The Mental Game Powered by The Pazik Performance Group

#220 - Daily MG - Love by Leo Buscaglia - 2 of 6

"Labels are distancing phenomena - stop using them!" - Leo Buscaglia

#219 - Daily MG - Love by Leo Buscaglia - 1 of 6

"Everything is filtered through me, and so the greater I am, the more I have to give. The greater knowledge I have, the more I'm going to have to give. The greater understanding I have, the greater is my abilit yto teach others and to make myself the most fantastic, the most beautiful, the most wondrous, the most tender human being in the world." - Leo Buscaglia

#218 - Daily MG - This Is Your Brain On Sports - 6 of 6

Our Win The Week email comes out tomorrow. All fear, frustration, inconsistency, stress, discouragement, anxiety, and anger come from out-of-control thinking. Out-of-control thinking leads to out-of-control performance. Each Sunday I'll send you an email to make sure your mind stays disciplined for when you need it the most. Join the Win The Week Club at www.pazikperformancegroup.com/wtw

"In order to go our hardest, we need to know when we can finally stop." - Sam Sommers

#217 - Daily MG - This Is Your Brain On Sports - 5 of 6

Thanks for listening. DM me on instagram - username @pazikperformancegroup. Let me know your thoughts on this episode!

"When we encounter an emotionally turbulent event such as a death in the family, a primitive set of brain and hormonal responses is activated. We get a surge of cortisol, the stress hormone. This can be dirorienting; after a rush of cortisol, people describe a feeling akin to an altered state of consciousness, as the brain/body system kicks into emergency mode. This feeling subsides after a few hours, however, allowing us to continue with life as we know it fairly quickly.... How so? Bonanno has proposed and found evidence of four distinct trajectories of response in the wake of a potentially traumatic event. There's chronic distress, an immediately high level of dysfunction that never really goes away. There's delayed reaction, whereby an individual initially experiences only a moderate level of grief and disruption but then gets worse rather than better as time goes by. There's recovery, the gradual process of working through acute distress, in the "let nature run its course" manner. And, finally, there's resilience, the absence of major symptoms or dysfunction." My note: What they found is that people respond with resilience more than they are respond with the other three combined. So when pros go out there and perform after a traumatic event happens in their lives, it's not that they're special. You can do that too! We are all resilient. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. All it takes is for you to step into your life and get back to doing what you do on a daily basis." - Sam Sommers

#216 - Daily MG - This Is Your Brain On Sports - 4 of 6

Thanks for listening. If you have gotten anything out of this podcast, please rate and review it! Rate and review the podcast and leave a sparkling (or scathing) comment. Thank you!

"Praise can boost performance in the classroom, just as it can on the home ice of South Bend - but not when it's based on simply showing up, and not when it frames success in terms of fixed levels of aptitude. To maximize impact, praise has to be linked to effort. In other words, contrary to intuition, it's problematic to tell a kid she's a natural athlete. Or that he's a winner. Becuase when performance-based praise or reward is framed in terms of fixed ability, the stage is set not for perseverance but for future letdown. It's those kids praised for effort who are more likely to show grit and less likely to skirt a challenge down the road. To lapse into coach-speak: They're the ones who develop sticktoittiveness when the going gets tough." - Sam Sommers

#215 - Daily MG - This Is Your Brain On Sports - 3 of 6

Thanks for listening. Our 6-week coaches course is getting up and running soon. D1 coaches, high school coaches, teachers, and administrators are all already signed up for the upcoming live course starting November 1st. Make sure you reserve a spot as we only have a few left at https://www.pazikperformancegroup.com/6weekcoachescourse. pazikperformancegroup.com/6weekcoachescourse.

"Unlike the football program [at Notre Dame], the Irsh hockey team is a more recent success story. For decades it skated bak and forth between varsity and club status, and in the early '80s Lefty's teams started to go sideways. Despite heralded recruits and stars... the Irish struggled. In 79-80, the team won 14 of its first 16 games, and the season was pregnant with promise. But things took a hairpin turn, with several lon losing streaks culminating in a final record of 18-19-1. The Irish then endured losing seasons of 18-20-1 and 13-21-2. Lefty was puzzled, and the seniors were left groping for any solution that might help them finish their college careers on a winning note. The co-captains of the team approached some of their psychology professors and explained the team's failure to fulfill the potential of its celebrated recruiting class. It was an inspired, if unusal, course of action... two of the psychologists, Charles Crowell and Chris Anderson, specialized in behavioral management within organizations.... After hearing the hockey players' lament, the professors - as psychologists do - asked the captains to engage in a bit of self-diagnosis. What was the team's biggest on-ice limitation? If the cocaptains could change one thing about the way the team played, what would it be? Their answer: Checking. The captains said that increasing legal body checks was critical to improving the team's performance. More checking would disrupt opponents more and create more opportunities for ND to regain control of the puck. This would lead to more Irish goals, which would lead to more victories.... the first step was to create a player feedback intervention. Each Monday following a weekend home game, the captains posted graphs in the locker room showing each player's hit rate... second, in the middle portion of the season, the researchers moved on to individualized goal setting. This intervention required meetings between the captains and each player during which the player was asked to come up with a challenging but achievable hitrate objective. This target was then added to each player's locker room graph in the form of a bold line, giving him a goal to aim for in each game (and to compare his performance to afterward). Finally, the researchers introduced performance-contingent praise. For the last two games of the season - a number increased to six in a follow-up study the next year - Coach Smith spent a few minutes during the pregame dinners lavishing public recognition on specific players based on their hit rates. Crowell, who's still a professor at ND, recalls that Lefty was "reluctant at first," but the coach played along. His praise was specific to the checking. It wasn't "great job out there" or "hell of a game." It was targeted praise for specific players whose stats indicated that they had been aggressive. "Great job on the boards, Number 68," or "Hell of a difference you made out there on the ice with those three checks in the third period." The effects of these interventions were impressive. They led to improved player performance, in the form of an overall 82 percent increase in hit rate. The Irish played more aggressively, but it was a controlled aggression: Researchers found no evidence of an increase in penalty minutes after any of the interventions; only clean hits were on the rise. Most importantly, the 81-82 Irish finish 23-15-2, giving their graduating seniors their first winning season. What helped turn ND hockey around? Concrete feedback. Specific goals tied to performance. And praise linked directly to increased effort." - Sam Sommers

#214 - Daily MG - This Is Your Brain On Sports - 2 of 6

Thanks for listening. The Mental Game Enthusiasts are chatting on facebook. Search mental game enthusiasts on facebook and get in on the discussion. See you in there!

"Lardon walked us through the basic effects of arousal. "Think of the brain as a series of highways," he explained. "You've got the thalamus - you can think of that as a relay station; the cortex, a place where consciousness, attention, and processing occue; and the amygdala, which also helps with decisions but plays a big role in all emotional responce." Under non-arousing circumstances, Lardon said, the following oversimplified series of events might occur: We perceive a stimulus in our environment; it's relayed to the thalamus; the cortex helps us digest it and ponder, at least briefly, the potential repercussions of how we might respond; the amygdala weighs in if an emotional response is called for; and we respond. Following this examples, Lardon continued, "you decide that it's best not to give the umpire the finger becuase there are consequences, so you don't do it... you just don't go crazy." Arousal, Lardon says, "short circuits that pathway," making us more prone to outbursts (such as flipping off that ump). When the arousal is sexual, emotion and imagery inundate the cortex, "revving it up," as Lardon put it. In the midst of this bombardment of excitement? The cortex is flooded, distorting rational thinking. "Bottom line is, you don't think the best," said Lardon. But in many respects, the effects of competitive arousal are potentially more dramatic, Lardon suggested to us. Referring to the thalamus, the brain's relay station, "the fight or flight type response blows open the gate - going directly to the amygdala, or 'fear factory' - and we don't really go through the cortex at all," he explained. So while the brain ordinarily takes the high road from thalamus to cortex to amygdala, a tense and anxiety-producing situation sends us down the lower express route from thalamus directly to amygdala. From an evolutionary perspective, this rerouting switch has served us well: When the prehistoric caveman saw the dangerous bear, he didn't stop to ponder various courses of action; the amygdala told him to be fearful and run... but when the modern caveman takes a questionnable called third strike in the late innings of a playoff nail-biter, he blows open this very same gate. And bypassing the cortex means an increased chance that the batter, too, gets bypassed - for the duration of the game, after being ejected for cursing out the ump." - Sam Sommers

#213 - Daily MG - This Is Your Brain On Sports - 1 of 6

I heard a coach say yesterday that coaches want performance skills, they don't necessarily want communication skills... my answer to that is it's going to be really hard to get the most out of your athletes if you aren't a good communicator! That's the reason I created a free 8 week mini-course on communication skills. Join the course at pazikperformancegroup.com/mastercommunication

If you're looking to stay sharp this season or just today in general, you might want to check it with your "Totalitarian Ego." Tony Greenwald wrote a paper called just that, "The Totalitarian Ego." Here's what they say in the book:

"What [Tony] proposes is that our typical self-views "correspond disturbingly to thought control and propaganda devies that are considered to be defining characteristics of a totalitarian political system." Specifically, Greenwald suggests that our personal histories - the autobiographical stories we tell ourselves about past performance and how we've gotten to where we are today - are replete with revision, fabrication, and an unrealistically egocentric perspective.... Here are but two examples: 1. We always think we're the center of attention.... tyrannical rulers aren't the only ones who think the world revolves around them. Most of us do - it's a consequence of spending much of our day engaged in internal conversation but lacking insight into the monologues everyone else is producing. 2. We think we're more powerful than we are. We regularly succumb to the illusion of control, overconfident in the role we play in outcomes around us.... regardless of the actual scoreboard, athletes looking for a reason to stay sharp can almost always find it through a quick totalitarian infusion of perceived underappreciation." - Sam Sommers

#212 - Daily MG - The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy - 6 of 6

Our Win The Week email comes out tomorrow. All fear, frustration, inconsistency, stress, discouragement, anxiety, and anger come from out-of-control thinking. Out-of-control thinking leads to out-of-control performance. Each Sunday I'll send you an email to make sure your mind stays disciplined for when you need it the most. Join the Win The Week Club at www.pazikperformancegroup.com/wtw

"You feel better, don't you?" Without looking at her he said "Yes." Her dress, her figure, the expression of her face, the tone of her voice, all revealed the same thing... "Forgive me," but said "Forego" and waved his hand, knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand." - Tolstoy

#211 - Daily MG - The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy - 5 of 6

DM me on instagram with your thoughts on today's episode - username @pazikperformancegroup... let me know...

"An explanation would be possible if it could be said that I have not lived as I ought to. But it is impossible to say that," and he remembered all the legality, correctitude, and propriety of his life." - Tolstoy