um yeah I mean Campbell uh as he does teed this up beautifully i think um you know if if you were in my cohort you've heard me say this before but um I I do think that oftent times like sport is the best metaphor for life and you don't have to know anything about sport to just understand that like performance as a human being starts when you wake up in the morning um and so I'm going to use the word athlete and performance um and I'm also going to try and be clear about how like I'm not just talking about athletes and athletic performance but throughout this class today I would love you guys to just like always remember that when I'm when I'm using the word athlete this also goes for everyone the principles we're going to talk about today the ideology we're going to talk about today it's not just for athletes um it's it's for everyone um applicable and for those of you who don't know me or my story just very quickly um I was a tennis player in college so I was a a division one college athlete um and my career was pretty short because you know I had a little little menty bee my sophomore year as female athletes do and um you know at that time in my life I was 16 17 it was it was a really big deal it was like I actually felt like my life was over um because this sport was the only thing that I hadn't done for 17 years so that sort of catapulted me into coaching um and I realized that you know the same sort of identity price uh identity crisis pressure management um you know anxiety levels that I felt as an athlete i could see with my clients who would come in um straight from the office my clients who would come in you know who just had their third kid right like I could see all of these parallels between what happened to me in college as like an athlete and everybody else from across all realms of life so I'm going to tap into this today um this idea that you know when we do talk about performance as it relates to managing anxiety through an athletic lens we will talk about a lot of themes that we've learned throughout the curriculum and I'm just going to sort of package them and present them to you in a slightly different way and I find that often times when we talk about things over and over again but maybe as Campbell said you see it in sort of like a different world or a different light um it really does help to to make sense so with that being said um the goals of of this master class today is um to really like use these sports psych theories to introduce you know this new lens probably new for a lot of us just quick show of hands are any of us familiar with athletics sport world performance or even just like it okay cool that's actually more than I thought because I you know I've had some people who are like "Coach Casey I literally do I don't do sport i don't do sport." And I'm like "It's okay this is still super relatable." Um so I'm glad that we are somewhat familiar with it um like I said like human performance starts with just getting out of bed in the morning so whether we're talking about professional athletes or you getting out of bed your clients getting out of bed that's where performance starts and this is where I want to lock in today drawing parallels between athletic performance human performance um so today we're going to talk a lot about like the biggest thing that I have seen in training elite level athletes as well as the mom of three kids is managing energy like at the root cause of of a lot of people's issues your clients your classes yourself it's it's an energy management um equation essentially and I think that especially in a postcoid world like we're in a little bit of an energy crisis and at the root cause of a lot of people's struggle and and suffering is this lack of awareness of how to like take control put themselves back in the in the driver's seat and and simply manage their energy and what's really beautiful about this course is that we are literally giving people like tangible tools in order to do so so again whether you're working with um you know yourself your clientele your athletes like this is sort of across the board what I see as the main theme and the root cause of a lot of struggle is energy management so when we look at energy management we think okay well what is like depleting or regenerating of energy it usually starts with our emotions right like in order for athletes and for people to perform well they need to learn how to manage their physiological and psychological energy levels and athletes and people who deplete energy like through worry anger frustration anxiety just take a moment to embody all of those emotions that's depleting right so our emotions are sort of like the control and the catalyst for where our energy goes anxiety like as an experience um we all know very well across the board again this is what you know we're going to be dealing with um and I'm going to get a little bit more detailed about uh anxiety as it relates to arousal levels um hi Eric let me just let a few more people in here Eric multitasking Okay so um so energy okay energy like is at the root cause it's like how are we managing our energy where are we depleting our energy in what like ways do we have an opportunity in our life to um replenish our energy and as a facilitator and as a coach that is sort of like pulling yourself back and seeing the huge picture of who you're working with again that is sort of the driver and the direction um that I encourage people uh to run with so emotions as we know right are these like temporary feeling states and they happen in response to events that have both body and mind components physiological and psychological components right so feeling states that happened in response to events and we know this by moving through the modules of emotions and nervous system we know that your body responds to your environment when I'm working with athletes it's about training the athlete to interpret their emotions in a specific way that's going to be advantageous to their performance when I'm working with clients who are not athletes it's about providing the tools for that client to interpret their emotions in a specific way that will be advantageous to their performance okay we know that our body and our breath responds first to our environment so when we can provide these tools to interpret and reinterpret these responses positively we start to manage our emotions better when we start to manage our emotions better we start to manage our energy better okay so you can kind of see like hopefully where I'm just moving 360 with some of these concepts in terms of energy emotions and performance what I really want to delve into today because we touch on it a little bit throughout this course actually we touch on it a lot throughout this course but I think it's worth delving into um deeply is that your nervous system right our nervous system our response to our environment it's not black and white so I think that we live in like this culture this modern culture that loves this like quick fit idea of a nervous system disregulated regulated good bad right what can fit in like an Instagram post about your nervous system and like make sense to you know the average person's ears and while this is okay because at least it's bringing some light in exposure to like the health and wellness world about nervous system I do think that oversimplifying it like this can actually become a little bit detrimental and counterproductive when somebody is trying to build a more agile nervous system right so when we talk about nervous system athletes or normal people high performers on the field high performers as soon as you get out of bed in the morning when we talk about nervous system we're talking about levels of arousal right your arousal levels of arousal in your body this is your stress response we're going to get into stress stress is like a different thing but I want to talk about arousal first arousal is this blend of your physiological and your psychological responses to your environment right we we we know this we've learned this but I'm just repeating it so that we can like lay a little bit of context here in sport this is referring to an athletes levels of motivation okay so levels of arousal when it comes to an athlete can be like super psyched up and this usually is tagged with positive emotions ready to go ready to get on the field and compete i feel prepared i feel confident or this can be sort of on the other end of that spectrum or continuum as flat unmotivated bored even right not paying attention and I've worked with a lot of athletes and in the normal world we would call this burnout right so displaying one side of the continuum versus the other side it's a continuum you can be anywhere in the middle of this it's not one or the other right and I think again like what our world has done is it's just been like you're this or you're this right and that fits in an Instagram post but there is so much complexity and nuance to this continuum depending on who you're talking to their background their experience the way they navigate stress so continuum right um if you look at do we remember poly bagel theory at all we can go over it really quickly right so how I think of like levels of arousal when it comes to an athlete being super motivated or super flat I I draw parallels with polyagal theory here and this is essentially that three ladder um hierarchy where that vententral veagal is like you're feeling good um Porgis you know talks about this in terms of social engagement so the top of the ladder like your nervous system you're feeling good you're engaging with other people like you feel peaceful you feel curious we all know how that feels in life when we're sort of at that stage when we're like yeah I could be around people like I feel pretty good right so vententral veagal is the top sympathetic activation that's kind of that like middle rung on the ladder that's our fight or flight so that's that defensive state in which your body is ready to like you know fight a tie tiger um and that's going to display itself within your physiology that higher heart rate that like choppy breathing bottom of the rung is dorsal veagal so this is that flatness right this is that burnout this is when your nervous system shuts down or freezes it I I picture like a turtle going into its shell so when I think of levels of arousal with my athletes from super psyched to like bored and burned out I tend to look at this also through uh poly bagel theory does anybody have any questions so far i'm going to pause like once or twice here as I get deeper and deeper into this um just to make sure that we're on the same page okay cool okay so arousal is not good or bad in and of itself it's simply a measurement of the activation in our body your heart rate like your blood pressure your hormonal response right when it becomes quote unquote bad is when we tap into this subcategory of anxiety so a subcategory of arousal that is negatively perceived by the athlete or by the person in this emotional state is anxiety so I have an athlete who comes in and they're just completely overwhelmed with life they've got a lot going on let's say they're a student athlete they super behind on homework they've got stuff going on at home um they have a history of um you know not believing in themselves and they have a game this weekend right all of these sort of like contextual um factors are going to probably have this athlete perceive uh their levels of arousal as anxiety same thing when you have somebody coming in to work with you right like you can have somebody coming in um who you know is just let's take the mom the mom of three she's tired she hasn't slept um her husband's not around um she's you know wants to go back to work right all of these factors are going to like lead this woman to perceive her levels of arousal as as anxiety so this is I I use quotes when I say bad right because it's it's when the person perceives what's going on in their body as worry nervousness fear okay when we talk about athletes in the athletic realm we have state anxiety and we have trait anxiety and I encourage you to look at these two things which I'll explain in a moment and think about like the clients that you've worked with maybe think about yourself in terms of okay like have I experienced somebody with state anxiety have I experienced somebody with trait anxiety and you have state anxiety is circumstantial okay so when you have a big test at school you might be feeling nervous in the moment your heart's beating fast you might worry about doing well if I don't do well you know my parents are not going to love me anymore but after the test is over you feel okay again so state anxiety is temporary it's a temporary elevation of arousal levels in your body it causes these feelings of nervousness and worry um but it goes away okay so if we reflect on that I think all of us on this call are like "Yeah I I can relate to that i can remember a moment in which I've experienced state anxiety it was this morning." Trait anxiety okay kind of builds off of this think of this as a more chronic situation so this person has embodied this feeling of anxiety they've embodied these emotions over time and so now it's sort of just their personality let's take that same person right let's take that same kid that kid who feels nervous a lot and even when there's no test or anything scary happening they might worry about little things all the time so that's that's trade anxiety it's it's this like chronic buildup over time that's just sort of seeped into their um perception of self okay and you're going to have clients who are coming in who have one or both are dealing with one or both like on a pretty regular basis and so I think it's really really helpful to sort of like differentiate the two um and understand how they both fit in somebody's life because we know I'm a visual person I like to think of state anxiety as like this rainstorm right comes and it goes and you know somebody's moody and then they kind of like work through it trade anxiety is just like a cloudy sky that sticks around okay so it's temporary and it's chronic so we've talked about arousal we've talked about anxiety and now when we talk about stress in sport stress is defined by this imbalance of the demand so that could be physical or mental or both right the match the game the next day the fitness test so an imbalance between the demand and your response capability in a generally high pressure situation where there's consequences okay so in college I had fitness tests and oh boy the anxiety that I would feel about this stressful situation because the tests were hard it was a running test the physical and mental demand was hard and my response capability as an athlete who had forever struggled with imposttor syndrome i approached this situation with a lot of anxiety a lot of worry a lot of concern right stress as we know it can be good it can also be bad but no matter what it generates arousal if stress is good it generates arousal you're getting ready to speak to a big audience you're like but you're pumped up about it you feel excited about it right you're kind of getting jittery but your mind is like let's go i got this that's you stress and that's probably going to be like a positive level of arousal we also have stress that doesn't work for us it's called distress and that's when our perception of the arousal starts to turn into anxiety i have a fitness test tomorrow i'm slow i don't belong at this program i've I'm not good enough right so breaking it down between like the environment the body's response and then your perception of your body's response and of the environment yeah does this make sense okay so the reason why I started with all of this today to kind of just like lay the canvas is because in sports psychology there are a lot of really interesting theories about arousal and why certain levels of arousal work for some athletes and why they don't work for other athletes and we're going to talk about three of these today and I do think that they are directly translatable in everybody's life okay athlete or not so three theories we're going to talk about today we're going to talk about drive theory we're going to talk about the inverted U theory and we're going to talk about reversal theory theory in science is like a wellested tested over and over again explanation for why something happens in nature the way it does okay so theories are like a couple levels up from a guess because there have been a lot of experiments done and a lot of evidence collected to support why things happen the way they do so the question that we're looking at here the why is why does arousal affect one athlete beneficially and another athlete not so much right so these are the theories that are going to sort of like touch on that question okay the first one is drive theory so this one's really interesting all right and again as I move through these I want you to think about people in your life clients who you work with who may kind of like fall under some of these categories or or maybe it might be helpful to think about this when working with them drive theory when researchers first started examining like this relationship between arousal and performance it was thought that it follows this very direct linear progression so in other words the more hyped up you are the better you perform okay but this is dependent on skill level so this theory thinks that the more pumped up you are higher the heart rate jitteriness like can't stop kind of moving before a game the better you will do depending on your skill level in my brain I'm thinking of this as like an optimal sympathetic state all right and and we know that that exists so we know that sympathetic state is not bad even though with the majority of people we're trying to sort of like downregulate we know that the sympathetic state of our nervous system is the oldest state is the oldest sort of like one of the oldest systems in our body that's just kept us alive until now so that thing's important right and it can work for us in a very optimal way so this theory is basically stating that depending on your skill level and I'll talk about that in a moment the higher your anxiety levels the better you're going to do now the important thing here I think when you're thinking about people that you're working with is skill level right because it's basically saying that if you're better at something you will perform better at these higher states of arousal but if you're not if you have an athlete for the first time like you know maybe they're a year into their sport more arousal is not good okay so this theory is dependent on skill level as a coach as a facilitator as a therapist when you have somebody coming in who is completely incapable of managing their emotions they've never done it before their skill level is very low you want to start with the simplest steps for them you want to start with coherence breathing no let's let's go even simpler you want to start with the mechanics of their breathing right i think this is again super super valuable when thinking about teaching people how to breathe because if I was a coach working with a player let's say a tennis player who'd only been playing for a year and they're getting ready uh to play their first match okay and they've got like they still have to think about how to hit the ball they have to think about how to move their feet what position to be in now over time all of that becomes automatic and you can work on something else with that athlete but in the very beginning as a coach as a facilitator as a therapist you want to keep it really really simple with people the simple how can you simplify right and that's why we talk about like you know foundationally across the board if somebody's never been exposed to like a different way of breathing before you start very simply yeah does that make sense cool um okay so drive theory higher arousal higher performance depending on your skill level the second one is called inverted U theory so this like was proposed a little bit later it kind of builds off of drive theory but what this one says and I'm sorry I I don't have a visual for you guys but if if you Google it you'll see it right an inverted U it's an upside down U and it essentially says that certain levels of arousal help in performance to a point until it doesn't right it helps levels of arousal like we're feeling good we're feeling kind of jittery we're feeling like you know capable and prepared but then too much of that essentially is counterproductive that's inverted you theory i like to like in my brain I think of this as kind of like Goldilocks levels of arousal right not too hot not too cold just right the top of that U if you see that visual is sort of this like proposed just right level of arousal um if you if you think of somebody riding a bike right if they ride too slow it's going to be hard to keep your balance if you ride too fast you could lose your control and crash but if you're riding at just the right speed you're cruising that's kind of what this is saying about um athletes when it comes to performance and when you're looking at clients when working with clients especially the high performers so I think this this one is really interesting with clients who you know it's your it's your seauite level guys it's your type A lawyers right Eric I'm sorry Eric Ralden these people do well um in high performance environments they love pressure like I live in New York City I'm around these people all the time they get bored without it right like there is an optimal zone zone of performance for these guys but very quickly you can start to see that become counterproductive if they don't have the right tools to emotionally regulate and navigate stress right very quickly that becomes a like I'm just going to hang on for dear life and push through with people so I think that this model can really help you understand areas of their life that are becoming unhelpful if I'm working for this lawyer or if I'm working uh with a lawyer who is seven days a week you know I don't know 10 12 hours a day right maybe it's 20 hours a day like when I look at their optimal zone of performance okay I know that I'm not going to just pull them out of this high pressure situation cuz they do well there but maybe I look at the ways that they respond to their boss throughout the day right maybe I'm looking at how much sleep they're getting maybe I'm looking at you know they're like essentially this comes down to basic needs in my opinion when that U starts to like leak out the other side basic needs okay so I think that model is really helpful um to kind of like work with some of those higher uh higher performers again athletes or um working people okay so the third one is reversal theory we have drive theory we have inverted you theory and we have reversal theory and I'll I'll start this one off by saying this is the one that makes the most sense to me okay okay so I'm encouraging you all to like look at these as like that not truth or you know um what's opposite of truth not not a truth or like a a non-truth right but just like an option and I think that reversal theory is um sort of relative to this entire course and essentially what reversal theory says is it's really your interpretation of arousal that can either serve in your favor or not right i think that throughout this course we learn a lot about how to befriend your mind through breathing strategies at foundationally and this one really gets to the core of befriending your mind so a little bit of history on this one this guy in the 90s his name is John Kerr he introduced this theory um as it relates to sports performance and he basically said that you know anxiety impacts performance but it depends on the athletes interpretation of it to see like if it is beneficial or detrimental when I'm working with my runners runner A feels like the classic pre-race nerves so there's your arousal levels right i have my I have my stressful environment that runner is about to race they want a specific time they're going for a result right that's their stress that's the demand their arousal levels are that high heart rate that like kind of churning in the stomach the butterflies but with these pre-race nerves which is what we call that in the sports world runner A interprets that as excited and ready because they know how to right runner B running the exact same race wanting a time experiences the same pre-race nerves little tight chest little churnney in the stomach you know all of that stuff that we know very well and instead they're interpreting these feelings as fear and they slowly start to lose confidence right so runner A and runner B have the exact same levels of arousal going on in their body but runner A is aware enough and has trained to understand that it is their interpretation of their arousal of their arousal levels that is under their control so they both respond differently which is essentially what we are trying to teach people how to do is create a little bit of space between what they feel in their body and how they respond to it and over time with practice because this becomes a skill over time people will learn to respond differently what's that going to do that's going to help them have a little bit of better control over their emotions which is going to help them have a little bit better control over their energy levels okay we have the power and the ability to reverse the interpretation of these feelings um pausing here again so the three theories to uh kind of like address the question of why certain arousal levels affect one athlete positively one athlete negatively drive theory inverted you theory and reversal theory do we have questions on those or comments um before I move on yeah christina can you can you create um like a visual for reversal theory the other two landed like I I I have two clients that I'm going to now use this information on next time I talk to them this week but reversal theory i don't have anybody in mind so I think that your visual will help me connect with with someone I'm sure I know totally by now okay so you've got a huge pitch tomorrow okay you are going to be standing in front of the board i don't know corporate world that well but I know that that is a stressful situation for a lot of people you are pitching an idea that you have been working on you've created a whole pitch deck you've put a lot of work into that pitch deck you've made it pretty colors um you've practiced like you know that you're ready for it and yet you it's a big deal so you still feel that tightness in your chest that turning in your stomach but you know how to interpret those physiological feelings in your body as I'm ready i'm prepared and I'm excited now that same person with the same sort of like leadup to this pitch they've prepared they're ready pretty colors in their pitch deck they've practiced they have those feelings of a tight chest a churny stomach maybe they can't sleep but they're interpreting all of that as I'm nervous i'm going to fail i'm not good enough so essentially what reversal theory is stating is that we have the power and the autonomy to reverse how we perceive our uh levels of arousal right a lot of this is going to depend on like reversal theory in my um opinion it it's it's a learned skill because as human beings we tend to naturally just fall into anx like we're not taught as kids to do this right we're we kind of go through life and life in inherently teaches us to just like be anxious about things and so I think that reversal theory and teaching somebody how to reinterpret their physiology is a skill and what's a really powerful tool to start training somebody to do this anybody know breathing nice yeah thanks Dad that's my dad by the way everybody I hear I I hear the scale breathing being very effective in something like this yeah where like you know managing you causing your arousal level if you want to call it that in the moment and then guaranteeing yourself to be able to enter and exit it because you're the one that's if you have this information that we've been taught uh which we will teach to others to cause your arousal but with a guarantee that this will end you know 15 minutes from now and then to take an action based on that sounds like good practice here uh the visual helps I now have two people in my my brain that I can connect this to which is how I study for things um but it it was sounding like uh it was sounding like the first one to me for a while where like the differences skill set drive no that's a great call and and a lot of these are they sort of play off each other and the the um differences are a little bit nuanced right but drive theory is um less uh drive theory sort of like relies on the actual physical skill of the person whereas reversal theory is more the interpretation of what's going on in their body so theory is like that person is not like super aware of their emotions as much as they are just like trusting in their ability whereas reversal theory you could take somebody with a history of imposttor syndrome with a history of self-belief belief issues and you could train them in a way where they can like start to become aware of how their physiology changed and aware that they have the control to tag an emotion to that and it's not always easy i another example I literally this morning I am not a fan of needles and I had to get blood tests this morning okay and I'm in that room and before the nurse even comes in I'm just sitting in the room and I'm getting super laded i don't I'm not even like having any concerned thoughts yet right i'm just sitting in the room and I'm getting super laded and then my head's like "Whoa are you going to faint are you nervous are you scared?" Right and so then because you know we know this stuff I'm trying to practice myself like you're not you know you can tag a different emotion to this dizziness right but it's it's it's a little bit you know it can get complex um when it comes to performance though that I think it's it's a learned skill yeah i think of the greats already but you know who I'm thinking of like who probably mastered all three of these i don't know if you know Derrick Rose the basketball player yeah but he he was like he was slated to outperform LeBron James back in his height and he was just injuryprone but he just you know so he just does these amazing things every once in a while he'll make the news uh people love him for this he'll be on a different team and just do something amazing um but he threw like a perfect pitch at a White Sox game recently and just like of course yeah yes that's what he does no matter what situation what team he's on what year it is he's learned how to either adapt his performance or his mindset at an expert level which is why he was shades above LeBron back in his uh in his prime and so just you know again that that body thing was different he's a he's a undersized basketball athlete which means he had to overperform physically so in a different league he would have did he would have been different person but it sounds like he mastered all of these yeah and it's a really interesting you know if you inject this theory when it comes to your clients dealing with pain whether it's acute pain or chronic pain right like this is something to think about because you know pain is one of those things that become ingrained in your physiology and like the emotional tag to it is just it's so automatic when somebody feels pain over and over and over again it's just it's a part of them and so oftent times like we can kind of start to slowly teach somebody that okay maybe this pain doesn't mean what you automatically think it means you know my knee surgery a lot of you in my cohort know about this but like I I had this knee surgery and I'm trying to get back to competitive running in a fairly quick amount of time and by doing that I I was feeling a little bit of pain in my knee and there's a past version of myself that would have been like "Oh god I ruined my surgery i tore it again right as soon as I feel the pain but instead I was able to say "Oh okay i'm it's I this is because I'm pushing my capacity a little bit and now I'm just going to kind of like hold you know lay off for a few days and then I'm going to try again right?" And so I'm like reversing this emotion from oh god I tore it again the apocalypse is around the corner like ah to oh this is because I'm actually making progress and I'm gently tapping my ceiling and that's going to help me raise it right so like when we think about you know how we can play with some of these theories again like in in uh your lives and and with your clients I just think they're they're helpful different lenses in which to see things because people are complex like this is what it comes down to is just you know not people are just complex and um whether you want to take drive theory inverted you theory or reversal theory and try and experiment with how this person could relate to one of those you know like okay where are their optimal levels of arousal and how can we teach them to tap into that um is is really valuable and it is it's it doesn't happen right away and sometimes you get it wrong you know um but all of this to say like I do want to I do want to go over a a few ways to um pair certain techniques with breath strategies that we already know in order to manage arousal levels we talk a lot about shifting attention in the course and I think this is one of the most powerful most valuable things you can do with anybody you're working with including yourself is learning how to shift their attention and then tag a breathing strategy onto that right when we look at that three-step framework talking about shifting your nervous system state from a place that's working or from a place that's not serving you to a place that's going to work for you a little bit better we teach somebody how to do that we start with shifting their attention in sport and in fitness um and I think you know a lot of you um in different your different fields i'm kind of looking around and I think a lot of you probably do this with your clients but there's something called progressive muscular relaxation PMR if you're taking a yoga class they do like kind of a little bit of this like a certain style of this kind of lightly in yoga right but essentially like this is saying that okay arousal is self-regulated through control of our physiology so if we can sort of control our muscular skeletal tension control and release control and release then maybe we can start to like gain um a little bit of better sense of body awareness um and again just like self-regulation through this control and it all comes back down to control so how this works with my athletes what I'll do and I'll do this pre- breath work i'll do this like when people come in and their first um you know they're coming off like an already sort of stressful heightened day we start with the body and we'll go through a series of alternating muscular tension to relaxation again so they they can kind of learn to become more aware of like their somatic tension and thereby control it awareness equals control or let me rephrase that better awareness equals better control because it'll probably never be perfect right so all we can do is sort of better their awareness pmr relaxing tensing relaxing tensing you can do this um full body you can start you know how how I do it is I'll start body part by body part we'll we'll start with the feet scrunch your feet scrunch your toes okay relax and ideally you want this to be like max tension so you want the person to be super intentional about how much tension they're creating in their body again so that the brain can kind of like s send signals to those parts of the body and then relax we're going from 100 to zero starting with the feet and then maybe it's the quads right maybe it's the calves and maybe it's the whole legs right so you're slowly working your way up and what is this going to do besides promote this higher feeling of uh you know somatic control is it's going to shift their attention away from the stressful thing during their day and um sort of into the space we know that a relaxed body can promote a relaxed mind so that's that's the goal here so that's the first technique that I pair with breathing okay the second one is imagery and I love this one because if I had another hour and a half I would go into more like neuroscience with you guys but um we know that the mind is extremely powerful and visualization is extremely powerful that being said just like everything else it takes practice and it's a skill so in athletics we call it imagery um you can also think of this as visualization and you can think of this as mental rehearsal so hi Danny in your face hi so imagery is a skill all right where we take athletes and we have them create and recreate experiences in their mind now I'm going to tell you that you can't do this normally you can't really do this like right away if we move back to that three-step framework of shifting your state and sort of managing your levels of arousal we start with shifting attention we move into coherence breathing or maybe it's a breath pattern that you like better because again this is a framework and not set in stone and then that third one if you guys remember is self-generated emotion and I I've gotten a lot of questions about this one and so I hope that this is helpful right this is where we can really use imagery um and and have it benefit us so ideally you have your client or your athlete they've gone through the shifting of attention they've gone through the breath work and now they're ready and they're in a state where they're welcoming some of these like image play and image practices if you're super wound up and stressed your mind's going to be fleeting all over the place right so we ideally we set the tone already and now what we're doing is we're having people create and recreate these experiences um in their mind for athletes we're using all of the senses to create a mental experience of their specific athletic performance a tennis player comes into me they've got a big tournament and I start with the simplest we're going back to simple over complex i start with the simplest form of imagery right like you're holding your tennis racket in your hand and you're spinning it in your hand and we're going to just start there and we're going to do that for a while and then I start to build complexity slowly what kind of racket are you using what color shoes do you have on maybe you take your other hand and you start playing with your strings right so I'm like I'm keeping them in this space of just like turning the racket in their hand before we even get on the court and compete because again just with how the brain works we want to start very simple before we build if you go right into the match that person like they're not ready for it yet okay they're not primed they're going to be distracted maybe those emotions start to seep in of oh I'm already on the court competing i can't do this right so we start we start simple you can use this with your clients um in the non-athletic sense and I often like to use like a place so put yourself in your favorite place and maybe you're sitting in your lawn chair in that favorite place maybe it's your lake house and you're looking at the lake and you're sitting in the lawn chair and you're feeling your arms resting on the lawn chair's arms what color is the lawn chair what's the sky doing right so we're starting stationary and simple and then we slowly start to build from there and essentially what we want to do is we start we start to build these senses that emulate joy gratitude love and we have that person like confidence all right okay when we're talking about athletics confidence self-efficacy readiness preparedness we have them start to feel those emotions in their body so that they can then start to build this subconscious like reality that they can then take into that environment the vividness and the detail becomes clearer and clearer with continued practice here and as as we know like your brain is not really good at differentiating your thoughts from reality and oftentimes this works against us as human beings because really what we've learned to do like in our modern culture is just rehearse anxiety rehearse worry rehearse pain fear right but if our brain isn't really good at differentiating our thoughts from reality and those are our thoughts maybe we can start to shift those thoughts and form a new reality campbell talks about this a lot i I and I use it a lot with people because people also love neuroscience terms but reticular activating system right if if I don't know you want that green jacket that you saw on Instagram it keeps popping up in your ads now now you're seeing your friends wear it right like all you can think about is that green jacket and so then you start to see it everywhere the same thing happens with our emotions all I can think about is how I'm not good at my job and so now I'm I'm not good at my job and I'm also oh man I just went to order a coffee and I was so awkward with the barista and okay now I'm walking back and right so it's like all of this tends to form this trait anxiety um which over time is detrimental and this is how we train and retrain and remold our system that make sense yeah in in sport um my coach my one of one of many one of the only good ones of many um but he used to say "We want to win we want to win your mind before we even step on the court." Winning the mind before you even step on the court and I think that is like exactly how life works as well whether it's stepping onto the court or getting out of bed in the morning can we win our mind before we get out of bed in the morning how do we do that well we got to kind of take it step by step here as we've talked about the last one the last sort of technique that I'll pair with these with um breathing progressive muscular relaxation imagery or mental rehearsal i also like to call that one nervous system rehearsal right because we're rehearsing a specific arousal level that works for us if that heightened one works for us then we're rehearsing that in the environment yeah the third one um quickly here is is self-t talk and it's like that's literally a thing in sports psychology self-talk right you've got positive you've got negative and you've got instructive and I'm going to keep it like very simple for you guys today in terms of this interpersonal communication with people you want to start by before you change anything you want to you want to examine like how their current self-t talk patterns play out in their life before you start changing anything and then get them to understand whether it's helpful or not and then you start to assess appropriate ways to kind of modify and tweak and retrain Um I was on a run i have my best thoughts when I run by the way there's something with like the default mode network in your brain and you're running and and again if I had another hour I'd get into it but um I have my best thoughts when I run and I think that what we're trained to do as as humans is speak to our body and listen to our mind right when I was a tennis player I don't know if you guys watch tennis at all but I was like crazy i had a crazy attitude as this is why I do what I do now i was I would crumble under pressure i could push my body through anything but as soon as I tasted pressure I would just crumble and I remember being on the court and what I would do is I'd like I'd hit my racket on the ground or I'd slap my leg right i'd tell myself "Come on." That was my selft talk come on i'd talk to my talk to my body and then I'd listen to my mind my mind would be like "Well you're going to lose this match are you serious you're not going to beat her she's she's ranked lower than you are." I'd talk to my body and I'd listen to my mind and I think it's extremely valuable when you can get somebody to do the reverse listen to their body and talk to their mind and so the way that we listen to our body is we start to understand that arousal is a continuum an elevated heart rate and higher blood pressure and jitteries before a big pitch may not mean I'm nervous it's just I'm listening to my body okay I'm a little pumped up here and then when we can learn to talk to our mind that's when we can say I this doesn't have to be nervousness if if nervousness and excitement is the same chemical reaction in my body then I have the power and the control to pick one so brain we're going to feel this way right listening to your body and talking to your mind and I think it's it's like we have it completely backwards and nobody from a young age like nobody teaches us how to listen to our body and speak to our mind we're all a victim of our thoughts so if you learned anything today it's I want you to just like keep an open mind to some of these other theories whether you see them in um you know like yogic philosophy sports psychology like all of this plays a role in how different people's minds can interpret um stress and and maybe how they've built this like state of their nervous system that works works or doesn't work for them and so use like be open to some of this stuff and understand how maybe it plays a role in people who you're working with um and also I think Campbell does a really good job of encouraging this throughout the curriculum but these are all frameworks right like as at some point you acquire the skills and the knowledge to start to understand things so well that you can kind of make it your own because again people are complex whether we're working with athletes or regular people the human brain and body is really complex so I hope that some of this was a helpful new way in in um seeing already what we've learned and and putting it into play and again just to take it all the way back to the top like when you're working with anyone the big like macro lens here the problem is usually energy management and that is usually coming from a lack of control of emotions so how do we get that person back in the driver's seat to reinterpret their emotions yeah questions yeah go ahead Heather you said something earlier that I didn't write down correctly and so I wanted to ask again you said that something and I don't know if the something with stress or anxiety is an imbalance between demand and something else yeah can you repeat that or if you can remember but it was like maybe like response capability or something you got it yep so stress so you know I started I wanted to start with arousal and anxiety just so that we have a really good idea of like the arousal is like that spectrum of your nervous system you pumped up or you feeling flat and there's a lot of gray area between those two ends and then anxiety is sort of like one end interpreted in a negative way stress is the imbalance between the demand of of the physical or the mental task ahead of you and your response capability all right so like you know take that person who's got a big pitch tomorrow that's a that's a high pressure situation stakes are high consequences are high in their mind yeah and mentally the demand is um is great it's it's heavy it's a heavy demand there's a lot of pressure it's a heavy demand now stress comes from like okay like how capable am I in executing this task a stressor is the envi like the stressor is the entire situation it's like the environment it's going to be um you know the the the people sitting there listening to him the amount of work that it takes right but the feeling of stress is that imbalance between the demand and essentially um you how much you believe how capable you are i've never heard it defined that way so I love that yeah thank you yeah of course and again like so that's that's a sports psych definition or it's more like under the sports psych umbrella but I think that yes with athletes going into a big game or with somebody going into that like big pitch it's it's the same thing it's that imbalance um and and stress generates arousal but it's only when the perception of that arousal is negative does it generate anxiety right so stress isn't inherently bad arousal isn't inherently bad but it's when we think then we tag an emotion to all that that it becomes you know unhelpful great question anyone else oh yeah go ahead hi um thank you so much for that that was um yeah really really interesting i I just have a question about the um like the visualization like the practical um the practical exercise so after you do the I guess like you get them in you do coherence breathing and you get them into that sort of that state where they can start to visualize my question is like do you kind of get them to just go back to their natural breath or do you sort of encourage them to continue doing that heart coherence breathing as you sort of walk them through the visualization awesome question um I sort of uh don't give instruction about the breath at that point so if they want to if they are cognizant enough to continue it on their own um that's good but I I think that more often than not people will naturally return to like their natural breathing cadence when focusing on imagery um but there is in and and this is just my opinion and this isn't like research or anything but I don't think there's a right or wrong there i just think again it's about attention and once we've shifted their attention into their body once we've um you know established like uh a breathing that's kind of creating some more harmony in their body coherence in their body then we can sort of like go step three with their attention and if we lay off the gas with the breathing it's it's it's usually okay because they're like already in a state where they're calm and ready okay great no that's good cuz Yeah I've done sort of both before and I'm Yeah I think it's definitely and even for like myself when I'm doing it myself I it's really hard to obviously focus on the breathing while visualizing so yeah I was just to see what what you do yeah totally and sometimes to that point like I'll sprinkle it back in too so if I'm you know working with that tennis player right and they're I'm having them like imagining balance the ball and their racket I will walk them through some of this stuff and then I'll be like "Take a big inhale or take a slow inhale exhale like look down at your shoes what color are they?" Right so I'll kind of like go back and forth a little bit there but the exact instruction on on cadence and volume of breath will will um be a little bit less specific at that point yeah sure and and how long would you like um say that practice normally goes for it depends yeah yeah it depends um if I'm in classes so if I'm in group classes with people it it depends for the sixth time on on sort of like who I'm working with and why they're they're coming to me if we're just focusing on breath work um I'm going to start off the session let's say I'm in a class session with like a whole bunch of athletes or or people right i'm going to start off the session um trying to kind of get to know everyone i think it's really important for them to understand why we're about to do what we're doing hey we're going to bring our body back down to like this state rather than just throwing them into it the actual breath work will be maybe 20 to 30 minutes and often times at the tail end of that maybe it's 5 to 10 minutes I'll throw in um some of this visualization usually though at that point in a session um I tend to talk less because they're they don't need it anymore so that's kind of a class environment and that's the format that I use now if I'm working with somebody individually it's like it's way more like hands-on like I'm I'm with them every step of the way we're picturing you know the strings we're walking onto the court we're breathing together like it's it's a little bit more um and that might take more of the session moving through that but the goal here for everybody the goal here Eric what's the teach a man to fish that I can never remember the statement uh give a man a fish eat for one day teach a man to fish yeah give a man a fish eat for one day teach a man to fish eat for a lifetime thank you Eric it's always like on the tip of my tongue that's the goal as a coach i truly think that that is like the the sign that you are doing your job and changing somebody's life is when you can provide them the tools to do this on their own so essentially you want that person to feel the effects of everything that you're doing so that they start to do it themselves because they know it's helpful thank you so much thank you you're welcome good question awesome oh thanks Campbell i'm just reading your uh your chat um anything else yeah I think I've got a time out of this i've been trying to trying to save it for maybe more research but I was going to talk about more minutes left um I've been having conversations with people in my life that listen to how I speak about these things and they'll bring up undiagnosed ADHD or yeah I'm pretty sure that their parents didn't go get them tested but they're on the spectrum and they're having all these you know the definitions of these conversations around uh presence in the body presence in the mind are all shared in people without the diagnosis is but then when it crosses over um it's there as well so I'm wondering if you've seen anything come across anything recently so that these diagnoses aren't just catchall phrases so they're actually on a on a spectrum of this kind of internal behavior and that leads to you know certain types of mind brain activity specifically um that you see you know for for example you know people on the spectrum will have capabilities beyond the norm in certain aspects that come completely natural to them and it's part of their brain chemistry or design and I'm I'm trying to relate that to like the athletic performance or like the you know the drive theory or something like that i don't want to cross over too much in that but I'm wondering if you've seen anything and how they relate to each other yeah okay great question Eric i think if I'm understanding it um if I'm understanding it correctly my my response is going to be that we macro societal and like bigger health issue we just simply don't equip people with tools to um help themselves we just throw pills and diagnosis at them um and when I've worked with athletes in in the past you know it's actually really interesting working with younger kids at this point in my life because um there are different versions of my history as a as a younger athlete where I can like see it in in different kids right like I can see sort of this like emotional range and and lack of self-regulation in younger kids as well as like so much potential if they just had the tools um to focus on a task to shift their attention to understand how to relax their body to um you know and this is like sort of graduating in levels right but to like start to visualize themselves as competent like those that self-efficacy building toolkit is not something that I think our culture is um good at at um at giving people whether it's kids or whether it's adults we just we sort of like put them in this black or white bucket of you have ADD cuz you can't focus you're super hyper so you have this right but we like we don't look at like this like gray scale that we've sort of covered today again whether it's in athletics or or whether it's um in the outside world and so like my response to that is essentially um I mean again it's really easy it's really easy in an Instagram post to be like five ways to address ADD with your child and you know whatever right like sleep more like downregulate like it's just it's so easy to just bop bop bop bop give these like simple labels quick fixes um but because like looking and understanding the nuances it takes a little bit more education um and and so yeah I think the most important part of working with athletes working with clients like understanding the people around you is just that there is complexity like there is complexity right and and you can't you can't really put like a simple diagnosis on complexity i think that it takes some time to understand and to work on great question i know that if Campbell were uh were not have didn't have his sleeping baby on him he'd probably have more to say on that but hopefully that helps her i'll pin I'll pin Campbell in that too you're around here i bring that up camp yeah do it anyone else energy management energy management right okay well um that's all I got for you guys again I I hope that this was an enlightening and kind of like a new world type of way um if at any point you want to chat you know where to reach me just message me on school um I did I always say I'm going to do this um I people in my cohort are going to laugh but I do have a Substack where I write a lot about um sort of like the interchangeable ideology between sports psychology um even like sort of like more eastern philosophical ideals and modernday stress and so I'll post a couple of those um along with this recording or I think Campbell post this recording but I'll post a couple of those later if if you guys are interested um it's it's like researchbased stuff but it's also pretty anecdotal and experiential as well which is how I encourage all of you to just go about everything is like researched base and also pay attention to your own experience put those together and it's super powerful right okay if nobody has any other questions you guys can hop off i appreciate all of you so much thanks for being here thanks for listening thank you thank you amazing good awesome all right bye everybody bye great questions