The Dad Bods and Dumbbells Podcast
The hosts Mitch and Bart discuss fitness, fatherhood, and guy stuff to help men live a great life, have fun, laugh, and get a little more fit in this weekly Podcast.
The Dad Bods and Dumbbells Podcast
BONUS Episode: Pushing Past The Mind’s Limits with Mindset Coach Taylor Brown
First of all, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO Mitch (Dec. 18th). As we are on a hiatus, here is a deep track episode from the Mindset Forge Podcast discussing Mindset around peak performance.
In this Episode, we explore how elite performers push past the brain’s early stop signal and how mindful acceptance turns pressure into presence. Taylor Brown shares the Brown–Harvard sprint, a sub‑5 mile journey, and practical tools to loosen rigid expectations and focus on controllables.
• trust and culture as speed multipliers in rowing
• the mind–body gap and perceived 100% vs real capacity
• pacing the sprint finish and timing the true last stroke
• using meditation to handle the second‑lap “oh no” moment
• radical acceptance over resistance to fear and anxiety
• one‑cue focus for technical execution under pressure
• choosing your relationship with inner experiences
• resources: Enduramind, MSPE podcast, Austin Rowing Club event
Please note: the EVENT at the Austin Rowing Club is not a new event.
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You are listening to the Mindset Forge podcast, where athletes and performing artists discuss their biggest moments and mindset shifts that made them so successful. High-level athletes and performing artists understand how to show up for the big moments, how to be present and on point when everything counts. That's what I want to find out about, and that's what I want to help understand so that we can take some of those amazing nuggets and implement them in our own lives. I'm your host, Barton Bryan, and I'm an athlete. I'm a fitness coach. I'm a former actor and singer, and I love helping people discover their fullest potential. In this episode, I interview Taylor Brown. We discuss how powerful the mind is in changing our ability to perform at a higher level. Taylor is a mindful sports performance coach and is the founder of Enduramind.com. He works with Olympic athletes, he works with crew teams all across the country and at the Austin Rowing Club. And his whole thing is really helping the person have a relationship with their inner experiences and how they perceive the information that the body and the brain are telling us and how to do that well so that we don't get thrown off. This is a really interesting interview, and I will tell you I learned a ton from this. In fact, at the end of the interview, I go to the Austin Rowing Club with him and he puts me through a 1,250 meter sprint row, and I literally got to experience exactly the type of thing he was talking about, pushing past that pain, going to that place where I was in total vision and just feeling my whole body want to quit on me. Before I kick off this episode, I want to talk to you about the premium membership option. If you look at the show notes, there's an opportunity to click on it. It's only eight bucks a month. You're gonna get a ton of extra value. So if you're somebody who just loves these podcasts and thoughts, man, I'd love to get another 20-30 minutes of this interview with Taylor or Brendan. Check this out because it might be exactly what you're looking for. All right, on with the interview. Here we go with Taylor Brown. Taylor, thank you for being here. I'm just excited to have you and I want to dive deep right away. So I want to find out what makes people rise to the occasion, show up for the biggest moments of life well and fully present, able to do what they're hoping to do out there and kind of achieve at the highest level. And I feel like you are the perfect person to talk to, not just as an elite rower yourself, but now as a coach working with high performance athletes and even Olympians and how to prepare them.
SPEAKER_02:So yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I really am excited to be here right now. And I think really what it does is it gives me the opportunity to learn more about my work through describing it to other people. I think the best way to learn is to teach. So any opportunity to speak more about what I'm doing, you know, usually helps me find some deeper insight. So thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Well, let's start writing with you as an athlete. We're gonna uh just talk about maybe the moment in your rowing career that really kind of in your mind is that was the big moment for me. That was my big kind of experience or day that just as I look back, really shines as like my my true potential was met.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I have one moment in mind, but I don't think the moment itself really captures kind of what it meant and the meaning of it uh for me. So I went to Brown and I was there from 2008 to 2012, and I was on the men's rowing team. Throughout the four years at Brown, I was really with this same kind of horror group of guys in the boat. Our senior year, we had five seniors in the boat. And if you're not familiar, rowing boats are made up of nine people, uh, eight rowers and one coxswain, which is the person who steers. And throughout the four years, these five guys had really been together in a lot of the boats that were very successful. And our junior year, we had a really hard season. It seemed like things just weren't really clicking. We weren't doing super hot at Regatta's. I think we went into the championship season, which is two championship races, uh, having only won maybe two races that that dual season. And so junior year, we kind of got our butts kicked a little bit. And we came into senior year and and we went three and three in the dual season. So we got beat three times. Harvard beat us, Washington beat us, and Yale beat us. And Yale was really hard because we had always beat them previously. And uh going into the Eastern Championships, I think we were ranked second going into that race. And the kind of throughout the entire race, we were kind of going neck and neck with Harvard, and and it just ended up being a really good race where Harvard and and us pulled away. And in the last 30 seconds of the race, I guess I should give some context, rowing races are generally between five and a half minutes and six and a half minutes long. But in about the last 30 seconds of the race, we were able to pull, pull in front of Harvard and win that race. And it it wasn't just that race, it was really a climax of four years of these this core group of five seniors and the the all the other seniors, which were about 10 other seniors on the team, uh, so like around 15 and all, that were really just really strong. And there was this high degree of trust, and there was a high degree of work ethic and determination about that entire group. And it was, you know, to go from where we were junior season, which we finished fourth at that race the previous year to go win it, and then in the national championship three weeks after this, to go and get second in the national championship. It was just really a big moment. It was really, it was really meaningful to kind of have that be the kind of telos, if you will, of our of my career, being able to win that race in the varsity eight and kind of cap the four years of training.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and you're in a team sport, so there's eight other guys, you know, including the coxswain, that you're dependent on to put everything they have at the highest level. And you're, you know, you had this incredible chemistry, but was that going to be enough? And clearly in that moment it was, which I think puts encapsulates this incredible experience you had in college. Oftentimes the secret sauce you hear with teams is like culture, trust, vulnerability, and such, but also incredible comp, competitiveness, work ethic, grit, drive, you know, whatever it takes, kind of mentality. And it's interesting that you had that experience and that you actually, you know, were able to, you know, to win at that level. A lot of people can come out of an experience like that feeling like a failure, like, oh, we did everything we could and it wasn't enough. And that can inform, you know, the way they think about their performance moving forward.
SPEAKER_02:You know, what you just mentioned there was trust. And I think reflecting on back on the success of those boats, trust was was absolutely essential. And it was something that at least in in rowing, you need to know that everybody in the boat is going just as hard as you are. You need to trust that everybody is putting in their absolute maximal effort in every moment, and that's what's going to, you know, that's what's going to make a boat and a team fast. Because that's all you really can do. You need to trust that that everybody is there, everybody's at that point. And I think the the points where we struggled was when there were people in the boat that we felt like weren't giving their all. If you're not pulling your weight, then you're not of value in the boat. Right. So if you're 220 pounds and you're 6'5, you better be pulling really freaking hard to get your weight. So if there's if someone's sandbagging a piece or sandbagging a race, we we call them an anchor because they literally they just drag you down. And so you need to know that everybody is is going just absolutely as hard as they can.
SPEAKER_00:So talk about that last 30 seconds. You guys, it's you and Harvard pulling away. There's your five and a half minute race, so you're aghast. I mean, your all systems have been depleted at this point. And what happens in that last 30-30 seconds? Take us back to that moment. What'd you guys do?
SPEAKER_02:So, I mean, we were really neck and neck to the last 10 strokes of the race, and that's when we started pulling away. And we didn't really even pull away that much. I mean, we the boats are about 60 feet long, and we won by about a foot and a half. And generally, if if you're rowing a good boat, if you have good, good rowers and you have good rhythm and stuff, if you take the strokes per minute up higher, typically boats will row races at the collegiate level around 37, 38 strokes a minute. So we were right there, we were rated on 38 strokes a minute. And about halfway through the race, we bumped it up to about 39. And then coming into the last 600, that's when you kind of start sprinting. That's about a minute 40 left in the race. And so, you know, Harvard takes it up to 40 strokes a minute, we take it up to 40 strokes a minute. And then it was just kind of every five, seven strokes, each each boat was just bumping the rate up. And I mean, if you think about 42 strokes a minute, you're almost doing a stroke every second or the last minute and a half. And it just it just kept coming up. And we ended up getting the the rate up to 44, 45 strokes a minute in the last 10 strokes. And you can just see, you know, they're looking at the boats side by side. And it's at one point, Harvard's strokes and our strokes just kind of mashed up, and you could see that we were at the same rate. And then you see that we just kept going. We just kept taking it up more and more and more. And you know, from my perspective in that race, I mean, coming to the last 30 seconds, you if you're in something that's that tight and you really, really go in for it, the lactic acid is in every little milk and cranny of your body. It's coming up in your neck, you start to kind of get tunnel vision, and and you don't really, you can really only see the person in front of you. And I've really never done anything as hard as really going for it in the last 30 seconds of a race because you get to a point where you just can't physically push any harder. You're telling your body to push harder, and it's just like giving all I got. And so that's that's kind of what it's like, and then cross the finish line and you just and I fell backwards.
SPEAKER_00:I was just completely done. I love the tunnel vision. Your brain just probably starts shutting down, and all you see is what you need to see in order to function.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's that's really it. It does shutting down is a really good analogy. I mean, if you if you're really good at it, you you kind of time it so that like the last stroke is physically the last stroke you can do. You could not go another 10 stroke without your power completely giving way. You want that last stroke to be the really the last bit of power that you can put in at that level.
SPEAKER_00:So I want to take that analogy or that understanding of like being able to push to that limit. Take it into just working out. Like you're out, you're out exercising at the gym or on a run, and you're a big runner. How do you understand like what your body is telling you that I know a lot of people like, oh, I felt the burn, I had to quit. You know, I personally, as a trainer, feel like so many people never really experience true fatigue or you know, true failure because their brains said, no, no, no, no, that's too much. True. Pretty quickly. Right. What's your kind of experience with that understanding of your body's fatigue and what it's telling you?
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's I I think what it comes down is to understanding what's going on there and understanding the signals of your body and respecting respecting your body and working with your body rather than working in opposition to it. And I think about it a mind-body gap. And what I mean by that is when you're at a high level of effort, your mind will convince you that your body is at 100% that it can't give anymore. But your mind will start doing that around when your body's at, I think, around 80%, 80% of its actual physiological limit. So when you're at 80% of your actual physiological limit, I think your mind says we're at 100%. But I think there's a gap there, which is about 20%. I think there's an extra 20% that you can physically give before you die. And recognizing, okay, this is what my mind is saying, but this is where my body actually is. So when you're working out, when you're getting to that level of fatigue and exhaustion, the question I usually ask myself is may I accept this discomfort in this moment? Can my body physically continue going at this capacity I'm at right now? And invariably the answer is usually yes. And it's not until the last 30 seconds of 2,000 meter race or something where I'm saying yes, go, go, go. And my physiology of my body is saying we're at that point. With the experience that I've had in rowing and understanding what's happening in my mind in those moments, I think I can get my body closer to its physiological limit than most people can. And it's certainly when you're in that last 15, 20 strokes, I feel like I'm there. And actually, last week I'm coaching Austin Rowing Club racing team right now. And I do some of their evaluation pieces on the rowing machine with them. They can build some trusting coach. That coach can still throw down. And if I can do it, you can do it, kind of thing. And we are doing 1,250 meter tests, it's about four minutes. And that's a really hard distance as well. Because you think, like, oh, it's shorter than six minutes. It's it's easier. You go harder. And so it's it's hard. But really, in the last 500 meters, I mean the last minute and a half, my mind was saying, Oh, you got this, drop the hammer, right? And so it was actually flipped from what I just said. In my mind, I was thinking, oh, I can go harder, I can go harder. But it was my body that was saying, no, this is where you are right now. Because I haven't really trained in rowing in about five years. And so my body said, nope, this is what you have. And my mind was frustrated by that.
SPEAKER_00:So whereas maybe you're for a young kid, you know, 18, 19, 20, their brain or their mind may be, in a sense, the weaker of the two. Their bodies are can do anything. They have great resilience physically, but maybe mentally is where they're challenged to kind of accept and go through that pain. But you're at a place where it's kind of the opposite. You're 31, something's switched in you where you know the brain can really will it there, but the body's a little bit like it hasn't been doing that type of exertion, so it's still on you.
SPEAKER_02:My mind is, I've trained my mind over the years to be really accepting of discomfort and just not jump the gun, not react, and just be able to sit in hours of discomfort.
SPEAKER_00:So before we go on, I want to spend a lot of time talking about you as a coach. But before we go to that, you're working on your mile run. This is a pursuit that you've you're actively involved in right now. I noticed that on your website you had crushed your mile, five-minute mile, and now you're at your goal is 430.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Talk to me about your how you attack that, how you do that, and and what's your kind of preparation and mindset around that is.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean, that was something I started embarking upon September 2020. I was kind of going a little bit stir crazy during COVID. And I thought, well, I can run. You can't stop me from running. So it was right around when I started developing this kind of mind-body gap idea. I had read this book called Endure by Alex Hutchinson and actually reached out to him and graciously had a Zoom conversation with me about it. In that book, Alex talks about the different theories of what is actually the processes that are happening during fatigue and exhaustion. What is fatigue? And why does it make us slow down? Right. And so four of those theories are based around physiology, your body, your body's limits, your oxygen carrying capacity, your VO2 max, your muscular endurance, all these all these things that you can see and you can measure and you can understand. Then there are two theories. The mind acts as a governor on the body, and the mind is what's actually producing the sensations of fatigue. Sensations of fatigue are illusory. They're not real, they're not being produced by the body. It's something that the mind is tricking you into feeling to protect your body. So one's called the central governor, central governor theory. Fatigue is actually more like an emotion than it is like an actual physical sensation. And if that's the case, then we can observe when fatigue is happening and choose to push through that to a certain level. Your physiology is going to limit you, just like I was talking about where my body is right now. I get to that limit and I can't physically actually push any harder. I'm watching the numbers on the rowing machine, they're just not going down. I'm pushing as hard as I can. Right. So getting kind of closer to that actual physiological limit of your body is more possible when you kind of view fatigue as something that can be observed and either listened to or not listened to. So when I set out to do the, you know, my goal was originally to break a five-minute mile. And I started, I did my baseline in September 2020. I went 540. And I kind of used this idea of being able to train my ability to accept discomfort and choose not to allow it to affect my performance. And the way I did that was through meditation and mindfulness practice. I kind of embarked upon doing meditation every day for about five months, usually somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes of meditation every day. And what that helped me cultivate was kind of this ability to create space between my experience or space between a stimulus and then my response. So if the stimulus, for example, was the fatigue in my legs, the pain in my lungs as I'm breathing hard, I could kind of observe that and witness that and then choose if I wanted to back off or not, rather than just, oh, I feel tight in my lungs or I hurt in my chest or my legs hurt, and having that immediately uh affect my performance. So when I was running, for instance, on the track, and one of the points when I noticed that my speed would start to decrease would be partway through the second lap. I do the first lap and I'm fine. And then coming through the back stretch of the second lap was when I call it the oh shit moment. And so that's when I would actually start breathing really hard. In that moment, I would really work to stay present with my breath and accept the pain that was there, accept the discomfort that was there in kind of an erratical way and not actually allow that moment to slow me down. And one of the ways that I also stayed present was I kind of had a mantra in my mind. And I've heard I heard this mantra from Michael Gervais, who is the mental performance coach for the Seahawks. But he says, you know, dancing on the razor's edge, right? And I really like that because this idea of the razor's edge, right? It's like, it's kind of like this piece of paper here. It's like if I if I go a little bit too far to one side, I'm gonna slow down, right? I'm not going hard enough. If I go a little bit too hard on the other side, I'm not, I'm just gonna, you know, I might not be able to maintain that pace for the entirety of the one mile test. But if I dance right on that razor's edge, it's like just beyond that point of being comfortable. I kind of want to be right in that kind of discomfort. And I knew that I was there because I could kind of feel the experience of being kind of on the razor's edge in my body. What does that actually feel like when I'm pushing off really hard on my drive leg? What does that feel like in my breathing when I'm actually right there at that pace that I really want to be at? So I think it was really just a process. Of accepting discomfort as it's there and not really allowing it to make me slow down, I think is the long answer. And I ended up getting down to 452 and I'm taking some time away from running right now, but 430 is still very much my goal. I think there's another goal in front of that. If you kind of follow the logic of five minutes, 430, and then, but I'm not going to talk about that yet. But the whole idea kind of came along of thinking, like, okay, if I get my body, if my mind wasn't a part of it and there was a robot controlling my body, just remote control, how fast could my body physiologically go right now? I think that was the first question. And that day I went out of the park and I ran a 540 mile. I was like, okay, I probably could have been under 530 where my fitness was at that point. But I do really feel like when I got down to that 452, I mean, I do feel like I got pretty close to kind of where I actually was in that moment.
SPEAKER_00:You squeezed every ounce in that moment out to get 452.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think so.
SPEAKER_00:A lot of people, if given a goal, let's say I want to squat 405, I want to sprint a mile in six minutes, five minutes, whatever that number is, whatever that goal is. I think that most people, and maybe this is an American thing too, over other cultures, but would focus on technique, the training, all of the physical stuff. Well, I'm I don't have the legs yet. I've got to build up my hamstrings, I've got to do all this physical work and go out and work on their A skips, B skips, three skips, all these things. You took the completely opposite approach. Right. Now, granted, you had a high level of fitness stepping into that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But still, like your whole approach was like, I'm going to, I'm, I know that the mind is really my big limiter. You know, it's going to limit me most. I'm going to control or accept the pain, the fatigue, whatever those tricks the mind's trying to get the body to get you to listen to and say, oh, okay, I better pull back. Wow. I think for for you listeners here, I mean, this is a huge aha moment for me and hopefully for you, is like, I think we can spend so much time on like, are the exercises just right? Is the training just the way it's supposed to be? Is the programming right? If we miss the mind part, if we miss how we're showing up and how we're practicing and talking about meditating every day for five months, 10 to 15, 10 to 20 minutes a day. I mean, that's so intentional on what he understands is going to get him the type of results he's looking for. And that's that's amazing.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I surprised myself.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I got down from 540 to 452 in five months. And I was training maybe three times a week. Don't get me wrong, you're not just gonna jump off the couch and go from eight-minute mile to 430 mile in in six months, but generally the body has a lot more to give than the than the mind will let us know. And the mind is is really evolved to protect the body, and it's gonna do anything in it, everything and anything in its power to protect the body. The mind doesn't like when we push ourselves hard. It's a fact. The body was designed for performance, that's true, but the mind was designed for survival.
SPEAKER_00:All right, so you are having the up to you right now of coaching two Olympians, two ladies, one's an athlete, one is a javelin thrower, and they've just crushed Olympic trials, they're headed to Tokyo for the Olympic Games. Talk about your experience with old Maggie and Annie and what that's been like, and what you've been able to help them with that's allowed them to be at this level.
SPEAKER_02:One thing we do is really reduce the attachment to expectation. When an athlete or any performer really has really rigid expectations of what an experience needs to be or must be like, that really limits them and becomes kind of an anxiety-producing distraction. Expectations in and of themselves aren't bad things to have, but they become really destructive when we're super adhered or attached to the way something needs to or must be or has to turn out. Because if we get into that moment and reality all of a sudden doesn't align with what you expected, then you know that's anxiety, that's pressure, that's frustration. Right. So Maggie, for instance, right, she has, you know, and she competes in javelin, she has three throws in the preliminary rounds in order to get to the final rounds. And so one of those three, she has to be in a certain place after the first three throws in order to get to the finals, right? So there were a number of times this year where her first throw was out of the sector, which essentially means it doesn't count. So it was kind of off to the right, and she typically would pull to the right sometimes. And so, you know, she goes up there and she has this expectation that, okay, I need to throw this javelin right down the middle and it needs to be over 64 meters. And then she throws the thing out of the sector and it went 50 meters. What now? Right? If she's really attached to that expectation, that's gonna totally throw her off. That's gonna totally throw any athlete off if reality is not meeting what you expect it. So what we do is we do a lot of work just being present in the moment and being completely accepting of what is here right now, right? Not being resistant to reality, essentially, not being resistant to the discomfort that it produces, right? So she might go up throughout the sector, and that might produce a sense of anxiety for her. That might produce a sense of worry, right? That might produce a thought of, oh man, I need to get these next two, I need to get these next two perfect. And she's not necessarily controlling that stuff. That stuff might just come in. Anxiety might just happen. We never say, I'm gonna make myself anxious right now. Like anxiety just happens, right? So the work that we've done is accept that that thought is there, accept that that anxiety is there, accept that whatever the worry is there after that experience. And now you can choose how you want to respond to that thought, how you want to respond to that anxiety, how you want to respond to that emotion that's happening. And there are two paths you can take. You can take the resistance path, which is avoid those experiences or engage those experiences. And that is ultimately done in order to try to make them kind of go away. So she could, she has that anxiety, she could kind of engage in it and go down that rabbit hole of thoughts and worries and thinking about what she should do different, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that stuff is just distraction. Or she can choose to accept those experiences that she's having, go down the path of acceptance, notice that they're there, acknowledge that they're there, let them be there, and then put her attention back on the things in the moment that she knows are going to help her. Okay, so take a few deep breaths, ground yourself, feel your feet on the ground. Right. At this level, her body knows it's muscle memory how to throw a gap. She's not gonna go up there and change a bunch of things. Just focus on one thing. Okay, I wanna hold my core a little bit tighter on this next one. And that's literally all she needs to do to throw out, right? It's just a matter of how do you respond to those things that are produced when expectations are present? How do you be not super attached to what happens and just be completely in the process? And how do you really commit to that? I think is the big thing. It's one thing to say, you know, I'm not attached to the outcome, or I'm I'm not uh attached to these rigid expectations. But when push comes and shove and you just went up and you kind of bombed your first throw, and in that moment saying, I'm not attached to the outcome, I am in the process. That I think is where the magic happens because it's it's like, okay, I'm actually in the moment.
SPEAKER_00:And when you're talking about that second lap of the mile, when you start noticing the brain telling you those messages, like you know it's gonna happen. You can't show up at the biggest event of your life and not expect anxiety. Like that's not real realistic, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You're at, you know, your athletes, you're coaching, they know that these things are gonna happen. And you're helping them see, okay, I got two options. How do I deal with it? How do I accept it, process it, and focus on the thing that you can actually control and not get kind of let that thing either fight it or let that thing overwhelm you.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Yeah. You know, I think a lot of athletes and people in general live at the effect of their experiences in their environment. So when I say they lived at live at the effect of their experience, I mean they let their experience dictate their behavior, how they act in those situations. Some example of some experiences could be a situation that you're in, could be something somebody has said to you, which provokes then an internal experience, like an emotion, a thought, a sensation. And typically the idea is okay, you have your emotions or your thoughts are true. And so you don't even think that, oh, I have space to decide how I respond to my thought, how I respond to my emotion. I think what this comes down to, if I were to ask you a question, who are you? When you say I, what are you referring to? How would you answer that? Are you body? Are you your thoughts? Are you your emotions? So, what I tell athletes a lot, and what we have conversations about is who am I actually? What is the self? We have the physical self that's every some meat and bones, the tissue of the brain. And then we have our thinking self, where the thoughts exist. And then we have our consciousness, we have our awareness, our awareness self. And you can be aware of your thoughts, aware of your emotions, and kind of observe them from a distance. And that is really, I think, where we are. So we're not necessarily our bodies, we're not necessarily our thoughts, we're not our emotions. And if we allow those experiences, though, to control us, then we don't really kind of have choice in those situations. But when we practice taking space between those experiences and our response, then we, if we live in that space, we can decide how we want to proceed in that. And that's what I mean by taking reclaiming the power of choice and kind of not living at the effect of our experiences or our environment.
SPEAKER_00:As we're talking about the Olympic athletes that you're working with and how you're helping them, which sounds like to me, kind of take a step back from the moment that they're in and realize what these things are and have choice over those.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And I think the big point here is that most people don't realize that an inner experience is not very different from an outer experience. I am having an interaction with you right now, and I am choosing how I engage with you. I'm choosing the words I use, I'm choosing how we relate, you know, how I relate to you. And you can do that same exact relationship with your inner experiences, with your emotions, with your thoughts, with body sensations. I choose my relationship with my thoughts. All my thoughts don't represent truth. All my emotions don't represent truth. All my sensations don't represent truth. I choose how do I want to be in relationship with this inner experience right now? And I think where we get really that out of shape is when an inner experience is really uncomfortable, we oftentimes just want to get away from that and avoid that as possible. So we have these kind of habitual condition mechanisms in order to get rid of those inner experiences. And what's an example of that?
SPEAKER_00:Anxiety, fear, stress, anger. So an athlete's three minutes before they get on, you know, they grab the javelin, let's use the javelin throw. Yeah. And bam, fear hits them like a truck. And all of a sudden, it just like all their doubts, all their fears consumes them.
SPEAKER_02:Right. And what happens if that athlete just immediately it reacts to that stuff by believing it and by giving into it and engaging with it? It screws them up. But it's not the experience itself of fear that is causing that, that is screwing them up. It is their relationship with that experience that's screwing them up. If I have fear or anxiety right before a performance, I have a choice about how I want to respond to that. I can respond to that by going down the path of resistance, which is I need to get this fear away. This fear is bad. I need to change this. And the way I'm going to do that is either engage with it. So trying to kind of rationalize my way out of the fear. I might try to think positive. I might try to be optimistic. I might try to do all these things to try to get the fear to go away. But guess what? You're just going to concentrate on the fear more. Right. So that's that's the engage. I might try to avoid. I might just try to kind of push it out. I might try to just not think about it, right? What happens if I tell you not to think about something? You're immediately going to think about it, right? So those two routes are really kind of fruitless, and they're they're based out of it, it is a fear-based mentality. It is a, I need to get rid of this thing. I need to get rid of this inner experience in order to perform well. Well, guess what? Everybody's going to have anxiety, fear, or worry at some point. And there's no really easy way to just get rid of that stuff. The other path is just being in complete radical acceptance that it's there. And I can show you a small demonstration. If you take your hand and you put your hand in front of your face, so you can do this if you want to part. If you put your hand in front of your face, and imagine this hand is uh fear. Okay. This is a fear hand. Now you can kind of get it close enough to your face where you can still focus on it, right? You don't want to get it so close. You can focus on your hand. Now, if you take your other hand and put it up in front of that hand, now you gotta focus on one of the hands. You can either focus on your front hand or you can focus your eyes on your backhand, but you can't focus on both of them at once. Now, imagine that your front hand is the fact, you know, your performance, the things you need to do to perform well. Your backhand is fear. That fear can still be there in the background, but you can focus on your front hand. And so this is kind of an analogy that I go through, a little exercise I go through with athletes, where it's like, I think there's this, there's this myth that in order to be, in order to perform well, in order to be happy, in order to access any positive emotions in life, that there's only there's only enough space in your awareness for one emotion. There can't be confidence and also fear. That's a myth. There can't be sadness and also joy. That's a myth, right? You you can experience those things in the same awareness. And so that's I think one is just in the front. One is just in the front, and one is in the background, right? Right. And and if you if you kind of keep keep the one in the front and focus, the one in the background is gonna just kind of drift away over time, right? Right. Or it might come back, or it might go in front. And then it's really about where are you placing your attention? Where are you placing your focus? Yeah, you can have fear and confidence, right? I think this is where some people get messed up, is they say, Oh, I can't perform when I'm anxious. I have to get rid of the anxiety, but I can't perform when I'm worried, I have to get rid of the worry, right? But I say, no, I think that stuff can be there. We just have to manage, manage how we respond to it. What is our relationship with it? If we're in opposition to it, it's gonna continue to be there and we're gonna continue putting our attention on it. If we're in kind of a dance with it, you know, we do the salsa, right? We can then decide it's it's more of a relationship and less of a less of a fear, right?
SPEAKER_00:The control goes away. Right. Yeah. If the fear or the anxiety is there and you just keep looking at it and trying to figure out a way to like trying to change yourself, control it, trying to create certainty, right?
SPEAKER_02:This is what I tell athletes is the only way to truly control your experience is to accept that you cannot control a lot of your experience. Yeah, there are certain things that you can control, but if you could if you could actually control your experience, you would just say, hmm, I never want to be afraid again. Okay. No more fear.
SPEAKER_00:Good luck.
SPEAKER_02:I never want to be anxious again. Okay, no more anxiety. Yeah, that'd be great.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but we can't go to guru and just put the hand on the show. Right, yeah. That's you'll have no more fear.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that'd be, yeah, right. So, so I think it's it's it's funny. I kind of chuckle when people say, Oh no, I have no fear. Right. That's that's a lie.
SPEAKER_00:I feel like we could go another hour or two just kind of scratching the surface of understanding really the depth of what you're what you're doing with your athletes and such. But let's give my audience some opportunities to find out more. Talk to them about your podcast and the website for Endural Mind. Sure. And just uh more information about what you're up to.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I produce a podcast that I don't speak on. Actually, the hosts are Drs. Keith Kaufman and Tim Pinot. And they are two researchers and clinical psychologists who've been researching mindful sport performance enhancement or mindfulness-based methodologies and performance for the past decade. And so they're based out of Washington, D.C. And I got a certification with them a few years back. And at the end of the certification, I went up to them and said, Hey guys, do you, you know, what's your what's your outward-facing media? You know, do you do a podcast? Do you, you know, you you have to have something? And they said, Well, you know, we have the institute, the Mindful Sport Performance Enhancement Institute, and that's about it. We run trainings through that. And I said, Can I produce your podcast for you? Because just I was so enthralled by how much knowledge these guys had and how much our interests aligned. And so I've been producing that podcast now for the past two years, and and we're coming up on our 30th episode and you know, end of our second season. So that's on Spotify. It's called the Um Mindful Sport Performance Podcast. And if you want to check that out, yeah, Spotify, any any other podcasting platforms, you should be able to find it. And then if you yeah, want to take a look at my website, learn a little bit more about what I do. I felt like I hit on that stuff pretty good today. But yeah, check it out, enduramind.com. That's E-N-D-U-R-O-M-I-N-D.com. And if you want to contact me, you can you know find that on my website as well.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, we'll we'll put all the information and the links and such in the show notes here so that people have easy access. One of the things that I'd love to do with you, and we discussed it briefly early on, but I'd love to figure out a time where you and I, and it just seems like an awesome opportunity to get a bunch of people from Austin down to the Austin Rowing Club, and we'll get a workout in. We're not gonna jump into Cow Lake, we're not gonna jump on boats and row, but but maybe some get some ergs out and get some you know boot camp style stuff. And I'll I got my camp gladiator kind of style that I do, and you can bring some of your you know rowing stuff, and we can just have a fun workout and invite the community and just kind of celebrate this connection and this podcast in a physical way because I think we're both very physical people. We're athletes, we like to kind of put it out there. So, would you be interested in doing that?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I spoke with Austin Rowing Club already, actually. There's some there's some dates we're looking at right now.
SPEAKER_00:That's fantastic. For more information on the event with Taylor that's coming up at the Austin Rowing Club, just keep tapping. On the website bartonguybrian.com or at our Facebook page, the Mindset Forge Podcast. For the workout with Brendan Hansen, check out the show notes, jump on the link, sign up, or show up as a spectator. We're gonna have a ton of vendors, including Arosty, Hyperware, coming out and bringing all the equipment for the workout, and we've also got Mantra Labs, Rain Energy Drinks, Five Star Nutrition, and our title sponsor, Camp Gladiator. Secondly, you can see Taylor's race with Brown University against Harvard. And of course, you can watch my 1,250 meter sprint row with him coaching me the whole time and then us talking about it afterwards. That's also a link in the show notes. Don't forget to share the podcast if this really spoke to you. And thanks again for listening to the Mindset Forge podcast.