I get a team. It's HARP. So I hope you're terrific. Welcome to another installment of the new project. And by that I mean kind of. So I did a chat the other day, or I had a chat the other day. Do you do a chat? And I think you have a chat harps. I had a chat the other day with very brilliant Andrew May from the very brilliant Performance Intelligence podcast. I really liked it. But I'm only me and my experience is subjective. You might hate it, but
I think it was good. He got really good feedback from it. And we're doing what the kids call a co share here on typ is sometimes I'm on someone's show or they're on my show and we both have a podcast, and both both podcasts rate reasonably well, and so we decide to do a co share if we like the quality of what we put out. This is such an occasion. Andrew and I have been friends forever, and we kind of cross paths a lot. We're speaking and lots of other work. But anyway, so this is
great chat. I think I hope you enjoy it. I love catching up with you, I love your show, I love everything about you. So it's good to get together, and we should probably get together in three D one day and see what that's like. But for now we'll deal with the virtual kind of version.
Mutual admiration society. We were chatting earlier this week about this topic and we both lit up. Would be remiss of us as middle aged male podcast hosts sitting here think we had our shit together all the time. Why don't you lead? And I got an example as.
Well, well, yeah, I wish, I wish I was middle aged, by the way, I think if I lived to one hundred and ninety four on middle age, run.
Run with it. Because look I hear' I'll from this. I look at you. Your podcast is out of this world. You have middians downloads, you run courses and you put a notice and it fills up straight away. You've written books, You've done TV, You've been strength and conditioning coage for some very high profile teams. You train big names, like if you look at that extrinsic or that external measure of success, you're killing it.
Yeah, thank you. Do you know what I was really fascinated with this sense I was a kid. I didn't know, you know, the performance capacity gap. As Andrew said everyone, it's really like what you're currently doing, what's your current output?
What are your outcomes? Like, where are you at with pick a variable in your life, whether it not it's how fit or strong, or what you're doing with your dough or your relationships or how your business is going, and it can be any component of the human experience, And then what is your potential? I think this is one of the few times that I advise people for comparison. It's like, we're not comparing Andrew with Craig or vice versa,
or you with anyone else. But what we're we're comparing is current you with potential you or possible you, Like what is possible for me? And I think everyone thinks about that at some stage. And so my genesis story with this is I won't bang on about it too
long because I've done it too many times. But when I was the fat fourteen year old and I was, you know, morbally, I be fat, aest kid in my school, and then over a course of not that many months, four or five, I totally transformed my body, more motivated by what I didn't want to be than what I was hoping to be. I just didn't want to be pick last anymore. I just didn't want to be socially invisible. I didn't want to be made fun of. All those
things which were a compelling force for me. But when I lost weight and I got quite fit and quite strong and quite healthy, and you know, with what I had to work with my genetics, I would say I started to get somewhere in the ballpark of optimizing close
to what I had. But the biggest thing for me was this kind of new awareness or understanding of my capacity, like, oh, even though I'm not super small, or I don't have brilliant, amazing genetics, or I'm not a great athlete, or I'm whatever, I don't have a I'm not a creative genius, or all of these things that I can recognize without beating myself up. But just go, well, Craig, you don't have awesome genetics, But what can you do with those genetics? What can you do with that mind that you have?
Maybe you're clever in a different way. Maybe your brilliance, if you have it, doesn't exist in the classroom, you know, and all of that stuff about what can I do versus what am I doing? And so the biggest light bulb or revelation. For me in the changing my body process wasn't even about my body. It was about getting a glimpse into my own potential and my own possibilities and for this conversation, my own capacity.
That's young to have that awareness, because a lot of people that you and I would work with don't have that awareness. In the fifty sixties and even.
Beyond, well, I didn't think of it in the you know, I wasn't you were quoting performance, but I mean, if I was craigifying, I'd go, fuck, how did I do that? Well? If I can do this, then what else can I do? And there was no ego in that. There was just excitement and awareness and I guess a new level of understanding about how I'd thought for fourteen years and how I was starting to think about myself and my possibilities now. And so I went, well, I can I can't have
better genetics than Andrew, but I can outtrain Andrew. I can eat better than Andrew. I can sleep better, I can try harder, I can put up with more pain. All of those things I can just choose. I can recover better, I can learn more, I can educate myself. I can build a relationship with food that I didn't have before, because my relationship with food was horrendous, my relationship with my own kind of emotions like that, there
was no bigger hater of me than me. I'm like, well, that actually doesn't work well, Like there was so much self loathing and self doubt and self sabotage. I'm like, why am I doing that? And then I'm not a redundant question, why am I doing that? No? Actually, why am I doing that? What is that about? And I think, you know, better questions can lead to much greater self
awareness and better choices and better behaviors and better outcomes. So, you know, back in the day, I didn't articulate it like this, and I didn't even know there was a thing called the performance capacity gap. And I couldn't really explain to you what success was or what potential was. But I just knew that the biggest variable. I didn't know what a variable was, but I knew that the biggest thing that was going to make a difference in my life was actually me, not any external kind of force.
You know, do you think it's hard to go back when you were fourteen? But if you can try and transport back to the feelings you had, the emotions you had, the thoughts you had. Do you think because you went through that hardship and it would have been tough. And I've heard you talk about this a lot on the podcast, that you just had pain, you were just sick of that and went, fucker, I'm going to tap into something to prove everyone wrong. Or was it to prove yourself right?
Or was there some different motivation.
I was probably motivated more through insecurity and fear. I didn't want to prove anyone wrong. Really, I just once I did that, I kind of it was almost like this constant question, even probably till now. But like when I set up Austray's first personal training center, most and this is you know, people go, oh everyone hated on MYA. It wasn't that, It was just that nobody really thought
that was a thing. I mean, we're talking nineteen eighty six when I first started thinking of this forty years ago, and I didn't open it until nineteen and ninety, so it took four years to go from concept to reality. But you know all of that where I thought, oh, well,
I actually think I could do this. I think and of course someone would have done it if I didn't do it, So there's there's no kind of boasting in this, but trying to understand, well, what can I do if I can get out of my own way, and even if it doesn't work, that's okay. I'm going to learn, I'm going to grow, I'm going to evolve. I put up a post the other day about my first corporate speaking gig in Inverted Commas. I also happened to be twenty six, which was when I opened my first center,
and I was fucking terrible. I spoke to twenty guys at a timber yard. I spoke in the lunch room. I spoke for half an hour. I got paid fifty dollars. I prepared for three weeks, and I crashed and burned horribly. I was so bad, and they couldn't get out of there quick enough. They only stayed there because the boss was there and they felt compelled.
Right, But can I say, as a fellow speaker, for your first gig, to be in a timberyard with a bunch of blokes name Louis Moose, Kanker, Bifo and Smash, They'll think, and who's this young punk buff idiot. That's a tough introduction. Good introduction, but a tough one.
But here's the thing, Like, and I know this sounds cliche, but when we get past the cheese and the self help and the fluff and the motivation, and of course there's good and bad pain. But like for me, that was a good pain. That was that was good discomfort, that was good. I learned a bunch even in that about what to do, what not to do. You know, how much stories do I share? And how much information? And how do I build rapport and connection? And what
language should have I used? And what did you know? Like that gives you a chance to figure out what went okay, what went terrible, and what I would never do again. But you can't get good at what you're not doing. But the problem is that people want to be excellent without the pain. People want to be at the top of the mountain without fucking climbing the mountain. Right, So dude, of course you'll get the i'ming the mountain
sucks literally and metaphorically. But how do you build exit, Like, if you're not super talented like me, how do you get good? How do you become exceptional and not just for the sake of being that will. But how you become exceptional is by doing what most people won't do. So your behavior is exceptional. Like what will most people do? I tell you what. They will not work as hard as I worked, or for as long as I work. They will not deal with They will not deal with
the discomfort that I dealed with. Some will, and some will do it better, but the majority won't. And I hate to say this, but I'm seeing this more and more in twenty twenty six, where if I said to an audience of two hundred people, put up your hand if you want to be more resilient, everyone puts up their hand, and then you go, who's going to do the work to create that? Fucking nobody? Everyone dives under their seat, And that's because.
Give me an app Isn't there something you can download?
Their appeal is they're a powder? Is there? You know? And that's not everyone, of course, But I think it's so important that we are prepared to and it doesn't need to be an hourly practice, but go you know what. And the metaphor, of course, or the analogy is in the gym, how do you get strong? You work against resistance, and we've spoken about this. You do hardship, and the byproduct is you get strong. Literally, how do you build muscular endurance and aerobic durance? You do hardshit. How do
you build capacity do hardshit? How do you build resilience? You do hardshit? You know, And so it's not like this is a no cost situation. So that whole thing is spilled over into the rest of my life, mate, and I get more excited about other people's potential than mine these days.
But you're living it yourself through helping others. That's called being on purpose. You find purpose, you find something bigger than you were excites to living daylights out of here, and it's future focused. So I can totally see you're on purpose. And you explain that story. It helps me understand a bit more because I've listened to your podcast a bunch of times, lots and lots of times. And when I hear you say I was a fact kid
from Mawha, I'm not really great. I used to sometimes think I was Harps just downloading that because he's always been this naturally gifted dude. You know what I'm saying. You probably had some other people say this as well, but that hardship in you forged a hardiness to quote out mate Paul Taylor, and then you had the physical and psychological resources to tap into it. This is hard as a parent, and any parent or people who are involved with kids and extended capacity will know this. What
do you want your kids? You want them to be loved and to be in a good environment and to feel good. What's the worst thing you can do for your kids? Everything? Because they become precocious of lass holes, And it's hard as a parent, mate, because you want to give the kids everything, but we know when you do, you're actually doing them a disservice. So I think a big thing about this performance and capacity gap is just having a bit of drive and like you had it
as a young kid. So for me, my story as a middle distance run I was good, not great, So a bit of a shift on your story, but a similar theme meaning I won multiple state championships, I went down to Tasmania the Institute of Sport, I did my best races in low keymates, So if I'm looking out of one hundred, do you give a mark on this? Do you give when you're talking to people? I give him a mark out of one hundred or ten as an example. Have you ever worked on that?
It depends what we're doing, but I do have ways of quantifying things with people around different processes.
But yes, so let's see if we look at your performance potential, if it was one hundred. As a runner, I probably hit sixty five or seventy. So I didn't close that delta. Got to a good level, not great, But when I was honest with myself, I liked running, but I love fitness and I love making a difference
in other people's lives. And at twenty seven, I just went, look, I'm not going to do this for another couple of years and try and get to that next level because I was just I just wasn't really passionate about it. But what I was passionate about. I'd seen you speak at Farlax, I'd seen Matt Church, I'd seen the great man Doug Maloof and a bunch of other speed Because I went, I want to do that. So I shifted and went right, let's say if there's a score out
of one hundred. As a speaker, you mentioned that presentation of the Timberyard, my first big presentation at FILEX was fucking woeful. It was ego driven, which was masking insecurity. I reckon. I had three hundred and fifty to four hundred people in the room and I was speaking about periodization. I made it really detailed, lots of slides, tried to show how much I knew, and literally half the audience
left in the first fifteen minutes. I reckon. By the end of the hour, I had twenty percent of the audience. I was mortified. But the gap that I had mate between that performance and also that capacity was I'd seen you, Matt Dargan, others, and I did that presentation and I sucked. And there were one of two things I could have done, stick my head in the sand and go fuck it, I'm never presenting on the public platform again. Or the other one was I'm going to drill down and get
good at this, and I chose the latter. And it's an evolution still to this day. I'm always learning. You don't arrive around the formans. I think, if you do, you stop. Yeah.
I love that story. It's so true, And it's like all of this is just anecdotal. Everyone. These are my experiences, right, I don't have data on this, But I would think that seventy or eighty percent of the population really underestimate their capacity, their potential, their possibilities. They don't understand what they can do. I think so many people are limited by fear of a myriad of things. You know. It's like, oh, embrace failure, Well, do embrace failure? Because what's failure? Well,
it's an outcome? Okay? Is it the outcome? You want to know? It's not? Did you learn anything? Like if you turn down the emotion and get a bit of a break between the failure in inverted commas and then the processing, It's like, I actually learned quite a few things, and you know, to go from where I was to where I am now working with you know, bigger teams and companies, and I've spoken all over the world. I've probably spoken in twenty countries and all of that. That's great.
But to be able to stand on a stage and be competent, and to be doing a really good job and building rapport and connection and trust in the moment and know how to engage, and know how to tell stories and know how to read the room. And of course I don't always create outcomes, but that's been a forty year process or a thirty five year process. It's like,
how do you become a black belt? Well, you get kicked in the dick a thousand times over ten years, right metaphorically, and you put up with the pain, and you be consistent, and you persevere, and you choose, you choose the hard thing, and you keep going back. And in the middle of all of that discomfort and joy and fun and evolution, you become a different version of you. You can't at twenty five go oh fuck, I'm going
to be different by next Wednesday. No, you're not. You might be doing different things, but you're not going to be different by next Wednesday.
Instagram tells me you can. You're on Instagram, and that sets up a lot of people. I'm sounding like I'm old with that younger generation, so that borderline gen why the millennials. It's really dangerous. I see some of the posts what people do around getting success, and I don't comment because you just leave it. But it's erroneous. It's total bullshit. Like you just mentioned forty years, and I
think that's one of the things we've lost. Mate, that hard work takes time, decades and helps to choose something you like. If you look at that grit with Angela Duckworth, it's passion plus perseverance. So you love helping people the you project this is your third or fourth iteration. You've got to be bloody persistent and persevere after a few knockbacks. And I think that's I think that's one of the reasons why people get nowhere near that potential capacity, because
they get one or two knocks. I'll stop. I'm just going to coast it thirty percent.
It's very you know, when we're talking about ourselves, it's very hard to be objective because you're analyzing yourself, which is subjective analysis, right, So I can't be totally objective about me because I'm me. So you start with that knowledge, you know, it's like the beginning of awareness. Self awareness
is to recognize your own lack of self awareness. It's like this mind fuck, right, but you go, oh, it's like when somebody hears their voice on audio for the first time, or sees themselves on TV or video camera, or you know. I worked on Channel ten for three years once a week in the morning's quarter of a million people around Australia every week. Well, Craig Harper is with us this morning to get us off the weight loss. Mary go around once and for all. Good morning, Crazy,
Good morning Craik All. Well, hopefully, because a lot of us spend our life getting on and off that weight loss. Mary go round, So perhaps this will be the end of the road for a few people, of which you are. I don't think that you're really in die need of a body renovation, but maybe a little little weeny bit of toning up. When I got back to my office after day one, I watched myself. I'm like, oh my god, I'm a fucking idiot, Like I hate did what I saw.
But they loved it. They're like, no, that was good. You were good. And I'm like, wow, if they think that's good, giddy up, because I know that that's not me at ten, that's me at three or four. And there was an ego in that. There was just I knew what I could do and over time, and I was never a megastar or anything, but I ended up
doing a pretty good job. But being committed to being okay with not being the best and not necessarily being the best anyway, and being okay with embarrassment or failure while genuinely striving to do the absolute best that I could, knowing that sometimes I will fuck it up and that's okay.
And it's that willingness I think to be okay with fucking up as long as you're trying, because fucking up is learning, fucking up his self awareness, it's understanding, it's in sight, but also being able to which is rare in twenty twenty six, be okay with wrong, just wrong right. And it's like, oh, I thought this, I even argued this, I even got all emotional. I even pointed things. I
even guess what I was one hundred percent wrong. Now you know that that's one of the other things, too, is our need to be right is a is part of that gap. You know, when you have to be right all the time, that's an inhibitor on your potential because if people aren't echoing your thoughts and your ideas. I mentioned this actually on a podcast this morning, but new audience, I'll say it again. But I thought so two things over the last two days. It was essentially
the same comment. Somebody got on their high horse on Facebook and they gave this rant about whoever it is or whatever it was. But this isn't this person. And at the end they said, if you disagree with me, please unfriend me. And two different people did that about two different topics, and I was thinking, how much self awareness you lack that you are saying this is how it is according to me. If you don't agree with me, then go away, right, because I am right and you
are wrong. Also, I want to live in an echo chamber. I only want people following me who agree with me or think like, wow, if you really want to limit yourself, do that be that you and I might be diametrically opposed on an idea or a construct or, a theory or a belief. Right, I couldn't give a fuck. I like you. We don't have to align on things to be friends. I don't want to live in an echo chamber with Andrew. I don't want that. I want you to challenge me. I want me to challenge you, and
then you'll go, okay, you know, let's unpack that. Because there's every chance, Andrew, because I get twenty three things wrong every day, this could be one of them. This need to be right is a fucking It's like a hamdb on your potential.
It's horrible. I think a lot of it is insecurity mass but healthy conflict or some people don't like the word conflict, robust dialogue. It's a central tenant of a high performing team. You need to I was in New Zealand with an exec team last week. Won't say the name of the team, but we're talking about this is
a high functioning team. They paid zero's lots and lots of money, and some of them, even at that stage of their career, find it difficult to lean in and have the conversation if they don't want it doesn't create corridor conversations. We all know this, but I think that's foundation. But any team that I'm involved in, sporting team or corporate team or consulting, you want to be able to have that robust dialogue and actually to get deferring opinion.
If you had to rank yourself at the moment on your potential and where you are, what school would you give yourself? And I know that's a bit of our old question. Yeah, look it depends on what area.
You know. If we're ranking me and my potential on flexibility versus my current actual flexibility, I'd give me two. I'm talking about physical, not cognitive, but show.
Career, you project impact you're having.
Yeah, right, I would say a seven. Honestly, I think I think I could do quite a bit better. I don't want to be a ten. I think being a ten would depress me, I think. But I don't think I'll ever be a ten anyway. But if we're basing it on what's possible for me, I think I've had moments where I would say this for me, this experience, or this process or this presentation was about as close
as I'll ever get to a ten. A couple of years ago, I did a just a Me workshop craigharp Alive they're called at Deacon in Melbourne, and I had six hundred and seventy people and it was three hours of magic. And this sounds weird, but it's almost like the magic happened despite me, not because of me. It was like I was in flow, I was in this state and it was almost like it wasn't but I was hovering above me watching me do this, build this
kind of or help create this special moment. And I walked away from that and I'm like, oh, maybe I'm just a conduit to God for God or something. But it was awesome right, and then probably two gigs after that I fucked up or hated myself. I'm not sure, but there are moments. There are, But I think the human experience is you do great, and you do shit, and you do a bit better. You learn its peaks
and troughs of performance and emotion and experience. And I think the thing for people to think about with this gap that we're talking about, Andrew, is where am I now? With you know, whatever the relative variable or measurement is for you in relation to whatever component of your existence? Where am I now? And where do you want to be? So to get clarity around that, but then too, so, okay, this is where I want to be. My next question would be why do you want to be there now?
If I'm thirty percent body fat, sorry to use a physiological variable, but and I want to be ten percent body fat? Or if you said that to me, I'd go cool, why And if you said to me anything like oh I want better self esteem or you know, any of these emotional or psychological variables which we attached to this physical outcome, I'd say maybe maybe maybe you be in ten percent body fat might make you a
neurotic wido I've seen it. It might make you less happy because now you're stressed about gaining weight, and now you weigh everything that you put in your mouth and you track it, and you're antisocial because you can't eat that. And now you've created a bunch of other issues because you achieved this outcome that you perhaps erroneously thought would make you better. And sometimes it does, by the way,
you know. But I would say the people that I coach and have coached over the years, I would say a disproportionate number compared to the general population of those success successful, high profile people are more miserable, more medicated, you know, sleep, anxiety, depression. And I'm not saying that's causal. I'm saying, but there's definitely a correlation there. I'm not
saying being successful makes you miserable. I think the belief that I can fix my inner world by doing stuff in my outer world is something which is another podcast in its own kind of right, but that you know, understanding back to this kind of thing, where am I? Where do I want to be? Cool? So you figure out where you want to be. Now, let's try to turn down the emotion. As long as you have clarity and certainty about where you want to be and what
you want your level of performance to be. Then let's create a strategy. Let's create a non negotiable timeline accountability process. Let's think of this as you're building a house, or you're building a brand or a business. But what you're doing is you're building a better version of you. The idea of non negotiables. We talk what are you non negotiables around this and that, but they're not really non negotiable because people just stop them and start them when
they want. Well, that's not non negotiable. That's optional. So when someone says to me, how do you go out all the time and never drink beer? I go because I never drink beer. So it's not that doesn't require discipline, self control, willpower, or motivation, because that's not something I do ever. And I'm not saying anyone should be following me.
I'm saying I have very clear boundaries and rules and non negotiables about what works for me to be somewhere close to my version of optimal, and I don't do that periodically like this is this is how I live now. For some people, some people will go, oh, fuck, you're a hard ass or you're this or that's full on or ah, but you've got to have a life. And I go, okay, it is sure, sure, Sure, I go guess what the outcomes for me are good. I'm not saying be me. I'm not saying do what I do
like you do you. But most people that I talk to that are doing their version of our whatevs. They are not happy, they are not healthy, they are not where they want to be. If I ask two hundred people in a room, put up your hand, if right now you're really struggling with something, every hand goes up. Now. Again, that's part of the human experience, but it's like if you really I mean not conceptually or not hypothetically, but
if you actually want to move the needle. At some stage we need to step away from all the not as in let them go, but the theory of the podcast and the theory of the book, and the theory of this, and that we need to be We need to be the procademic. We need to be putting this shit into practice, because transformation lives in the doing, not the knowing, not the understanding, not the planning, not the talking, not the theorizing. Nobody learns to play the piano by reading books on
playing the fucking piano. Just over there, just how do you become a black belt? You become a white belt and you get smashed for ten years and then that's where you end up.
We could go down so many rabbit holes. We always do when when we converse.
Can I share a couple of other constructs which I think are really while people are thinking about this, you interrupt me at any time. But so the performance capacity gap, as I said to you, like the stuff around thissel is the psychology of it is spoken in great to detail in many kind of ways in the research.
But you're reading my mind. I was going to say, can you tell me what do you think causes it all? What are some of the scientific frameworks?
Well, there's let me mention a few others because they all correlate intention behavior gap? Right, intention, what's your intention? Yeah? Cool? Great? What are you actually doing? Knowledge? Action gap? What do you know? Amazing? What are you doing with that knowledge to move the needle? To create change, to learn, to grow,
to evolve? Confidence competence like Okay, On the other end of the scale, we'll have people who are overly confident, but they're not actually doing anything, they're not actually you know. And there's a mix of course and then perception and reality. How do I see the world, How is the world? What do I think of my potential? What is my potential? How do I think others see me? This is my PhD,
But how do others actually see me? Because it ain't the same ergo back to the audio thing where we hear our voice and go, I don't sound like that, and everyone in the room goes, you sound exactly like that, because we never experience us from any other perspective other than our own. And the last one is the effort outcome gap. So what is the effort required versus what is the effort that I'm actually making?
Deep It's one of those. I'll add two. And this comes more from thinking about this a lot lately. A new pupil of title. Earlier in the week. You've done this up on this. Work with athletes, work with performing artists, work with musicians, work with corporates, and they've got so much potential, but they get nowhere near it. And I think a couple of other things that come into it is psychological skills. If you want your body to be fit fast, flexible and strong. If you want to look
like Harps when you're what are you now? Forty five mid forties mate?
Yeah? Yeah, my T shirts and forty five, bro.
You got to do reps and sets. If you want your brain to be fit, fast, flexible and strong, you've got to do reps in sets. So practicing emotional regulation and while it can be a big kids, hey go do mindfulness, but doing ten minutes a day of mindfulness as a research from John cabots In because he was
very good market and got all the money. But I think if you take any of those skills, mindfulness, breath work, just self awareness, if you do ten minutes a day, five or six days a week, you do that for six weeks, you're going to have a dramatic shift in your ability to regulate emotions. And we say this here. We all have emotions. But when you get had by
your emotions, fuck you, Harps and fuck your horse. Whereas if you know how to ride that spike in cortisol and stress and adrenaline, and we talk about this regular you and idea a migtal hijack and you can settle down. You might just say fuck you, but it's under your breath. I think the second subset of skills on this and again you'll be going because you've done this, mate for forty plus years, is managing state. So when you're stepping into a performance moment. That was one of the things
going back to running. I didn't know how to make nerves work for me. I didnt a low keymate, but a big keymate. My nerves got the better of me. So when you step up to do a presentation or the interview, or go on a date or just talk in a team meeting, knowing how to be in that sweet spot, so to be alert but not arouse, and to have your emotions working for you. So I think those two things and that's pretty low lying fruit to
get some psychological skills. It's going to take a couple of months, but manage your state and actually give activities that are important. I call these a performance mind. The attention they deserve not just in the our meeting presentation turning up, but the preparation for it. Who's in the room, what does success look like? How am I going to show up? And what prep do I need to do?
So I think those two are big ones that people can implement to train your psychological skills, know how to manage your state, and then when you have opportunities, you've got more likelihood to step into it emostiontly, physically, psychologically, every other alley.
Yeah, I'm thinking about So there's you know, there's the whole kind of self reflection, self awareness. You know, it's like that, just trying to and again it's hard, but like this little process of just being still. And I ask myself all the time, what is it like being around me? Not because I want people to love me or because I'm insecure, but because me understanding the Craig experience for or my audience, be at one or a thousand, me having an insight into that allows me to be
better for them as well as theory of mind. Understanding their process is their thing. What's Andrew's version of reality in this moment. As I've said to you before, we're in the same chat at the same time, on the same podcast, but we're having different experiences. It matters that I understand your experience, not because I need to agree or align, but if I understand you, then I can work with you better, I can solve problems with you better.
I can self regulate better, I can resolve conflict, I can lead, or I can be led. All of those things is just this understanding yourself and more specifically, I don't want to open this door, but fuck it. Understanding your mind. That is maybe beyond food and survival and shelter. That is maybe the biggest challenge of all time to understand your mind, because your mind is essentially UHQ. It's
your operational headquarters. It's where everything you know. It's where all the decisions are made, actions are initiated, data interpreted, stories told. It's that you know, that space where you know there's the thing that's happening, and then there's our story about the thing that's happening, and then you think about it. And we've covered this, but I think it's worth opening the door again. If you think something bad is happening, but something bad is not happening, your body
will respond as though something bad's happening. And now you're in a stress state, and now you can't fucking breathe, and now you've got anxiety, and now your heart rates through the roof and your sympathetic nervous systems go on nuts, and you're producing quartersole and adrenaline and you're in this space where you're like and it's completely self created, but we don't know.
Have you heard Jackie Lauder, who you introduced me, so thank you. Jack's doing it to work with our business. Have you heard Jack talk about the different brain zones?
No?
No, make sure you get to listen to this. Jack are giving you a good plug. So Jake talks about different brains and so zone one is the back part of the primitive brain and that's that fight or flight response and being in zone one, Jack say says, is not bad because there's time. So if you're talking about football, when you're on the defensive line, you want to be in zone one when you're defending because you want to narrow your focus. It's short, sharp and you're they're defending,
and it's that myopic view. But when you're in a relationship or running a business or catching up with friends, we want to get into zone three, which is our smart brain. So you front part of that cerebral cortex. And what Jack does is she teaches people how to shift between zone one and zone three and zone two. That's coming in through the Olympic system, so that happens in like point zero two of a NATO second happens automatically, but you can really learn to shift between zone one
and three and some of the executive groups. I've seen Jack do this with It's really clever, and you know she's an intelligent, intelligent person, but she breaks it down and you hear them go, oh, I'm in zone one. Now I'm having a zone one thought time. That back in with what you said, Understanding your brain and how it works. I think it's a huge part of this. It's a huge part of performance because we've got this circuitry. We're not given the manual and we just try and
go on default or through experience. If you've got some good role models, maybe from a sporting background or performing arts, you might learn some of this. I find that again an equals one. But if someone's had a bit of a performance background, they tend to take that into their next career. But if you haven't had that opportunity, that mentorship, that guidance, you could be fifty like an execu I had a few weeks ago, lovely lady I won't mention
the name. We had a very personal, private conversation. She opened up and she'd learned some stuff about what we're doing on nervous system and brains. You said, Andrew, I cannot believe I haven't learned this, and I'm fifty. And she was quite regretful and remorseful of like, why haven't I done this? I'd learned all these mathematical formulas at school. Fill up a tank volume, micals four thirds bi aqube,
but I finished that formula and year twelve. And I said to her, look, I get the emotion, thank you for sharing, but how cool You've now got this for your next fifty years and you can take this to your kids and then grandkids and everyone else. So rather than being pissed off, process it. You're learning this now,
pay it forward. But it was just an interesting reflection, and I did have that thought, Yeah, God, what would have been different if you'd learned some of those skills to get closer to her potential gap ten, fifteen, twenty years earlier.
That's that self understanding. That's that like you call me Socrates before we started tongue in cheek because you said I look like an old stoic quill.
People who aren't watching this on our YouTube channel, harps has got the trimmed beid looking very very sophisticated intelligence.
I thought you were going to say old. But what's interesting about Socrate is is he was the dude who said the beginning of wisdom is to know thyself me understanding me. You know that metacognitive process of thinking about my thinking? Why do I think the way that you know? Why do I like? Where did my beliefs come from? Did I even choose my beliefs or did I inherit them through social osmosis? Are my beliefs Dad's beliefs? Like? Did dad believe it? So I believe it? And did
you know? Or I was raised in this environment, around these people or as exposed to these ideas? What if I was exposed to those ideas? Or what if I grew up in a synagogue not a church, Or what if I grew up an atheist? Or what if I grew up in this country not that Like the same person with the same genetics, what if all of my experiences have been different to now, who would I be and how would I be? And what would I think?
And understanding that you have become what you have become, largely unconsciously and largely unintentionally, And then to go, m What to do with that? What to do with that? You know what? How do I get my self limiting beliefs out of the way? How do I get my need for belonging out of the way? How do I get my I don't want to disappoint my parents out of the way? How do I get the guilt out of the way? Because all of that shit, understandable as
it is, that's a handbreak to your potential. That's getting in the way. Doesn't mean you've got to be disrespectful or disloyal to people, But for God's sake, understand yourself and think for yourself about yourself, and stop trying to keep everyone in the world in your group happy because all you won, you won't keep them happy. Two you will exhaust yourself, and three you will waste your potential.
So, before I paraphrase some of the collective themes we've been talking about, why there is this performance and capacity gap, I've just got to go make it. Christmas time, I grew a bid and Sophia, who's our second younger, so she's fine. We're in Fiji and I thought I'm doing a good job, and she swam up to me in the pool and she went, Daddy, how do you get the little bits there? And they're gray and not the
other bits. I'm like, oh, Daddy's got to get some hair dye which I couldn't find at Freji or the bids coming off. It's just gorgeous. How do you get those little bits there? Gray? Thank you, Saphia. All right, let me summarize. There's a lot of cognitive frameworks meta cognition,
which you're talking about. So if we're talking about how to help people close there's gap between performance and their actual capacity, I think one is listening to a conversation, reflecting on a conversation like this and would be just locking in. And I asked you an open ended question, and correctly you said, well, depends whatever. And I said, let's look at the you project. So let's get our audience to think and reflect.
Harps.
Pick an area in your life right now, physical fitness, career, relationship where what would optimal look like? Let's go give it a score of one hundred. Where are you at? So then you've got that gap between your absolute potential and where you are now. Now we've spoken about what are some of the reasons you very cerebral smarty pants. When are you getting your PhD? It's not far away.
I'm in a like I'm submitting very soon, like in the next four to eight weeks. But I've written a bunch of papers, as you do when you do a research PhD, and they're all off at journals being considered and pondered, and I'm writing my thesis. So all the work has been done. But it's anyway. I don't want to bore you, but you know, the problem is you send off you've written an article on or you've written
a paper on your research, you send it off. Sometimes you don't hear depending on the journal, you don't hear anything one way or the other for four or five months, and that's you know, so there's stuff that's out of your control in the timeline. But yeah, I would hopefully next time we have a chat on your show anyway, that might be done and dusted. So that would be nice.
But I think I can't wait to call you doctor Harper.
Oh yeah, let's not worry about that. But for me, even talking about you know, the performance potential blah blah blah blah blah or performance capacity, you know, that for me was something that I had to even going into high level academia. Not being a high level academic. Okay, I actually don't belong in this room. One could be everyone's granddad, you know, sitting at Monash in my cubicle, just doing my thing, trying to figure out what everything like.
It's a new culture, it's a new language they are, and new people there is. There's just this this whole kind of dimensional that you step into where you're unfamiliar, you're incompetent, are you nervous? And you go, okay, this is fucking horrible, But I'm glad I'm here, you know. And six years six years dude, obviously I switched from full time to part time because of my relatively hectic schedule.
But but you're like, oh, I'm different now. I'm still me at my call, but I know different things, I can do different things. My understanding has grown, my capacity has grown. I think my ability to have this conversation with you is better than it was six years ago. And I think even in that you're in your fifties, I think, but you know me at sixty two, it's like, are you lower? What are you forty eight or something?
Early fifties.
Yeah, I just think practically and realistically. Like even one of the questions that I ask is, well, not to impress anyone or not to I don't know for any outward appearance, but it's like, well, how highly functioning can I be at my age? Like? Can my brain work better than when I was thirty two? Can I still do chin ups? Can I go run ten K's? Can I solve problems? Can I be creative? Can I learn
new things? Can I adapt? I think these are great questions for anyone at any age, and the answer to all of those questions for most of us is yes. So rather than you know, I think before retirements, people almost retire horrible.
It's a shit worth.
Yeah, they retire their potential, they retire their brain, they retire their capacity for learning. And I know that's probably not most of your listeners, but a lot of people do it. It's like, oh, it's almost like they put
the queue in the rack. I'm like, Bro, you don't know, or Borsophine, you do not know how much cool shit you could do that apart from all the great stuff, you're going to be so much more fulfilled and excited rather than just sliding towards the finish line with a fucking pie in your hand.
Brosophene. That's been a big takeout of this one today, Harps, We've got to you know, You've I don't want to say it, but you know I've googled Marcus a realistic and a few quotes on the Stoics. Here's a really good one. Now, these dudes were around thousands of years ago, so Marcus or really on control. You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength. So he was saying, before we had neuroscience
PhDs and pulling all this physical psychological stuff together. It's crazy, is that you look back at some of those quotes. I'll pick one or two other ones. On perspective, waste no time arguing about what a good man or woman should be b one, It's all about being present. Crazy on adversity. Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been. So he's talking about self efficacy and self awareness and self
control thousands of years ago. So if we stitch all this stuff together in the modern era and try and give it a Stoic frame, a multitude of reasons why there's a gap between someone's performance and between their capacity. I mentioned psychological skills. I spoke about state management. You've spoken about self esteem, self efficacy, self talk, meta cognition. So there's a lot of psychological cognitive ones, a few physical ones that can get in the way because we're
not ahead, and the stick. So we summarize there's a multitude of reasons, modeling, role, modeling, environment, so many reasons why there's a gap for people well.
I think also everything from simple things like anxiety, like lack of focus, pro preparation, fatigue, zero motivation, distractions, environmental stress or is lack of belief. It's like there is a myriad of things, but they affect all of us. You know, I have I still lack confidence with lots
of things. Over the last six years, I've had to do four academic milestones where I, the professional speaker, go and stand in front of four super duper academics who make me look like a plant intellectually, and nobody in the room would think this guy is a professional speaker. Like I was so nervous. I was so shit because you know what, in that environment, how well you speak or how funny you are or how many stories you have.
Nobody cares. And by the way, none of the people that are assessing you right now, Craig to get your mid canned review or your final review. They don't know you. They don't care about you. You're number three, zero, five, seven one. That's you. You're You're the candidate in front of and terrified. I was talking to four people. I was terrified. You put me in front of four thousand. I'm excited. It's context dependent. But over the course of those four which was over you know, a bunch of years,
I got slightly better. But it's back to that. Yeah. So I think being scared and being inefficient and ineffective is okay as long as we're recognizing what we need to work on over time and we're actually stepping into it. I want to say one interesting thing while you're talking about the Stoics, and here's an interesting thing that people wouldn't think of. Firstly, the word mind. The word mind is only about four or five hundred years old, as
that English word mind. Also, psychology as a field of research or as a science is only about one hundred and fifty years old, Like the psychology of this or that. You know, it's where three hundred thousand years old as a as Homo sapiens allegedly. I think they're saying it's more now. But you know, for the whole time that we've been around as a species, psychology hasn't been a thing. But human behavior has been analyzed in a myriad of
ways over millennia. And you know, I'm sure there were lots of people before the stoics, but they were essentially talking about what we're talking about two and a half thousand, three thousand, five thousand years ago. None of this is new. None of this is new.
It's not new, but we're not putting it together. And I know you love your science. So I did a bit of research, so I've got to use this quote. Batal Sheddon's going to say, why do we do the research with harps? It's a good one. So research for the Corporate Executive Board found a high perform individuals typically have three things working together. Number one is aspiration, the motivation to step up and take on greater responsibility. Number two, ability,
the capability to deal with complexity and challenges. As we've spoken about today, that is improved with training and number three engagement staying committed long enough to grow forty years in business. You might just do all right, young fella. And here's the interesting part of the research found less than half of the high capability employees feel fully engaged, which means a lot of capable people never actually convert that into consistent performance. So one thing it also showed
is that capability isn't just about talent. Research showed that high potential performers typically have those three things working together. I found that really interesting, so aspirational, so you're looking at something you wanted to move towards. So that would be linking to a lot of the research around purpose ability, which is dealing with complexity and challenge is not just easiness. And that engagement or that passion pace low.
Itte love it. Yeah. I've got one question which I want to share with everybody that they can use, and the question is when you get up every morning and you have your coffee or your tea, and you have your little moment where one or two minutes I ask myself this question every day and this is true or a version of this, and the question is in terms of what I want to do, be, create and change today or maybe need to do in terms of what I need to do, be, create, or change today? Where
should my attention be? What needs to have my attention? What needs to have my focus? Because we weigh so much cognitive, emotional, physical energy on shit that doesn't serve us. So even that awareness around how much of my focus, concentration energy am I wasting every day on bullshit that actually brings me down, not up?
What do I need to do, need be and create today? What a great frame for every single day. It really pulls in a lot of that line on this present focus intentional control.
Yeah, yeah, if you want to simplify it in terms of who I want to be and how I want to be? Where should my attention be today?
This is a big topic, big topic, isn't it?
And oh that's why I said you and I could do three days of this, but you and I could run a series of workshops on navigating all this stuff around self awareness, self regulation right through to self actualization. You know, some topics are relevant to forty percent of the audience. This is everyone, This is one hundred percent of the audience.
And everyone's going to be in different pathways, different awareness skills, knowledge and when you're feeling stressed in life. Shit, it's hard, isn't it. Like when you've nailing stuff at work, you're getting feedback from people around you. You've got that multiplower effect. But that's life, and I think that's why you've got to play the long game, Like I look at that research engagement staying committed long enough to grow. So I really think as we sum up the gap, it's not
going to happen overnight. Like you said, you don't do this my Wednesday. You've got to be patient on this, but at the same time, you've got to be hasty enough to get some change that you're getting some feedback that it's working, so you keep going. It's that dance between the two yes.
And self awareness not self loathing. Don't beat yourself up. You're okay if you're listening to this, And I would be wildly astounded if you don't have a lot more potential and a lot more capacity than you're currently using or stepping into or even understand at this point in time. So it's good news. It's good news, but we've got to do the work.
I've only got one more question. I've been holding this. You said, you're a seven out of ten?
Yes?
Is that where you want to be?
I'm pretty happy being a seven. Like I said across the board, I would say seven. I think there are times when I have moments of ten, I approach ten ten out of ten at something could be Andrew being six out of ten, because I'm just talking about what is my capacity? You know, my training partner is multiple time mister Australia former IFBB pro da da da da. Me training at ten out of ten? Is him training
at five? You know? Me deavlifting a certain weight as him warming up, but me lifting deadlifting a certain weight as somebody else killing themselves. So it's it's it's all relative to us. And I think that if we, like I said at the start, like comparison is good if it's you comparing you to you over time.
Yeah, I was just curious because if you at seven, he's getting to an eight going to make you any happier, any different?
This is now, this is another conversation that is such a fucking smart question because here's the thing. It's like, what is the correlation between optimizing oneself? Which I think is a good idea depending but it's but yeah, what's the Can I be the guy who doesn't have much? Can I be the guy who doesn't do much, but also be the guy who's not anxious, the guy who's calm, the guy who's content, you know. And I think, like my mum and dad are really quite unwell at the moment.
They're both eighty six and without giving away too much details like when I sit with them or a be with them, and it's like, you know, without being too cheesy, all that matters is them, All that matters is love. All that matters is that they are okay, you know. But that doesn't mean we're not going to have the human journey with goals and experiences and peaks and troughs.
But like sometimes like I'm in the middle of this process at the moment, throwing out basically every eighty percent of everything I have in this house because I do not need it. I'm giving away really good things. But it's a really good thing that I don't use or needs, I'm giving it someone who does use it or need it. And it's so fucking liberating. It's like that attachment. There's an other one we could do, attachment theory.
I think we've got two or three parties.
We're ready, We're set for years.
Thank you for planning the seed, and thank you for your time. It's got me thinking more. I often get off a conversation, and a podcast with you is ever relaxed conversation that you press record. And I know I'm going to be reflecting about this a lot over the next few weeks.
Well, mate, you're a good man. You're doing good things, and I know your audience love you and I appreciate you, and thanks for the opportunity to speak to your folks. It's great.
Thank you, O wise one, and keep the beard. It suit you.
I'll do my best.