The Genesis

I was never the most athletic kid on the soccer field. For most of my career, I was squarely average - not bad enough to ride the bench, and not good enough to win any awards. There was a brief period where my physical stature made me more of a threat when the other kids were a bit scrawnier, but it was negated by my speed and general unwillingness to push myself. I coasted by and failed to reach my full potential.

Despite my limited physical gifts, I made some pretty competitive teams. At the time, I thought it was because my friends’ parents were the coaches. We were still of the age where it was more important to include people than try to separate them based on skill. It wasn’t until I left the sport and played pick-up soccer a few years later that an old teammate’s mom gave me an insight (thanks, Mrs. Mendoza). That was when I first learned that the mental side of sport could make a real difference.

At the end of a game against my old squad with my new crew (pretty sure we lost 3-0), I was walking off the field to say hi to some old teammates. These were people I played with several years ago, several of whom had gone on to make Olympic Development and other select teams. As I waved goodbye, Mrs. Mendoza said, “You should come back to the team. You can just stand in the middle of the field, pass, and direct. We miss that.”

At the moment this felt like a subtle dig at my slow feet and an acknowledgment that they didn’t need me taking too many shots on goal anymore. But I did think a lot about her comment. It was the first time someone highlighted that skills that are not physical - the ability to see the field and direct - could impact performance. This was the beginning of more dynamic thinking about what it means to be elite in sport.

I didn’t go back to the team and instead dabbled in some other sports. I tried Australian rules football, American football, and CrossFit. Each of these was low in match quality, and my sporting playing career came to an end when I left Arizona and moved to New England.

I’d spend the next 6ish years of my life trying to make it as a football coach. This was where I had my second set of insights related to the importance of my own mind in regard to my success and what I wanted for my life. It was also my first run-in with mental health and how that could impact my performance at something in which I was deeply invested.

Coaching taught me that I have a capacity for work that I didn’t anticipate. When you go 126 days in a row from 5:30 in the morning until 10 or 11 at night, you learn just how far you can push your body and mind, and just how much you can suffer by doing that. I don’t care who it is - sleeping that little and working in a pressure-packed environment takes its toll. For me, the ability to persist, if you could call it that, was mostly due to my expectations of myself and my mindset around quitting. Though I could do it, it became clear that this type of work drastically reduced my quality of life. My sleep sucked (I downed 64oz of coffee twice a day just to function) and I had no time for meaningful things like relationships with friends. I could do high-volume work at a decent quality, which I thought I valued. Turned out I mostly hated it. Human potential is not quite limitless but pretty darn close, and it can suck on the outer limits of our own capacity.

The other insight for me was that optimizing my own life and performance was more motivating than spending time in a film room. During those long work days, it would be challenging to even get 10 minutes of exercise. As a person in my mid-20s who was used to moving around often, this felt like a death sentence (long-term it might’ve been). In some ways, the simple fact that I would barely be allowed time to take care of myself was what pushed me out of the profession. I didn’t want my well-being dictated by the work decisions of someone else for the rest of my life - or at least until I was a head coach and I could choose.

The one silver lining in all these experiences coaching was my relationship with the players. I loved helping them and coaching them, and there are several I still keep in touch with over a decade later. It’s been amazing to see their careers unfold. I even got to see one of them become a contestant on The Bachelor. And there are very few experiences if any, that can replicate what it feels like to put that much time into preparation and win with people you care about.

Coaching showed me that work, at least the sheer volume of work involved in coaching (whether needed or not), would probably preclude me from truly being the best version of myself because there wasn’t enough time in the day leftover for the things that make life worth living or taking care of myself. It also showed me how much I valued being in a position to help other people.

After a 6 year run in various capacities, I walked away from coaching, a mix of despondent and lost. I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself next. This was and continues to be the lowest period of my life. I didn’t know who I was, only that I didn’t want to be that unhealthy, physically and mentally, again. The end result of all that hard work was a life largely devoid of meaning and motivation.

After trying my hand at a variety of roles, from advertising sales to finishing an MBA, I had enough distance to look back and see the coaching experience for what it was and to start examining what I wanted to do next.

I knew that:

• I needed a job built on good relationships
• I needed a job that would allow me to work toward being the best version of myself.
• I needed enough time away from work to have significant relationships with other people
• I never wanted to jeopardize my own well-being again
• I wanted to stay in the sports environment because of its unmatched energy and the joy of competing

I also knew I wanted to focus on some of the sports insights I had outside of coaching. Something about how people see these games intrigued me, and my own mindset allowed me to do some incredible volumes of work, and also pushed me to my personal limits.

I stumbled on to the idea of sport psychology a few weeks later.

Now 10+ years into my second career, I see how the moment with Mrs. Mendoza and my own experience coaching has led me to pursue a profession that allows for several things I value. The first is the chance to optimize myself so that I can help optimize others. The second is the chance to live in an environment I love, that’s dynamic, and built around fun. The third is an opportunity to unpack some of what helped me stay competitive as an athlete and elevate and apply that to some of the best athletes in the world. Mrs. Mendoza gave me a new way to think about performance.

Since that time, my fascination with human performance has continued to evolve and expand. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was also part of my interest in coaching. It was about trying to figure out how to get people to realize their full potential. And, as 5+ years of school will teach you, there’s a lot more to discover than you initially imagine. The deeper I get into it, the more I realize how little I actually know.

This newsletter is a result of the accumulated experiences I’ve had personally and professionally. Now that I’ve had the chance to live and work in high-performance settings as a psychologist and coach, I’m turning my attention to the next phase of my own professional development: scaling up, with a goal of helping as many people as possible live their healthiest, highest-performing lives.

This journey has taken me down several paths, some of which have been fruitful and others that have been total misses. I spent 2 years writing a dissertation on grit, which I’ve now come to believe is a long-standing construct disguised as something catchy, like many other pop psychology concepts. I have been to therapy, worked with a coach, applied the techniques I’ve learned in graduate school to myself, tried meditation, hypnosis, journaling… you name it. I’ve fixed my sleep (mostly), and aside from some genetic heart issues, have elevated my overall health. I’ve also continued to build on what I think anyone can turn into a competitive advantage: their own unique mindset. Some of my strengths are having high expectations, a rigorous approach to learning, compassion, and constructive risk-taking.

I’ve also discovered a bunch of things at which I’m average or well below. I’m not the most creative, have the propensity to jump in and fix before fully understanding, and can be impatient. I do too much, which means I am still not fully reaching my potential in many areas of my life. I get anxious when the pressure is on, and still sometimes think I don’t have what it takes.

What I hope to share from here on out are the tips, tricks, systems, tools, and processes I’ve learned and applied to myself and the elite performers I’ve worked with. I’ll draw on science as the foundation and push on the space between science and real life to help you (and myself) become the best version of ourselves.

In no order, here are some of the things you can expect to learn about and action after reading Perform:

• Mindfulness
• Psychological Flexibility
• Mental Skills
• Self-Talk
• Journaling
• Predictive Processing
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
• Process-Based Therapy
• The Gut-Brain Axis
• Practice
• Energy Optimization
• Sleep

This list isn’t exhaustive, but hopefully gives you a sense of the range of things we’ll be covering. That range, I believe, is important. Optimizing your mindset starts with optimizing your brain, and since your brain is inextricably linked to your body… there’s a lot of ground we can cover. I’m not an expert in all of it, so I’ll draw clear lines around what I do and don’t know as often as I can. There are no hacks or shortcuts here. Everything impacts another part of the system.

What I’ve found in working with some of the best performers in the world, from professional athletes to Olympians to Special Forces and the C-Suite at Fortune 5 companies, is that the best performers embrace this range and the associated complexity. They don’t want to just get better at self-talk; they want to change the way their mind and body respond to negativity, and one part of that is how they speak to themselves. They don’t want just to be the best individual contributor they can be; they want to know what it takes to be a great teammate. They want to be the best version of themselves.

I hope I can help you get a little closer to that, too.

If you have questions or comments along the way, send me a note and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Expect 2-4 posts per month on the topics above and more. I’ll do my best to regularly deliver this content beginning in 2023.

I look forward to this journey with you.