#193 Dr. Jim Loehr: Change the Stories You Tell Yourself
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I'm very curious and I will be till my last breath. That's the gift, teaching people to be excited about what you could become and what you might really find great joy in mastering. If you can do that as a teacher, as a parent, that is a forever gift that will never stop giving.

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Today, my guest is Dr. Jim Lehrer, who's a world renowned performance psychologist, co-founder of the Human Performance Institute and author of more books than I can count, including one that really impacted me a while ago called The Power of Full Engagement. Dr. Lehrer believes the single most important factor in successful achievement, personal fulfillment and life satisfaction is the strength of our character.

I wanted to talk to Jim because his belief in matching energy and time had a fundamental impact on how I spend my time and how I allocate my days.

In this episode, we talk a lot about the little voice inside our head, the one narrating life for us, the one writing the story. We explore when it powers us, when it limits us, how we can recognize when it's serving us and when it's not, how to edit it, how what we say affects our kids' narrative that they are telling themselves, and the difference between what the best in the world tell themselves and other people.

We also explore the power of journaling, matching time and energy, decision-making, and health foundations. It's time to listen and learn.

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Let's start with how we tell stories about ourselves to ourselves. We tell stories around work, family, health, happiness, and friendship. And the story that we tell ourselves in reality are often different. Sometimes our stories empower us and sometimes they limit us. And I'm wondering if maybe we could explore a little bit about the story you used to tell yourself as a father. That's an interesting question. You know, I have three sons.

And it wasn't until I became heavily involved in the field of psychology and mental health and performance psychology that I began to realize that just about everything we say publicly and privately in our head is a story. We don't have direct contact with the real world. We have all this data streaming into our five sensory portals.

And then our big neuro processor has to make sense out of that. And there's a preference for making sense in terms of what's already been loaded in. So if you get information that might be somehow contradictory to what's in there, you tend to just purge it. You tend not to listen or you tend not to incorporate it. And the more I began to understand this and as a father,

You know, I wish I had understood it much earlier in my life. I began to realize that the way I spoke to my three sons, my public voice became a major factor in the way their private voice would speak to them as they grew older. When I realized that, I stopped on a dime because I didn't want something that I might have said haphazardly, you know, I said something off the cuff.

you know, that was actually not aligned with my values or who I really wanted them to think of themselves as. And you kind of think, well, they don't really hear it, but our brains are always listening. And there are some people that get direct access into command center, what I call command central, and a father, at least for a period of time, and the mother have direct entry into the sacred space

where most of the meaning is created in our storytelling. If as a father, I say to my sons, you know, I don't know what's the matter with you. You're always screwing things up. I really wonder if I'd have had your opportunities, I would have been a star. And you say these things and you don't think they're really going to have much of an effect. You're trying to motivate them.

But the more we have learned about the power of this inner voice in directing traffic, your inner voice, pretty much as we've learned it, determines your destiny. So I am every time I speak to my sons, every time I speak to my grandsons, I'm very careful that is this what I want them to say to themselves?

when they start maturing in life. That was a game changer for me, big time. What questions should we be asking ourselves to better understand if the story we're telling ourselves is empowering or limiting us? Again, there's this level of awareness, and I have tried in my career to raise the curtain so that people understand

that there's something going on that maybe was purely automatic. And maybe the voice you got, you never really intentionally acquired. But suddenly you have this critic inside yourself or this storyteller that we all have. And you have to stop and reflect. I have rules of storytelling. They're not really rules, they're guidelines. And the first thing is the rule has to be true.

Is this aligned with reality? So the first awareness, am I making stuff up here that just is convenient for the moment to maybe make me feel better? Or is this aligned with really objective reality? That's the first kind of principle of really good storytelling. Another one is, is this story that I'm telling myself, is it aligned with the best part of me, with who I really want to be in life, my values, my sense of purpose?

Does this story take me where I want to go in life? Does it help me feel more optimistic and hopeful about my future? Or does it in fact give me a sense that, you know, I'm not that capable, the world is tough, I probably can't make it, why am I doing this? This is stupid. And so I really want people to have this kind of automatic sensor before you allow these stories to take form.

That you intentionally, purposefully orchestrate them so that these stories are aligned with the best part of you. And if they were made known publicly to all the people that you know or put on a jumbotron, you would be proud of the way you have been coaching yourself, talking to yourself about things.

What's the storm that you're in or about the future that you're crafting? And I'm very hopeful that the more we can bring an awareness to people's lives, I have changed so many people's thinking about so many things in sport and outside of it. And it's basically the question you ask, which is,

How do we make our stories really, really help us navigate better in life? You work with a lot of world-class performers. Is there a difference between the story they're telling themselves and the story that the rest of us tell ourselves? What's so interesting is that when they started, often they just, they had a love affair with whatever sport they were involved in. They never had any dreams or were, they just, you know, they just thought these are,

people who have become number one in the world. I've had 17 people that have become number one in the world. And when they look back, they're so astonished because they never dreamed this was ever going to happen. They dreamed of being maybe a great tennis player, golfer, speed skater, but they never dreamed they would have this kind of accumulated success over so many years. But as they get more success, the possibilities begin to increase.

open up in their minds about what they can and can't do. And all I can tell you is that the sense of joy in the pursuit and to be able to have parents who enable it, not force you, but actually give you the opportunity to explore this in your own way and then be surrounded by great coaches who I had a great coach in the early part of my

athletic career in basketball. And he saw something in me that I never saw in myself, Coach Guy Gibbs in basketball. And he came into my life at a very important time. I was kind of struggling with confidence. And somehow this guy that I really felt was an extraordinary human being. And that's the way we look at most of our coaches. I mean, coaches have a special place in our lives. He really just took me aside and said, listen, Laird, you can be really good.

And I'm going to push you until you get there. And I want you, I believe in you more than you believe in yourself. I will never forget it. I've written many books. He's now passed away, unfortunately. But a lot of my books, I credit him for

You know, coming into my life at an important point and we never know when something that we say or do is going to impact someone in a powerful way. But most of the number ones and really high success athletes that I worked with never, never really dreamed when they have to pinch themselves when they realize I'm number one in the world now. What the world?

But as they pursued a love affair with their sport, it's very hard if you're forced to become number one in the world with a parent hanging over your head or it just doesn't last. It's just it's really unfortunate. And I've been there many times. It's not like you're starting out saying, I want to be number one in the world. And you really believe it. And you start and you're just beginning with a sport. There are a few that said they kind of knew everything.

Novak Djokovic, who's probably the greatest tennis player, is the greatest tennis player of all time. One of his early coaches, her name was Yelena, said of all the young athletes that she had trained as a young little boy, she told him that he had the greatest potential than anyone that he had ever seen. And I think that kind of changed his perception of himself. Now, what if she had told him that?

And he really didn't have all that potential. You know, he would have continued to push as long as he had a love affair with the sport and really love getting better and learning. If he didn't become number one in the world, if he never made a professional career out of it, if the message is right, use this sport to help you grow up and become a better human being.

And if you become number one in the world in doing it, you know, no one loses. I don't care how far you go. I try to send that message over and over again. But when you start out, it's pretty hard to believe you're going to be number one. If it is, it's probably just you're blowing smoke into the world. That's all it is. But you're trying to lift yourself up and maybe give you a hope that someday you might be inspired to be like

Novak Djokovic or the greatest athletes of all time in their sports. But for me, I have to say that I never thought I would end up in the character space. I'm a performance psychologist. People come to me because they want to win. And I wrote most of my early books on mental toughness. And it was all about how do you

get so strong mentally and emotionally that you can out-compete anybody because the muscles between your ears are stronger than they'll ever have. You have skills that they maybe don't have between their ears, and that's what I specialized in for most of my career. But then I began to realize something very different. And I began to notice that the careers of those who really developed

these incredible, what I call character strengths,

be they performance or really moral and ethical character strengths. I began to realize that more important than what you achieve is who you become as a consequence of the chase. That you're becoming a person, some kind of person, either brutal, warm, loving, caring, focused, dedicated, kind. You have integrity, you're honest, you're grateful. And what I began to see is that

People who developed these moral and ethical skills from their coaches and parents, along with the skills of the sport, they were the true winners. And they were much more likely to sustain the success because everyone wanted them to succeed. So I still have to wake up and think, how did I end up in the character space? I had nothing in my training whatsoever to take me there. But I'm a data guy and we had...

By the time we left the Human Performance Institute, which a company I co-founded, over 400,000 people go through.

And it was a massive data set. And I would look at this and I love data trends. And we were so fortunate to have all these extraordinary people come through. And that's where it led me. So I started going there. And I'm still a little bit shocked that I ended up in that space. But it's more important to me than what you achieve is the way in which you achieved it and who you became as a consequence of the chase.

That's a powerful message. When we recognize our stories need editing, now what? How do we change them? That is another great question, Shane. So I wrote a book and it was called The Power of Story. And the subtitle was...

Your story becomes your destiny. And every book I've written, I've written 19 books, and each one of them represents another insight that I never had before. If it's new to me, maybe it would be new to other people as well. Maybe I'm just a slow learner.

I began to realize that the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others either enable us to fulfill and to have a great life or actually take us in tragic directions. And I've seen this over and over again. And more important again than what happens to us in life is the story we craft around what happens to us. And if we realize that our story is faulty,

that we're making stuff up that's literally not helping us, really do not, the story elements do not fit what I would say the principles, the guidelines of good storytelling, then you've got to edit that story just as you suggested. And again, this will probably surprise

many of the folks who were listening, but we tried everything. And we had a lot of very smart people. We had some of the smartest people. I mean, our faculty was one of the most brilliant faculties I think we'll ever, ever assemble. And we tried visualization. We tried very interesting ways of kind of changing the way people actually process thinking and thoughts over a period of time over and again. And what we finally concluded was that your hand is

your hand, writing, probably had the greatest impact on neurological functioning, on the way in which these neural networks formed and were changed, than anything else we could do. If I were to ask you, if you needed to remember something, what would be the most likely thing you would do to remember it? You'd probably write it down. What we call an executive functioning, prefrontal cortex and cortex, there's

something that's happening and moving the muscles of your hand that actually create a greater imprint and are much more likely to be sustained. There's a brilliant researcher by the name of James Pennebaker. He's at the University of Texas. And I mean, it's incredible the kind of success on the protocols he's had

in helping people overcome trauma with their hand, with writing, with writing skills. But we found that creating the story that works for you with your hand and rewriting it several times from memory and then reading it and even using the voice memo on your phone where you actually talk to yourself over the phone

your voice memo capability and then you play it back and you listen to yourself coaching you. It's not having someone from the outside coaching you with their public voice. You are taking your private voice and making it public and now listening to it and trying to get a new way of having these neural pathways in your brain transfer information. And eventually over time,

the story begins to change. So, it might be, I hate putting, I've never been a good putter in sport,

And if I could just be a great putter, I would be on the PGA Tour list and one of the top guys or women. But and then the story you tell yourself is I just don't seem to have the ability to be a good putter. I've always had trouble putting and I think this is my greatest. So I say that you can't get there with that story. That story is so limiting.

Here's the story that works for you. At this point in my life, the truth is, if you look at my stats, I'm one of the poor putters on the PGA Tour or the LPGA Tour. That's true. But I'm an athlete and I have to tell you, one day I'm going to become one of the best putters, if not the best putter on tour. And I'll tell you why. Because I am going to devote more energy, more effort, more

I'm going to make this the most important part of my game and I'm going to love doing it. And every time I see a green, I'm going to light up and say, "Ah, fantastic. I have another chance to practice my putting and to get it right." And if I miss a putt, a three-footer for a birdie, I'll simply say, "Thank God I got that out of my system."

Now I'm going to get better. And so you develop a running kind of narrative with yourself that builds confidence, builds belief, builds this, and you start by crafting the perfect story with your hand. And the more your hand works, and it actually, what we found, James Pennebaker hasn't found this though, but with our data collection, we found that it's more powerful to do it by hand than it is on a computer.

And so we have everybody do it. You can print it or you can cursive writing, however you want to do it. But we prefer that you do it by hand. And each new iteration you do from memory and then you compare it with the last one. And then those that you're putting new energy into this process.

network where stories are told around putting or around your marriage or around your intelligence, your confidence. And that's what we've done over the years. We've had so many astonishing successes. And I had no idea any of this was going to surface. It all took years of practice and data collection and

to refine it. And I feel very grateful to have had that opportunity, what I call a living lab for helping distill a lot of the mysteries of how this miraculous human system is engineered. I love the nature of writing. We encourage that with sort of decision journals and as the means by which we can reflect or one of the ways by which we can reflect

And one of the ways which we can learn to think as well. So not only do we discover through writing that we don't know what we're talking about always, but we discover new ideas and we come to a new understanding. It's so powerful as a form. And if you look throughout history, most of the people who we would consider the greats of history at one point or another have journaled.

I completely agree and it was something that I started with after learning about this with a lot of our clients and so forth. I started journaling and I mean I get up in the morning I have to do it. It's almost like an addiction now and I try to program my day and look at all the things and when anybody asks me you know how am I feeling today my response is if I'm feeling a little foggy and I have a headache or whatever I'll say you know I

I have a little, I have a few things that are bothering me, but I gotta tell you, I'm excited about having another opportunity to push the needle, to learn a little bit more. I'm grateful for this day. And if you put that down in writing, something magical happens. It's like it changes the whole kind of template, the screen, the mindset you have

for, you know, dealing with all the storms that you are inevitably going to face all day long so it doesn't become a nightmare day. And that's, it's a wonderful lesson. I'm such a believer in journaling. Are there particular questions that you come back to, whether it's when you're journaling or helping people identify or modify their story that they can be asking themselves and reflecting upon? Well, one of the things, again, I...

All these things I didn't get from my working on a master's or doctorate degree in psychology. So you've got a degree in the real world. I've got it in the real world. But we began to realize that all the people that came there, that the people that had the greatest success had a deep, compelling reason for success.

expending all this energy in completing the mission that they had set for themselves during this intensive program. So we began to realize that there are some forms of purpose, if you want to call it that, that take you way beyond where you would normally go in terms of the effort and energy and expenditure and

It's almost like a mission for once it's tied to your success, we ask people to really describe in their language what is the ultimate mission they're on in life. The mission for which failure is not possible if they're going to be successful in life. And so we try to get them to understand that we're all here for a purpose. You had no choice in terms of showing up on planet Earth at this time.

But you do have a choice as to how you want to spend the energy, the precious energy you have and the time that you have while you're here. And what would define ultimate success of your life? So we began to really, really dig into that purpose. And then we link whatever change they want to make to that purpose. So in my own life, you know, my purpose is life.

I laminated it and put it in my wallet and now it has continued to evolve. And probably the most compelling purpose is that I live what I teach. And that is that I don't teach to others something I don't do myself or that I think is only for other people. And so the question that I ask myself every day, I look back on yesterday and

And I go, did I live what I believe is really the most important mission I'm on? And was I consistent in terms of

fulfilling what I believe my ultimate purpose is with my three sons, with my grandsons, with my colleagues. I'm trying to hold myself to account in terms of the purpose for which I believe I am here for. And that resonates with me and I'm willing to do anything and everything I can to make sure I don't fail. And for me right now, I'm in a position where

I don't really need to put the metal to the floor, but I'm more fired up now because I want to make sure that what I'm teaching, what I'm delivering on this podcast, if someone were to do an audit of my life, it would actually reflect this is how Jim Lehrer actually runs his life. It's not just something that he speaks about, but he applies it first to himself and then hopefully by example,

People will be interested in hearing more about it. I want to come back to something you said earlier about as children and grandchildren, we sort of inherit

the stories that were told by the people in our lives. And, you know, you had a great teacher and that's, that was a powerful change of your story where he, or coach, I guess he believed in you before you believed in yourself. And the story we tell as parents becomes the inner monologue, I guess, the inner narrative that our children grow up with. What are, what

the things that we can do as parents listening to change that for the positive with our kids when they come home with a test that they, you know, maybe they failed or they're struggling with something or how can we change the story that we're telling them so it becomes a different story that they're growing up with and a different story they're inheriting from us? A lot of people are not even that aware of this inner voice.

Until someone makes them more aware of it. And a lot of the athletes that we worked with thought that whatever is going on between their ears, it's just like you're pushing air around. There's nothing really happening. You can think something, but it doesn't really work.

doesn't seem to have any consequence. So it's just kind of like nonsense. It's like babble between the ears that is just of no consequence. But we have come to an understanding that everyone has an inner voice, a private voice. Everyone has a public voice unless they have a speech issue. And it almost looks as if it's coded in the genes because one generation

passes on that inner voice to the next. Your public voice with your children become their inner voice. And if you talk to them in certain ways that are very destructive, demeaning, critical, sarcastic, even though your response is, hey, I'm not trying to be anything but a good parent that's going to help them face a tough world. I don't want to develop wusses. I'm not going to be all

kindness and love and all that garbage, I'm gonna be like a drill sergeant because life is tough. And their parents before them, they say kids today have it way too easy.

And you have to remember, I'm the guy that wrote a lot of the books on mental toughness. So I'm not for the wussification of youth, trust me. But what's so interesting is that the voice of your parents, unless you became very aware of it and intentionally changed it, you're going to bring that voice, particularly under stress, to your children. So the first issue is I want you to tune in

to what kind of coach are you to yourself? What is your inner voice? Would you want your inner voice to be somehow incorporated into the head of your children? The way you speak to yourself, are you proud of it? Is it helpful or is it a very almost sadistic adversary that's all you're never good enough?

You never live up to what you really should. You're always falling short. You are a dumb head. And if you look where that probably came from, if you came from a very tough culture, that may have been the way parents thought for a long time. That's how you raise tough kids. You just have a tough language.

not realizing that that's really, you know, it's not what the evidence shows. You want them to be truthful, straight up. You may want them to have a voice that's, you know, at times really tough and they pull themselves up by their bootstraps and they don't, they're not wimps. They're going to be strong and handle life's

stresses in ways that would make them very proud, but it's not this harsh inner critic where they're actually fighting two battles all the time, one with the outside world and one with themselves. It's an exhaustive two-front battle. And so we're trying to help parents understand what is your inner voice saying to you? And be very careful if you don't think that's what you want in your son or daughter's head,

Be very careful what you're saying publicly to them, because your public voice will one day be their inner voice, which controls their destiny, their belief in themselves, their joy and happiness in life. That's where it all plays out. That voice no one hears but them, that will be the only voice that's in their head until their death.

will come likely from you. And when you realize that, you're probably going to change the tone and the message in many important ways. I think that's so important. It's sort of like a realization that you don't know you're having this impact in a certain way. And then when you realize that that's where you got your internal voice, it sort of makes it hit home a lot.

How do we help our friends identify and sort of like edit their stories? Like I'm thinking, you know, we all know when the story our friends are telling themselves is getting in the way of them being the best version of themselves.

And, you know, when I'm saying this, I'm thinking we're so prone to being victims of circumstance. We like to absolve ourself. And this is a common story. We all have it in moments. I'm sure you've had it. I mean, I've had it. Everybody else has it. How do we become a good friend in that moment and resolve?

help somebody or is it worth that? Or can you actually do anything when somebody is sort of blaming circumstance or I'm thinking also my kids, right? They, they come home and, you know, they're like, I did the best I could. And they kind of shrug their shoulders sometimes and, uh, you know, absolve themselves of responsibility. And how can I act in those moments? So the, the issue is how do you get through to this inner core of a person

to their inner voice is control central because your kids can just shut you out. They hear you, but they don't really, it doesn't register. And sometimes they hear their peers much more powerfully than they're going to hear you, particularly after they reach a certain point where they're starting to strive for independence. They, you know, they kind of lock out a lot of adult messaging, but

What kids don't want to be is preached to. They don't want to be preached to. The great wisdom seekers in our history, when they were trying to, let's say in the American Indian tradition, they would tell stories.

They tell stories that actually don't bring defensiveness. What defensiveness does, it means I'm locking you out. You're threatening me with your bloody preaching. And so the more parents can say, "I'll just give you a quick little anecdote here about my life that I learned." And you give them a mindset, say, "You know, I was not a good student.

I actually hated school. And one day I had a teacher who took me aside and said, "Listen, I don't know what your issue is, but you seem to be angry every time you come in the classroom. And you don't want anyone to call on you. There's no joy here. And I would just like you to think about this." I've had lots of students like this. And there is a joy in learning if you can dig it out.

and you provide them with a little different perspective. You know, Carol Dweck, the brilliant developmental psychologist who developed this notion of mindset. There's a way to look at something, and they may not really look like they're hearing it the first time you say it, but it may register because even when you're saying it, they may not allow it into the inner recesses of this command center. But you're hoping that

Over time, that mindset will begin to change as opposed to being a victim. Kids don't like me. And what's happening on social media for so many kids is actually, it's a tragedy. They're getting so beaten up. Their self-esteem is so fragile. You know, kids are not held accountable for what they say and they can't see them. When this digital criticism comes across, they can't shake it. That's why so many kids today are

struggling, their self-esteem is like so fragile. They're only as good as the last post that came up. And when someone just gives them a chilling source of feedback, no matter how untrue, you can't stop it because it comes from their peers and they're so vulnerable. Parents have to be very careful about, particularly in the early years, how much time they allow their kids on social media.

And they have to be able to put some counterbalances in there in ways that they don't get blocked out because that's what happens. Parents, we're working on a board and a program for young people. It's called the Youth Performance Institute. And we're recruiting kids who've been through all kinds of really challenging moments and really have come through on the other side of it.

And we're using them as mentors for kids who are struggling. And so we believe that the best way to get to kids is through the mentoring of other kids who have been through the wars and have figured out answers. You know, the more you realize that there is such a powerful, destructive force, there are some positive benefits from social media. But it's like touching a hot stove. You can use a stove to cook and to do all kinds of great things with.

but it can burn the hell out of you. And if you don't understand how to protect yourself and your family from that, it can completely take all these very delicate impulses and stories in your head that actually seal your fate. You don't even want to live because, you know, you have no real meaningful connections to other people, particularly your peers, after what's just happened to you.

One of the examples that you used in your book I thought was really powerful, and I tried to use it this weekend and probably failed, but it was around video gaming and how parents talk to their kids about video gaming. And I think the example in your book was stop, you know, you're playing too much video games, stop the worthless video game playing. And how do you go from that all the way to something like online?

I really want what's best for you because I love you. And I'm concerned that too much screen time is limiting your creativity, your brainpower, your academic progress. How do you switch that phrasing? So what you just said, Shane, you were very careful in the way in which you presented the second version. And that is the version you want embedded in their heads. That's coming from your...

public voice as a parent. And you want that to somehow be the way in which that young boy or girl now is thinking about it themselves, that there might be some good things here and have them talk about how this might not be a good thing to spend too much time and what might be

a way to actually control the way in which this is actually dominating your life. How could we put some... And I'd like for them to be involved in that as opposed to me as a parent just putting the hammer down and then they're sneaking around and they use other kids' phones. And I mean, you've got to get their brain wrapped around the dangers involved and you have to be so skilled

in terms of how you're telling the story. And it may not work, but you got to keep trying because the risk is real. And the way you presented it there probably is the best way you're going to have as a parent, as opposed to, you're not, I'm taking your phone away. That's the end of that. As opposed to let's,

Yeah. Have you been hurt by what someone has ever said to you on your social media? And why do you think you spend so much time on social media? What is it doing to help you and what is it doing that might hurt you? And you bring them into the conversation as opposed to being the know-it-all parent.

because you didn't grow up with social media. So they don't even think you understand it. And you probably don't because you were never there. So you have to really be very careful about how you present a potential solution to a crisis that could be really deadly. And some of it, like drinking and driving or taking drugs, they're really, really dangerous areas to talk about. And

just swinging a sledgehammer probably is not going to get through Mission Control Central. You're going to have to spend time getting them to think about this. What would happen just hypothetically if you were drinking and driving and you were in an accident and someone got seriously hurt or died? What's the impact that might have on the rest of your life? Or if someone who's drinking and driving hit you and your best friend was killed,

How would you feel about that? And getting them to kind of look at it through those eyes as opposed to some mandate. If I ever catch you drinking and driving, trust me, I'm taking your keys away. I think, you know, especially with the drug thing, that's really hard. I have two teenagers, 13 and 14. And, you know, on the weekend we walked by somebody who had clearly overdosed, I think, on the sidewalk. And it's tragic. And I felt...

you know, compelled to talk to them about this moment afterwards. And the only thing that I could really muster was, you know, I don't think he thought he was going to be addicted when he started. 100%. Nobody thinks that that's going to happen to them. So that notion there, but for the grace of God,

Go I, you know, go me, you know, it's like, you know, some of these folks are victims of mental illness. Sometimes they had a very, very severe injury, maybe an accident, and they started taking painkillers and they got addicted. We didn't know how addictive this, some of these different classes of, you know, anesthesias, analgesics, all this, you know, that actually,

It's the area of the brain called the nucleus of Cubans and the release of dopamine. And some people are just far more likely to become addicted in even a single experiment with some of these drugs. But they never intended, they never dreamed if they had known this was going to be the consequence, they would not have gone there. And all of a sudden, they have to get their fix and they have no money. So now they're forced into crime.

And now they're doing things they wouldn't even imagine doing, but they have to get it to satisfy this incredible drive to get another fix. And it's really challenging. So anytime you see that, that's a great opportunity with your children to have a conversation. That sometimes a single bad event happens.

I mean, I have some good friends who ended up with in really painful situation and they ended up taking painkillers and they became addicted and it became an absolute war and their spouses wanted to divorce them. No one could understand it.

They had to go to all kinds of rehab for the third time. And one of my cousins ended up in jail. It's just a very, very, and it's treacherous. And it seems like it would never happen to anyone in your family or any one of my kids. But anytime you can prepare your loved ones to be very careful, you can save a lot of very, very sad, terribly unfortunate consequences in life.

You've worked with 17 people who were the best in the world at what they did unequivocally, and you've worked with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of other people who would be considered sort of in the top 1% of their particular domain or field, whether it's in business or athletics. What would you say you know about the highest performers that other people seem to miss? When we come into the world...

We just fight to try to get a sense of, you know, just, hey, I'm not a complete idiot. You know, you're trying to just find some confidence. You're always put in situations where they be emotional, social, classroom situations in math,

or science, or you're not a good communicator, a good writer, and you're always pushed. You try to get into sport, you're not that good at it, you can't find the right thing. The thing that's amazing to me is that, you know, these folks who become such extraordinary examples of genius, most of them had no clue, no clue that this is where they're going to end up. And they tended to end up in a situation where they had the opportunity to flourish.

were something that they, a light went on inside them. Maybe they had no idea that they would be, you know, a genius in math. They ended up with a teacher, a physics teacher that they fell in love with. And all of a sudden, they started realizing, I got some talents in this area of science and I love it. And all of a sudden now they're on a whole interesting career path.

Everybody has strengths, but it has to be discovered and it has to be aligned with what your interests are. What we've found is that you tend to like doing what you're good at. Not always, but some people say, "I'm really good at that, but I hate it." It doesn't happen that often. If it's really that challenging and you find yourself, it's almost like easy, it's seductive. You like doing things that actually bring you great success.

So most of the people that I have had the opportunity to work with, if I have an opportunity to sit down and talk with them, they have to pinch themselves when they realize where they've ended up. They've exceeded by multiples where they ever thought they could end up, whether it be financially or their prestige or their family or whatever it is.

And then there are all those that just never really caught fire, never really found that. And that's the beauty of a great teacher, a great coach, trying to find out how they can light the fire of a young boy or girl and help them understand that you don't know what you're good at until you try a lot of things. And eventually you're going to land somewhere. And life is so much better when you're in pursuit of something that you really love.

are excited about and you love to learn. If I were to say one thing about myself, I'm a forever learner. I just, I love to learn. And I wasn't that way in school. I hated school. But I mean, I'm a reasonably intelligent guy. My father was a brilliant mathematician, engineer. But I just, I never found much joy until I found a few teachers who

who actually brought joy out in the learning process. And then all of a sudden, I started to get on fire. And I am as on fire today about learning. If you look at all the things I love to learn and read, and I just have, I'm very curious, and I will be till my last breath. That's the gift, teaching people to be excited about what you could become and what you might really find great joy in mastering.

If you can do that as a teacher, as a parent, that is a forever gift that will never stop giving. It's definitely within the purview of most of the people we come in contact with on a regular basis. Give them joy in the learning process. They can't read. Help them to find books that excite them. I had a couple of grandkids who were not that excited about reading.

But their parents got them into Harry Potter. And Harry Potter is not an easy book to read. And all of a sudden, they had so much excitement or Star Wars reading about that stuff. And all of a sudden now they're reading books like crazy because they got them started into things they wanted to do. And, you know, maybe a music teacher wants you to learn all the classical music and you just roll your eyes and go, I hate this.

And then you go, well, let's learn something you would like to learn. And so they start playing things that really excite them. And all of a sudden, the learning curve goes off the charts. And maybe at some point, they're going to go back and want to play the classics. But if you start with something they're not that interested in, you may kill the golden goose.

real world sort of example of that in a different way. We used to buy books for classrooms. And so for schools that wouldn't buy the kids the books that they want to read, because often the books in the classroom in grade two and three are sort of like hand-me-downs from like a decade, but they have no relevance to the kids. They're not the books they want to read. I realized this with my own son in grade three, which is a different story. And so we offered to buy

to buy classrooms, like all the books the kids wanted to read. So they just had a selection of them. And we did, I think we did this for 50 or so classrooms per year for like five years and

And I still get emails from those teachers saying how unbelievable the difference in the children was when the books changed. That is absolutely brilliant. That's a brilliant way to intervene in a young child's life when they're so young.

open to the possibilities that they could become something. That's exactly it. And I got this idea from my son who always never wanted to read. It was a huge reader. I think he read before he talked basically, and still is the most prolific reader I know. But he never wanted to read anything the school was telling him to read.

And I always asked him why, because I always thought it was like an authority thing. And for him, it was just like, no, it's really boring. Like, I don't want to read that.

And I thought that was, well, what would make it more? And why aren't the books that you love to read? Cause you clearly love. And that was the, that was the stimulus for you to do that for five years to bring all those books into the schools. Yeah. Cause I was like, well, if this impacts him that way, it's probably, and he was lucky cause he had no problems reading. And I was like, well, all these other kids who are struggling. What if they had, what if he couldn't read, then you've pretty much locked him out. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, pretty. If he doesn't have anything that's interesting, he has no motivation to learn. Exactly. And anyway, I thought it was so empowering and the results, at least, you know, not scientifically, but in the real world, I was like, why don't schools do this? Like, I don't understand. Like we spend so much money later on downstream, sort of like with people who are,

are literate or struggling to read, if we just spent a couple hundred bucks a year in grade two and grade three on books that kids want to read, whatever that year that is, whatever it's, whether it's Ninjago or whatever's culturally relevant in the moment that the kids are into, you'll save all this money downstream. And I always thought it was such a powerful idea that never really took off. I love that example. It's a real world example where you made a big difference.

at a critical time in a young person's life. One of the biggest things that I've taken from your work over the last decade or so is the amalgamation of time and energy. And one of the things that you've said in your work is that time only has value in its intersection with energy. Therefore, it becomes priceless in its intersection with extraordinary energy, something you call full engagement.

Talk to me about time and energy. So when we set up the Human Performance Institute, I had come to understand... First of all, I wanted to set it on a science foundation, and almost all science is about energy, whether it's physics or chemistry or everything fundamentally goes back to energy dynamics.

We are reservoirs of potential energy and we're trying to figure out how to convert that into kinetic energy. To have a big life, you have to be a big spender. But if you're going to be a big spender of energy, you have to, this is a system that has to be renewed constantly. It's not once you have energy, you know, all energy comes from the same place, from the mitochondria of the cells. And that's basically the union of oxygen and glucose called the Krebs cycle.

And when you're depleted with glucose or oxygen, energy dynamics start to decline pretty quickly. And so we decided to set up the whole system of training around energy. And the impetus, one of the big impetus that I found when I was working with athletes prior to setting that up,

I was at the Nick Boletieri Tennis Academy and I was there for six years as director of sports science and director of sports psychology. And I watched all of the players there. We had 240 of the best players in the world and they would be completely on time because they were demanded to be on time. I videotaped everything when they show up on the courts. I had all this telemetry on all these kids because I

I wanted to learn, I wanted to figure things out. And what I began to realize is that even if you were there on time, there was no way guaranteed you were going to learn anything. In fact, we actually saw where some of the kids, because they hated it so much, they were perfectly on time, they got worse. They were worse from all the practice. And they were not in the language I began to use later was engaged. And engaged for me was the intersection of whatever time you have

with the infusion of energy aligned with what the objective was. So if the objective was to have a better forehand or a backhand or serve or to compete better, just the fact that you showed up and were in practice, but you never invested extraordinary energy, you're not going to get much of a return. Just kind of going through the motions. Exactly. Exactly.

And so at that time, time management was, I mean, everyone was crazy about time management as the ultimate way. And I, we had Stephen M. R. Covey on our board, who was Stephen's son. And I knew Stephen Covey, a brilliant man and his seven habits and everything else and his son. And I said, you know, I think you have to, this is how my brain tends to work. I said, you know, there are

the whole time management industry is flawed. It's set on a faulty premise. He said, no, this is a billion dollar industry. A lot of smart people. I'm sorry, Joe, I don't know what you're thinking, but that's not true. And I said, okay, I'm going to give you this scenario. You tell me if I'm right or wrong. Is the basic thesis of time management is that the first thing you need to know is what your values are, what matters most to you in life.

And once you do that, you have to very courageously begin to invest time in all those things that really make the greatest difference for you, that will bring success as you define it. And the more you do that, the more successful you will be. But you must invest time in the things that matter most to you. And that's why time management is so important. And I said, how close am I to that thesis? He said, that's basically it.

And I said, "Well, I will tell you, the investment of time, time has no value, has no valence, has no force. Until time intersects with energy, you really have nothing. I mean, you're just there. You can be present with your family, but because you're there, is that going to move the needle forward being a loving, caring mother or father? And the fact is, no, you're going to have to invest energy aligned with a mission

Time doesn't give you anything except the opportunity to make the investment of the one thing that changes the needle, that changes everything, and that's your energy. Whatever you invest your energy in, you give life to. And it's not time, but energy. So I developed this notion

of full engagement, which is investing, it's an acquired ability to invest your full and best energy right here, right now, regardless of what the situation is aligned with the mission. And it's hard, it's difficult, but it's a skill set. And you've got to have time, but you really have to make the investment of energy. And if your energy reserves are low, then people know you really care.

Because you're adding up the resource that you're very low on. You're not just hanging out because you don't have a lot of energy as a father, as a mother with your children. They know when you're tired. Now you're coming up with the goods. You are going to deliver on the one thing that people want because they know you care. You can invest time and don't really have much in it.

If you develop extraordinary energy and invest extraordinary energy, people know you care. And that's the whole, for me, that was a major breakthrough in the paradigm. It's just a different, it's a different paradigm completely than what most people have been exposed to. I mean, we have this, almost this tradition of time management being everything. I was home for four hours with my family. I should get some kind of an award with it.

But when we look at where your energy went, you didn't have, you know, you were watching the game, you were irritable, cranky, on and on and on. And you didn't move the needle positively. In fact, you got a reverse return on them thinking that you really care deeply about them. For you to pursue that, it actually is an indictment. It's a little bit uncomfortable after you have been hoodwinked into believing that time is everything.

Now you realize that energy is everything. And once you land on that particular platform, now how much sleep I'm getting, the quality and quantity, the frequency of my meals, and to really look at how the system was engineered from an energy perspective. We are oscillatory beings in an oscillatory universe. Nothing is a flat, straight line. Nothing is linear except death. Every biopotential in the human physiology is oscillatory. Everything.

And so we have to be wave makers. We have to understand that if we want to have a big life, we've got to be spending a lot of energy, which means you've got to be recovering a lot of energy. So in our training, we put a lot of emphasis on training the mechanisms of recovery. When you do intervals in anaerobic capacity, what you're doing is basically training the system to recover more quickly. The fitter you are, the faster you recover.

And so if you want to have a big life and be out there on the fast lane, you've got to find ways to recover quickly and take care of yourself. One of the big, big insights that we had at the Institute, which was so embarrassing when we finally had all the evidence to support it, was that health ignites performance. The healthier you are, the more energy you're going to have. And the more energy you have aligned with the

with whatever performance arena you're in, you're going to be better. So full engagement requires a lot of energy. And if you're in an environment where it's sucking all your energy up, you have nothing left. Like nurses who are on 12-hour shifts. We worked a lot in medicine. Or some of these emergency surgeries are very long and they're brutal. Well, how do you prepare for that? How can you oscillate in that 12-hour shift?

How can a surgeon oscillate effectively so that their blood sugar levels don't get so low that in an athlete's life when that happens, they bonk, they choke. Well, we don't want to choke when it comes to life and death. We worked with a lot of military special forces and helped them understand the importance of recovery and how can you get recovery in just a few seconds. We developed what is called the 16-second cure in tennis

where in 16 seconds between points, when you ritualize it, you can get complete and total recovery. And we validated that in using telemetry, heart rate telemetry. We looked at levels of cortisol and everything else, oscillatory frequencies of the brain. But you have to train it. We have to actively train those capacities. And it's very exciting because the system is infinitely trainable. And I wrote a book called...

stress for success. It's like, it's not stress that's killing you. It's chronic stress. It's stress unabated by recovery. And if you're in a high stress environment, you better start learning how to get the recovery and you'll start thriving in the stress. And in fact, the hormones of stress are the hormones of life. You take all the stress out of your life. You're going to start shriveling up and you, if I surround you with marshmallows and pillows,

Eventually, all you're going to be able to deal with is marshmallows and pillows. And the pillows eventually won't be soft enough and the marshmallows won't be sweet enough. So you've got to chase. You've got to chase old man stress. You've got to go after it. That's when the life lights up. When you're on fire doing something, making something happen, expending lots of energy and doing it in a way that doesn't compromise anything.

your ability to produce energy, eating good food, getting a good recovery at night and sleep, drinking and hydrating a lot, doing all the things that actually enhance energy production so that you can be a big spender. You want to be a big investor just like Wall Street?

you got to make a lot of deposits. And if you don't do that, you're going to bonk and you're going to blame old man stress. It wasn't old man stress that killed you. It was that you didn't honor the recovery that actually made the expenditure of energy manageable and actually very exciting.

Walk me through the 16 seconds between points in tennis. So, again, all this data collection I was doing at the Nick Volateri Tennis Academy, I had them all hooked up to all this telemetry, looking at heart rate variability. And we did the same thing with voice recorders on. They wired them up so they were supposed to put verbally, with their public voice, everything they were saying to themselves privately.

And we began to realize that the between point time in tennis, which is roughly 20 to 25 points, depending upon the tournament or whatever, and the time that we started doing this work, we began to realize that if I just took video of people playing points, you couldn't tell how mentally tough or how effective they were under pressure. But if I looked at the between point time only,

you could tell who were those that were actually extraordinarily good competitors and who were not. And you didn't even need to see the points. And about 70% of a match

is not when people are playing points. It's actually between point time, which is major. Anyone that would think that 70% of what you're doing between points doesn't affect what you're doing during points, I mean, you have no idea how the system is integrated. When I started talking about the between point time in tennis, people thought I had duly lost my mind. No one had ever looked at the between point time.

And so we began to, I took as a lot of the coaches would do, if you want to have a great forehand, you look at what are the common elements in the 10 best forehands in the world and you teach those. Those who were the best competitors, we took the best competitors on the men's and women's tour at that time and looked at all those things that they did in common that were not just personality dynamics or anything else.

And we developed a training system between points based on those 16 seconds. We found that Steffi Graf at that time took the shortest amount of time of anyone on the tour. So we said, you need at least 16 seconds. So some people would just walk right up and serve or just right away jump into it. And we said, no, no, no, no, no. The system has to recover. You have to make waves. And we began to realize that the fitter you were, the faster your heart rate would come down.

And we actually developed a computer that actually determined what your ideal range of heart rate was prior to starting a point. If your heart rate was too high or if it was too low because you kind of gave up and there was no intensity.

you're not going to likely perform well. And anger would send your heart rate over the top, fury, anger, frustration, all that stuff would block recovery. We began to develop this concept and I made a video of it. It became maybe the best, most widely watched video in tennis history. But the 16-second cure basically you start out with a positive physical response immediately when the point is over. Then you go through a relaxation stage.

Then you go into kind of a ritual stage where you bounce the ball and then you kind of go purely instinctive into the point. And that video will show you in great detail with all the best players in the world and they all do it. But they learned it by instinct, although now the coaches teach it regularly to everyone. But I felt, you know,

really positive that I may have made a contribution to the training of tennis players in their ability to manage the stresses of competitive tennis. You mentioned a word there, ritualize and ritual. Why do you use that word? The difference between a habit and a ritual. A habit is something that just may or may not help you in life. You have a bad habit of eating too much or you just don't hydrate enough or

you drink sugary drinks all the time and it destabilizes your blood glucose levels. But you have a lot of bad habits. You sleep too late. You don't have a habit of, you know, really laying out your day very clearly. And so you're kind of

floating around most of the day just trying to catch up with yourself. We just call those bad habits. And then you have good habits or positive habits that you've tried to acquire. Some of them just show up and you've been around a lot of people with good habits and you kind of acquired them. A ritual, as we define it, is an intentionally acquired habit that serves the mission.

whatever the mission is. So to become a better tennis player between points, to become to stabilize blood glucose during a match, what should you be eating? Maybe a banana, drinking lots of water and some specific hydration elements between games on changeovers. You can have a ritual for getting up in the morning.

that you intentionally develop. It's kind of a tiny habit that you decide is going to help you navigate in life more successfully and the things that matter to you. We need rituals. I will tell you it's called the unbearable automaticity of being. We are creatures of habit.

And some of those habits just destroy us. I mean, they don't help us at all. We don't even know how we got them. We just some one day we woke up and this is how it is. We love to sleep late. We don't like to get up in the morning and on and on and on. And a lot of things just, you know, they just happen. But our days pretty much unfold automatically. You're going to do tomorrow pretty much what you are wired up habitually to do. Now, the beauty is,

of being human is that we have the ability to pause between the stimulus and response and create a novel response. And that takes a certain amount of time and a lot of energy infusion until we rewire the circuitry.

And it is a, it's basically a, it's a neurological loop that enables you to continue doing certain things. And in the animal kingdom, they're completely wired up with instincts and routines that enhance survival. But human beings actually can stop and reflect. I don't want to be 40 pounds overweight. And then you have to link

This mission, which is maybe very difficult to get off of drugs or whatever, you have to get a purpose that is so powerful that it just grabs you and ushers you into the storm and you will not surrender.

And most of the time, it's these little tiny habits, getting up at a certain time, setting the alarm, having breakfast always at a certain, even if it's a small amount, you get yourself started rather than having a big lunch and then a huge dinner and going to bed. You start understanding, you know, you don't have to be a victim of your environment. You actually can intervene, but it takes a lot of heavy duty lifting and it's all made possible.

by your energy investment, intentional. And the other thing I wanted to come back to that you mentioned quite a few times is mental toughness. How do we increase our mental toughness? Well, again, I didn't have it wired up right. I was just getting started trying to figure it out. And I did develop a construct that based on all the players I interviewed

athletes from 21 different sports and asked them to describe what they feel like when they're playing at their absolute best, something that sometimes referred to zoning. When what they could do and what they were doing were one and the same. It's an exhilarating feeling and everyone has been there. And I just, I asked them for the descriptors that they would use. And I was blown away because they all use, it looked like they all copied from each other.

They were very calm, physically relaxed, emotionally confident, lots of positive energy. There was a whole constellation. There were 12 of them that surfaced. And I use that as I refer to it as their ideal performance state. And whether it was a linesman in football or a gymnast, it was like levels of intensity might change. But the feeling that they had was

when they're performing from inside was similar across all sports. So that led me to understand that there is an internal chemistry that's bubbling up that actually drives those feelings and emotions. There's a physiology that's allowing this very delicate balance in the neurophysiology and in the physiology of the whole body, this mind-body connection.

And so the question is, how do we train to actually get all of this chemistry to line up when we want it most? If you get a little too much cortisol, which is more of a defensive survival-based hormone, it throws everything out of kilter. All of a sudden, the brainwaves start going faster, you get tighter.

You get tunnel vision, on and on. And so it's a very delicate balance and you never master it. You get close, you get better, and you have to do everything right and you have to follow your rituals to do that. When I started, I called it mental toughness. And I began to realize that mental is only one component.

Emotions also are a huge, huge driver of this chemistry and maybe more important than what you're thinking and what you're analyzing logically. Emotions probably drive more of the chemistry than anything. And your mindset that you set, obviously the mental side is really important, but you can just completely come apart because you're

your fitness, you haven't really achieved the right fitness. So now your cells are not getting enough oxygen or you haven't eaten properly. Now you're really in a glucose challenge. And maybe you don't even want to play motivationally. Maybe, you know, maybe this is something your parents wanted you to do, but you don't really have a purpose that's your own, which will unwind so that for this delicate chemistry to rise up, you have to really want it. You have to really have

The system has to bring out this amazing chemistry formula, which is not easy to mobilize, particularly in the context of pressure. So it's not mental toughness, it's mental, emotional, it's physical, it's actually spiritual as well. We are a fully integrated species and we've got to understand that everything we do affects everything else.

And even the way you speak to yourself, the way you walk, the way you carry your shoulders. I flew all the way to Spain because I got a fabulous opportunity to interview one of Spain's most famous bullfighters, Martin Vasquez. He's now just passed away, but he was a superstar.

And I begged for the opportunity to meet with him because I wanted to know how a matador controls fear when they know that there's this massive bull who is going to do everything possible to kill them and to subdue this potential threat that the bull is seeing. How do you control fear? How do you keep from being paralyzed? Because when you choke, you're very likely going to get gored and can very possibly die.

And he smiles and he says, "Is it not obvious, Jim?" And I said, "No, I came all this way. It's not that obvious." And he said, "Have you ever seen a bullfighter in the ring show anything but supreme confidence? Have you ever seen them mope around with rounded shoulders

saying, "I'm having a bad day. I don't feel like I'm on my game today." Being negative or a little bit pessimistic and irritated at the bull because the bull is just not cooperating or whatever. You see nothing, every step, every movement. He said, "We start training as a young boy

at a very early age on how to walk, how to turn, how to carry our shoulders, where to put our eyes. Every single detail is done meticulously. And he said, the bull can see that and knows that you have no fear and that you dominate the bull by your presence. We control fear by our physical presence. I was mesmerized by

the whole thing and we looked at videos and it was really quite so I brought it back to the states to the Nick Voluntary Tennis Academy and we showed all this video of bullfighters and we developed what I call the matador walk and I would take tennis players out on the court and teach them how to walk how to turn how to look how to control their eyes

And I will tell you, it had a profound effect. They thought it was a little weird in the beginning, but they saw the results they were getting and how they felt much more. If you want to be fearless, you look fearless. If you want to control the chemistry, you have to look on the outside the way you want to feel on the inside. And that was the insight.

It's powerful. It also relates to the stories that we were talking about earlier. It sort of comes full circle. Right, exactly. You can control your chemistry from the inside out or from the outside in. You can work with meditation, with thoughts, with ideas, with private voice, you know, or you can work from the outside, working with your actual physical muscles and

And the way in which you carry yourself, all of that can either contribute or undermine your ability to achieve your potential. That's a really powerful way to take control. No matter where you are in this particular moment, you can always do something to sort of move forward. I want to end with the same question I always ask, which is, what is success for you?

I want to make a difference in the lives of other people. And I have a very opportunistic kind of stage where I can help people if what I am saying is true. Success in my life is helping other people be successful in things that matter to them. And that's why for me, my mission is to live what I teach so that if I teach it,

It's not something I'm just voicing. They actually see it in my life. And I feel like if I didn't get it right, at least I did the best I could. And for me, success in my life is using the opportunities I've had to learn to help other people be successful in whatever way they define success. That's beautiful. Thank you so much, Jim, for taking the time. I hope some of this resonated. I appreciate all the work you've done, all the contributions you're making. And, um,

I hope we move the needle forward. Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog slash podcast or just Google The Knowledge Project.

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