Who Is Your PACER?

This is a special episode. It marks the one year anniversary of this podcast and offers a reflection on what it’s taken to get here and the role others have played along the way. I discuss why having a coach or trusted voice in your corner can accelerate your growth in ways that are hard to replicate on your own. Drawing on conversations with elite coaches and leaders, I share a simple way to think about the role this person plays and how they can help you see more clearly, stay consistent, and turn insight into action.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

There's an African proverb that says, if you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go together. Now, today I find myself reflecting back on this past year because today marks the one year anniversary since starting this podcast. And in that time, one thing has become abundantly clear to me. None of it happened alone. This show has grown because of the people who've been part of it, the guests, the listeners, the real life conversations, and the shared ideas. And it's also reinforced something that I've seen in a lot of the high performers that I work with. That the ones who grow the fastest, they don't try to do it by themselves. So today I want to talk about why having the right person in your corner matters not just for athletes and performers, but for all of us. Hey coaches and leaders, I got a quick question for you. You spend a lot of time building game plans for those you lead, but when was the last time you built one for yourself? If you're looking to sharpen your leadership skills, strengthen your team culture, or find better ways to support and challenge your athletes in the mental game, I'd love to help. I'm offering a free coaching call where we can talk through your current challenges and create a simple game plan for what might move the needle most for you, your players, and your program. Most coaches I know obsess over developing their team, but they neglect the person in the mirror. This call is a chance to invest in you because a better you is going to produce a better them. And if that sounds helpful, you can grab a time at Callendly.com slash Zach Brandon. That's Callendly.com slash Zach Brandon, or just check the link in the show notes. I'd love to connect and explore how I can best support you. So I just want to start by saying this briefly that today marks the one year anniversary since I released the first episode of this podcast. Now there's a lot that's changed. There's a lot that's transpired since the inception of the show. In fact, I've even changed the name. Some of you that have maybe been here since the beginning, you might have known that it was originally called the Threshold Lab, and then we adjusted it this winter. But in year one, we released 236 episodes with over 30 of those being guest interviews from all different arenas. And it's been just a lot of fun for me to explore the human side of leadership and coaching and to share some of the lessons and principles that I'm using with athletes, performers, and coaches that I'm working with in real time and kind of broadcast them out to others. And more than anything, though, I just want to start by saying thank you. Thank you to those of you who've been here from the beginning. Thank you to those of you who have stumbled uh across an episode somewhere along this journey. And thank you to those of you who have shared this podcast with at least one person. Because one of my hopes from the beginning was that this show would grow primarily through word of mouth. Because if something resonated enough for you to pass it along to someone else, to me, I thought that would be a really good indicator that we're going to move, or at least that I'm doing things in the right direction and hopefully providing value for you all. So genuinely, as a starting point, I just want to again acknowledge those of you that have been listening and say thank you. Now, there's also been a lot that's changed for me personally over this past year. Uh a year ago at this time, I was in my seventh season working full-time in Major League Baseball as the head of mental performance and coach development for the Arizona Diamondbacks. And now my work has branched off more independently, continuing to find ways to support coaches and leaders in their pursuit to win more in whatever their chosen craft or arena is, and also to live better, hopefully, in that process. Now, a big part of that work today is partnering with coaches and leaders one-on-one, serving as a guide in their journey, helping them enhance their leadership, improve the culture and systems within their teams, and also help those that they serve develop a mental edge that enables them to thrive really under any circumstance and hopefully just consistently perform as close as possible to their full potential. And what's been interesting is how often this idea of coaches and leaders having their own coach or partner has also come up on this podcast itself. Some of the most successful coaches that I've had a chance to talk with, people at the very top of their given professions, have openly shared that they have someone in their corner too. The Hall of Fame women's basketball coach Tara Vanderveer discussed how at the end of her illustrious career, she partnered with an executive coach to help her team, but she herself might have been the one who benefited the most. I talked to Chris Peterson, the former University of Washington and Boise State head football coach, who not only talked about the importance of coaches having their own coach, but also how he continues to mentor head football coaches across the NFL and college football now. Cleveland Guardians manager Stephen Boat shared how he works with his own mental coach to help him sort through his own stuff and be able to be at his best more consistently for players. And also Matt Doherty, the former North Carolina men's basketball coach, discussed how a coach once benefited him early on in his coaching career and how much he recommends it now to current coaches to find their own person. Now, in my most recent conversation with Aaron Matson, the head uh field hockey head coach for the University of North Carolina, she framed it in her own way. And here's how she described it in my most recent conversation with her.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

One of the things that changed my life as a player because I was, I was, I mean, and not to talk about myself, but I was at a different level, right, than my my teammates. And with that, sometimes either came frustrations towards certain decisions or levels of whatever, however, drill's going, or frustrations towards myself. Um, or you're just having a bad day, whatever. And I genuinely don't remember who who told me, but I was asked once, do you have your person? And I was like, What do you mean? Yeah, I have like all my friends, like I'm a team, what do you what do you mean? And they were like, No, no, no, like, do you have your person where you're frustrated, or you're the captain today and you don't feel like talking, or something's going on at home and it's distracting you, or whatever? Like, you're just not a hundred percent. Do you have your person that you can go and just tell them and say, hey, it's not my day. I need you to talk for me more today, or it's not my day. If you see me getting frustrated, just look me, like, get my eyes and tell me, like, take a deep breath. You know, like, do you have your person?

SPEAKER_01 6:35

I love that idea. Like, do you know who your person is? Because when you really think about it, most of us default to trying to navigate some of the most important challenges in our lives and our careers largely on our own. We're routinely thinking through big decisions, trying to lead other people, or just managing our own pressure, expectations, and uncertainty. And we're doing it all from inside our own perspective. And I think that's where having the right person in your corner can be so valuable. Someone who can be a thought partner, someone who can challenge you, someone who can guide you. Or one way that I've started to think about it more recently is someone who can be your pacer. So if you've ever watched a distance race and running, you've probably seen a pacer before. They're not there to win the race, they're there to help someone else run it better and faster. They help set the tempo, they keep things on track, they reduce any wasted energy, and they make it more likely that the person that they're supporting reaches the time or the outcome that they're chasing. And when I think about the work that I do, I think this is actually a pretty good conceptual conceptualization of it. This is the role that I aim to serve, to help you move toward your goals and your vision more effectively and efficiently. Now, part of my job is in essence to be your pacer. You can certainly gain a ton of value from books, podcasts, conferences, coaching clinics, and other forms of personal development. But I'm convinced that there's very little that can replace the value of having someone in your life who coaches you. I can say this because I think I've also benefited from it greatly in my own life, in my own career. And it's been an honor to reciprocate this to others. So today, I want to explain why I think having a coach can help anyone get closer to their goals and dreams and how this pacer analogy aligns with it. So I want you to think about this in the uh through an acronym. P is for perspective. I think one of the biggest challenges that we all face is that we can't always see ourselves clearly by ourselves. There's a ton of research that highlights how the majority of us think we're very self-aware, but there's very few that actually are. Now, Tasha Yurik in her book Insight offers a breakdown on how anyone can improve their self-awareness. But one of the main assertions that she presents is that it's hard for us to truly be self-aware in isolation from others. In other words, you need other people to help you see what you can't see clearly in yourself. Now, there's a phrase that I've shared before on the podcast that you can't read the label from inside the jar. We all have blind spots, we all have patterns of ways of thinking, patterns of way of being that we've normalized. And just we don't realize sometimes how they start to shape our outcomes and our habits. Part of my job is to hold up a mirror for you to help you see things clearly that you might not be able to see on your own. And here's where I want to give a quick shout-out to Carrie Guess. He's the director of Mind Health for the Boston Celtics. We've been fortunate to work together both in our time at IMG Academy, but also um hired him for a year in Arizona to be our sport psychologist. And one of the things that I always appreciated that he would say is anytime he would work with a client or a player, his goal was simple. He's like, I want them to know themselves better by the end of our conversation together. I think a great coach isn't there to just give you answers. They help you ask better questions so the answers can be revealed from within. This is what I think great coaches do in sports too. They don't just tell athletes what to do, they help them uncover it. Because when it comes from within, it's more likely to stick. In essence, these coaches, they provide perspective. So that's what the P is all about. Now the second thing is I think coaches or pacers can provide accountability. We all have goals, we all have intentions, but there's often a gap between what we say we're gonna do and what we actually follow through on. And that gap tends to close when someone else is in it with us. Now I think back to like physical workouts that I've been part of, and I want to give a shout out here uh to Dan Carlson. Dan was a major league pitching coach with us. Uh, he now works for the San Francisco Giants. Um, I know he's gonna probably tune into this show, so hopefully he appreciates this. But one of my all-time favorite memories during my time with the Diamondbacks were these like morning workouts that we would do in spring training or in the offseason, and we called them get tough or die workouts. Uh and uh thankfully, no one died. Thankfully, we were all able to survive. But I think the thing that I appreciated most wasn't just like clearly, it definitely wasn't the exercises themselves. Um, that was not my favorite part. It was the group, it was the power of like accountability. It was having people to have to experience like shared suffering with. And I can't tell you how many times it was nice to have someone there to push you and just to be in it with you. And I think that's what great coaches do. That's what a great pacer does, is they provide that accountability, not just that someone to be there to check in and say, How are you doing, but someone that helps you stay aligned with who you say you want to be and ensuring that you stay disciplined in that pursuit, especially when it's easy to start to drift off course. Um, because left alone, I think a lot of us, at least again, maybe this is just me, but it's easy to negotiate. It's easy to make little compromises and slowly stray away from the path that we want to be on. Uh, but when you have the right person in your corner, you stop negotiating and you start executing. Uh so again, I think accountability here is essential. The C, when people reach out, one of the things that I try to be really intentional with is community. Uh, a lot more than just connection. It's about being part of an environment where growth is the norm, where people are operating at a high level and where that standard becomes contagious. Now, there's research out of Northwestern University that found that simply being and sitting within close proximity to a high performer, it can elevate your own performance by up to 15%. Not because necessarily anything all of a sudden magical is happening, but because proximity to other people's habits, standards, and beliefs is contagious. Your environment's always shaping you, whether you realize it or not. And one of the fastest ways to elevate your thinking, your habits, and your performance is to change who you're consistently around. So my job as your coach for those that I work with isn't just to work with them one-on-one individually. It's to help you plug into a community, help you to find people who can challenge you, support you, raise your standard, help you tap into people from other arenas who may not come directly from that normal circle that you tap into, but maybe offer again a new perspective and again somebody that can help you raise your game along the way. Now, the E is for efficiency. Where I think about efficiency is most people don't need more information. They need what's useful and practical. They need to know what actually matters, and not that I have to like try to figure out how do I filter out all the noise. We live in a world where there's no shortage of content, ideas, strategies, best practices. You can find that anywhere and it's flooded all over different places. But more often than not, it oftentimes leaves people with just more scattered focus. And one thing I've come to learn even firsthand is that diluted focus produces diluted results. So one thing I think I can do as a great coach is to help you filter some of that noise. It's to help you identify what actually matters and where your time, your energy, and your attention are best spent, and how to eliminate the things that don't actually move the needle for you. And that's the difference between chasing everything and just focusing on the few things that truly will drive progress and produce results. And with that, that's the R, results. Because at the end of the day, insight alone isn't enough. You can listen to podcasts, you can read books, you can consume all the information you want all day long, but it doesn't, if it doesn't translate into action, it won't change anything. A great coach can help you take what you're learning and actually apply it. They help you turn ideas into execution, they help you figure out what works for you and create a system that's perfectly designed around your goals and your dreams, and they help you adjust along the way based on what's actually producing results or not. And do do we need to course correct? Do we need to refine something? Because anybody can consume information, but very few consistently convert it into execution. And I think I think that's the gap a great coach helps you close. So if we take a step back for a moment, to me, this is what having the right person in your corner can do. They give you perspective you can't access alone. They create accountability so you follow through. They surround you with a community that raises your standard, they build efficiency so your effort actually counts where it matters most. And they help you drive results by turning ideas into action. That's what a pacer does. They don't run the race for you, but they help you run it faster, smarter, and with a lot less wasted motion. So maybe the question to leave you with today is a simple one. You know, as Aaron said in our conversation together, it's like who's your person? And maybe better yet, who's your pacer? Because if you're serious about growing, about leading, and about performing at a high level, it's worth asking whether you're trying to do it all on your own and whether having the right person alongside you could actually be the thing that helps you become the person that you're capable of even faster. Thank you.