The Wellness Mindset: Focus on Personal Value

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Hi, my name is Gerhard Schwantner and welcome to Selling Power tv. Today we are speaking with someone from the Toronto Raptors, Alex Auerbach.

Welcome, Alex Gerhard. Thanks for having me. Excited to spend some time with you.

So you are the Director of Wellness. What does that fancy title mean?

That fancy title means I'm responsible for all the mental health and mental performance services for our players and staff for the Toronto Raptors. And so it's really about building healthy and high performing team, organizational culture and of course, healthy and high performing individuals.

When you think about the organizational culture of the Raptors, how would wellness fit into the culture statement?

A simple way of thinking about it is you can't perform if you're not well. And so that starts with building a foundation of wellness, taking care of yourself, doing things like sleeping well, eating well, exercising, hydrating, but then then also engaging in things like managing your stress, proactively, building self awareness. And it's really become a core part of what we do and I think is in general a movement in sports right now to make sure that athletes can sustain excellence over the long term.

So what you're saying is you are creating value for the customer, for the viewers, and in order to do that you gotta create a value mindset in the players and in the organization that supports it.

Absolutely, yeah. I think it's really important to help people understand how what they do is an investment or in some cases is a detraction from their future value to the people. Ultimately, we're all serving.

What evidence do you have that those principles of wellness apply beyond the field of sports?

I guess to me it kind of boils down to a few different dimensions or pillars of wellness that I think are really important. So the first is social. We know in general social support is a huge buffer for resilience and helps people perform better. We all need social relationships to reach our full potential. And so we really prioritize connection and making sure people feel like they've got healthy relationships. Beyond the social dimensions, we look at things like stress management. So this might involve things like breathing techniques, having a better sense of what your triggers are. And this might be things like managing your practice or performance schedule more effectively. So making sure that anything that you're doing is moving you toward your goals and that you're really intentional with it. Those would be some of the pillars we draw on that really help our players move forward. And certainly there are others too.

So you recently gave a presentation at sales 3.0 conference and that's the first time you Addressed the sales audience. What was the response?

I think the response was pretty positive. It sounds like, you know, I got a lot out of that presentation and I got to learn a lot too. And what pays me was the number of parallels between the experience of a salesperson trying to, you know, consistently perform, to work on a team, to manage difficult conversations, to bounce back from a no or from a failure. I think those parallels all align really neatly with sport.

So what support do you get from your peers and from the rest of the staff and management? How do managers sort of reinforce what you are doing so that it is synchronized?

And so the messaging trickles down that we need to take care of ourselves, we need to prioritize things like sleep recovery, good nutrition, exercise, self care, and we all reinforce that and send that message in our own way. But I think everyone in the organization realizes that these actions, taking care of your wellness is not in contrast to high performance, this investment in your ability to perform down the line. You know, the world has become, since COVID started, largely pretty unpredictable, right? And that's kind of the underlying factor in driving anxiety. And then you have all the sort of challenging circumstances that don't help mental health. So the things I just are one, like ask, right? Talk to people about how they're doing, Ask them, and actually pause to listen for the answer. You know, so many people make small talk at the beginning of a virtual meeting or make small talk in the hallway and ask something like, oh, hey, how's it going? And the normal refrain is like, yeah, good, fine, you know, but if you take that moment to actually connect, I think managers and leaders can communicate how much they value and care about their staff and give really clear feedback about what is working well most of the time, managers and coaches alike spend a disproportionate amount of energy on things that are not working and really minimal time on things that are going well. And so flipping that ratio, right? People need about five positive things for every one negative thing that they hear. Thinking about that I think is really important. And then actually, I think for managers and leaders, it's taking care of yourself in between calls or in between meetings, right? To take some time to debrief and not just let things compound and keep pushing and pushing and pushing, but actually manage your energy effectively, right? Fully present and focused in the middle of the call. And then when that wraps up, take a few minutes, breathe, jot down some notes to yourself, right? Think about the next call that you have or the next meeting you have, mentally prepare for that, and go in and execute at a high level versus what I think a lot of us are used to now in the zoom world is like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. There's not even time to get lunch in between things sometimes. And so that's, I think, a really concrete place where we can make a big difference both for players and staff and salespeople alike.

Where can people learn more about you? When is your new book coming out?

I'm hoping to have a book out sometime next year. You can follow me on social media. Of course. I do some tweeting at Alex Auerbach, PhD and LinkedIn and also working a bit on developing actually some high performance coaching for sales leaders. And so folks are interested in that. Would love to connect.

Awesome. Thank you. Alex.