Mar 15, 2023
Sports Performance - Train Your Mind to Be Your Best in the Present w/ Alex Auerbach
- BRT S04 EP11 (173) 3-12-2023
Things We Learned This Week
- Mindfullness - Be in the Present, use breathing techniques to anchor in
- Imposter Syndrome - Q of confidence
- Client Psychology (30%) vs Environment (70%) - take care of your health, get sleep
- Sunk Cost Fallacy - resources are gone, move on
Guest: Alex Auerbach, Sports Psychologist for the Toronto Rapters (NBA)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexauerbachphd/
Performance psychologist working with the world's best performers | Building science-backed systems for health and high performance for elite athletes, executives, and organizations
Area of Expertise Include:
· Wellness & Performing Under Pressure
· Leadership & High Performance
· Mindset Training & Systems optimization
Alex is a counseling and performance psychologist currently working as an executive in professional sports. He’s been fortunate to work with the best athletes in the world in the NBA, NFL, MLB, and the Olympics. Also with high performers in other domains – including elite military units, Fortune 500 Companies, and venture backed start-ups.
In addition to his training as a psychologist, he also worked as a college football coach with 2 different NFL Teams. Alex collaborated as part of several venture-backed start-ups, working in a range of roles from consultant to C-Suite. Outside of work, Alex is the father of an incredible daughter, a dog, & a husband.
3 Mindsets that separate the best from the Rest:
Post - HERE
Notes:
Seg 1
Alex works in sports performance. He is a trained psychologist working for the Toronto Raptors. Works with elite athletes, teaching them how to perform under pressure. Star athletes could be pitchers, basketball players or any other major sport. He has also worked as a consultant with executives, start-up founders, and military types.
He helps them through any psychological stops, like self-doubt, or poor habits. Common things are confidence and imposter syndrome. Alex works with athletes to create behavior changes and build high performance habits.
Alex must ask Qs to determine how he can help. What story are you telling yourself?
Everyone needs a coach, and training to develop skills for their unique situations.
Diagnosis - What’s the problem, what’s the most pressing issue?
Change the thinking, working with risks and discomfort. One must understand how their mindset affects their behavior. We all want to be doing meaningful work.
Everyone is human, so they have to learn to be grounded. Star athletes unfortunately are significant people with lots of fame and talent, and it can be lonely at the top. It can be difficult to connect with others.
Alex works to bring them back to their values. Blend the ‘who you are’, with ‘what you do’. How you achieved that success and who helped.
Alex councils individuals and groups. The group dynamic is different as a multiple people must align on core values to help the group achieve a goal.
Seg 2
Alex is originally from Arizona, currently lives in Toronto. He studied at the University of Arizona in the athletic department as an undergrad. He took a job after in New England as an assistant football coach. Then decided football coach was not the career calling, and went back to school. He has worked around the country in universities in North Texas (got his PhD), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (his residency), and back to U of A in Tucson.
Since 2020 has worked for the Toronto Raptors NBA basketball team. He had to get a work visa like any other employee. Sports psychologists are very common now in all pro sports like the NFL NBA NHL, and also at the big university schools. Long term, Alex may want to work in climate tech.
One of the most famous is Dr. Brett McKay at University of Alabama. They institute Coach Nick Saban’s – Process: Practitioners of process thinking focus on the present instead of past events or future outcomes, and believe that all actions one takes in life, regardless of how trivial they may seem, affect the desired outcome.
Example of Dr. McCabe’s work:
4 Ways to Endure the Chaos and Emerge a Warrior - Click HERE
Alex also works with people in business fields, like CEOs of Fortune 500 Companies. There is lots of pressure to perform and always raise profitability of a business. He also has worked with startups who need to do a big fundraise.
Alex works on the mental process, focus on the task at hand. Determine what is tangible like action steps to get it done. It is easy to be paralyzed by all of the possibilities when you focus on the goal. Control your actions day to day.
Better to focus on the process and what you control - then to focus on an outcome which can have lots of factors that are out of your control. One can be overwhelmed by all the factors that go into an outcome. You may not achieve the goal.
Seg 3
Imposter Syndrome is a very common confidence issue with lots of people who have success. Question one asks is do I belong? Do you want to manage the ambiguity? You made is somewhere, but unsure if you deserve to be there.
You may have gotten away from your core skills, and have been coasting. You were getting by, but now it is not working.
Ways to work on this are – 1. focus on past success with wins past experience and be proud of the win leverage the strengths. 2. best to be intentional, what you do to accomplish the task. 3. Your values what do you want to be known for.
Pull from your evergreen well of accomplishments. Non-conscious processes in the brain to work for you, what is your default network. This network monitors how aligned you are with your goals.
Freely Determined by Dr. Ken Sheldon is a book that discusses this. Tilt the brain towards what you’re after on a conscious and unconscious way.
Player works towards goals, you always have an internal compass to know what your true north is. Discover your true north. There’s a great 30 for 30 about what would it be about.
Client Psychology vs Client Environment: 70% of your behavior is influenced by your environment. Understand that external factors (coach, Mgr, equipment, etc) affect success. High performers have to control not only their mind, but their environment.
Olympians complain most about conditions stopping them from achieving their goals. They need a coach that encourages them and brings out the best. Good coach also removes any external factors blocking top performers. Understands how to challenge and create the right environment for success.
Phil Jackson (great NBA Coach) is known as the Zen Master for bringing out the full potential of top athletes to win 11 championships.
Seg 4
How do you measure performance?
Does the athlete feel better when learning psychological angles?
An athlete cannot control playing time, so Alex will check to see how they feel, get feedback. Do they feel more confident? Have a better mindset?
Mindfulness Meditation - the mind wanders to Past or Future events, so you want to bring the mind back to the Present. Redirect the mind. To do this, through focus training and breathing work. Mental reps to redirect the mid and strengthen the connection to the present.
Focus Training Routine: 5 to 10 minutes, 3 to 5x / week for 6 weeks - change the wiring in the brain
Performance is based on being in the here and now, being present. Practice being in the present. Use an anchor to the present, by using a mantra or transcendental meditation.
Breath work, regulate autonomic nervous system, a.k.a. mindfulness. Techniques are the Box or Birthday Candle. Breath can be an anchor to stay in the present.
You always want to pay attention to your health, sleep 7 to 8 hours a night. Sleep cleans the brain during REM sleep. Hydration – drink lots of water. Also exercise, which cleans the nervous system. Spend time with loved ones.
Spend time in nature, 20 minutes 3x / week. Reset your stress levels.
Other ways to reset, write in a journal daily. Write down 3 – 5 things you are grateful for. You want to do a balanced critique of yourself. Ask 3 Qs – what did I do today that I want to: keep doing / do differently / learn from.
Work on your decision making process. Self regulated learning to spot bias or ‘thinking traps’. Careful not to get caught up in black and white thinking, and work to detach from this.
Sunk Cost Fallacy is also very common. It’s hard to believe that the resources are gone, so it’s fruitless to try and get it back. Do not double down on a bad decision, let it go.
Bonus
Loss Aversion – mentally ‘spend more time in the past leads to more problems’
Do you want to have baselines for defaults in your Decision process? Work to review decisions and assess quickly with no judgment good & bad.
Let it go. To be great, must be able to quickly forget what went wrong, and refocus on the situation at hand. Have baseline default actions of pas successes to recover.
Most sports performances are odds based, so top athletes need to understand how to recover from mistakes, and move past it. Dwelling on mistakes does not help.
If you mentally ‘spend more time in the past, it leads to more problems’.
Related Show:
Management Accelerator w/ Dave Kline
- BRT S03 EP44 (143) 9-11-2022
Guest: Dave Kline
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkline/
https://maven.com/dave-kline/new-manager-accelerator
Bio: (x-Bridgewater Associates, x-Moody’s Analytics, x-PwC Consulting) has run large, global strategic and operational teams for the last 2 decades. He has a BSEE from Bucknell University and an MBA from NYU’s Stern School. Find him on Twitter @dklineii or LinkedIn, writing about management tactics, leadership lessons, and the evolution of online learning.
Clip –
Determine the vision of the company, what’s your mission? Design the company and recruit the types of people you want to work there. Remove fiction to get to the result faster. Good analogy is studying next say then, head coach of Alabama. Always talks about the process and having systems for everything you do. Also a master recruiter, really knows how to look for talent.
Then knows how to sell them on playing at Alabama. Telling recruits were to win with or without you, but it will be better if you’re there. Also the talk that since Alabama has so much talent you may or may not play. When it be better to know that even in practice you are competing against the best, prepares you for life and going pro. Sabin checks the character of all recruits, talks with seven people they know before he even talks of the recruit.
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