Show Notes

• What top athletes do that others don’t do
• Inspiration for becoming a mental performance coach
• The missing link in athletic performance
• Why athletes struggle with “head issues”
• What to do when you’re in a bad headspace
• The most powerful voice we’re ever going to hear
• Incorporating self-talk into your life
• What if you’re not an elite athlete
• The four-step personal development program
• Becoming the best version of you

Connect With Brian Cain

✩ Website: http://briancain.com
✩ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/briancainpeak
✩ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/briancainpeak
✩ Twitter – https://twitter.com/briancainpeak

Additional Resources

Mental Performance Mastery (MPM) Certification: https://briancain.com/certification

Summary

Brian Cain is a mental performance coach, speaker, and bestselling author. His client list includes four Major League Baseball Cy Young Award winners, a Heisman Trophy Winner, eight UFC World Champions, and both World Series and Super Bowl Champions. Brian shares what the world’s elite athletes do that others don’t do, and tools you can use to take your performance to the next level.

Full Transcript

Brian Bartes   

Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers, and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success.

Brian Cain is a mental performance coach, speaker and best selling author. His client list includes four major league baseball Cy Young Award winners, a Heisman Trophy winner, eight UFC world champions, and both World Series and Super Bowl champions. He has coached athletes, coaches and teams at the college level, Olympic level and in all the major professional sports. Brian is also the creator of the Mental Performance Mastery coaching certification course and the 30 Days to Mental Performance Mastery for Athletes program. Now one thing I really admire about Brian, is he clearly practices what he preaches. He’s an avid Ironman triathlete, ultramarathoner and golfer and has integrated into his own life the same mental performance strategies as the world class athletes he coaches. I’m super excited for this conversation, and I’m honored to have him on the show. Welcome, Brian, and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence.

Brian Cain   

Brian, fired up to be here, man. Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show and what a privilege it is to be with you here today.

Brian Bartes 

Well, the privilege is mine. So thanks again. Brian, as I mentioned in the intro, you’ve worked with UFC fighters, Olympic athletes, golfers on the PGA and LPGA Tour and numerous other elite athletes. What do the world’s top athletes do that other athletes don’t do to take their performance to the next level?

Brian Cain 
 
I don’t think it’s a real big secret that they’re doing things that other athletes aren’t doing. I think they just do it more consistently and I think they do it with more obsession. I worked with a UFC fighter by the name of George St. Pierre out of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, one of the greatest to ever step inside of the octagon, a two division World Champion, 170 – 185 pounds. I remember when I asked him – as I do all athletes who I work with when they retire – I said what’s the biggest difference that our work made together? He said, Brian, the thing that you taught me was that I was making decisions, not sacrifices. I don’t remember saying that, I don’t remember sharing that, but I now use that all the time. The great athletes and great performers at any level, Brian, they’re not making sacrifices to be great, they’re making decisions. I’m making the decision; making the decision to go to bed early so I can wake up early to train instead of going out to party. I’m making the decision to say no, as Warren Buffett would say, success is saying no to 99% of the opportunities that come your way so you can say yes to the one big one that you truly want to pursue. So we’re not making sacrifices, which I hear too often people say I’m making a sacrifice to do this, do that. Well, they’re focused on the things that they’re missing instead of focusing on no, this is what I’m going towards, this is what I’m setting as my north star and what I want to pursue. So they’re obsessed and they’re making decisions, not sacrifices. They’re taking ownership and they’re playing offense. I worked with the University of Georgia in their swimming and diving program and the women won three of five NCAA national titles during that span. Their head coach, Jack Bauerle – one of the greatest names in NCAA coaching history especially in the sport of swimming – I remember doing a session with his team and I asked him, Coach Jack, what’s the thing that you wish you knew now, when you started coaching 30 years ago? I call it the million dollar question. It’s one of my favorite questions to ask; what do you know now that you wish you knew then. And he said, when I first took over and I started coaching, I wanted our athletes to be well rounded; I encouraged them to get involved in as many things as they could on campus, whether it was sororities or fraternities at the time, or getting involved in different extracurricular activities or whatever it was. And he said, what I’ve realized is, if you want to be great you can pursue probably two things at an elite level, not three and those two should be school and swimming. So they have to make a decision, do they want to be world class or do they want to be well-rounded? I thought that was a pretty profound statement. But I found both of those things to be very true. Pursuing well-rounded you do a lot of things well, pursuing world class, you do a few things at a world class elite level.

Brian Bartes   

So what I heard you say is focus and decisions. It’s interesting, the examples that you gave about the decisions that people make, it’s not just decisions on the field or in the octagon, it’s decisions about how you live your life. I heard someone once say, how you do one thing is how you do everything, so I think that consistency of decisions too, that support where it is that those elite athletes want to go.

Brian Cain   

As they say, decisions determine destiny and focus determines future. Throughout your day you’re squared away with making a lot of little decisions that have big impact. Like the decision to say yes to an interview, the decision to say yes to someone knocking on your door if you’re an executive saying, hey, do you have a minute. Small interruptions cost big time, it costs big time to your productivity, it costs big time to what’s called attention residue. One of my favorite books is “Deep Work” by Cal Newport and in that he talks about attention residue and how when you stop doing an activity, it doesn’t stop in your brain, it continues to carry on. An example for everybody would be, I’m going to check my text messages or check my email one more time before bed, you open it up and there’s something where now you have to make a decision. And you go, oh, I’ll decide on that tomorrow but when you put the phone down and you’re laying in bed, it’s constantly inside of your head. We call that decision fatigue and attention residue. I get fatigued making decisions all day and I have this residue of attention from things I’m looking at. The way our world works for now is there are so many inputs, you really have to safeguard against your energy and attention. Part of the way that we do that is creating routines and habits. So I create routines and I create habits so I can turn over a majority of what I do to autopilot. It’s why 95% of the clothes that I own are black, because what am I going to wear that day? Something black. Something that I learned from studying Steve Jobs, he was always going to wear jeans and a turtleneck, Mark Zuckerberg, always going to wear a gray shirt. So when you look at those little decisions, how many decisions can I turn over to autopilot so that I can have more time, energy and bandwidth to focus on what’s truly important.

Brian Bartes   

That’s great. The mental aspect of performance coaching is fascinating to me, because I know how important it is to success. You’ve given so many examples just in our short time already. It’s not just with athletes, as you pointed out. How did you get into the business and what inspired you to become a mental performance coach?

Brian Cain   

It goes back to when I was a high school athlete in Massachusetts. I grew up in a small town, Williamstown, Massachusetts and played football, basketball and baseball and it was like being the best snowboarder in Mexico. When you succeed in a small town, your population, your sample size, is not accurate so you think you’re really good. I had a football coach who was really influential in my life; influential in that he believed in me and influential in that he was doing mental performance coaching before it was known as a thing. There was a quote of the day that he would hang up on the practice plan and he would always, before practice, call on somebody to talk about what the quote of the day was. Being a quarterback of the team and a captain of the team and a three year starter, I got called on frequently. I think he knew that I needed that because I had come from somewhat of a broken home, I had a brother that was an alcoholic, and I came from a challenged background, relatively speaking. That was something that really gravitated towards me. I was into mental performance at that time before I knew it was a thing. When I went to the University of Vermont to play college baseball, I became college baseball’s biggest failure. I went in there as a pitcher, I had a great work ethic, had a great attitude, was coachable. I just wasn’t necessarily getting coached on the aspects of performance that I needed. I needed to focus. I needed to focus on the controllables. Really what I needed was the Ten Pillars of Mental Performance Mastery, the system that I now teach and what’s in our certification, what’s in my 30 Day Athletes program. That’s what I needed. My junior year I had a shoulder surgery, and in one day, completely changed my life. I’m a huge believer in the power of moments. So one of my favorite book books is actually called “The Power of Moments” by Dan and Chip Heath. They talk about these moments in your life that course correct or change the direction you’re on. One of those was at a general store, my freshman year of high school when my football coach came in and said, hey, how come you’re not playing football? I said, well, I want to play fall baseball. He goes, we don’t have that here. Like, what are you going to do? Go play by yourself? He goes, I’ll pick you up tomorrow and we’ll go to our scrimmage. And the rest is history, changed my life. I have a picture of my high school football coach right there on my wall of mentors that you can’t see behind my desk here. Then the second day that changed my life, it was July 4, 2000, I walk into a Barnes and Noble across from Fenway Park in Boston; I happen to be down there for the holiday. I picked up this very book “Heads Up Baseball” by Dr. Ken Ravizza. And Brian, almost every page in here is underlined, almost every word is underlined, pages are falling out. I’ve had this book now 23 years and I have Ken Ravizza’s face tattooed on my heart. My first daughter’s name is Carolyn Kendall Cain in his honor because this one book, when I picked it up, gave me the answers for the problem I was trying to solve. I remember making my friend drive our car from Boston back to Burlington, Vermont; I read the book in the car on the way back. The next day I went to the library, because I didn’t own a computer, and I sent him an email and I said, Dr. Ravizza, this is the best book I’ve ever read. I left out of that, that it was the only book I’ve ever read at that time. [Laughter] I said, hey, do you guys have a master’s degree in this? Because what I wanted to do at that time was I wanted to go back to Williamstown, Massachusetts, I wanted to be the high school baseball coach, football coach and athletic director like John Allen was. I sent him an email. Three weeks later I get a handwritten letter back and it says hey, come on out, make a visit, let’s see if this is for you. I go out there. I’m supposed to stay with one of the grad students. The grad student gets food poisoning so I’m staying at Dr. Ken Ravizza’s house. We walked downstairs to his office at his house. He goes, hey, there’s a couch. It’s all I got. I’m sorry. You can sleep on the couch. Here’s my office, help yourself. I didn’t sleep that night. I was going through videotapes watching him speak to the University of Nebraska football, watching interviews with Jim Abbott, who was one of the top pitchers in the big leagues at the time, watching him on video with Team USA – I think it was like 1986 or ’96 whatever year it was – him and Skip Bertman with Team USA in the Atlanta Olympics. I’m sitting there watching all these videos. He comes down at like 6:30 in the morning and he goes, the sheets haven’t moved, did you go to sleep? I said nah, man, I’m trying to get better. And he’s like, I think we’re going to like having you in this grad program. So for 2001 to 2003 I was his grad assistant. I was his shadow, I would have done anything for Ken Ravizza at the time. While I was there, I was a grad assistant coach with the Fullerton baseball team, still looking for what it was that I needed as an athlete who would have helped me. So what I found when I was there for 2002 and 2003, we finished third in the country. In ’03, ’04, I’m back in Vermont teaching health and phys ed, and Fullerton baseball wins a national championship. As the baseball coach, when you win the college baseball national championship, you kick off the national convention. So the national championship is in June, the convention is in January. George Horton, the head coach at Cal State Fullerton, who I’d worked for those two years, is now the speaker because they won it all in ’04. He says if we had used the mental game and Ken Ravizza in 2001 and 2003 as much as we did in 2004, we’d probably have another national title. He went on for 40 minutes of his keynote speech to talk about the difference that the mental game made. At that point, when they won the national title, his pitching coach, Dave Serrano, goes to become the head coach at UC Irvine. And Dave calls me in Vermont says hey, Brian, I know you’re no longer a high school teacher – which I was for the one year – you became an athletic director, do you have any flexibility in your schedule to be able to come out and work with our team? So I’m flying from Vermont to Southern California once a month, leaving Friday on like the latest flight, get there all day Saturday, all day Sunday, red-eye back, driving two hours back to the school, going in the office on Monday. I could keep up that pace and that experience was exactly what I needed to get into the trenches for sports psychology. At that time I didn’t think I could do sports psychology full time. I didn’t think I could be a full time mental performance coach. Then, as all good marketing is word of mouth, Irvine has success and Dave Serrano’s on the team USA baseball staff with the coach at Vanderbilt and the coach at TCU – so my first three teams – Irvine, Vanderbilt, TCU. Vanderbilt has a pitcher named David Price, who’s the first pick in the draft who has won a Cy Young, TCU has a pitcher named Jake Arrieta who won a Cy Young; two of the best pitchers in baseball. And at that time, I start working with a UFC fighter that trains in Montreal, with George St. Pierre. You pick up George St. Pierre and it’s like your first client in football being Tom Brady. The next thing you know, it starts compounding. I have a decision to make where I’m 60 hours a week, 70 hours a week as a high school athletic director, gone 40 to 45 weekends a year doing this work on the side, and finally got to a point where I’m like, I’ve got to make a decision, what do I really want to do here? I loved being a high school AD, I’ve just never had a bad day being a mental performance coach. I went all in on the mental performance coaching route in 2011 and I’ve been doing that full time ever since. It feels like yesterday, and that was 12 years ago. So you know, I got into it selfishly because I went looking for answers to solve my own problems as an athlete, to close the chapter on that book. What I found is that it’s the missing link in athletic performance. If I’m working with eight UFC world champions, a Heisman Trophy winner, Cy award winners or CEOs, the biggest gap in elite level performance is mental performance. What we’ve identified, Brian, is that there are ten fundamental skills that when you train, they give you the skill set of mental toughness. So if people are taking notes and following us here, what I do as a mental performance coach is not different, it’s very similar to what a position specific coach would do or to what a strength conditioning coach would do. I give my clients drills, things to do to get better, training, whether they be an executive, coach, an athlete, whatever it is. I give them drills to develop ten skills. When we combine those ten skills, it’s the mental toughness skill set, those ten skills:    mindset, motivation and commitment, focus and awareness, self-control and discipline, process over outcome, meditation and mental imagery, routines and habits of excellence, time management and organization, leadership and the right culture. The first eight are really individual based skills. The last two, leadership and culture, can be individual but they’re much more organizational when you’re talking about working with a team or an organization trying to pursue a collective goal. What I I found in 20 years of obsession in doing this work is it doesn’t matter the age, it doesn’t matter the level, it doesn’t matter where in the world, it doesn’t matter how competitive, those ten skills are what gives you the best chance to win in the mental game.

Brian Bartes  

One of the things that really surprises me is how much top athletes struggle with just what you’re talking about, what I call the head issues, whether it’s a golfer on the PGA Tour who’s leading for three days of a tournament and then just completely blows it on Sunday, or a designated hitter in baseball who goes 0 for 12 in the playoffs, or most recently, a top tennis player threatening to quit the game because she doesn’t think she’s good enough to compete in the majors and she’s in the top ten in the world. It just surprises me that athletes with so much talent, those elite athletes at the top of their profession, struggle just as much or maybe even more than the rest of us in the mental performance stuff. What are the dynamics at play in those and similar situations that you run into?

Brian Cain 
 
Well, I think it’s a lack of training, to keep it simple, a lack of mental performance training. I mean, if you look at athlete’s training, what percentage of high level competition – we’re talking about PGA Tour, Olympics, professional tennis, the US Open just happened, Major League baseball – at the highest level, if you ask those athletes, the executives, what percentage of what you do is mental, they’ll probably say 80 to 90%. But when you ask them, well, how much of your time – whether it be in practice or training or in education – has been around the mental aspects of performance, it’s less than 20% of the time. Now, when you’re talking about a youth athlete, there are mental challenges but they’ve got to learn the physical fundamental skills of how to throw, how to run, how to catch. But at the professional level, all those are at the elite level. So what’s the difference maker in consistency, what’s the difference maker in your talent showing up? It’s the six inches between your ears that control the six feet below, and that comes down to a training issue. Most of the athletes that I’ve been around at the highest level, they’ve never had formal mental performance training until we get together. They don’t realize that you can train mental toughness like you would train your body physically, like you would train the skills of sales or the skills of performance in an octagon or on a golf course. When we work with golfers, we look at the three aspects of golf management. There’s swing management – what am I doing mechanically, there’s course management – how do I attack the course, I’m planning to put myself in the right place to score well, there’s self-management. I think you can kind of take that analogy of swing management, course management and self-management and create a hybrid of that for anything in the world. One of Ken Ravizza’s biggest principles he would teach is you have to be in control of yourself before you can control your performance. But most people don’t know how to stay in control themselves. They don’t know what to do when they get off course to get back in control of themselves and they don’t recognize when they get out of control. So we spend a lot of time on what I call a loop called recognize, release, refocus. After each play or moment recognize where you’re at. Are you in control of yourself? What we would call green lights, like a traffic light; if you’re in green light and you’re driving a car, we just go, there’s no thought process. You come to a yellow light, awareness kicks in. How fast am I going? Is there approaching traffic? Is there anybody out walking? Is there a cop behind me? How fast am I going – do I step on the gas and go or slow down? Same way in life and performance. When you start getting out of control are you out of control because you’re going too slow? Are you out of control because you’re going too fast and moving too fast, you had too much caffeine and all of a sudden, now you’re making mistakes because you’re going out of aggression or making mistakes because you’re talking too fast? You’ve got to understand yourself and your awareness of when you’re in yellow light – losing control, red light – I’ve lost control. So green is in control, yellow is losing [control], red is lost control. I’ve got to be in control of myself before I can control my performance. So if I recognize that I’m in yellow or red lights, what do I do? I’ve got to have something to go to. We call it having your toilet [sound of toilet flushing] that you flush, flushing your toilet and being able to let it go; it’s a three step process. You have a physical action that you make with an association. So for example, we were having a conversation before we started to record about the NFL. If you watch certain players, you know one of the things you might see them clap and clear; they might clap their hands, wipe their chest to clear it away. The wide receiver with the Denver Broncos, Courtland Sutton, you’ll see him do that if he misses a block or misses a pass; clap, wipe, deep breath and you’ll hear him out loud say, next play. So that three step process, physical action with association, deep breath and a verbal trigger to pull me back to the present moment like an anchor, a verbal anchor, that I drop that says okay, I’m in the middle of a storm, I want to stay right here where my feet are. That’s what we do. Breath, physical action, and that verbal anchor. So I think the biggest gap for people is simply in training, because there’s not a lot of people that are doing training. That’s what’s so exciting about our our community that we’re creating in honor of Ken Ravizza. I started working on the certification the day that he passed away because I said, I need to shift from me being on the front line working with athletes and coaches to going maybe up a level in terms of coaching coaches to be able to go out and do mental performance work. Because my biggest goal and my mission in life – what I want written on my gravestone – is educated, empowered and energized other people to be their best through living and teaching the Ten Pillars. Well, every time I do a one to one interaction with an athlete, one person’s getting better but if I have a chance to sit down with you on your podcast, or have a chance to work with a coach, that coach hopefully walks away with some skill sets, to be able to then impact everybody for the rest of their career. And this life, we get one chance, what it’s about? It’s about influence and impact. How many lives can you touch with the one that you have?

Brian Bartes    

That’s great that you’re doing it, you’ve obviously leveraged your time, which is…I mean, we have capacity constraints, even for action-oriented super achievers like yourself, there are capacity constraints. I really like how you’ve leveraged that into coaching coaches. I want to go back to emerging out of the funk and what I’ll just call pattern interrupt, which is what you’re describing in your three step process. It’s really clear to me how to do that after dropping a pass, or maybe having a bad inning in a baseball game, or at the end of a set in a tennis match or the end of a game, but what about, let’s say in the middle of a marathon when you’re in a bad head space, whatever that looks like, what’s the equivalent? Or is it something different that you would advise for, say, a marathoner in that situation?

Brian Cain   

Well, I’m glad you asked, because I ran a marathon yesterday for my 45th birthday. We did 45k for my 45th birthday, my friend called them Canadian miles, but it was about 28 miles. As you’re doing that you are out there on this trail getting crushed, took nine hours to run this thing, very much elevation, about 5000 feet elevation gain. And as we’re out there doing this, the entire time you’re riding the roller coaster of I feel good, I feel terrible. I love this, I hate this. That’s life. I mean, before we even started, I’m in the starting gate and I got a hamstring cramp, this is going to be interesting, as we’re getting ready to go. So when you’re out there and you have those moments where you want to quit – it hurts, it’s not fun, why am I doing this – I think you’ve got to do two things. I’ve learned this through the ultra endurance – whether it’s Ironman, whether it’s the 100 mile ultra endurance event that I’ve done – is talk to yourself, don’t listen. Like, you know it’s gonna suck, you know you’re gonna get crushed. If you go into it with an ego or too much confidence going, I’m gonna crush this, I think you have to go into it and respect the event and have the humility to go, this is going to suck and I have enough tools to be able to handle it. So when you get in there and it starts to hurt, you talk to yourself, and what I would do is shrink the course. I’d say okay, I’m at mile two and I want to quit yesterday. I don’t have to go another 26 miles, I have to get to that tree that’s about 100 yards in front of me. So that’s one strategy is shrink the course, just what’s the next thing I need to do, do that. That’s an analogy for life. You’re not writing the book, write the dedication. And then the second thing would be stay external. And what I mean by external is, the more energy you give, the more energy you have. So one of the guys I was running with, who ironically, the first five miles was like floating up the mountain but after about six miles in he was dry heaving for the next 20. So the roles switched at about six miles in, I felt amazing after riding through the wave, and then it was like it shifted. So staying external is talking to the people who you’re with. I would talk to everybody who I would pass or would pass me. There are times where I would just be running, I would just start clapping my hands. I would start talking to him really loud. I remember doing an Ironman…the hardest Ironman I ever did was in Barcelona, because we were like one of three Americans who were there and no one really spoke English in this really small town that we were at. I couldn’t really talk to anybody when I was out there so it was really difficult because I was really internal and quiet, not bringing any energy and the more energy you give, the more energy you have. Energy is a lifecycle. So staying external, communicating, pouring into other people, you get more back, talk to yourself, don’t listen. Then the other one is ride the wave, like this too shall pass. No matter what it is, you know it’s going to be a roller coaster and this too shall pass. So using those tools, those strategies, of knowing I just have to ride through this, this is normal. Instead, if I didn’t have this training in the endurance world, it was oh, what’s wrong with me, today is not my day. Like those are self-sabotaging thoughts. What do I have to do in this moment? I’ve got to get more food. What do I got to do in this moment? I’ve got to keep my body language big. What do I need to do in this moment? I’m need to stretch my hamstrings, slow down and walk for a little bit until this cramp kind of works itself out. So I think those are three strategies that people can use whether it be in life or be in a marathon; talk to yourself, don’t listen; ride the wave and stay external; the more energy you give, the better you’re going to feel. It’s like my friend and mentor, Dr. Rob Gilbert always says, he goes, hey, if you’re having a miserable day, go find somebody who you can serve and you’ll turn that day around.

Brian Bartes  
 
That’s awesome. I love those tips. I’d like you – if you’re willing – to say more about self-talk because you imply that or infer that. Also, I noticed in your language, you’re talking about a having a challenge with your hamstring and saying, wow, this is interesting. I don’t think most people – when they have a problem with their hamstring and they’re running 45 kilometers or a one hundred miler or a half marathon for that matter – they usually don’t say things like, oh, this is interesting. That self-talk is so important, saying “get to” versus “have to” and just little phrases like that. Can you tell us more about that?

Brian Cain   

For sure. I mean, it’s the most powerful voice we’re ever going to hear is the one that we have for ourselves. It’s with us all the time. I don’t know how they prove this but I’ve heard people who I really respect in the field of mental performance say that 80% of our thoughts on a daily basis are of a negative tone, which again, I don’t know how you evaluate that. I don’t know what the research is on that. But someone who I have a ton of respect for, that was like their big thing, their underlying foundation is 80% of what we say to ourself is negative. So until we learn how to talk to ourselves in a better way, none of the strategies in mental performance are going to make a difference. I will kind of debate that but I think there’s some validity to what what this coach was saying, who I have a ton of respect for. So when it comes to self-talk, and talking to yourself, don’t listen; it requires that you know what to say; so your classic pattern interrupt, Brian. And if you go back to E plus R equals O, which Jack Canfield first wrote about in his book, “The Success Principles,” and Urban Meyer grabbed on to in his book “Above the Line,” Event plus Response equals Outcome. Well, the event happens continually. You always get to pick your response because attitude is a decision. If you’re looking for one of the best books ever on attitude as a decision, check out “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl, about a psychologist who survived the concentration camps in Nazi Germany; that is completely about ownership of one’s attitude, where they can take everything from you but that fact, that attitude is a decision. So when you take the ownership of your self-talk and you take ownership of your attitude – which really is self-talk – then now you can start going to work and you can determine what you’re going to say to yourself. One of my favorite videos that’s ever been created is from a guy named Jocko Willink, a former Navy SEAL, Navy SEAL Commander, from his podcast and he talks about the one word “good.” And he would say, we would get this impossible mission that would be given to us and I’d go in and give it to my men. Then they would come in and they would say, we got this, we got that, boss, I’m not sure we can do it. And he’d look at them and he’d say, good. And then they’re supposed to be getting these new night raid goggles and this different equipment, and it wouldn’t show up at the time they’re supposed to go on their mission, he said good, we’re already prepared with equipment that we have. So everything that came down the pike that was a problem he would simply say, good. Well, when I step back and think about it, Ken Ravizza, my mentor, used to always say “beautiful.” We’d go down 4-0 in the first inning; beautiful, let’s see how we respond; beautiful, they think they’ve got the lead, they’re gonna cave in and make some mistakes because they won’t be as focused; beautiful, got them right where we want them. We’re down 4-0 the bottom of the first, he’s saying beautiful. So it was a pattern interrupt and from that pattern interrupt now we move forward. Well, when we move forward with our self-talk, we have to know what we say. So for example, yesterday, hamstring cramp. Good. And I would say to my friend, light, smooth, easy, fast, baby, let’s go. And we must have said light, smooth, easy, easy, fast one hundred times when we were on the course. I remember listening to Mark Devine, another former Navy SEAL, his book, “The Way of the SEAL,” and he would talk about how when they were going through hell week – six continuous days, 120 hours worth of training, very little sleep if any – he would say, looking good, feeling good, I should be in Hollywood; that was a mantra. If I had a dollar for every time I’d been out somewhere getting it laying on me in an endurance event and said looking good, feeling good, I should be in Hollywood, and started laughing…once I had our first child, I would be out there and just go, man, Elmo put his dancing shoes on, I got my dance shoes on, let’s go to work – just little stupid things like that. But it takes you out of the moment and makes you laugh and if you can laugh, you can take another step. So those are when knowing what to say becomes important. And what I’ll often do with athletes is a couple of strategies, for my clients is a couple strategies. I have them write down three affirmations, an affirmation being something like, looking good, feeling good, I should be in Hollywood or light, smooth, easy, fast or the next step is all I need to take. But when it goes to life, for example, in life, affirmation could be, I live out of my core principles of apples, I work remote and generate wealth from home, I love and serve my family and community. They just write those three things down in a journal every day. By writing down those affirmations, that’s like bench press and getting reps for your self-talk. So the affirmations that you write down – and I don’t feel like you need more than three, because really, all you need is one to turn you in the moment – when you have those three that you write down consistently on a daily basis, that’s what’s going to come up in your mind instead of what you may be used to be you with the negativity. The other piece that I like a lot is what I call the “three keys to keep it simple.” My friend, Sean Casey, who is a ten year major league baseball player, lifetime 300 hitter, he’s an analyst on the MLB Network and this year at the All Star break, he gets hired by the New York Yankees as their hitting coach. He’s the major league baseball hitting coach of the New York Yankees. And he would say that when he was playing his best, he would have “three keys to keep it simple”. It was “see the ball, be easy, hammer it”. That was it. I’d say Sean, how often did you change those? He’s like, yeah, maybe twice. I’m like, twice like a year? He goes, oh, no, twice in my career. I go, so every time you walked to home plate, you would take an index card? And he pulled it out, he showed me, he still has it in his house. He put it in his pocket before the game, it would say “see the ball, be easy, hammer it” and he had that card, and he would slap himself on his pocket, walk onto home plate, as an anchor trigger to remind himself “see the ball, be easy, hammer it”. So I like self talk, Brian, with the athletes or the clients I’m working with. Like, if I asked you your birthday month, date and year – if somebody asked me that, 9/20/78    – if somebody asked me my three affirmations, my three keys, I want to give it to them with that type of commitment and that type of speed because it’s front of mind. So a process that I like to use with creating awareness around self-talk is what I would call three steps to ownership; I know it, I do it, I own it. So I say I want you to write down your three affirmations and three keys so you know them. Then I want you to, during training, find opportunities when it gets hard, where you come back to when it gets hard and you’re looking down, you remind yourself whether they’re written on a water bottle, written on tape, written on your shoes, wherever you can see them physically, here are three keys or three affirmations. And when you know it, because you write it down every day, I call you randomly and say give me your three keys, give me your three affirmations, have a good night, and I hang up and it’s a 30 second phone call. If you know them, and then you do it when you’re training, you’re gonna be able to own it and use it when it gets really hard and uncomfortable during the competition. So those would be examples of self-talk. And another one that I really like is what I call the New Narrative. We all have a narrative and a story that we tell ourselves. What I often will do is have my clients write down the new narrative. They literally write out a story about who they are with mindset shift in terms of what they might have been in the past and who they are now. Then what I’ll do is I’ll make a personal commercial for them, I’ll take a song that they like, usually instrumental, and I’ll voice over what that personal commercial is, that self-talk, that new narrative. And they’ll listen to it when they’re driving, listen to it on a consistent basis. They’re just flooding themselves with the self-talk, who they want to be, what they’re about, what they do, what they don’t do anymore. One of my favorite statements is the question of, is what I do in my life in alignment with what I want from my life, and if it’s not, you’re gonna have a problem, you’re gonna have some internal conflict. Is what I do in my life in alignment with what I want for my life? Well, that implies that you know what you want for your life and a lot of people don’t, they just have their nose down. They’re working so hard that they get to a place of success and they look up and they go, I’m not sure this is what I want to do. And then you have to kind of go to work on what’s the meaning behind what you do. What’s your intention? What is it you really want for your life, which is a very difficult question for people to answer.

Brian Bartes  

That’s all great stuff. I need to go back and listen to like the last ten minutes…well the whole show, and I really recommend that for our listeners and viewers. This is one – and I say this a lot because our guests are great and the content is great – but this particular show, with mental performance coach Brian Cain, I strongly encourage you to go back and listen to this at least three times and put this stuff into action because it absolutely works. This is simple. It’s easy to do, and it’s going to make a profound difference in your life. Brian, I know you work primarily with athletes in the sports domain. How is mental performance different for an elite athlete than say a C-level executive or a business owner? What are some of the commonalities regardless of profession?

Brian Cain   

It’s not that different. The biggest difference is, as a baseball player, you walk out and 45,000 people see what you do every day and then they can post their opinion on social media. And if you don’t have the behavioral system in place to not look at that, that can have a negative impact on you. As I share with people all the time, if you believe what you read when they’re telling you how great you are, you’re gonna believe what they tell you when you need to get out of town too. So I think that’s one of the biggest fundamental differences, that the CEO, C-level suite executive, what they do every day is not as public as what athletes are doing every day. That’s one aspect of trying to bulletproof the athlete from the opinions of others, and what other people will say, and what other people think because it’s really irrelevant. I don’t think you have to look any further than what Deion Sanders is doing in Colorado right now, to realize that other people’s opinions really shouldn’t have any impact on how you go about doing what you’re doing when you believe in what you’re doing. Now, the commonalities are there’s pressure, there are time demands and the margin for error is small and the competition is fierce. It just depends on…the bigger your goal, the tighter your system needs to be. If you’re trying to make $100,000 a year versus you’re trying to make $10 million a year, like that’s a lot different structure. Its no different than if I’m trying to make it to the big leagues, that’s a lot different than I’m the guy who was trying to have a 15 year career, end up in the Hall of Fame. So it starts with what’s the end result goal that I’m looking for. The bigger your goal, the tighter your calendar needs to be. So I think one of the things that’s consistent across all performers – C suite executives, athletes – is there are a lot of demands on you and until you start playing offense by time blocking your day, you’re going to be chasing your day most days, you’re going to feel like you’re playing defense, you’re going to feel like you’re getting pulled like Gumby instead of playing offense and you dictating the day. One of the concepts that I share…I’ve got two corporate engagements out here in Arizona in the next month and they’re both built around one concept. A lot of my training with the athletes I work with is built around one concept. Now that one concept is like a spider’s web that has a million things that can come off of it but I’ll share with you that one concept. They call it the Four Step Personal Development program, or Four Step Personal Development Formula, and it’s:    set your intention, schedule it, measure it, reflect and refocus. So let me unpack these. The first one, set your intention; what do you really want? What do you want for your personal? What do you want for your professional? And we call it an MVP Process. Mission – what’s your gravestone? Vision – what do you want for your life? Principles – how are you going to show up every day? I’m working with a UFC fighter by the name of Vitor Belfort, one of the greatest of all time, Hall of Famer. I remember sitting with him in the Mandalay Bay as he’s cutting weight in a sauna getting ready for his title fight against a guy named Chris Weidman. He’s 38 years old at the time; 18 years old when he wins his first UFC title, came over from Brazil spoke hardly any English and goes home a UFC champion. And I said Vitor, what is it you know now at 38 that you go back and tell the 18 year old Vitor? And he said, Brian, the biggest difference, to go back and tell the younger version of Vitor is a difference between being a boy and being a man. He says, a boy lives out of preference, a man lives out of principle. Not a lot different than what Mack Brown the football coach in North Carolina now, who won a national championship at Texas, shared. A viewer asked him the million dollar question. He said, you’ve got to have fun, if you’re not having fun you’re doing something wrong. He said the second thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to stick to your core principles. Same thing as Vitor. He said, number three, you’ve got to sail the right ships. I said, Coach Brown, what do you mean by sail the right ships? He said you’ve got to invest in leadership. You’ve got to invest in relationship if you want to win championships. So back to the Four Step Personal Development Formula; number one, what’s your intention? What do you want? What do you want for yourself personally, professionally? What’s your mission, what do you want on your gravestone? What’s the vision, the resume you want to accomplish in your career. What do we do in the next 90 days? That’s a whole training in itself. The second step, schedule it. It gets into time blocks, like we only have 168 hours in a week. When you look at these high level achievers, the one thing they do – and I picked this up from Gary Keller in his book “The One Thing” is he says the success habit of his highest producing real estate agents is time blocking. What we start doing, we start time blocking and it’s really quite simple:    pm routine to get ready to sleep – sleep, am routine – fitness block, when you’re investing in yourself with energy, work blocks, and then you have your family and other things that you’d like to do, but everything has a block. So if I could show you my schedule, my entire 168 hours in the week is all timed out in where it’s going and then I track how much time is in family, how much time is in deep work, how much time is in exercise, how much time is in podcasting or article writing, how much time is in coaching. So I’m able to track all that to see, is what I’m doing with my life in alignment with what I want for my life. Step three, checklist, measure it. I interviewed Marshall Goldsmith author of the book “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. When I asked him the million dollar question, Marshall, what do you know now that you wish you knew when you were getting started coaching, he said, use a success checklist. He goes, ask your clients to write down the behaviors that they want you to provide support and accountability to them for and then every day talk to them and see how they’re doing on that list. So it’s one of the things we do, we create a success checklist of the behaviors that they want to bring awareness to, either to do more of or do less of. I have an app I use on my phone called Habit Share. It’s a digital success checklist. I can see, every time I get on a call with one of my clients, the first thing we do is we inspect what we expect. And we say, let’s take a look at your checklist because that’s the accountability, that’s the support. If they do what we’re asking them to do, they’re going to get the results that they’re looking for. And then the last step, the fourth step, is reflect and refocus. That’s where we insert the journal. And in the performance journal, we do two journals a day – am, pm or in an athlete context, pre-work/pre-game, post-game. It’s really simple. The pre-game, write down their one word focus, what’s the one thing they’re trying to live in alignment with. Right now I write down the word “discipline.” They write down their most important tasks for the day; what’s the one thing I’ve got to get done today to make today a success. And then they write down their “three keys to keep it simple,” back to self-talk, they write down their three affirmations. That’s the pre-game journal. Post-game journal, they write down three wins from the last 24 hours, three gratitudes in the last 24 hours, and they do a start, stop, continue analysis; based off my last 24 hours of behavior what do I need to start doing, what do I need to stop doing, what I want to continue doing. And they do that every day. I have my clients screenshot it, send it to me as a text message so I can look at the journal, I read the journal, sometimes I just give them a thumbs up, sometimes I’ll make a comment back on what they say. But that allows me to feel like I’m walking with them as I go through this and because of that high touch, where I’m looking at their journals every day and we have 30 minutes to an hour scheduled every week…I’m able to take about 40 clients at the highest level, and then my team will kind of fill in and pick up the others that are on that waiting list, if they are able to get with me when I’m not full.

Brian Bartes   

This is great stuff. And what I love, Brian, about the last segment is you really expanded beyond mental performance into what I call peak performance or life management, really getting into systems and processes; it’s related to mental performance, for sure. But this is really about life performance and overall performance, which includes the stuff that we talked about earlier in the show so I really appreciate that. Brian, our show is called LifeExcellence and I’m curious, what does excellence mean to you?

Brian Cain   

Is what I do in my life in alignment with what I want from my life? Am I working to become the best version of me, not comparing myself to anybody else, but competing to be better today than yesterday, better tomorrow than today. The easiest and most simple way to do that – and I wrote a book on this called “One Percent Better” – is if you’re looking for a place to get started…I know you’ve got very high performing people that listen to your podcast, or maybe somebody who’s listening to this for the first time ever going, oh, my god, I’m getting the fire hose today from Brian and Brian, where do I get started? The place to get started is make the commitment to get one percent better. One percent of your day is 14 minutes and 24 seconds. That’s it. So what can you do for 14 minutes and 24 seconds? Is it listening to my Mental Performance Daily podcast which is two to three minutes? Is it journaling? Is it an exercise and going out for a walk and listening to the podcast? Is it listening to this podcast? What can you do for one percent of your day that if compounded over time with consistency will help you to get closer to being that best version of yourself. So to me excellence has nothing to do with an outcome. It has everything to do with the journey and the process of stepping into becoming the best version of you. Because every time you get closer to being the best version of you, the finish line moves and it moves further, and it moves further. It moves further because you get tasked with continuing to evolve into the best version of you, which there is no finish line in that journey.

Brian Bartes   

That’s great. Brian, thanks so much for being on the show today. It’s a pleasure to meet and speak with you and I really appreciate all this great information that you’ve shared today.

Brian Cain   

My pleasure. This might be the first time in history there has been three Brian’s on one podcast. They may have to refer to us as the “Killer Bs”. Watch out Houston Astros, if you don’t have that copyrighted we’re taking it.

Brian Bartes  

That’s awesome. Thanks for tuning into LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with Brian Cain on social media, and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.