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Coaching Mind's Podcast: Perform at your best!
Coaching Mind's Podcast: Perform at your best!
#124 - FC Pt 6: Real world stress and burnout at work. Can the Focus Cycle still work?
High school volleyball coach Lucy Grenda reached out to me with a simple text after I completed a team session with the high school team she helps coach, "Sometimes when I use my self talk in those anxious moments, I feel like it doesn't work to calm me down because I 'know all the tricks' I tell my students to do."
Discover her journey through mental training techniques both on and off the court, as she uncovers the power of wearable technology in understanding and managing stress in real-time.
In our conversation, we explore a treasure trove of practical strategies for taming stress and anxiety. From the calming rituals of reading the Bible and prayer to the grounding practice of journaling through a nightly "brain dump," listeners will gain actionable insights. We dive into the power of breathwork and the liberating concept of giving oneself "permission to forget," especially crucial in high-pressure environments like teaching. Emphasizing the role of purpose and the importance of professional counseling, this episode is a holistic guide to mental wellness.
As life's pace quickens, we reveal the art of balance through rest and mindfulness practices. Discussing the struggle of carving out Sabbath moments or mere quiet minutes amid chaos, we highlight how habit stacking small routines can yield significant changes. With personal anecdotes and stress-tracking success stories, we encourage listeners to prioritize self-care and mental health, offering a strategic blueprint for enhancing both life and athletic performance. Tap into the episode for insights that could redefine your approach to balancing life's demands.
Are you an ATHLETE looking to take your training to the next level? Check out our website to learn more about 1-on-1 training opportunities:
mentaltrainingplan.com/athletes
Are you a COACH looking for an affordable year-round mental performance training program? Check out the MTP Academy available through our website:
mentaltrainingplan.com/academy
Hey, welcome to the Coaching Minds podcast, the official podcast of Mental Training Plan, today joined by a very special guest. We are wrapping up the end of our focus cycle series and we've been talking you know what is the focus cycle, how do we apply that? And we talked last time about what's that look like with actual athletes. You got to hear an example of this being implemented in real life and, super excited about today's conversation. Lucy, I'm going to go ahead and just let you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are and how you got here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to talk about everything and what I've learned from you. I'm Lucy Grenda. I am a Westfield high school volleyball coach, so I've known you, I think, since you were my teacher and then, when I graduated from college, came back home and I started coaching and I also teach here in the community, so, and then you recently just worked with our girls, which is kind of how we got reconnected, and then that's when I gave you a call.
Speaker 1:Just from a background standpoint. You know obviously started, you guys started working with the MTP Academy pretty early. You started doing it in the off season. Last year. I came in and did a live session with you guys and we put your team through the focus cycle how do you control your mind, how do you control your body in these high pressure situations? And would love for you to just give the audience a little bit of background on why you reached out to me because, I'll be honest, I thought your text that you sent me was incredibly honest, and it was. It was, to be honest, a little bit different than than most communication I get from coaches, I think, which is why it was so intriguing to me. Take it, take us through a little bit of maybe that background.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it was that session that you came in with our girls and I was in that session as well, and so I was going through everything that you were teaching our girls and you got to the point where you were talking about their statement and you went through different kinds of statements that the girls could choose from and you said pick one statement and it's going to work. And it does work. And then you went through the research and everything to prove how it works, and then you said if your statement doesn't work, give me a call. I'm wide open. And so I was like okay, I'm going to give you a call after this and I texted you saying basically what I just said hey, my statement doesn't work.
Speaker 2:I am noticing that I get anxious feelings when I'm teaching and I don't know how to control it, because sometimes I will, or you know, we walk kids through anxiety and nerves and um life factors that happen, and so I felt like the things that I walk my students through, I knew I looked at it almost as like a trick, and so then my brain knew okay, you can calm students this way down, but we actually know why we're doing this and we're not going to calm down this way, and so then, that's basically what I told you I was like, yeah, I just I want to read this text.
Speaker 1:Okay, the I feel like it doesn't work to calm me down because I quote, know all the tricks that I tell my students to do. Do you have any book recommendations to help with the coaching, the mental side, which I'm sure you didn't mean it, but I was like, oh yeah, your, your self-talk nonsense doesn't work. You have like a book that I can read that's actually going to get this to work, like a book that I can read that's actually going to get this to work. Tell us a little bit more about what you know. We don't need to go into specific details about what you were struggling with as far as, like, the situations.
Speaker 1:You know that I don't think the comparison game does anybody any good, because then we start getting into oh you lost this person, or you're dealing with this. Well, what about me? I'm dealing with, so I'm uninterested in that. But maybe just a little bit deeper, dive into the specifics of maybe some of the side effects. Yeah, because I've also not. I would say the wearable technology Do you have a whoop band? I did wear a whoop band.
Speaker 2:I did wear a whoop.
Speaker 1:I wear an aura ring now, okay, yeah, Because obviously the wearables technology is kind of taking this to a whole different level, where we can track these things in real time and you can see visual representations of what's going on. Tell us just a little bit more about maybe some of those effects that you were feeling and what you were noticing tracking stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Right, and I think you said it perfect. Like everyone has a stressful job, right, like everyone has something that's going to either cause stress or, um, you know that workload. I mean, I'm a person who I want to give a hundred percent to everything, so naturally I just feel like that's going to happen. That's who I was as an athlete. I noticed that as a teacher, um, and sometimes that's hard for me to turn it, know when to turn it off and know when to kind of put myself into a less stressful, um mindset, and so when that happens, I would just kind of like let myself keep going in that like mindset or that mind track, and so I didn't know how to, how to kind of break that up. I knew how to do it as an athlete, but then as a teacher, I was noticing that I wasn't able to kind of not work myself up over things that I knew I could just put to the side later, yeah. So, um, that's kind of why I called you. I was like I need something, I need a tool not to use again Like I'm I'm a coach now, not an athlete, I'm not playing, so I don't need, I don't need that right now. You know what you put the athletes through. I need this for my what I consider my game day right, going in and teaching Um, and there were certain times of the day where I would notice it happening more so than not, kind of like in my morning time, um, and I've done.
Speaker 2:I'm super passionate about like health and fitness, so I've also kind of, I think, correlated that a little bit to like with nutrition and and everything that's going on there. So I was noticing a certain time of day that I was telling you that I was getting super worked up about and I didn't know how to calm myself down. And then, um, we had a conversation and you gave me so many great pieces of advice over what, um, I need to start incorporating into my day. And at first, when I was hearing this, I was like, okay, yes, I know that I should do this Right, but then I wasn't actually doing it. And so when, um, we went over all of those things and then I went over it myself and then I just started slowly incorporating it each day. I think the easiest one for me was the breathing technique, the belly breathing, and, um, that was just kind of eyeopening to me because you know, we think deep breaths, and then that was just kind of eye-opening to me, because you know we think deep breaths and then we naturally just do it from the chest versus from the belly, um, so that was the easiest thing, that kind of helped me in the moment.
Speaker 2:And then the journaling, what you were saying, like just brain dump at the end of the night, um, so I started doing that a lot and noticed a big difference.
Speaker 2:So the so the aura ring, it tracks your stress, it tracks a bunch of like, it tracks your sleep and your HRV, which is a reflection over your nervous system as well, and then, but it also tracks your stress which. So when I called you and we were having this conversation, I said, ben, my stress levels from my aura ring are about four or five, six hours every day. The only days that it wasn't that high was maybe the weekends when I wasn't coaching, um, and so then I think it was I'm looking back yeah, it was the next day or two after we had our conversation and I started implementing what you were, what we talked about, and my stress, uh was, on a Monday, 45 minutes and restored was 30 minutes, and I had never seen a restored level, meaning, like my body was, you know, kind of kind of balancing that out? Um, so that you know, that's a number that I would maybe see on a Saturday when I'm just sitting on the couch not doing anything.
Speaker 1:That's, that's awesome. Um, I know when, when Pepeo got out to the Dodgers, literally one of the first things they did was put him in a whoop band because they wanted to see what his recovery was like. They wanted to be intentional about tracking some of those metrics From my perspective, to kind of catch up the audience. It sounded to me as you were, you know, because you sent me that text as you were, you know cause.
Speaker 2:You sent me that text and I was like this isn't a quick text fix conversation.
Speaker 1:Um, I said we we need to hop on a phone call and basically, you know, at that point said all right, kind of take me, take me through what all you're experiencing throughout the day. And you know, I would say from a focus cycle standpoint, we teach that to all our athletes so that when in that moment where there's a reaction, and you know I drop a pass, I get blocked, I serve into the net, whatever, what is my body automatically doing? And how do I take back control? Right, and so we talk about how the lower part of the brain reacts, just like if we stepped off a curb and a car laid on its horn, we wouldn't think we would automatically jerk back up onto the curb. And then how do we use the top part of the brain to basically take back control? But you weren't just dealing with one moment right.
Speaker 1:You were dealing with the entire lower part of your brain and that middle part of your brain. Your amygdala are basically on high alert Right All the time.
Speaker 1:And you're just living in this stressed state, and so in my mind it was like, okay, well, if we want to change the lower part of the brain, that's going to go a little bit deeper. Like I, I can show you the science to prove that the focus cycle works. That's not my opinion. It works. But if we want to change, if we, if we want to go deeper than that and you needed to go deeper than that then we've got to get a lot more intense. It a lot more intense. And so I just want to.
Speaker 1:I want to read the text of the. It was kind of like a quick summary and it almost reads like a prescription and like I'm going to. I'm going to, I'm going to come right out here and say, like I'm not a psychotherapist, I'm not a counselor. That's not what I do. Um, everything that I shared is just from in my own struggles with anxiety. Here's some things that I did that worked. I can show you the research and the literature behind why they work, but I like I just want to throw that out there to the audience. Take this for what it is.
Speaker 1:Um number one I said reading, reading the Bible in the morning and throughout the day, anytime someone's faith is important to them.
Speaker 1:I think that that that is a great place to start and I can show you this book right here how God changes your brain. Basically, takes a look at, okay, if someone is spending a lot of time in scripture or someone is spending a lot of time in prayer, what a functional MRI machines say is going on in their brain. Number two I said journaling. We talked about the permission to forget the end of the day, brain dump. What can you control? What can you not control? Again, just giving you some specific prompts that would help you out the Sabbath taking a day off, having a day where you rest and you recover. I sent you a link to a different podcast. The midday break was number four and we talked about the video that someone was showing basically the stress levels and the cortisol levels throughout the course of a day when they were at work, and it was just this slow and steady climb, always getting more stressful and then they started to have.
Speaker 1:You know, how do we, in the middle of the day, maybe bring those back down so that, even as they continue to climb, at least they're not getting as high as what they were? We talked about the 15 minutes of quiet. Don't talk, don't read, don't pray, just be there, be with God in silence, count your breaths or do nothing like slow down amygdala activity and do the opposite of PTSD to your brain. We talked about focus. What's the purpose of you being in education? Why does God have you there? What's he trying to do with you? When is Satan trying to disrupt that or steal your peace that allows you to accomplish that purpose? We talked about counseling. You know there's a whole bunch of solid therapists out there that are way more qualified in this area than me, as a mental performance coach.
Speaker 1:And I'm not going to lie, as, as I'm sitting here looking at this list and I'm reading all this stuff to you, to me this sounds almost like an overwhelming amount of stuff that I've just kind of heaped on you and said, hey, I did all this and it, it really works, Good luck. Where the? Where the heck did you now begin on day one?
Speaker 2:Well, the easiest one for me, like in the moment, especially because, like to me, teaching, I'm kind of like, okay, I'm putting on a show now for these kids, right, Like I'm going to make it entertaining, but they're going to learn, and so whenever I would start getting overwhelmed, I almost looked at that as like a weakness. I don't need them to know that I'm freaking out right now mentally, right, Like I'm supposed to be that person who's their safe spot, like during the day. So the easiest thing for me that, um, you know, no one could really see was the, the belly breathing that you walked our girls through. Um, so I can do that, you know, sitting at my desk or like if they're reading, I can just take a couple of deep breaths and kind of do that. That reset, Um.
Speaker 2:So that one I started there. And then I started with the permission to forget, Because I think when we were on the phone I was telling you I'm forgetting so many little details that I know I should remember. And then, naturally, I'm cycling. I'm like, why am I forgetting this? Why can't I remember this? What's going on? And then you said the permission to forget, write it down and then forget, and there's always something. In every job. There's always something more that you can do. There's always something that you can take home and do. So it's the stopping. Write it on the to-do list, journal, it brain dump, whatever and then go home and do something else a part of your life. So I started keeping a journal at school writing down certain things. I have my to-do list right in front of me and then at night I keep a journal next to my bed and that's more of like a reflection over my day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so neurologically. Now what's happened is you've got all this junk that's swirling around inside of your working memory and I don't call it junk to downplay anything that you have going on in your life.
Speaker 1:I call it that because when we're trying to focus on other stuff and there's things cluttering it and clouding, it's just junk that we need to get rid of and set off to the side. We're not saying we're never going to deal with it. We're saying we can't deal with it right now, so we're going to give ourselves permission to forget about this and then move on. What would you say was the most challenging part of trying to implement these changes?
Speaker 2:I'm still not good at it, but probably the Sabbath, that one, because I mean I could even throw out a bunch of excuses why, you know, not to give up a day to not just do anything. There's all. Like I said, there's always something to do, there's always something to prepare for. Um, and then different seasons of life. I mean I find more time now, since we're out of season, to find a little bit more of that day to just truly give it to God than in season, when I could tell you a bunch of reasons why I'm super busy. So that one is definitely still probably hard. The 15 minutes of quiet is hard.
Speaker 2:I think that kind of goes a little bit hand in hand with the Sabbath, like just completely turning off, of turning off your brain and your thoughts and letting it actually just decompress. The easiest time to do the 15 minutes is probably before bed, though when I can't, I think that's the easiest time yeah.
Speaker 1:So, I think I don't know if you've felt this, but something that I tell clients anytime we're having a conversation anywhere near this is, if you do one of them, it might have an impact and it might help. Like if you do, if you just do the breathing that might be helpful.
Speaker 1:If you're just focusing on your purpose, that might be helpful. If you're just taking a 15 minute break in the middle of the day, that could be helpful. But where I think it becomes life changing is when we start to pile these on top of each other and we sort of start to stack some of these habits. Where did you start to realize like, oh, this is having a way bigger impact than what I was even realizing or expecting.
Speaker 2:Well, I definitely noticed it when I saw the concrete evidence on my aura ring. I think that was. I could feel different when I did it, when I started doing some of those things that you texted me about. But then when I looked on my aura ring, I was like no way I have more restored time than I have stress time on a work day. So that was probably my light bulb moment of like, oh my goodness.
Speaker 2:And then we were still in season, so I went to my athletes and I was like, guys, you have to do what he's telling you to do, because this is working. And then I told them I called you for different things in my life and and I was like implementing it. Um, so I was encouraging them. And then I was telling other teachers as well, like, okay, we just have to, you know, slow down our thoughts and know that we can put things to the side. And it's not. I mean, it's so important everyone's work that people do, but it's you can't stress yourself out that much, right About everything. You have to know when to also help your mental health yeah, and I think it can be.
Speaker 1:I think it can be challenging at times to focus on ourselves, because I know, like for me, if I were to, if I were to right now, you know, let's say, go work out at the gym for an hour, that would mean that I'm asking my wife to watch our kids for this, you know this half hour, and then I'm going to drive over there and then I'm going to do this and then I'm going to come back home and now it's been like two hours and it's like during that time I could have been getting stuff done around the house, I could have been doing stuff for work, I could have been I mean, fill in the blank with 10,000 others, and that's.
Speaker 1:That's not even being a coach in season, that's just. That's just like day-to-day life. Um, where, how did how? Did you maybe overcome feeling I don't? Did you feel guilty at all about setting aside some extra time for yourself? Did it feel inconvenient? Did you feel I'm too rushed to do this? Like, what were, what were some of your excuses when you were like I just I don't know if I can do this.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it was the guilty. I think it was the inconvenience of like you're always cause. That was, you know, part of that working memory. My, it felt like a hamster wheel inside my brain, like there's always something what else should I do? Or sometimes I tell other people it's like I have 50 tabs open in my brain. You know like every day, where. Okay, what's the next thing, what's the next tab that I need to go close? Um, that I just couldn't stop.
Speaker 2:So giving yourself that time to just forget, or truly saying, okay, this can wait until tomorrow or we'll figure this out later, type of conversations, or you know what, lucy, it's going to be fine, you don't need to stare at this lesson plan for two hours when you're only going to teach it for 15 minutes. Just those types of permissions. That's hard and knowing the kids are still going to learn, like you're still going to stand up there and teach. So I think some. So I guess, maybe a little bit of guilt too. So a little bit of inconvenience, a little bit, I guess, of that guilt feeling of like letting yourself kind of, I guess, unplug from your work life and then your personal life.
Speaker 1:And what's that balance look like for you, like in in reality? Because with an athlete you know I work with. I work with high performing athletes all the time that put so much pressure on themselves and prepare at such a high level and put so much time and work into their craft that it's like they don't feel like they're doing their best if they don't commit all of that time. So how do you? How do you go about let's say it is that 15 minute lesson? How do you go through some process where you say, okay, now is enough?
Speaker 2:I started a little bit more firm boundaries, I guess, with myself of like, okay, right now you're at work, so let's get as much work as we can, you know, in the allotted time, like my prep, or when I don't have recess due to you know other times when I can do stuff. So like working through that, finding other times to kind of chip away at what would be on my to-do list, because what I was noticing is I would be teaching, doing stuff, and then overwhelmed with, you know, the next day or the next week or not feeling prepared enough. So then what would happen was, especially in season going coaching that takes up your night, and then I would feel like I need to pull back out the computer and do it again. So then my brain was nonstop working up until what 9, 10, 10, 30 at night, you know, and sometimes I compare that to myself.
Speaker 2:I'm like, okay, in high school, right, like I went to school, I did volleyball. The only difference at night was the homework part. But then to not feel guilty, is that now I'm the adult, right, I don't. If I can still show up to work and do my job, well, I don't need to constantly keep worrying about the week ahead. So a little bit more of those firm boundaries and finding that time to get that work done during my day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I want to dive a little bit deeper into some of the data and some of the screenshots because you sent me. To be honest, it was kind of new for me because, you know, my, my tracker just looks different.
Speaker 1:Um, talk to us, though, and kind of describe, like, what these charts looked like beforehand and what they meant and what they looked like afterwards and what that meant. Because, I'll be honest, there were, like I know, I know this stuff works and I believe this stuff works, but there were some things that I was looking at that you were sending me that it was like holy cow, I didn't, I didn't know it worked this well almost.
Speaker 2:Right, um, so I'm just reading this text because I sent you one screenshot and it said zero minutes stress, zero minutes restored, which I had never, like I told you, seen that on my aura on a workday. And then I sent you literally the day before and it said four hours stress, zero minutes, restored. And it was a workday and I think I said, oh, my goodness, did the brain dump. Last night Bible, this morning instrumental worship music playing softly. I worked in the pausing point today and I did mindfulness and breathing activities and that was just the difference. So you'll see the colors on there are blue is more of a relaxful day and then that purple is more of your stress day. So all my stress days my graph was always purple and like barely blue, and then on my restored days it's almost always blue.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and when? When you reached out to me, it was almost like you know you had, you had this wearable and it was almost throwing back in your face. You already feel overwhelmed, exhausted, worn, burned out whatever those words are for you. You're already having this, this experience that's just draining you Right. And then, on top of it, you have to look at your phone and then it's like I know I'm stressed.
Speaker 2:You don't need to tell me yeah this just made it way worse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this just made it way worse. So I would imagine, as you started to implement some change, that when the reverse all of a sudden starts popping up on your phone, that that's maybe a little bit more encouraging.
Speaker 2:Yes, this is working and this is worth it, and we need to do this definitely, and now, even like I look at my phone and I think since I've started this, maybe my highest stress day working was an hour and 30 minutes, and so now when I look at it, I'm like, oh, my goodness, that's so high, which compared to a month ago it wasn't, and now, relaxing day only been stressed out for an hour and a half Right.
Speaker 2:So just kind of the difference of like working through that. Yeah, it's definitely neat to see. Especially I'm such a person who likes seeing like the concrete data of seeing that, and so when that was happening I was like you have to see this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, tell me, tell me a little bit, a little bit more about the interactions with athletes, because I know, like part of the reason I'm such a believer in the go-to statement was because I felt it in like a week. It completely changed my outlook on a football game and my role, what I was doing, where my head was at, how I was feeling my ability to do my job, so much to the point that I went back to my all the guys in my position group that next week.
Speaker 1:And I was like you have to do this. It works. I read about it in this sports psychology textbook and it's now mandatory. It's amazing. Tell me a little bit about how some of that interaction went.
Speaker 2:So all the girls, they wrote their own statement and then we kind of copied that for them and kept it, and then they had a copy of their own. When they said it, how they said it, that was up to them. That was from, you know, kind of when you came in and you're teaching, and then. But what I noticed when they were doing it and it was like it wasn't right away type of thing, it kind of was. But then it just became more natural and in the h huddles, when we would have either a super exciting moment where we still needed to stay focused or a moment where we could kind of feel ourselves disband a little bit and needed to bring it back together, we would do, they would do the FMR release.
Speaker 2:Um, and you know it, it would be either me or another coach or even some of the other girls. They would just like come in the huddle and they would stop and go FMR, fmr, FMR, and then everyone would be on board and then we you would see all the girls kind of tense up and then release, and then we could talk about what we needed to talk about. And then they went back onto the court. And when we did stuff like that, versus when we didn't always implement it. Sometimes whatever we said in the huddle worked and sometimes it didn't, but I noticed more of a positive impact when we would come into the huddle and either take a couple of deep breaths or do the FMR and then go back out. We were more successful from that huddle and that's.
Speaker 1:I know that always. You know, it's one thing for coaches to to try and implement cultural pieces and say, hey, we're going to do this differently, or here's the expectation, or here's, you know what we need you to do. It's a whole nother animal. When the girls are bought in and the girls are now leading it, and now the, the freshmen and the sophomores are like, oh, oh, the best player on our team is doing this, you know. Or the girls that are on varsity are saying it, and that all the other girls in the other levels are like, oh well, if they're doing it. If you could go back and tell a younger version of yourself maybe some advice just while you're still as an athlete, what would that look like? What do you think that advice would be?
Speaker 2:As an athlete or as a teacher.
Speaker 1:As an athlete.
Speaker 2:As an athlete. I would probably tell my past Lucy self to slow down, probably tell my past Lucy self to slow down which I guess that correlates into today as well Some of those things and habits. But I would tell her to slow down, take a couple of those deep breaths. I would incorporate the statement because I think there was times where I could have definitely used that as like a foundation. Especially when you're second guessing yourself over your ability or you know from what a coach says. I think that's such a good, strong foundation for you to go back to. So I wish I would have had, um, a statement that I could have repeated to myself, um, and then I just I love the FMR.
Speaker 1:I just like how your body feels when once you do it, so I wish I would have known that as well and then the the last question, knowing what you know now, if you could tell a younger version of yourself, maybe that first year out of college teacher, coach, professional version of you, what, what advice would you have?
Speaker 2:you don't have to go a thousand miles an hour all the time. Giving your best effort all the time is going to be exactly what you need and that it's always going to work out. You know it's always going to pan out in the end.
Speaker 1:Yeah, would you have listened to that advice as a younger version of yourself? Probably not.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean because it's still hard when you tell yourself that you know you always, especially when you're an achiever type ofone. My first question is well, do they want to? Because? I feel like this is one of those things that, until you feel like you have that moment where you sort of come to the end of what you're able to do and figure out and handle on your own and you have to say, okay, I'm going to ask someone else for help, like I.
Speaker 1:I don't know how to necessarily crack through to to those people but, you know, I think as coaches, we can continue to do our best to equip our athletes and come alongside them as they fail. So, yeah, love, absolutely love today's conversation.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for coming on and joining us. Yeah, it was great, great, thank you.
Speaker 1:If you've got questions or want some help figuring out how this could be a good fit with your program, please don't hesitate to reach out. Check out mental training plancom. You can click on parents, athletes or coaches up at the top. If you've got questions or topics that you would love to hear discussed on the podcast, please feel free to send those our way. And, as always, until next time, make your plan and put it to work.