Hello and welcome to the swim brief. I am Chris DeSantis. And what if I told you one of my keys to success was to plan on failing. Most people look at me like I am crazy when I suggest this for the first time. And I think that's because they've internalized thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of mantras wherein you're supposed to set your sights on success, visualize that success, and then somehow that sort of manifests the success into existence. What if I told you that planning on failing was the key to actually maximizing growth from moments of failure? And that not planning on failing was something that would ultimately prevent you from getting the most dramatic growth that humans were capable of. This past week, I was out visiting two of the best teams in college swimming. Princeton University Men's Swimming and Diving is a perennial contender in the Ivy League, and they're one of the few mid-major programs in the entire country that consistently sends swimmers and divers to the NCAA Division I championships, which is the hardest meat to qualify for in the world. It is much harder when you look at the quality of swimmer that you know just squeaks into the NCAA championship. It is harder than a world short course championship. It's harder than qualifying for the Olympics. Okay. The NCAA Division I Championships is the most competitive swim meet for qualifying in the entire world. After I was done hanging out with uh Princeton down on their training camp, I made a quick turnaround and I went up to Tufts University, which is sort of right in the backyard of where I grew up. Um I grew up in the Boston suburbs. Tufts is also a perennial contender in their conference, which uh is an accomplishment in of itself. Um if you know anything about the conference which uh which I swam in, so I know a little bit extra. It's it's the most competitive conference in Division III swimming. You can come at me, NCAC fans. You're you know I'm right. And um there are a couple teams who for a long time really had a stranglehold on first or second in that league. And um, Tufts has moved themselves up into that perennial contention. Their men's and women's teams were both top three at the NCAA Division III Championships last year. Now, what do these schools have in common? And why is this related to what I'm talking about in terms of failure? Well, these are schools that are extremely hard to get into. Okay, uh, looked up some statistics for the purpose of my point I was gonna make here in my podcast. Last year, approximately 34,000 students, okay, high school um graduating seniors applied to Tufts and just about 3,400 were accepted. So that's about a 10% acceptance rate. At Princeton, the acceptance rate is 5.8%. Um, and at both schools, your quote, average admitted student athlete that is somebody that has achieved academically at a very high level. They have probably test scores that are, you know, in the 90-something percentile. Um, they have an immaculate-looking report card. And what's my point? Well, the type of athlete I meet at these schools typically does not plan on failing. Okay. Um, they've achieved at an extremely high level for almost as long as they can remember. And their plan, if you ask them, is to do even better than just maintaining their level of achievement, right? They're they're gonna they're gonna move their swimming to an even higher level. They're going to do academically ambitious things, they're going to start building towards a career uh post-college. They plan on growing into somebody bigger, stronger, more ambitious, faster than ever. Okay. But what many of them don't realize is that failure is probably the most important part of getting to where they want to be, not avoiding failure. And when I say failure in this context, I mean not just like you know, your garden variety daily uh failure, you know, the kind of failure I make where I forgot where my glasses were in the other room. I'm talking like big, ugly, emotionally devastating failure that can feel like a never-ending punch to the gut. Reshaping the cognitive process in a moment like that that individual has around failure is extremely hard work. But it offers a couple of related and equally important opportunities. Um, and as I was talking to these uh audiences this past week, you know, one of the things I always uh uh struggle to do, but uh if you've been listening to this long enough, you you you you you know that I probably have given you know 18 different definitions for what positive psychology is. But um the one I'm the one I'm really focused on now is I think positive psychology is the study of opportunities. And it is the um it is it is cognitively growing your bias towards opportunities so that in various situations, whereas most of us, I believe, are problem-biased, right? We're we're problem-solving machines, we you know are designed to find problems and fix them, okay. Cognitive training, positive psychology-based cognitive training can teach you to see opportunities. So you experience the same things, but instead of just seeing another problem to solve, you start to see some of the opportunities in various things. And that's really powerful because looking at the same situations and one person says, oh man, this is a big problem, and the other person says this is a big opportunity. Well, I think it's pretty obvious which of those two people is going to have a bit more optimism. And I think optimism is something that correlates with a lot of outcomes that a lot of us want. So, but before I get into linking these two opportunities up, I am also going to do a very quick introduction to a topic which I highly recommend. I don't have started to make book recommendations on this podcast. Um, and I've actually said to the audiences, um, I think the list of nonfiction books that I actually recommend people read is less than 10 books long. I may have said that before. Uh, so you know, uh take take that for what you will when I list some of these books off. It's uh I'm gonna run out soon because um I don't have so many that I think are just like must-reads, but this is definitely one of them. This 2011 book by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, and he actually won a Nobel Prize. Um, the book is called Thinking Fast and Slow. And in it, he describes two systems of thinking, and he calls them System One and System Two. And for the purposes of what I'm about to discuss, I am going to tell you what I think is important to know about them. Okay, system one is a really fast, this is the thinking fast, okay? It's a rapid, unconscious, meaning you don't activate it. It's a system that activates on its own, an emotional uh decision-making system, okay? Rapid, unconscious, emotional. System two is a slow system, right? It's consciously activated. You actually have to put in effort to get it to start working, and it is um thoughtful. And one of the things that I'm not going to get into the purpose of this podcast, but something that I come out and teach audiences all about is let's let's just learn to distinguish between your emotions and thoughts, because being able to do so will really help you for what I'm about to describe, right? Then you you know sort of when you're employing various um decision-making systems. Um, all of us engage in both types of thinking, right? And various situations make a particular system of thinking more accessible, right? You can just think of situations where you just have a snap emotional reaction, you don't think about it, right? And you can have other situations where you, you know, sit and ponder and you know, what am I gonna do next? I don't know. Um, and of course, you know, they're not entirely distinct from each other. It's impossible to be totally rational in your decision making, um, and it's impossible to uh to be totally emotional in your decision making, right? Um but the work that I do focuses on situation where you can anticipate that you will be highly emotional. And the work that I do focuses on how you can use that system two, that slow, consciously activated, thoughtful thinking system to put certain processes in place or make essentially to make system one work for you in a different way, right? That's um probably worth repeating. So you're so you're using the thoughtful process so that when you get into emotional situations, um, you don't keep repeating, you you you build sort of new patterns, right? And I think this goes to the core of like what is coaching in the first place, right? People um that's why I think positive psychology is so cool, and why I think it's so intuitive in the world of sports, because basically all coaches, you know, this is what we do. We we we work with people and we observe their sort of um instinctual way of going about things, and we try to use like a cognitive process to teach them to adapt better, sort of better responses in the future, right? And improve and and keep making progress. Um many of the people, like the ones I began this podcast discussing, are not used to failing a lot. At least, again, in the sense of the big ugly failure that I mentioned earlier. They have probably not failed many or any of the evaluations they've been given in school. Um, they have gone to a lot of athletic competitions and been one of the best people there, um, or somebody that is sort of catching up to the better people there. Um and human beings uh do build up a sort of tolerance to anything if we experience it over and over again. And therefore, people who don't experience failure in that grand sense a lot developmentally coming up are particularly vulnerable. Like they're they're they're they're gonna experience it really, really intensely. Okay, when they have that big ugly moment, um, it's going to be super intense for them, right? And people generally want to avoid feeling bad. They right, and this is a we're talking for for for these people, those moments of failure feel really, really, really bad. Okay. And so um, you know, the system one really is designed to account for like avoiding feeling bad. It activates unconsciously immediately, and often it tries to put distance between you and anything that's making you feel bad, right? So let me give you an example of what this looks like in an athlete. Um, and what I the way that I see it most frequently, honestly, is some form of anger. And this is another thing where, you know, when I tell people anger, they always picture somebody yelling or screaming or acting out in a violent way. Um that's not how I perceive anger in a lot of athletes, although it's definitely a one-way to manifest anger, one way to express anger. But I find often with high achievers that anger is like an internal combustion, right? It exists uh inside of their uh their brain case, right? Instead of like yelling and screaming and um taking it out on the world, they turn on themselves really, really hard. And when they do that, they're actually avoiding, right? That system one has activated and they're actually avoiding their emotional state that lies beneath that anger. So their systemic response um, therefore, that anger that they they turn inward, it does real damage to their psyche and it cuts them off from the natural growth that failure offers. Because in order to actually get that growth, you have to you have to actually sort of like experience what you're feeling. If you if your your your emergency system activates, um, it really cuts you off from that big time growth. Um, so when you can actually experience the raw emotion of failure, it is it is total rocket fuel. Um so I know anybody who's listening is probably like, oh, tell me how to do it, tell me how to do it, tell me how to do it. Okay, it's really hard. I can't explain it um in the course of you know a 20 to 30 minute podcast. Um, that's why I get to uh charge people thousands of dollars for coaching, because basically um the simplest way to explain it is you start building with people, and this takes time and effort and um uh conscious attention and experience, but you start building a cognitive link between for people between experiencing that raw emotion and the growth on the other side, right? And then you get to that second opportunity that I referenced earlier. You can actually start to, if you if you build that cognitive link, you can actually start to truly seek out challenging situations. And I mean like in an athletic sense, you can start to seek out situations where you perceive that your chance of not being able to uh achieve, and therefore like your chance of failure is greater than 50%. And I think a lot of athletes that have achieved at a high level often reach a point where they start to avoid these situations, right? Because their perception is that because they have a significant chance of failure, and that failure will lead them to that internal combustion, and that they they don't experience real growth on the other side, that situations where they're likely or more than likely to fail are actually detrimental to their progress. They ruin my confidence. So I'm gonna look for situations that build up my confidence. Like if these are the things you're hearing, this is the work that is going to get you out of it. Because the opposite is actually true. Failure is how you grow your capabilities. The true experience of the emotion is what leads you to alter your path, to actually change something. And sustaining that change is something I've talked about in other podcasts. Um, and it also is a is a cognitive skill that you can develop through coaching. Um, and if you're interested in just sort of getting at least an overview of it, you should listen to my episode from February 27th, 2023. Uh, it's called What Starts a Fire, What Sustains It, and I discuss it uh in greater detail there. But it's certainly easier to maintain optimism when you know that future failure is an engine for growth, right? It means that even in moments of great pain, you can manage to get into that second system and be thoughtful and create space for the fact that the immensely painful thing may eventually lead to something better for you. That's all for this week, folks. Thank you again for listening. Um, thank you to Princeton and Tufts for the inspiration. Thank you to the uh athletes there that were willing to sit down and have a conversation with me. There were some really brave athletes who were willing to sort of put themselves in a vulnerable position in front of everybody else. Um stay tuned. I've got some longer-term projects I've been working on here that uh that have been delaying me a bit. Uh follow Christy Coach on Instagram, that's Christy underscore coach, CD swim coach on Facebook, and go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and download and subscribe to the swim brief. Thank you guys, and I will see you soon.