It's my general policy in coaching that if you're lying, you could be coaching better. Hi, I'm Chris DeSantis, and welcome to The Swim Brief, a podcast where we discuss coaching, usually drawing from my experience working as both a one-to-one coach for athletes and as an advisor to coaches. Today I want to talk about a powerful contradiction I see in a lot of coaching and work my way through resolving that contradiction. But before I get into that, a couple of housekeeping notes. Frequent listeners of the podcast might wonder where has my usual co-host Joel Rawlings been? Joel is in the middle of a college season, so it has been harder than ever for us to coordinate on a podcast. I also got sick with COVID, and I had some stuff pre-recorded. So it's just life basically intervening. We were all ready to record one last week, and it's actually really good news that we didn't, given that the topic, there's been some ongoing developments in it. So we're going to hopefully do that here in a couple of days. And because the one we did last week, we just had technical issues and we couldn't get it together. So the short message is Joel hasn't gone anywhere. He still remains a part of the podcast. I still really enjoy having him on here. I hear those of you who uh really enjoy having him on here. Have no fear, Joel will be back. Um, I also want to tease a long-boiling podcast that I've been developing around nutrition and swimming. It's probably my most ambitious podcast by far that I've done. And I'm just about to get the final pieces recorded. I think you guys are really gonna enjoy this. And I'm eager to get your feedback on it. So look for that in the feed. So maybe sometime around the holidays. We'll see how quickly we get it together. It could be in the new year, could we could still be a whole month away. Uh, but as usual, it's gonna be less, it's not gonna be like a podcast that you listen to and go, okay, now I know you know what to eat on a Sunday before practice on Monday morning. And it's gonna be more about how you might actually go about selecting, you know, who you listen to, who you're influenced by, what kind of sources of information you're drawing upon when you're making decisions like that. Um, and you know me, that's the kind of stuff that I find really interesting. Anyway, let's get back to today's topic. And uh for those of you watching the video version of this, I'm wearing my Jersey Wahoos sweatshirt. First off, it's really comfy, and uh I'm really excited to watch my old team, Jersey Wahoos, uh, compete in Junior's East this upcoming weekend. Can't wait. Um, and uh if you're if you're a swim brief listener and you're at Juniors East, um you should uh you should go say hi to Coach Paul Doniffin. He's a cool guy. Um if he's listening to this, he may be like, I don't want random people coming up saying hello to me. Sorry, Paul. Um, but uh uh you know I'm I'm really excited to watch that beat this weekend. Okay, now finally on to today's topic. I want to address a conflicting message that I see a lot of athletes getting that, you know, like a lot of other things I bring up on here, it's something that gets into popular usage or sort of becomes the given knowledge around something. And I honestly can't remember where I first heard it, but I'm gonna give my best guess and sort of chart, I can tell you how I think it sort of came into my consciousness, right? Um and like a lot of things for people of a certain age, I'm dating myself here, it was reverse engineered from Michael Jordan. And again, I could do a whole other podcast on, you know, the the psychology of sports where we take a singular great athlete and ask them to describe how they think about things and then extrapolate that that must be the best way to think about things. Um I don't agree with that as uh a process, but you know, we got told a lot of things like that about Michael Jordan, uh the royal we here. And one of the many reasons we were told Jordan was great was not just because he wanted to win, but he hated losing, right? He hated it. Now, I don't want to get into a detailed discussion of Jordan, because again, that's probably even aside from reverse engineering top athletes, that's its own podcast series. And especially with regards to positive psychology in Jordan, there's some really interesting stuff in there. A lot to say, but as usual, we're not at the contradiction piece of this yet, right? Um and like a lot of other things too, that original sort of statement we receive about Jordan gets put through a game of telephone, right? It gets repeated, it filters out into the atmosphere, and it gets translated so many different ways until a lot, I think, of it starts to lose its original meaning. Now, in my book, it's fine to not like losing. Hate is such a strong word, right? Don't we all agree? I mean, if you have a shred of competitiveness, then you'll experience some bad feelings when you lose. Right? So actually, it's better than fine to not like losing, it just makes you competitive. And in my work in sports, I don't run into uncompetitive people. So I would say if you don't like losing, you're you're typical. You're a typical athlete or coach. However, a dislike of losing, I think, somehow got translated, mutated through a bunch of, I would say, fake macho talk. Um, gosh, I'm gonna do there's so many podcast ideas on this one. I'm gonna do podcast some point on fake macho talk, what I mean by that. It got translated into never conceding that losing was possible. And that's where we start to have a problem. I've talked previously about how I observe many athletes who will not consider even thinking about bad outcomes because they think that, or will try not to consider bad outcomes. You can't really not think about something, but um they will they they think that it makes the outcomes more likely. But I think there's another aspect that's related here for athletes. Their distaste for contemplating losing or failure or a bad outcome goes another layer. They actually believe that being in denial about bad outcomes happening is a winning strategy, right? Because it's somehow related to hating losing and never conceding defeat, and etc, etc, etc., etc. I'm here to tell you it's not. It's not a winning strategy. What I see in my work is that denying bad past possible outcomes leads your unconscious mind to completely override you in big emotional situations. And not override you in a way that most people want. Because your mind, the best way of understanding this is your mind has an early warning system for events that you're gonna feel really bad about. And and I've spoken about this before. If you have a big level of emotional investment, if you actually care about what you're doing, right, then by nature, any possible unwanted outcome, well, that's gonna land with heavy emotional impact. And your mind, your subconscious, your unconscious, really, I guess those two are two different things, so I should say unconscious, wants to get your conscious mind thinking about that. It wants to uh it wants you to worry early, which we'll talk about a little bit as one of my strategies, but it wants you to worry early about things that are gonna have a big emotional impact. And it pings the system. Often far ahead of the event, not always, or not always in a way that you can perceive, but it does to think about it. And when you avoid that opportunity, your unconscious actually regroups, strengthens, and gets ready to issue you a more urgent warning the next time. And usually what it's building into is that moment of override in the high stress, high pressure situation. And the override is actually your unconscious mind trying to be a bit protective. Like, let's just steer into this thing um gently because that'll be better than fully crashing. Right? The net result is that many athletes, you know, they're capable of ignoring this opportunity to worry early a lot of times, but they're incapable of avoiding it. They get overwhelmed by their unconscious, right, in that high competitive situation. And my philosophy is that if you're going to worry, worry early and worry often. And that might actually mean that you have to intentionally be cognizant of the moments when your mind is pinging you to worry about a potential bad outcome in the future, and slow down and take time to think about it. Which is becoming increasingly harder advice for people to follow to slow down and think. And who really wants to intentionally make time to think about stuff that's upsetting, right? I mean, um don't we have enough upset? Or who feels strong enough, right? You can often feel too weak to do that. Convincing athletes to abandon the strategy of avoidance of that unconscious ping and move to one that accepts bad outcomes are possible is really not an easy pivot, I can tell you. Um, I'm gonna talk about one way that I use to make it a lot easier. And for those of you who are coaches who are listening, I mean, I think this is gonna be consistent with a lot of ways you're probably already coaching. So, like, you already know how to do this. Congratulations. Um and it gets to the heart of the contradiction. As coaches, we are often harping on athletes to focus on what they can control, right? Control the controllables. We train athletes to intentionally give thought to actions that they can actually take. And what's the hope there? Well, I mean, if I could say one thing that we're probably hoping for is we're hoping to crowd out rumination on things you cannot control, right? Because ruminating about things, which ruminating just sort of spinning and staying in the same place, thinking over and over again, um you part of rumination is you're you're you've got that unconscious pinging, but it's it's something that's completely out of your control. So you can never think about it and come up with any kind of plan. Because it's it's not up to you. So does anyone actually believe they can guarantee bad outcomes won't happen? Or to flip it, does anyone actually believe that you can, through sheer force of will, 100% make an outcome happen? I do not. I think uh I don't know any coaches who actually think they can guarantee outcomes. And this is a sure way to identify somebody who's too totally full of it is anybody that says they can guarantee an outcome. Okay. That my BS alarm sounds louder than than ever when I get into that situation. Therefore, a strategy that denies the possibility of bad outcomes is by nature focused on things you cannot control. So there we go. Neat and tidy, we solved it, right? Wrong. While what I've said thus far sounds great and abstract, let's get real about the situations in coaching where athletes actually give you an opportunity to coach them on this specific concept. I would bet, don't quote me on the science of this. I haven't I haven't done the research, but I would bet that 99% of the time, athletes don't even give you an in to the fact that they are struggling with the denial until like basically the eve of the competition. And moving towards accepting bad outcomes, that's not like a switch flip. That's not something you just go to somebody in that situation. Um, you go, hey, you should accept this bad outcome. And they go, oh yeah, I didn't think about that. Let me accept that bad outcomes are possible. Now I'm not worried about it. It's something that you practice over the long term and then get very slowly better at. So this creates a lot of situations for coaches where it may be totally impractical for them to discuss the actual strategy, the good strategy that I'm discussing above, and I learned this lesson the hard way very recently, of acceptance. Because essentially, you have an opportunity with the athlete, but giving them something they should accomplish over months in the space of a couple days will likely lead to them losing trust in you. Because inevitably they will think it doesn't work. Right? Whatever he is asking me to do, it doesn't work. Okay. So I want to talk to you about what I see as a common, acute solution to this issue. Um, but I want to give you so much caution about it. Because it's a very, I can't, I can't describe perfectly for you the circumstances where this might be appropriate, but I think it's pretty narrow. And I'll and I'm gonna explain to you why I think it's pretty narrow. Okay, but when you're in this situation and and like, okay, the actual good long-term strategy, right, you you have this feeling like it's not a good idea to try it because it's not we're not gonna be able to do that, you know, in this short period of time. Um and I see these strategies, what I'm about to talk about, often discussed as sort of terminal strategies. That is like this is it, this you do this step, and now you're not struggling at the meat anymore. Let me be clear. If you are going to use these strategies, they're for short-term use only. And the only practical scenario I can see is if you want to build up some credibility and you actually build up credibility, like you link it to the long-term strategy of acceptance later. You say, like, okay, we're gonna try this for this weekend, but this is we're not done, basically. And because in using them, and you're gonna go like, Chris, when are you gonna tell me what the thing is? I'm almost there. Using them, you really you run the risk of an athlete seeing that they work, quote, quote unquote, work, and then losing that motivation to actually do anything to come up with a better long-term strategy because they go, problem solved, we did it. Great. So, what is the acute strategy? One word for you, distraction. Remember when we used to see Michael Phelps pre-race blasting music through noise canceling headphones? To me, it's practicing distraction. Literally, if you don't have time for the stable long-term strategy, do whatever you can to drown out your thoughts. I can remember when I first had a nice little breakthrough racing post-college. I was at a master's meet, and I was standing behind the blocks, and I ran into a friend, like a long-lost friend, somebody that I competed against growing up, and it was like, oh man, you, you know. I was surprised and I was happy to see them, and I was, you know, just chatting it up. I was so caught up talking to them that I almost missed my race. So it was like, oh, whistle was getting blown, oh shoot, throw on my goggles, uh, jump on the blocks, here we go, time to race. And I could feel the difference of not having spent the entire pre-race period trying, like, to do the impossible, like, not think about uh what if things go bad. Right? I've referenced before a frequent podcast listener, shout out to Rob, you know, because this is sort of how we met, the concept of the kid who almost misses their swim and then has to run up to the blocks, you know, and just hurriedly get in there, and how frequently that leads to a really like good situation for racing, particularly somebody who tends to uh really spin themselves up behind the blocks. So distraction, literally anything, almost anything, we'll get to that in a second, under the sun can work in this respect, and it's highly individual. If I was coaching a person and trying to figure out a distraction strategy, and I would first listen to all the caveats I've already told you, but I would be really curious about what they find just really grabs their attention. As I say that, the exception comes up. Because um, and then maybe this is where we're gonna kind of end things. What is the one thing, pretty universal, that grabs the attention of nearly anyone? Ah, well, of course, some form of screenslash phone. So, am I advocating can't even say this without laughing, am I advocating that you empower a nervous swimmer to doom scroll behind the blocks in order to distract them? No, okay, no, screaming, no, hopefully the audio is all nice and equalized because I find that distractions are more about shifting your emotional state than pure attention. Phones and screens, really good at drawing your attention towards them. But it's the emotional distraction, okay? A good song, right, it it evokes certain emotions in you. Seeing my story, talking to a long lost friend, right? Like I was uh I was pumping whatever um, I'm not a not a hormone scientist, but whatever, you know, scientist, uh whatever hormone pumps when you meet a long-lost friend, right? Emotions were shifting. So to conclude, any distraction strategy is also very unlikely to be reliably replicable. Anything more than I would say a one-time gamble or a hack to get you through one moment, one meet, etc. I just don't suggest it in general. Um, I suggest that as a coach, you resist the urge to hack your way short term through situations. And honestly, you probably in the long term, even though it's hard, almost always will be better off letting people fail and organizing a plan on the other side of that failure in order to build longer-term strategies like acceptance. Um that's all for this week. Thank you for listening. See you soon. Uh, if you want to submit something to the podcast, you want to communicate, swimbriefpodcast at gmail.com. Chris D underscore coach on Instagram, CD swim coach on Facebook. Reach out to me, any of those platforms. Uh, if you see me around, say hi. Love to meet listeners of the podcast. Met some really cool people at the Big Al Invite this past weekend. Um, had a great time there. And um I'll see you guys all soon.