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Hello and welcome to the swim brief, and also welcome to the Chris DeVer DeSantis YouTube channel. If you're watching the video version of this, um today I want to talk to you about irrational confidence because it's kind of the rabbit hole I'm going down at the moment. And if you guys have been listening to this podcast, you know that it's sort of based on whatever I'm interested in at the moment, having a conversation around that. And um, I have found myself over the last few days, you know, I you get these suggestions from your various algorithms, and and for um, I'm gonna say for whatever reason, like I don't know why this is, uh YouTube loves to suggest to me these uh videos about Larry Bird talking trash. And go figure that a white dude who grew up in Massachusetts and loves the sport of basketball uh is game to watch videos about how amazing Larry Bird was at basketball. But before we get into that, I um I I want to introduce the topic because um, you know, I think that's nominally what you're supposed to do at the beginning of a video like this. And of course, I've got a bunch of stories to tell along the way. Hopefully, those will help you to learn a little bit about this term irrational confidence and how it might apply to something that you're doing. Um, I have to say and acknowledge right off the bat that I didn't um the the definition that I'm relying on here, I did not come up with. Um I was as a as another way of typecasting me as a white dude from Massachusetts, um I was a huge fan of Bill Simmons back when he was still a writer and not a podcaster, although I enjoyed his podcast at some junctures. I haven't listened to him for a few years. But um I had a special, like I came of age um with Bill Simmons, who started writing as the Boston sports guy right around when I was in eighth grade, and uh I was obsessed with reading all his stuff. I think he's a wonderful writer, and he would always use this term very specifically in the context of basketball, and he would call players irrational confidence guys. And basically the premise of this was that there were guys on a basketball court that despite the statistical improbability of them making shots, they would always come into the game and aggressively like take shots. They would um come off the bench, get into the game, and just immediately start putting up shots. And you know, if uh for all of you who are maybe not familiar with the sport of basketball or not huge nerds in the sport of basketball, like almost nobody um shoots over 50%, and certainly like from long range, like it's you're considered very good if you can make 40% of your shots um from the three-point line. So statistically, like you're not actually likely in most instances to make shots. So these players had um a bit of, I think correctly described, irrational confidence in that they believed that they were going to make shots, regardless of the whether they were the best player on the team, right? By nature of coming off the bench, they were maybe the sixth or seventh or eighth best player on the team at best. And yet they came on and they sort of played with the confidence of, yeah, like I'm the best guy on the team, and I have to like, you know, I have to assert myself and I have to do things. And um in most cases, right, unless a guy was truly bad, this was actually a really good style of play to have. And it was good to have guys that, regardless of whether or not they were the best player on the team, their attitude that they sort of brought um onto the floor was one of I am the best, if not one of the best, players on the floor. And therefore, it makes sense that I play really aggressively and have confidence in my ability to hit. Now, I didn't think a lot about this concept in the sport of swimming until I went to go coach in Denmark. And um I had uh been, and there's a whole nother story to be told here, but I'd been in Denmark uh three months. I was on job number two, and being who I am, um people will recognize this in me. I um I was speaking to the board of club number two. We're having a lovely brunch, I believe, together, because uh, you know, when they invited you out for a meeting, of course, it was always catered to some extent. So I'm sitting actually in somebody's wonderful, like big Copenhagen apartment, and you know, we're drinking coffee, and uh, I think we're probably like going over details of my uh contract and you know my vision for the team and all this sort of stuff, and I say, you know, of course, um naively at the end, I say, and you know, one of the things that's really important to me is I would like to identify um what is what is great already about the environment that I'm in, because um some effort needs to be put in when a new person comes in to sustain something that's broader uh in the culture, and then identify what the opportunities are for me to make the most improvement in the team that I'm that I'm gonna be ultimately the the the head honcho, um the most responsible person for and one of the board members, you know. I I I honestly I don't remember this. My answer to this question was like, oh, well, what do you think is you know amazing? And I I I can't. As I'm telling this story right now, I can't remember what I said, but she said, what do you think one of the biggest opportunities for improvement is? And like I said, I'd only been in Denmark three months, but already I had observed something that I found to be very strange, even though I understood it on a cultural level as a Danish person myself. And and so what I said back to her, I said, I'd like to teach some of these athletes to have irrational confidence in themselves. Because what I have observed of them in a competitive environment is that they are being um, and I would modify this the way I would say this now, but what I said at the time, and I have to be honest to what it was, and try not to embellish my stories as I get older. I said, what I observe from them now is that they're highly rational, highly sort of like looking at what they've done in training, and and that has you know corresponds to a certain very fixed level of performance that they're potentially capable of doing. And I said, you know, they're actually closing themselves off to a level of performance by you know trying treating essentially preparing for competition as like a math problem to be solved, and so you'll feed stuff into the formula, and then theoretically, like a fixed result is going to come out at the other end, you know. Sometimes amazing things happen, sometimes you exceed what you've done in training. In fact, the whole concept of going faster than you've ever gone, part of it is because your body has actually prepared for a level of performance that it's never actually experienced. Which is pretty cool when you think about it. And then if you want, if you really want to understand that concept, this is not a swimming book recommendation, but it's a book recommendation I've made many, many other times. Read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Anti-Fragile, probably the best book I've ever read in my entire life, and um one that I've reread several times because I I love it to death, and I think it really explains what I just said about performance extremely well, and it's not about swimming whatsoever. Um, but I digress. So, you know, I said that I wanted to teach swimmers to have irrational confidence. Now, the way that I would modify this now, and the way that I look at this now, is what feels rational to us in a lot of competitive situations is actually not, is actually not rational. And that's because almost all of us have a heavy negative bias, a heavy sort of pessimistic bias in the way that we predict what we're capable of or sort of adjust our belief level in ourselves. And um, if you want to learn more about that, I'll try to link to all these videos. You can you can uh see me in a hotel room this summer in Ohio, uh summer 2022, I guess it's 2023 now, summer 2022 in Ohio, talking about why the brain is built for survival and why um you're more uh likely to be naturally predisposed to sort of talk down your level of performance. So actually, it it feels because we have this negative bias, negativity feels rational to us because our brain very naturally works extremely hard to craft pessimistic explanations for us about what's likely to happen in the future, and it does this to protect us, right, from heartbreak and disappointment and anything else, um probably more likely on an evolutionary scale from doing something extremely risky and dying, right? So that we continue to um live and procreate and you know take care of our offspring and all that stuff. So on an evolutionary level, right, it's it's predisposing us, it's predetermining that we're going to be much more negatively focused, that we're gonna be um oriented and and feel, unless we really examine thoughtfully what's going on in our mind, that being uh pessimistic about what we're capable of is just being real, man. You know, is just being rational. And what how does this all bring me back to Larry Byrd talking trash videos, right? After all, um, Larry Byrd is not necessarily an irrational confidence player since he's one of the greatest basketball players of all time. So you could you could much easier like sort of graft on, like, yeah, he's actually appropriately confident in his abilities. And yet I'm listening to story after story, great players that he played against, where you know, Bird is saying, Bird Bird is quoted is saying, like, uh he told me exactly what he was gonna do, and then he did it. He said, I'm gonna go over here to the corner and I'll shoot the three, and over your head is gonna go in. Now they all tell that's some variation of that's that story, or I'm gonna play left-handed and um because I'm bored, and you know, I'll score a ton of points with my offhand on you. All sorts of variations of this stuff. And I'm listening to these, and they're all super entertaining, and you can even see the smile, probably hear the joy in my face, because I, you know, I think they're I love the wonderful storytelling, and I um I'm just finding myself naturally absorbed in. And then I think to myself, why isn't anybody now? I know why, but still, we're not hearing any stories of times when he said something like, I'm gonna do this, and then didn't. Which, just looking at Larry Bird's uh stats on basketballreference.com, I'm just guessing that actually happened a lot. Like there were probably a lot of times when he said that he was gonna do X and Y and Z to somebody and did none, right? He missed a ton of shots. And if he was just generally um talking all the time, you there's no way you can convince me that you know he only predicted he was going to uh succeed, and and he only talked, he only talked shit when he was going to be successful. There's no way you can convince me. And and yet it's insightful to think about why are we not hearing about those stories? And how does that apply to some of the stuff that we do and the way that we approach doing various things in our lives? Because um, I don't know about you, but most people I meet out there are not smack talkers. Now I happen to be a little bit of a smack talker, but I am not really a smack talker. Like I am you can hear it here on this podcast, it's always kind of self-effacing and never as blatantly confident. It's it's definitely um with me more of just a playful thing. Like I like to I like to poke people a little bit. I like um to get people off balance a bit. I like to point out tension in situations by introducing a a joke um as sort of a soft entryway sometimes into it, and I can I can get into all sorts of trouble um by doing it. But it's it's actually not the same concept um as what I'm discussing in the bird example, or you, you know, like for whatever reason, basketball tends to be the sport where you you hear, I guess, about stuff the most, and maybe it's just because it's a sport where you know an individual player um has so much influence, but then we have a sport like swimming where you know individual athletes have even greater influence over what happens because literally most of the races are you you're you're racing by yourself, right? The relays are are few and far between, and so you are in that way very determinate um in the results that you have against other athletes, and yet partially because the sport of swimming, we have decided that it's um you know that we're a gentleman's game, and it's uh it's considered rude to be overly confident in the your your sort of self-evaluation. Um you know it's it's considered it would be considered rude basically to uh declare confidently that you were gonna win a race before the race took place. And you probably would face a lot of shunning regardless of the result afterwards within the sport of swimming. And I, you know, of course, um we can think of probably some prominent examples of those people without the sport. Not going to get too deep into it, but imagine if Larry Bird had the attitude of a lot, myself included a lot of swim coaches and um and athletes in the sport of swimming, so that essentially he went, well, you know, like sometimes I say I'm gonna hit that shot, and then I then I don't hit that shot, so I probably should probably stop. You know, I should stop declaring confidently that I'm gonna hit these shots because you know I don't always hit it. That's literally a piece of logic that I hear coming out of so many coaches and so many athletes' minds where they're actually holding back, confidently declaring what they're capable of, for fear that you know, people might that they might come off as arrogant and that they might not do it. And like honestly, who cares? Look at all these videos. Why isn't there a big video top 20 times? Larry Bird said he would you know hit the game-winning shot and didn't? Because nobody remembers, and nobody really cares to remember. Okay, the um the situation that we imagine, even as I say in the sport of swimming, that you know there would be greater social pressure to um to you know not overconfidently predict what you're capable of. Um I think what people are probably imagining and what's holding them back from confidently asserting what they're capable of, the reality is is far less difficult than I think a lot of people imagine in their mind. And so um there's there's an opportunity, I think, within sport to have some irrational confidence, even though as we've discussed in this context, it's actually quite rational. It's rational in the sense that if you're gonna go out there and you're gonna try to compete at your best, you don't need to handicap yourself by scaling back your belief to match what is probable. Because really absolutely almost no one cares whether or not you fail. And if they do it's really for the most part, none of their business. So you know. All of this reservation where we scale it back doesn't do us any good. Doesn't really do the people around us any good. And what we end up with is a bunch of people culturally, I think because of the culture of swimming, this is acute in a lot of circles, where um we're actually collectively pulling down on a high level of performance. And that brings me full circle to Denmark. And if you if you want to listen to some of my podcasts where I talk to Danish coaches, you'll know when I say I should have understood this on the first, there's there's quite popularly recognized in Danish culture a um a pull towards the mean. I mean, I saw it very I saw it very acutely when I was coaching over there, and we, you know, it was it was in the lead up to 2016, swimmers were are gonna trying to qualify for the Olympics at the at the Danish trials. I mean, it was called the Danish Open, but it was sort of one of the opportunities that you had. And we had the world record holder, was a Dane, a woman, Leika, uh, Mirla Peterson, and she was swimming the 200 breast, and you got her to pin drop. I mean, like, and and and when I say you could have heard a pin drop, it wasn't because people were waiting suspensefully. It was more like people were afraid to cheer because, you know, she's already so good. Does she really need more support? It was kind of like the attitude in the room. Whereas in the men's event where there was a swimmer in the water who had almost no chance, um, but I guess some irrational confidence, because he was going for it, um, of making the team, you know, the people were really enthusiastically supporting. So they have this collective pull back. Now, that's actually there, there are some, it's not all bad. There are some advantages to it. It does um, I think, help some things on a broader scale for them that you know, that I think in general, your average Danish swim club provides a really good competitive environment for your average swimmer, but you end up with some issues as you get up to a higher and higher level of performance when you have these sort of cultural pulls back. And probably one of the reasons we succeed so much in America is, and I can't believe I'm arguing this because if you know my politics, it's sort of like completely flies in the face, but because we have such a decentralized sports system, as much as um there is power in our national governing bodies and our Olympic committee, it's actually quite a bit less uh in terms of what they can influence on the day-to-day experience of most people. And like plenty of people are mad about that because they go, I pay money to swim, you know, USA swimming every year, and they don't do anything for me. There's a whole other conversation to be had about that. But the decentralization of the system means that there's a lot of different areas where little subcultures um have the opportunity to sort of bubble up and create, and a lot of them are built around essentially some level of collective belief that despite the fact that there's hundreds of reasons why not, that this could be the place where something really exceptional happens. And people culturally sort of come together in the belief of that and start to break the normal limits of rational, I'm saying with quotes, rational confidence levels. And so athletes that put in another environment, I don't think, would have achieved a high level of just sort of naturally get caught up in what's going on. Their their set point for what they're capable of gets moved just by the what's all around them, what they see. There's a whole other conversation to um be based around the concept of learning. And uh, somebody should be writing these down as I talk about because of the learning. Um I'm famously a person who doesn't take notes. Um, and one of the reasons for that is that because uh listening to other people takes basically all of my attention, and so um if I have to try to write at the same time, I will miss a lot more information. So I usually, now that I'm getting a bit older, I have to write stuff down or keep talking about it um afterwards to keep it in in my memory. Um, so I I spent a lot of my life being criticized for this, like, oh, you're not paying attention, or you know, you're not taking notes, you know, how you're gonna recall this later, um, this, that, or the other thing. But um the greatest uh uh coaching mentor of my life, Milt Delms, made a really good point on this, and I think it goes to you know how this sort of confidence spreads in environments, and gosh, there's a coaching point like on an individual level here that's incredible, which is Chris, how long in human history have most of us been able to write stuff down as somebody says it? Right, if you think back, like the invention of the pen and paper, and that being a widely available um way of just like learning about something new, it's extremely recent. So, do you think evolutionarily like we were designed to learn that way? Do you think that human beings were designed to do, well, one person talks and the other person writes down what they hear, and then they later they read again what what they wrote down about what the other person was saying, and that's how they absorb information. I mean, don't get me wrong, it can help. But how do most of us actually learn? We learn by listening to other people. We've been able to do that since the dawn of man, right? We've been making some kind of, you know, we were given senses, right? So um we listen to communication, we hear, we um even if if we're deaf, we you know, we absorb communication on some level from other people. And then we watch other people do things. We observe other people do things. And when you're in an environment where you observe other people behaving in a certain way, you will be influenced by it. That's my podcast on irrational confidence. I hope you guys really enjoyed listening to this one. I got a great suggestion for how to use some of these positive psychology-based um podcasts last week. So thank you to the listener who sent those in. Um, I know he's gonna listen to this right away, so you know, wanted to make sure I thank him. And um, if you want more positive psychology-based content, you want to follow my um trip this this past week to Queen's University. I'm actually recording this before I go on the trip, but I'm gonna post it after I go on the trip. So it's a little, I'm having struggling with the tense. You can go to Instagram, Chris D underscore coach, uh, Chris DeSantis coaching on Facebook. You want to reach out to me, probably the best way is to go to Chrisdcoach.com, fill out a contact form that goes straight into my email, then I'll email you back, and then we'll have each other's email. Um, and uh there's been quite a few people reaching out that way. I've been um a little bit overwhelmed on the communication front, but but please um continue to use that. And um I will be back next week, I believe, with Joel once again. We're gonna be talking some coaching, we're working on some stuff. Um, the format of the podcast is changing a bit. I hope um you guys like what's what's going on there. We had um a giant record in the number of listeners last month. So thank you to everybody, and I'll see you again soon.