What do professional athletes, executives and parents all have in common? They all face high stakes, high pressure moments when good performance and decision-making matters the most. Learn what peformance coaching is and how it helps coachees perform at their best consistently. Coach Alex delves into what skills coachees develop and what are the benefits from this type of coaching. If you are looking to understand how to make pressure a privilege, then tune in today.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
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Jaimie Kosmar: Designed to help demystify coaching and help you, our audience, understand what coaching is and how it can help you. I’m your host, Jamie. I am super delighted to be here with coach Alex to discuss a very favorite topic of mine, performance coaching. Coach Alex has been coaching for about 10 years. And in addition to having worked with athletes in the NBA and the NFL, he’s a performance psychologist who holds a PhD in counseling psychology and an MBA.
These clients are only athletes, but professionals who are at the top of their game, but are still striving to go further. This includes executives, CEOs, finance professionals, and art, and even [00:02:00] artists. Um, welcome coach Alex, and thank you for being here with me today.
Coach Alex: Jamie, thank you so much for having me.
I am excited to be here with you, and I love talking about this. So, I’m hoping we get to have a fun conversation here.
Jaimie Kosmar: So one of the things that excites me about talking about performance coaching in general is that, um, I think historically, uh, people tend to, when they think about coaching, they think of it as a remedial tool.
Um, and I think that when we talk about performance coaching, and we think about performance coaching, we’re, we’re reframing it from being a remedial tool. Intervention to an accelerant. Um, so I would like to start by sort of laying the groundwork today and talk about what do we mean by performance psychology and performance coaching.
Coach Alex: It’s a great question and I’m glad you started with the accelerant versus remedial topic. So I guess broad strokes, performance psychology is really about helping people be their best when it matters most. That’s the core principle at [00:03:00] play in the work that we’re doing. Now sometimes that working to solve particular challenges.
Maybe it’s things like performance anxiety or difficulty with public speaking or even difficulty with leadership. And at other times we’re working on optimizing how someone shows up to work the way that they do their leadership. Things are largely good, but they’re interested in getting a promotion or becoming a top performer on their team, or just figuring out how they take themselves to their full potential.
So performance psychology Is really built around evidence based principles of behavior change to help people address those gaps or issues or optimize their performance to be the best that they can be. And performance coaching is just kind of an extension of performance psychology, really. It’s about leveraging those tools and helping people learn the skills that they need to be as effective as they can possibly be.
typically under pressure or in high stakes, uh, high risk situations. And in some cases, you know, as a performance psychologist, those risks are [00:04:00] like with elite military units where I’ve done some work, for example, helping army rangers figure out how to defuse bombs. And in other situations, high risk is You know, we’re scaling a company up, or we have to go through a big layoff, or we’re acquiring a new company, and we’ve got to integrate culture, and we’re not sure how that’s going to work.
So, of course, the risks are on different scales and different consequences, but in both cases, they feel really important. And performance psychology is about helping you learn the skills that you need to manage those things effectively, perform well through them, and then again, kind of thrive, right? Feel good, perform well, and be the best that you can be.
Jaimie Kosmar: That’s super interesting. I, I would, you know, I don’t know how you coach people through when human lives are extinct. That sounds, sounds quite intense. Um, just as a follow up question, you know, are there any types of coaching that performance coaching gets confused with or how to differentiate itself from other types of coaching?[00:05:00]
Coach Alex: Broadly, coaching is hard to differentiate anyway, unfortunately, for better or worse, right? There’s lots of types of coaches and people also think about coaching with things like Mentoring or other sorts of advising that goes on So I think what makes performance psychology and performance coaching a bit unique is really the focus On peak performance and helping people be their best consistently, whereas sometimes things like executive coaching might focus on tactical or operational aspects of a business or traditional psychology is focused on fixing mental health problems.
Right? So, performance psychology can kind of live in the middle there. Um, and it’s really about the individual as a performer, the team as a performer, the organization as a performer, but not necessarily about, you know, should we pursue this tactic or that tactic, or should we execute this acquisition, or should we not execute this acquisition, or what does it mean to be a new CEO, you know, we can talk about some of those things, um, but ultimately [00:06:00] performance coaching is not necessarily designed to address that in the way maybe executive coaching or mentoring or advising might help with some of those other issues.
Jaimie Kosmar: Okay, thank you for that. That clarification. As a next question, you know, we, we talked a little bit at the end, your introduction about, you know, who your clients are, but can you, can you tell us, maybe give us a little detail about, you know, why someone should consider this type of coaching?
Coach Alex: I believe that everyone who’s working in a high stakes, high pressure environment is a performer.
And I think there are actually quite a number of high stakes, high pressure environments that require good performance, right? So even things that people don’t typically Think about as a performance, like parenting, for example, I think is a high stakes, high pressure situation for most people. And as a, as a new dad, I certainly feel that.
Um, and then you’ve got obviously different challenges that you’re working through, you know, as a CEO of a company or different challenges. Again, if you’re working in private [00:07:00] equity or venture capital, but ultimately you’re dealing with high risk decisions and high stakes situations that require a bit of skill, you know, and.
To be able to navigate it. And so what I’ve found is that a lot of the same things that impact the pro athletes that I’ve worked with impact really everybody. And I kind of break my work down into five or six sort of key buckets. So the first is what I would call self regulation. That’s the ability to control, moderate, direct.
Your thinking, feeling and physiology, and to be able to optimize your own learning and become an expert in your own way. So it’s kind of two parts, how you learn and how you control yourself. The second is leadership. Um, and you know, athletes, of course, have to work on their leadership, regardless of being a starter or a bench player.
The same thing is true with pretty much every executive or even parents, right? You’re leading your kid. Um, Third is kind of relationships and communications. It’s kind of related to that, that leadership bucket, but it’s a little bit different, right? We all are learning how to work [00:08:00] best in our teams, whether, again, that’s your family unit, your basketball team, or your investment committee.
You have to be thinking about all the ways that those things come together and how you operate. Fourth would be decision making. So, you know, obviously decisions happen on different timescales, but ultimately there is a process that we can all develop and a set of skills. We can all deploy to help us make more effective decisions.
Things like identifying our own biases, coming up with frameworks around decisions for our values, learning what information to pick up and wait for. Or to build out to make a more effective decision when to trust our intuitive expertise and when to be slow and deliberate. You know, all these things play a part in how we perform.
And then finally is performance under pressure. And there’s a set of skills that again, you need whether you’re diffusing a bomb, shooting a free throw. Um, you know, giving a big pitch, right? These same skills actually cut across the different spaces. And so of course you teach them in different contexts, but I think ultimately those are sort of the core buckets of really good [00:09:00] performance coaching.
And again, you touch on some of the tangential things that come with that, right? You know, if you’re talking about leadership that might bleed into something like executive presence, where you’re figuring out how you show up and be more confident, right? And that’s like, again, a performance psychology skill, or if you’re thinking about.
Decision making, you might be thinking about how you do things like hiring and firing, which is one type of decision, but it’s still related to the way that you process that information. So you can kind of see how you fit in all the core challenges underneath those big buckets. And that’s what I rely on as my framework for the work that I do.
Jaimie Kosmar: Amazing. I love how that framework really fits this broad. I love that. So how broadly you define performance, first of all, um, because, you know, for example, I am also a parent. I don’t think of parenting as. Being a performance, but it is in a way, right? It’s high pressure and a lot of times the decisions that you make have long can may have long term implications, right?
And you don’t really know in the moment, [00:10:00] right? What what those are. I’m curious as to whether do you coach parents as well?
Coach Alex: I’ve worked with a few parents. Yeah, and obviously parenting, especially if you’re working with high performers and business, for example, oftentimes those performers are also parents and, you know, parenting is stressful, right?
Like it’s hard. Um, and so if you’re, if you’re in a stressful situation, again, a high state. There are going to be some skills from performance psychology that are going to help.
Jaimie Kosmar: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the reality is, right, is that our lives are not as siloed as oftentimes we would like them to be. And, and often what happens at work can bleed into what happens at home, uh, and so on and so forth.
So, uh, I think it’s really, again, I think it’s great that, This framework helps you address how you show up generally, whether it is work or home. Um, so, so what sort of outcomes have you seen from this type of coaching? And, you know, can you, can you share any real coaching stories that our audience be interested in learning about?
Coach Alex: I [00:11:00] can share some real stories without sharing some real names. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Protect the people that I work with. But yeah, I mean, I think a host of outcomes that you can kind of associate with performance coaching. I think some of the more foundational or fundamental things are, uh, feeling more in control, right?
Having a sense that you are kind of the agent and author of your own story, that you have a sense of how to best execute. You understand how to perform well. I think a second outcome people often experience is feeling more confident. And that often comes from that experience of feeling a bit more in control of themselves or their situation, but it also changes the way that they show up, the way that they interact in our personally, the way that they communicate.
Uh, third, I think, is feeling more motivated, right? When you’re really tapped into, um, and feel confident in the skills that you’ve developed, then pressure becomes like a privilege, right? Um, it becomes an opportunity to perform better versus something to be afraid of, and that increases motivation. Uh, fourth, I think you’d get improved leadership and [00:12:00] communication.
Um, you know, a lot of really good teamwork, whether it’s sports or business is how you talk to your teammates. It is how you interact with your teammates. And so being an effective leader, being an effective communicator becomes. part and parcel of elevating everyone’s game so that you can be successful.
So those I think would be a few of the outcomes that you, you could expect. And I mean, gosh, I’ve, I’ve now worked with performers across a range of spaces, but, um, one of my favorite stories is I was doing some work with an NBA player, Uh, who struggled a bit with shooting at the free throw line, uh, which is, you know, for many players, kind of a unique experience because you practice this skill so much, but in practice, you can never replicate, you know, 20, 000 people staring at you and screaming at you and hoping that you miss, right?
If you’re, if you’re on an away game, um, and so you’re kind of out there in a team sport on an island for a moment, you know, and so in individual sports, things like golf or tennis, right? You get used to that performing by yourself, but in basketball, you [00:13:00] can mostly perform with everyone else. And then for a brief moment, everything stops and everyone’s staring at you, waiting to see what’s going to happen and how it’s going to impact the game.
And so a lot of players get nervous. And so I had one player who came and said, you know, I want to work on shooting free throws. I want to get more aggressive going to the basket, which is often going to mean I’m going to spend more time with the free throw line. It’s like, okay, great. Well, tell me a little bit about, you know, what you’re thinking or what you’re feeling when you get up there.
And. His original approach was like, I’m just so nervous. I’m in my head. I started thinking about, you know, what if I miss, what am I going to do? What’s the right tactic here? What would my teammates say? And then my heart rate increases and my breathing increases. I’m like, okay, so tell me a little bit about how you deal with that right now.
And his solution was to spend a lot of time, right? Hoping that it would just kind of slow down. And what you find often is, you know, for better or worse, it’s actually quite a common tactic, right? Across spaces, people are just waiting for it to stop versus doing something proactively to address it. And so we started to think [00:14:00] about, okay, well, what could we do and what would resonate for him?
And it turned out that the most important thing we could address, which is often true for people who feel a bit of performance anxiety, Is really addressing and reappraising the physiology. So you kind of have two parts. You have learning to do something with the actual increased, uh, adrenaline, if you will, right.
Learning to control your breathing with techniques like box breathing. You can practice things like mindfulness meditation to help you control and direct your attention. Really learning to talk to yourself in a way that slows you down, even slowing your physical movements down so that you send the message that like, okay, I’m calm.
And then you want to reappraise. that stress is something more helpful, right? So we’ve all been socialized or conditioned into this belief that stress is bad and that we should all try to get stress out or away as quickly as possible. But the reality is stress itself is not harmful. Stress is just your brain and body preparing you to do something effortful.
And if you change the way that you think about it, you have all this [00:15:00] data that shows if you appraise stressors as a challenge versus a threat, Then all of a sudden the physiology becomes excitement. It becomes focus. It becomes determination, not, Oh my goodness, I’m about to melt down at the free throw line.
So we worked on some of these skills. Um, and then early on in my career, you know, we were in COVID. And so there were times when we had no fans and times when we had some fans. But one of the privileges of the experience was getting to watch, you know, all these basketball games from up close and personal.
And at one point, this player just looked at me at the free throw line and winked, and I was like, okay, he kind of got it. And so those are the cool experiences you get to have in my world. And I’ve had, you know, very similar experiences with executives who feel empowered when they give a pitch or feel like they’re operating with their team at a high level, deploying these skills.
And that’s what makes this work so fun, is you get to see people in action be the best that they can be.
Jaimie Kosmar: Um, that was a, that’s a wonderful story. Thank you so much [00:16:00] for, for being here with us today and sharing that story. And the one thought I would love to leave us with is this, the idea that pressure becomes a privilege because you are motivated in the confidence.
That you have built by working with Coach Alex . Ah, uh, um, thank you so much, uh, for being here with us today and to our audience, if you would like to work with Coach Alex or one of our other qualified coaches, please visit us@theidxs.com. Thank you so much for listening.
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