Win Cycle: Mental Performance Specialist Jeff Troesch on Race Anxiety, Confidence, and the Mental Game of Racing Your Best
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Welcome to the Win Cycle Podcast!
Welcome to the Win Cycle Podcast! On this episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon and Jeff Troeltsch discuss mental performance in endurance sports, focusing on perfectionism and race anxiety. Troeltsch emphasizes the importance of accepting one's current state while striving for improvement, rather than being perpetually dissatisfied. He highlights the need to manage cognitive distortions and the impact of data on athletes' mindsets. Troeltsch also stresses the significance of breathing techniques and maintaining a balanced perspective on performance. Additionally, they touch on the concept of identity, advising athletes to see themselves as individuals rather than solely defined by their sports achievements.
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Episode Timecodes:
00-1:04 Promo
1:33-3:20 Episode Intro
3:26-end Meat & Potatoes
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Transcription
Matt Dixon 00:00
Folks, today is part two of our discussion with Jeff Troeltsch. It's a special one. It's all about mental performance in endurance sports, and as you go on the journey today, you might be inspired by our conversation. You might want to learn more, and of course, you can purchase Jeff's new book, and that's going to be in the show notes. We'll add a link, but also, if you're excited to actually take your own performance to the next level and partner with Purplepatch, whether it's a part of one of our squad programs or dialing in deeper and even greater customization and personalization with a one to one specialist performance coaching relationship, feel free to reach out. You don't need to make the decision now, or even on the website. We offer complimentary coaching strategy calls. Just reach out, it's pressure free. We'll make sure that you leave with plenty of advice and a guidance, whether you choose Purple Patch or not. And, of course, if you do decide that we're a right fit for you, we'll make sure that you get into the right program. Just reach out to us, info@purplepatchfitness.com Alright, enjoy the show. I'm Matt Dixon, and welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast. The mission of Purplepatch 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 today I'm excited to welcome back Jeff Trosh.
Matt Dixon 01:41
If you missed episode one, make sure you give it a listen. It was a fantastic application of the 40 years of Jeff's expertise as a sports mental coach specialist, transferring those lessons into broader performance across life and business. It was incredibly insightful. There was amazing crossover with our win cycle program and leadership, and how we talk about things, and I think there was something there for everyone. Today, we dig into athletics. We come right into the bullseye of Jeff's expertise. If you missed last week's show, well, I want to give you a little bit of a headline news of who our guest is. He has had 40 years working with athletes in the NFL, the NBA, the LPGA, the PGA, Major League, NHL, Olympic sports, endurance sports, multiple Purple Patch podcasts, and all of the major universities across California, Stanford, Cal, UCLA, etc. He is one of the most respected mental performance specialists across the global scale. And today we're going to dig in and give you some tools. We're going to talk about performance anxiety, priming for racing, controlling the mindset when things go wrong. And let me tell you, in any sports, there's always setbacks. It's incredibly insightful, but most of all, it's actionable. And I should add, don't miss Jeff's new book. We're going to put the link in the show notes, and of course, you should grab it for you and any friends that might benefit. Alrighty, enjoy the show. It is the meat and potatoes, you is the meat and potatoes, and we're back round two. Jeff and I are locked and loaded in San Luis Obispo, Jeff and, and of course, me in Marin County, just outside of San Francisco. If you didn't listen to what will be last week's episode. Please, please, please go back and listen to it first. We highlight all of Jeff's journey, but more than that, we do a lot of mental performance coaching for obstinately business, but it certainly correlates to athletes as well. So, I think we're going to go back over some ground, but for part two, Jeff, I thought what we would do is actually shine a light on three common challenges that, for us as coaches, we often are met with athletes and struggles, and the first one, so we don't need to go into your background, your journey, because people should go, absolutely should go back. In fact, this is a coaching command, if you're listening, to go and do it, to listen to part one. We're going to just go right into it, right into the group of it, and dig in here. Okay.
Matt Dixon 04:26
The first, the first topic, and an area that we really want to shine the light on is one that I always call it the silent killer of the performance journey, and it is, I think, particularly prevalent in sports like I coached at the pro level, which is triathlon, and it's perfectionism, and there's one where there is last week we talked about the sort of separation of trust and commitment. I think that there is a huge differentiation between being all in and committed and perfectionism that can really evolve people, and I really want to dig into your perspective, because in reading one day better, your book that we talked about last week, and your, your focus on there in your work around focus, adaptability, emotional volatility. It really got at me thinking around this concept of perfectionism, the athlete that's committed, disciplined, and yet it becomes the thing ultimately that in many ways can hold them back, and I want to dig into this, because I think it's under appreciated. So, in your experience at working with athletes, and as we talked about last week, across almost every sport that you could possibly imagine at the world-class level, what does perfectionism look like? How does it express itself in practice, and why is it so damaging to athletes.
Jeff Troesch 06:00
Wow, that's a great way to frame the question, and I think it's one of those - you call it, you say, the silent killer - it's one of those things that manifests death in the athlete metaphorically in multiple ways, right? It depends on the individual and how it ultimately manifests, because that notion of never being good enough, of you know, worrying about being complacent if I don't set my standards to 100 out of 100 all the time, I mean, there's, there's, I could go on and on about the multiple ways it symptomatically evidences itself, I think for most, most athletes, they're high, if we're talking about at the elite levels, and even for folks that you know, maybe elite in their own domain, their, you know, age group, or their, their, their club, or their, or their, whatever, just, yeah, doesn't have to be world class, yeah,
Matt Dixon 06:59
yeah,
Jeff Troesch 07:00
right, yeah, it doesn't have to be, you know, an aspiring Olympian, it can be a, you know, 40 year old age group triathlon triathlete, and the challenge here is, is that the idea that it's never good enough initially sounds like, feels like a good thing, and it gets reinforced, it gets reinforced at early ages and in early developmental stages as one acquires skill, right? In the early development, in the early skill acquisition of, oh my gosh, you're getting it so fast, and you're really grinding it, and you're putting the work in, and you're whatever, so not that those things are bad, or those messages are wrong, or that those are necessarily, you know, maladaptive messages, but, but ultimately, that can, for some people, trigger that sense of, you know, more is better, it's never good enough, and, and while I, you know, I, I, in the way that I coach the athletes with whom I work, I want them, frankly, to never be satisfied completely with what they're doing, because I like, I like the athlete to be a little hungry all the time. Okay, you want a gold medal, like, you know, how can we move, you know, move beyond that into other domains of, you know, development, improvement, growth, etc. Right? So, no matter, even if you hit the mountain top, there's still an opportunity for something else, but, but the challenge with perfectionism is that there's a lack of acceptance, so for me it's like the notion that I'm constantly trying to sell is, you know, it's important that you not be satisfied, but that you accept where you are, you accept limitations, we accept sort of like the reality of being human and do being in a physical domain where we don't have control and there is a lot of uncertainty and the the for some people the idea of accepting where they are that it rolls them into a place where I don't want to be complacent I don't want to I don't want to be less than my full potential, and things along those lines, then start to the messages that they're, that they're responding to the narrative that they're creating in their own head, then drives them into a perfectionistic sort of mentality, and and then yes, it becomes very challenging for coaches to coach, it becomes very challenging for athletes to fully perform and or almost ever enjoy what they're doing or feel some level of like pat on the on the back for what I've done, it becomes, you know, manifests often in a lot of perseveration about what they haven't done and what they need to do, and the gap between where they are and where they want to go into such an extent that there's almost never, you know, a moment of acknowledgement of how far I've come, and then the growth that I've made, and the good things that I did today. It's like, well, why would I do that? I'm gonna pat myself on the back for what I'm supposed to do. Yeah, like, well, who does? You know, that's sort of the feedback I hear from, from perfectionistic type athletes.
Matt Dixon 09:54
It got me thinking on self-awareness a little bit, or self no. Self diagnosis, I don't mean that, but there's a, there's a lot of black and white thinking on this, pass-fail thinking in many ways. I've coached many athletes like it, and would you say one of the, one of the ways that this is manifest or expresses itself is when you have a good day, when you have a win, it is euphoria. You've, you've summited Everest at the same time. When there's one small setback, it's catastrophe, and everything is bad. So, is this emotional volatility? Is that one of the signals to say, 'Hang on, this yeah, yeah.
Jeff Troesch 10:34
For sure, for sure. I would say that, you know, that 100 or zero sort of sort of thing. For sure, I would say there are many perfectionists who don't even acknowledge the 100, and they, and they only emotionalize the zero, and again, sort of, sort of, the 100 becomes like, well, that was, I was supposed to do, I mean, literally, they're, you know, I'm what we all look at life through our own filters and our own frames, and I'm, I'm watching, you know, the Olympic Games, or I'm watching a World Cup, or I'm watching whatever, and you know you're you can see the perfectionist who you know they'll win a they'll win a silver medal or even a gold medal, and you'll just see the response is more more relief than it is euphoria and and so it but if they were to not medal or they were to they would have what they would consider to be disappointing, you'd see a lot of emotional, you'd see an emotional response that is, that is profound. So, yeah, to your point, what we're, what we're really talking about is helping the athlete identify cognitive distortions, like, like looking at things through a lens that is just, that is just a filter that is clogged, yeah, and, and, and so not really framing things in a way that is productive or helpful, and, and for some perfectionists, where I was going a moment ago, is that for some perfection, I don't like the label, but we'll use it here, for lack of a better way to, you know, more diplomatic way to say it, but for people who have perfectionistic tendencies, you know, it's, it's there is a concern that I hear, I hear this a lot from athletes with perfectionism. I hear a lot like, but if I back off from that, I'm going to get complacent.
Matt Dixon 12:09
Yeah,
Jeff Troesch 12:10
I'm worried. Yeah, I'm going to lose my edge. I'm not going to push myself enough. I'm not going to be able to, like, my superpower is being willing to push through to the, to the end. And so I try to help make a distinction between perseverance and resilience. There's a difference between that and, you know, the basically the opportunity cost of going for that, that that nth percent. Sometimes that nth percent is necessary and beneficial, and the time and energy expended to get that last bit is actually a benefit. Sometimes it's an energy burn, you know, so, so one of the things I'm saying to athletes who are perfectionists, which many of them hate initially, is, as I'll say, you know, what we're really working towards is averaging an A, like, if you want to grade yourself, average an A, yes, not everything has to be an A plus, right, but it's for some people, like they get nine, they metaphorically get 98% on the test, and they're they perseverate about the 2% that they didn't get, and that's that's what consumes them, so that's the cognitive distortion piece, so for my work in working with athletes in this domain is to help them reframe those things, for to help them identify that sort of the automatic thoughts that trigger distress for them, for them to sort of fact check and challenge the beliefs that they're, that are undermining what they're saying to themselves and how they're reacting to these things, so those become sort of the some of the tools in the toolbox that were that were moving towards helping them reframe things in a way that they they're they're managing their their their life in a more productive fashion
Matt Dixon 13:39
and I'm not sure if it's even possible on a show like this, is it possible to give one tool to try, as it were, for if this is a challenge or one perspective, one way to challenge oneself to improve.
Jeff Troesch 13:54
Yeah, I think the risk of being overly redundant with part one. My number one answer, my number one answer is for people to challenge what they're thinking, as whether it's factual or if it's an opinion.
Matt Dixon 14:07
Yes,
Jeff Troesch 14:07
and, and whether it's helpful or not helpful. And oftentimes what people are saying to themselves upon reflection is an opinion that they're there, that's a narrative that they've created in their mind, and one of the things we know is that we all tell ourselves stories all day long about the world, some of which are actually true, but most of them are not. But we operate under, we operate under the guise that what we're telling ourselves is factually accurate and is absolutely true. And a lot of people who, who run perfectionistically in their, in their internal environment, they're constantly dialoguing, they're constantly telling themselves and supporting a narrative that is just factually inaccurate. So, so specifically, what you know, what might that mean? Like, you know, if I, if I don't hit these numbers today, I've got no chance for in the race two weeks from now, factually inaccurate. Yeah, if I. Up, if I don't, if I don't hit this on the meter today, you know, I got no chance. It's like, well, what do you, what are we talking about, you know? So it's that, it's that sort of constant, constant vigilance around, is this good enough, is this enough, is this gonna.. there's a dealing with uncertainty of the future that that clouds the internal environment, rather than like, okay, here's information. Here's what happened in today's training session, and coming from a place of curiosity, information gathering. What do I.. this is how I would want them to be thinking. Instead, it becomes sort of a life or death. It illuminates whether or not I have a chance or not in something that's happening three weeks from now, again, completely, completely distorted, but it's what they're selling themselves, and trying to fall asleep at night, they're ruminating and perseverating about these things. So, is it factual? Is it isn't an opinion? Is what you're thinking right now helpful? You know, are you present, or are you time traveling in your mind into something that's a month from now, or two weeks from now, or tomorrow morning, and it's, and it's the night before an event, like all those, like when you're time traveling, you know, so strategies, and getting, getting more present, being more neutral, you know, being more task-oriented in the moment, those are the sorts of strategies that we would, we would be employing, among many.
Matt Dixon 16:17
One last piece on the on the perfectionism, which I've always noticed there's been over over our careers in parallel for me in the last 20 plus years of being in endurance sports, the absolute explosion of metrics and data, and I quite often see this amplifying some of these traits, and and I should preface this question with the vast majority of athletes that I coach, and we coach, do leverage, and we support, by the way, power meters, GPS, garments, heart rate, etc. There's the all this information can be helpful, but have you seen that ways in which this can be equally harmful or amplify these traits?
Jeff Troesch 17:00
Yeah, the way that you frame that is exactly on point. This information can be helpful, yeah. And, and when it is helpful, it's amazingly useful, helpful, it guides us towards it, motivates us, it inspires us, it informs us those things for those reasons. I'm a big data guy, personally, and so you know I love that stuff. Right now, as soon as I use it as a way to judge, as soon as soon as I use it as a way to, you know, future trip, as soon as I use it as a, as an imperative, as a have to sort of a thing, as opposed to a desired thing, like what is your desired number on this for this training session, and your intention is that, and you would like to do that, but then if one quote unquote falls short of that, how do you deal with that sort of a sort of a moment, and what are we leveraging in those moments? So, yeah, I think the data, the more data centric we are, the more opportunity for quality information, and the more exposure to things that might be misused in a way that is non-productive, and I think harmful is a little strong, but, but close to harmful. Yeah,
Matt Dixon 18:14
it's great. But, by the way, I just want to shine a light on the listeners of something that you've said a couple of times now, which is, I think, an incredibly powerful tool in itself. I'm not sure I don't want to highlight as a tool, but use you. What do you say? Future, what do you say? What was the time traveling in your mind? Yeah, time traveling with the mind, like that concept. Like, okay, am I time trialing with the mind? Because quite often, like, these things are about awareness of what, as well, because our, you know, as you said, as you sort of said in part one, you talked about the heart pumping blood and the lungs pumping air, and the brain pumping thoughts were not always in control, it's just emerging, so that sort of time travel of the mind concept is a really useful, it's a great t-shirt, by the way, you know, because it's like, hang on, that's like, that's in the future. Let's come here. So I just wanted to highlight that from me being the coach, of like that is a great simple thing that that you can draw on to say, hang on, I'm catching myself here. And is it true? Is it factual? And is it helpful? And it
Jeff Troesch 19:20
can be clearly there are times when, if we are intentional with our time travel in our mind to the future, it can be productive if we're using that to plan, if we're using that to, if we're using that to prepare, right. Okay, I've got this training set, I've got this competition in three weeks, that's 21 days from now. Here's where I'd like to land three days or three weeks from now, what now? Okay, now reel it in today. You know what? Can I do today?
Matt Dixon 19:47
Yeah,
Jeff Troesch 19:48
what can I do today that gives me, you know, the one day better. How do I, how do I advance towards what I want three weeks from now? Then that can clarify and inspire today, but most people inadvertent. Certainly, time travel into the future with anxiety, as opposed to with a clear intention for it to be useful.
Matt Dixon 20:06
Yeah,
Jeff Troesch 20:06
and so that's that's where we want to, yeah, as you said, we want to be checking in, like, okay, is that, is that a helpful thing right now? Am I am I thinking thoughts that are productive? Is this actually a fact? Am I starting to stress my sip out with the way that I'm thinking?
Matt Dixon 20:20
Ladies and gentlemen, we're in the presence of greatness. He managed to weave in a plug for the book, there it was amazing detour. I couldn't have done it better myself. We can't have this conversation without talking about race anxiety and performance under pressure. We've got to dig into it, and you know, we talked in part one, right at the end. I said about confidence and trust emerging from evidence, etc. I'd love your distilling your race anxiety is something that, and his headline news for everyone, every single athlete feels, from first timers to season competitors, weeks leading up, day itself is, I guess, I'll kick it off with a softball one. Is race anxiety, as it were, something to try and eliminate from our brain, push it away, or is there a role for it? There's a, there's a softball question for it.
Jeff Troesch 21:18
Yeah, that's a softball one. That's, that's almost too easy, but I'll do it anyway. We'll walk before we run. It's essential, frankly. I mean, partly one of the big pieces around what you're calling race anxiety. One of the big pieces is to make a differentiation between the physiological activation of preparing oneself for a consequential, uncertain event,
Matt Dixon 21:48
yes,
Jeff Troesch 21:49
which is, which is the physiological, you're going to get adrenaline dump, you're going to get, you know, your body is going to be charged and activated, I mean, that's how you perform at your best,
Matt Dixon 21:58
yeah,
Jeff Troesch 21:58
up to a point at which then we might go beyond that, and now it becomes something that inhibits performance rather than enhances it. So, it's really something that we want to manage and moderate to the way in the way that it ultimately is useful to us rather than harmful to us. So, and I make a distinction between nerves and anxiety. I see nerves as the sort of the physiological condition of challenge and adrenalized and anxiety, I see more as something that's a cognitive, that's cognitively driven, that we're thinking in ways that are non-productive, which is driving the physiological processes that feel like nerves, but it's actually anxiety, so you know, so yes, it's going to be there. I was talking with a gal a year ago, or so, and I.. it's one of those lol moments where she, she won an Olympic gold medal, not in the last Olympics, but the one prior, and she was saying that she was reading something that a sports psychologist had written that basically said that you should not have nerves, and that you should be fearless in every competition, and she, and she said to me, Do you think this guy's ever really talked to an athlete before? It sure doesn't sound like it, right? Because I don't know an athlete, I mean, it's the notion of fearlessness too fits in here, like I don't know, I've never met an athlete that's completely fearless. One person that I think was very close to that is somebody who had a really damaged amygdala, and so the threat center, and their, the threat center in their brain under brain scan really did not show a lot of threat potential and things. So that person, that was when I had a contract with Red Bull, and dealing with people who are doing some really extreme things, but in 40 years, 10s of 1000s of athletes - every athlete I've ever worked with has some level of fear, some level of doubt, some level of anxiety, some level of nerves, and again, the question is to moderate them to the point where we can still be effective and compete. One of the things that I'm constantly driving people's awareness to is like, I'll ask the question, you know, have you ever felt pre-race anxiety? Have you ever felt pre-race jitters, or the night before morning of starting line? Have you ever felt that and perform well? And I don't think I've ever met a quality athlete who has said no to everyone says yeah. And so, so, like, okay, so part of this is an acknowledgement and a recognition that it's not a necessary thing for you to perform well to feel that stuff at that level, but it also isn't necessarily a performance inhibitor. It really comes down to, like, how are you interpreting it in real time, back to what are you saying to yourself, is it helpful, right? And if, oh my god, How can I.. how can I possibly perform when I'm feeling like this, and people are getting stressed about being stressed, and now that now they're adding the layer of anxiety on top of anxiety, right? So one one gal who I think.. I think you know, in fact, I know that you know who performed very nicely. For a number of years in world-class triathlons, where our little night before joke was that she would call me the night before the performance, and she would say, "I'm scared as shit about tomorrow, and my response always was, "Awesome,
Matt Dixon 25:15
yep,
Jeff Troesch 25:16
that's exactly how you perform well. Sorry that you're uncomfortable, sorry that you feel bad, right? Sorry that you know all that stuff's going on, but you know, I think a lot of athletes are driving too much attention to being comfortable getting onto the starting line, and my preference is that they drive themselves towards being competent on the starting line, and competency is not necessarily inhibited by feeling that stuff that you're feeling, so you're gonna be uncomfortable, you know. And if you're frankly, if you're not uncomfortable, I'd actually be a little more worried if you're in there so flatlined or so zen moment, like some people can can accomplish that and be very successful. Good, good on them, but for most people, there's that little bit of stuff that's going on, we just don't, we just don't want to misinterpret it. Yeah, and interpret it in a way that gets in, gets in our way.
Matt Dixon 26:08
So, with them, with an athlete to wrap it up on the race anxiety side, someone that you know, proverbly is doing everything right in training, but really struggles with performance under pressure, and it goes well beyond nerves, it is debilitating anxiety. Sure, have you got a strategy or two that managing it in maybe one for the weeks going in, and maybe one for race morning, something that they could maybe put into action.
Jeff Troesch 26:37
Yeah, a lot of it again has to do with thought, thought changing, and I'll try to make it more concrete than that. Here, I guess I want to speak to in the weeks prior, and morning of, or walking the star line, when we're talking about conf, we're talking about confidence, is one of the one of the terms that we're plugged in here, like, how do we, how do we help athletes get high confidence, and certainly it's, you know, driven through their, their, their good work, and their, their evidence gathered from either their training, or preparation, or previous competitions. But I also want athletes to appreciate that confidence is only your thought.
Matt Dixon 27:13
Yes,
Jeff Troesch 27:13
like this thing, this thing that we call confidence, like it doesn't really exist in the world, right?
Matt Dixon 27:17
Yeah,
Jeff Troesch 27:18
it's, it's how I'm choosing in a moment to think like, what am I giving power and attention to in a moment, and what's guiding how I'm feeling and thinking right now. It's, it's, it's a choice about what I'm giving power and attention to. Is it just your thought? So I'm trying to constantly guide athletes in the weeks leading up to, and certainly the day before morning of, to for them to be intentional with reminding themselves of what is factually like, I'm about facts, I'm about neutral thinking, I'm about objectivity, on and on and on. I say the same thing, but in different contexts, right? It's like, what are the facts about the work that you've put in? What are the facts about the traits you possess as an athlete and as a human ready to go do something that's really hard. What are the facts about the evidence gathered about about all the stuff that you've done and accumulated to this point? Those are the traits that you possess that you bring to the start line. Now, how you think about those traits is your confidence, right? And so, if you're an 85 out of 100 100 being the absolute world best, if you're 85 out of 100 from a skill set perspective, you are 85 out of 100 Nobody can take that away from you in this moment, but if you think of yourself as maybe I'm only a 75 or maybe I'm only a 70, we create hesitation and tentativeness and self doubt. We start performing like a 75 not because we're incapable of doing more, but because we've talked ourselves into a situation where we're creating self doubt because we're thinking about the state that we're in, not feeling very good, as opposed to the traits we possess, which is permanent and foundational. So, how can you use this and leverage this if you're a person who has competitive anxiety? You know, race journals are massively important, you know, keeping a diary or a log training log, making sure that you're anchoring and banking the things that you're doing well, and the gains that you've made, and accessing that in the days leading up to it, being really purposeful and intentional about flooding yourself with evidence that you're pretty darn good, and you're fully capable of, as long as what you're setting yourself out to do from a goal perspective is reasonable and is doable and relevant, then if we, if we've matched our success criteria well with what we know we're capable of being, then we likely bring ourselves into a space of being, of being challenged rather than, you know, finding challenge in that situation rather than fear in that situation. So a big piece of it for me is like recognizing confidence is your choice to think in a particular way, leverage your traits in your mind as opposed to the state that you're in, which is on a yo-yo for all of us, but the traits are more of a permanent condition. The other thing that I'll say is a very obvious and simple. Is utilization of breath, it's amazing to me how few athletes use breath properly, helpfully, in, you know, in the weeks leading up to, in the night before, to get to sleep, in the morning of, in the, you know, on the start line, in, in the, in the competition itself, how few people use what is the most, you know, available tangible thing to do, which is to use breath in a way that that can help moderate the physiological and and cognitive distress that one might undertake. So a big piece for me is to make sure that people have very, very strong breathing strategies, and again, that's across the domain. Everybody's got their own way of doing it that works for them, but working on that is something that I think is also extremely important.
Matt Dixon 30:48
It's fantastic, you know, with the Purple Patch Pro Squad. One of our taglines, which, which you might think is absolutely silly, by the way, but we had a thing that that really was galvanizing for them, which was freedom to fail, and that sounds really defeating, but what that was, which it came to be, which is we can do everything in our power to get ready for this thing to get our trained potential as close as we can to the race demands, and the freedom to fail was now we go and put it into action on the day, and there's a whole bunch of stuff that we're not under control, that are not under our control, what competitors doing, etc. But if we do everything under our control to our best of our ability, and we make bold decisions to the best of our ability, we'll learn, and we'll see what happens. And it was really galvanizing as a group, it became kind of our thing, freedom to fail, converted into a positive,
Jeff Troesch 31:46
yeah. No, I don't see it as a silly thing at all. It's exactly what I sell in different words, but it's the concept is exactly the same. You know, my way of saying I think exactly what you're saying is this: back to the acceptance piece, like we want to accept that failure is an option, because you know, I want to, I want to, I want to live in the real world, right? I mean, it is true that you could DNF, it is true that, you know, shit might happen, you might have a, you know, whatever bad day at the office, whatever it might be, that's reality. And so, my and my way of driving that notion is like your job is to set yourself up for the greatest likelihood for success, and you, it's about increasing your odds, no matter all that we all that we do guarantees nothing.
Matt Dixon 32:30
Yes,
Jeff Troesch 32:30
other than, other than a good chance, which, by the way,
Matt Dixon 32:33
is the beauty of sport, the jeopardy of that's it, that's it,
Jeff Troesch 32:37
exactly.
Matt Dixon 32:39
And, and you know I'll say, in addition, one final thing I'll say as well. What that enabled us as a, as an athlete group and coach, was that our assessment of performances became more factual and objective, because I had athletes that would win an Iron Man, and we could actually say that wasn't a great performance, they almost won despite themselves. They didn't execute everything under control, and it just so happened that either a set of circumstances or their competition had some form of events, and they won. And on the flip side, they might have finished sixth and navigated adversity, but had an incredible personal performance where they did, despite what happened around them, they did a great sort of, they controlled everything that the control, and at the end of it, it was huge growth, and it was a catalyst, and there was this acceptance to say, hey, that didn't work, so it's sort of like the two big concepts we talked about today, with perfectionism and race anxiety, are undeniably correlated, so that this stuff that we're talking about really, really does open it up for athletes.
Jeff Troesch 33:46
Yeah, yeah, I love all that. And yeah, you're what you're talking about is identified in clear success criteria that are about things that we largely control, and it's about the inputs that we put into our moments rather than the outputs of what flows out of them, and so you know, am I being intentional with what I'm giving attention to? Am I being intentional with executing my race strategy? Am I intentional with my breathing? Am I intentional with am I doing those things that I have control over? I get to the end of the race, what does that do that manifest a podium or not a podium, or whatever. Obviously, we know what's preferred and what's not preferred, but at the end of the day, if I've done what, what I believe is all that I can, given the inputs and the success criteria that I've created for myself, that's that's a successful race, and whether I've podium or not, podium first or last, there is, there's an opportunity to learn something at everything that we're doing, so again, back to the one day better concept, it's like everything can, everything we do is an opportunity for us to one day better. Doesn't mean you're getting faster every day. What, what it means, what it means is you're getting more experienced, and you have the, you have the opportunity to be, to have more wisdom every day, based on extracting from today's lesson how we apply it in the future, so. Yeah, and that becomes more, you know, again input related, and with the acceptance, like, you know, failure is an option, not preferred, but it's an option.
Matt Dixon 35:07
Yeah, I wondered how to ask this last question. I'm gonna, so, and I'm deciding to make it actually very personal, and give you this, because I want to talk about identity, just for one minute at the end, and so I talk about, I'm going to talk about my son Baxter, who just turned 14, but he's, he really loves swimming, he's a really, and he's pretty gifted, you know, he's doing well, but in his committed to swim, and it's great, but one of the things I, I always try and enforce as a dad, is that Baxter, you are not a swimmer, you are Baxter who swims, and in the same way that if he ends up shifting and deciding to take up rowing or flag football or guitar, or whatever it is, you're not a guitar player, you're actually Baxter, and that's that's really important for me as a dad, and, and always, what you know, that that was definitely born out of my work with professional athletes. I just love your quick two minute summary on identity and identity statements, particularly as it sort of correlates in many ways, as you just sort of started to highlight through the book, one day better.
Jeff Troesch 36:23
Yeah, yeah, I think first of all, for 14 year olds, we're, we are identifying ourselves with things that we do typically do well, and the things that we're getting reinforcement for from others, so you know, they're probably not a lot of people in his world, maybe aside from his small domain at home, that are you know, loving him up for being Baxter, but he's probably getting a lot of attention for how fast he can swim, or how strong he is, or, you know, and so then the conversations around the home become around these things, and the conversations with friends began, and so culturally our identity starts to become intertwined, independent of what we, as you know, good parenting dads do to try to dissuade our kids from interlinking those things. Really, really difficult to do, and, and it does. It's not just for a 14 year old. If we're talking about age group triathlete, and we don't have to talk about the ultimate elite professionals, we can talk about, you know, just every, you know, the weekend warriors who are out there getting it done, it is very challenging to mitigate one's basically putting one's worth into performance, and particularly, frankly, you know, as you.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
mental performance, endurance sports, perfectionism, race anxiety, cognitive distortions, emotional volatility, self-awareness, confidence, breathing strategies, data metrics, time traveling, identity, athletic potential, performance under pressure, adaptability