Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness || Peak Performance

listening and enjoy the podcast. But right now I'm really excited to introduce my guests for today, the writer Brad Stolberg and the high performance coach Steve Magnus, who are authors of the new book Peak Performance Elevate your Game, avoid burnout, and thrive with the New Science of Success. Thanks for chatting with me today, guys, Thanks so much

for having us. Yeah, thanks for your patience. We have been so backed up on the podcast, but I'm excited to finally get a chance to talk to you guys. Your book has been out now for how long you guys are thinking about that? Yeah? So three months? About ten? It launched in June? So yeah, three months? And how you guys feeling about it? Like, are you happy with the responses you've received? What are your thoughts on it. It's a big deal putting a book out in the world.

I know, yeah, for sure. You know, we're trying to practice what we preach, which is to focus on the things that we could control and not spend too much time worrying about the things that we can't. And I keep on telling myself that as a mantra. But man, it's hard to practice what you preach. Like the first day of the book came out, Steve and I were on the East Coast doing book tour stuff, and we both said that we're going to go for a run the morning with the book launched, and not bring our

phones and not check notifications. And then somehow we convinced ourselves that it would be okay to bring our phones. And the next thing, you know, we're sitting there like on a treadmill because it's raining, scrolling through our phone checking the Amazon rank. And you know, looking back it this being the first big book that both of us have launched together, I think it's hard to resist those things.

But man, at the end of that first week, you kind of look back and like this was really stupid, Like I didn't need to stress about it. It's along with a way of saying we're feeling pretty good, good good. Did you want to add anything to that, Steve, Yeah, I mean it's it's kind of funny. You never know quite what to expect when you release a book, because it's like you have you think it's good, you have your or close colleagues and friends who think it's good.

But like seeing what other people think and seeing like hearing critiques of your work from people you have no idea and never heard of, never seen before, is something else. So it's it's just nice to finally have it out in the real world and see what we did really well and then see what you know we could maybe improve on for next time. Have you guys been getting critiques really? What are some of the major critiques you've

gotten so far? That's interesting. So I think a lot of positive reinforcement on how we were able to tie ideas together from traditionally siloed domains, and that's something that we set out to do to try to bridge different areas of knowledge and then bridge different areas of skill. You know, one area in particular, and listeners of your podcast might be the ones that are critiquing us, is

the science of willpower. So as we were writing the book, some of those ego depletion studies were failing to replicate, and Steve and I tend to look at willpower and maybe we'll get into this more later. Is the basic takeaways. It's really hard to do a lot of hard stuff at once, and there's benefits to pacing yourself and developing habits.

But that science was changing throughout the process of writing the book, and then even as the book was being published, and we did our best to hedge against that changing science. But the people who studied willpower from one standpoint loved it, and then from another standpoint kind of hopped on us. You know, we nerdy scientists can get lost in the weeds, and I'm afraid this might be an example of getting lost in the weeds, because you know, the phenomenon is

really not in doubt. You know. The phenomenon is this. You know, when you exert extend your willpower, you're trying to like really hard to exert self control over something it actually for in the future, you know, like following that, it makes it harder to exert self control over something else, you know, So you know, I'm like, oh my god, I've got a fast, I'm not going to do the cookie, but I always then like sports and have fifty cookies

because I've done that somehow. Yeah, so the basic behavioral pattern exists. What all these papers that are going back and forth is like they're trying to understand the mechanism. Now in a lot of ways. I mean, I guess you care about the mechanism so that you can have an intervention, the proper interment. You want to know what

is the right intervention that'll really help with this. But in another sense, you also are helping people by just making them aware that they are more likely to have certain outcomes following prior outcomes that in itself without understanding the mechanism is useful information, right exactly. And you know I come at it from an athletic background, and I look at it similar to fatigue. Right If I go run a race, I know at some point I'm going

going to get tired, like it happens. If you look at the exercise science research, it's debated on how that occurs. Is it like the muscle failing? Is it glycogen depletion? Is that the brain and the central governor shutting things down? And the reality is like no one knows at this point.

But if I'm trying to run a race, like it doesn't matter, right, I'm trying to figure out methods in ways to resist that fatigue so that I can finish that race faster, and a lot of ways I see willpower in some of these other scientific issues where I think we lose. It's like you said, we lose a horse from the trees a little bit and get caught up. Yes, there's debate over like these details and mechanisms, but for those outside of our little corner of like scientific research, nerdism,

like that doesn't have practical impact for those people. Yeah, I mean, regardless if it's my glucose depletion or you know, all the myriad other alternatives that could potentially explain it. I you know, like regardless, Like it still matters that I've been depleted, Like, it doesn't change the fact that I've been depleted, regardless of how it came about. But from a scientific perspective, I think it's good for us to discover what those mechanisms are so we can really

target them. I do think there's value there. But yeah, it must be hard to try to keep up, you know, you're juggling so many things at the same time when you're writing this kind of book, right, because you're juggling all the competing theories, but you're also trying to say something that's practical. Did you have your received any other criticisms other than the ego depletion one that was the main one, Steve, this is Brad here, Steve, anything else

kind of come your way? Yeah, I mean those were the main things. I think everyone has like little quibbles here and here and there with things, but I think it's like that's all personal tastes, Like you're never going to write a book that is a perfect fit for everyone. But by and large, like the reception has been great, and it's just those probably that ego depletion thing where it's more of a science nerds debating that stuff that people bring up more than anything. Yeah, which I'm we're

totally fine with. Like we're both kind of research nerds ourselves, so we get it. We debate. We have the same debate between ourselves when including that stuff. Yeah, ego depution is your achilles heel. Well, well, fair enough. Can you

tell me a little more about your audience? You know, when I hear the term peak performance, I think sports, you know, I think the people that are most excited by that term itself, Like not everyone's excited by that term, right, we all agree on that, right, like the visual artists who's or the creative writer who's doing poetry. There's no one size fits all for everything in this world. So who are your you know, you know, Brad just pointed

at someone. What was that? No, No, no, I'm pointing at Steve because you know, when we record a podcast three ways, what happens is Steve and I always jump in at the same time. So I'm trying to tell you all that coordination is like you're going to take the first I have to say. I had to say something just a little meta, a meta card. Team. Yeah,

I have a meta comment about you two. I actually think you too adorable and I and I you know, I'm not I'm not saying that in any creepy like I hope you don't take that in a creepy sort of way, like you kind of want to like leave the interview now because you feel creeped out. But I really think you guys are like such a cute couple,

like like team Team, you know, like a team. I'm wonder what my wife would people haven't said that about my wife and I and since we got married, And you know, I'm not trying to sexualize this in a non sexual way, you know, like for instance, my people say that about me and my best friend, you know,

like he's a philosopher, I'm a psychologist. Like I almost like make an analogy to us to like what you guys are, Like one of you is the psychologists in your relationship to the the others is the philosopher, like you know, I don't know, I don't know what if that perfectly maps on, maybe not, but anyway, it's just it's really nice to see that the energy between you guys. Okay, let's move on quickly from that. And you pointed at

Steve to address my point. So do you remember my point was because I don't I think I got it somewhat. Who is this book for? Right? Yeah? Yeah? And do you know what I mean by that question? Like is that even a fair point that I'm saying that can we acknowledge there are certain people that get more excited by obtaining peak performance than other people in this world? Oh?

For sure? And I think if you look at how we frame the book and where we came at it from it like my background is more sport and athletics and Brad has more of a business background, but is

heavily involved in sports and athletics. And the way this book came about is we were looking at all these ideas, these lessons, these reasons that we were seeing in a lot of areas, but mainly in the area of sport and athletics and figuring out, okay, like, hey, this is translating over to my writing, this is translating over to my business life, this is translating over to you know,

every other aspect. And what we started to do was see, like where these commonalities were and to ask the question is performance performance? Right? So does it matter if you know, I'm starting a marriag or if I'm playing a concert in front of twenty thousand people, or you know, sitting down to write, you know, work on a mathematical equation to get a breakthrough. And I think what we discovered more than anything is like when you dial it back

to like its basic needs, like performance is performance. We would sit there and I think we'd have aha moments where you know, one of the ones I remember distinctly is we were talking to Matt Billingsley, who's a world class drummer, and we're sitting there talking about, like how do you get ready for, you know, performing in front of forty thousand people? And he starts taking us through like his warm up and none of it involves drumming.

It's all like how do I get physically and mentally in a spot where I know I'm going to perform? And like I'm sitting there being like, dude, that is exactly the same warm up like I get ready for if I'm going to go run like a five k race. And you know, it's those those similarities and that was coming out that we really notice and what we've tried to push in like promoting this book is like that's

who it is for. Like it's yeah, it's like easy to say, oh, everyone buy it, but like if you're trying to get better at something something you care about, then that's our aim is Like there's so many lessons across domains that if we can all connect them, then you're going to learn something and improve on your specific domain. Okay,

you know that that makes sense. I mean so this could apply to music it can apply to almost anything that you The thing that's interesting though, is, like, you know, I've written like articles distinguishing performance from creativity, right, So I'm trying to think like, sometimes the goal is not to get better, Sometimes the goal is to be creatively expressive. Well, I think it depends on how you define better, right,

So maybe better is becoming more creatively expressive. So I think that there's a misnomer that performance always just means some kind of tangible and measurable results, or like becoming more productive. I think the way that we think about it, when we say get better, it's get better at your defined goals. So if your defined goal is to be more creative and experience the world more creatively for a short period of time, you likely won't be as quote

unquote productive by conventional standards. But a lot of these same practices would I mean, I firmly believe would help you in that pursuit of becoming more creative and having more creative experiences. Cool. Did you want to add to that, Steve, Yeah, I was going to say that, you know, a lot of times, like we think of performance measurable outcomes, and we think that they lack creativity because they're kind of

a hard goal. But you know, if you just look at throughout the history of sport, especially again in my sport of running, like you see that most of there people who have these really great breakthroughs, these really big performances, like they don't describe like the nuts and bolts of the performance. They almost call it like it's a work

of art. Like there's a great quote from a famous US runner, Steve Prefontaine, who essentially said, like erase is like a work of art, Like I'm expressing myself out there, and it's just a different form of expression, right, And you wouldn't think of like running until you you know, throw up as an expression of creativity. But for him it was because it was like experiencing different sensations and feelings in his body that he couldn't experience without pushing

himself to that level. That's fascinating. But then, how do you you know a lot of art is not just experiencing it, but then revealing that experience to others in a way that resonates with them. How does that apply to running? So that's what I think. Another point that specific runner was making a point of is like if you're a fan of sport, right, and you sit there and you watch someone do something amazing, it's aspiring, right, And in a lot of ways, it's not the end

result that does it. It's how they get it, how they get there. So the first time I watched Usain Bolt run one hundred meters, right, I'm more of a distance runner. I like watching longer stuff. But to see him, like the smoothness of his ability to run one hundred meters in nine point five seconds, which is just insane to me, was just mind blowing. Regardless of the time.

It was like a thing of beauty to do it right. Yeah, And like he'd trained to be able to run that smooth and that efficient well being incredibly powerful, and I think there's some artistic output there that I think sometimes we don't recognize. You know, one of the characters stress. I'm in the field of positive psychology, and one of the character strengths is excellence and beauty. And I've always found that fascinating that those two things are linked together

in the character strengths framework. And you may have just convinced me that they do belong together. I could see that. I could see that. I mean, there is something beautiful about that. There's in the same way as something beautiful about his hearing a beautiful just a virtuoso chokes sonata. The kind of amount of work that goes into the craft and the mastery of something like that is is beautiful and kind of is inspirational as well revealing to

us what could be possible. I'm going to go down the philosophical rabbit hole the philosopher so one of, not one of, by far, my favorite book ever written is a book called Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig, and the book he unveils the metaphysics of what he calls quality, and he capitalizes quality with a queue to make it a singular event. And for person, quality is the space between an actor and his or her act and person's whole, at least how I interpret

person's whole. Metaphysics equality is that quality is what happens when you give something your all and you truly care about something, and if you have that quality and the outcome takes care of itself, and that will also exude quality. And when I think about art, when I think about athletics, even when I think about writing, relationship parenting like I try to hold myself to for things I care about,

am I pursuing them with this quality mindset. You're the first person to bring in Zen and the art of motorcycle meanance into the Psychology podcast, the first guest to mention that classics good, good, good good. I like that a lot. And there are lots of ways to develop quality and in so many different kinds of domains. Okay, so let's maybe go into some of the of the specific things you talk about to help with higher performance.

And while you're doing this, I'll be thinking in my own head how this can apply as broadly as possible to different fields and stuff. So can we start with the paradox of rest? Tell me a little bit about

that paradox. So, the paradox of rest is that conventionally, a lot of folks tend to think of rest is a passive act and is something that might be separate from their work, and oftentimes that they're sacrificing work because they're resting, when in fact, when you rest, both your brain and body are actually extremely active, and it's often

during rest that physical, psychological, and emotional growth accurse. So it's kind of an aha moment for me in a reframing of rest, that we shouldn't consider rest is something that is distinct or separate from the work that we're doing, but we should think of rest is integral too, and a part of doing good work. The easiest analogy is a physiological one, and it's how you would make your

muscle grow. So if you think about your bicep muscle, the muscle on the front of your arm, you need to first stress the muscle right, apply some stimulus to it, and that's lifting a heavyweight. But if all you ever did was lift a heavyweight and you never stepped away and recovered, or if you lifted way too heavy of a weight and you didn't put enough rest in between those intervals, what what happen is your muscle would quite literally burn out, like it would succumb to fatigue, and

it worse, you'd get injured. Now, the flip side is if you pick a good way, a good stress, a good stimulus, and you follow it up with appropriate rest, that's how your muscle grows. So people like to think that the muscle grows when they're in the weight room pumping iron, but that's not the case. The actual growth occurs when you're not pumping the iron and mostly when you're sleeping. So it's not in the weight room that

all of these growth promoting hormones are released. It's when you're on the couch or when you're in bed sleeping. And then we got into cognitive science in neuroscience, and we started we started looking about sleep and its impact on the brain and in particular cognition and creativity. And we learn something similar, which is oftentimes our breakthrough thoughts and our breakthrough thinking they don't happen when we're sitting at the whiteboarb trying to solve a problem. That happened

when we're in the shower. I know this is in your book too, Scott. That happened when you're on a run. That happened when you just wake up from sleeping. So it's in these moments of rest, when you're not actively stressing your cognitive muscle, that some semblance of growth can occur. So good, good, good good. So the products of rest makes a lot of sense. That's in the line with you know, andres Ericson's study is about how people don't practice.

It's not that they just practice more hours. In fact, they had more hours during the day of not practicing, and I feel like that point doesn't get When people talk about ten thousand hours door to practice, they don't also mention ten thousand hours of no practice. You know, that's also a thing, right right, And in ericson studies with particularly with the violinists, the reason that they can go so hard in it, they can practice with such

intensity is because they rest. It's like doing running intervals, right, Eventually you're going to burn out without their res So I think again back to this paradox of rest. Unfortunately, what happens so often, and this is true in athletics,

this is definitely true in the workplace. I can't speak for artists, but I've gathered that this happens there too, is that people neglect rest so they're hard days when they think that they're working really hard, they're actually not working that hard because they never let themselves go easy, and then they get just stuck in this kind of gray zone. Yeah. I think this applies to the world of ideas as well, because I inhabit you know, a

different world. But it's like as a being a writer, not a performer, but you know, like being a writer and you guys experiences as well. When you're writing this book, do you find that you're better if you can somehow, like you know, go all in and synthesize or not synthesized, but read a lot of information and then just let it go and then come back to the same material after a lot of rest. I mean, I find it's absolutely necessary for me or else I go bokers one

hundred percent. We actually, you know, we took our book and what we were learning to heart, and we actually scheduled our writing so that we could try and like take advantage of that phenomenon. Like there would be periods where we'd be like, all right, like this is for these next three hours or two hours, like we're all in. We're going to be focused and get this done, and

then we're going to step away and let go. And actually that was one of the best things about writing this together is that we design our weeks so that, you know, maybe I was going super hard Monday Tuesday on the writing and Brad would be going super hard on the research side, and then we'd flip so that we had a couple of days away from like reading the manuscript, so that as I'm sure you're aware as you found out, like it doesn't become the jumbled mess

where you can't think through it and can't have new ideas. So by staggering things like that, we were allowed ourselves to like have these moments where like all of the information we were sensesizing could like you know, be absorbed and then our brain, hopefully a couple of days later, would like spit out what we needed to you know, have for the next section. What do you think of the harmonious for subsessive passion distinction? So this Brad here

I'll go first. I think it's a really helpful framework in a quite good way distinction. I think it's definitely useful in athletics, where the perils of obsessive passion are that you become so focused on results in externals that you start to lose a love for what you're doing and instead you're doing what you're doing for some kind of validation or perhaps out of fear, and those are the athletes that often end up with anxiety, depression, injured

from overtraining, or just completely burnt out. I think that

that probably holds true in the corporate world too. It's kind of where I have my background experience, I can tell you that there are certain partners at consulting firms who it is very clear of that they are in it for the ego gratification of being a partner to consulting firm, in the paycheck that comes with that, and the ability to say that I'm a managing director at XYZ firm, and those individuals seem to be not as happy and also tend to not have as long of careers.

Is those people that are in consult because they just genuinely love problem solving. I think the only other thing that I would add about the dichotomy of you know again, a harmonious passion being you love something, it's a love for the work, but you don't let your ego your identity get too tied up to it, Versus obsessive passion where every result is not about the work, it's about you and your ego and you're completely tied up with it.

I think that we're all humans, so I try to embody harmonious passion as best as I can, and writing this book is a great example. So you write a book. I love writing. I love the act of collaborating with Steve. I was in flow when we wrote this book. It was total harmonious passion. But then when the book's out in the world, like I told you in the opening, I was seeing the sales rank. I cared about the reception, and I don't have like the zen power to just

completely put that aside. But what I've tried to do is keep all of that a minority driver, so that my drive to right to want to write comes predominantly from within because I love writing, not from all that external stuff. But of course I pay attention to it. It's hard not to. No, it is hard not to. It's a matter of managing those regulating self regulation. So key, Yeah,

I was just gonna adds. Growing up as an athlete, like I was a one hundred percent obsessive passionate, Like that was I was you read down Valoriande, you know, definition, and like that was me through high school and college, like identity was wrapped up in running and that was all that mattered and like nothing else did. And eventually that leads to this like fear of failure and your motivation shift says you become more obsessively passionate about things.

So I think it's it's one of those things that is very easy in domains that are results driven, right where you actually have some way to be like, oh, this is how good I am and you're ranked, It's very easy to fall into that pattern and let your

identity become wrapped up in whatever activity you see. And what I've seen both with myself and then also when helping other individuals is like those motivation qualities slightly shift over time until pretty soon you're just stuck in a state where individuals are just afraid to lose or afraid to fail. And when you get in those spots, like the anxiety that comes with it can just be, you know,

mind blowing. I've watched world class performers sit there and get to this point and they're about to do the thing that there are world class at, and they're paralyzed with fear. Not because like you know, they might lose a paycheck or something that, but because it is their identity and it is how they define So they see, if I fail at this or if I mess up, it is assault on like the soul core of myself.

And that is it's when you see it at really bad levels, it's just, I mean, it's heartbreaking in a lot of cases, so I think the extremes of it, of obsessive passion are bad. I think, like Brad mentioned that, you know, we're all human, like, we're all going to have some sort of outcome driven at some point, and

I think that's okay. But it's just like managing that balance between obsessive and harmonious and knowing like when you're going too far in one direction and being able to be aware that you are is a skill that we all need to develop. So something that I have personally found works wonderfully for me and also up individuals that have coached and worked with, is to be able to self regulate the emotional response to some kind of outcome

but not be overcome by it. Is what I've come to call the twenty four the forty eight hour role, which is you ought to give yourself twenty four or forty eight hours to be really happy after a big success or to be pretty bummed out and sad after a quote unquote failure, but then after that twenty four to forty eight hour window, get back to doing the work. Because it's really easy then to figure out am I in this because it's my identity and validation or am

I in it because of the work. And I'll share an intimate example for Steve and I. We thought that this book had a good chance of landing on the monthly New York Times bestseller list, and we were told by people that we trust that there was a pretty good shot. It didn't make it not make that list, and we were bombed, no doubt about it. But we said, like,

let's practice what we preach. So we gave ourselves a day to be bombed, and then we were back at writing articles to promote the book, back at fleshing out the next book. And I swear Scott like I was not sad two days later because I was just so

excited to be doing the work. And I think that where you get into a trap is if you don't have those hard rules and you let those emotions kind of linger and precipitate and same things with good results, right, because then you just sit there and bask in the glory and you've become complacent, and then you get into this trap where you're talking about how great writing is versus actually writing. Oh I like that rule, Well, no, I appreciate that, and I think that that's good. So

how can you optimize your routine? How can you take this one man? Yeah, for sure, you know. I think the funny thing about routine is it's become almost like a cliche to say like, oh, this is a secret routine to reach peak performance or to be at your best. And what we found is that there's no secret to it. It's every individual takes their own like routine and creates it what works for them. Right. Some people work really

well in the morning. Some people need to go for you know, a walk in the morning and then get into it right. So it's just about like figuring out where are you paying attention and figuring out where you tend to work well, right in terms of time, in terms of setting, in terms of environment. Do I write best at my desk? Do I write best at a coffee shop down the road? Like how where is it?

And then figuring out, you know, how to set your day up for that, and like some of the things that we used or what we realized is that for writing, there were certain periods of time where I like, if I got up in the morning, I could nail stuff. I would be on a roll, right, And if I tried to write late in the evening it was garbage, right,

So what do you do? You say, Well, I'm not going to just take you know, everything after ten am off, right, I'm going to have some recovery, but I'm going to do tasks that might not stress that focus or that creativity maybe that I need during that. So it might be you know, responding to emails later in the day or doing like very strict editing on things. That is just rule base right, and it's about figuring out what works for you on those parameters like that. Brad, do

you want to add to that? No, I think Steve sended it up really well. I think that routine on an end of one is extremely powerful. But there's no

single routine that works across the population. So anyone that says, you know, if you just drink up, wake up at this hour, drink this kind of specialty, do this particular cold water exercise, immersion, and then you're going to be great, maybe that individual person's going to be great, But there's very little to no science showing that there's a single

routine that works for everyone. So it really is about a lot of self experimentation and then doing what you can to design your day around what you learn when you experiment with yourself. And you know, what I hear in some of like the corporate coaching that I do, is people say that, well, I don't have control over my schedule, And after prodding and asking questions, what I find is that people almost always have more control than

they think. And yeah, you might have to be at the office and work an eight to six, but can you you know, let's say that you find that you're a morning person and you do your your good deep focus work in the morning, and perhaps then you're a little bit more creative in the afternoon because you're mind wandering,

you're not as latched on. Well, do what you can to schedule meetings in the afternoon where creativity might be a more important skill and where you can feel off the energy of others and protect your mornings for more of the deep focused work. So it's just like these kinds of small aha moments on an individual level and then trying to figure out how to bake them and build your days around them. Cool, and you guys, try to apply some of those principles of optimization in your

own life. I mean, do you I guess all this you' is mesearch as well, right, is that right? Yeah, it's funny. You know, we figured we had to be extremely true to our books, so we didn't recommend anything that we didn't try. You know, it's funny even going into this. We had a nice chapter on meditation after visiting Search Inside Yourself, Google's former offshoot of meditation, and neither of us had ever been big meditators before, but we were like,

all right. I turned to Brad and was like, all right, Like, let's set aside some time. We've got to try these things in order to see if they work, because, like the sciences, they but it's also about applying this to our own life, so regardless of what it was like in the book, we tried to apply it. And in terms of routine, you know, we both are writers obviously and have this book coming out, but we also both have other jobs, right, Brad in healthcare and me and

athletics coaching. So for us, like the routine stuff really came in handy because we knew our writing deadlines and we knew when we had to get certain chapters in certain sections of the book done. So it was about figuring out, all right, when can we both be efficient at this and how do we design our day so that we get optimum productivity at this book that we really care about well at the same time, like not

letting the other apps our lives or other jobs. A lot of thought process and a lot of even trial and error to figure out like what worked for each of us individually. That's great. I actually wasn't aware that Bread works healthcare. What does that mean? What do you do in healthcare? Bread? Yeah? So I do a fair amount of like executive leadership development for a big healthcare system in northern California. Cool, very cool? Like you don't You can't go to school for that, right? Like is

there like specific training? Yeah? I kind of did so. I My background is very circuitous. So I was in McKinsey and Company doing just like pure strategic consulting for two years. I knew that. Yeah. Then I decided that I if my skill was kind of creative thinking and problem solving, I wanted to apply it to something that I thought was more meaningful than like consumer products and goods.

So I went to public health school and then since then I've been taking the traditional consulting skill set and using it in healthcare and then starting to do more and more one on one coaching, just because I enjoy it, and I think for the principles that we write about in the book, there's no better way to get them

across than to really have a coaching relationship with someone. Yeah, so you really like that that one on one like that would give gives you more task action, or you'd be not as complete if you were just doing like online courses, Is that right? Yeah? I like the human interaction. I mean, it doesn't have to even be in person, even if it's be a skype, but I like I guess for me the two ends of the spectrum that give me the most fulfillment is writing is my favorite.

I think that's just because as a reader, I love nothing more than like getting so immersed in the page that you almost forget that you're reading this physical book. And if I can try to give that to probably fail miserably. But if I can at least try and tell myself I'm trying to give that to other people, that makes me take a ton. And then the other end of that is like the very intimate one on

one coaching. So it's a nice balance. Sounds good. Okay, So let's turn to the last part of this chat today, and that's purpose and transcending yourself. Now, it is very rare to read a book on peak performance and see the word transcendence in there. I mean, that's a topic I love, but purpose you will see a lot, but transcendence not so much. So, So, first of all, congratulations

and to you for bringing in that literature. Can you talk a little about how transcending yourself can actually improve peak performance? Sure? So we started in exercise science, and in exercise science, like Steve said at the outset, there are competing theories on fatigue. But over the past two or three decades, there's been a lot of research that shows that fatigue likely happens in the brain before the body. So what researchers have done is they've had people exercise

their muscles until they're completely tapped out. They're saying, I'm begging for mercy, I can't do one more repetition, and then they'll run an electrical current through their muscle and their muscle contracts with full force. So what that's led researchers to speculate is that there's some sort of central governor. It's actually the brain shutting down the body when the body has more to give. And the theory is that this is a protective mechanism. Your brain, excuse me, is

literally protecting your quote unquote self. It's saying, if you exercise any harder, you might injure yourself. So therefore we're going to put the brakes on, and your central nervous

system kind of shuts the body down. So this guy is thinking, when you think about incredible athletic performances, and I've gotten to be I mean, Steve's gotten to be on the sidelines coaching some of these I've gotten for my writing it outside to interview some people that have just done insane stuff, And whenever you ask them, what's going through your mind in the backstretch of that marathon or when you're looking down from El Capitan free solo

climbing three thousand feet, like, what are you thinking? How do you overcome those moments? And no one has ever said that they're thinking about money or how great it would feel to be champion, or all the publicity or breaking records. They always report some kind of transcendent moment.

So whether it's a spiritual experience, whether it's thinking about their family members who have sacrificed so much for them to be there, whether they've committed this to a cause to inspire other people, perhaps to raise money for charity, but it's always this transcendent moment. So that got Steven I thinking, well, what if there's something there that when people break through and when they get more out of their body than traditional sciences, they should be able to

Maybe that's because they're actually transcending their self. And if you're transcending yourself, then you're not worried about protecting yourself. So that led us to this small field of study, which is called acts of superhuman or hysterical strength. Any story of my life? Really? What an active hysterical superhuman strength? Yeah? Yeah, I mean yeah, that's what I did for That's what I ate for breakfast morn all right. So besides Scott's

special cereal superhuman hysterical strength. This is when there are situations when like a child or an animal gets stuck under a car and a regular person is able to lift the car off of that child or animal. And if you were to tell that regular person the next day, I'll pay you a million dollars. I'll pay you a billion dollars to lift that car. They'd never be able to, but in that moment when there's something beyond themselves stuck under that car, they're able to muster the strength to

lift that car. And there's like an ICU physician that studies this, and it's very similar to what the exercise science scientists theorize, which is that the part of your brain that is so concerned with protecting yourself just kind of goes offline in that moment and you have access to the superhuman or hysterical strength. And then the last place that our research led was in healthcare, where there are increasingly interventions to help people quit smoking or go

on extreme diets. In what public health researchers and clinicians are finding is that one of the best ways to do it is to have people reflect on their purpose, and in particular on a transcendent purpose. And what they found is that if you tell someone to quit smoking, that is a very threatening message to a smoker. It's a part of their life. They're scared to get these smoke to get through a day, they're nervous about they're

going to feel without it. But if that same smoker is reflecting on what it will mean to their child, or to their partner, or to their parents. If they're able to quit and spend more time with them have a lower chance of disease. The likelihood that they quit

goes way up. And actually, some researchers at University of Pennsylvania, I don't know if you're familiar with this research job, Actually they stuck people in an fMRI machine so they could look at their brains while delivering these threatening messages. And what they found is the individuals they were reflecting on their core values and purpose, the area of their brain associated with threat didn't light up nearly as much. That is so interesting. And from a personality perspective, that's

currently going to be linked to neuroticism. And I mean to me, that's like the core demeain of personality for like that gets in the way of everything. Like we talked about defense, you know, defending the self versus that keeps coming from the neuroticism. To mean, good stuff, man, men, men, good stuff men. I'm talking to two people right now, not just one. Congratulations on this book and for putting this really valuable resource into the world. Thanks so much

for having us. Yeah, I think the time. Thank you so much for listening to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought provoking as I did. If something you heard today stimulated you in some way, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.