Win Cycle - Lessons from Ironman for the AI Era: 4 Capabilities You Can Train
Follow the Purple Patch Podcast at:
APPLE PODCASTS - SPOTIFY- AMAZON MUSIC - GOOGLE PODCASTS - YOUTUBE
Welcome to the Win Cycle Podcast! On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon discusses the importance of adaptability, or "being changeable," in the context of AI-driven change. He emphasizes that adaptability is a trainable skill, not a fixed trait, and highlights four key capabilities: clarity, capacity, learning velocity, and recovery. Dixon shares insights from his work with athletes and leaders, noting that adaptability is crucial for thriving in an ever-changing environment. He stresses that recovery is not a reward but an integral part of the work, essential for maintaining high performance. Dixon encourages deliberate training to enhance adaptability and leverage change as an opportunity for growth.
If you have any questions about the Win Cycle program, feel free to reach out at info@purplepatchfitness.com.
Episode Timecodes:
00-1:34 Episode Promo
2:06-5:24 Episode Intro
5:32-end Meat & Potatoes
Purple Patch and Episode Resources
Hiring Purple Patch Coach: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/careers-page
Fast Track Run Squad: purplepatchfitness.com/fasttrackmarathon
Check out our world-class coaching and training options:
Tri Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/squad
1:1 Coaching: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/11-coached
Run Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness/com/run-squad
Strength Squad: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/strength-1
Live & On-Demand Bike Sessions: https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/bike
Get a free needs assessment and learn more about our programs: https://purplepatchfitness.simplybook.me/v2/#book/service/19
Live in San Francisco? Explore the Purple Patch Performance Center: https://center.purplepatchfitness.com
Everything you need to know about our methodology:
https://www.purplepatchfitness.com/our-methodology
Amplify your approach to nutrition with Purple Patch + Fuelin
https://www.fuelin.com/purplepatch
Get access to our free training resources, insight-packed newsletter and more at purplepatchfitness.com
Transcription
Matt Dixon 0:00
Today's episode all about being change able. It's an important one, and if today's conversation is resonating well, this is exactly what we do every single day. Through WinCycle, we partner with leadership teams and organizations to help build human capabilities that drive sustained high performance, clarity, Capacity, adaptability, high-performing teams-everything that we're going to talk about today. It's practical work designed to help people like you perform better in the real world, not just inspired for an afternoon. If you're interested in furthering the conversation, just reach out to us. Info at purplepatchfitness.com, and my team will connect you with me directly, and we'll have a conversation and see whether we're a fit. And also, if you're listening today as an athlete, well, that's the foundation of what we've been doing at Purple Patch over the last 20 years or so. We don't just simply write training plans; we empower you to adapt, thrive, and unlock performance. All admits the demands of this ever-changing world. You can book a complimentary strategy session with one of our coaches, where no pressure, a chance for us to understand your goals, talk through where you're at today, and map out the best next steps for you. These are always really, really helpful for athletes. They always get a lot out of them. And hey, the best thing for us is if you feel empowered to go and unlock your performance. That's what we care about. If it's a part of Purple Patch, great. We can do that too.
Matt Dixon 1:32
We're going to use the same email address as ever: info@purplepatchfitness.com. All right, enjoy the show. 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 sport into life. And welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast. As ever, your host Matt Dixon, and let me ask you: Have you deliberately trained to change? What's he talking about? Well, a few weeks ago, I was in Oregon, Salem, Oregon. It's a very nice little town, by the way. There was a half Ironman there before the race. We got a group together. This group was comprised of a host of executives, and we got together, gathered for breakfast. Nothing fancy, just a handful of competitors in the race, coffee, little mixture of nerves in there, and a conversation before the big day. One of those athletes was Pasquale Romano. Now I've coached Pasquale, or Pat, as I like to call him, for many years. Today he's 61 years of age, and remarkably, he's still racing faster than he was as an equally committed 45-year-old. Pretty amazing, 15 or 16 yards further on in the journey of life, and yet he still keeps getting faster. He must just have a fantastic coach. But that's not really the principle of why I'm talking to you about Pat today.
Matt Dixon 3:23
During breakfast, he said something that has really stuck with me ever since, and I want to share it with you today. And I paraphrase here, but his quote was essentially this: Over the last 15 years, I have developed massively as an athlete, but more importantly, I've developed just as much, if not more, as a leader, that really stuck with me, because here's someone that's become faster, wiser, and more effective, not just in sport, but in work and life. That's a wonderful example as a CEO of someone who's leveraged the journey of his sport, ultimately his hobby, to deliberately build the capabilities that make him perform better everywhere. And what I wanted to do today, emerging from that story, is explore one of those capabilities, one that I might label as being perhaps the most important in the environment that we find ourselves in today. That trait is adaptability, or as we often call it inside Purple Patch and wind cycle, being change able. I genuinely believe, from observations, that this this has become one of the defining capabilities of our team, not because adaptability is new, but because we're all sharing in this incredible environment of change right now. The work conditions, life conditions that we must operate and thrive. Driving ultimately is fundamentally changing at a rate that is unprecedented.
Matt Dixon 5:07
Yes, I'm talking about AI-driven change, and so today we're going to dig into being change able and why this is such an important trait for all of us as we take on our journey of performance. It's all in the meat and potatoes. Yes, folks, the meat and potatoes AI, huge change, perhaps unprecedented, happening faster than we can imagine, adaptability, being changeable, and you might already be going. Oh no, here we go again. I've already got AI-driven fatigue, and here's this coach talking about that AI conversation once again. I get it. I understand. It's difficult to escape. Throughout the course of the last year, I've presented in multiple arenas: keynote presentations, executive workshops, leadership programs, Oxford University, the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute, private equity CEO summits, executive teams all over the world, and consistently, the conversation is centering around AI, and that's not a surprise. And it's exactly at the genesis of why I wanted to record this episode today, because when I step back from all of those conversations, understandable as it is, we are navigating this huge change of AI, and I start to look at these conversations in reflection through the lens of ultimately what I am-a high-performance coach. I started to observe that there's a missing piece of the puzzle here. There's a part of the conversation that I don't think is getting quite enough attention. See, most of the conversations have been focused around AI itself, how fast it's evolving, how is it going to actually change how we work, how much time might it save, how many jobs could it replace? These are all important conversations, but there's an area that I want to shine a light on today, and that's a focus on people-the actual people that are expected to navigate this change, the human beings that are tasked with integrating these AI tools that are responsible to lead through it to perform within this change, and here's the thing that's been really fascinating: is when I go back to the presentations, the summit, the executive workshops, etc. Yes, every single one included a huge focus on AI. It was the headline topic. Let's not sugarcoat it. But the second topic that consistently emerged, almost partnered without even realizing it, can be summarized in one word: burnout. That's the other topic. There's a truth that is observing across wildly different organizations, from small to large, and that's the simple fact that people are tired. Leaders and their teams, teams are stretched thin, leaders are overwhelmed, and I started to see a common challenge that's emerging across broader life and work, very very similar to struggling athletes.
Matt Dixon 8:54
You see, there's a thesis here. It's a headline that I could say: AI isn't creating the adaptability crisis; it's actually revealing it. For years, expertise-how good you are at doing your job-has been a huge competitive advantage, and it still matters. Make no mistake about it; we need experts. But today, I think something else matters just as much: your ability to continually learn, to adapt, to respond, to not react, and to grow. And I think that over the course of the coming years, the people that are going to thrive-not just survive, but thrive-aren't been the ones that are just better at using technology. They're going to be the people, the teams that become really, really good at adapting. Now, who am I to sit up here and say this is my point of view? You should listen. To me, well, it's because I understand something that's quite important and useful, and it's good news. That's that adaptability is not a personality trait. It's not a genetic gift. It's not something you're born with. It's actually something you train. People often ask me, "How do we survive all these teams? How can I? How can I get my team to navigate this huge change? But the better question will be, how do we become more capable because of the change? That becomes a really interesting question to try and answer. You see, pressure by itself doesn't build capability. Pressure reveals whether we have the capacity to perform. And let's buckle up here. When you stay with me on this a little bit, change is really, really hard. Whether it's positive, whether it's negative, it's really hard. It can be exciting. It can also be incredibly uncomfortable. Quite often, it's kind of both at the same time.
Matt Dixon 11:13
But this is change that we're going through now. That's got a certain murkiness about it. It doesn't have a very clear road map because we've never gone through this change before. It's not just a checklist of things that we have to navigate. It doesn't even have a finish line. It's a little bit wild west in many ways. The landscape is evolving right now. While we're standing in it, our whole landscape is evolving. That's why adaptability, being changeable, has shifted. I think, from being a nice quality to actually becoming something that is incredibly essential. It is a key capability. Now, I'm just a dumb coach, and so where's my standing on this? Well, it's born out of athletics. That's the truth of it. I know quite a bit about adaptability. I spent the last 20 years coaching it as a trait. Let's think about what elite athletes actually train in their lives. Let's just strip it all away. Let's think about an Ironman athlete, and they are in pursuit to become a champion in the world's toughest endurance sport. It lasts multiple hours in a dynamic environment. Many people assume that these athletes, as much as they are highly trained machines, they believe that they train as an athlete to execute just a perfect race. There has never been a perfect race. They don't look.
Matt Dixon 12:57
They train to get their bodies primed to perform. They build the mindset traits, but really, when you strip it all away, what they're really training for is uncertainty. In fact, we always used to say, the one thing we're certain about is uncertainty. World-class athletes know that the conditions are going to change. They know and expect the unexpected. The original plan is always going to need to adapt. The very best athletes that I've coached are actually not obsessed with controlling everything. They just focused their energies on the things they could control, and partnered with that, they became exceptionally good, world class, as it were, at responding when reality didn't match the plan, and that's a very, very different mindset. Over the last couple of years, as we've formalized all of the journeys and systems of methodologies of building world-class athletes and top business leaders at an individual level, and applying those levels to working with leadership teams and teams within organizations, I've gradually become more and more convinced that an elite endurance athlete's journey isn't just a nice analogy. It's not a metaphor. It's not a source of inspiration. It's actually the best blueprint that we have to navigate this environment we're in right now. Not because I want everyone to become an athlete. That's not the mission here. This isn't athlete conversion therapy, but it's because elite performance teaches us something universal: the people across my last two decades of coaching who consistently perform and the. Incredibly high level have built the capacity and the capability to adapt. That's the key thing, and so I ask you: Are you really changeable? Are your teams changeable? That's what I think we all need today. And so let's unpack this phrase a little bit. I know it's a very Matt Dixonism type thing.
Matt Dixon 15:24
When we're talking at Purple Patch at Wind Cycle about change able, what do we actually mean? Let's define it a little bit, because it doesn't mean oh everybody should enjoy change, everybody should really fall in love with uncertainty. It doesn't mean saying yes to everything. Being changeable means deliberately building the capability to respond when the reality doesn't match the plan. From coaching athletes to working with leaders, I think there are four capabilities that consistently funnel in to create adaptability, to helping you become changeable, and so I think this is a good time to unpack our four main capabilities. The first, clarity, incredibly important. It's one of the greatest performance advantages you'll ever have. In fact, just the other day, when we were as a team at Purple Patch working with AI to try and uplevel the tools that we're putting in the hands of our athletes, the team working on it were doing very, very good work. They were working their tails off, and they were looking to evolve the platform so that we could put something in the hands that would radically improve the coaching experience. And we had a meeting about it.
Matt Dixon 16:53
And I listened, and I looked, and I adapted, and finally I took a step back and said, "This is good work, but hang on. Are we really, really clear on what great looks like? Do we know what we're really building here? Because there's a lot of good stuff, but we need clarity on what world class looks like. That's going to create a sea change in the athlete experience. The team paused. We looked at ourselves, and we looked down at our navels and said, "Probably not. If we're going to build something great, if we're going to develop something, we need to be clear. And so we paused. We took a step back, and we're going through that process to get clear. If we're going to be highly adaptable, we need clarity. As I say, it is one of the greatest performance advantages. You don't need every answer, but we do need to know what matters most. The very best athletes that I've ever coached, and the top business leaders, don't waste energy deciding on what's important every day, they've already decided that side of it. They know their purpose, they know their priorities, and they know what doesn't change. When uncertainty increases, clarity on focus and success becomes really, really valuable. And so, ask yourself, and it's a good thing to think about what stays true even when everything around me changes.
Matt Dixon 18:30
If we can get clearer about that as an athlete, as a parent, as a leader, as a business professional, whatever the arena you're looking in, if you can create clarity of what's really important, and put your focus on there, no matter what changes around us, is going to enable you to adapt in a more positive manner. The second capability to train, and this is something that's trainable. It's not something that's fixed is your capacity. So, what do I mean here? Well, capacity is your ability to continue producing quality decisions and quality work under increasing demand. That is particularly prevalent at this time, because everybody, all of us, can probably hold hands and share in the spirit of "Hang on, my day-to-day role hasn't changed. It's still full of demands. It's still got high pressure. It's still a challenge. And now, this rapid seismic AI change is layered on top of it. There is ever incremental increasing demands, so my capacity is going to be the dependency where I can continue to think straight, make smart decisions, drive quality work as the demands continue to go up, and so yes, your capacity. Is not fixed with the Purple Patch professional athletes. We always used to talk about this. How do you drive to greater capacity? What you think is full right now, we can increase the size of the bubble. Just last week, I was talking to an executive leadership team, and I said we have agency if we approach things correctly to increase our own capacity and our team's capacity. The principle is universal. Whether we're talking about athletics, whether we're talking about broader life, whether we're talking about work, nothing has changed.
Matt Dixon 20:36
The principle is universal. You cannot continually ask yourself or the people around you to absorb more change, while quietly removing the capacity needed to adapt to the change. When we take a step back and we look through an athlete lens, this is exactly the reason that we think about sleep, about quality nutrition, about practices in hydration, about intentional recovery-it's what I failed in as an athlete. I had the work ethic. I trained my booty off swim, bike, runner strength. I did it all. Where I ignored was the essential components that fueled greater capacity, and I became maladaptive. My career ended in chronic fatigue. Now the Purple Patch pros they were successful, and they were successful because they integrated those practices to fuel capacity, and that's exactly what we're teaching with practices and habits that can fuel greater energy, greater brain function, enhanced decision making. We want to increase your capacity, not because they're life hacks, but because they increase the capacity to perform. We always say more is better. You've heard of that, I know. What it doesn't mean, though, is less is more. What it means is better is better. Great performers deliberately, with intent, boost and build capacity, because they know that's the thing that enables them to become more changeable, to become an enhancer of their adaptability.
Matt Dixon 22:26
If you want better decisions, if you want greater creativity, if you want improved performance, the ability to bounce back to setbacks, you can't do this on a bedrock of exhaustion. And so, ask yourself when you're listening today, do I actually have the capacity for what I'm asking of myself? That's the unlock that we're looking for. And so, so far, we have clarity and we have capacity. There's the third one that's very important. You best be smart. You best be purely quick. You better process well, mate, because we're talking about learning velocity. Yes, that's right. I learnt it on the stalls and the markets of East London. Learning velocity. This is huge through an athlete. Look, every athlete that I've ever coached, some of the best, the world champions, the Ironman athletes, they got a whole bunch of stuff wrong. In fact, champions have failed an unfathomable amount. It's a part of excellence. Setbacks are there. We always talk about the journey to progression of performance is never linear. It's going to involve setbacks, but there's a big difference here. It's not just about embracing our failures and saying, "Oh well, that's a part of life. It's a part of the journey. That sounds cute, but here's the key thing that fuels those failures into progression: learning really quick.
Matt Dixon 24:03
The greatest athletes that I've worked absorb, adapt, change, able really, really quickly. After two decades of coaching, I've become more convinced than ever that the fastest learner often beats the smartest planner. This is huge. In fact, it's one of the big reasons that I always, as a coach, really, really hated those very fancy spreadsheets. I'm going to build your annual training planner, and it's going to include increasing load, and then in a little bit more increasing load, we're going to go through this specific phase of training, it's like goodness me, as a busy, time-starved athlete with a wildly dynamic set of demands across all aspects of life, and the dirtiness and unpredictability of physiological changes. You're really telling me. That in 24 weeks' time I can predict what the training load should be. That's over precision. That's fake specificity. That's optimization without actually the reality of performance. Because life changes, physiology changes, the athlete's motivation and commitment level changes, and so instead of becoming attached rigidly to some prefix plan, become attached to learning, to growth, to adaptation as reality changes. Sure, have a framework, have a direction, have clarity on what we should be working on, but don't take it so make it so precise that it paralyzes the ability for adaptability and being changeable. Every single athlete needs to be committed to the mission, needs to be aligned and clear on what it is, and then they need to adapt the execution, learn, adjust, repeat. I much prefer those words as a performance coach versus the thing that people love to throw out. We're going to be really specific. It's about precise training. You're going to optimize the ROI. Goodness me! As we take a step back and we think about the environment that we find ourselves right now, with huge change occurring very quickly, AI is demanding us this of us right now.
Matt Dixon 26:34
We cannot predict the future. We are in the proverbial wild west, and I see people around us trying to build two-year plans around something that's evolving every single week. Precision isn't the answer in this scenario. In the same way as we talked about coaching an athlete, learning is the answer, and you better learn quick. The goal isn't to be right; it's to be less wrong faster. Reflection into the process. Build feedback into the process. Build adaptation into the process. That's what champion athletes do, and that's what we need to do if we're going to be successful in this environment. The last one. Well, it's my nickname. What might we talk about here AI-driven change? It's a single word: recovery. It's huge. As I talked about, recovery or a lack thereof ended my career as a professional athlete. I didn't respect it. As a coach, it became one of my biggest lessons of life. So much so that my Nick then became the recovery coach, and at first it wasn't given to me because it was pleasant. It certainly wasn't a term of endearment. It was sort of looked down as me being a hack and a quick fix merchant.
Matt Dixon 27:52
But here's the thing, and this is a shift of perspective that I think is really, really important for our athletes to adopt: the Purple Patch Pros. I said, "Look, recovery isn't reward for your hard work; it is a part of the work. And if we think about what we're navigating now, as our roles and responsibilities stay high, and we're increasing demand and expectations on top of it with this AI-driven change, you better start having the same mindset. Recovery isn't a reward; it's not something that you take as an afterthought. If you want to thrive within this environment of change and increasing demands, you better start to embrace it on your heart. With athletes, we always talked about training, and the training stress was just the thing that provided the opportunity. But the adaptations came with recovery. That's where it was, and so without recovery, the training stress became maladaptive. We started to regress. We started to fall into what we call the fog of fatigue, and in broader life right now, pressure, unbridled, chronic accumulative stress, it creates fatigue. With the recovery, it creates growth. Over 20 years, Purple Patch athletes achieved extraordinary success. World champions Ironman champions, Olympic, Parametric Olympic medals, and people often asked, "What's the secret?
Matt Dixon 29:28
What are you doing? There wasn't one secret. It wasn't actually that magical. It certainly wasn't the workouts that I was prescribing. But if I had to strip it away, to how did we actually generate so many consistent performances, long-term development, athletes that were being successful, male, female, all distances, etc. I think there were two that I can break it down. First was building a genuine team culture inside of an individual. Ironman is swim, bike, and run as fast as you can go, but we applied a team approach to it. That changed everything. That created outperformance across so many individual athletes. The second, I'll strip it away with this: what we're talking about here, as it relates to being changeable, we valued recovery just as highly as the hard work. We often said it takes courage to recover, and I still believe that. And in fact, when I think about the lessons of how we developed so many world-class pros in the sport that is the toughest in the world, it is a really tough time now in broader life and in work. We better take the same approach. It applies. It's about being capable of doing more. It's not about doing less. Whether you're leading company, you're raising a family, you're training for your next race, the principle is identical. You cannot be change able if you're permanently exhausted. Now, a special note here: if you lead people, if you happen to be a part of a team where your role and responsibility is leadership, you don't have to have every answer. Your role is to build the conditions to enable good decisions to occur without you. Teams don't become adaptable because you tell them to, or you ask them to. They become adaptable because you have created clarity, ownership, trust, learning, a culture of learning, and capacity.
Matt Dixon 31:45
Your greatest contribution as a leader is not solving every problem; it's developing people to solve problems without waiting for you. And so, yes, as a leader, just like we talked about with Prosquarili Ramono, focus on yourself, but then set the conditions for your team to do the same. Let me tell you this: the core lesson. I've never coached an athlete to eliminate uncertainty. I've coached them to perform well within the environment of uncertainty because that's what Iron Man is. That's how I've trained Pat Romano, trained for the uncertainty. And guess what? This explosion of change occurs. What does Pat Romano have? The ability to thrive inside the uncertainty, not survive it, thrive, leverage it for growth. He's trained the brain. He's trained his body for clarity, for capacity, for recovery, and of course, as we go through our favorite one, which is the learning velocity. He's a fast Learner. Whether it's sport, whether it's life, whether it's business, we can't prepare people for every scenario, but we can become capable across every scenario, and that's really what being change able means. And so let's finish it with young Patch, 61 years of old. He's not just racing faster; he's leading differently. He's thinking differently. He's responding differently.
Matt Dixon 33:31
He's deliberately taken lessons from his sporting journey and applied it to leadership and life. When I asked him about the pace of AI and everything changing around us, he wasn't fearful. He was excited, not because he knows exactly what's coming. None of us do. That's the ultimate truth about it. But because he spent years deliberately developing the capability to adapt, and that's the opportunity for all of us. Change isn't slowing down, folks. AI isn't going to go away. The demands of work-it's not just a phase. This is the norm. And so the question is whether you'll experience disruption. You will. The question is whether the challenge leaves you more capable than ever before, as with everything would change, it's an opportunity. Great performers look to leverage, but they don't simply survive the pressure. They create it to become better. What do they say? Pressure is a privilege, and so I ask you this to finish the day: Have you deliberately trained to be able to become more changeable? You can. Take care. Well, thanks very much for joining me today. My hope is that this episode gives you something to think about, not just this week, but every time the world. Ask that little bit more from you.
Matt Dixon 35:02
Now, if you're interested in applying some of these principles with intentionality, we'd love to help. A couple of vehicles to do that through. Firstly, Wind Cycle, of course. We work with Leads and teams to build capabilities that enable people to navigate change, and not just survive it, but thrive amidst it. And through Purple Patch, we spent the last 20 years helping athletes perform their very best by applying the exact same high-performance principles. We're going to share the email address for either. You can set up a complimentary strategy session where we will go through and see whether we're the right fit for you, but most importantly, ensure that you have got a road map to set yourself on a journey and your team to be successful. Just reach out to us. Info at purplepatchfitness. com. We'll set up the complimentary time that suits you. Thanks again for listening. If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, leave us a review as well. It's always helpful, and of course, the best thing that you can possibly do: share it with someone who might benefit from the conversation. Until next time, keep building the capacity to perform. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Adaptability, AI-driven change, human capabilities, high performance, leadership, clarity, capacity, learning velocity, recovery, endurance sports, Purple Patch, Ironman, executive workshops, burnout, team culture.