31: Final Messages on Leadership and Life from a Dying Coach, with Performance Psychology Expert

Steinfort on the podcast. Patty is a mental conditioning coach and assistant instructor at the University of Pennsylvania's Applied Positive Psychology Program. His latest book is Breakfast with Baales, The incredible true story of a dying coach and his final message about life, learning, and leadership. Patty is also a former professional football player. Patty. It's great to have you on the show today, Scott, thanks for having us, great to be here. A lot of things we could talk about.

I thought we could start. We're talking about your experiences as a former professional football player and how that led you to see the psychology of sports in a new way. Yeah, I think you know. I found a lot of success with psychology myself as an athlete. I wasn't super talented. I was obviously physically the right size to be able to compete at least, but I was definitely not the

fastest or the strongest or anything like that. I think my advantages I found came from my psychological skills, and that was my first introduction to it. I guess at the age of seventeen and eighteen getting drafted as a professional back home and then learning the hard way also that even once you get there, it's still not over. There's still a lot of improving to do. I had the inglorious honor, I guess, of having a record by the time I finished my career of the longest time

playing without actually getting on the field. I had five years as a pro and was injured pretty much the whole time. So there was a lot of frustration. And but you're still getting paid. I was still getting paid. I was a professional. Yeah, that's right. That sounds I want that gig. I could do that. I could do that myself. It sounds good. You could have done it, man, you could I'm very what do you say you could have done it better than I did? Probably I could

get injured better than you. I bet that is true. So I learned the hard way. I guess about the resilience that's needed as well. Just it sounds like a cool life, but sometimes it's not that easy. So that led me to explore it academically, and as you said, I finished the master's recently and now working as a coach of the coaches and the leaders in elite sports teams,

helping them be more resilient and be able to focus better. Yeah, there's a lot of talk in sports psychology about a concept called mental toughness and wondering if you apply any of those principles. I mean, resiliency is such a core aspect of that. Yeah. I think the word mental toughness it's a little bit like the word leadership or culture, like it's a really broadly defined word that mean different

things to different people. And so when you look at it within the literature, there are probably two main leaders of that research who have fairly specific definitions. But if you're talking about you know, you watch the NFL on a Sunday and I'll refer to something as mental toughness, there's not a lot of clarity around what that means.

Some people would say it's being resilient and dealing with hardships and setbacks, and other people would say it's the ability to focus on a simple task when there's fifty thousand people young at you and another five million watching at home. So there are many different aspects of it, and we definitely touch on that. A lot of the resilient stuff that I do with the athletes is based on some of the UPEN training that they've done with

the US military and within schools. In terms of training, optimism is really the main thing there, and then the other part that probably the Seattle Seahawks have made the most visible is their incorporation of mindfulness into their training practices, and that's based around, I guess, at its core, the acceptance commitment therapy model, which is performance context being able to accept that people are yelling at me and it doesn't feel good, but I'm getting paid a lot of

money to do this job, and I just have to accept that that's one of the conditions of my employment. And then guys can still go about doing their jobs effectively. Same as having a crowd yelling at you, or a three hundred pound man standing five meters away I wanted to bash your skull in. They're pretty distracting, but that's part of the job. And so people got to accept that and be able to still stay in the moment. Yeah, for sure. And a lot of what you talk about

is how football can teach you a lot about life. Yeah, and a lot of those insights came through your discussions with Bells. Right. So first of all, let me clarify something. You're a former professional football player, football meeting soccer is that football in Australia is a little bit like football in America. We've got our own football that no one else plays. So I'll take about Australia football because some people, some people might have heard of accent coming from them.

So yeah, the game is called AFL back Home, but it takes up the same position within society as what the NFL does here in that it's the biggest game in the country, most popular game. The guys who are playing, you know, they make a very good living out of it and are considered semi celebrities. So it's very similar. The game plays a little different, but a lot of the mental challenges are almost identical. Gotcha, So it actually you do throw a ball. We are not allowed to

throw a ball. Actually you kick the ball. You can hand pass, which is where you punched the ball out of your own hand. It's a three six. It's probably more like hockey than it is like football in that it's a three sixty game where you can get hit from any angle. Now, yeah, I can't, I can't, but I don't know what it is. I need to watch a video. If you're listening, go to AFL dot com dot au and you'll see some video of it. Great. Great, So tell me a little bit. So I'm glad we

got that out of the way. Tell me who is Bales and how did you make contact with him? So? Bails is a At the time I met him, he had just finished as a head coach of the team in Melbourne and we were both hired as coaches as part of the coaching staff at Adelaide at the same time. When moving over to Adelaide, I got a random email saying Dean Bailey has offered for you to live with him. And this is a guy who I only knew from TV.

I live with him for the first month or two while when we said into a new town and then moved out. But we obviously then worked together for the next three seasons or two and a half seasons, and it turned out and so Bales was a very respected coach. He'd played at one of the best teams in the nineteen eighties, had coached, been part of the coaching staff in a couple of Premiership teams, so he knew what success looked like. And then he'd been a head coach

at a very team that really struggled a lot. So he'd seen a whole range of things. And so that's why he was brought to Adelaide as an experienced wise mentor, I guess to some of the other coaches and some of the older players. Gotcha, So you've got a chance

to know him for a while before he got sick. Yes, right, And so you really you saw this, I mean it was amazing transition of such a strong character, rate such a wise man, and kind of going through this entire transition from not even having any idea that this was on the horizon to this, you know, happy and him dealing with what became queer was going to be an

inevitable course soon you know, death, death, you know. So it is quite an experience for him and for you and for both of you guys together to kind of be on that journey together. Yeah, it was I mean just to paint a picture for those who might not know this story. Obviously, it was fairly famous back in Australia. But Bales, or Dean with his first name, but everyone called him Bales, was diagnosed with cancer on the eve of training camp for the third year that we were

working together. What kind of cancer? It was a MESOTHELIAU, so it's the lighting of the lung. And he'd never smoked, so it was a real surprise and it was a bit of a I mean, I know now, having having gone through everything that we dealt with, that once you get that, you're pretty much like you're clock sticking. There's no way you getting you're going to beat it. There's

no way to beat that cancer. And so but I didn't know that at the time, and I said to Bales, I'll come and sit with you, and you know, you can give us some inspirational messages. I'll take it back to the team that you stay in contact while you're beating the cancer and then you come back and everyone's happy.

And then he and his wife were probably the only ones at that stage that knew how serious the diagnosis was in terms of how soon he would pass away, and so pretty quickly it became clear, once I'd visited him once or twice that this was really serious and more serious than I had thought. And so the talk quickly turned from short term inspirational messages to some real deep wisdom. And for me it was as you said, it was a really special experience that literally changed my

life in a number of ways. Why did you say it to do this my role in terms of the mental conditioning stuff. I was doing a similar role back at Adelaide, And so part of what we do within that in some instances is to help the team craft and identity, to build some leadership and a team culture, I guess around certain themes. So I saw it as a fairly normal step in terms of, look, while he struggling, will help him out. I work on the people side of the team rather than the tactical side, I guess.

And also we had both when we lived together, discovered to shared interest in psychology. So Bales was never trained, but he was always super interested in Malcolm Gladwell or a Daniel Cordle sort of a pop psychology book. And so when when he fell ill, I knew that we read Tuesdays with Murray. Both of us and had enjoyed it, and I just suggested to him, look how about I

come and do that. I'll just sit here, you tell me some stuff, I'll take it back, not knowing that it would end the same as Tuesdays with Murray did

as well. Gotcha. So I have quite a few listeners in the in the sports psychology community, coaches and players, and they're going to want they're going to be very interested in this advice and then the in the wisdom abil So for the remainder of this podcast, could we could we go through some of the great insights and then you know, let's not give it all the way. I want people to buy the book. It drops December seventh, three,

that's right. Yeah, and all of all the proceeds go through his family, so it's not a profit making exercise. This is really just to help out the family that he left behind. Wonderful, wonderful. So yeah, let's let's go through the ones that you're comfortable sharing right now, because, like I said, I do have quite a few listeners that work in the field of sports psychology and would love to take some of those insights to their own

their own work. Definitely, definitely one of the things that became apparent really quickly, and I sort of knew it intuitively having lived with him and he just randomly offering a place to stay. But one of the things that became clear early on in the visits was that performance actually starts with people. And so I probably before these visits and throughout my career, had a view of the world of it's a it's dog, e dog. You don't need to worry about friendships. I'm here for business, and

so I don't need to get along with people. I'm just going to be good enough to make it. And particularly when you get into a leadership position within a sports team, so as a coach or as a leading athlete. There are a number of stories that Bail's told and also examples he gave that really once I started looking into it. In terms of the psychology research, there's a heap of evidence that stacks up that actually having really good relationship skills are really key to improving the results

of a team. So you know, there's obviously the classic study by George Vallen in terms of the impact of warm relationships on people's outcomes across a number of measures, both obviously personal outcomes but also education, income, all sorts of things. But then there's also something about Kelly mcgonagall's work on compassion and its ability to develop improved willpower for the athletes. So there's a number of things that the more I looked into it, the more surprised I was.

But it also really rang true with Baios. He was a fantastic people person, and his people's skills made the teams around him developed quicker than you know, a similar talented team might have without him. Yeah, no, that's great. You know the importance of social relationships has been shown to be so important for education, contacts, business, there's something

that transcends sports. So if you're a coach, how can you be, you know, cultivate these warm relations but also you also want to show tough love sometimes, you know, you want to you want to motivate people to work harder, for instance. Yeah, and how do you do that without having them walk over you? Well, I think you actually

put me onto some great research as I was writing. So, once Bayos had passed away and I started really digging into transcribing our visits and trying to trying to make sense of everything, I asked you a question Scott about is there research or are there examples of environments where you provide certain environmental factors that allow people to flourish, particularly creatives or performers, and a lot of the research

pointed towards I think it's a fit. Well, sorry for me, it seems fairly well known, but I'm not sure for some listeners they may not know of the idea of developing autonomy, mastery and relatedness within. So if we're talking about self determination theory, there as a big overarching umbrella, but that as a coach, if you can engender that within your players or athletes, and this goes for teachers

as well or mentors in a business sense. The more you can have the three key psychological needs met for the people you're trying to lead, the longer they're going to persist in whatever the task is that you're giving them improved. Obviously, within a sporting context, there's always an element of we're trying to master something. We're going to be working on a skill, so that one sort of

takes care of itself. And I say with most of the coaches I work with, that's a pretty natural thing that a lot of people have switched on to the other two though, are really important and are often underestimated.

The ability to have the player make a choice about what they're doing, so not just giving them the answers, but having them be involved in the problem solving and actually giving them the freedom to almost play it a little bit, particularly playing small groups, which allows them to develop the autonomy and also the relationships that help them

stick out things a little bit more. One of a great quote from Vincent Lombardi, who's the best non trained psychologist coach ever, was that those were the most invested are the last surrender. And that's a fantastic lay person summary of this bit of research or this and I say a bit of research. It's a massive body of research around the more autonomy there is, so the more people who have actually chosen and invested themselves into the task,

the longer they will persist. And that research comes up in education, in healthcare, in spore, there's a heap of examples of that concept actually coming alife. Very interesting concept that the more you know that you know autonomy and freedom, doesn't that also come with a certain kind of detachment.

Like you're talking about the importance of mindfulness, right, I'm trying to square away the importance of mind reconcile the importance of kind of having a detached sort of I mean, mindfulness is obviously a very intense awareness and heightened awareness and focus, but at the same time, it's also a

detachment from your emotional reactions to immediate stimulus. Right, So you can be really invested in what you're doing and be free and autonomous, and yet still have this kind of stolid, you know, very stoic I should say, temperament about what you're getting. So you know, all these things are important, right, yes, yeah, So they may seem on the surface incompatible, but you would argue they're not right, definitely, definitely not. And I think that's a really important clarification

around the word autonomy. Some people look at it as freedom, and particularly coaches, they tend to cringe a little bit when they say, well, if we give them too much of this, the inmates are going to run the asylum. That's why a coach is here. I'm supposed to teach these people. But autonomy doesn't necessarily mean freedom. It means choice. So you chose to be doing this now. It doesn't mean you're going to be having every single choice in the on the menu, but you have some autonomy to

say that, Okay, I decided to do this. Now I've got skin in the game. And the ability to have that present does It's not mutually exclusive from the ability to also be emotionally separate, particularly within a performance moment. So in the third play of a final drive in

a two minute drill. Obviously we want people to be motivated, but their ability, particularly if we train them right in preparation, their ability to stay disconnected from the outcome and focus just on the performance cues that they need to is like, that's one of the biggest predictors of performance in an instant is their ability to not think outcome but think the process. Right. Yeah, and that's such important lesson in life. Like you said, you learn a lot from football about life. Yeah,

there is there a place for daydreaming at all in sports? Yeah, Well, I mean, I think part of the mindfulness approach is we don't sit there and let them just daydream for twenty minutes. But there is a lot to be said about two parts of day dreaming. One is the use of imagery in sport. It's a fairly well established psychological practice. I guess, and it has a lot of person support from performers who say, you know, I pictured doing this

title Woods is a huge rap for it. Although Tiger's results these days aren't fantastic, but there are a number of fantastic best ever performers, Michael Jordan, a lot of performers across different disciplines in sports who used imagery, which is a form of controlled or positive day dream if you will. But there's a Jordan use imagery Yeah I did, Yeah you did. And then the other element of that

is also the idea of mental recovery. So when I tried to explain the amount of cognitive load on an NFL footballer to someone in at the Positive Psychology Center by describing it like this, think of the periodic table, and you have to memorize the periodic table twice. So there's two different types of periodic table. Plus you have to be able to record on spec knowing which atoms and ions can go up or down one period to

make different elements. And then also you have to do that while your heart rates at one hundred and eighty bits a minute and there's a three hundred pound person standing in front of you wanting to bash you in the face. Go That's the sort of cognitive load that you have to deal with as an NFL footballer, and so not only the installation of that knowledge, but the

recollection plus the physical load. There's a lot to be said about the ability to shut down for twenty minutes and just not force any thought, but allow your thoughts to wander and have some freedom in that sense, because by the time you come to game time, we can't have your mind wandering at that point. That's a perfect metaphor for how I felt when I took the SATs, Like the whole thing with a three hundred pounds, like the whole thing was exactly exactly how I how I felt. Obviously,

that's imporptriate. So there's a police. There's time and police for meditation for my mindfulness, and there's a time and police for the preparation stage of definitely of visualization. Are you familiar with any recent research on in sports. I'm not a huge fan of it. It has mixed support, and so there are some who will out of as this is the most important tool you can use, and it's one of the easiest most of us are, particularly if you're a performer. You can picture you can create

a mental picture of yourself executing fairly easily. Most people do that relatively simply, but there's mixed results in terms of how effective it is as a tool for improving performance. It can improve your sense of self efficacy, and it can improve your confidence because you see yourself performing well, but that doesn't necessarily translate into your ability on the

field to do what we're asking you to do. And so the separate The use of imagery for me, at least in my programs, will often be more about problem solving in advance. So we'll picture something, we'll picture you doing it well, and then we'll say that, oh, something just happened there in the ball. What might have happened if the ball didn't go the way you wanted it to go? Okay, So if that's going to happen next time,

what would you do to adjust? So we're almost preparing answers in advance, yes, because the game is not always going to go how you like, but when it does, when something does pop up, you've already sort of practiced your response to that. Very cool. Yeah. Someone told me once that a good way to overcome social anxiety is to like before I enter the party, like right before

I enter. Just imagine that like on the way for the party, like that people like like me yeah, and that really it really matters, like when you get in there, you set off that vibe exactly, Like vibes matter. Like how much in sports do like vibes that you put off, you know, like matter to other players? Well, I think to other players a lot. I think there's a you know, there's a lot of research around emotional contagion in a lot of different areas, and in sports it's no different.

Cam Newton is a perfect examp at the moment who is over the top with his confidence and his bravado and celebrations, but it does lift the other players around him. There are some players who have a outsized impact on the guys beside them, and potentially the opposition as well. It can be more demoralizing if we keep attacking this guy, but he just doesn't seem to get deflated, like there's nothing we can do to turn him down. That definitely

does have an impact. I don't know of any specific research in sports that has investigated that, but I do know obviously of the emotional contagion research and then there's also the impact to you the individual. Yeah, I think within subjects, so in terms of your ability to go out and do what you need to do. If someone feels better the I guess the best way to explain it is they're less likely to question the first thought

that pops into their head. And that's the entire point of mindfulness in terms of being able to get into the zone or prepare for a performance mindset. We do this stuff so that you can quieten your head and stop second guessing yourself. Everyone who gets particularly to a semi elite or an elite level of sport, whether it's

in college. Even if you're playing college football and you're not a starter, you're still better than ninety five percent of the rest of the world at what you do, and so there's no even if you can't play for five years at all. Exactly well, yeah, exactly, I was one of the two percent. Your ability to when you get into that position, not question your talent is one of the big things. Most people get in their own way in that instance, and they worry or what if.

I know, I've got to be really careful about my follow through on this shot, because there's a million people watching, but that stops you from doing what you've trained yourself to do for ten years, and your ability to not think while you execute is vital to execution great. Once you've built up the expertise base, that's right, you want to let be it go automatic, But there's this whole

process where you're really making me conscious unconscious exactly. And that was the Probably the second thing that came out from the time with Bales was the idea that there's no magic pill. Now. It was almost an ironic play on words because he was undergoing chemotherapy at the time and often there was pill sitting on the table in

front of us. But we talked a lot about coaches often, and it's no different from leaders in business or teachers who want to know the next big trick, what's the trend? What do we do here? How do we make someone more gritty or how do we make how do we get them better quicker? There's no real magic trick like whatever it is. If you want to build a grittier kid, you have to do a lot of things over a

long period of time. You can't just click your fingers and then after a six week program, we've got more grit. Same goes for developing skill or expertise, or your ability

to chunk information as an expert. You know, That's one of the things that and as Ericson talks a lot about is the ten now as a practice does have a lot of a lot of I guess neural plasticity it in terms of wiring the right pathways, but there is also an element of I've seen this scene so many times that I'm able to tune into the right cues, and that only happens from the scene so many times.

We can't fast forward the ten thousand hours. Now. There's obviously a lot of research that since that big Obviously glad I was probably the one who made that the most widely known theory, but there's a lot of counter counter research that argues against that. But there is still a lot of in my eyes, and I'm not sure about your thoughts actually, Scott, but there is a lot of a lot to be said about the time required to build mastery, particularly in a very specific skill physical

skill domain. Yeah, when we're talking about mastery, that's absolutely correct. I wonder about the difference between mastery, however, and creativity, and I wonder in sports like the creative. You know, I don't think that like Dilbert practice, just following a set of rules and practice training regimen is going to make you necessarily an imagine never creative warmers, you know, sports performer. But even if it gets you to mastery. Yeah, what is the difference between an expert or even a

professional athlete and some who's a really creative athlete? Yeah, I think it's a really fantastic distinction. And there's a great story within the book that Bales actually details some interactions he has with a player who is if you gave him something to do for ten thousand hours, he would do it, and he'd do it in nine thousand hours. Like he was a great student to teach because you know, you're not going to get any pushback and he'll do

what he's told. But the problem was when we change game plans with us as new coaches coming in, he got stuck in his one way and he wasn't able to get out of what he used to do because that was how he trained for ten thousand hours. And so one of the important things I think some the research shows up is it's good to have a base. So you have to have before you can go and add lib on a freestyle, on a concerto solo, you

need to be able to play your scales. You need to have that stuff downpat and your technique to be able to reach and move and flex. But once you get to that point, then you almost have to do the opposite. So the ten thousand hours isn't rigid and constructed, it's play. Do something different, and actually we force the athlete to think outside of what they've been trained. So the great example from the book was, I was told this guy that we want you to start practicing being

different than what you used to. So every day when you drive to training, you've got to go a different way. You can't go the same route every day. So when you get to that place that you normally go straight ahead, you've got to turn left and then make it up from there. And over time with that as a practice, and the kids still spoke to him as I was

writing this, he still does it two years later. Is you start to get the individual more comfortable with freestyling, being able to not feel like things have to be this way for them to be successful. That's great. Is

there anything else you wanted to talk about today? I think that one of the and this is probably the biggest life changing thing for me coming out of Bails's the conversations I had with Bales was the idea of he used a metaphor towards the end when I was talking about why he coached and what do you get out of coaching, and he was really strong on this point of the There was an empty coffee cup and he said, look, to me, coaching is a little bit like this cup, in that the cup doesn't exist just

to hold whatever you put in it and keep it to itself. The cup exists to pass that into something bigger. So the coach is you have a certain amount of knowledge and experience and that's inside you, but really the only point of that ever being there is so you can pour it into something else, and particularly into something

bigger than yourself. He was really connected with a strong sense of purpose and that really struck me as one of the turning points to me of having me look at what I was doing at that time, and that's what led me to move over here to the US, knowing that there was probably a larger calling I felt. I felt pulled towards doing some more researching and positive psychology and working at a higher level here to impact the lives of coaches and athletes and not just help

them get better and grittier and have better results. And that's awesome because I'm a competitor and I love people helping people win, but more to the point, changing the way that people are coached so that we improved their

lives at the same time as improving their results. And I think for me, there was a lot of stuff in there towards the end of the book about the legacy of a leader, the ability for a leader to leave behind a neural imprint on someone that they've taught, that even if you do move on to another team, or God forbid you die, you're still alive within the minds of everyone that you've touched as a teacher or as a coach or as a leader, and that really,

you know, that was life changing for me. That's great. I think it's a good quace to end. Really recommend that people read the book. I found it very insightful

and wise, but also just very touching. You know that there are these two people got together that cared about each other so much, and and you know it's very clear that you know he gained from you as well as you gaining from him, so thanks for sharing some of that today on the on the show great Thanks for having us get Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as an informative and thought provoking as

I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com. Do