Sept. 12, 2023
Renowned Sports Psychologist Dr. Colleen Hacker on Peak Performance, EP 226
Season 1
Masters Topics, Athletes & Coaches Interviews
Mindset, Mental Health & Wellness Topics
Authors, Speakers & Performance Coaches Interviews
We're elated to introduce one of Team USA's Sports Psychologist, Dr Colleen Hacker, a certified mental performance consultant (CMPC), author, and professor. Dr. Hacker uncovers the keys to achieve excellence in sports and life. This enlightening conversation is rooted in her latest book, Achieving Excellence Mastering Mindset for Peak Performance in Sport and Life.
How often do we consider confidence as a dynamic entity, especially for world champions? Dr Hacker challenges our understanding of this concept, inspiring a fascinating discussion about pain, risk, and the pursuit of athletic greatness. Highlighting the importance of physiology for masters athletes, we discover how understanding our bodies can propel us to new heights in our chosen fields.
Swimming serves as a perfect canvas to illustrate Dr Hacker's insights into the interplay of mental and physical skills in sports. Race strategies, strength, flexibility - all these elements interweave with mental tools like self-talk, cognitive restructuring, and imagery to create a triumphant athlete. Whether you’re a sports enthusiast, a high-achieving corporate athlete, or someone captivated by the psychology of excellence, this episode promises to engage and enlighten. Join us and discover the immense power of mindset in sports and life with Dr Colleen Hacker.
Email us at HELLO@ChampionsMojo.com. Opinions discussed are not medical advice, please seek a medical professional for your own health concerns.
Chapters
00:05 - Achieving Excellence in Sports Psychology
08:33 - The Ever-Changing Road to Confidence
26:16 - Fear, Pain, and Athletic Achievement
39:25 - Swimming and Mental Skills Training
Transcript
WEBVTT
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Hello friends, welcome to the Champions Mojo podcast.
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I am your host, kelly Palace, and, as usual, I am co-hosting with Maria Parker.
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Hey, maria.
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Hey Kelly, great to be here today.
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Yes, and today it's truly a special guest and an honor to have Dr Colleen Hacker, who is the author of her new book Achieving Excellence Mastering Mindset for Peak Performance in Sport and Life.
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As a certified mental performance consultant and member of the US Olympic Committee Sports Psychology Registry, she has served on six Olympic Games staffs, both winner and summer, and more than a dozen world championships teams working with Major League Baseball, the NFL, the PGA, the LPGA, Pro Soccer, USA Swimming, Yay, Crew Speed Skating, Track and Field and Tennis, just to name a few.
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And in her day job, Dr Hacker is a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at Pacific Lutheran University, Maria.
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Today we are going to get to talk sports psychology, one of our favorite subjects.
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What more can you tell us about Dr Hacker?
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Well, espnw named Dr Hacker as one of the 30 women in the country who changed the way sports are played, and she's been inducted into seven different halls of fame, either as an athlete or coach.
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Her strategies for performance are sought by corporations, business groups, professional and Olympic sports team and both print and media.
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Her work's been appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, cnn and ESPN, just to name a few, and we're just delighted there's so much to talk about.
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Thank you very much for being here, dr Hacker.
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It's an honor to have you, and welcome to Champions Mojo.
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Well, right back at you, kelly and Maria Champions Mojo like what?
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a title.
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Let's do this.
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It really is a privilege to join you on and your listeners on your on your pod.
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Thank you.
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Thank you, yes.
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So we do want to ask you some questions that we know our listeners will be like oh my gosh, we have the Olympic, you know consultant for mental skills here with us.
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What could we ask her?
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So, before we do those questions, can you just kind of tell us about your new book, which, oh, let me show you.
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I don't know if you can see here, got it.
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It's very beautiful and thick.
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Tell us about achieving excellence, mastering mindset for peak performance in sport and life.
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This is my new Bible.
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It is unbelievably comprehensive.
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There is nothing one could wonder about mindset for sports and our performance in life, and we always talk about on the show, dr Hacker, how sports mimics life.
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But tell us about this new book, kind of how it came about and let's go from there.
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Well, first of all I have to comment on this little phrase that you use.
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We love to talk about the mental skills, we love to talk about sports psychology.
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I would say you love to do that because you cannot compete in sport without attention to that part of the game you can talk about you know, ironman.
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You could talk about distance swimming, you could talk about sprint swims, and I will argue till my last breath that those six inches between our ears might be the most significant real estate that we're going to face in the competitive cauldron.
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So there's a reason you talk about it, because the psychology of excellence is inextricably linked to the competitive environment.
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Now to the new book.
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Thank you for those kind words and I want to assure the listeners I didn't write that promo.
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That was exterperaneous from you and you actually hit on what we tried to do.
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This is my second book, 20 years in between the two, but this book really is the culmination of my career in this sphere and it reads that way.
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It is written primarily for sport, there's no question.
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But the folks at Human Kinetics, the publishing company, said we want it for high achieving corporate athletes.
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We want it in sport in any competitive domain, whether it's youth to intercollegiate, to Olympic, to masters, and if you heard that in the pages, like when you read it, if you hear that attention.
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We were very purposeful about that.
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And there's tons of books in this marketplace I'm aware of that and generally they are one or the other.
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They're like workbook-y kinds of things like here's a worksheet, do this work on this?
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Here's questions to ask and you don't have any understanding of what that recommendation is based on.
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Both as a speaker and a writer, everything I do is scientifically based, it's evidence-based, it is grounded in the literature, and then I try to speak and write as though it's not, if that makes sense.
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Like I try to translate that jargon and that rather esoteric kind of data and make it accessible and practical.
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So we talk about what each topic is, why it's important examples in sport, in life and in business to which they can be applied, and then every single chapter contains elements that say, ok, make it your own.
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Now.
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This isn't cookie cutter.
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This isn't one size fits all.
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This book allows each reader, each athlete, each high performer to overlay their careers where they are right now with the exercises and elements in the book.
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So it's been very intentional.
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I'm not going to be awesucks about it.
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I'm proud of what we did.
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The reviews and the responses from the folks I care most about, and that is the athletes and coaches and organizations, has been remarkably positive.
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Terrific.
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Yeah, it is a true masterpiece, and I have been a collector of books in this genre for my entire life.
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My library is I've probably got 25 books and I have not read the entire thing, but I am absolutely thrilled.
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This is just.
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It is a true masterpiece.
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So what we wanted to do is hit, while we have this, you hear the guru the brain trust of mastering our mindset.
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What is when you deal with the US Olympic swimming team and we pre-recording?
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We talked about the fact that we've had many Olympic champions on our show and you've probably worked with many of them.
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What would you say is a common problem or a common issue that swimmers tend to have with their mindset?
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Well, it's a great question and just one slight correction.
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Usa swimming often hires one mental skills coach for the entire team.
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I am hired privately and individually by Olympic swimmers, so they have a team mental skills coach and then, when you get at the upper levels, they want their own person.
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I don't know how else to say it, not because USA swimming has a great track record, hires wonderful people, but I have been very fortunate to be hired from Olympic individual swimmers.
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Nice.
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Well, I don't know if I'm going to surprise you two or not, and I would love to hear you comment on this.
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When people hear Olympians, when people hear gold medalists, when people hear the word Olympic champions, they don't expect what I'm about to say.
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One of the common threads is the issue of confidence.
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They're like but they're world record holders, but they're Olympic champions, but they're in the top three in their discipline in the war confidence and there's a wonderful Robert Hughes quote that goes something like this perfect confidence is reserved for the least talented.
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It's their consolation.
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I love that and I think there's wisdom in that.
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Yeah, the truly greats have exceptionally high standards.
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They don't assume because they swam well in preliminaries or in Munich that they're going to swim.
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So what does that have to do with the finals?
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Like they understand that each moment their training is on the line, their approach is on the line and, tactically, what their approach is in the early prelims may change when they get to the finals, right In terms of conserving energy, in terms of not giving too much away in their race strategy.
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So the truly greats, not the wannabe greats, not the hanger arounders in the edges, I would say to you that the confidence road is always under construction for those folks.
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They're either trying to get it back because they've lost it after a poor event or a poor meet, or they're trying to maintain it for a longer period of time, throughout a competition or in the run up to a major event, or they're trying to just eke out a little bit more.
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Most of us realize that our swimming changes depending on our confidence, right, I mean, I hate to say that bluntly yes, yardage, yes, nutrition, yes, sleep, yes, hydration.
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Yes, you know, elite performance is multifaceted.
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But confidence, individual confidence, which varies from time to time from athlete to athlete, from race to race, from a competition to a competition, from site to site, is incredibly variable.
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So I don't know if that surprises you.
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I would be curious, but I would say confidence is a recurring thread throughout a quad, throughout a four year time period.
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Let's say you experts, Well, I, I, I, yeah, you, you, well, I, I was just gonna.
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all right, Kelly, you need to go, I want to say, no, I'm gonna let you go, but I want to just let you both know that I'm in Florida in the middle of an afternoon thunderstorm that is rocking my world.
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I don't know if you can hear it but it's just booming.
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So if you lose me, keep going.
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So the reporting, and I'll edit this part out, but just know that I'm I'm gonna try to go out and come back in if I lose power.
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So go, maria.
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Well, I, I'm sure you're correct and I've certainly that's been true in my own athletic career and and professional career.
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But confidence seems to come and go and you know, sometimes you feel like a poser, you know.
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But but I, I guess, since we work with masters, we are our audiences, masters, and we're both masters athletes I would ask you, has that been your experience with older athletes and older professionals, that they, that they also are struggling with confidence?
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Yeah, that that's a great distinction, because the demographics of the athlete changes in the course of our lifetime.
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What we're chasing are in terms of records or achievements.
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What our approach is to training and two competitions is not, is not fixed in stone and it's not linear.
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It changes.
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It can change throughout the course of a lifetime.
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One of one of the aspects of masters levels athletes and I deal with masters level athletes in a number of sports and I'm speaking in generalities which carries its own risk there is a wisdom and an appreciation to the process infinitely more than in for lack of a better way to say it prime of their lives.
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Athletes.
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They're like I'm snapping my fingers now like they want it, now, it's immediate.
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They rise and fall on the last performance.
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It is a, it is a rocket ship of up and crash and up and crash.
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Masters level swimmers.
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I really will stand by that.
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There's a wisdom, there's a patience, there's a recognition and I would argue, at least in my master's level athletes, a real respect and appreciation for the training and the process and the experience.
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The intrinsic motivation tends to be consistently higher and a driving force they're.
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They're not trying to, they're not trying to get their next endorsement.
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They're not trying to rise and fall on the next gig.
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This is about something generally personal, meaningful, intrinsically valuable.
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I want to see if I'm capable of this.
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I want to see how far I can push me to my capabilities, rather than getting caught up in the comparison game of you me.
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I don't mean to indicate that results don't matter, they do.
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I don't mean to indicate that I don't know that I'm fourth and you're third.
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I probably do.
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But but my focus, my primary and again I'm speaking in generalities is about the process, the value, the goals, mastering, no pun intended, mastering the craft, trying to be a little bit better.
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And for masters again, with my clients, for me myself, I'm still running marathons, have marathons.
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There's a pride, is sort of like I don't know, I'll say it how I do I'm the oldest I've ever been and I'm busting it out.
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You know there's something, you know, you, you generally see in the life trajectory, you kind of go one way or another, you don't just stay on a plateau, and so there's a sort again, this intrinsic pride of man.
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I just had another birthday and I'm fast.
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I just had another birthday and I just cranked it out Right.
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There's it's.
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It is so powerful and compelling.
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Yeah.
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I love masters level athletes.
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It's it.
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It's the same but it's different.
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That's how I'd say it.
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Yeah, I love that and I do too.
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Yeah, I love that.
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And then I want to give you my response to confidence for a master's athlete.
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So yeah, I feel like that what you've said.
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So, as a master's athlete, many masters athletes have different, you know pedigree.
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I was an Olympic trials qualifier as a young swimmer, went to college on a full scholarship, continued swimming.
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Masters now swim at a high level.
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Where I go to a meet, I'm trying to win a national title, get a number, one time set a world record or a national record.
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Those are that's my trajectory.
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I swim with all the range of people who are swimming in their first meet.
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They're afraid to dive off a block, you know.
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So we all have different levels of confidence.
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But I, as this master's athlete that's trying to achieve something special for my age, for my age group, for you know all, like all the history that we talk about it and the wisdom, it doesn't seem to make me any more confident.
00:17:00.095 --> 00:17:09.642
It's like I don't know if that's just like, maybe it's just a work in progress, like you said, like it's always, like I'm just I.
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What is it the word that you know?
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You doubt that you're ready, you doubt that you've had the best.
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So I love that.
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Confidence is what?
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Whether you're swimming at a high level, whether you're a brand new swimmer, whether you're an Olympic level.
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So let's talk about that confidence, and do you think that it applies to comparison?
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So, when I'm lacking confidence, I might stand up and say, ooh, I'm swimming against swimmer A and swimmer B and, oh my gosh, they've had top times above me this season and I'm scared of them.
00:17:46.986 --> 00:17:53.060
So, instead of so, how, how do you find that comparison has to do with confidence?
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That's a good question it is, and, let me, you know, willfully choose to be repetitive.
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I want to come back and say the confidence road is always under construction.
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And that might sound like some cute little phrase, but there's power in understanding that, because I find that people are continually frustrated by how they're.
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You know, I'm confident, wise, I'm a cop, you know.
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It's sort of this, this nagging issue, and it's like we don't mow the lawn and go well, I mow the lawn, that's it for the rest of my life.
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We don't wash the dishes on Monday and go who, thank God, those dishes are done forever.
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We this, we normalize repetitiveness and that important things need to be done and done again, and done again, and done again.
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And then all of a sudden we get to confidence and we get not only is our confidence peaking, falling, but then we're frustrated over that fact and what I'm trying to do is normalize it by saying the confidence road is always under construction.
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So I want to say that.
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Secondly and all of these require some explanation, I'll try to do it in the in the most pithy way that I can, but confidence follows focus.
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I'm going to say that again and then explain it Confidence follows focus.
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Athletes want to know how do I get confident, how do I keep confidence, how do I stay there longer?
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And what I say to them, the beginning is to understand that confidence follows focus, so that when we are I'm putting an air quotes when we're lacking confidence, you know what we're thinking about.
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We're thinking about the sets that we didn't get in.
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We're thinking about the days we had to skip because we had a cold or we had all that shoulder injury that's flaring up again.
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Do I train, do I take a day off?
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And then that messes with her.
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You understand what I'm saying is, when you lack confidence, I can't say it's 100% of the time, but it's up there, it's an overwhelming majority.
00:20:09.865 --> 00:20:13.230
What I want to do is peel back the layers and say what are you focusing on?
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What are you thinking about?
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And chances are, when you're confidence dips, you're thinking about how you haven't swum well at that city before or in that pool before, or at that time of the year before.
00:20:26.251 --> 00:20:27.289
Do you see what I'm saying?
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Or at that meet, or you didn't match up well against that particular swimmer before.
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Well, that was then.
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This is now Do now well, and we carry that baggage, literally baggage, only it's psychological baggage.
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Imagine if I put a 10 pound weighted vest on your body and say go, get them, tiger, that's what you're swimming in right now.
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And you'd go.
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Why on earth would I swim in a weighted vest?
00:20:59.394 --> 00:21:07.795
But we do that psychologically and emotionally, by carrying past baggage into the present performance.
00:21:07.795 --> 00:21:10.853
And then my phrase is we tend to swim heavy.
00:21:10.853 --> 00:21:12.450
We tend to swim heavy.
00:21:13.345 --> 00:21:20.454
I want to say another common issue that is related to confidence and related to focus.
00:21:20.454 --> 00:21:31.231
Athletes don't realize and again I struggle with are these do these phrases make sense Without explanation?
00:21:31.231 --> 00:21:32.516
Or how much explanation?
00:21:32.516 --> 00:21:54.575
But athletes, by and large, a majority of their their time in their sport, they benefit the process of putting skill in the process of putting speed, in the process of putting technique in right, whatever it might be stroke, turns, starts, finish.
00:21:54.575 --> 00:22:10.089
That process requires effort, thinking, repetition, attention to detail, not yet do it again, not yet do it again, not yet do it again and loving that process.
00:22:10.089 --> 00:22:20.297
But the process of pulling out that talent, pulling out that work, is entirely different.
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That's when we don't want to think, we don't want to analyze, we don't want to critique moment by moment.
00:22:30.198 --> 00:22:44.873
And so there's this tricky little dichotomy that I have benefited I'm as good as I am because of my attention to detail, and I sweat everything, and nothing's ever good enough, and I'd say good on you exactly.
00:22:44.873 --> 00:22:47.833
To put excellence in, it requires that.
00:22:47.833 --> 00:22:52.111
But to bring that excellence out, then you have to trust your training.
00:22:52.111 --> 00:22:55.453
You have to let go and trust your training.
00:22:55.884 --> 00:23:00.330
Okay, so let me give you an example, and I won't tell you who.
00:23:00.330 --> 00:23:05.692
I hope that our listeners won't be able to guess who, because I want to protect this.
00:23:05.692 --> 00:23:12.294
This is a multiple gold medal swimmer that I worked with prior to a particular Olympic Games.
00:23:12.294 --> 00:23:20.009
Remember I said, the process of bringing skill out, the performance element, is almost the opposite of what went into it.
00:23:20.009 --> 00:23:22.407
And so she's swimming.
00:23:22.407 --> 00:23:26.897
And so we try harder when we train, we try harder.
00:23:26.897 --> 00:23:34.932
We want, when you try harder, when you're swimming, you're tighter, the timing is off.
00:23:34.932 --> 00:23:47.476
So the phrase that we use for her is easy speed, easy speed, easy speed that we didn't want her to swim at 100%.
00:23:47.476 --> 00:23:49.030
Do you guys get what I'm saying?
00:23:49.285 --> 00:23:51.030
Yeah let's not swim at 100%.
00:23:52.204 --> 00:23:58.733
Tight shoulders make slow times, so we wanted her to have this feeling of easy speed.
00:23:58.733 --> 00:24:01.471
And again now I'm sort of whispering.
00:24:01.471 --> 00:24:07.771
Not because we didn't want to win a gold medal, not because she didn't want to swim fast, not because she didn't want to get a PO.
00:24:07.771 --> 00:24:08.969
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
00:24:08.969 --> 00:24:27.594
But trying for it, working for it, analyzing for it minutely, monitoring her stroke, her turn, her split, that's not the process of bringing skill out, that's the time to let go and trust your training.
00:24:27.594 --> 00:24:30.751
So do you see there's so, there's this.
00:24:31.085 --> 00:24:33.409
Yeah, it's beautiful, all of it, all of it.
00:24:34.244 --> 00:24:38.655
Yeah, this is a great point to ask about pain.
00:24:38.655 --> 00:24:47.315
So love, love, love and easy speed is a term in swimming and tapering that we always talk about.
00:24:47.315 --> 00:24:53.855
When you taper and you're properly prepared and you're in the right place, you just easy speed comes.
00:24:53.855 --> 00:25:03.813
So that is a term that I think many elite swimmers know and I love and that's a good trigger for when you dive in easy speed.
00:25:04.704 --> 00:25:30.192
But for those of us like Maria and I and this would be one of the questions that we're listening to that we've talked about a lot because we do have a lot of triathletes, so endurance athletes the thing that freaks me out more than lack of confidence, more than anything, is when I'm standing behind the block and I know many people do it and Maria's on her bike ready to go for 12 hours and I'm about to swim a mile, I am afraid of the pain.
00:25:30.192 --> 00:25:43.576
I literally fear that pain because I know, yes, I can have easy speed on the first 800 of a 1500, but when I hit the halfway point it's a different story.
00:25:43.576 --> 00:25:56.553
If I'm on the threshold of that aerobic, anaerobic threshold, I have to maintain that pace, to hold the pace, to set the record, and I'm just it's just excruciating.
00:25:56.553 --> 00:26:04.075
What strategies could you share with us that those of us that are afraid of the pain could use?
00:26:05.650 --> 00:26:15.025
Well, respectfully, I would argue that without the pain you would not be a master's level swimmer at the highest level.
00:26:15.025 --> 00:26:20.038
I would respectfully argue that you love the pain and you hate the pain.
00:26:20.038 --> 00:26:28.265
True, that which we achieve too easily, we esteem too lightly.
00:26:28.265 --> 00:26:30.564
Right, you guys feel me on that?
00:26:30.564 --> 00:26:31.253
Yeah, absolutely.
00:26:32.046 --> 00:26:32.432
Oh yes.
00:26:33.365 --> 00:26:59.625
So there's one of the different ways you understand the importance of phraseology, but love the wind, love the rain, love the hills, right, right you can't go in fearing the hills, fearing I need it to be perfect, right the weather and the course, or whatever it is, whether it's cycling or running, swimming I guess it would be open water versus a controlled environment but love the wind, love the rain, love the hills.
00:26:59.625 --> 00:27:06.924
That's a metaphor, for the pain is coming and the pain is the separator.
00:27:06.924 --> 00:27:09.423
The pain is the separator.
00:27:09.423 --> 00:27:12.184
Right, are you willing to endure?
00:27:12.184 --> 00:27:13.423
And now I'm gonna go back.
00:27:13.423 --> 00:27:17.585
This is what I love about truly authentic conversations.
00:27:17.585 --> 00:27:25.525
In my mind, we come back to what one of my earlier answers it's personal, it's intrinsic.
00:27:25.525 --> 00:27:27.964
Nobody's making you do that.
00:27:27.964 --> 00:27:30.445
I'll tell you how to stop the pain, kelly.
00:27:30.445 --> 00:27:33.074
Here's how you make the pain stop.
00:27:33.074 --> 00:27:37.237
Go slower, choose shorter races, don't switch.
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