Ep. 1371: The Performance Perspective with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

Please enjoy my monologue The Performance Perspective with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive. --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel https://twitter.com/covel Facebook: @trendfollowing https://www.facebook.com/trendfollowing/ LinkedIn: @covel https://linkedin.com/in/covel/ Instagram: @mikecovel https://www.instagram.com/mikecovel/ Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!

• 0:00Speaker 00

  My last episode for 2025 comes with a certain motivation, a certain inspiration, a certain reminder that it's all in your head. It's the six inches between your ears. And with that in mind, two guests from my archives that will put you in the spirit of being ready to kick some ass in 2026. I hope you enjoy and see you soon.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  Now, this conversation is why I do my podcast. Now, don't get me wrong, I love all my guests, but it's one of those ones where it's something from perhaps my youth that I was always curious about and I never expected to have a conversation with Michael Jordan's personal trainer. In fact, my guest today, his very first pro athlete client as a trainer was one, Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player who has ever played. And I gotta tell you, Tim has some fantastic lessons about life, even how he made his way to be at Michael Jordan's doorstep, that very first meeting.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  Wow, a little bit of luck, but also a lot of taking a chance, putting himself out there. And that's just how he got to Jordan. But those lessons he learned along the way, those winning lessons, he is here today to share a little with all of us. Without any further delay, let's jump right into my conversation today with Tim Grover.

• 2:06Speaker 00

  You've got about, I think, looking at ages, you've got about four years on me. So I want to take you back in time. I'm going to go a little fishing here in the beginning. I want to take you back in time to 1982. At that point in time, I was living 15 miles from Washington DC. I was a rabid Georgetown fan. My father went to Georgetown and I sure as heck did not want that team in baby blue to win down at UNC. I loved watching that guy named Michael Jordan, but I did not want that team to win. When I think back to the physical shape, and I can still remember, you know, look, he was a young guy. He was a freshman in college, but the Michael Jordan as a freshman in college was not the one that you ended up

• 2:50Speaker 00

  remaking physically, huh?

• 2:52Speaker 01

  In college, he was 197 pounds. After our years of work, he was all the way, anywhere between, played between 213 and 218.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Do you remember watching that game?

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Yes, of course. Everybody watched that game. I mean, you know, there was something about him that was just, I won't say different. I think that word is used too often. There was something unique about him. Just, and then hearing while all the different coaches described him and his work ethic and his preparation and his different mindset and his detail to the game. So it didn't surprise me the way his career ended up being and him being able to take that shot during that moment as a freshman and make it.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Maybe you're right. Different is overused, but to win the national championship as a freshman, kind of a rare thing for people to know something about college basketball.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and never hesitated when he took that shot. Just like, all right, here it is. Ball came to him, saw was open, stepped into it, hit nothing but net.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  When did you guys first meet up? Let's get granular and tell that story, the setup. How did it happen? Because obviously that changed your life to have that meetup, huh?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  It did. No question about that. I actually started with him in 1989. I'd already been in the league, what, four or five years?

• 4:13Speaker 00

  He had a 63-point game against the Celtics. He'd already been doing some big stuff.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Oh, he been doing some special stuff. I mean, listen, one of the coaches after four games into his rookie year said he's already the best player in the NBA. He had already been doing some special things, you know, obviously his rookie year, and then the second year he had the foot injury, then he came back for the big game that you just mentioned, and had a lot of individual success up to that point, but had never won the championship. I was working at a local health club during that time. My education is I have a master's degree in exercise science and a bachelor's degree in kinesiology. I always knew I wanted to train professional athletes. So there was a small article in one of the local papers saying how Michael Jordan's tired of taking the physical abuse from the Detroit Pistons.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  He's looking to bulk up. Alright, so what I did was, I was like, okay, there's no way the organization is going to hire an individual who's never worked with a professional athlete or outside to work with him. So what I did was like, alright, if I can get in with some of the other players, then there's a chance he could see my results and maybe he'd be interested somewhere down the line. So what I did was, back then, remember, no emails, no text messaging, very few cell phones. They had the big ones with a backpack on them, so it wasn't the ones that fit in your pocket. So I did was, I wrote 14 letters to every single player on the Chicago Bulls organization, handwritten letters, put them in a mailbox, hoping they would get to the players. So what happens is when you send

• 5:45Speaker 01

  letters to athletes in that time, they get thrown in a pile of fan mail. So every athlete, if you put their name on it, somebody in the back puts them in the person's locker and say, okay, here, and then it's the athlete's decision whether they want to open it or not. Well, obviously, somebody opened one of my letters. I still don't know who it was, and it was sitting in another player's locker, and Michael saw this letter in somebody else's locker and reached for it and pulled it out and told the team athletic trainer. And the team physician at the time, he said, find out what this person is about.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  Oh, come on, really? Is that true? Come on, really?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  That's how this happened.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Serendipity.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  The one person I didn't send a letter to was him because I was like, okay, it doesn't make any sense to send a letter to him because there's no way the organization is going to let me work with him. There's no way he's going to be interested in working with me. So I just said, I'm not even going to send him a letter. So then the team athletic trainer, the team doctor both called me and they said, hey, we have somebody who's interested in your services, which was very unique because during that time they kept, training was always kept in-house. Nobody hired anybody outside.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  What was in this letter? You just stopped Michael Jordan five or six years into the league. He sees a letter randomly, doesn't know you from Adam, and he then gets the Bulls to find you. What was in this letter?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  It explained who I was and what I did. And the key to the letter was, and I talk about this in the book, Winnie. Everybody would tell him what to think, what to think. This is what the books say. This is what's going on here. There's that and so forth. I wrote some stuff in there on things that you wouldn't find in studies, you wouldn't find in books about training. I said, hey, listen, I have different methods, different ideas, different thoughts, how an athlete should be trained. And I just put a couple of examples in there, nothing detailed, but just a couple of things that were up different than what everybody else. So obviously something caught his, something in that letter caught his eye because when you look at him now, so many years later, when you watched him play,

• 7:47Speaker 01

  his game wasn't just about what to think, it was how to think. He was very fluent in his movement. He really trusted his instinct. He was so well-prepared. My thought process was kind of the same, not knowing that's going to be the edge that got me there. So that's in my estimation, I've never asked him, what was it about that letter? Put it another way, knowing his competitiveness, he could have been simply, why the hell did I not get a letter? Why did everybody else get a letter, but not me? So here I'm telling you this elaborate story about what I think it is, and it could be something very simple as like, oh, does this guy think I'm not good enough? For three months, we went back and forth. They put me through a bunch of practical exams,

• 8:30Speaker 01

  a bunch of written stuff to make sure I knew what I was doing. So three months time passed. I still didn't know who they were preparing me for. So then they said, hey, here's the address. We want you to go meet the client at 1:30. They just still didn't tell me who it was. They gave me the address. I went over there. This was before the big gated house. You can just go, you could just walk up to the house. So I rang the doorbell once. No one answered. Rang it twice. No one answered. Rang it a third time and Michael Jordan opens up the door.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  Obviously, you were pretty well grounded to be writing that letter, the content of that letter. But there still must have been this interesting euphoria. You had a temper in that moment, didn't you?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Well, you know what? I'm not a starstruck person. That's the one thing. At that moment, that was very advantageous for me. Listen, I admire what they do. I know how hard they work to get to those areas, no matter what line of work they're in. But I'm not a starstruck individual. So I was just like, all right, here's an opportunity. Even though he was the one individual I did not really prepare for as well as I prepared for the other individuals. But since he was on TV so much, just like you described, there was so much emphasis put on him since that shot. So it was easy to understand and gather information about him and watch his game and what he did.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  So that was already kind of innate in my head to see what he needed to work on and what he didn't need to work on. He invited me in the house. Well, the first thing before I walked into us, I had Converse gym shoes on. So we know that wasn't going to work. So I had to take those shoes off. So we went inside the house. We talked for about 45 minutes. I explained my philosophy to him, what my ideas and thoughts were. He was all about, he goes, you know, I need to get bigger. I need to get stronger. And I was like, yeah, okay, let that's down the line. These are the things we need to address right now. And he was the first individual that probably came at him and didn't allow him just to. Dominate the conversation and say, hey, this is what I want. And I was like, no,

• 10:30Speaker 01

  this is in order for this to work, this is what we need to do. And the things I told him that were more important was, you know, he's been, I want to be more athletic. I want to be explosive. I want to be more stronger. I want to be able to do these things. So when I said, well, you have some injuries, you have these little nagging injuries that come all the time, your ankle injuries, groin strains, your hamstrings. I said, let's address those things. If we address those things, you'll automatically be stronger. You're automatically faster. You're automatically able to jump high. You're automatically be a better basketball player. So you're not, imagine your body functioning at an optimum level. So he goes to me, this doesn't sound right. I said, it doesn't get any righter. I said, give me a chance. Let me prove what I can do. We never discussed money.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  We never discussed any of this. He goes, I'll give you 30 days and 30 days turned into 15 years.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Of those 30 days, how many days per week were you getting?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Every single day that they had practice or a game, I was with him.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  For the, you know, the average Joes out there, they're kind of curious. I mean, obviously, whatever a training program you give for one of the world's greatest athletes is not going to be the average Joe training program. What did you start to do in those first 30 days that got him hooked? Was it particular exercises? It was the mindset talk? What was it? Was it just you? What got him hooked on your direction?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  What got him hooked was I told him exactly how he was going to feel and where he was going to feel things. 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours, 96. I was telling him, say, hey, this is what your mind and body is going to feel during these times. When we do this particular exercise, this is what we're going to do. This is what, how your body is going to feel. This is what you're going to be able to do on the court. This is what's going to be a little bit difficult here. This is the time you're going to have to adjust your shot. So all these things were laid out. It was kind of like already telling him what the future was going to be as it related to his body. So he could make the adjustments that were necessary. And when we do this exercise, you may feel hair. We do. Do this, your ankle is going to have a lot more mobility here. When we do this thing,

• 12:39Speaker 01

  your hips are going to open up more over here. And also, the program that I did was, it wasn't conventional to what everybody else would do. Normally, you see people in gyms and where they work out. I'm just going to use a shoulder press movement, for an example. You'll always see, if they have 30-pound dumbbells in one hand, they're going to have a 30-pound dumbbell in the other hand. And I would hand him different weights in different hands and have different reps for one side versus the other. Because I would say, listen, one side is already overused when you constantly play. This is the direction. So now, we need to focus in more on the other side. You have a strength deficit on this side, so we need to use more weight on one side, less

• 13:21Speaker 01

  weight on the other side. And the same thing with his legs. So stuff that was actually still is unconventional to this day. He started to see the results quickly, and with me being able to tell him, hey, this is how you're going to feel. And him, okay, well, this guy actually knows what he's talking about.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  You're a guy in your twenties at this moment in time, right? Mid to late twenties?

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  And so is he. You know, he's got a couple of years on you, I think, if I'm right. And you wanted to train pro athletes. Was he your first pro athlete?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  He was my first professional athlete.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  This is the craziest story, Tim, right? Really, this is the craziest story. What I love about it is the letter part, man. That's what people don't understand. I did a bunch of that kind of stuff and met some really interesting people from a similar technique. And people just don't understand that idea of just you having that self-confidence to go give it a shot. Yes, there's some serendipity. It's fortuitous that Michael spotted it, but still, you had to take action.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  You have to take action. No one's paying attention to you unless you take action. I have this thing that says, hey, what's the one thing that hasn't gone up in price in the world? Talk. Talk is cheap. It's always going to be cheap. It's the action you put behind that talk. It's the action you put behind your studies. It's the action you put behind your education. It's the action you put behind the action that allows you to get closer to winning. And it was just like, hey, this is, I saw the opportunity. This is what's going to happen. And okay, you know what? I had rather given it my best during this opportunity. To try to get whatever was available than to not have even sent those letters and found out somebody else who either sent those letters or ran into them by accident,

• 15:03Speaker 01

  ended up having the career that I ended up having. That regret would have hurt me more than me not getting the opportunity to work with him, but I know I did everything possible to get to that area.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  I still remember your name coming up back in the day, but it was all secretive. Everyone kind of knew that Michael Jordan had this trainer. There was no leaks. No one knew what was going on. It was all kind of like this, who's this guy, Tim, this mystery thing, you know? Jordan's great. What's, who's the trainer? What's going on?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I didn't speak to the media. I knew my role. My role was like, listen, obviously back then there was no social media, but even if there was social media, I would have not been that person. You could see that even on my social media, it's very rarely do I do post anything about my clients unless they tell, unless they either tell me to, or that there's a reason behind it. To me, the best endorsement you can get is when your athlete talks about you, whenever that is. If he's ever asked, let him explain. My job is to be that person behind the scenes, keep him as healthy as possible, keep him as strong as possible, keep functioning at the highest level, let his results speak

• 16:09Speaker 01

  for my work. I would just show up. I would do my job. And Michael always had this saying. Later on in his career, when other athletes would ask if they could work with me, he would say, hey, he goes, listen, I don't pay Tim to train me. He goes, I pay him not to train anyone else.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  I caught you saying that on the Skip and Shannon show the other day, and I thought it was great. How quickly did you get beyond with Michael? And I want to talk a little Kobe and perhaps some other clients later in the conversation, but how quickly did you get past only the physical with Michael to the winning mindset conversations with Michael? How did that unfold?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Well, obviously I had to build a trust. He was extremely competitive. He had his thought process. So people come in as a quote unquote trainer expert. They try to throw everything at an individual. I've always taken things into pieces. I was like, okay, let's figure out something about. Let's master one concept first before we delve into the other, before we delve into the other. So the mindset actually was the last thing I wanted to address. First thing was the physical part. The second thing was the nutrition part. Then the third thing was the mental aspect. As I saw him mastering the physical aspect of it, then we started to put more emphasis on the nutrition part. We started to add that component in there. Then we started to drip the mental component in there.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  And what I would do was I would watch him. I would watch his different, I would watch his body language. I would see how he, I'd ask him how was practice and what went on, because I didn't work for the organization, so I didn't have access to all the practices. So, hey, what happened in practice? He would tell me, hey, how'd you handle this situation? And then he goes, man, you asked a lot of questions. Yeah, I said, it's important for me to ask these questions so I can get a better understanding of what's going on in your head. I'd watch how he handled the media. I'd watch how he did after a win, after a loss, his tone, how he talked to different teammates. I would ask him questions, hey, why'd you do this? Why'd you do this? And he would tell me why he did certain situations. I would keep notes of those things.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  I would point out things like, he would handle a situation one way, and I would see how this teammate played and reacted the following game. Then if he handled that same situation in a different way, how that teammate played and handled. And I would ask, hey, what did you say? What did you say to that individual? What did you say to that person? What happened here? And then I would point out, hey, this is the result you got, this is the result you didn't get when you handled this situation one way, when you handle a situation the other way. He would lose his temper in a certain game, and how he would react towards the referees or what he would say. I would take and pinpoint everything that happened before and afterwards and see how

• 18:54Speaker 01

  the psychology of what was going on in his head and the different results he was getting with the different emotions, thoughts, and actions that were going on with all these different things going on. Everyone got a chance to see the last dance, and you got to see how competitive he was. So this wasn't always him learning from me. This was a lot of me learning from him and understanding that mindset of that individual, how important winning was to him.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  If we keep it at the Pistons for a moment, a big roadblock in his success. And I remember watching all those games and all those series and, you know, especially the early series where the Bulls could not overcome. And you know, those guys were, I don't want to say anything bad. I mean, I enjoy any team that can win and they, that was a cohesive Pistons team and they could win, but they played a brand of basketball back there in the late eighties, early nineties that I think if the young kids today had to experience, they might just run off the, they might run off the floor crying. I mean, those guys were, they were rough and tumble, weren't they?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yes, they were. They did whatever the rules allowed them to do. Here it was. That's what it was. And they knew there was like, hey, listen, Chuck Daly had a rule. He goes, don't let Michael get airborne. If he gets in the air, we're in trouble. So that was like, hey, knock him on the floor, knock him on his ass, do what he's supposed to do. Make sure every time he comes to the lane, there are many hands on him. Every time there's a foul, make sure there's another foul afterwards. You can't be called for two fouls. So there was a strategy that was put into place and they knew that it's just like boxing. If you continue to take those blows over and over and over again, it is going to take an adverse effect. It is.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  We had to develop that body and develop those muscles, not to be like a Teflon shield where he could take those blows and not only take those blows, be able to dish it out. And then when the Pistons saw that those blows weren't having the same effect anymore, then the psychological advantage kind of turned to the Bulls' favor.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  This winning mindset that you write about, it's so motivational. I mean, anyone with a pulse, even if they can't execute, even if they're just breezily going through your book, when you start to wrap your arms around this winning mindset, it really does energize you. And I think one thing, and I want you to run with this and explain to people, so much we hear in life is all about balance. Okay, you're going to be a super high achiever and you're going to have balance and all this other kind of stuff. How many super high achievers have you met with, quote, balance?

• 21:26Speaker 01

  None.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  There we go.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Plain and simple, none. And you said high achievers is right there. Now, you'll get individuals who have reached that pinnacle of achievement, and now they have other people doing stuff for them, or they've developed enough wealth, or whatever winning means to them, and now they can balance their lives a little bit more because they don't have those things. But nobody wants to talk about the time those high achievers took to get there, how many years and hours and decades they may have sacrificed where they didn't have any balance. Because what happens is, like I said in the book, winning demands obsession, or you'll find someone else to consume. Winning wants all of you. There is no balance. Everybody tells you, you need to have more balance. You need to have more balance.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  You don't find balance. That's the problem. You don't find balance. You create it. You create balance, and what you create balance, and your definition of balance, could be completely different than somebody else's. What happens when people tell you, you need more balance? Well, you start to add more. You start to add. Everybody says, oh, well, now, okay, I need more balance, so I need to spend more time here, more time here, more time here. So when somebody says you need more balance, you actually become more unbalanced, because now you're trying to do all these things all over the place. It's like a juggler. I don't juggle, but I know it's a lot easier to juggle three things than it is to juggle 30 things. So when people tell you, you

• 22:53Speaker 01

  need more balance, you kind of keep adding stuff, and that's not the way. How do you get closer to the balance that you want to create for yourself? It's not by the addition. It's by the deletion. It's by deleting the unessentials. It's deleting the unessential people in your life. It's deleting the unessential habits. It's deleting the unessential thoughts. It's deleting the unessential actions. It's deleting all these things that you need to do to be able to create that balance what you want. Remember, time for everything equals time for nothing. Balance is personal. It is personal. You don't want those scales tipping all the way, but you have to decide how much, where it's going to be, how much you want them to tip, where that balance

• 23:36Speaker 01

  Is going to be for that high achiever. There's not a single individual out there. I know it sounds good. I don't talk the rah rah language. That's not me because that's not what winning is about. Everybody wants to make it sound good like you need to have balance in your life in order to achieve these things and all this other stuff. Your greatest winners, your most successful business people, your most successful teachers, your educators, your social workers, whatever it is, they have very low balance in their life.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  You could not have known everything you knew back in the day when you first met Michael that you know today. He must have been very comfortable with the idea of betting on you, betting on your energy, knowing that you knew a lot at that moment in time, but he was also betting on, I'm assuming, that you were going to be a constant learner as well.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  One of the first things he told me, he said, you better keep up. You better keep up. That wasn't keeping up with him in traffic. That meant keeping up with him in life, keeping up with how things moved, how he studied, how he learned, how his brand grew. It had to be the same way. He adapted to situations. He adapted. He adjusted. He overcame. We all had to do that. And if you couldn't, you were replaced often. And there was many people that were part of his circle that didn't stay in that circle very long because they couldn't keep up. They didn't adjust. They didn't adapt. And we knew every time he won a championship that you had to make another

• 25:06Speaker 01

  adjustment because he was going to make an adjustment. And after each championship, he would always come up to me and say, hey, what's next? Because he knew if he came back exactly the same, and as good as he was, if he came back exactly the same, winning was not going to open its doors for him. It was going to be somebody else. So he knew he had to get better. We knew we had to get better. His training had to get better. His mindset had to get better. You know, his schedule, everything had to get better. Everything had to get a little bit better. We knew we had to figure those ways out. If we allowed him to figure those things out, then he Isn't allowed to do what he does best.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  It was our job to figure those things out and implement those things. He put us in a position of trust. He said, I trust you guys to do this stuff. So make sure you get it done. Make sure you stay on top of things. And every now and then he would test him and say, hey, did you hear so and so? I say, yes, I already know. Or he'll be like, oh, this athlete is doing this. Or have you heard about this method? Already did the research on it. Already got it. This is why we would use this. No, this is not we're going to use this. This is why it's beneficial for this athlete, but it's not beneficial for you. And if we didn't know, this was extremely important with him. The part of being able to keep up. If we didn't know, we didn't guess. We didn't guess. We would say, I don't know, but I'm going to find out.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Because if you're asking somebody a question, they don't need you to guess. They can guess on their own. Have the answer. If you don't know the answer, go find the answer out. Don't BS that person.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  I want to go into a little Kobe in a second, but big picture wise, obviously you had a tremendous effect on what other people were seeing. Okay, they see Michael Jordan's results and people want to know who's the trainer he's working with. Speak to just big picture today across pro sports to the extent that you can or want to. How many pro athletes? I mean, the NBA is a pretty rarefied group. What 300 guys, maybe? I mean, there's some of the, some of the best athletes on the planet already. Some very natural, kind of born with it. Some work really hard at it. How many guys or however you want to quantify this? Where are we in terms of, if we look at the population of the NBA?

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Guys that are employing the mindset and techniques that you have helped put forward? Do more guys today feel compelled to do it? Or is it still, there's still a rarefied air of people going all the way with the kind of mindset and techniques that you use?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Well, all the way, not many. There are quite a few players, maybe every single player at some level is using some kind of outside coach, whether it be a skill coach, or maybe a strength and conditioning individual. I'd say that's at a very high percentage. Whether that individual is adapting the program for that person, that I can't say. Now, it's become more, who are the results aimed for? Because you get a lot of individuals that the first thing they do is before they even train a client, they already got a picture of that individual up on Instagram. Well, whose brand are you trying to build? Are you worried about the results? Are you trying to build your own brand? What is it? And I understand the trajectory of how people do business now has changed, and people want

• 28:23Speaker 01

  to get the information out there. But I always say, let the results speak for themselves. The mindset stuff is extremely difficult. And this is a good segue into talking about Kobe, because everybody talked about the mama mentality, the mama mentality. And I've said this to more individuals. I said, the mama mentality is not a mentality, it's a lifestyle. All right. And I've seen mama mentality destroy and hinder more careers than it's actually helped.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Define the mama mentality for those that might not be core basketball fans.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Mama mentality is, in a nutshell, a no prisoner mentality. That's what it is. It's just when you're competing, nothing else matters. When you are in that, when you're in your competitive nature, whether it, not only in games, whether it's in practice, whether it's just shooting free throws, whatever it is, you are so ultra-focused that nothing else matters around you. It's to the point where you are so selfish about winning.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  The zone, the flow state.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Yes, it's just those things. And you don't come down to anybody else's level. You make them rise to yours. You don't back down. It's a place where your mind is always stronger than your feelings. It's a huge thing over there. You understand. You don't, you don't say something nice to somebody because you don't want to hurt their feelings. It's like it's truth. It's 100% truth. They always want you to be honest until it's time to be honest with them. You get to a certain point in your career where people are afraid to say no to you, are afraid to say, hey, this is wrong, or this is incorrect. There's better ways of handling certain situations. That's what mama mentality is.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  So people love to say it. They love to hit like one basketball shot or throw one touchdown or whatever it is and say, oh, it's mama mentality. No mama mentality. You don't talk about mama mentality. You're just like, you go out there, you produce the results, you show what you're supposed to do.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  What's the root of that in Kobe? Where did that start in him?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  So what happened was he was going through a personal issue in his life at a certain stage in his career. And he wanted to create a separate alter ego identity to separate the two of what he was going on in his personal life and what was going on on the basketball court. And I talk about this in a book, Winning, uh, the movie Kill Bill. I don't know if you're familiar with that movie, but in the movie, there was an assassin named the Black Mamba. So obviously, you know, Kobe's looking at something, he's not going to name his alter ego after a garden snake. He's going to name it after the most venomous snake out there. He saw the idea there and it kind of evolved into this thing of this personality

• 31:09Speaker 01

  of when I step into practice, when I go to play the games, when I'm on the road, this is the mentality I need to have. When I step in between those lines, this is who I am. It allowed him to focus, like you said, be in that flow state and be that individual where it was no prisoners, no second guessing, knowing that in order to win, that he had to use his heart less. He had to use his mind more, not worry about other people's feelings. Didn't care what anybody thought about how he played, what he said, and being able to constantly stay in that flow state that you were talking about.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  I still remember some of those Boston series with Kobe. And as a Celtics fan, I was just like, damn, you know, I grudgingly had to admit to myself, this guy is too. Too good. I mean, he was just deadly. You had a nice setup on, on, on Michael, but speak to some of that one-on-one with you and Kobe. I mean, I'm not trying to compare and contrast. They've each got hellaciously incredible careers on their own, independently, just different stages and different generations and all that kind of stuff. Speak to your involvement with Kobe, perhaps a contrasted difference, something that was more unique in working with him.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  The two biggest differences, I would say, was Michael had full trust in me. It was just like, hey, I hired you, go do what you're supposed to do. I shouldn't have to question you. If I have to question you, just have the right answer, as I mentioned earlier. Kobe wanted to know everything. He wanted to know every single detail. He wanted to know why we were doing this exercise, why we were doing this exercise in this particular order. Why am I eating this thing? Why do you have me taking a nap at this time? He wanted to know every single detail.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  His questioning probably made you better, though, huh?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  It did make me better. I don't mind that. If I'm going to challenge you, you have the right to challenge me. Every single thing. And here's the thing, if I can't explain to you why we're doing something and why I have you thinking this way, or why I have you eating something, or why I'm having you do this exercise, why I don't have you doing this exercise, we shouldn't be doing it. We shouldn't be doing it. There's a reason behind every single thing. And that reason is to get you a step closer to your next win. Challenge me all you want. And this was a way for him also to see, am I developing a program that was a Kobe Bryant program and not what a Michael Jordan program was? Yeah, there were pieces and foundations that were crossed.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  He wanted to make sure I wasn't just taking what Michael did because his body type was different, his gameplay, the way he played was different. I wasn't just taking what worked for one individual and trying to force it onto him. And he would ask, he goes, hey, did you have Michael do this thing? But I would say, yes, I had Michael do this, or no, I didn't have him do this. Yeah, I had Michael do this, this way, but I'm having you doing this way. This is why I have you eating this, and I had Michael eating this because your metabolic rates are different in different stages of your careers and everything. This is why I want you thinking about these things. I had Michael thinking about other things over here. There was a reason behind everything.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Got the preparation. I can think back to when you first met Michael and then meeting Kobe, other athletes, but the preparation, I mean, you're not making it sound easy, but there is a heck of a lot of preparation for you in particular, when you're dealing with individuals that are at this particular level. There's no faking it. I mean, you've got to be so prepared. I could just imagine, you must have been burning the midnight oil, so to speak, in terms of your preparation every time you dealt with another high achiever in terms of professional athletes.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  I've birthed through so much midnight oil, I think I might have caused some of the gas prices to go up. I had no choice. Going back to Michael early in his career, I always tell people, I was the original Fitbit. So what I would do is I'd go to the game. I was blessed enough to go to majority of the games. I could watch the games, but I couldn't pay attention to the details that I wanted to. For our younger viewers, they're going to have no idea what I'm talking about here. There was these machines called Betamax's and VHS recorders that you would actually record a game on. I would set that up to record the game. So then after the games, I would come home because I knew the workout for the next morning. I had to re-watch

• 35:40Speaker 01

  the game because I had to count all of MJ's steps. I had to count how many steps he took to the left, how many steps he took to the right, backwards, forward, sideways, how many jumps he did. Because if I didn't have that information, I wasn't prepared for the next workout tomorrow because I needed to know if one side was more fatigued than the other, that the right knee and the right ankle and the right hip take more stress than the left? And what parts, there was a part that he fell and how did, you know, what happened after that? So I literally would come home, it would be about midnight, sit there, watch all the games again, do all the details, and then have to be back at Michael's the next morning,

• 36:23Speaker 01

  depending on what time the workout was. And the workouts were usually at 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM, or 7:00 AM. So I would literally be going on anywhere from three to four hours sleep at the most.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  I got a kind of a side tangent question here before I bring it back to something that Kobe. Said, but in working with pro athletes, especially let's say the NBA guys up and down the court, who knows how many miles they're running in a game. Is it possible for these guys to get to their 50s and 60s and still be not physically damaged? They're giving it all during their 20s and 30s and it's kind of like no prisoner and they they kind of lose something.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  100% if you see a professional athlete in their 50s and 60s. Listen, obviously stuff is changing now, but still, if you've given it all for 15, 20 years, there is going to be a body part or body parts that you're not going to be able to walk straight, your fingers aren't, your fingers aren't going to be straight, your wrists, your elbows, your shoulders, your knees, there is going to be a detriment to something physically. If you're giving everything you got, if you're literally playing and practicing at the highest, highest level. I have some of the top condition athletes that played the most amount of games in their

• 37:39Speaker 01

  career and I don't have one, not one, that doesn't have a issue after they retire. The crazy part about all this is we paid particular attention to all the areas that have a tendency to get injured. We paid attention to the ankles, we paid attention to the wrists, the fingers, just things that nobody else would think about. There's still physical issues with them.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  I love this line from Kobe, it's on the first page of your book and I don't think I've seen it before. I mean, I guess I should have seen it before, but rest at the end, not in the middle. And that gets back to some of the mindset stuff, the beginning of our conversation. But I thought that's a good philosophical jumping off point as you and I wind down. Rest at the end, not in the middle. I guess a lot of people can interpret that in many ways. Why don't you give the Kobe interpretation and you can add some context and color to it?

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Well, you know what? This fits in real good with the second to last chapter in the book where it says, winning's not a marathon, it's a sprint with no finish line. A lot of individuals think they have the luxury of taking their time. You don't have the luxury of taking your time. You just don't because time is something that we have no idea when it's going to be taken away from us. So when you get a lot of individuals that just kind of like are at cruise control, yeah, you know what? I got time, I may have time to figure this out and so forth. Those individuals are constantly managing time. They're the individuals that manage time, manage time, manage time. The one thing we did with all our athletes and the whole idea about resting at the end and not resting in the middle.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Start managing focus because when you start managing focus, you have so much more time. You have so much more time. Oh, just think about when you're in that state where you're so focused. How much more you can get done during that time when you're managing that focus instead of managing time. And people that manage your time all the time, they love to rest in the middle. They always like, oh, it's a break time here. I can take a little. No, I'm not telling you, listen, you need to rejuvenate. You need to get distracted a little bit. You need to let that mind rest. You need to re-energize physically and mentally. But don't stay in that rest state for a long period of time.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  The people that stay in that rest state for a long period of time don't have the ability to finish. They don't have the ability to win because they have a tendency to get comfortable. It's, we used to talk about this all the time is, you know, everyone says, you know, it's about the journey. Yeah, it is about the journey, but the journey has to have a destination. It has to have a destination. These individuals, they enjoyed the journey, but each one of their journeys had a destination. And that destination allowed them to rest at the end of that journey. Because they knew the next journey was going to start back up again. So for individuals that are out there, if you want to put something together with that line where it says, hey, rest at the end, not in the middle.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Start managing focus and stop managing time.

• 40:45Speaker 00

  What's so cool about your work, your book, your books, several books, is that this winning mindset, too many people, maybe they get out of high school and they move into just a Regular job or whatever and they lose the feeling of what winning is about. They don't have anything in their life where they're competing still. It's like the spring unwinds. The only reason I wake up every day is I'm chasing a win. I'm chasing a win. If I'm not chasing a win, what am I doing? I mean, I wake up every day energized to work on the stuff that I'm working on. I am chasing a win every damn day, every day. I can't turn it off. But I think too many people, and you know this more than I, too many people lose that. They don't have it.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  I do think your book is a great reminder of folks that, and regardless of how old they are. I love finding those YouTube videos of there's two guys like 100 years old, running 100 meter dashes in under 20 seconds.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Oh, I love those things too. Yes.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  Those are great. That stuff is great, you know? Speak to that issue though of like people that perhaps think, well, you know, I'm past it. I can't do this. I mean, they really can do it. They just need a swift kick and then you know what?

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Those individuals, and this happens at a lot of stages in people's lives. When did you quit? When did you give up? What made you give up? What made you quit? That's what you have to address. That's what you have to address because the ability to win is in all of us. Winning is everywhere. It's every minute you have the opportunity to win. I also think a lot with everything that's been going on in the, in the world these last year and a half, two years, whatever it was, people forgot what a win looks like. They forgot what it feels like. They've forgotten and they've gotten comfortable. They've gotten comfortable. They've gotten comfortable making excuses. They've gotten comfortable blaming somebody else. They're looking for, they're looking for their wins to wear a halo all the time.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  And winning doesn't wear a halo all the time. A lot of the times it comes at you with fangs. Just like what you said, you get up every single morning excited. You get up every single morning excited to, hey, listen, what's the next win I can get? You're not looking for steps. You're not looking for the easiest way. You're not looking for five easy steps to get this win or five steps to greatness. You're not looking for 10 steps to super mindset. Those individuals that lose it, they're constantly looking for. The easiest way they're constantly looking for that one thing. How many times, Michael, do you get asked all this time? If you could give me one piece of advice, God, don't we wish it was that easy? If it's just one piece of advice. Those pieces of advice are infinite.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Those steps are also infinite. They're constantly shifting. They're constantly changing. Sometimes you see them under your feet. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you can't even walk up those steps. When people, what happens is the ones that give up, they're looking to constantly walk up those steps and they're looking for an escalator to carry them. And they just don't understand that sometimes you gotta sit on those steps. You gotta crawl on those steps. You gotta fall down those steps. So they're just like, you know what? I just don't want to do this today. And then today turns into tomorrow, the next day, the next day, the next day, the next day. Winning requires you to show up every single day. It doesn't care about what happened yesterday. It could care less what had happened a year ago. It could care less about what happened 10 years ago.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  And too many times people get comfortable and they use their surroundings, their environments, their past, their present situation as excuses that allow them to put themselves in a comfort zone of always being a victim instead of being the victor.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Someone can't win for you. You've got to go win it. You can't hire someone to win for you.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Your obligation has to be greater than anybody else's obligation to you.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  The book, Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness. Motivational stuff. It's nighttime for me here in Asia, so now you've got me all jacked up. I will not be able to fall asleep.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Where are you?

• 44:45Speaker 00

  I'm in Saigon, Vietnam.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness. How long you been there?

• 44:49Speaker 00

  Eight years. I was randomly living in San Diego, got invited on a speaking tour for one of my books and I loved Asia and I said, well, gosh. I was in 20 cities in a three month stretch and I had the most fun in Saigon. So I said, I'm gonna stay.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  That's winning. That's winning. That is, how many people have come up to you and says, man, I could never, I could never do that. Or like, man, I wish I could do that. Well, why didn't you? You know, that's you did it.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  I think you make an interesting point there, and I'm sure you could compare it to many other things. When it happens, you have to go. When it's go time and you see it, you can't hesitate, you must take it. Like you said, okay, you'll get too comfortable, you'll forget about it, you'll make excuses, etc., etc.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  That's a great point, and I'll end with this. In the book, you said, listen, we're all going to have fear, but you can't have doubt. You had fear, you're like, ah, do I really want to do this? But you didn't have any doubt that it was the right situation to you. Winning requires you to have no doubt.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  That's a great one. Again, the book, Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness. Tim, the book is everywhere, all that kind of fun stuff. Lots of great interviews that I've seen with you for this book. Where can we send people? Is there a website you want to direct them to?

• 45:55Speaker 01

  I'm the easiest person to find. My website is timgrover.com, and my Instagram is @timgrover.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  Tim, cool stuff. I appreciate you coming on.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Thank you, Michael. Take care.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  My guest today has an endorsement on the front of his book, from Eli Manning, two-time Super Bowl MVP. Studying confidence with Dr. Zenzer helped me win two Super Bowls. Who doesn't want that endorsement? That's just fabulous. My guest today is Nate Zenzer. He is the Director of the Performance Psychology Program at the United States Military Academy at West Point. This is the most comprehensive mental training program in the country. He has helped two generations of cadets develop their leadership in the US Army. And as I mentioned, Eli Manning, he has also helped out numerous pro athletes and pro sports

• 47:00Speaker 00

  teams. Our conversation today is about confidence primarily, and everything that stems from confidence. Because, look, we all need a little bit of that unshakable performance, and Nate has done the hard work. He's figured out what we all need to know. Without any further delay, let's jump right into my conversation today about the Confident Mind with Nate Zinser. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Confidence is an awesome word, and I like to think of myself as being a pretty confident person, but it ebbs and flows. Sometimes I'll be a little more confident, sometimes it'll drop. But I'm used to this ebb and flow aspect to it. I'm used to thinking of it, not the way you define it, because you really get into the nitty gritty, where most people don't ever think of it at that level. But I'm used to thinking about it as something, as a tool, as a resource, as an asset. And I don't think a lot of people do think about it like that. I think a lot of athletes do, a lot of high performance people, but regular people, I think confidence can be a really tough word for them, a tough concept. How did you first get started with the word confidence?

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Well, I think I got interested in the concept way back, even in like, middle school, when I noticed that there were some intangibles that had a profound effect on the performance of high school athletes. I think I narrowed my interest in confidence down probably 10 or 15 years ago, when it seemed that of all the topics in the sports psychology toolkit, confidence seemed to be the one that most of the Division One athletes, the professional athletes, the aspiring Division One athletes, this was the thing that confounded

• 49:08Speaker 02

  them the most. This was what they came into my office asking about most of the time. I don't have the same confidence I used to. I need to get my confidence back. They expressed it in so many ways. That's how I got into it. And really, over the last decade, working on the book and bringing the book to completion, it's really impressed me more and more. I wasn't wrong. This is the most important topic in all the sport and performance psychology literature.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  Let me keep it at that high school level for a moment. I played high school baseball. I played a year into college and then just didn't have the interest to keep going. I guess I could have. I mean, I for sure could have, but I just didn't have the interest. I had a childhood friend though, who stayed with it. He was probably the best player in the city up till age 12. Then we got to the big diamond, the big baseball diamond. He didn't grow. He left high school at like 5'7", 150 pounds. Somehow or another, he got himself into St. Bonaventure's baseball program as a freshman in college. Then he started growing. He got up to be about 6'4", 215. Eventually, he signed a free agent contract with the Astros because he could throw over 90 miles an hour.

• 50:21Speaker 00

  But it was a great case of kind of confidence and endurance and all that kind of sticking with it. What did you see and what was really motivating you early on? When you mentioned these intangibles with high school athletes. My nephew right now is a senior in high school. I've just watched three of his games. His team plays for the state final in one week in the state of Virginia. You watch these guys at that level. Okay, they're going to play for the state final. There's a lot of very confident athletes at 17 and 18. I mean, they got a spring in their step. What was some of that was influencing you back in the day when you would see those intangibles?

• 50:58Speaker 02

  The fact that there was one team and one team only at this private boys' day school that I attended, which was year after year, a powerhouse. There was only this one team. It was our soccer team. Year after year, they were dominant. Year after year, they would win the New Jersey Prep School championship or the Union County championship or this and that. They would lick not only the small boys' schools in our same league and demographic, but they'd also beat up on big public school teams. And it was the only team in the school that had that kind of consistent domination of its sport.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  What was so curious to me was that you could take several of those players from that soccer team, put them on the basketball. Team, put them on the lacrosse team, put them on the baseball team, put them wherever. This is back in the days when boys played two and three sports consistently. If you were an athlete, you played a lot of sports. This was well before the era of specialization. But if you could put these same fellows on other teams, they just didn't perform as well. And there was something about the way that coach and that coaching staff communicated to the soccer players in the context of soccer. That if you hang with the sport, if you maybe go to a summer camp, you're probably going to play for us as a junior and a senior.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  And every year, the team was packed. You'd have five or six starting seniors, three or four starting juniors, and one hot shot sophomore who you knew in two years was going to be the captain. And so every year, there was this mystique, a very functional, self fulfilling prophecy about this particular sport. And it didn't exist for any other team at the school. And I have this very powerful memory that I've shared with a lot of people of sitting at the lunch table one day, I think I'm in ninth grade. And I'm explaining to a couple other guys in my class

• 53:05Speaker 02

  that if our class gets a little seasoning, gets a little practice, gets some experience, we could have a really good wrestling team in a couple of years. Now, the backstory is that our wrestling team at the school had been a doormat for decades. But I was thinking, we might be pretty good because we got some good guys in our class. And this fellow, this classmate, looked across the table from me and said, Nate, shut up. You're never going to be any good. Guys at this school don't wrestle well. We're good in soccer, we're good sometimes in swimming and sometimes in tennis, but we've never been good in wrestling and we never will be. I was really taken aback by that, that this fellow could have such a clear crystal ball about the future. And again, it was another self fulfilling prophecy that was operating in his mind.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  And I'm proud to say that in my junior year, our wrestling team had the first winning season in decades. And we had another winning season as a senior. Since then, the school has not been a doormat in wrestling. It's not necessarily a powerhouse. That change wasn't so much because we were such talented wrestlers. It was because we refused to buy in to the status quo. We refused to buy into the belief that we couldn't be big. That was an experience of mine that really highlighted how important confidence, the way you think about yourself, the sense of certainty that you have about yourself in a given situation, really expresses itself in the performance arena.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  When I listened to what you just said, I wanted to say confidence is contagious, but then I thought to myself, no, confidence can be contagious because for some people, if they don't have the right frame of mind, it won't be contagious, or it won't be, to use a better word than contagious, it won't be learned.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  I think you're absolutely dead on with that. Confidence is such a personal, such an individual thing, that you can see someone else who has some of it, who's displaying some of it, and you can decide to embrace it, endorse it, or you can decide to discount it. People do all of those things in all kinds of variations, all the time.

• 55:12Speaker 00

  I can think back to playing high school baseball, and I'm sure it's changed for some of the best high school programs today. I know a head coach in Virginia who's won three state titles, but there's something to these mindsets, this confident mind, as you speak of it. If you're exposed to that, it puts you in a so much different place, whereas typically in American sports, there can be a lot of emotion, or maybe even some recklessness, but those folks that kind of see the full playing field and can harness that confidence, boy, it's an entirely different skill set to have.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I think of confidence as a skill, and I love the way you put it in your intro, confidence as an asset, confidence as something that you either have a lot of, or you don't have a lot of it. And as you say, it can ebb and it can flow depending on the situation. I ask young athletes all the time, how much of your success up to this point in your career has really been a function of, or depended on, or a result of your level of confidence? And inevitably, they all say, oh, lots, most of it. Almost all of it. And then I asked them, okay, well, you say the confidence is pretty important,

• 56:30Speaker 02

  and you seem like a pretty smart individual. Do you work on your confidence? Do you work to develop that asset that you just told me was vitally important? Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them are going to look at me cross-eyed and go, "No, I don't do that. I didn't know you could develop confidence." They've never understood it as an asset that can be practiced, improved upon, et cetera. Every once in a while, I get a guy who says, "Hey, absolutely. I work on it all the time." And I say, "Good. Let's talk about that. That's important."

• 57:01Speaker 00

  Now, when someone comes to you, though, regardless of status level, or current achievement, or whatnot, professional, amateur, and we're just going to stick with the athletic story for a second, everyone's a blank slate when they come to you because you've put the time in, you've had a chance to develop this understanding more than the average person. If somebody wanted to compete with you, they could put the time in as well. But you've got this extra advantage that we don't have because we've not put the time in. Let's use a really fun example because I believe this is somebody that you have worked with, a probably future Hall of Fame quarterback, Eli Manning. Now, when you get involved with an Eli Manning for the first time, and you'll have to tell me when you met him and all that,

• 57:43Speaker 00

  you have to still approach that meeting as a blank slate, meaning you can't assume, even though he's had all kinds of success, you can't assume that he knows what you know. How do you approach that first kind of meeting with an Eli Manning or with me?

• 57:58Speaker 02

  Pretty much the same way. I ask, "What brings you into my presence?" I ask, "What do you think you need to learn about or develop in yourself or change?" And I ask, "Well, what does success look like to you?" Based on that, the conversation usually flows. I typically follow those questions up with a conversation about, "Tell me about the times when you have performed beautifully. Tell me about your most successful, memorable, fulfilling moments in your sport, or your art, or your profession." What you're like when you're at your best and give me adjectives that describe your state of mind in those moments.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Once that conversation gets going, so many wonderful things come up because people learn that their state of mind is so important, so directly influencing their level of performance. And we learned about how they get out of that state and how they can get back in it. So often it comes down to, all right, I have to learn to think about myself in more constructive terms. I need to learn to be more certain about myself. And if I can just get to that state of certainty, I open myself up for basically transcendent moments, what they call flow in the popular lexicon.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  Mikhaili Chikisimahai, not a bad pronunciation, huh?

• 59:25Speaker 02

  Not bad. Mihai would be okay with that. I was fortunate to speak with them. I very nearly pursued a master's degree under his tutelage at the University of Chicago. This is going back to 1978. Chikisimahai coined that beautiful term and it has entered into the popular terminology. I am fascinated with those moments of transcendent grace and ease and power. What he called flow, what so many other people just called being in the zone. I've experienced that myself on a few rare and beautiful occasions. And boy, does that keep you coming back for more.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  Let me keep it at Eli Banning for a moment. I'm not going to let you escape. We've got a guy who's gonna probably be in the Hall of Fame. He won two Super Bowls. Now, for every aspiring quarterback out there, whether they are in grade school, high school, college, or in the pros. When somebody says that studying with you, Nate, helped him to win two Super Bowls. Now, there's a lot of different ways that people can get insights to become a better quarterback. But when Eli says that you helped him to win two Super Bowls.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  He's not going to say that if he didn't believe it. Now, of course, you can't reveal everything. You can't discuss everything. Maybe you could, I'm not sure. What can you pass along to us that could give us perhaps American football fans that watched those two games against the Patriots? What can you give us as to why he says that about you? Him personally, what did he take away? What did you help him with in particular? We all have to imagine being Eli Manning, a professional quarterback for the New York Giants, who's already achieved some pretty high milestones just to get there. How did you help him?

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  I would say, and this is how I reported it back to head coach Tom Coughlin at the conclusion of our first season working together, which was that marvelous year of 2007 into 2008, when Eli won his first Super Bowl and won his first Super Bowl MVP award. What I helped Eli do was have a sense of himself that was independent of stats, independent of wins and losses, independent of what sportswriters and fans all thought of him. I helped him cultivate his own sense of certainty about himself.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  I helped him understand that he could maintain that sense of certainty regardless of what the world was saying about him, regardless of which stadium he was playing in, regardless of which offensive linemen were in the lineup that day to block for him, which receivers he had in the lineup to throw to, whether the receivers ran the right routes, caught the balls that were thrown to him, whether he threw great throws, okay throws, or some real wounded ducks that ended up getting intercepted. I helped him maintain a sense of himself that was independent of all of that. That's the quick answer.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  What's interesting about the way that you say that is I think for people that know American football, if you take out the two Super Bowl wins, I think I'm safe to say this, and I'm not trying to be cocky because I'm just a guy. I'm not, I'm not an NFL quarterback, but I think it's safe to say that the chances for Eli Manning to get into the Hall of Fame without the two Super Bowl wins is probably zero.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, slim and none. His regular season one lost record is only 500. But when the chips were down in the biggest moments of his career, Eli delivered, and that's what he's going to be remembered for.

• 1:03:13Speaker 00

  Absolutely. What's so great about this, and I was thinking about it earlier, is regardless of whether we're talking football, or military, or just daily walk of life, human beings, except for perhaps Shaquille O'Neal, we're all roughly, give or take, in the same physical space. Meaning, for an NFL quarterback, I mean, Eli Manning is physically is another guy. I mean, there's all kinds of other guys. I mean, I look in professional baseball, there are all kinds of guys in professional baseball that are all-stars who are 5'9", 180 pounds.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Right. They don't stand out physically. Absolutely.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  Right. You might pass him in the airport, and you have no earthly idea. You just passed a guy who's making $20 million a year as a professional athlete. And I think that's what's really interesting about your work is because that six inches between the ears is, once you put aside the physical, which, okay, we can all kind of get there if we want that. Well, I mean, not everybody, but whatever. The mental side is all of it.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  Can't argue with that. That's why I'm in business. The world of professional sports is finally paying formal attention to that importance. They've always paid a little bit of attention to it, but now they're addressing it a little more formally, a little more directly. The military is doing the same thing. There are 25 army posts across the country, one in South Korea, one in Italy, one in Germany, where soldiers are being taught much of the same curriculum that we've been teaching here at West Point since 1988. So it's getting out there because people are finally realizing that, okay, we've always known.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  That that space between your ears is the most important battle space a soldier, a sailor, a mariner, an airman can have. But now we're going to take the time and the energy and spend the money to address it somewhat formally, so that we're not leaving it up to chance, as we've done in past decades.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  Do you find that some people will come into your world, they want your expertise, they want your insights. This could be sports, it could be military, it could be any walk of life, Fortune 500. They come into your perspective, they want to listen to what you have to say. Perhaps they've paid good money for these insights. And they seem to have all of that opening meeting, they have all of that desire seems to be there. But then they get into what the hard work is, they get into what you really do. And some of these quote, top performers can't go with you, they can't get over the hump, they can't accept where you are. Do you bump into that, where some people just can't go with you

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  to this way of confidence that you look at?

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  I wouldn't say that they can't. I would say, and I say this charitably, they decide not to. It's not that they can't, it's that they won't. The reasons why they might not are many and varied. I think most of them come down to the fact that cultivating a confident attitude runs rather counter to many strong cultural and societal forces that these young men, young women grew up understanding and grew up basing their sense of self and their understanding of what performance was all about. A lot of the things that I share run

• 1:06:48Speaker 02

  very much counter to that. Some people have trouble accepting that and putting these principles into daily practice because it just doesn't mesh with their past enough.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Does it become an argument? Do people want to argue over these ideas with you?

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Sometimes, absolutely. I would say that perhaps the most common

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  Disagreement in cultivating a confident attitude is the idea that if I start looking for the best in myself on a routine, steady, daily basis, following all the principles in the Confident Mind book, I'm likely to become a little too self-satisfied, a little too complacent, a little too happy. And I've always been told that you've got to be hard on yourself. You can't let yourself be satisfied. And it's that misunderstanding, that conflict that prevents people from sometimes embracing my methodology. This is a question that almost always comes up, and it's a question that you can resolve. There is a time and a place

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  to be your own harshest critic, and there's a time and a place to be your own best and most honest friend. Most folks haven't worked that out yet. They need a little guidance. But that is an area of considerable controversy, Michael.

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, before I read a book, especially a book like yours, The Confident Mind, before I read a book, I will quickly skim through it to see if there's anything that I could find that I like disagree with. Your work for someone like me, I say to myself, well, maybe I am not currently executing all that Nate has put together. Maybe I won't execute all, but I can't find disagreement. You know, it's like, where am I finding the disagreement? Because it's just so logical. It's so plainly logical. It's so plainly evident. It's self-evident. And again, this is not like a, I salute you for putting the time and energy in to pull everything together, but it's not because it's like that you did

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  it in particular. It's just you have brought it all together. And when someone sees that you see that amount of work and you see how it's all tied together, to disagree with it is kind of ego.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  Well, thank you. That's a nice compliment. I'll take it.

• 1:09:08Speaker 00

  Let's talk about failure. In my world, in the investing world, it's all about failure because the mantra is cut your losses. Let your winners run and cut your losses, which obviously is going to fit right into your world in many ways, too. For a lot of people, that idea of cutting losses, and that could be money, it could be anything. It could be relationships, it could be some venture you started, whatever the loss is, if something is going bad for you, letting it go and not living with it nonstop. It sounds simple, but it's so hard to execute, huh?

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  Boy, you are dead on with that. Most of the time when I am engaging with a performer, asking them, okay, tell me about those fulfilling moments. Tell me about your state of mind when you're great. I get a few adjectives. I get clear. I get energized. I get instinctive. And then I ask them the question, well, okay, what do you like the rest of the time in your sort of average, everyday moments that aren't very special? They will give me adjectives like, my mind is busy, cluttered, diffuse, overthinking. Just as you advise in the investment world to

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  cut your losses. Stop doing the things that don't work. I'm advising all my clients, okay, let's get away from that busy mind. Let's get away from that overthinking process. Those are the mental habits that interfere with the sense of certainty about yourself, with the sense of trust that opens the door to those magical transcendent moments. It's really, in a sense, mentally, a process of stop doing the things that mess you up.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  I just watched the Washington Football Team yesterday, and they've got a young kid who apparently was out of the league, and a guy named Taylor Heinecke, and they put him onto the team a couple of years ago, and they won a big game yesterday against the Raiders. And a couple of other Washington players went ahead and said about this guy, it doesn't matter. He just keeps coming back. If he throws an interception, he's the same guy. If he throws a touchdown, he's the same guy. He just keeps coming back. And that's a lot where your world is, isn't it?

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I would go so far as to say is that is pretty much where my world is. The ability to be sort of even keeled about oneself in these high pressure moments. Quarterback in the NFL is a very glaring spotlight. You're the guy who touches the ball on every offensive play. Every decision you make, everything that you do is under incredible scrutiny, not just by the play by play analyst on the television broadcast, but by 20 zillion sports bloggers around the country. So the ability to be even keeled like that,

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  to not respond and not to get an incident of inevitable human imperfection to kickstart a process of over analysis, over judgment, over criticism is really important. I would say that is something that Eli Manning always had a little bit of ability to do. And our work really helped him trust his kind of ease of being in the crucible of quarterback. Okay? His nickname amongst the team became Eazy-E because he was never freaked out by mistakes either made by himself

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  or by other people on the team. He was a much more even keeled player as he went into his fourth season, which was his first Super Bowl winning season. So that ability, as you point out, Michael, to be present even when things are going bad is a wonderful characteristic. And young Taylor Heinecke is a great example of that. Who would have expected him to be a starter in the NFL? Not many.

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  A lot of people probably never expected Tom Brady to be. I mean, considering the draft status.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  Well, the only person who really considered Tom Brady to be a starting NFL quarterback and an eventual All-Pro and Super Bowl champion was Tom Brady himself. And that's the way it's got to be with everybody. If you don't think that you're the best player in your position, if you don't think you're the best candidate for the job, then you by default think that somebody else is. How are you going to compete with that?

• 1:13:41Speaker 00

  That right there, that's it in many ways. We bring up Brady and we bring up Manning and the other quarterback. This sense of certainty for any achiever, any performer, having this sense of certainty, this sense that it will happen. That's just so mission critical.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  Couldn't put it better myself.

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  What's interesting about a sense of certainty too, and I find this in my world, I'll have a sense of certainty about something that's going to happen and I place it in my mind and I don't question it. I keep plugging away. Now, some of those senses of certainty about whatever might not happen. I've occasionally shifted to something else, but that doesn't bother me. Like, okay, so what? But you have to have that sense of certainty. You know, if you pick some big hairy audacious goal, if it's out of the norm, if it's something that you don't have the pedigree for, if you don't have the CV for, you have to have that sense of certainty that's going to happen. And the fun thing about that sense of certainty, and I want you to touch on

• 1:14:44Speaker 00

  this, is how it rubs off on other people.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  We're all social beings. We all pick up on one another, whether we're aware of it or not. And somebody who has that sense of certainty, and again, I think NFL quarterbacks are a wonderful, small sample size to look at here. The NFL quarterback who steps into the huddle, regardless of the game situation, and just by his demeanor, his tone of voice, his body language, the look on his face, looking around the huddle, just the way he is in that huddle as he calls the plays and claps his hands to send the team out onto the line of scrimmage,

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  that is contagious. That matters. I'm sure some of the other players on the team won't maybe consciously register that, but it's there on a non-verbal level and it's very powerful.

• 1:15:42Speaker 00

  Now, that quarterback can have it either intuitively or learned. And that's the thing. So that back to the skill, back to the asset part. When that quarterback comes up to the team in the huddle and at the line, I mean, okay, maybe he's learned it. I say intuitively, but he's learned it his whole career versus maybe sitting down with someone like yourself. Or, and the alternative, and Eli Manning says, well, I sat down with Nate and that really helped me to get to two Super Bowls. Either way, there's a skill being deployed there.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  Absolutely. That skill is honed in the film room when the quarterback and the offensive coordinator and a couple of the receivers are in the room studying the film. It's the way that quarterback is in that setting. That also matters. The skill is honed there. The skill is honed in practice. The skill is honed doing weekly interviews that like every NFL quarterback has to do. Right after the game, again on Monday, again on Wednesday. And if they get into the playoffs, they've got to do even more of those on the Saturdays before the playoff games. So the

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  skill of projecting a sense of control and competence and belief in both himself and his teammates and the tactical scheme that the coaches are cooking up during the course of the week. The way the quarterback displays his confidence and all that stuff, as well as confidence in himself, is hugely important to how those guys are going to feel in the fourth quarter of a game when the team is down by 10 points. There's six minutes on the clock and they just started an offensive series from their own 10 yard line. Are they going to say, hey, we can do this. This is great. What a great story this is going to

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  be. Are they going to come into that huddle and go, oh geez, we've got a long way to go. I don't know if we're going to be able to make it. The quarterback will very often set the tone and get guys to believe that, hey, let's play ball. Let's move the sticks. We got everything we need. Time to rock, fellas.

• 1:17:49Speaker 00

  Let me give an example, though, that's away from football and I'll go personal with me. I don't know if I've said this before exactly on this podcast, but when I started this podcast in 2012, I interviewed mostly traders and investors. But after about a year of that, I said to myself, well, I want to go a little bit wider. It's not just interesting anymore. I need to go wider. And I had done a documentary film years before and I had a chance to interview a Nobel Prize winner named Vernon Smith. And so I recalled in my mind, I recalled that Daniel Kahneman had shared the Nobel with Vernon Smith that year. And I really wanted to get Kahneman on this podcast. So I emailed him just out of the blue to his Princeton address, no response. So then finally, I reached out to Smith and I said, Dr. Smith, would you like to come on this podcast? And he came on because

• 1:18:31Speaker 00

  I had interviewed him before. Then, once I had Vernon Smith on the podcast, I sent that interview to Daniel Kahneman. And then Kahneman said, okay, sure, I'll come on your podcast. That was a good interview with Vernon. And I know him. Once Daniel Kahneman came on, I started sending emails to whoever, whoever looked interesting to me. Now, I'm not saying this to be cocky. This was a learned skill on my side, because even before I started the podcast, I had already had the experience of being a quote, "average" person who could reach out and communicate with people that at least looked like in the headlines to be massive stars. So I had that experience. And I knew all along that those massive stars

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  were still just people, still just humans who put their pants on, just like all of us. So if you can reach out to anybody, and you look like you're competent, then you can have a conversation with anybody. But none of that was like to pat myself on the back and say, oh, Mike, you're all that. No, no, it was just, I had the chance to experience what happens when you meet some of these highest achievers, and you gain a certain amount of confidence. And I'm sure, to talk about your practice, at various stages, you probably were working with people that were not so well-known before Eli Manning. But you developed also in yourself, a certain confidence that like when Eli Manning walked in the door, you're like, well, this is no problem. He's just another guy.

• 1:19:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely. One of the things that I learned during my training at the University of Virginia, was that if you, as a sports psychology trainer, advisor, consultant, do not communicate verbally and non-verbally, a belief in yourself, and what you know, and how you might be able to help an athlete, a musician, a businessperson, whoever, then why the heck should that person spend any time with you? If you're not modeling the skills and the perspectives that you hope your client to take on. I remember sitting down, gosh, this would have been 2003, 2004.

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  I was sitting down with the general manager of the Philadelphia Flyers. Now, the Flyers are a major market NHL team. It's a big deal. And the general manager at the time, a Hall of Fame hockey player himself by the name of Bobby Clark, looked me in the eye and said, do you have what it takes to get through to some of these millionaire players? And I looked him in the eye and said, coach, they're just guys. They're just guys. I can get through to them. I've done it plenty of times before. Let's give this a shot. And Bobby Clark nodded and we went to work. And I spent the next 12 seasons being a regular advisor in the Flyers organization. Great experience.

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

  I think I did some good, but I had to have a sense of my own competency, my own certainty, to be effective in that context with a lot of these guys who, as Bobby Clark was mentioning, were multimillionaires and had a pretty high opinion of themselves already.

• 1:21:41Speaker 00

  But you knew, you knew because you had done the work in an entirely different field. And you talk about this in your work that confidence doesn't necessarily apply to every field. You might be really confident in one area and you might not know about another area. But if you walk into a room full of professional athletes and you know something they don't know, wham bam, thank you ma'am, they're very interested.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, you are absolutely on target in that confidence is very, very, very situation specific. There is no such thing as confidence across the board in everything.

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've got a buddy of mine who's a Navy SEAL and he has slowly become interested in investing. Now, you and I both know, he could take me out and teach me things for years that I don't know about being a Navy SEAL. But he was like, hey, Mike, what about your work? Is there something I can pick up from this? So he was very. Just you could see that that natural learning like, okay, you know, this guy is a super mega achiever on this side of his life. He doesn't know about this thing. And he approaches it like he's starting over and doesn't care how it looks.

• 1:22:47Speaker 02

  Right. He does not care if he comes across as a neophyte or ignorant about a particular area. I'm pretty sure that they screen SEAL candidates and look for that open mindedness. Are you willing to learn about something that you might not know about? Be it underwater demolitions, be it small unit tactics, be it how to speak several different Arabic or Farsi dialects. You don't get to be a Navy SEAL without that ability and without that self-awareness to know what it is that you do not know.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  And be willing to embrace the process of learning something about something that you do not know.

• 1:23:34Speaker 00

  You know, in this conversation, we're not going to get into all of the nitty gritty. People are going to have to jump in and read the book, but an interesting aspect to a work like your work, The Confident Mind, is that you do have steps and you do have a kind of list, things people need to think about, these different processes. However, and I want to compare this to walking up and down a flight of stairs or many flights of stairs, which I love to do as exercise. I don't think about it. You can't walk up and down stairs thinking about, well, okay, the foot goes here. What's going to happen on the knee? What's going to happen to the hip? You just got to do it. And that's what's so interesting about your work is you want people to look at all these different processes, all these different steps. But at the end of the day,

• 1:24:19Speaker 00

  you don't have time as a high achiever, a high performer, to sit there and check off the boxes when you're doing the act. It has to be automatic. It has to be subconscious, right?

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  It has to be automatic when you are in the performance arena. Absolutely.

• 1:24:35Speaker 00

  I mean, look, this is probably a very long answer, but how do you start to get people into that mindset? Because you might have someone that comes into your purview and they want the steps, so to speak, and maybe they get a little fixated on the steps and they lose a little bit sight of the automatic part of it. How do you help people to bridge that chasm from the steps to automatic?

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  I stress with people, basically practicing being automatic at certain parts of their daily practice or rehearsal time. If you are practicing a simple skill, if you're an offensive lineman and you're with your position group at the start of practice and you're just practicing getting off the ball with your pads low, that's a time to be somewhat stepwise, somewhat systematic, and you have to be practicing, okay, this is what I need to take away from that drill. This is what I need to be taking away from that drill. But when it's time for your practice to include a much larger range of skills, besides just

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  getting off the ball, when it's time to practice a complex skill, well, let's just assume we've got it all in place, fella, and I want you to practice being automatic. Look, do, sense and react. I want you to cultivate that habit about yourself in certain parts of your practice. In other parts of your practice, when you're just working on one thing at a time, that's when you get to be more analytical, more judgmental, and if necessary, critical. But as soon as we get with the entire offense and we're doing scrimmage-type activities and we're running through full plays and we're really working against the defense that we think we're going to see come Saturday, we want to practice that sense of instinctiveness

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  and automaticity. I hope that answers your question, Michael, because it's a very important one.

• 1:26:25Speaker 00

  It does, it does. And let me kind of dovetail into that with the idea of relaxation, and I love the way you say this, training yourself to relax on cue. You're talking to somebody, me, who, after growing up in the States, spending most of my time in the States, I spent eight years in a Buddhist country. Now, I've not done a lot of study, per se, of Buddhism, whatnot, but I do practice yoga. So I'm in that physical environment. Quite a bit, and I'm sure by the process of osmosis, it's worn off on me quite a bit. And I do think I've kind of developed a skill set more in the headspace of where you talk about relaxing on cue.

• 1:27:07Speaker 00

  And this is some of the work that you work with the cadets at West Point, breathing exercises and whatnot. Is there a certain amount of your work and your CV that's been influenced by Eastern culture?

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  Oh, without a doubt, I have been influenced as much by my participation and my very serious training in traditional Japanese karate, as I have been influenced by the formal Western scientific study of sports psychology. I will go so far as to say that sports psychology started out with the training of warriors in Eastern cultures going way, way, way back. I advise all my staffers to study very carefully the Bagavag Dita, which is one of the oldest stories in human history. And it's about a reluctant warrior who has to go forth and do battle.

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  And he learns to get out of his head, to get out of his conscious deliberate mind and deliver when he has to deliver. The author Stephen Pressfield made a wonderful retelling of that story into 1920s timeframe. The book, The Legend of Bagger Vance. Steve and I are friends and colleagues. And he signed my copy of The Legend of Bagger Vance, saying, read the Gita, read the original. So I have been very influenced by Eastern cultures. I have been very influenced by my study of martial arts, which really emphasizes first and foremost, you got to be in the right mindset. You have to see your opponent.

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  You have to be very aware of yourself and you have to be very nonjudgmental, very clear, so that you can actually sense what is going on in a combat encounter. I could talk for days about that, Michael.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  Well, maybe we'll do that longer conversation too, if you ever game. The interesting aspect to this is if people try to imagine a combat situation, and it's very difficult if we've not been in that, and I have not been in. I've been in fights, but that's a lot different than bullets flying. So let's imagine somebody at some point in time in the last 20 years, an American soldier. People can have the political debate another time, but an American soldier is in Afghanistan, and bullets are flying, bodies are dropping, death is all around. Now, some people listening might be saying, "Well, okay, that's great, relax on cue." Well, put that one aside, that's not relevant now. That's not the right way to think, is it?

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  No, not at all. You have to relax enough so that your sensory channels are open to what they need to be open to. No, you are not going to be floating in a hot tub relaxed when bullets are flying and bodies are dropping. But you don't have the luxury of being so wound up, so hyped up, that your vision tunnels, your muscles tense, your blood flow constricts, and you lose the ability to stay present in the moment. I tell several stories about combat moments in the Confident Mind book, and the common

• 1:30:18Speaker 02

  denominator in all of those stories is the ability of these officers who are West Point grads, who trained under my supervision while they were cadets, to control their breathing, be able to maintain a sense of certainty in the moment, so that they could accurately call in the airstrikes, direct their various fire teams to the right target, in order to ensure that everybody got out of that firefight alive. So the quick answer to your question is, even in the most dangerous moments, you still have to have a sense of self-control. And you better practice that self-control long before you get into those moments,

• 1:31:03Speaker 02

  or you might not have it when you need it the most.

• 1:31:07Speaker 00

  Your style, as I listened to you for the last hour, your style, you're calm, you're consistent, and you're not speaking rapid fire. Is that just your personality? Or is that a learned skill set? Is that the way that you work with everyone? It's very interesting, the way you present.

• 1:31:27Speaker 02

  I would say the answer to that is, I may always have had a little bit of it, but boy, have I worked on it in order to be effective. I have organized so many of my presentations and so many of my speaking points with that same calm, deliberate manner that you just identified. And if I'm teaching something, I try to be very clear and deliberate. And I say, it's one, two, three. It's this, this, and this. Do, re, mi, one, two, three, A, B, C. For those of us who have been around a while, Mo, Larry, and Curly is a way of putting things in perspective, simple groups

• 1:32:11Speaker 02

  of three that people can relate to. I find that a lot of cadets these days don't understand Mo, Larry, and Curly anymore.

• 1:32:18Speaker 00

  But here you are at West Point advising, teaching, young men and whatnot. And I can think back, I saw this recently, Stanley Kubrick's movie.

• 1:32:29Speaker 02

  Full Metal Jacket?

• 1:32:30Speaker 00

  Full Metal Jacket, The Drill Sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. That would be the way that most people would think young men in the military are trained. I know there's some aspect of that might take place, but you're like the polar opposite. I mean, you couldn't be any farther away than The Drill Sergeant in Full Metal Jacket.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  Well, let's acknowledge that Full Metal Jacket is a movie.

• 1:32:55Speaker 00

  Of course, of course. But that guy was real. He actually was a marine drill sergeant in real life.

• 1:33:01Speaker 02

  Okay. And I'm sure Mr. Kubrick and the directorial staff wanted to bring out certain parts of his persona, certain parts of his behavior, and emphasize them under camera for the sake of communicating certain points and certain feelings in the movie. You still need to have some element of that decisiveness, that call it ferocity on the part of a drill sergeant, and that still exists today. But we're also developing some different skills, the ability to listen, the ability to communicate in more than just one style. Because not

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  everybody who enters Marine Corps boot camp or Army basic training is going to relate and understand and actually thrive under a single directorial instructor style. You've got to have a little flexibility if you're going to communicate effectively to the kinds of wide audiences that we actually have in our armed forces.

• 1:34:08Speaker 00

  One last point that I think is really key. It's a great word. A lot of people don't use it. Maybe they think of this word in terms of celebrations or religious ceremonies or whatnot. But the word joy is such a great word. And to find a place in our lives where we wake up, and even if we don't think of the word joy, but we're acting with joy. We are just clued in and we're happy and we're doing our thing. This is such a huge part of this, too. I mean, one can learn all of the skills that you want to give us. But if the joy's not there, it can be tough. That's got to be there where it's kind of halfway done.

• 1:34:46Speaker 02

  Couldn't agree more. Why are you doing this in the first place? Why did you choose to spend all those hours as a kid playing hockey, or playing the guitar, or doing experiments with rocketry? What brings you joy?

• 1:35:06Speaker 02

  And for so many people, they started out with an activity because it was joyful. And then at some point in their developmental process, somebody or somebody said, okay, now you got to get serious about it if you're really going to be good. And a little bit of that joy, sometimes a lot of that joy, just gets squeezed to the periphery and maybe even squeezed out altogether. So encouraging people to hang on to that sense of excitement, that sense of joy, that childlike fascination, whether we're talking about lacrosse, or whether we're talking about learning foreign language, or jumping out of airplanes, is super important.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  I can't put a value on it, but I am constantly bringing people back to that sense of innate satisfaction, that ineffable joy in doing something that's just cool for its own sake.

• 1:36:03Speaker 00

  That's it, right? Cool for its own sake?

• 1:36:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a big, big, big part of it.

• 1:36:09Speaker 00

  It's tough for a lot of folks because I think a lot of people get caught up in that world of like, you know, I've got to get the job, they don't like the job, I've got to get the wife, maybe they don't like the wife, or they don't like the husband, whatever. And they kind of go down this life of checking boxes, and they really don't find a box that's joyful.

• 1:36:29Speaker 02

  Sometimes you got to look at yourself and ask the question, now, why am I doing this? Am I doing this because I genuinely enjoy it? Genuinely think there's some excitement in it? Let's be honest, Michael, every job is going to have some garbage that comes along with it. We don't live in a perfect world. But can you hang on to your sense of satisfaction and joy and excitement? And seek that out in various places in your life? Maybe you're not going to have it 24/7. Maybe you're only going to have it a few hours each day. But can you use that and hang on to that and get enough of your mental and emotional satisfaction to sustain you?

• 1:37:15Speaker 02

  I did a conversation just a few weeks ago that appeared in the Bloomberg Business Week about burnout. Think about the concept of burnout. A fire burns out because it doesn't have fuel. Well, what's the fuel that you need in your life to sustain yourself? Are you looking for that? Are you getting it? Keep looking for it because you're probably going to find it if you look properly. That's my advice to a lot of people.

• 1:37:38Speaker 00

  You definitely are not the kind of guy that's going to get away with a two-minute Bloomberg interview. Maybe you'll do the interview, but you're definitely a guy that needs more time because there's a lot of nuance to this. There's more explanation is needed. I'm sure you have fun in the longer form interviews versus some of the quick ones.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  Well, that's why I enjoy talking to people like you who take the time to ask the right questions so that we can actually get into some of the nuances of these important issues.

• 1:38:02Speaker 00

  The book, The Confident Mind, A Battle-Tasted Guide to Unshakable Performance. Look, we have only just skimmed the surface today, so people are going to really need to jump in and do some reading. And I'm sure if they've got any questions, they can reach out to you and all that kind of fun stuff. Nate, is there a website we can send people to? Where would you like to direct people to? They can find you at West Point if they need to find you, but where can we send people?

• 1:38:26Speaker 02

  NateZinser.com is ready to rock. People can address me directly there and I'm happy to reach out.

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  Well, I think maybe in a past life you were a Buddhist monk because I feel more relaxed after an hour of talking with you, so.

• 1:38:40Speaker 02

  I'm quite certain that in a past life, I was indeed a samurai, a monk, somebody who tested himself regularly.

• 1:38:49Speaker 00

  Great stuff, great stuff. Listen, I appreciate you coming on. I really enjoyed the conversation. I enjoy getting a chance to, you know, on this podcast, so many different minds, so to speak. And you've just carved out a really interesting niche for your life and I appreciate you sharing your wisdom.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  Well, thank you so much for the privilege of being on your podcast. I'm pretty certain about myself in a lot of areas, but I don't consider myself a Nobel Prize winner. So to be in that company, just by virtue of your interviewing, Michael, is a great honor and I thank you.

• 1:39:22Speaker 00

  Nate, you take care and please keep me posted about future books. I would love to talk to you again.

• 1:39:27Speaker 02

  Will do indeed. You have a great day yourself, boss.

• 1:39:36Speaker 00

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