Rethinking Execution Episode 7: Zach Brandon on Self Talk for Major League Success

Hey everyone. Welcome to the new Economy. I'm Scott Levy, CEO and founder of Result Maps, where we're on a mission to help the world be its inspired best. That means helping CEOs and leaders build healthy cultures of relentless execution so you hit your numbers and thrive no matter where your people are or what challenges come your way. One way we do that is bringing you these sessions with leaders who've learned to thrive even as they navigated uncharted territory and thorny challenges. The idea is to get you actionable, learning you can put into practice immediately to lead and navigate at your best as you thrive forward the most immediately useful lessons in teamwork and performance come from the worlds of military arts, performing arts and sports. This came up in our last episode as Cameron Herold shared his Formula one for aligning and inspiring teams. It's one inspired by techniques from Olympic coaches and Cameron found it essential in helping him scale three different companies to 100 million in revenue. Cameron also left us thinking about the importance of developing people's skills and confidence in tandem to ensure they can propel the company on that type of journey. So we double click on those ideas in this episode with someone directly from the world of sports, our guest, Zach Brandon. Zach is mental skills Coordinator for Major League Baseball's Arizona Diamondbacks and prior to that he was a mental skills coach at the Elite and legendary Athlete Development School IMG Academy. I talked with Zach about the role mindset, self talk and other concepts play when it comes to peak performance. You had a post about examples of positive self talk and I'm fascinated by the idea that in this most high stakes world of professional sports, teams are now employing mental skills coaching. Share if you would just some of your ideas and aha's about this. How did you come to realize this was really important field? How did you become attracted to it and what are some of the things you've learned about how critical that self talk is?

I think you know one of the things that I've noticed as I've I think it's what probably led me to the field is just this passion for exploring and like studying human excellence. And I don't really care what context or what environment or space that comes in, whether it's in an elite sport or whether it's with a musician or performing artists, whether it's a business person, it doesn't really matter to me where that source comes from. But I'm really interested in exploring what it is that allows them to be the best version of themselves as often as possible. And so when I think about the role that our mind plays in everything, I think that, you know, everyone talks. Certainly to be an elite athlete, you certainly have to have physical ability. There's no one that's ever going to question that. But I think the physical ability kind of sets this bar at what you might be physically capable of achieving in your career. But I think it's your mind that influences how close you get to that bar and how close you're able to be there. And there's a lot of things that go into our mind, a lot of things that can work for us, a lot of things that can work against us too. And, you know, I think that's, for me, what I. Where my passion really lies is unpacking what that is and kind of decoding what do the best in the world do from a mentality standpoint. What is it that they're able to do that allow them to be consistent on a daily basis, to trust themselves when they're in those moments where execution is necessary. So that for me is, I guess, the passion kind of all bottled up into, you know, what's led me to where I'm at now. And, you know, really fortunate that, you know, baseball has been kind of a driver for. For this world of mental performance, performance psychology. I think just about every team now has somebody embedded within the organization that provides these types of services and support for players and coaches. So it's grown a lot. We're seeing it grow now in other domains as well. And that really excites me. But I think, you know, I think there's a lot to still be had. And more than anything, I just like to study the best in the world and figure out what makes them tick and how we can have that translated to our players.

It just occurs to me that because baseball, it's a small set of interactions, like it's high impact, baseball is these short bursts. I could see why baseball might lead in really trying to hone in. In your study, are there certain things that you found recur as you help different players and different athletes improve their game? Is there a set of patterns you see frequently, or is it different in every single person or a mix of both?

Yeah, it's a mix for sure. I think there are, you know, certainly some characteristics and patterns that you see kind of at that top tier. You know, and I think what's. What's really cool for me is recognizing that a lot of our guys who are at the highest level, they've developed these tools, these tactics, these thought Patterns kind of on their own through experience in most cases. A lot of these players haven't worked with a mental performance coach. They've had to learn kind of through the fire and trial by error. And so one of the things that I really enjoyed the most about my time working now in our organization is just learning as much from our players as they probably learn from me and asking those questions and trying to unpack what those consistencies might be. And I think to your point, like, certainly every, every individual is going to be different. And that's why I think for me, the quality of my work is very directly proportionate to the quality of the questions that I ask guys. That, to me is, I think, really a foundational piece for what I do. I say, like, I may have a graduate degree in sports psychology, but I don't have a graduate degree on the person. So to be able to unpack what that is for each individual, what are their strengths, we certainly don't want to ignore those. And as human beings, we're very quick to go straight to our areas of growth, usually our weaknesses, Those are usually a lot easier for us to draw upon or bring up. And so trying to just help them see, hey, this is where you're at, and then kind of guide them from there to where they want to go and figure out what tools they already have and resources, but also maybe what are some areas that they can explore or add to the toolbox to produce some more effective thinking patterns or thought patterns.

How do you guys approach and how do you as a coach approach that idea? What's the mix between. We're going to double down on your strengths, but we're also going to look at these areas of improvement.

I think one of the unique things about baseball is the fact that we train and we prepare on the same days that we perform, which I think is a really interesting, interesting challenge that it raises for us in our sport. So I think when it comes to training, you know, a lot of the focus is on addressing those areas of growth, those weaknesses it's focused on. Let's try to fill in those gaps. The challenge I think becomes is when it's 7 o' clock and the lights come on and the umpire says, play ball. That to me, is where I think you have to have a shift. I think at that point you have to then shift to, okay, what do I have? And one of the most important things that we talk to players about is there's this difference between what you're capable of and your capacity. So your capability Is it may be 100% right. That's when your physical game, your mental game blends together and you're in the zone, so to speak. And obviously the goal is to get there as often as we can. But generally, if I ask guys, out of a scale of 1 to 100, where are you at on a given day? Very, very rarely do I ever hear 100% right? Most of our lives, most of the season is at 80%, 85%, maybe sometimes 60 or whatever it is. So it's helping guys understand that when it's time to perform, when it's time to execute, at that point it's more about, I think, acceptance of what you've got in that moment. It's more about what your capacity is on that given day because you're not all of a sudden going to get stronger when you step onto the field. That's not quite how it works. And so helping them understand that whatever you have in that given moment is enough. And that's a really challenging thing for many because so much of this kind of internal dialogue that we have is focused on not being good enough in a lot of cases and inadequacy. And so that's always a big challenge. But for me, I think that's where it comes into play is when it comes to game time and performance and execution, we always want to have conviction in our strengths. And that's usually where we try to remind guys of those things because sometimes we have to be our own biggest fans.

Do you have any examples of things where you've seen someone's self talk or maybe the way they're thinking about their game or their performance create any sort of self fulfilling prophecy?

As we kind of talked briefly at the beginning, self talk I think is just so essential to just performance in any domain. You know, if you think about it, I think our words, both internal and external are like the wardrobe of our beliefs, right? Like they say outwardly, how we think, how we feel about ourselves, about others, etc. And I think, you know, for those who may haven't deliberately maybe thought about what self talk is like, I think of it kind of like this internal soundtrack, right, that's playing perpetually in the back of our minds. And most of the time we're not always maybe consciously aware of it, but sometimes we do become aware of it. And what we realize is that it doesn't always work for us, sometimes it works against us. And I think the challenge with this that I see in baseball is this internal. I'd almost call it narrator that rents space in our head, very subjective. And the challenge with that is when you mix that with our negativity bias. As human beings, we get caught up and focused on these feelings of not being good enough or we start to criticize ourselves rather than the act. And I shared this recently, or I thought of this recently thinking about like, you know, I don't think people can fail, actions can fail, but I don't think people can fail. But in our own mind, I think we often feel very differently about that we think that we failed. And so this is long winded to get to with. I think a baseball example is, let's say you have a pitcher on the mound who is struggling to execute a particular pitch. And all of a sudden, if I'm watching them, I might see that frustration or that emotion come out. And to me, that usually only comes out when they're engaged in judging themselves. And I think that's one of the biggest challeng for any performer is being able to separate what just happened, the event versus the story of what just happened, our judgment of the event. And so for me, that's kind of where my mind goes with baseball. And that probably sounded way simpler than it is to practice in reality and to address. But that for me is where I see baseball players sometimes get hooked is as you mentioned earlier, the game is played in these increments of 15 seconds. And if you're in judgment mode and those 15 seconds, it's going to be really hard to execute when the clock strikes zero and you have to deliver the next pitch or you have to execute your approach at the plate. So at least in our environment, that's kind of what it looks like.

You said a couple things. I want to double click on the negativity bias. Can you tell me a little more about that?

You know, it's an interesting thing that we confront as human beings is this. You know, you think about it like the lens through which we see things is tinted towards seeing the bad, seeing the. And that's part of it too, as I said, like, I think when you mix judgment with the negativity bias it creates, we like to, we have a brain that prefers certainty and we like to make sure that we're engaged in things where we're going to feel physically, psychologically safe. And anything that we think might threaten that creates this tension for us. And so if I kind of reverse engineered or go back a little bit, I think there's three kind of common emotional or psychological daggers that our brain wants to avoid One one is humiliation. Like we don't like basically asking the question, will I look stupid? All right. Embarrassment, am I doing it right? And then inadequacy, like, am I good enough? And if you kind of deconstruct those, I think each one there's a fear, there's a thread of fear within that. And there is. They're also contingent upon other people. And I think that's the part where our negativity bias really comes to the surface is typically it's when we're either surrounded by others or it's when it's dependent on other people, because that's how we're, we're basing off of our self image. And we're social beings and we. And connection is important to us. And so that becomes really tricky. Where if any of those three daggers are. If our brain starts to experience any of those things, that's where we create these comfort zones. We create this psychological wall where it tries to shield us from these things that we were vulnerable, we feel vulnerable about. It leads to these behavior habits or manifestations where we try to avoid that confrontation. So this is a long winded response to just the negativity bias per se. But I think that's where, where my mind goes and where again, like our brain can just play a lot of, a lot of tricks on us is because it just. Its default is this form of judgment and seeking, hunting out these things that threaten our safety physically and psychologically. And we know, as you hear all the memes, the poster, the nice quotes about growth occurs outside of your comfort zone. It only occurs if you're willing to take some of those risks. And in order to take those risks, those, some of those securities are probably going to be threatened a little bit. And it's like, can you perform anyway without those or with that feeling there?

One of my favorite stories is Tiger woods kind of famously now said he still likes to go imagine he's playing the last hole with a bunch of his heroes as he takes that shot. In the seriousness of professional sports, how often do you see the seeds of that joy that we have when we're a child come out? Because I noticed, like, even with somebody that's got that killer mentality like Kobe, it felt to me as a spectator, like you could see that kind of joy and just performance. You find that that has a role. I'm just curious there.

That's a really good question. And you know, one of the quotes that I'll share sometimes with our guys is I promised them, I was like, Even though I've never pitched in a major league baseball game, I can promise to you I pitched in several in my own head, right. Like you think about when we were a kid and for me it was basketball. We had a hoop in our driveway and I spent hours, I can't even tell you how many game winning shots I hit when I was a kid. I think that's really important because, you know, in the baseball world, you know, there's a lot of terms that get tossed around as to what makes this game such a mentally demanding sport, one of which is they, they call it a grind. And it is a grind. You know, you play 100 normally, you play 160 games, 162 games in about 180 day span. And it is, it's physically, emotionally, mentally taxing for sure. And I think if you, what I see and I read this quote the other day and it really, I thought nailed it, is that the need for progress often will, it often threatens our joy of the process. And I really like that. And it really resonated. And there's actually, you referenced Kobe and there's a great clip of him being interviewed by Ahmad Rashad several, several years ago. And he basically says that when I was younger, like I was in love with what he kind of called the highlights, right? The dunks, the awards, the game winning shots, all of that. And he says, I got older, I actually developed an appreciation for the process. I developed this appreciation and joy for these little things that most people take for granted. So in his words, he said ice baths, like there's a lot of people that would do a lot of other things over hopping in an ice bath. And I thought that was a really. I'm right there with you. Like I, I thought that was a really powerful quote. And, and I think it speaks to his mentality that again, that we could go, we could do the whole segment here on Kobe himself. But that's something that's always really resonated with me. And I think if you really want to be this high achieving performer, really in any context, I don't think you can lose sight of that joy that you have in that process. That doesn't mean it will be easy. Certainly we say this isn't Disney World, this isn't Disneyland, right? Like, if you want just pure joy and bliss, like I recommend going and paying 100 something bucks and you can go to Disneyland. It's not going to be that easy. But I think when you can challenge yourself to see the joy and just even sometimes the mundane. It will make that journey toward progress and self improvement not only more enjoyable, but you're probably going to also, when you're done, feel more fulfilled along the way, regardless of how far you get in that journey.

Well, let's talk about setbacks and self talk and resilience and recovery is on a lot of people's minds. And that was the post that originally got my attention. It was a linebacker, I think you had a miss on a play, but he was coming back. What have you learned about how we respond to those setbacks and what separates the top performers from everyone else in terms of the language they use to make sense of those setbacks you talked about? I think actions fail, not people. That's an interesting idea, too.

Let's frame it around like failure for a second there. Like, I think failure is this thing that we've grown up kind of despising because it comes with this emotional baggage, right? Like we have this visceral reaction when we fail. But I think where failure gets misunderstood sometimes is there's the event itself that may occur that you fail at. But what I also think is really important is that response to that failure, to that event. And that will oftentimes dictate really what the final outcome is. And in the last five months, one of the things that has been really on my mind amidst the pandemic and everything that people are encountering is how important perspective is. And the quote that has come to me time and time again during this is perspective is one of the only things that can change the outcome without changing any of the facts. And I think about that when it comes to setbacks, because the reality is, if we look at it from an objective lens, the setback is the setback, whatever that might look like. You know, there's. I wish I had a great business example off the top of my head. But to continue in the sports realm, you know, Alex Smith, a former first overall pick in the NFL, had a great, has had a great career, a lot of success. And then he has a very devastating leg injury to the point where they were concerned that he, they may have to amputate his leg. And there's a really great, you know, E60 that if anybody's interested, they can certainly check out to hear more of that story. But, you know, I just saw a great picture the other day of his family celebrating. He's been cleared to return to football. And I think it's an incredible example of when we experience setbacks, you can either be defined by them or you can develop from them. And I think he's a perfect example of that. And I think a lot of that to develop from a setback, it ultimately comes down to your perspective towards it, how you choose to respond. And I think this goes into, you know, when you start thinking about thought patterns. And, you know, I get asked sometimes, like, how do you avoid or how do you, like, shut off your mind, right? Like, how do you quiet your mind? And I'm like, the tricky part is, like, I don't really think you can, you know, like, that's not quite how it works. That internal soundtrack is always going to be there. But what we can do is we can develop these new forms of thinking. We can develop these more maybe productive or healthy thought patterns. And you can think of it like learning a second language. You can learn this new language of your mind, but the old language doesn't disappear. It's not like it just is erased. And I think that's really important as well with this. Because what I care more about sometimes is not the person's first thought after an event or after a setback, it's what's their second thought. That, to me, is the one that I care more about because that, to me is one that I think you can create some space between. And you can, in the moment, choose a response and how you want to come, you know, kind of combat that or how you want to work through it or navigate it. So when I think of setbacks, like, for me, that's what comes to mind is that, you know, the event plus response kind of equals your outcome. And that perspective in your response is going to influence what that outcome is.

Do you have anything you do to work people through, say, setting goals or defining, where do I want to be in the future? What am I trying to get to? Do you have any techniques you've evolved for that?

I personally am not a big goal setter. If I work with an athlete who does, I certainly encourage them to do so because I know that there's a ton of value out there in setting goals. The challenge that I experience with it is sometimes our goals become like checkboxes, and we become very good at checking those boxes off one by one. And we don't actually stop to, as we were talking about earlier, kind of enjoy that process along the way. And sometimes, too. A perfect example is I was talking to a consultant who works with Olympic athletes, and this was an Olympic year, and we had a lot of athletes here, you know, across the. Across. Across the globe who had a lot of goals and you know, it's like now all of a sudden, that's been swept out from underneath them. And if that's the case, it's like, then what? You know, if you, if you're, if you're only going to set goals, and I think that's what happens sometimes is because there's so much that's outside of our control when we set some goals. So for me, what I typically will do with players that I resort to way more often is helping them identify kind of those. Their. Their values. Like what. What do they care most about? What matters to them? Because what I think's great about a value is a value gives you an opportunity in the moment today to experience success, right? If you value fitness, right, you can go and you can go do a workout and you can be successful today, right now, even whether you do that for five minutes or whether you do that for half an hour. Whereas if your goal is to run every day for 20 minutes for an entire year or whatever, there's going to be a lot of uncontrollable things that may come into that. And so for me, I like to try to help them get back to, okay, what do you value? And let's set objectives or let's set goals today based off of those values. So that's typically where I go more. So in that realm of kind of thinking ahead, planning ahead, I just like values because I think it gives you a chance to experience success in the moment.