Failure is Never Final: Sports Psychology and the Growth Mindset

In this episode, I talk about what I learned from attending a lecture with a sports psychology professor from Adams State University, Dr. Brian Zuleger. While the topic was Mental Performance Training for Student Athletes, what he said is relevant for anyone on a transformational journey and when working with a growth edge.  

I discuss some the concepts that resonated with me and overlapped with previous trainings I have done on the powers of the Mind.  Some of the concepts include a build it (conscious creator) vs. fix it approach; maintaining joy in your pursuits; finding harmonious passions; and bolstering confidence and motivation from the inside out rather than the other way around where performance doesn't dominant self-worth. Enjoy!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Centered the Podcast. I'm your host, Leslie Braverman, and I'm sharing holistic healthy content that reconnects you to your most centered self, that place within you that is energized, knowing, and uplifted despite the chaos and demands of life. It's that place within you where you can become the portal of possibility. Today we're getting into the idea of mental performance. And last night I had the honor of attending a lecture by a local professor who spoke to our student athletes at the high school where my son goes. He is a cross-country and track athlete. It's track season right now. So he spoke to probably over 60 track athletes in high school and their parents. So while the talk was very focused specifically on athletes, because we all have a brain and because we all have moments of growth that we're doing, whether we're entrepreneurs or parents or athletes, whether we are running retreats or just enjoying time on a retreat, we're all going to reach points in our life where emotional growth is happening, mental growth is happening, and spiritual growth is happening. And these growth edges are really powerful. And sometimes if you're not held in a container and if you're not, if you don't have a bestie who can speak to some of this stuff, you can really have some struggles, like a lot of struggles. A lot of us are in this time in life parenting ourselves or reparenting ourselves while parenting children. And I really want to share this. Like this is really coming from the heart. Although a lot of the content I'm going to share is from this particular speaker whose name is Dr. Brian Zuliger. He's a professor at Adams State University. He's a sports psychologist and professor of mental performance training. He's worked with high school athletes, college athletes. He mostly works with college athletes and Olympians. And I thought that was really a cool resume. But I have to say, most of what he was sharing is stuff that I have talked about before because so many others are also aware of this now. So people who have been doing work like this are teachers of mine, everyone from Her Holiness Saima to Bob Proctor to Wayne Dreyer to Joe Dispenza, Esther Hicks, like so many of these amazing pioneers have put information out. But what I love about what I'm about to share with you is that he does have a unique framework. So let's get into it. So overarching thing that he was talking about, theme that he was talking about, is with the mind having a build it versus fix it approach. It's not about fixing your mindset, it's about building, or what I've spoken about before, of being a conscious creator, being a conscious creator, going in the side door when you have to of your mind, and having a build-it approach. And one of the people that he quoted that really got me some buy-in because it felt personal was Steve Kerr. And if you don't know who Steve Kerr is and why it's important to me, I'll give you a little background here. Steve Kerr was my neighbor for six, maybe even eight years. And at the time he was my neighbor, he was playing for the Bulls during the time period that Michael Jordan was in his heyday. And I've I love Steve Kerr. I've always thought he was just such a wonderful person. And it doesn't surprise me that he's had a very illustrious career in the NBA. He's been not only an athlete, an award-winning athlete, but also an award-winning coach and an award. He's worked as a coach for Olympian teams. And he's also just a fabulous guy. So the quote that he has that was used in this is maintaining joy is a huge part of success, both individually and as a team. And if you picked up my book, you know that joy in movement is one of the key ways to continue having good and optimal movement. Joy, regardless of what you're doing, is key. And especially in creating and building your mindset. So I love that Steve Kerr was in there. And that's just a little note about him. But we he talked a lot about how schools in particular talk about excellence. And if you haven't been to a school lately, you would be surprised at how almost every single school has in their mission statement or written on the walls of their hallways something about excellence. And I see it in gyms too. And one of the things that was talked about is having sustainable excellence. And that really has a lot to do with both your mindset and your motivation. And so this kind of segged into this idea of where does motivation come from? Where does performance come from? What is sustainable performance? And one of the things for that was kind of at the crux of sustainable performance is that it has to work for you. It has to work for your life. It has to be a fit for your life. So having confidence in what you do is really a lot about where does whatever you're doing fit into your life? Having harmonious passion is one of the things that he described, meaning this healthy, joyous, but autonomous passion that aligns with your life. And then the idea of having motivation and your well-being and that joy and passion, and how all that relates to performance. So what I liked about the speaker is he went on to identify that most people, whether they realize it or not, because it's the state of being human, have confidence from the outside in. The performance impacts or sets that self-identity, that self-esteem, that self-worth, that self-confidence. So looking at that is the human state, right? This is all very normal. And we all know this feeling that when we've had a performance that feels like a failure, and the thoughts that happen in the mind, the inner critic, sometimes flack from teammates or colleagues or whatever, how that impacts you and your identity. So flipping that model, having this inside-out performance, it would look like having that self-esteem, that self-confidence, and that motivation in the center, and having that arrow go out to performance, and having the other rings of the circle be focus and quality practice, meaning deliberate practice, and then resilience and well-being. And all of those are then factored in to having the endurance, the stamina, and the resilience to have performances go however they're meant to go, because they're all learning experiences. One of the quotes, I'm gonna tell a little story actually. So one of the quotes, I was a high school swimmer, and we had quotes on the back of our t-shirts, and I love that every year. A new quote. And the quote that we had freshman year when I first started the team was Winston Churchill quote. And it's success is never final, failure is never fatal. And all the freshmen have to swim the longest swim event at least once in the season. Most of the time, nobody wants to swim it. I didn't like it. I was a sprinter, of course, if you know me. And I was just like really dreading it. So I didn't have the greatest mindset, but I had a mindset of, okay, I'm gonna do it, and then I never have to do it again. So there was some motivation there. And I had learned flip turns just that year because I had just started swimming competitively that year. And most of my events had, I mean, we had tons of quality training. So I was doing flip turns regularly. But when I got in the pool that day and I started swimming, I found this rhythm and this pace to get me through the 20 laps. And one of my turns, I flipped and pushed off at a diagonal and went into the other lane. I was immediately disqualified. I had a choice. And for me, it didn't take very long. It wasn't even like a real choice in for my mind. I flipped back under the lane and I kept going. And it for me, it was never an option to stop, even though I DQ'd. I was gonna swim that whole race and it was gonna happen for me that way. And I, you know, I had tears when I was when I was continuing my laps. Like I remember that feeling. I remember that drop in energy when my self-critic came out, but I knew that I was gonna finish the race and that it actually didn't matter because it wasn't, I had all these reasons, right? The mind will come up with reasons right away. I had, I knew I wasn't ever gonna swim it again. And I then I kind of made myself laugh, like what coach would ever ask me to swim that again after this performance? And I, you know, I kind of got myself out of it and I got my groove back and I finished the race. But the biggest and coolest thing that happened was as I was getting out of the pool, what felt like every single one of my teammates put on the shirt with the quote, and the quote was on the back of the shirt. They all turned their backs to me, showing me the quote as I got out of the pool. And again, the quote from Churchill is failure is never, or sorry, success is never final, failure is never fatal. And for me, that memory, that second line, failure is never failure, fatal, was huge. And I got out of the pool, got lots of hugs and drank a lot of water and moved on with my life. But at the same time, here I am, you know, 30 some years later, and I still remember that day and that experience. So whether you're an athlete or not, you've all everyone's had moments like that, whether it's in public speaking or whether it's an event like that, where there's gonna there's an epic fail at some point in time. And so being able to be resilient after that epic fail, what does it take? And that's where this inside out confidence model, I think, is so great. So again, I'm just gonna speak it. So in the center of the model is your motivation, your self-esteem, your self-identity. Outside of that comes well-being, focus, quality practice, right? These things that are required to continue being your best self. And then the resilience that that level of the model creates is irrespective of the performance. And it can be strengthened based on the performance if you have an epic fail to. So getting out of your comfort zone, right? And being able to have this kind of toolbox or this target set of inside out confidence is really awesome. So I'm gonna read one more quote, and that's Mikayla Schiffrin. She's, if you don't know who she is, she's an Olympic skier. But what's interesting about her is that she was known as a child prodigy. She started at, you know, age four and you know, had various bumps, peaks and valleys along the way, as you do. But what was people were kind of getting into her head and messing with her because she had been such a powerful skier with such great performance for so long that when things shifted, they weren't the kindest. And so what she came up with for her personal focus and mantra was focus on the journey, not the immediate results. And everybody in the field who's looking at the mind will say the same thing that it doesn't matter how you say it, that results aren't always immediate. And it is a journey. And whether it we're talking law of attraction or we're talking, you know, manifestation, or we're talking, it doesn't matter how you speak to it. We're all saying the same thing. And this is why we practice, right? The purpose of practice is to prepare for the performance in life and whatever that means. It's it's all about the quality and handling the pressure. And so there's a little bit more discussion on handling pressure, too, and how we can look at certain prepared preparatory experiences as pressure training. And I liked the idea of this because we talk a lot now about the nervous system and getting the nervous system up regulated to handle whatever, to up-level capacity to handle whatever is next as our journey unfolds. But the way that it was described by this sports psychologist is that the purpose of pressure training is to increase pressure so that you're comfortable in being uncomfortable. And my first thought with that is like, that's yoga. That's what yoga teaches is how to be uncomfortable, how to be comfortable in the uncomfortable. And I love seeing how you know, my background in sports and mindset training and yoga and functional movement and raising kids, and everything just came together with a different lens last night when I was listening to this. So hopefully you've had some aha moments as I've been talking through this too. Again, there are a lot of different ways to think about mindset and performance, mindset and training and the things that I've learned in being a coach over the last 20 years, whether I'm working with parents, you know, a person going through perimenopause versus a person who's in preconception versus a person, I mean, it's the brain is all the same. And that's what's so cool. You know, sometimes when there's resistance, you go in the side door. But either way, what's happening, what people are doing when they come to see me is they're in a phase of transition and transformation in their life, and they're experiencing a growth edge. And in this growth edge, you're creating a new identity, whether you realize it or not, and you're strengthening or pressure training what's happening within. So it's like the idea of I was talking about this with a client the other day. It's like you have a diamond growing inside of you. That's how much internal pressure is happening through this change that you're going through. So keep creating, keep growing, keep thinking about your environment to create some support for yourself as you're going through transitions and challenges. And what I know about the metaphysical at this time is that it's like a bullet train how fast we are all able to work with the energies around us to keep changing for the highest and best outcomes. So keep investing in yourself and be that portal of possibility. And just let me know if you resonated with this episode. Lots of love.