Being Your Best When It Matters Most with Coach Alex

journey to become a powerful leader, mother and wife. IDMX coaches help you increase your self awareness, improve your problem solving skills, and evolve your habits to achieve your goals, all things I'm grateful to have learned and done through my.

PhD and counseling psychology and an MBA. These clients are only athletes, but professionals who are at the top of their game but are still striving to go further. This includes executives, CEOs, finance professionals, and art and even artist. Welcome Coach Alex, and thank you for being here with me today.

intervention to an accelerant. So I would like to start by sort of laying the groundwork today and talk about what do we mean by performance psychology and performance coaching.

And at other times we're working on optimizing how someone shows up to work the way that they do their leadership things are largely good, but they're interested in getting a promotion or becoming a top performer in their team, or just figuring out how they take themselves to their full potential. So performance psychology is really built around evidence based principles of behavior change to help people address those gaps or issues or optimize their performance to be the

best that they can be. And performance coaching is just kind of an extension of performance psychology. Really, it's about leveraging those tools and helping people learn the skills that they need to be as effective as they can possibly be, typically under pressure or in high stakes, high risk situations, and in some cases as a performance psychologist, those risks are like with elite military units, where I've done some work, for example, helping army rangers figure out how to diffuse bombs.

And in other situations, high risk is you know, we're scaling a company up, or we have to go through a big layoff, or we're acquiring a new company and we've got to integrate culture and we're not sure how that's going to work. So of course the risks are on different skills and different consequences, but in both cases

they feel really important. And performance psychology is about helping you learn the skills that you need to manage those things effectively, perform well through them, and then again kind of thrive right, feel good, perform well, and be the best that you can be.

other sorts of advising that goes on. So I think what makes performance psychology and performance coaching a bit unique is really the focus on peak performance and helping people be their best consistently, whereas sometimes things like executive coaching might focus on tactical or operational aspects of a business,

or traditional psychology is focused on fixing mental health problems. Right, So performance psychology can kind of live in the middle there, and it's really about the individual as a performer, the team as a performer, the organization as a performer, but not necessarily about you know, should we pursue this tactic or that tactic, or should we execute this acquisition or should we not execute this acquisition, or what does it

mean to be a new CEO. You know, we can talk about some of those things, but ultimately, perform coach is not necessarily designed to address that in the way maybe executive coaching or mentoring or advising might help with some of those other issues.

certainly feel that. And then you've got obviously different challenges that you're working through, you know, as a CEO of a company, or different challenges again if you're working in private, do your venture capital, but ultimately you're dealing with high risk decisions and high stake situations that require a bit of skill to be able to navigate it. And so what I've found is that a lot of the same things that impact the pro athletes that I've worked with

impact really everybody. And I kind of break my work down into five or six sort of key buckets. So the first is what I would call stealth regulation. That's the ability to control, moderate, direct your thinking, feeling in physiology, and to be able to optimize your own learning and become an expert in your own way. So it's kind of two parts, how you learn and how you control yourself.

The second is leadership, and athletes, of course have to work on their leadership, regardless of being a starter or a bench player. The same thing is true with pretty much every executive or even parents, right you're leading your kid. Third is kind of relationships and communications. It's kind of related to that leadership bucket, but it's a little bit different. Right we all are learning how to work best in our teams, whether again that's your family unit, your basketball team,

or your investment committee. You have to be thinking about all the ways that those things come together and how you operate. Fourth would be decision making. So you know, obviously decisions happen on different time scales, But ultimately there is a process that we can all develop and a set of skills we can all deploy to help us

make more effective decisions. Things like identifying our own biases, coming up with frameworks around decisions for our values, learning what information to pick up and wait for or to build out to make a more effective decision, when to trust our intuitive expertise, and when to be slow and deliberate. You know, all these things play a part in how

we perform. And then finally is performance under pressure. And there's a set of skills that again you need whether you're diffusing a bomb, shooting a free throw, you know, giving a big pitch. Right, These same skills actually cut across the different spaces, and so of course you teach them in different contexts, but I think ultimately those are sort of the core buckets are really good pformance coaching, and again you touch on some of the tangential things

that come with that, right. You know, if you're talking about leadership, that might bleed into something like executive presidence, where you're figuring out how you show up and be more confident, right, and that's again a performance psychology skill. Or if you're thinking about decision making. You might be thinking about how you do things like hiring and firing, which is one type of decision, but it's still related

to the way that you process that information. So you can kind of see how you feel in all the core challenges underneath those big buckets. And that's what I rely on as my framework for the work that I do. Amazing.

this type of coaching? And you know, can you can you share any real coaching stories that are audience be interested in learning about.

you understand how to perform well. I think a second outcome people often experience is feeling more confident, and that often comes from that experience of feeling a bit more in control of themselves or their situation. But it also changes the way that they show up, the way that they interact and are personally, the way that they communicate. Third, I think is feeling more motivated. Right when you're really tapped into and feel confident in the skills that you develop,

then pressure becomes like a privilege, right. It becomes an opportunity to perform better versus something to be afraid of, and that increases motivation. Fourth, I think you would get improved leadership and communication. And broadly, you know, a lot of really good teamwork, whether it's sports or business, is

how you talk to your teammates. It is how you interact with your teammates, and so being an effective leader, being an effective communicator becomes part and parcel elevating everyone's game so that you can be successful. So those I think would be a few of the outcomes that you

could expect. And I mean, gosh, I've now worked with performers across a range of spaces, but one of my favorite stories is I was doing some work with an MBA player who struggled a bit with shooting at the free throw line, which is you know, for any players kind of a unique experience because you practice this skill so much, but in practice you can never replicate, you know, twenty thousand people staring at you and screaming at you and hoping that you miss right if you're on an

away game, and so you're kind of out there in a team sport on an island for a moment, you know. And so in individual sports things like golf or tennis, you get used to that performing by yourself, but in basketball you can mostly perform with everyone else, and then for a brief moment, everything stops and everyone's staring at you, waiting to see what's going to happen and how it's going to impact the game. And so a lot of

players get nervous. And so I had one player who came and said, you know, I want to work on shooting free throws. I want to get more aggressive going to the basket, which is often going to mean I'm gonna spend more time with the free throw line. It's like, okay, great, well tell me a little bit about you know, what you're thinking or what you're feeling when you get up there. And his original approach was like, I'm just so nervous.

I'm in my head. I started thinking about, you know, what if I miss, what am I going to do? What's the right tactic here? What will my teammates say? And my heart rate increases and my breathing increases, I'm like, okay, so tell me a little bit about how you deal with that right now. And his solution was to spend a lot of time right hoping that it would just kind of slow down. And what you find often is, and you know, for better or worse, it's actually quite

a common tactic right across spaces. People are just waiting for it to stop, versus doing something reactively to address it. And so we started to think about, okay, well, what could we do and what would resonate for him? And it turned out that the most important thing we could address, which is often true for people who feel a bit of performance anxiety, is really addressing and reappraising the physiology.

So you kind of have two parts. You have learning to do something with the actual increased adrenaline if you will right, learning to control your breathing with techniques like box breathing. You can practice things like mindfulness meditation that help you control and direct your attention. Really, learning to talk to yourself in a way that slows you down, even slowing your physical movements down, so that you send the message like Okay, I'm calm, and then you want

to reappraise that stress as something more helpful. Right, So, we've all been socialized or conditioned into this belief that stress is bad and that we should all try to get stress out or away as quickly as possible. But the reality is, stress itself is not harmful. Stress is just your brain and body preparing you to do something effortful.

And if you change the way that you think about it, we have all this data that shows if you appraise stressors as a challenge versus a threat, then all of a sudden, the physiology becomes excitement, it becomes focused, it becomes determination, not oh my goodness, I'm about to melt down at the free throw line. So we worked on some of these skills, and then early on in my career, you know, we were in COVID and so there were times when we had no fans and times when we

had some fans. But one of the privileges of the experience was getting to watch, you know, all these basketball games from up close and personal, and at one point, this player just looked at me at the free throw line and winked, and I was like, Okay, he kind of got it. And so those are the cool experiences

you get to have in my world. Then I've had, you know, very similar experiences with executives who feel empowered when they give a pitch or feel like they're operating with their team at a high level deploying these skills. And that's what makes this work so fun is you get to see people in action be the best that they can be.

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