Episode 311: Performance is Performance
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"How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice." This age-old saying has stood the test of time. There is no shortcut to success, and achieving elite status in any field requires hard work and dedication. Consistently high performance can only be achieved through practice, or following a set of practices designed to bring out your best performance.
IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon has developed a simple premise that applies to all areas of performance. This concept is at the heart of the discussion in this week’s podcast - Performance is performance. In this episode, Matt delves deep into this idea to help you set a plan that will help you achieve consistent and predictable results. This is what we like to call "Purple Patches".
Matt has spent the last 20 years as a coach working with a diverse range of clients, from professional athletes to high-level executives. He strongly believes that the principles of success in triathlon can be applied to leadership in the workplace.
This episode aims to highlight the practices used by high-performers and make them accessible to anyone looking to enhance their performance in any field or endeavor.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 04:00 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
04:07 - 08:16 - Matt’s News-ings
08:31 - 10:57 - Word of the Week
11:04 - 45:53 - The Meat and Potatoes - Episode 311: Performance is Performance
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Full Transcript
Matt Dixon 00:00
I'm Matt Dixon and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sports into their lives.
Matt Dixon 00:25
Well, I'm 50 years of age, and you'll know that if you've been listening to the show recently. So what does that mean for me? Well, when I was a puppy, all I cared about was sports performance, getting faster, trying to make the Olympic team, and trying to be a successful pro. I was kind of middling with both of those. But now things have evolved a little bit for me. As I sit in my situation now and look ahead, I care about showing up every day with great energy and being able to give my best to all the things that are important to me. But I'm also thinking about the future, future-proofing myself against all major illnesses, making sure that I can have the highest quality of the years, however long I'm here, ahead of me, that I can pick up the luggage and throw it on the carry-on, that I can roll around with Baxter my kid as much as I possibly can, fighting, wrestling, playing football, whatever it might be. It's about quality of life, and it's about performance across all aspects of life. And I also want to stay as fast as I can in the stuff that I love to do. I'm still a pretty competitive guy. Now, maybe you're a little bit like me. What do I do? Well, I have adopted lots of positive habits; I have reduced my alcohol consumption, especially during the week; and I make sure that I move my body every day. But another tool that I use, and I'm not paid to do this, is InsideTracker. By taking a look inside at biometrics, what I get is a clear picture of the things that I can't see. And that enables me to the action plan that's delivered via the team of scientists and experts. InsideTracker has actionable things that I should take on and do to try and improve my health. It enables me to focus, filter out some of the noise, and get action-based and focused. It's incredibly powerful. And guess what? You can be just like me if you'd like. Nope, joking aside, you can take advantage of InsideTracker as well, as all of the athletes that I coach do. And so I think that you should as well; all you need to do is head to insidetracker.com/purplepatch. That's insidetracker.com/purplepatch. And while you're there, feel free to use this code; it will get you 20% off the store. Purple Patch Pro 20 is exactly the code that I use. Alright, let's get on with the show.
Matt Dixon 02:52
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast as ever, your host, Matt Dixon, and today we're going to talk about performance, not just any performance, high performance, elite performance, and not just in athletics, in anything important to you. If you want to show up at your best consistently and predictably, you want your team to show up and deliver results. No matter what arena we focus on, I've learned something important. I learned it across two decades of coaching; it took a while, but it's a very simple premise. Performance is performance. Now we're going to dig into that subject today. We're going to unpack the concept so that we can set a route for you to help set your best approach to yield predictable and consistent results, or maybe consistent and predictable purple patches. That's our mission for what we want to do at this organization. Before we get going, it's going to be a fun one. Hopefully, it's going to be a little inspirational but also set the path for your high performance. I think first we should do a little bit of Matt's news.
Matt Dixon 04:07
Yes, Barry, it is Matt's news. And first, we're going to do a little bit of an update for high-performance listeners. Today's show is all about developing sustained high performance. And as you're going to hear in today's show, I never set out to coach executives and leadership teams. But the years of coaching led me into this arena. Well, I'm delighted to announce that now we have formalized lessons and applications of elite athletic coaching that are all tailored to the corporate and leadership setting. If you or your organization is seeking a performance edge, want to deliver a results-driven and high-performance culture within your teams, or simply want every member of your leadership team to show up performance-ready daily, feel free to reach out. I'm available to keynote, and we have a suite of performance-focused programs for leadership teams and broader organizations. Now I should point out that the Purple Patch Leadership Program is not corporate wellness. It isn't executive coaching. This is about elite performance, and it is applied, like elite athletic coaching, to the business world. I've learned a lot over the last 20 years of doing this. And so naturally, this is the next organic step; it's going to be a lot of fun. And if you're interested, feel free to reach out to the regular address, info@purplepatchfitness.com. Just let them know that you're interested in having a discussion, and we can see whether I can maybe be of service to your organization. Second, I want to talk in Matt's News about triathlon performance a little bit. If you go and Google any aspect of triathlon performance, you're going to get 15 different results from 15 different opinions. And many of those people seem to have pretty good credibility and expertise. How do you get faster at open-water swimming? How do I improve my running off the bike? Whether it's training, strength, nutrition, fueling recovery, race craft equipment, the list goes on, there is a storm of information. And in that storm is a blizzard of contradictory advice. It's confusing. It's time-consuming, and a life that's already full of plenty of stress and many competing demands. I imagine it must be tough for you to know where to place your focus and what to prioritize so that you can get the results that you want. Well, at Purple Patch, we leverage my two decades of experience in unlocking performance in athletes just like you, including more than 1500 time-starved athletes who have qualified for world championship events. The Purple Patch tri-squad is a program that is specifically tailored and designed for you. Because our mission is not just to deliver a comprehensive training program that works with life demands. But we also cut through the noise. We filter out the distractions; we simplify things so that you can act on the behaviors and habits that are going to yield a return on your investment. I want you to get faster. Just because you're time-starved doesn't mean you should compromise. All it takes is a little innovation, a little bit of pragmatism, and smart, effective work. And so, whether you want to become a part of our tri-squad or you want to get involved with the more personalized touch of one-to-one coaching, we have your back. Feel free to reach out; it's three simple steps for you. Set up a consultation; that's complimentary. Of course, we'd love to understand your challenges and goals. We could have you on the plan within 24 hours. And you know what? We back you, and we also back ourselves. If you don't love it, and we're confident you will, we'll give you a 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can just say adios if you don't think it's a program for you. I promise you. We do it. We've got a great community, and we'd love to have you be a part of it. All right, guys, that keeps us almost ad-free on the Purple Patch podcast. And so I appreciate you listening to us and having the endorsement. But now that I want to carry on with the education, let's do Word of the Week.
Matt Dixon 08:31
Yes, it is the word of the week, and this week is 1970. For goodness sake, what a year it was, and I know what you're thinking. It was the year that I was born. But that's not why we're going to focus on that number. This week is Word of the Week. You see, in American football, that's not real football. My English friends, in American football at that year's Super Bowl, the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback was named Len Dawson. Some of you guys remember Len Dawson. Very good player. But there is a wonderful image, and we'll pop it in the show notes. There was a wonderful image at halftime of the Super Bowl. And Len Dawson was sitting down, recuperating, getting primed for the second half, and holding his hand. A cigarette? Yes, to open up the lungs. Ladies and gentlemen, A perfect halftime break. A nice Marlboro red, the starting quarterback at the Super Bowl. Can you imagine that happening now? Patrick Mahomes Having a puff to clear his lungs? Well, it's fair to say that sports have evolved. And what it takes to win now is very different than what it took in 1974. But the same could be said about business. It used to be the case that good enough was good enough, but it certainly isn't anymore. It's more competitive. It's more challenging. You need to step up consistently. You can't just get on the treadmill, go through the day-to-day, and finally arrive at that utopia of the corner office. Things have changed; the demands are higher, and we need to meet those demands. And so I want you to lock that in your head. It ain't, as the word of the week is this week, 1974, anymore. Now, it is imperative that if we are going to be great at whatever is important to us, we bring an elite mindset and a professional approach so that we can upskill, meet the demands, and have the capacity to step up when we need to. And so 1974 is our word of the week. And with that, Barry, it brings us lovely into the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 11:04
Yes, the meat and potatoes, ladies and gentlemen. And today, let's start this off with a story about two Purple Patch pros. One of the pros had great talent. When I reflect, perhaps the most talented so far as physical gifts that I probably ever coached. And yet she failed to convert her potential into consistent world-class results and victories. It just didn't happen for the other pro, Sarah Piampiano; she was much less talented in terms of physical gifts. But she overcame that, starting from behind, and went on to have more than a decade's worth of a professional triathlon career at the very highest level of performance, multiple Ironman victories, the second fastest US Ironman finish ever, and the top 10 at the Hawaii Ironman World Championships multiple times. Now, I've talked around on this show many times; she was full of grit, and it would be easy just to stop there. Yeah, she's tough. She's gritty. But that doesn't tell the story. That's not the differentiator, because grit is an important part of it. But the true catalyst of her enduring success is based more on her good practices and habits. She was highly coachable. Across all of the areas of her team, whether it was nutrition, strength training, or me as the overall head coach, She was incredibly consistent, looking after herself, making sure that she got enough recovery, thinking about fueling her hydration, and other key performance habits. She had a wonderful ability to prioritize shifting and reducing the noise to something simple and actionable. She was a great team player. She was selfless and thought beyond herself so that she, ironically, perhaps paradoxically, increased her performance levels and many more aspects. Now, as you listen today, I want you to think about Sarah Piampiano, because she wasn't the athlete that I coached who had the greatest gifts; she wasn't some genetic phenomenon. She developed traits and habits that became the catalyst for a hurricane of performance over many years. We can learn a lot from the story and the approach of Sarah in our lives, not because we're trying to become world-class athletes, but because we are still seeking to adopt an elite approach to whatever is important to us. Now that I know that you're busy, I'm sure you've got 100 things going on. I can imagine that it's just consistently a battle against compromise. Because most of us live in a world with massive competing demands, many things are going on at home and work. And then, amongst all that, we're trying to fit in stuff for ourselves—things that we can do to help us improve in those areas. We want to do consistent exercise; maybe some of us are event-driven. We want to try to protect our sleep quality. We want to think about how we're eating so that we can improve our health in all of these areas, and we're doing it in this turbulence and challenge of a life that is full of stress and competing demands. It's challenging. And here you are today listening to me, and I'm starting to rattle on about Sarah Piampiano, a professional athlete. And you might be listening and thinking, What's that story about Sarah got to do with me? Well, it turns out to be a lot. When I started Purple Patch, which was in early 2008, my mission was very simple: I wanted to change the way that endurance sports were coached. You see, I had that drive in me that was purpose-driven because I saw at the time a need after both my struggles as an elite athlete and also looking around the landscape of the sport and seeing many committed athletes that were fit and fatigued just like I was. And when I reflected on my coaching journey in swimming, my athletic journey in both swimming and triathlon and my backbone of education with a master's degree in clinical physiology, I just refused to believe that this was the way. I thought that there could be a better way. I saw a need. And so my passion at the time was elite sports. I wanted to coach the best. That was it; it was pretty narrow. And my approach to elite sports was polarizing, against the grain. It meant that being a Purple Patch Pro, under my guidance, meant that you were doing things a little bit differently than what most other athletes were doing at the time. Now I work with the athletes very hard. And I don't want to misunderstand many people here, as my nickname is the recovery coach. Well, that sounds like it's easy. No, I valued recovery to counteract and support the incredibly hard work that we did. That's why we play somewhat on an equal playing field, the same as I adopted integrated full-season strength training to ensure that the athlete could stay healthy but also maximize the results of their endurance work. And we prioritize all of the habits that fall undernutrition so that we can provide the nutrients and fuel to maximize the return on investment. So it was a performance mindset that I believed would help an athlete (A) build a platform of health and (B) yield the results to help them get to world-class. And yet, it was unpopular at the time. I was often called a shill or a quick-fix merchant or something along those lines. I think I heard snake oil salesmen quite a few times as well. And that was okay. But the key part of this is that there is no shortcut to having a Purple Patch Pro Excel. And it wasn't easy to enable them to develop over multiple years and then stay at the world-class level. There's nothing easy about it for the athlete; it takes a lot of commitment and a lot of hard work. As a coaching team, we had to invest consistently, continually look to evolve and improve, and keep coming up with ways to help the athlete drive on to greater success. But at the bedrock of this, I had a deep belief that I could only help any athlete and the collection of Purple Patch pros excel if they were fundamentally healthy. First, I believe that performance is built on a platform of health. And if we could achieve that, then the results and the predictability of the results would flow from that very premise. And it turns out that we did pretty well. And this is important when we think about this concept today. For the first years of my coaching, I was singularly focused on how I could help pros excel. I then extended that little bit to say, Okay, I'm passionate about time-starved amateur athletes as well. And so folks that were very much identifying as triathletes, looking to often qualify for the Hawaii Ironman World Championships, or wherever the Half Ironman World Championships happened to be that year. But it was a triathlon coaching company through and through. And we might have had a methodology that was polarizing and against the grain, but that was the focus. And that was the passion, and it was wonderful. This method, as I mentioned, delivered great sporting results at the pro level. It was terrific fun for me, but it was also a great source of pride because we had a robust track record of equal success across genders, something that I've always been proud of. We've also had a rich history of long-term athlete development. So a lot of our coaching relationships started with amateur athletes going on to progress to improve, to manage to go pro, to develop as pros, and ultimately ending up being world-class. And we had multiple world-class athletes and Ironman champions that started as amateurs, and that's every coach's dream. So unexpectedly, after multiple years, I could sort of sit back a little bit and be like, well, as an elite coach, I kind of made it. And that's great. But that's not what I want to discuss today.
Matt Dixon 20:14
Throughout those early years, beyond coaching the pros, I also guided amateur athletes. As I mentioned, ultimately, you got to pay the bills. However, I became passionate about supporting time-starved athletes who were seeking to integrate sports into their lives. In the early years of my elite coaching that I was doing with the pros, I happened to also work in parallel with a host of C-level executives. They wanted to benefit from the practices of an elite coach, and so they reached out to me, it was great, and we have lots of names that maybe some of you guys have heard of: Sami Inkinen, the founder of Trulia; Max Levchin, the founder of PayPal; Carmel Galvin, who was the head of people at Autodesk and then Stripe; Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital; Mark Zuckerberg; yes, indeed, Erica Berthou, from Kirkland; these lists of very high-profile executives reached out to me for coaching. And I'm not saying those names to namedrop or anything like that. But these were high-profile people. And here I was wanting to become a world champion. I was thinking about pros, and I had this host of really interesting and, frankly, inspiring people that I felt like I was learning from as much as guiding in their sports. But what started to happen over not months but years was that I started to observe something around this group and this type of population that I was working with. And that's pretty simple. And what you would hope is that these executives were getting faster in their sports of choice. Not all of them were event-driven, but they are all improving. And that's great. But what I started to observe in this conversation was that they were taking the method and approach that I coached them to help them show up better in the workplace. And many of them were bringing the principles that I was guiding and applying them in the work arena and also to their teams. And that's something that I started to find incredibly interesting. Now, I want to be clear: when I talk about this, this isn't something that I set out to do. It wasn't a specific target audience or anything like that. It happened organically, really incrementally. And I suddenly found myself almost straddling two worlds: I had pro athletes, and I had these elite performers in business. And I was working with both groups in parallel. Over time, I started to see consistent patterns, and this group was time-starved beyond any doubt of a degree and had a lot going on in life, navigating a tremendous amount of stress. And at the same time, we're improving athletically, but we're also reporting back and saying this is helping me show up in a broader life. This is enabling me to have more energy. I'm applying many of the tools and strategies to my workplace. Now, I'm not an executive coach; I never was an executive coach, and I never claimed to be that. But there were principles that they could apply to the workplace. And they started to expand that and take it to their teams. Some of the concepts that we talked about were just drawn from and adapted from my work with professional athletes. So over time, as this started to emerge and I was becoming passionate about it, I spent some time to reverse engineer. And I realized something incredibly simple. And that's because many of the same lessons that apply to my pro athletes also apply to these executives. And it was an epiphany. It helped me connect the dots between elite athletic coaching and what it takes to perform better in any arena in life. Now, what this means and what this boils down to is that if we are discussing elite athletics, elite executives, or, quite frankly, anyone because this isn't just elite, let's remove it. Let's just say whatever we're talking about. If we are thinking about looking to perform in any arena, many of the challenges that we face are very similar. They really are, and many of them are similar, but perhaps most compellingly, what I've learned over this time is that many of the solutions to these challenges are also the same. Now, it can be manifested in different ways. But there is a simple truth that's important for us all to understand. Performance is performance. Now that I have talked about this, it took me several years of coaching to appreciate it. And it was something that I stumbled upon. But it provided the platform for my thinking, focus, and method to apply this elite athletic coaching more broadly across time-starved athletes, business professionals, parents, and anyone else seeking to show up predictably and consistently. So let's dive into this a little bit more; we want to get some traction.
Matt Dixon 26:00
So I want to dig in. And perhaps the best way to dig in is to ask a couple of very simple questions, which are: What does it take to excel in elite athletics? So that's world-class to become world-class? What does it take to become a champion? And what does it take in parallel to that to excel in business, whether you're starting your own business—it might be a coffee shop, a coaching company, a hotel, or something else? Or in a broader enterprise business? What does it take to excel in that? And in fact, we could sort of wrap this all around this: what does it take to excel in anything? But let's just keep it to elite athletics and excelling in business. What does it take? Well, in both of these, we can categorize a few really simple concepts. The first is consistency. It's my magic word for performance. Also, you need to show up every day. And this is very simple. There will be very few people who argue against this backbone of achievement in any arena. Consistency is the magic word for performance. You can't excel in business or sports if you're not done consistently. Number two is the simple fact that success is a journey. And it is a journey without shortcuts. Now, that's why those who know, despite the concepts out there in the world of you, can shortcut to this: let's do life hacking. Here are the five magic bullets. Ultimately, there is no shortcut. If you want to shine, if you want to have staying power, if you want to create championships or magical businesses, there's no shortcut. It takes consistency, it takes hard work, and you better be equipped to fasten your seat belt and go on a journey, because it's also going to take some time. The third component is that you need a plan. We all know the saying that hope is not a strategy and that randomness delivers random results. The key, if you're an athlete or if you're leading a business, is that you need to have a plan and a strategy. Now, all of these so far are very, very simple. But we can join the dots; you don't even need to separate them at all. The intention of planning is one of the key parts of the performance puzzle. Great.
Matt Dixon 28:28
What about other aspects? While you kind of need to know and understand your competitors, You can't excel in a vacuum. It might not be the same for amateur athletes on that. But as elite athletes, you need to understand your competitors, their strengths, their weaknesses, your opportunities, how you get ahead of them, and how you beat them. You need to develop a set of practices that will enable you to deliver the results and outcomes that you desire. So much of elite athletics and so much of business success is backed around practices, habits, and things that make up the behaviors that will deliver the results that you want. Very, very important. Let's carry on. You need to be equipped to handle huge competing demands and high-stress environments. You've heard me talk on this show about how elite athletes develop a positive relationship with stress. It doesn't mean that they like stress. They're not sadomasochistic; they're not just into it for the suffering, but they appreciate that high stress is the thing that delivers growth and improvement. And so highly stressful situations and experiences in training and competition are something that they realize are part of the journey to excellence. And that's the same with anything; anything worthwhile is going to take a little bit of suffering. You're also going to have a lot on your plate as a professional athlete; it's not just in my sport. swim, bike, and run; it's not just showing up and doing that; there's strength. There's recuperation, there's sleep, there's navigating your calendar, there's sponsor demands, there's building your brand, there is prehab that you go into it, there is a host of competing demands, and you also have directions getting pulled across your sponsors wanting to do a race versus where the bigger prize money is versus where your heart wants to go. Anything around this is not easy for a pro athlete; it's very challenging. And yet, amongst all of that high stress, you must be able to handle and meet the demands of, the big moments, whether it's business or whether it's sport. In the big moments, you also need the capacity to step up, respond, and upgrade your level to go that one level beyond because the big moments are built on top of the consistency we talked about. But it's essential; you need that to become a champion. Finally, you need a robust accountability mechanism that is set up for you so that you can hold yourself accountable for the actions and behaviors that are going to drive success, ensure that you remain focused on the right things, drive the performance needle, and stay on course throughout. And that's a framework that you need to set up and have in place if you're going to ultimately be successful. And that's the message because those components—the practices and behaviors that Sara Piampiano mastered—were the things that equipped her, both mentally and physically—her mindset and her readiness—to thrive and continue to thrive and become a multi-time champion. Therefore, she can be labeled a champion. And the nice thing about this is that the lessons from her journey apply directly to you.
Matt Dixon 32:05
We talked about the other pro athlete being genetically gifted and having a great deal of physical talent. She was born with that. However, she failed to adopt practices and habits that can develop the other side of sports. Well, we are all born with a certain set of physical traits and even a certain a certain level of intellect. And we can improve that. But there is a genetic component that is out of our control. But everything I'm talking about here—all of the things that Sarah put into action to excel at—is not generic. None of them are innate. They are learnable. And they are coachable. It takes commitment. It takes understanding where to place your focus, and it takes consistency. And if you do that, over time, you become better equipped to show up, get better results, and ultimately thrive across anything. Business, sport, life—it doesn't matter. And that's where we join the dots. That's how we find great consistency in life. And that's why I say the lessons from her journey—Sara's journey—apply directly to you, no matter what arena you chase performance in. That's the reason that I believe that if we take an elite approach, which doesn't mean restrictive, it doesn't mean monk light. But if you take an elite approach to your life, it is fundamental to you meeting the demands of your role, unlocking your effectiveness, and giving you more time for yourself, your family, and other important stuff in life. All by just taking an elite approach, at Purple Patch, we believe that everyone is an athlete; we believe in human potential. I believe that you can achieve great things. You don't need to identify as an athlete to draw from the lessons of elite athletic performance. You don't need to sign up for an Ironman or a marathon, which is great if you want to, but you don't have to. But I am here to tell you that I do believe that you will benefit from adopting many of the key strategies and principles that elite athletes do. If you go on a journey in which you adopt practices and habits incrementally that build up, and we've talked about this in the show before, a robust platform of health, what we'd like to label a performance baselayer, where you have stable energy over most days, your cognitive function is at its optimal level, and you have mental and physical resiliency. If you can go on a journey where you can adopt those practices to deliver that, you'll be in a place where you can do better at whatever you want to do better at. And that's great. And you can reap the benefits by also taking on a big, daunting personal challenge. Now, this isn't a call to action just to get healthy. It's not about you just improving by committing to exercise, eating quite well, sleeping, and saying that's kind of enough. I think if you want to take an elite approach, you need to take on a challenge. We used to call it a b-hag, a big, hairy, audacious goal, or going for something. And the perfect arena to do that in, because it's risk-free, is where you're going to deliver all of the lessons. Many of the traits that we talked about with the high-performance mindset are something in sport, something in fitness, or taking on something scary. It's challenging. That's why so many executives love to take on and get trained for a marathon or an Iron Man. It's also a reason that we see many time-starved athletes say, I want to achieve this. It's why I went and raced the Haute Route last year, seven days across the Alps because it scared me. I knew that I had to get ready. But it also refreshed me with a high-performance mindset. And it was the framework that enabled me to stay committed to the habits that I knew would get me ready for that event. But also, I drew from it to show up better as a father, as a husband, and as the leader of Purple Patch.
Matt Dixon 36:40
And so I believe taking on a big challenge in sports is a risk-free arena. But when you've done that as well, you're now suddenly equipped with all of the lessons that you went through to be successful. All of the tools that you develop to navigate adversity, to stay committed when things get tough, and to work out a better path when maybe the road is blocked. And that's a high-performance mindset. And those tools apply to anything else that you want to do in life. And to end the show today, I'm going to give you a real-life example of this. His name is George Jordan, and he is a Purple Patch athlete. And George is, was, and is committed to sport. It's a big part of his life. Now I would label him a mature athlete. But George, for many years, chased personal performance in Ironman racing. He was very, very busy. He had a family, but he was committed, and he competed in half Ironman and Ironman racing. That was his thing, and he wanted to get better, but it wasn't easy. When I reflect on his journey over the last three, four, or five years, he has faced many challenges. And he faced many of the same challenges that most time-starved athletes do. He had obstacles in sports. He also had a fair few failures, setbacks, challenges, cramps, whatever it might be, and struggled on the run coming off the bike—normal stuff. But all of those lessons emboldened him. I believe that George became smarter and had a higher performance mindset because he developed a toolbox. Now, if we go back just a few years into the middle of the pandemic when so many of us felt untethered and our worlds were turned upside down, I decided to issue a challenge to Purple Patch athletes. And I said This is the time. This is the time to take on a big challenge that you can't do competitively in sports. But in any arena in life, go and take on a challenge and go and achieve something. Because that's going to be the tent peg in the storm. That's going to give you a framework and a structure; it's going to help you be driven. And you can develop and utilize the tools that you used in your sporting journey for anything else that we could go and achieve. And I issue that challenge broadly to everyone. I think it's a healthy thing to do. Let's go and do it. Well, just this week, I got an email from George, and it has been three or four years since that challenge was issued. I have forgotten about it. But I'm going to read to you. What did George write to me? He said, in his own words, He said, "You presented a big, hairy, ass goal to all of the athletes. And at that time, I decided to take it on. I'd already competed as an Iron Man. However, I crafted a pathway to become a fellow at the American College of Radiology. That's the FACR. And with the help of my wife, Karen." Thank you, Karen, very much. "I studied and became elected as the chief of staff at Sinatra, Alba Marley Medical Center. That leadership position, along with my professional contributions to the hospital and my community, as well as letters from existing fellows, supported my acceptance as a fellow. Today.." Today, as I record this, "I will be inducted as a fellow." Well, goodness me. Isn't that brilliant? Congratulations, George. But it's also a prime example for all of us. What George did was simply transfer the mindset of high performance into something deeply meaningful in his life and ultimately much more powerful than finishing an Iron Man. Performance is performance. If we come back to Sara Piampiano, one more little vignette. Sarah's now retired; she's a mother. And she decided to take on a new challenge in life: What am I going to do at the age of 40? Now that I'm done with this decade-long professional triathlon career, I know I'm going to start a real estate organization. She's had no background or history in real estate whatsoever. She's two years old and one of the highest-performing real estate agents in the state of Colorado. And why is that? Well, it's not surprising to me; she simply adopted and applied the same mindset and set of practices that she utilized as a pro, turned the corner, and applied it in a brand new industry, and her performance amplified. And that's because, ladies and gentlemen, performance is performance. I want you to make sure that you leave today not separating the power of the sporting journey from life. Instead, I encourage you to draw the lessons and apply those lessons in your sporting journey directly to any aspect of life that you want to improve in. And that's a sure way that I believe you can get better. From my perspective, thanks for listening. See you next week! Take care.
Matt Dixon 42:21
Guys, thanks so much for joining, and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel on YouTube, and you will find it there. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe and share it with your friends. And it's really helpful if you leave a nice positive review in the comments. If you have any questions, let me know. Feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. As we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show on the Purple Patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it. And so, feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community. With that, I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, and do whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
performance, athletes, life, sport, coaching, elite, competing demands, patch, years, starved, purple, results, journey, pro, triathlon, started, habits, challenge, arena, improve