 Well, welcome to the show, Eric and Alan. So great to have you. Thanks for having us. Great to be here. Yeah, thank you. Great to be here. And I'd love to just jump in. How did the book come about? Eric came and gave a talk at Google in May of, I believe it was 2021, three years ago. And I was working at Google at the time. We were home due to COVID. And I wasn't sure if I was gonna go to this talk, but my wife said, yeah, that sounds pretty interesting. You should go. And I was just fascinated by how, he talked about performance principles, but it was all based on his hands-on experience of working with a wide variety of people. And I just thought it was really interesting. And I had written a couple of previous books, How Google Works and Trillion Dollar Coach. So it was sort of itching for a third project anyway. And here we are. Yeah, I think Alan mailed me a copy of the Trillion Dollar Coach and I consumed it in one evening. I really like the writing style. I've been entertaining for years in my mind about maybe doing a book. So then we met and we just kind of seemed to hit it off on the personality side. And I knew it was a matter of time. I just wasn't sure when it was, but I wanted to kind of get a message out about a 30-year career, working with about 25,000 of the world's best performers and learned principles in working with these men and women that I thought could be very actionable and applicable to the population as a whole. And what drew you to performance psychology, Eric? So I got an undergrad degree in psychology and biology from UC Davis, took time off and kind of backpacked through Europe and then got into a PhD program. And I was kind of the standard clinical psychologist. I wasn't focusing on performance as much then. My job was then to make people who didn't feel well feel better as it were. And then I took an internship with the US Navy. And that's when life changed for me. My intent was just to kind of do the residency, if you will, or the internship and then the obligated three-year payback and the opportunities that presented themselves were literally mind-blowing. We've lived in Spain for a while and I got to work. I'm packing the book a little bit, the NASA program. And then the world changed, right? 9-11 occurred and because of my interest areas, my research background, I really shifted from more of a clinician to more performance-based. And went to Sears School, worked there and survival of Asian resistance and escape. And then what really kind of drew most of my interest was working for my last 10 years in the Navy as the head clinical and performance psychologist for the Navy SEALs. So that's when I was kind of sharpening that skill set as it were. And that's when I knew performance psychology was much more interesting to me. No disrespect to the clinical side, been there, done that. But I was much more interested in taking incredible men and women and making them even better and doing it empirically. And I'm very curious around the title Learned Excellence because I think many listeners think of excellence as rare, hard to come by and probably not learned. So how did the title come about and what exactly do you mean by learning excellence? Yeah, I don't want to go down various rabbit holes here but I am so tired after 30 years of the narrative of I can never do what he or she is doing because they were born that way. It is utter nonsense. I mean, complete noise. In fact, I want the listeners and the readers of the book to run away from that narrative. So for me, I'm dumb, but I'm not stupid. There are clear physical advantages that people are born with and maybe we can make an argument some intellectual advantages at times as well. But to a man and to a woman, when you read the book and you impact the 32 elite performers that we doc, we could have literally had thousands in there but we chose 32. Each one of them tells the story for us and the narrative of they weren't born that way. No one is born, all of the top performers have navigated usually behind the scenes. Very, very few people can kind of see the failures they've had and how they've iterated their growth outside of the comfort zone. So that was a non-negotiable. I wanted people to remember, excellence can be learned, no one's born with it. Johnny is a performer on stage in a band and when we started this company, I was telling Johnny that I didn't know anything about performance and he was like, what are you talking about? Getting on the microphone here in the podcast and being in front of the room with our clients is performing and it was really eye-opening for Johnny to give me that insight because I had never really thought of myself as a performer and I know there's probably some listeners in the audience who feel the same way. When they think about performance, they think, oh, that's someone else, that's athletes, that's Navy SEALs, that's leaders. How would you explain to someone who doesn't see themselves as a performer how they could actually improve their performance? We're all performers. When you have a job, I started my career, my first job was in retail. Actually, before that, I taught karate and you're performing. You're up there teaching a kid how to do karate. You're trying to sell a pair of ski boots. That's performance. It doesn't mean it's fake or scripted or what have you. It just means that you have an objective, you have a perhaps a script or a set of knowledge that you're trying to convey. That's all performance. So actually the very thesis of our book is that we are all performers and not just at our jobs. When we're at home, we're performing as a partner, as a boyfriend, a girlfriend, a spouse, as a parent. I don't mean it's performative. I don't mean it's fake, but you're doing something that you really care about that you're invested in and you would love to be really good at it. That's what we mean by performance. Look, there's been a ton of information podcasts, readings, et cetera around mindset. I think one of the takeaways from a 30-year career with 25,000 roughly high-end performers is one of the takeaway messages is that the default mindset, if someone has the same mindset for every role that they play, when you look at the research and you look at their lives, they're probably not performing in other roles very well. And I'll give a great example, a really easy one I think for a lot of people to think about is within the sport analogy here. Like if we're all professional athletes and we get paid to be competitive, relentless and gritty, pick your favorite sport. And we do that and then we transition to, now we go home to our significant other spouse and our children. How do you suppose that relationship's going to work if you're competitive, relentless and gritty with husband, wife, et cetera? It's gonna fall flat. So one of the things that we've invited the readers to really think carefully about is how they transition. First, identify those five or six key roles that you play in life. For me, I'm a performance psychologist, I'm a husband, I'm a son, I'm a father, a grumpy pickleball player on the weekends, whatever your roles may be. And then choose literally words that you think will help propel that mindset or that role to perform optimally. So as a parent, for example, I wanna be empathetic, I wanna be a mentor, I wanna be a guide, I wanna be patient. One of the kind of revelations for me in the book was like, wait a minute, I can choose my mindset. Because I think most people just sort of wake up, well, here's my mindset. And then you may try, you know, various ways of self-improving here or there. But when do you ever stop back and say, in this job, in this career, here's the type of mindset that people need that are the most successful, to be the most successful. And I got 70% of it and I don't got 30% of it. That really kind of a more systematic approach. What is the right mindset for that role? But then as Eric is saying, my role as a son is different than my role as a parent, than my role as, you know, what have you. So we're just saying be deliberate. And then when you're going between those different roles, make sure you're changing your mindset, like actually have some sort of process read the markers of the new mindset, something. So your mind is triggered to go to the new mindset. Well, I love that. And it just, it really got me thinking because we have a lot of very analytical listeners who tune into this show. And it's an obvious why that set of folks find this show fascinating because their analytical minds work very well at the analytical job that they have. Their engineers, their software developers, that problem solution oriented mindset works fabulous there. But that mindset also comes up short when it is connection and conversation and being in the moment because it's always fast forward and backwards or looking for weak points to be able to fix. And it's very important for people to understand that whatever mindset that they have developed in order to be successful in certain areas of their life when they put themselves in an uncomfortable situation or see where it comes up short that doesn't mean that you are a failure. It just means that you have, this is the area in which you can improve and which you can build a new mindset, just a new mindset that not only will allow you to exceed but will allow you to be just as successful as the mindset that allows you to do very well at work we can now install a new mindset that will allow you to be very successful in networking, connection, being in the moment, rapid rapport building. Now, Alan, you bring up a great point around the choosing the mindset piece because so many of us have mindsets from our peers or our significant other or our family the way we were raised and these become our default mindset without ever choosing it. It's just the environment we're in the way we are communicated to, the way we are raised and then when we come up against resistance we don't often think, well, what if I just changed my mindset? You might think I have to work harder or I'm a failure or their inner critic gets into play. So how do we recognize when it is mindset and not effort output or something other than mindset? Well, mindset is kind of a vague term, right? How would you actually define it? So we play with that a little bit in the book of how do you define it? But what's not vague is how do you practice your mindset? How does your mindset manifest itself? And it's really, Eric has a mantra, stay in the circle. What does that mean? Well, what's in the circle are the things that you can control? What can you control? Your attitude, your effort and your behavior. So if you wanna practice a mindset, let's say, like you said, you come up against some adversity which we coach you to do, like go out and seek a little bit, try new things. So that you can practice your mindset because let's say you go on a first date with someone maybe you wouldn't have gone out with and it doesn't go well. Well, that's a chance for you to practice because your old mindset might be, well, that was dumb or I wish I hadn't said this or I'm never gonna do that again but maybe that's not the mindset you want. So then you could stop and you could say, okay, what's the mindset I want? Well, the mindset I want at my attitude is, I'm optimistic. I don't know, you know? So, well, the next one will go better. You know what I mean? So the more, besides choosing the mindset, the other thing is putting yourself into positions to practice it. And usually that's through adversity. So when you're in an adverse situation, something happens, stop and say, oh, wait a minute. Now I can practice my attitude, my effort, my behavior. As we go into mindset, I think for many of us we might recognize some areas where we want to improve our mindset but that idea of seeking adversity or discomfort oftentimes has consequences tied to it. And for a lot of us, if we are in the extrinsic mindset where those consequences influence our reputation, can hurt our career, can make someone not like us, can have that first date go awful and judgy, can be very scary for us than to go even further outside of our comfort zone. And our comfort zone often tries to protect our reputation. Yeah, so you just brought up that term that I was gonna go there anyhow, AJ, so the comfort zone. We all have these bubbles of comfort, whether they're at work in relationships, hobbies, whatever. And I think the mistake that I've seen people as the performance psychologist on my end, I see the mistake happen often is people try too much, too fast, too soon. And I think that the key word here is kind of incremental. I think regardless of what circles you're looking in, whether it's hobbies, work, et cetera, if people take a mindful approach to, okay, I'm going to incrementally work outside of that, and I'm gonna be okay with failure, right? That's the F word here. If I had a nickel for every time I've seen risk aversion because of what you said, they view it as a threat, they view it as a hit upon their reputation, et cetera. But without getting on a soapbox too much, I mean, the world is a very complicated place and it's not going to get easier. Whether we talk politically, climate, whatever it may be, we're at a time in our lives now and a time in the world now where we're gonna need people to be okay taking incremental risk to iterate and innovate. If people stay in the comfort zone, by definition, the comfort zone does not equate to growth, literally. And I think that if I asked all of us, not only on this podcast, but your audience members as well, to think of the most significant learnings that they've had in their lives, I probably am gonna be correct when they look at failure as those times they've learned the most. Now, do I want people to fail? Of course not. But do I think that they're going to learn from failure and iterating if they do it incrementally? Of course I do. It's the people that try too much too fast that all of a sudden have an enormous failure. Yeah, so stretching that comfort zone in an incremental manner allows you to face failure that doesn't have to be the reputational hit, but starts to strengthen that grit, that resolve, and help you find the right mindset to be successful in that performance role. Versus, and of course it's the new year, so everyone's thinking about six different resolutions and all these habits they need to change. And of course it's very easy to fail in one of those resolutions, then throw all the other five out the window and just give up on it if we stretch ourselves too much too far with this comfort zone. And I'm gonna challenge you a little bit on, you talked about failure and reputational hit. And the very first mental discipline we talk about in our book is values, values and goals. And values is all about understanding your identity and caring less about reputation. Then people think, okay, well what is my identity? I need to understand my identity. And everyone thinks they understand their identity and they probably do, but have you really taken the time to write it down and really understand it? And we go through this process that Eric goes through with each of his clients, the values credo. And it's a lengthier process. I'll let Eric describe it a little bit more, but the point is we think we know ourselves, but why not take the few minutes to really know yourself? And actually, well it takes more than a few minutes. So that you really understand your identity. And then in most cases, you don't really care as much if your reputation takes a hit as long as you are being true to your identity. And the truism in fact is that if you're true to your identity, your reputation is usually just fine. I agree with that. And I'll say one thing, AJ and Johnny. So when you look at the best performers in their respective disciplines, literally, sport, music, medicine, law, business, politics, whatever it is. And we interview at Tana Cirque du Soleil, all sorts of entertainers as well. When you look at what I think most people would say, yes, those men and women are the best at what they do. When you look at these individuals, what they've done, and this is key, they've just accelerated, meaning they're moving from valuing reputation to valuing identity much faster than most. So ages and stages in life, one of the facts that we know in the human developmental process is as we age and stage and get older, we care generally less about what other people think. So a 65, 70-year-old's gonna care less than what a 25-year-old thinks, right, about how they're perceived, their reputation, et cetera. Where whatever they want to at the beach or whatever, they just don't care. So my point here is if we know that the best performers in the world are moving away from reputation to identity, then it makes sense, and this is where Alan and I unpack a process to do that. It makes sense to get people to kinda double and triple down on their identity faster because you're literally wasting time worrying about reputation. Identity is where it's at. Your values, your credo, if you focus on that, by definition, as Alan said, by definition, your reputation will follow. And with that, I noticed when you were stating values earlier, that those were not at all related to outcome. So win or lose, success or failure, you can still be loyal. You could still be adventurous. And I think that's a really important distinction because a lot of times, reputation is tied to outcome, right? And we think if we lose in public, if we miss that shot or we fail in that presentation or we have to go back to the dinner table and tell our parents we didn't get the job because of the job interview, that outcome is tied to the reputation. And then of course, if we become outcome dependent, our performance can sink based on whatever the last outcome was in our life, whereas values are around actions you can take, win or loss, success or failure, each and every day in that specific role that you're looking to perform in. Amen. I mean, you have a very advanced analysis. I'll keep it simple. Focus on the recipe. Don't worry about what the cake's going to look like. Every cake has the same six ingredients at the same temperature and they're all gonna look the same. The people that worry about this, there's a quote here that we talk about often, like professionals focus on process, amateurs focus on outcome. Where do you wanna be? Which side of that equation do you wanna be? Now, I often say I'm dumb, but I'm not stupid. We all have someone we answer to, right? Whether you're a business making widgets, whether it's stakeholders, stockholders, whether it's a professional sport team that needs to deliver wins for the city, the players, the ownership, et cetera. We have limited control over the outcomes. We have some, we can influence an effect, but where we have total control is a repeatable consistent process that we exercise. And then by definition, if we stay true to the recipe, we're gonna get the outcomes. We're going to get that cake more times than not. And again, to go along with that, you were mentioning of writing it out and putting it on paper and what that looks like and what the behaviors and actions that go with that identity look like. And for a lot of people, they're not going to take the time to do that. And they're sitting on the couch and are like, I know exactly who I am and how I behave. And these so-called couch warriors are going to be right. While they're sitting on the couch, doing absolutely nothing, who they say they are is who they are. But once tension and pressure gets put into the situation where they're outside of that comfort zone, well, now they're gonna be faced with a reality of a true identity that is either going to be comforting because they are who they say they are to themselves and to the world or they come up incredibly short to that. And that is just certainly scary for a lot of people because that means that what is on paper is not what's in their mind and is not what shows up in reality. And at that point, there's either work to be done or you submit to what that reality is. And that could be quite terrifying for some people. Yeah, we have five disciplines in the book that they're more or less in order and it starts with values. So you really, the foundation of everything is who are you and why are you doing this? Why are you performing? Why do you wanna get better for yourself, not for others? But then we spend a whole chapter talking about mindset which we've talked a little bit about and then we get into process which Eric was just talking about, process not outcome. And on that one, it's very easy when you have a bad outcome. It's very natural to go, whoa, I have to change something. I did something wrong, I made a mistake. Something has to change and blow things up. And what we're preaching there is no, sometimes you can do everything right and things still go wrong. You play right and you still lose the game. So don't overreact. Part of that comes from your identity but mostly it comes from your confidence in your process and having a process to adjust your process. I'll say this, Johnny. I highly doubt that many, if any listeners to your UNAJ's podcast here are going to be kind of couch surfers or couch potatoes. But given that there might be a few, I would challenge them to once they do this and we unpack this in the book, there are some great stories of very high level performers, Cliff Divers, Snowboard Champions, Cirque du Soleil. And the minute you can codify, if you will, and really document kind of those value or identity markers, even though you might be on a couch saying, hey, I know what those are, but the minute you not only document them, but here's the key. I have reading glasses somewhere. My reading glasses, if I gave you my reading glasses to each of you to try on, you would say, wow, Eric, your vision is screwed up because it's my prescription. So yeah, maybe, there you go. But my point is here, it not only becomes freeing, but once people actually make decisions based on those values, that's where the game changes. It's not just writing them down. It's actually using that as a filter saying, okay, I'm gonna do things that are true to who I am, as opposed to the noise outside of the circle. And again, I know that it's just gonna require some trust and belief, but if you don't believe us, like I would invite your readers, hey, read the book and read these great stories from elite performers that once they do this, they don't give to you know what's about what other people think. They're focused on their convicted kind of linear path on what they believe they ought to be doing and why. Now that process piece is, Alan, you had alluded to a lot of times when we fail, we can wanna change the process or you can become a bit of a process junkie and getting golf swing tips on YouTube and then on TikTok and oh, I gotta change it. And all of a sudden you've created this Frankenstein process that is not gonna get you anywhere near the performance that you need or want. So how can we know that the process that we're on is right and who do we need to bring in to help us make sure that we stick to that process to be successful? I have a few pet peeves in life. One of them is watching performers or people make changes without measurement. Drives me bananas and this to your point about like golf swing on YouTube when we document a very high performer who will remain nameless but was literally taking athletic advice from a Starbucks barista for those baristas listening for those baristas listening to your podcast here. I appreciate what you do. I could not function in this world without what you do. So thank you, but you have literally no business or little business giving feedback to a tier one athlete. So my point here is if you're going to iterate a change and all of us well, we're gonna iterate process changes as we age and stage, whether physicality changes, whether talking to Johnny a musician as well as you age and stage, you may have to iterate changes as well. My point is change one thing at a time and measure that because if we change all three I often bring up fly fishing as a great example. I'm a part-time obviously resident of Montana. I love to fly fish. There's only three ways if catching fish is important and it isn't catching release, I really don't care. But if catching fish is important, there really only three ways that you can catch fish, right? Where on the river, how many casts and the type of fly you're using. If I don't catch fish and I change all three and I start to catch fish, how the hell do I know why? So I think it's important to really adopt an iterative process. I'm gonna make a change. I'm gonna measure that. I'm gonna bounce it off valid and vetted board of directors or coaching staff or the people I trust in my life. And then I'll measure it and then make another change if necessary. Now, Alan, you brought up contingencies and for some of our audience members and sometimes myself included, it can feel like catastrophizing. Do you think about all the contingencies and all the things that can go wrong? So how do we put together a contingency plan that will actually work to better our performance and not bog us down in a negative mindset that might keep us from taking the actions we need to? I don't see why it's catastrophizing to be prepared because things go wrong. It's as simple as you're giving a presentation and it always happens. Suddenly your laptop decides that's the time to reboot and download the latest install, right? And now you gotta kill 20 minutes. So be ready for that. Have a second laptop. Be ready to do it on a whiteboard. What have you? And think through these things. What if this happens? What if that happens? It doesn't mean it's gonna happen. It doesn't mean you have to focus on that happening but it reduces the stress because when that happens you go, all right, I'm ready for that. I gave a speech last year at a conference and I practiced that speech. I was ready to go and I was two thirds of the way through it and boom, I forgot what was next. And I did not prepare for that contingency. So I muddled through it, I figured it out. But there were several seconds of stammering on stage in an awkward audience. I tell you what, next time I'm gonna be ready for that. What if I forget what's next? Maybe I'll have a cheat sheet with me. Maybe I'll have a joke ready to go. I don't know. But it's simple things like that. The only thing it can do is reduce the stress. The other thing I'll add, I'm somewhat biased as a 20 year retired commander in the Navy, obviously. But in the military, we have this thing and had this thing called readiness. I think outside of the military, aviation has it. You want your pilot and co-pilot to be very well versed in multiple contingencies if you're 35,000 feet or 36,000 feet above earth. In medicine, I hope none of us have to go through surgery but when you go through a surgery, there's a medical team that has multiple contingencies in place. So we often view contingency planning as just kind of something that the really high end astronauts, surgeons, Navy SEALs do. I actually say false. I scream false. I think all of us can iterate and be ready with multiple contingencies. The good thing about having a contingency plan is that ideally won't cause you to catastrophize. Instead, it causes you never to exhibit the human stress response. If I have plan A, B, C, and D and plan A and B die on the vine and I had no plan C, I'm gonna have stress. I'm gonna be Allen on that stage going, oh, God, now what do I do? Or if I have this plan built, it seamlessly flows into not a big deal. So I think for the listeners, I would invite you to also start to build in contingency planning into everything that you do. People talk a lot about visualization and we include that as one of our techniques in the book. And people tend, I think, visualize what I'm gonna do, what's gonna go well. When I was practicing for that talk, I visualized giving the speech. Of course, I did not visualize forgetting the speech. And so when we're talking about contingency planning, bake it into your visualization. It's not gonna make it happen. It's not gonna add stress. It will actually reduce stress because you know, no matter what happens, I'm ready. Yeah, so I'd love to unpack the management of stress because obviously we know stress impacts performance and even with the best plans and process and contingencies, as we heard, you can have that blank out moment on stage in this big moment and this huge spike of stress. So what can we do to get ourselves ready before performance to manage stress? And then can we also talk about what to do in the moment when that stress is at an all-time high? Yeah, we have an entire chapter called adversity tolerance. And I think that when you look at the top, thousands of performers, irrespective of their discipline and what they do, these men and women are just doing more of these more consistently than most. And some of those things that you talked about are pre and post-performance routines. So I would invite all of us on this podcast as well as your audience to really think about what are those routines that get you kind of catalyzed, ready to go? I mean, obviously, Johnny's nodding. I mean, he's a musician. So music, ironically, and I'm not saying it because we have a musician here on the podcast, but music is probably the most popular. Like if I wanna go and practice an athletic performance and I listen, I'm gonna age myself. If I listen to Metallica or ACDC's Thunderstruck, that's going to get me going with a mindset of performance markedly different than say Beethoven or Mozart, which may be a post-performance routine. So pre and post-performance routines are one thing. I think as Alan said, visualization, pre, you ought to visualize many contingencies as possible. I think positive self-talk and thought management, managing that positive self-talk during the performance. I think being able to black box, the psychological term is compartmentalized. So when things don't go well, and by the way, we're human and we interact with technology, there are going to be failures all the time. Athletes are going to drop a pass, strike out. I was at a Van Halen concert years ago with my wife. And this was a handful of years ago, not too long ago, but it was when David Lee Roth came back with the band. And I think Sebastian Van Halen was playing as well with, anyhow, not unlike Alan, David Lee Roth in the middle of a song, literally forgot the lyrics. Like literally forgot. And I was just sitting there going, wow, this is crazy. And he dropped an F bomb and turned to his band saying, let's start again from the top. And my point is you have to be able to compartmentalize what we call black box it. You can't let that derail, in his case, the rest of his concert. In an athlete's case, the other endings or quarters that he or she is going to play. So I think that a long answer to your question, AJ, is there are multiple factors or disciplines? We unpack 10 specific ones in that adversity tolerance chapter that we believe move the needle and we're learning from the best performers in the world. So in a way, we're inviting the reader to reverse engineer what the best are doing. And it's not hard, by the way, no pun intended. They're all learned. None of us are born with any of them, by the way. Well, those processes are incredibly important to put yourself in the emotional and mindset that you wanna be in to perform at a high level. And what I loved about the book was that you also brought attention regardless if you know it or not, you have these processes. And if you take the time to look at what your morning process looks like, and sure to you, you're hanging out in your pajamas, making some coffee, and then maybe you'll get a shower. But if you look at that as that's the process of what you're getting ready for the day, you can make changes to optimize that to get you in the best state to perform at your best. But we never look at those things to that manner. They're just how we go about the day, but they have a purpose regardless whether you know it or not. Yeah, we have a section in the book about time management where we talked to several people, a lot of top business people about just how they organize their day and they organize their morning. And they are investing time in family things. You know, it's not all work, work, work except while they're doing that, they may say, okay, when I'm doing this, I'm gonna start thinking about work. I'm gonna start getting myself in that mindset. So a lot of it, like you said, are the things we're already doing and we're just saying be a little more intentional on how you're using that time. If you loved your couch potato time in the evening, that's great, put it in your calendar and be intentional to not do anything during that time. Like not think about shit, you know, like just be intentional on how you're using each of those times and adopting the right mindset. Now with that black boxing, just like in the plane crash scenario, we have to go back to the box and check the tapes. So not good in the moment should never derail your performance, but we gotta figure out what put us in that state. So walk us through what you do after the performance then to actually take meaningful data from that experience. Yeah, so Eric Spolstra, I believe obviously one of the best coaches of all time, Miami Heat Coach. He's in the book as well and he talks about a term that he learned from the military. We have something in the military called After Action Reviews or AARs. And that's a really important, I think, tactic that all the listeners can think about how they wanna employ in their lives as well or deploy in their lives. And I think that it's one thing to put something in the box to stay mission-minded whether it's a concert and you forget the lyrics, whether it's an athletic performance, whether it's a business presentation, you can't let that derail you. The non-elite performer gets completely derailed and shaken up and they literally have action paralysis. The elite performer boxes it and then as you appropriately mentioned, now in a safer space, not trying to sound touchy-feely here, but literally away from that performance, unpack it with people who can give you honest feedback. If you're an athlete, there's a tremendous number of I think the average professional athlete has between nine and 13 various coaches. So they are the strength and conditioning, nutrition, everything. There's video, there's also in the business world, there's a professional coach. We can unpack that at Nazian, but it's really important, what am I learning from that? And I think there are three, in addition to the AAR, there are three things that I would invite the audience to think about. What did we do well? What can we do better? In other words, what failed, right? What did I have to black box? And the most important thing are what are the processes we can put in play to make sure that doesn't happen again? So as Alan talked about, right? The first time I'm hearing about his failure on stage, which I think is a delicious example, but he put a process in play to make sure that doesn't happen again. So I do think the AARs, the unpacking of the box is a really important tactic. And Eric, you talk about putting distance or a safe place like it's a touchy-feely thing, but I think that's the critical aspect of doing an effective unpacking the black box. Get past the emotions, because when you make a mistake, you're mad, you're upset, you're sad, you're feeling down on yourself, and you need to put that in the black box and move on. And then after the event, after the interview, after the presentation, after the speech, what have you, you may still be feeling a lot of that buzz. You're not in a position to unpack the box yet. So we talked to Eric Spolstra and he talks about, maybe a couple of days after a game, he'll get the team in the locker room and they unpack the box together as a team. The emotions have subsided, there's less opportunity for finger pointing, and you can be much more rational. What happened, why, what do we learn from it? Yeah, I remember our first experience working with the military, and we were excited that they got great results and we wanted to get that after action report immediately. And it took a couple of weeks, almost three weeks, and we asked, what's taken so long, and exactly that for that reason. Listen, at the end of any training, there's gonna be highs, there's gonna be emotions involved, and it's gonna feel like we achieved our objectives and our outcome, but it is important for us to create the space for the emotions to dissipate, to then look and say, okay, these were the outcomes that we wanted out of the training, this is specifically what we were trained on, where are we now beyond any emotional high or low? Cause to your point, there's definitely low in failure, but you can't learn much either in success if you're just gonna ride the high of that emotion. Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, I think for me, this could be an entirely different podcast, I don't wanna go down a rabbit hole, but emotions are contagious, and that's probably why the military kept you at arm's length for a little bit as well, is they're digesting that. The worst decisions that I've seen made ever as a performance psychologist and coach for high performers are the ones that are made out of emotion. They're horrible, horrible decisions, and generally it causes everyone else, like I know when I'm around someone who's anxious, I feel more anxious, when I'm around people who are angry and irritated, guess what I feel? I feel angry and irritated. So again, if you think of an emotion as a contagion, I wanna make sure if I'm giving people feedback or if I'm receiving feedback, I wanna try to be emotionally neutral. So I'm not swayed one way or the other. So I agree with you wholeheartedly. Now there's an entire section of the book on balance and recovery, and I think it's very easy in the social media world to see top performers with their crazy schedules and everything they're doing and all the hours they're working on it, and to think they're superhuman, when in actuality, we all need sleep, we all need moments to recover, and sometimes there's gonna be other parts of our life or other identities that are just gonna have to be de-prioritized for us to perform at the level we need to in this specific situation. So how do you both approach balance and recovery in your performance identities? And are there any things that we might be doing wrong when it comes to balance and recovery for our audience members who, I know we had an episode recently around burnout that was really popular. I think a lot of our audience are feeling burnout for this reason. I really like the metaphor of a beach house. Like if we're all a beach house and I invite your listeners to think about the same thing you pretend, you are all of a sudden objectified as a beach house. Those homes that are on one or two pillars are going to be less stable than those homes on five or six. When the waves of adversity to stick with the metaphor come, obviously it's gonna wipe out a lot. When I, as a performance psychologist, both now within a career in the military and a career in professional sport, and I'm not gonna use names here, but I think we could each name five or six people in most disciplines that have become what they do, literally. They are a really good insert the blank. And they've fed and watered that for an entire career and entire life almost. And then when it's time to transition based on ages and stages, whether we call that retirement or whether we call that whatever. What we see is, again, I'm not gonna say names here, but we see a lot of these lives fall apart. Because again, they're so enmeshed on what they do. So I invite the audience members to think about six different pillars. Work relationships, which are both friendships, romantic as well as family. The third pillar's health, fourth pillar's hobbies, fifth pillar's spirituality can be religion, but doesn't have to be. You can be spiritual and just be in awe of this universe and this planet. And then lastly, legacy. And I would invite the audience members to think about how they're spending time and emotional and physical and financial resources within each of those areas. The last thing I'll say is I'm a research geek, I'm gonna geek out here a little bit. It used to be thought that the most balanced performers weren't the best at what they do. Not only false, patently false. When you look at the meta-analyses and that consolidate a bunch of different studies, those performers who are more balanced are actually more likely to innovate. They're healthier, they live longer and oh, wow, how ironic. They tend to be a lot more productive as well. So whatever they do for a living will actually become magnified if they feed in water multiple pillars on their proverbial beach house, as it were. Beautiful metaphor. I think it works so well in this category. And I know many in our audience are thinking of some of those pillars, but maybe not all six. So thank you for outlining it. Another question that I have for the audience members who are new parents or our parents, when we think about performance, we often think about our kids. So you talk family and legacy, those are two things that come up and immediately the parents in the audience go, okay, but I want my kids to perform at an elite level. So what advice do you have for parents when it comes to getting someone else to perform, not looking at themselves? Well, first, just reflecting back on the house on stilts. We're also realistic, like let's say you're one of those parents when you're raising kids and you're in the middle of a career. And boy, you know, it doesn't really just, you really just don't have much time to work out or to focus on spirituality or what have you. It's just not realistic. And so we're realistic about that and these things will adjust through your ages and stages. Our perspective though is when it comes to balance is be aware if there is a pillar that is being undernourished because you just don't have time right now. At least be aware of it and have a plan. Maybe three months from now, you're gonna take a vacation. And during that vacation, you're gonna go for a walk every day for 45 minutes. You know, whatever it is, have a plan so that you're going to be investing in balance at least over the longer term. And then on the parent side, Eric, you get that question all the time. What do you say? Yeah, so here I'm gonna skate on some thin ice and hopefully I don't fall in the proverbial lake. But I'm gonna tell you, I'm a big fan of having kids start to navigate working outside of comfort zones and iterating failure and failure with, let's call it controlled failure. Again, I don't want CPS Child Protective Services to be called here saying, hey, Dr. Padrat, it's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the world is a very difficult and complex place that is going to become more difficult and more complex, whether it's climate, politics, population, resources, COVID, whatever. I mean, we could go down this rabbit hole at 1,000 days until tomorrow. My point is we need what I want, ideally, is if you're listeners with kids, A, get the book, sorry, but I mean, seriously, because I'm a big believer that these tools and techniques are not being taught in schools and ought to be. It's shameful and I'll get off my soapbox. But I think it's important that if we're gonna ask kids and children to navigate in iterations of discomfort, then it's the onus is on us as parents to make sure and as mentors to make sure we're arming them with tools and techniques that are empirically based to navigate those adversities. Meaning, I want you to try something outside of your comfort zone. Again, back to what I said, the worst mistakes kids can make is working too fast out of that comfort zone or too far. But if we iterate and teach them breathing, teach them visualization, teach them black boxing, teach them contingency planning, teach them positive self-talk, and then they challenge themselves to work further and further, then what we have is a 25 to 30 year old who knows how to navigate adversity. Right now, I fear that there are gonna be a lot of people that are risk averse who are not practicing working out of the comfort zone. So I would challenge those parents on the call not to all the sudden put your kids in crazy positions of failure, but make sure that they're challenging themselves to try something new and what are they learning from that every day? We interviewed 32 people. I think we asked almost everyone of them a similar question and we all got very many similar answers. Put them in a position to experience some adversity. And we had this one story which I just loved which was from a former Navy SEAL named Peter Nashak. And he was, he went to Hawaii with his mom when he was 10, 11, something like that. And he saw some guy, he said cliff diving. I'm not sure what they were doing. He saw some people diving into a lagoon. And he saw, that sounds, that looks sort of fun. Mom, why don't you go talk to them and see if I can join them. And his mom said, no, you go talk to them. And he said, that was scarier than diving off the cliff. Going to talk to some strangers. And his mom's right there. Like she's not sending them off in any dangerous situation. But there's a small thing where she just said, no, you go try this thing that pushes you out of your comfort zone. And to this day, you know, former Navy SEAL, he remembers that as a watershed moment for him. For children, the idea of facing boredom is plenty adversity, right? But it's like, here, go outside and entertain yourself. Well, I could be completely entertained by playing these video games. That's right. That's why you're going outside, go find a stick and go find something to whack with it and occupy your time for four hours. And when kids are able then to go out there and then figure that out, they enter into their imagination and create worlds onto themselves that they can explore. But without that adversity, they can't plug into their imagination. They can't plug into being resourceful. They can't plug into their social skills, which all are going to help them succeed in the world. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I'll say three simple, I'm a simpleton, right? I try to keep things relatively simple. For your audience members who have children, if you can just do three things with your kids, I'll consider this a strong victory. Ask them what they've learned new today every day. I'm just literally three questions every day. What do you learn new today? Were you brave? So if we go back to the learning question, that forces them to actually try something new and adopt a new skill. Were you brave? It forces them to work a little bit incrementally outside of a comfort zone. And then the last question, were you kind? And we all know there's a ton of research around being kind and being empathetic and it builds adversity, all of that. So if parents can just focus on those three things, what do you learn? Were you brave and were you kind? Over time, it's gonna be like compound interest, man. That's gonna deliver deliciously, to be honest. Now, with that, I think a challenge is when to quit. So we talked a lot about adversity, facing adversity, putting yourself in uncertain situations, but then there's the flip side of, well, maybe I'm just not gonna get beyond that place of performance and maybe there's something else that I should be putting my focus or effort and energy behind. Do you have any rules or strategies around knowing when to quit or how to identify when it's time to hang it up? Not to come full circle intentionally, but I do think it's this ought to be values driven as well. Like if we use that as a compass, right? That should be true North, as long as I'm hitting my values. But I don't like the term quit as much as I love the term pivot. And I think it's important that times people have the freedom and flexibility to realize, hey, this isn't for me, but I'm still gonna leverage the exact same identity markers or value markers. I'm gonna find a way to scratch that itch, right? I may be competitive as all hell and that may mean one of my identity markers or value credo markers. But if I can't be a professional athlete or professional musician, how can I still scratch that itch of competitiveness and pivot elsewhere? Yeah, we have this great story. We talked to a guy named Derek Walker. He's a finance executive at Nike. Derek initially wanted to be a pro baseball player and he was in the minors for, I think it was in the Diamondbacks organization for about four years. Didn't make it. He didn't quit. He talked about pivoting and he talked about what did I like about that experience? What did I learn from that experience? Where can I get a similar experience? So he went for the Navy SEALs and made it almost all the way through training, but he did not succeed. Isn't that right, Eric? He failed in training. That's correct. So here's a guy that almost all the way through Hell Week and Bud's training and failed again. But again, learn from that. What can I learn from that? Went into business, got an MBA, has done very well. And so just his simple act of retraining a failure from reframing it from quitting to pivoting, I think was a very powerful for him. Absolutely. Thank you for coming full circle. It was so great to have both of you join the show. We're excited for the book to come out and share with our audience. Where can they find out more about the book and the work you do? Yeah, so the book comes out February 6th. Thank you for mentioning that. I invite the listeners to go on learnedexcellence.com. The book is called Learned Excellence. And yeah, please pass the word for sure. We certainly believe it's a very fine, I think hybrid of really great stories as well as the empirical side, which I think it needs to be research-based, evidence-based as well. And hopefully it's helpful and valuable to everybody. Absolutely. And I love the one, three and six month plan at the back of the book. I think tons of value there for audience members who love taking action. So thank you again, Eric and Alan. It was so great having you. Thank you. Thank you both so much. Thanks for having us.