Probably the biggest barrier I have found in my entire life to learning things is ego. Hello and welcome to the swim brief. I'm Chris DeSantis. On this podcast, I go deep on things that come up in my coaching. I'm an expert in positive psychology, a former and recovering swim coach, and somebody that spends too much time thinking about all this stuff. Today I want to talk about ego. And not just because the fate of everyone in America is resting in the hands of one person who's spent his entire life feeding and defending an unstable ego, and then another person who's unfortunately falling into that same ego trap at the moment. But before we get into that discussion of ego, let me do some housekeeping. I want to talk to you about this podcast in general. And I want to do this off the top because, as a listener, I really want your help. I see an opportunity with this podcast right now. I'm so grateful for everybody that's been a loyal listener. I'm always surprised, uh pleasantly, to hear about another person that's listening to it. I think there's a lot of coaches and a lot of parents of swimmers and some swimmers that listen to this podcast. I want to take it to the next level. And I've been talking to some really close listeners, sometimes I call them the unofficial producers of this podcast about how to do that. I have a lot of ideas, several of which I have some pretty concrete plans to implement, including upping the production value of this. More on that later. But the specific one that I would really like help with from you as a listener is I understand, like today I'm doing a podcast, it's just me talking into them, the mic. And I'm gonna share some really valuable stuff with you guys about positive psychology. And I think for the hardcore listeners of this podcast, um, you're gonna you're gonna love this. But I would like to bring more people into the tent. And the feedback that I've gotten, uh, one of the most important pieces of feedback I've gotten is that doing interviews on this podcast will do that. Um, and I want to make this podcast the go-to swimming podcast for coaches and parents of swimmers. Okay. Um and I want to bring some interviews that specifically those two audiences, if you're one of those two people, I want to know who you want to hear from. Who do you want to see interviewed on this podcast? Who are you curious to know more about? So if you're listening, you want to help make this an even better podcast, um, you want to put me to work a little bit harder on the scheduling aspect of this, please write me an email, swimbrief podcast at gmail.com. Go to my website, chrisdcoach.com, fill out a contact form, right? Um, or go to Instagram, Chris D underscore coach, send me a message there. Tell me who you want to hear from, because I'm starting to build out a list uh of people to interview on this podcast, and I do have plans to bring more interviews to this podcast, and I want to make this the best and biggest and brightest podcast in the sport of swimming. Um, not for my own ego, of course, as we're gonna talk about ego today, but because since I got involved in sports media in 2008, I have consistently wanted to make the sport of swimming better. And um I think the this podcast is the most influential thing I can do. Um, and I want to be able to influence more people in a positive way, get people uh to know more about positive psychology, and honestly, just learn myself from talking to more people, interviewing more people. So please help me with that piece of it. Now, on to today's topic ego, which I want to talk about because I've recently had a personal revelation. You know how it goes on this podcast, Chris. I'm coaching somebody or I'm working on something within myself, and and you'll see it reflected here in these podcasts. And this is another example of one of those. Um, I want to talk specifically about ego's role and the way that we open up ourselves to growth and development. I think the term ego gets a bad rap, um, and people often use quote ego as a shorthand for something that needs a little more definition. So I'm gonna do that. And I want to show some of the the downsides to being out of alignment with your ego. Um, and the good news about all of that is on the flip side of all that disorder, there's actually a lot of things, uh, really positive outcomes you can get in your life uh if you can get your ego in sync. And uh I'm gonna talk a little bit about even what that looks like, um, and then and then, yeah, what it can do for you. One of the things that comes up consistently in my coaching is that athletes often perceive that there are other athletes that seem to have, quote, big egos. And you know, this is honestly, it's come up for me even coaching-wise. Sometimes I've had these moments where I go, am I not achieving what I want to achieve because I'm not arrogant enough? Right. And that's really how I phrase it. I look at somebody who my perception of them is that they have a big ego, they're there's they're they're arrogant, right? But um, you know, they're they're putting themselves out there confidently in a way that I may look at myself and go, you're not really not doing that, right? And I I hear this a lot from athletes as well. So I always probe further on this because I just told you what what I'm perceiving, but like I get such a wide range of answers when I ask an athlete, okay, that other person with a big ego, tell me more about them. How are they? How do they how do they show up at a swim meet? How do they show up before a race? How are they at practice? Right? It's really important to understand somebody that you're talking to, in this case an athlete, is defining what it means to have a big ego. As the context that this comes up and the implication of that context is 99.9% of the time, they don't want to be that person, right? If you go back to my example too, I'm looking at this coach and and I'm thinking, oh man, so arrogant. I don't want to be arrogant, right? I hope most of you listening to this podcast, you don't want to be arrogant. Okay, so you're you can get caught in this paradox where you go, well, is my you know, is my lack of confidence holding me back? And yet I don't want to be what I perceive to be a confident person to be like, right? But if having a big ego just means having a healthy confidence in who you are and what you're capable of, I, which is what I actually think it is, I know that when somebody is saying, I don't want to be that person, I have my work cut out for me. Because I have to convince them that it is a good idea to build infrastructure up to a more aligned self-perception, right? A self-perception that's more accurate and honest. And I have to deal with the fact that they may be really resistant, whoever I'm coaching may be really resistant to that because they think that that ladders up to an undesirable outcome. And it, and if, and if people think something ladders up to an undesirable outcome, then they're not going to be very motivated to work on it. And I think anybody out here is listening to this who's tried to work with somebody else on their self-perception knows you can run into a ton of resistance. I think this is a big factor in why, right? Um, these people, right, who they're often seeing as confident, right, are really to me, in many cases, people that project confidence without having done any of what I just described, building up that infrastructure beneath it to support it. They haven't done the work on their self-esteem, right? That's what they think of themselves, their self-self-efficacy, what they think they can do. So when they come up against experiences that contradict their self-image, right, whatever it may be, even though they're projecting confidence, oh, I'm the man, I, you know, I I can beat everybody, right? Then when they don't beat everybody, they suffer from a really drastic swing. And that causes some pretty erratic behavior. And I think other people watching them behave erratically go, well, I don't definitely don't want to be that person. I'm gonna give you an example of this, a little bit more of a specific example from my days studying positive psychology. One piece of research that has stuck with me for a long time was into school age bullies, right? Kids that bully other kids in school. And this has obviously been a big point of emphasis in a lot of schools. I mean, I have two school-aged children right now, and I'm amazed at uh how much more sophisticated schools are about that kind of stuff than when I was a kid. Um, but the prevailing psychological theory when I was my kid's age, uh, as far as I could tell, around bullies, was they have low self-confidence. They have like low self-perception, their self-image is poor, and they victimize other children to compensate for their low confidence. Right? That's what that's what my parents told me, at least when I was getting bullied in the seventh grade, right? So the evolution of that theory to where it is now, I think is a little more nuanced. When people dug in a little deeper, they discovered that bullies don't really suffer from chronic low confidence. If they had chronic low confidence, they would be more likely to be bullied by other people than bully others. You understand? The kids who are getting picked on, those are the ones with chronic low confidence. They have something distinct going on from the ones that are pushing them around, right? What is more accurate to say is that kids who bully have insecure confidence. They believe in themselves, but that belief is really fragile, right? There's no, as I said, there's no infrastructure underneath it. And it causes them to act out to defend their ego when they feel threatened. Right? That ego protection response is really powerful in all of us, but when you suffer like a really like drastic sort of swing in terms of your self-perception, right, the the response can be even more dramatic. Now, I work primarily with athletes who are chronically lacking in self-confidence. The types who are more likely to get picked on by somebody else. Um, types of, quite frankly, are more like I was an am still to a certain degree. Um, they would kill to have occasional delusions of grandeur, but often their model, right, for having a big ego is another peer who is a little bit like a bully, like they're fluctuating wildly all over the place. Sometimes their self-perception is really high, sometimes it's really low. And they can see and probably experience the obvious downsides of that. That's not who they want to be, right? Without a lot of good role models, and let's be frank, right? Especially with teenagers, okay, peer role models make a giant difference. Adult role models are important, but peer role models are supreme. So they struggle then, right? If they know that they don't want to be chronically low in confidence, but what they perceived other sort of confident people to be is also something they don't want. And this comes up all the time in my coaching, also, like, what do you want to be? And kids will be totally silent because they don't know what they want, but they know what they don't want. So, what does it actually mean to have a healthy ego and what can it do for you? Let's get into that. First, let me try and describe what you can aspire to in terms of ego. Contrary to all the fake it till you make it messaging out there, which to me is almost entirely bullshit, having a healthy ego is actually about understanding the difference between humility and modesty. Or, put in a little bit starker, harsher terms, honesty or lying. Let me walk you through it. I think we can all agree it's admirable to be humble. Humility is something that we admire in other people. But what does it actually mean? To me, I think pretty universally, humility means being honest about who you are. If you are six foot one and you're being humble, and somebody says, How tall are you? you say, I'm six foot one. If you're qualifying for your LSC senior champs meet, if you're an athlete, then you are way better than the average kid that participates in swimming. So you're at least, in my opinion, quote, good at the sport of swimming. That's a little bit squishier than being than six foot or six foot one, but you understand my point, right? Humility is about saying honestly, going right up the line of here's who I am and here's what I'm capable of. Modesty, on the other hand, is actually lying, it's dishonest to exaggerate in the wrong direction about who you are and what you're capable of. Maybe there's some people out there, some cultures that admire modesty. Um I don't. I don't admire modesty because I think it's dishonest. To me, it's being six foot one and saying you're 5'11. I realize I use that as an example, and that's like a classic. There's a lot of six-foot tall women who say that they're 5'11 out there. We're not going to get into that whole topic, but I I don't advise, and I don't think it's healthy, to say you're 5'11 when you're 6'1. It's the same as saying you're not very good when you actually are good. Okay. When you frame for somebody that you're coaching the choice, not about whether or not you have a big ego, but actually around honesty, in my opinion, in my experience, your chances go way up of coaching somebody to more accurately align their ego with who they are. Right. So most of us admire humility. We would like to coach other people, help other people to be humble, but humble doesn't mean modest, right? It doesn't mean underestimating. It's actually about also about coming up to the line of who you actually are. Because if you come too far away, I'll accept six foot and a half, I guess if that's accurate. But if you start going under six feet, then you're you're you're going into the modesty zone. And um so there's a very there's a very fine line with this. And as I as I say this out loud, I'm realizing that a lot of people probably run into another scenario, which is often athletes, coaches, or parents of athletes who reflect a different slice of what we think of as ego. For them, it's not as much about humility or modesty. This is sort of the, I don't know, for lack of a better term, the do you know who I am effect, right? Have you ever heard of a celebrity getting pulled over for drunk driving? And they say to the cop some version of, don't you recognize me? Are you surely, are you sure you really want to give somebody who delighted America with her performances in two legally blonde movies a ticket? Now, Reese Witherspin didn't say that exactly. Um, and that's an 11-year-old reference to her DUI. But anyway, with athletes, you will run into somebody who you as a coach are trying to treat fairly, and they're unaccustomed to being held accountable. That's because of an that's not, well, it's not because of, but it's a byproduct of an insecure confidence. Their expectation is that you treat them differently, but there's nothing beneath that. There's nothing supporting that. They they kind of have a dissonance in their own mind. They know that, you know, they they they know that they want you to treat them actually unfairly, overly generously, and excuse a lot of stuff, but they don't really think it's justified. Right? Which is why they react so defensively when you challenge that.
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SPEAKER_00Because there's no infrastructure underneath, right, that they'll respond really aggressively to defend their ego. With coaches, most common what I see is you'll just have a coach who absolutely blows their top when questioned. I am like a heat-seeking magnet for these people, okay? Because I am always that little annoying shit that's like, hey, why are you doing that? Or I don't agree with that. You know, that's wrong. Blah blah blah, right? And so I think I've been blown up at more times than I can count in my entire life by other coaches who just insecure, right? They have no infrastructure beneath their projected self-confidence, and especially in regards to why they're doing what they're doing, and so they react drastically. In the parent realm, you may have somebody who has a pretty drastic reaction to their child's adversity with something. Their kid, the kids are having a hard time with something. And because they have an insecure confidence, they have a sort of uh they're they're vacillating wildly between like I'm a good parent and I'm I'm raising my kids well and I'm doing a good job, and um to moments of total despair, like, oh my gosh, maybe I'm messing everything up for the most important person in my life, right? They can really react drastically in a lot of situations. So a healthy ego is humility. If you exaggerate past the point of humility, um there's nothing underneath that confidence, and you're automatically in an insecure position. If you over-regulate down, right? If you if you set, and I see people do this all the time because they're afraid of the exaggeration, so they overcompensate in the other direction. These are the people that coach, you're being dishonest, and you're you're actually you're not only hurting yourself, but as I'll explain later, in a positive way, you have the ability to influence others. So there's a missed opportunity in terms of the influence you can have over other people. In order to help everybody listening, work through uh finding that range, right? Modulating that. I always ask questions to get people, this is part of my method here, to get people to think beyond their snap judgment, right? Okay, understand that the cognitive, conscious part of your brain is very, very lazy. It loves to make snap judgments, and it's kind of thought things through in the background. But if you want people to learn and progress. And grow, you have to have a way to get them into an analytical space where they reconsider their snap judgments, and that's how they build like new new pathways. Right? So I'm gonna give you an example of one time when I did this. This is not the only way to do this, it's just for you listening, if you're thinking about okay, I'm gonna start working on this a little bit. Start with something like this. Ask these questions, right? To get people to think. Um, when I was coaching in Denmark, I had a group of about 20 summers. I asked every single athlete to rate their own practice performance on a scale of one to five. One was I didn't do anything to get better today. And five was I did everything I could. Now, you can easily guess where the overwhelming majority of my teenage athletes rated themselves. I'm gonna give you a minute to think about it. Three! Now, after they asked three, they didn't know this, but once you get coached by me for a little while, you you learn to expect that I will exhaustingly keep on asking you to think. Um that's my job. So now I ask why? Why did you give yourself that rating? And that's a conversation starter to get them into that anal. Then they have to start analyzing. Okay, my snap judgment was three. Why? Well, and I'll summarize some of the answers I got. They were all shooting for humility, right? Nobody wanted to say five because they were they were pretty certain that would be exaggerating in the wrong direction, right? And to be honest, I wouldn't have given any of them fives either. So I'm with them there. Nobody wanted to say one because they feared that saying I didn't do anything today was you know an admission that they had wasted their own time, my time, and they did sort of understand that that was like if you showed up, that's more than nothing. Um, so so the only people who probably could have answered one were the people weren't even there to answer the question in the first place. I realized and helped them to realize that they weren't actually giving three as an honest evaluation, because no one said two or four, and there were probably, if I had done it, there are plenty of people that were in those camps. They were gauging what they thought would be the safest to say to me, right? So, again, if you've been listening to me long enough, as I just explained there, my method is constantly interrogating those that I coach to challenge them, to get them into a space where they actually engage their analytical skills. Okay, a lot of swimmers are bright, bright kids. Okay, and a lot of bright kids don't use that superb analytical brain of theirs to their advantage. Okay, they let that part run on autopilot, they let it cause all sorts of havoc for them, and just draw lazily the same conclusions over and over again. But if you can engage that part, um, it can be a giant asset for you. So, what can a healthy ego actually do? What do you get when you actually modulate to an honest set point about who you are and what you're capable of? Well, you get to make progress much faster. Here's where I'm at. Many of you know I recently competed at Masters Nationals and continue to compete in the sport of swimming. I plan to do that forever. Don't have any plans to stop. Um, you may also know that up until roughly six weeks ago, I was resisting swimming in any organized practice, just training by myself, right? And I was consistent and I was doing something. But can I sum up the biggest reason why I was training by myself? I'll tell you, my shitty ego. In this case, it was an exaggeration. I wasn't struggling with modesty, I was protecting an insecure ego that said that because of all I was as a coach, okay, because I'm such a great coach, somebody else couldn't possibly be better than coaching myself, right? Except that's not at all true. And I knew it, and I do know it. Let me say something clearly for everyone. Getting coached by someone else in some capacity is leagues better than coaching yourself. It just is. Coaching yourself is like, I don't know what kind of analogy I want to use here. It's like trying to give yourself a back massage, okay? You can get to some peripheral spots decently well, but you can never put the pressure on that you really need to work through something. And that would sum up exactly what my workouts were like pre-having a coach and post-having a coach. When I made the shift, I had to accept something that's been true my entire life. That there have been many moments in my life where what blocked me from progressing, from continuing on the path to improving at something, to getting the most out of whoever was trying to help me, was my own ego. Because having an unstable or chronically low ego blocks almost all feedback. Because any kind of feedback, instead of being interpreted as it was intended, as helpful, instead gets coded as an attack, right? And you can't take it in. So, on the reverse, having a healthy sense means that you can just take feedback for what it is. This other person is trying to help me, and I can let them. We're not. You don't have to let them, you don't have to do everything they say, but you can take stuff in. It's easy to get overwhelmed with too much feedback. And I don't know how many people wish that they could get more feedback and yet have trained everyone who might help them not to try. I know I trained a lot of people over the years to just not bother, including multiple coaches. The other asset of having a healthy, stable ego is that it increases the likelihood of people around you, the people that you interact and cooperate with, of stepping into the same healthy space. Is that right? I said you I said you could be an influencer. There is definitely some contagion effect because being around people who have warped self-perception towards modesty can gaslight you into being an overly modest yourself. Or being around fake, confident people that are really just one insult away from exploding to defend themselves can convince people around them to be more unstable themselves. When you step fully into a humble and appropriately positioned ego, you can influence every single person you interact with. Thank you everybody for listening. I'm at I'm at the stopping point now. As I said in the top, we're gearing up for a new push, a new era on the swim brief. Please reach out and tell me who you want to hear interviewed in this space. I'm always happy to hear from another listener. Please contact me, swimbriefpodcast at gmail.com, Christycoach.com, or Christy underscore coach on Instagram. And I will see you later this week with an interview coming up. Look for that.
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