basketball practice and interview prospects and, you know, talk about the decisions we're going to make. And then in the season, you know, I basically go where the players go. And so it's a lot of basketball games, basketball practices, shoot arounds, individual meetings, working with our other members of our executive team. But really my role is to facilitate our entire organization at every level performing its best. And so I am, wherever we all are to help facilitate that, whether it's adjusting sleep schedules or figuring out practice times or whatever it might be that I can do to help. That's. That's my role. And then, you know, occasionally I get a rest day, too, which I think is really important.

Excellent. And, and what's your prediction? Will the Raptors win again another championship?

I hope so. I hope so. I. I'm not in the business of predicting, but because I don't want to put anything into the universe and, and, you know, do anything that would be harmful. But I feel like we have a really, really excellent team this year. Got some incredible leadership, some really talented guys returning, some really talented new additions. And so I am confident that you will see a really gifted Raptors team this season.

Thank you. Thank you very much.