in sports sometimes it's like they put up this big ego and then there's more vulnerability beneath. I think it's almost the opposite in music that sometimes thing where it's like, well, people just don't get it. Like I have all of this, all these good things and all this talent inside, but outwardly they have to be like humble and gracious and like, I really hope you enjoy this thing that I'm giving you. So I think it's all an act for everybody, but like the desired product for athletes is the confidence is the like, I'm good enough to do this, I'm gonna do great. So a lot of athletes come out of the gate with all this swagger and a lot of that, but then the desired thing in art and stuff is making connections and we're in this together. So a lot of the projected image is a lot more soft and easy. It's Word to the Third, my reflections on purpose, life, and growth. I'm Toby Brooks, a speaker, author, professor, and forever student. Each week on Becoming Undone, I bring you guests who have dared bravely, risked mightily, and grown relentlessly. High achievers who've transformed from falling apart to falling into place. But every third episode, it's my turn to reflect, refine, and reprocess onward to the third. You know, it's great to be back in the studio for another episode. Continuing our reboot of my first foray into podcasting, a fairly short-lived show called Better Every Week that I co-hosted with my daughter Brennan, I thought it would be great to dust off another episode, recut it a little bit, and reproduce it here for my show. As I was listening to our conversation, I was struck by the notion that it's pretty cool that we discuss the importance of being brave, of viewing failure through the lenses of growth, and the show was a little rough around the edges. Our microphones were pretty sketchy. The refrigerator kicked on mid-conversation. I mumbled into the mic far too often. But we did it. We did it anyway. The best way to get better at something is to withstand sucking at it for a while. And we did. But after just four episodes, our good intentions were overtaken by pressures, packed calendars, and in some cases, good old-fashioned excuses. It's disappointing as that may seem on the surface, there were still victories. I learned how to host and post a show. I discovered some ways not to record and how not to edit. And while I'm still and forever will remain a work in progress, I got a little better. I persevered. And now I'm closing in on my 50th episode. The conversation was a good one too. In this installment, then University of Oklahoma freshman and now junior Texas Tech University vocal performance major and my daughter, Brennan Brooks, leads the way to talk about all the ways that competitive athletes and professional artists are different, and even more so how they are a lot alike. It's a fun topic that I hope you'll find informative and thought-provoking. I hope you'll enjoy episode 39, compete. So we're here at the house after a vacation. It's all rainy outside, it's a very good podcast vibe. So today we're gonna be talking about performance and music and sports. Yeah, for sure. So what we're talking about today is that in movies and usually in real life, sports and the arts are kind of like against each other, like they're opposites. It's always like the jocks versus the theater kids, the athletes versus the band kids. But I think, especially after I've got to college, where if someone's doing a sport or if someone's doing art, it's not just like, oh, I just do this for fun or I do this on the side. When it's a career, that's when it seems like they're really a lot more similar than people usually give them credit for, like notice. So since you're an athlete who's had music experience and I'm mostly a musician who's had some athletic experience, I thought this would be a good one for us to talk about. For sure. This is one that I think a lot of people struggle with, honestly. I know for your brother, he had to pick and the way the schedule is blocked. You have to make a decision. You can't be in marching band and do athletics at the same time. I always felt like that was so tragic because you're 14 years old and two years from now you're going to be a completely different human being. Forcing someone down one path or the other always seemed counterproductive to me and I really like schools and coaches and directors who recognize the value of being well-rounded. You're not doing a liberal arts degree but I was intrigued by that idea because it produces someone who's well-rounded on the end and that's really to me what's most important. And I think just the way the schools are set up to sometimes makes it like you're choosing your team when you have to choose sports or you have to choose art. And so it makes them very against each other. I'm sure like there's just a lot of division, you know, in theater. We're always like, oh, we don't get the good funding and they get the good buses and like it just everything is kind of set up to make them opposites or against each other, but I think there's some cool, cool similarities and differences. So we're excited to talk about them today. I'm looking forward to you hosting. You are in the driver's seat. Yay. Oh, I hate driving. Anyways, so what gave me the idea for this episode was I told you all the time about convocation. It was one of my favorite things that I did this past semester where we would just go and we would have different musicians and people who are doing that as their career would come and talk to us and it was just so cool it was my favorite and and we'd also have people come in and be like oh we're gonna talk about this certain aspect that will hopefully help influence you and like help you grow learn and be better in this career so for this one time where we had convocation we had this guy called dr. Bill Moore and he came and he's a performance psychologist and he came and talked to us but he mostly works with athletes, but he's done some with musicians and It just seemed very apt so the quote that I want to start us out with that he said during this talk was musicians are practicers who play or perform out of necessity and Athletes are performers or players who practice out of necessity So to get started, I just kind of want to discuss that what do you think how accurate you think that is? It's a unique way of looking at it and when I read that in your notes I read through it a couple of times and that's that's an interesting take. I think it's fascinating for years people have talked about how athletes want to be musicians so you know they'll come out with a hip hop album or you know they'll want to produce something to kind of show they're already celebrities, but they want to be musicians. And likewise, lots of times musicians, you know, they'll play in these celebrity softball tournaments and it's like we're never content to just stay in our lane. And I think there's something to that pursuit of excellence, to being better, to being the best. I'm wearing my Team USA shirt today. The thing that I loved about the Olympics from the first moments I laid eyes on it was this is like what somebody could do if they devoted their entire life to the pursuit of being the best they could be at something. And that just fascinated me. And the thought that musicians are practicers, as a singer your job is to audition, to embrace that process. You're never going to get good at something unless you embrace the practice side of it. And you'll see it as you get older. People who are naturally gifted, that'll only take you so far. And it's if you can meld and marry some of your natural giftings with that insane work ethic. People that have insane work ethic without the gifting, that's nurture, right? That's not nature, but nurture, they'll only get so far. People that have the genetics, the predisposition, that will only get them so far. But if you can find that that that melding where I have a genetic propensity to be good at this and I'm gonna work my tail off to hone this craft as best I can, that's when special things happen. Do you think you lean more towards, oh you really enjoy the practices or you really enjoy like the performances? Because I know in Little League sometimes it's like I only ever wanted to go to practice and I didn't ever want to go to the games or I would only want to do the games and I was like I don't go to practices you know so I don't think it's always necessarily like it says in the quote but I think sometimes at the professional level it gets more like extreme where like athletes are like well I want to go play against other teams and I want to go and so that's the performances or the players and they'll practice so that they're good enough to do that. And then musicians are like, well I just want to play music and they're like, well to make money off of it I got to do it for other people. I think early on when I was full of hope as an athlete, I loved them both. But as I've aged and competition isn't really what fuels me anymore, it's just kind of proving myself that I can do it. I think there's a critical step here where we recognize what practice does for us and how it is kind of an unlocked door to success. And when you were preparing for All-Region, you would come out into this very room because it was alone. You didn't want anybody to hear you, and you would work on your craft. And you have practice rooms now, but I would venture to say it's not the same because there's just something about toiling alone. No one sees my failure. No one sees how I fall short. All we get to see is the end product of that. And the beauty to me, and that's kind of one of the reasons I got into athletic training, is because I don't just cover the game. I'm there for every practice. I'm there for things that occur after. And I just I love it when I get to work with people who want to get the best out of themselves. So the next difference we want to look at that could be a difference but just that like this Dr. Bill Moore proposed in his talk to us was that he said the egos in sport are much lower than the egos in music except gymnastics. Which I thought was funny so I wrote that down. And I also think it's probably a skewed view of what he thinks because he was talking to a room of just musicians. So he's probably like, hey, I'm a sports guy, but y'all have, what do you think about that? Do you think that there's truth in that? That's a good question. I think any time you make a sweeping generalization like that, you run the risk of mischaracterizing things. I don't know. Have you encountered big egos in your major? I definitely think I have. I think it's... I don't know. The arts have a way of knocking down your ego, but I think that's the same way that sports is, you know? There's a lot of vulnerability in both of those, so like there's a lot of time for people to be like, oh haha, that thing that you worked really hard on? Not good enough and you're like okay all right where do we go from here? What we see as ego is someone's carefully constructed public facing version of themselves. I was never a really skilled athlete no no division even three schools came looking for me I was hoping to get recruited and I wasn't and so I was always humble out of necessity but I've worked with athletes who were recruited by major Division I schools and on the surface, they're super confident and they're just brash and bold and you'd even say arrogant. But when I work with them when they're injured, they're vulnerable. That ego is very fragile. It's very superficial in a lot of cases. And sometimes it's like Brene Brown talks about how we armor up, how we try to guard ourselves against pain. And I think in a lot of cases, until we get to know somebody, it's really difficult to say whether an ego is authentic. Like, are they really super confident? Or are they overcompensating for this feeling? Like you said, I mean, if 9 times out of 10, or 99 times out of 100, you get told no, I don't know how you can be a human being and not let that seep into your bones a little bit. Why not me? That's a bold statement for someone to come out and say, but there's a lot more to it than just who's got the swagger and who doesn't. I think it's kind of like you said, where in sports sometimes it's like they put up this big ego and then there's more vulnerability beneath. I think it's almost the opposite in music that sometimes, especially because music is more, or even just like art is more subjective, it's more like, then I think sometimes artists can get this thing where it's like, well people just don't get it. Like, I have all of this, all these good things and all this talent inside, but outwardly they have to be like humble and gracious and like, I really hope you enjoy this thing that I'm giving you. So I think it's all an act for everybody, but like the desired product for athletes is the confidence, is the like, I'm good enough to do this, I'm going to do great. So a lot of athletes come out of the gate with like all this like swagger and you know a lot of that, but then the desired thing in art and stuff is like making connections and like we're, you know, we're doing, we're in this together. So a lot of like the projected image is a lot more like soft and easy, even if that's not what people actually have or experience. There's been a lot of talk about this. I mean we've really started having conversations about mental health and athletes in the recent past and there was a documentary that Michael Phelps helped produce after the last games called Weight of Gold and he talks about how many athletes struggle with depression and suicidal ideation after the games. He interviewed some of them. They weren't just random people. These were like some of the most prolific Olympians in history like Apollo Antonono and an endless list of gold medalists and world's best performers. Almost every one of them talked about how once the Games was over, they felt like they had this huge void to the point of crippling depression. Many of them talked about the fact that as an athlete, you're taught and you're whether explicitly or implicitly you can't let people see that vulnerability in you because that's a weakness that can be exploited and so I think a lot of that false bravado and swagger that we see is a defense mechanism but I think you're also right like you know is Taylor Swift's life really the mess that it would appear to be if you looked at her discography. It looks like every relationship she has is awful. And it's almost like that's part of her brand, is just being authentic and open. And she wrote this. And leaning into those vulnerabilities. And you worry, well you don't worry, but you wonder, is this fiction or is this really rooted in who she is as a woman? And it's almost to the point where we expect Taylor to write songs about her relationship drama. Heartbreak, yeah. And if she doesn't have that, well now she's being fake. So it's almost like complete opposites, but it's really the same thing. It's like society has taught me I have to be this one way, and if I'm not it's perceived as weakness. And we're not used to people being both. People being, you know, like if Taylor Swift had like a ton of albums that are like so vulnerable about like all her heartbreaks, and then she has one that has nothing to do with any of that and then we're like, well, one of them is lying. And like, maybe neither is but like we're not used to people showing both and showing at the same time, you know? I think another difference that Dr. Bill Moore brought up was he said, everybody watches sport because they want to see excellence, but people watch or listen to musical performances or artistic things, because they want to be brought into the feeling and emotion. So what do you think about that first? So we, coming back, we stopped, for those of you listening, obviously you know this, but we stopped in Branson and we watched a musical theater production. As you often do, you and your mom always kind of debrief after every performance. And something you said really kind of resonated with me. You said the point of song in musical theater is to express emotion when words kind of fail. And I never really thought about it like that, but it's, it's true. I've never been a big fan of musicals until you came along and I thought they were stupid and you know, the typical male bravado thing, people don't spontaneously break into song, but there's something about that emotion. And for me, it's not the up-tempo big band numbers where, you know, with the jazz hands at the end and the big notes, it's whether it's the lead or a secondary character who is, you kind of get insight into their fears and the doubts that they have about themselves or about the decision they're making. Waitress has become, it's regular on my playlist, I can't believe it, but Sara Bareilles, like just that song, She Used to Be Mine, is just, I've never, I haven't even seen Waitress. I haven't watched it start to finish, but if I'm feeling uncertain about choices I've made in my job or where I'm gonna go next, I can listen to that song and immediately connect with what a waitress in a diner who's pregnant. There's just something about that that is so uniquely human and and that makes it, if you allow yourself to be open to it, it makes it something that kind of opens doors in your heart that you didn't even really know were there. On the other hand, the perfection side of things, we want to see excellence, yeah. I mean I think about the Olympics and when Simone Biles, greatest of all time, right, and she, because of no physical injury, just mentally she wasn't able to participate that's the first time I can ever recall anybody and there were people who were pretty vocal in their condemnation of her decision yeah but I think there were more people than I expected that came to her defense because the US Olympic Committee supported her as an athlete and we paid We paid to send her over there and she just watches the games. But she recognized that she was in a headspace that was dangerous. And because of that she chose to withdraw. And is that excellence? That's something that could be modeled. How many people might have tried to gut through that to horrendous results? So, yeah, there were people that would say she was a coward. What's the bravest thing to do? To go all that way, to compete all your life basically, and to say at the last moment, I can't do this. When everything's riding on it. She's got endorsement deals, and she's got... You know the backlash. Incredibly brave. Yeah, I think it's interesting because in my mind it's kind of like Broadway and the Olympics are the top of each. Like Broadway's best art, Olympics is best sport. But I feel like for a long time, the Olympics has been about excellence. And that was a really cool moment where it was like, hey, there's feelings and emotions. And like, we love the Olympics because I love watching all the sports. We love watching the gymnastics and you know, but we remember those heart-wrenching commercials where you are like the moments where they go and like hug their parents and they show pictures of them as a little kid and it's like Oh, that's so you know, there's that feeling and emotion there too And I think those are important too and I think there's the flip side with art too where it's like you go to Broadway to cry at the big ballads or to Really feel that but then you leave and you're like, did you hear that riff? Did you see when he hit that note or like when they sustain that thing like they both have to have both, but I think usually sport is focused on the excellence and you bring in the feelings or emotions and then art is focused on the feelings and emotions and you have to have that excellence. You know, those are both, they're all key ingredients, but I think that's just interesting. So my question for that is how do you think these different focuses affect people? We kind of already talked about it where if you're only focused on excellence in sport, if she only said I've worked this hard, I need to be good, I need to just power through and do it and be, to pursue this excellence, she could have died. But then the same way with art, if you're just like, oh I'm just feeling the song, and I'm just trying to connect emotionally to people, and you don't take the time and sit and work through that hard passage that you keep messing up on, and people are distracted by, okay that doesn't sound right, that's not the right note, that could have been better, then no one can connect to the feelings or emotions. So is there anything else? How do you think a performance is changed if a person, either in arts or the sports, is focusing too heavily on one or the other? That's a great question. I think just like we looked at nature versus nurture, we can also look at process versus outcome. And we love to celebrate those big accomplishments. And whether that's a sports accomplishment or landing a big role, whatever that is, that's the outcome. If that's your focus, if that's what you're all about, I guess that can be okay. But that to me seems really misplaced because you control so little of that. I've had this idea for a book for a long time and I've gotten notes written and have lightly started on it multiple times, called off the podium, because every one of those Olympians that you see, there was one person that was one step below them that didn't make the team. And then when they go to the Olympics, there's bronze, there's silver, there's gold. Just below that bronze is someone who worked their whole life, and they walk away with nothing. So for every story of triumph, there's like a hundred stories of what the world would tell us is failure. You don't have to interpret it that way, but if you're just off the podium, what do you do with that? Do you use it to fuel your success for either, I'm gonna gear up and four years from now, I'm gonna come back better than ever, or I'm gonna take this in a whole different direction and I'm gonna kill it in business, whatever. And then there are other people that never recover from that failure. It's impossible to predict how you're going to go with that, but if you're solely focused on the outcome, think about the senior class of 20, who could have predicted how that would have ended? There's just so much that's out of our control that if all we worry about is whether we won or whether we lost, it's almost assuring you of some sort of feeling of failure. Whereas if I focus, I mean the name of this is Better Every Week, we're trying to focus on the process. It's not called best. I'm not chasing my best because I don't have any idea what that is, but I want to get better every day. And so if I focus on the process, and for you as an undergrad, that's what your goal is, it should be at least. And there are people in your class that they're not there. That's not the goal at the moment. If I'm here, it's a W. And so I think it's important for me as a professor to try to cultivate that in my students. And when students are underperforming, just don't do nothing. Because doing nothing sends the message that maybe you're not important enough. Like you said, better every week, not best every week. So as a professor, as a student to my fellow students, for some people, better than they've been doing is just showing up. So encouraging that, and then the better can start, you know, like meeting people where they're at and being like, okay, what's better than this? But it's not like this unattainable goal. It's just like, okay, one step above, one, like baby steps, one at a time. And we see that, you see that in the arts and you see that in sports. The transfer portal has, you're not a sports person so you don't know necessarily what that means, but there were rules in the NCAA that said in basketball and football and maybe some other sports, if you transferred from one institution to another that was at the same level, you had to sit out a year. And so that really discouraged student-athletes from just picking up and moving. So if you go to the University of Oklahoma and you think you're going to be the starter, you end up third on the depth chart, you're buried there, your options were, well, I can stick this out, I can work through this, I can try to earn my spot. Or if I go somewhere else, I basically have to start all over, I can't play at all next year. It's a huge demotivator for me to leave. Well, the NCAA did two things. Because of COVID they gave everybody an extra year of eligibility and they did away with that mandatory year of sitting out. And so now you see almost this free agency where student athletes, I'm not getting my playing time so I'm going to go somewhere else. You've even seen it, your friends like they go one place and they think well this isn't challenging me enough I'm going to go somewhere else so that I can grow more. And it's really more difficult for your generation than any before to find out where you need to be and plug in and then give it the time it takes. Everyone has this expectation of immediate playing time, immediate results, and kind of gone are the days of someone that goes somewhere, they ride the bench for three years, they work out, they practice, they wait for their opportunity and then they shine. Everybody wants to just be the star from day one. And you're discovering that in things you've auditioned for as a freshman. The odds are stacked against you to land places. What do you do with that? Do you shoot for a lower bar? Do you go to a smaller school? Or do you just keep showing up in that practice room four or five times a week and wait for your chance. Which is really hard and I think that's because of the internet, you know? Like just because student-athletes who are like, they know of so many more places now and you can go and you can research and you can be like, okay, well I'm kind of riding the bench here but I know of this list of like 20 schools that I wouldn't be because we're aware of different opportunities and places and we can travel and do that. And is that positive, is that negative? Like, it's kind of good sometimes, but it's, I don't know, it's interesting. So we've kind of gone into some of the differences, which most of them that we discussed as differences were like secret similarities. But I think some of the main similarities, at least that he talked about in his speech he gave us, was just that both have aspects of performance. Not all careers are, well, I guess most careers you have like, okay, I have to go give this presentation. There's like presentation, but there's not always like performance in the same way that art and sport are similar in those ways. So do you have any thoughts or positives and negatives about performance? I read that and I was kind of thinking through it. One thing I think is important is for all of us, there's a time when I hung up my basketball shoes for the last time. There was a time when I marched in the marching band for the last time. Those lasts come at a clip, for me, they came at a clip much faster than I wanted them to. I wanted to play, I wanted to be in the marching band and play college basketball. That's what I wanted. I didn't get to do either of those things. That's either a tremendous waste of time or I learned something from that process. What did being on a basketball team teach me about high performance? What did being a snare drummer teach me about being part of a team? And so there's just so few that get the chance to move on to the next level, and whatever it is that we kind of pursued as a hobby or as an extracurricular, but there's still value in it. And so for me, I've taken things like just the headspace that I have before a big presentation. I approach that in much the same way as I did before a big competition. I've got a playlist for when I need to dominate. And, you know, I didn't have the technology to do that, but I absolutely would have done that if I would have had it. We take little tricks like that into whatever that next step in life is. And so the context changes. We listened to Jim Gaffigan last night and he was making fun of marching band. He's like, you put on a Captain Crunch uniform and you go marching straight lines. And he was just totally kind of railing on marching band. But I learned how to work as part of a team. I learned how if you want to be the best, you can't just... it's not just nine-to-five. We would practice early, we'd practice late, we'd practice together, we'd practice apart. And we achieved our goals because we kind of figured that out along the way. And that served me and continues to serve me even now. And I'm so thankful to my band directors who instilled that in us. We were a super small school. Nobody expected much out of us, but they, both my junior high and high school band directors, were really the first people to say, why not us? Why can't we win? And we ended up doing some things that no one expected from us, and that served all of us well. that quote about how high performance is getting 85% of your very best 85% of the time. You can't, you cannot be on all the time. You got to give yourself some cushion. Like there's gonna be some bad days and I might not be able to be pedaled to the metal all the time either, but more often than not I want to win the day. And those are lessons that I learned in both music and sports. Yeah, and I think it's interesting, like when you said, when you were talking about like marching band being important, but you said you learned a lot about being a part of a team and you learned about practicing with other people and creating good art. And I think that's funny because, you know, that's what we were talking about before where like music is usually focused on the connection, like it's not just you, like you're learning how to be part of a team, and you're being part of the feeling, and the emotion, and stuff. And so that's why I think it's interesting, like you said, when students have to choose one or the other, that I think you can learn a lot about performance, and you can learn a lot about how to just interact with the world from either. You can learn those same lessons. Maybe it'll be easier if you go into sports to learn how to have that work ethic, and how to just really remain cool under pressure and that kind of thing. And then if you go into art you learn a lot more about teamwork and you learn more about emotions and how to deal with those and how to express those, but you can learn both in everywhere and I think that's why it's really important in our world today to unify both of those in sport and in art. Like reconcile those where a lot of the time sport is focused on excellence, to say, hey, it's OK to express your emotions and put all of those into sport as well, and do the same thing in art, where we say, OK, it's really great to express these feelings and emotions. Make sure you're pursuing that excellence. Make sure you're learning that work ethic and to kind of make it more well-rounded. So it doesn't matter if a kid chooses basketball or band. They'll learn both either way and maybe learn it in different ways. So how do you think training and preparation affects the performance? Think about this in terms of rehab. So in rehab, if I'm trying to help you get back from knee surgery, early on in rehab we'll do skills called feed-forward skills. That's where you know exactly what's expected of you. So a hundred meter dash and track would be a feed-forward skill. I'm here, I've got to get to there. Nothing is going to change. I don't have to react or respond to anything but the gun and from that point on it's all about the decisions that I make. That's feedforward. That's simpler and we do it early in rehab because you're not yet fully recovered to the point where you can react and respond. Compare that to something like you've been handed off a football in the backfield and you've got to try to get to the end zone and there's 11 defenders all coming at you from different directions and different speeds and different heights and different weights and you've got to try to elude them. That's a feedback skill and that's harder because you're having to react and respond to someone else and you don't have the benefit of knowing what they're doing. And so when we think about preparation and performance, there's very little in the arts that's feedback. It's like this is the script, this is the blocking, and we want to drill down on this and get this as perfect as we can. And we don't want any feedback. Sometimes the magic in theater happens during the feedback. I remember somebody dropped a, I think it was during Little Shop of Horrors, like they dropped a gun and they had to react. Oh my gosh I remember that. Yeah, we were doing Little Shop of Horrors, and the guy who was Seymour, if y'all know Little Shop, he dropped the gun during the song where he's about to kill the guy, and the whole song is about him killing him with his gun. So he had to change all the words. But he did it, and you're right. That's so memorable. And Feedforward would say, that was absolutely not what we planned to do. It didn't go according to plan and a talented performer can still salvage that somehow. A lesser performer might have just crumbled or frozen or whatever. In athletics, we don't usually have that benefit. I can't predict where you as my opponent are going to go. I can watch film and I can try to learn as much as I can about your natural tendencies, but my success really depends on how I adjust and adapt to those unknown variables. And there's so many more unknown variables in athletics than there are in the performing arts. It doesn't make them better or worse. It's just mentally, it's a different approach. So I can remember you practicing piano and you would consistently, like you'd botch the same measure and then you'd bash the keys and start all over. And unless you got through it perfectly you weren't happy. And as soon as you hit that error you stopped and you reset. Can we do that in athletics? Not as often. I mean I can work on footwork. There are certainly fundamentals of my swing. I mean I think about your brother doing T-work. He never got to play T-ball. We moved him right in a kid pitch. But at 15 he still does T-work and it's to refine his swing. But is the ball going to ever be on a T for him? No, it's gonna be pitched to him and he's got to react and respond to the speed and the spin and everything else. So preparation in the arts, to me at least, is focused on taking that known quantity and making it as almost reflexive so that I don't have to think about what my next line is or I don't have to think about what the next note is. I just emote it. I can still play cadences that we played in high school because they were reflexes. Drilled down on them so many times that I don't even have to think about them. I can catch myself on my way to work sometimes drumming on the steering wheel to a cadence that I played 30 years ago because that was perfection. And in sports it's a different, like perfection is, you know, I went seven for seven from the field but I still made mistakes but it's just a little bit of a different approach. I think it's interesting because like you said with the feedback in sports because you're competing against, like you're opposing someone, the feedback is because you're trying to do all you can that they don't know what you're doing and that they'll be surprised with what you're doing. And then you as a person are trying all you can to predict what they're doing and you know so it's very much opposing to the other person whereas what little, well like you said there's there's a little bit less of that feedback in the arts but in the arts the feedback is more like okay my fellow actor in this scene we're trying to build this emotion together we're trying to more like, the feedback is how you can build up the product with somebody else. So athletics, it's against, and then in the arts, I think it's more like together, which again, neither is bad because both are like essential. And I think, like you said, with the preparation in both, the point of preparation is to do all you can to control the controllables, you know? I'm gonna do all that I can to know my blocking, know my lines, or know this piece of music like the back of my hand so that it gives me the space to have that feedback with my fellow musicians or my fellow actors. Because we all know our parts, so we can just be in this moment together. And then with sports, it's like, I'm going to do all I can to do the footwork, do the drills, know how all the tactical, different, like the plays and stuff, so that you're not thinking about the things that you could have known before. Yeah, I think one thing we haven't even really discussed yet is it's the impact of the crowd. And I think about the shows that I saw you participate in in high school, opening night was almost always the best. If there were two shows, go to the first night because the crowd tended to be liver. The lines were the same, delivering the same performance but you were feeding off the energy of the crowd and that made for a more believable, a deeper, a better performance. Same thing's true in athletics where the crowd is lively and you find levels within yourself that maybe you didn't know were there and that's one difference from running on an empty road versus running in the Olympic Stadium for a gold medal. Which of those motivates somebody? Yeah. Yeah. My favorite, one of my favorite things that he said in this talk, I loved when he said that performance is not about getting better so you have to just accept all the mistakes that happen during that time. Because I just, I've never thought about it that way. Like he said, I'm more of a practicer and I perform because I like doing the practicing and in order to keep doing the practicing you have to do some performing. But he said sometimes he's seen when he's worked with musicians that they can get so in their head and can beat themselves up about, okay, what did I do right? What did I do wrong? What can I... But then we'll focus on the one thing they're like, oh I messed up this measure, I messed up this part, I botched this line or this monologue. And they can't remember any of the positive things about their performance because all they can think of is that one thing that they did wrong. And so he was like, performance is never about getting better. When you're practicing, when you're preparing, that's when you're like, okay, I'm going to do this right, I'm going to do this, and it's that growth mindset. But when you're performing, the goal is not to get better, so you don't have to worry about any of the mistakes that happen because that wasn't the point. I really connected with that. What do you think of that and especially it related to sports? Yeah, I think When I read that I thought about playing drums in church We're taught that it's it's not performance like worship is not performance and Me I struggle with that because I want to do my best I want the actions of my hands and feet to lead people into a deeper place. And I can't do that if I'm ill-prepared. And that's a real challenging space for me to navigate because I have to view it as performance but I don't want to. But I would say in that respect I try to get better during every performance. It's not a grand stage. It's not like the worship band that I play in. We're not touring the country and we're not playing this old-out arena. It's our church and I love the people there and I want to do good. I do bonk sometimes and I almost liked it better when Tay didn't know, your brother didn't know as much about percussion because he recognizes when I bonk now much better than he used to. That's another thing, going back to our discussion on Little Shop, it's like the better you prepare, the better equipped you are to kind of cover those mistakes and make up for, kind of whitewash over some of those things so they don't look or feel quite so obvious. But I think for all but the upper crust of humanity, we have to fall in love with the practice. We can't all be Usain Bolts, we can't all be the best of the best, but we can all be the best of us. If it's me versus me, that's a battle I can win. If it's me versus a world-class percussionist, I'm going to lose every time. So maybe we should amend the statement that it's like performance is not about getting better. So you have to recognize all your mistakes and you can grow from them but the purpose was not, you know, you can't keep beating yourself up about mistakes you made in a performance because you were focused, your focus is not there. Well I think in an athletic standpoint this to me shines a spotlight on the people who don't practice well and they just want to show up for the game and they want to start, you know, they complain if they don't get playing time. Your opportunity to improve is not, if you're a college football player, it's usually not on Saturday. It's Sunday through Friday and that's where you need to focus. And unless we're willing to accept that, we're probably not ever going to be the best version of ourselves that we can be. So use your opportunities to get better. Don't make your opportunities to get better because that's when it's forced to be during performance when you haven't utilized your preparation time. Despite what television, social media, and a host of other sources might try to tell us, excellence is excellence. It doesn't matter if it's on a field, a court, a stage, or a boardroom. For the high achievers among us it's more about the steps toward success and continuing to remain true to the vision and it is about pointing out how we're perhaps different from others. As Brennan pointed out, giving our best effort and remaining true to our purpose, that's a universal currency in earning our chances to succeed. What about you? What are you working on or waiting for? What are you doing in the meantime to get better every day? I'd love to hear about it. Surf on over to undonepodcast.com and drop me a note. Also be sure to tune in for upcoming episodes as I talk to former collegiate athlete Dr. Quincy Conley as he shares his story of sports, school, business, and working in higher education. Also on deck, legendary strength coach Ron McKefree from the University of Washington drops in to share his inspiring story of his path to becoming one of the most recognized and respected strength coaches in the world. And then, former SIU Saluki star and NBA veteran Chris Carr stops by to tell his story of going from skinny kid in rural Missouri to competing toe-to-toe with Kobe Bryant for the NBA slam dunk title. This and more on Becoming Undone. I'm Toby Brooks and this has been Word to the Third. Becoming Undone is a MetroHype Creative production written and produced by me, Toby Brooks. If you or someone you know has a story of resilience and victory to share for Becoming Undone, contact me at undonepodcast.com. Follow the show on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn at Becoming Undone Pod, and follow me at Toby J. Brooks. Listen, subscribe, and leave us a review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for watching!