Dr Roy Sugarman on the Performance Brain, Trust and Psychological Flexibility

us, Tess Brower, and seventime world champion Lane Beley. We're the founders of Awake Academy. This podcast mixes raw life lessons, expert wisdom, and practical tips to help you stop sleepwalking through life and start living it on your terms. You ready to wake up and thrive? Let's go. Before we begin, we have a quick favor to ask. If this podcast has been landing for you, please hit subscribe and leave us a rating or review. It helps us grow the show and keep bringing these conversations to more people.

I found out that there was no science behind coaching that every every coach that arrived and I was working in Arizona at the time with um at least performance now called team exos is the director of applied neuroscience in performance innovation and said okay what performance are we going to innovate you know and they said well the applied neuroscience of coaching doesn't exist so the wakeup call was okay so we're starting from scratch you know tabular class and new brooms and all of that. I was apparently the new broom and that was the wakeup call to how can one of the most important parts. There's the organization, there's the coach, there's the players and everything in between. How can there be no science to that is it just your personal opinion and that was a shock. I've been into such shock I didn't drink at the pub that night with everybody. Really? See? Yeah. I forgot. Help me understand that. Do you mean just in psychology or in performance psychology or in like coaching like what when you say coaching that's quite broad? Help me understand that. Yes. The idea would Yeah. The idea would bring you bring in a coach into a team and there is no science to that approach. It's really their own reputation in their own brew. So everybody's like their own beer maker. They bring their own brew into this mix and then they just do what they do without any ideas about the individuation or athletes or the padonas in the team or managing. But what was missing was a model that they could work on. So the reason I was brought into athletes performance at that stage um was really to work out a model. They had four pillars of performance but the idea was there was no model to design coaching around. Why did we need one? Well, otherwise it's just your opinion and therefore you're a success or failure, but nobody knows what you're doing. Say you become the governor or you become the boss. But the question is why is there no science to evaluate that? And why are we not working from the basis of a model? And if you're going to create anything on the internet for instance as we're doing with the state of California, they asked first thing they asked for was where's the model that you're going to build on? So this was the first time I'd encountered a whole system where it was somebody's opinion of what was good, bad or ugly or what the process was, but there was no model for how to proceed. That would be like going into surgery and not knowing where you're going to start and not knowing what was real. So in terms of the big word epistemology, nobody could tell me what the facts to be studied were and there was nowhere to start. So you can't even start without a model. So I had to create a model. Why was that so triggering to you personally? Well, because everything we had done uh professionally in my 40 years now is based on the idea there is a scientific model for something. In other words, people have observed and made sense and passed on how to make sense of the universe. Otherwise, we're kind of lost and drifting around like pinballs in a pinball machine. And everybody does what they do. But that's a very difficult way. You're learning on the go and there's no way to approach a new a novel exciting complex team or game and that that's really hard way to do things. Having a model means you define the nature of what you're going to do and then you have parameters and understanding and communication and then if you want to test yourself you can self- evvaluate. But if you're going to be self-referential and evaluate your performance against what? Against your own opinion or against your results? Well, the results are fantastic, but what happens when you've got a team where the manager is not getting results? Then the press are waiting for he or her to be fired. And then where do we go from there? Then the new manager comes in and everything changes because there's no nobody knows what's going on. M so you're essentially creating systems and processes. Yes. So I operate from a general systems theory background of how you create ecosystems and the ecosystems have meaning and words have meaning and

different disciplines. You've created models and ecosystems and help people understand data which is like incredibly hard. And my mind went to I sort of feel like you're like the money ball guy of psychology high performance data and you can work out sort of pre- during and post someone's performance. Is it would that be a fair assessment? I've been called worse. I I was told by my students in the west that I was the David Atenburgh of psychology without the animals or with the animals I was about. These are students. You never know which way. Yeah. My husband likes to say that Lane and I like um the observation of humanity. But that is science because science is the observation. I mean the word clinical comes from the word clinical meaning by the bedside. So all science is observation and that's why you need to know what you're looking at. Yeah. So what are we looking at when you

could define what competitive mindset was. M. So people didn't have a definition for that. Oh, he's competitive. What does that mean? I don't know. He likes a good fight though. He's one up. How did you define it? I like to win. Yeah. Is that not a competitive mind? I guess. Sure. But then what are the elements of that? You know, in in 5 seconds, can you tell me what the elements are of a competitive mindset? Yes. And you probably could, you know, seven times world champion. You can probably do it. I never won anything. But what I did realize is that the the models that existed for psychology and psychology sports psychology used to be called peak performance and then it became sports psychology which is a term I didn't understand because are we talking pathology so when I moved to a coaching model I began to look at the fact that a competitive mindset was going to be based on something which didn't have a diagnosis. So it was transdiagnostic and the only science at the time spoke of psychological flexibility. So if you're going to succeed, you have to have a flexible approach to the damages and the dangers and the setbacks of the world. And that immediately for me replaced the idea of competitive mindset. What a psychological flexibility look like? And from there I began to seed the model that then was adopted by let's say California health services by life IQ in Singapore by various insurance companies in Manila. So I started to work in all over the world with companies who said can we have a non-pathological model for peak performance for ordinary humans and then could we apply to 13 to 25 year olds so that they didn't ever become mentally disturbed, upset, miserable. pathological in other words, no disability would flow from the exigencies of life, right? And then there was resilience and there was Angela Duckworth's grit and there

psychological flexibility? Um well it's called the hexiflex. There are six of them. Okay. And at team exos we only had four. We had movement, nutrition, mindset and recovery. And recovery was the biggest deal. Nobody realized that athletes need to recover. And in the recovery, their muscles would regenerate and it would also help their brain grow a bit because all of those growth hormones go to the brain. Um, so the first thing I wanted to do which took me a few years before happened is we rearranged the pillars to mindset, movement, nutrition, recovery. And mindset was the piece that nobody had. And the mindset needed a model. So we created this model. Right. Okay. because I must admit when I started competing uh back in the ' 90s there wasn't really any focus on sports psychology and there wasn't really much focus on managing the mind and that became my competitive advantage because I realized one of my weaknesses was some of the stories that I was telling myself or some of the limiting beliefs that I started to become aware of and then after I retired from professional surfing I then went into mentoring a couple of tennis players and this is in the late 2000s and there was no sports psychology or the mental game that was being applied to the athletes. They always really just focused on the physical game and the recovery and the physical game and the recovery and thought that they would build the mental stamina over that. Are you have you noticed that there's certain sports that are either slow to adapt or adopt these principles or just resist adopting the the premise around psychological flexibility? Yeah. The first difference I noted was between group teams and individuals. Yes, of course. So the minute you're a golfer or a a tennis player, whatever else or surfer, um the eyes are on you. There's no deflecting to the 21 other people on the grounds or anything else. And that was really important to to note. So that was where the first inkling came in. Um but we were certainly looking at sports psychology from you know from the get-go um as a peak performance rather than a pathological help someone with their anxiety or their performance anxiety which was terribly limiting. M

And therefore all of a sudden you're using different theories. Suddenly you have motivational interviewing. You have uh acceptance and commitment. You have um self-determinism. You have reactance theory. And reactance theory was the biggest one I got a shock about is that people as Steve um said in in the fifth, he said listen um people don't mind uh change. They just being they just hate being told to change. So, and Steve Hick started to write in baseball what you mentioned earlier, just because you can't hit straight, don't go and stand and hit a 100 balls. It's in your head. And Yogi Bear said, "I can hit or I can think, but I can't do both at the same time." And so, thought and emotions started to become this motor activity that would interfere with performance. Going back to what you wrote to me in the email, um it's a very interesting concept that emotions are motor activity and they affect your thinking and your thinking is motor activity which affects your performance and gets in the way of your swinging a bat or as Tiger Woods discovered your wife swinging a bat back of your ute, you know, and then you've got to come back from that. So yeah, the mindset piece became really important and the minute we started, you know, breaking the epistemology of of facts around coaching, we ran into the reality, the ontology of human flexibility and values and autonomy and really um self-determinism. And that meant that we had a model which had no pathology in it. It was transdiagnostic. What does that actually mean? It means no diagnosis. It means people all come to distress in the same way. What they're doing and how they're living is not authentic for them. Would you say like cuz I'm never going to win a world title. I don't want to. I don't see myself as a professional athlete. Um but like I have my own version of that. But then I I look at Lane and I can see every day why she won six world titles in a row. like year on year on year, seven in to like I can see like her mental fortitude is so strong. Her ability to reframe, rewire, be curious and just go is like it is world class. You're welcome. Mhm. Is that what you

not going to be a world title." So, well, think of what happens to your image across time. So, you're a four-year-old who suddenly is now getting up at 4:00 in the morning and swimming or skiing down the slopes or, you know, god forbid skeleton toboggoning or whatever else. And you have to go through a change from an ordinary childhood to start to now engage with discipline and with being hungry for something because you suddenly start with sacrifice. And the first thing I realize is that people have to be very clear on why they are sacrificing. And the reason they need to sacrifice and be clear is this horrible human concept of ambivalence. Which means on the one hand I really want this and on the other hand, oh this is too hard. And now you look at the big picture and you become ambivalent because guess what? Your emotional 300 million year old center that wants this just ran into your 200,000y old center that said this is way too hard. You will never manage it. And so they seem to balance that beautifully by going into micro goal setting and and working on the desiraability and their perceived abilities. And that's where coaching comes in is that why not you? Well, why not you is you've got to make sense of the sacrifice. And if I said to Lane, how much would you have sacrificed across your life? A lot. Everything. So, the first thing is But then in my mind, I go, "No, that was a choice." Oh, it is a choice. I chose that. It's not a sacrifice. In actual fact, it was a It is a choice. But what your brain did for you was very interesting because now we have two systems operating in the brain and they're both going to go to try and get control of your body. Can I just ask one just for clarification because we um we try and simplify science and shortcut the struggle because I realized we're in the um I am in the hot seat of greatness. I've probably got the greatest neuroscientists in the world and the greatest athlete in the world and I'm somewhere in between the middle. But understanding what you're trying to say is part of why I love this podcast is we try and simplify it for people to understand as you're driving to work or going for a walk right now. And this intersection of intellect and feeling comes into this like because I can intellectualize what you're saying sort of but I don't understand it. And when you talk about the primal brain which you're you've touched on, you've now split that into two from what I understand. Right. You're now talking about two different types of primal brains in activity. One's primal, one's new. Okay. So talk to me about primal brain

world is through smell. That's why your dog goes and sniffs everywhere. That's your dog making sense of the world. Knows exactly who's been there, what they were doing, what their motivation was, whether they were angry, sad, happy or not. The most beautiful thing um when you give birth is the baby crawl. You let the baby crawl bear its nose to find the breast. And I experienced that as cuz I learned about that was beautiful. And think about the fact that your old fatactory cordex, the thing that helps you smell, grew about 15% while you were pregnant. So you could smell your baby and know it was yours. Yeah. Which is a bit silly cuz I guess you figured it was yours when it came right out of you. Yeah. Unless you were separated at birth, which I was. Yeah. And in fact, the the nose is the only part of the body that is one-stop shopping away from your emotional center. And we still have those primitive things. So the lyic cortex, the emotional center of your brain, which is your emotional memory center, is this primitive system and it has three characteristics. It's incredibly fast. It's incredibly powerful and it's incredibly inaccurate. It has no idea what's going on. So it's instinctive. This is the instinctive side of when you make a choice that says this is too hard or oh my god, I want it. Which is why I drive a bright red metallic MX5 that took me about 2 and 1/2 minutes to decide on, you know. So, it's the kind of BMW advert I wanted because I want it and so on. So, the emotional side incredibly quick. It doesn't have to be accurate. It doesn't have to know the difference between that stick across your path and a brown snake, you know? It just needs to get you the hell out of dodging. And its job is to minimize danger. Yeah. So now your big powerful system with three neurons going in every direction and doing all kinds of things is incredibly fast. It's incredibly inaccurate and it's incredibly powerful. And this is what any athlete, peak, performer, everyday human has to overcome is that this system is going to operate in 30,000 of a second before you even know that you're going to make a choice. 30,000 of a second. It's incredibly fast. In fact, in that 30,000th of a second when you contemplate winning your medal, your liver has dumped ton of energy into your bloodstream. It's raised your heart rate and blood pressure to get sugar to your muscles, glycogen to your muscles. It has switched off anything long-term like your digestion, your hormones, you know, it has ramped up your immune system briefly. And it does this before you even know that you've thought about the

all of our executive functions, the things that enable us to do the difficult thing, the hard thing that's the right thing to do when we have a choice. that only developed over the last few hundred thousand years so we could socialize with people around the campfire. I published on it a few years ago which said our toolbox was empty and measuring these systems but they developed so we could lose our jaws and claws and go up on our back legs and make tools and talk and that meant we were weaker. So we had to now get a whole bunch of people together. We had to get our squad, our team to protect us so we could all get together and throw spears. But we had to evolve to deal with people. And Michael Jes who you interviewed wrote this book called Fear of Other People's Opinions. Yeah. It's a wonderful book. We love Dr. Michael. And it's hardwired. And the point is neurologically we're hardwired to need people because we ain't got the jaws and claws and we ain't got four-wheel drives on our legs and arms. We stand up on our back legs. And we got a lot weaker. Our arms got shorter. Our thumbs got So to do that and play tennis with a short arm and thumbs and everything else. Dr. You talked about this like four gossip, but really it was the human experience of connection. Like it feels like it was more positive as about like evolving into connection was the next stage as opposed to just gossip. Well, it was forming coalitions. And to do that, we had to de-individuate, which is what a lot of sports people have to do. If they're going to play in a team, they've got to be able to minimize the it's for me and you've got to say it's for all of us. You go from the me to the us. And it was essential, but you also need to talk about everybody and work out who's your allies, who's not, you know, like the TV show um, you know, survivor. I was thinking more like traitors. Let's go positive. Okay. Yeah. That just shows you where both of your brains are right now. That's why I'm not the psychologist and you're not in team sport. That's it. But think of it now. You have this new system which is incredibly accurate, very ponderous in thinking and slow and incredibly weak compared to what it's up against. And the problem is that the primitive system is the only part of the brain that grows under stress and becomes more pro problematic and attached to that system is your memory system. So our job is of this primitive system is to remember what we did when things got hard and things got messy. And the trouble is in relational frames terms, it also makes up stuff which is really bad and gets in the way such as I'm not going to ever win a medal. And then we become linked as we've spoken about before. Then we become linked to the idea I become outcome focused instead of process. I'm never going to win the medals. So why sacrifice? So that tradeoff of learning why you sacrifice needs emotional choices, not rationality. But we need to make emotional choices and good athletes make very good emotional arguments for the sacrifice. We all know logically why we should sacrifice but unfortunately that's really a hard way to live. I'm going to turn to you O. What was your emotional ability in that moment to Well, I think about the first time, for example, when I was 15, when I was competing, the choice not to go out and party was a really easy one to make because I chose to want to be able to wake up fresh and compete and perform really well. So, I didn't feel like I was making a sacrifice to party, to socialize, to, you know, to be with the with the pack. I was the individual who decided to isolate and hibernate and you know get myself into peak performance so I could go and perform at my best so there was no excuses. How do we generate that or build that? Is it is it something that we can build in individuals? Is you know we talk about nature over nurture? Are you are you born with that or is that something you develop over time as a a relationship with the goal that you're heading towards? It's a constant renegotiation. Right. I have 15 and 16y old athletes on the cusp of playing for the national team who give up the sport completely who are burned out, disengaged, exhausted. They want to wear high heels, go to the prom, go to college, and just be normal because the sacrifice was for some other reason which they never really articulated. And I've got 35year-olds who decide to become skeleton races and go screaming downhill because that's what they've always wanted. In terms of nature and nurture, there are no genes that decide on behavior until they contact an environment. And that's why I've mentioned um before in some of the things I sent to you was the idea of uh functional contextualism. The context can bring out your genetic disposition in very interesting ways and suddenly discover it and it can be very different. People said, "Well, what makes American football player better than the next one?" M and the answer is higher intelligence, better executive function and a good school because my best athletes going to the first rounds of the draft were also from the best colleges had the best academic marks overall. They had better prefrontal cortex. They would score more in their games. They would add to other people's scores. They would set up the ball etc. And that's well established by the Karolinska Institute studies on if you've got a better prefrontal cortex, you're going to be a better athlete provided you've done all the hard work. I was going to say because that doesn't always mean they're going to make the best decisions in life. And just because they're great athletes, that doesn't make them great human beings. No, of course not. And everything. It's a mix. So, but again, what does the mix look like for me? It was uh my particular thing in the applied neuroscience was how does that brain put itself together to cope with adversity and to be psychologically flexible in the face of the inevitable injuries, danger, failures, bad managers, difficult corporations, sponsorship.

out of the woodwork. You're amazing. Do you buy into your own PR? Well, but unfortunately a lot of athletes do. Yes. And you've worked with a few that have as well. Yes. Um and I fell victim to that as well. You know, I started to believe my own And uh and that that actually was I mean resulted in me getting away from my values, compromising my values, behaving in a way that wasn't true to who I am. And then I look back on that person and go, I'm not proud of that. So when I stand on stage today and I talk about life lessons in world titles, it I'm not coming from a place of this is how you do it. It's more around these are the mistakes I've made and these are ways I wish I did it differently but these are lessons that I've learned so that you can go and get the best out of yourself. I'm I'm very grateful also that I was competing at a time when there was no social media. So I was able to fail and fall and make mistakes without the scrutiny of it having on video and then being beamed to the world. How do you find athletes today that you're still working with manage that scrutiny and that intrusion into their daily lives? Like how how can we help athletes bring the best out of themselves without feeling like they're failing the world all the time and and humans in general? Yeah. Because they are at the end of the day, but we we put them on this pedestal. No, they're just as human as me. Yeah. Yeah. As a busy mom and an entrepreneur, I am constantly looking at ways I can optimize my sleep cuz when I sleep well, I feel amazing when I wake up. Micronutrition has an amazing product called Sleep Support. It has three different types of magnesium powder and passion flour, which just help me feel a little bit more rejuvenated in the tiny bits of sleep that I do get as a mom. So, visit micronutrition.com.au AU and use the code awake 10 and get 10% off all of their products. Enjoy your sleep. I've been managing menopause for years and I've constantly been looking for something to help me create mental clarity, boost my immunity, and help me show up with more energy. So, we came up with Wake Up. It's only got seven ingredients in it, including a bit of caffeine, but cortiseps, turkey tail, jinseng, ginko, vitamin B, vitamin D, all really natural good stuff, and it's good for you. So, if you're feeling a little fatigued and need that little boost, wake up is your pill. You'll find it on our website, awakeacademy.com.au. I'll give an example. I started to work with an athlete who was a a great basketball player. Mhm. And was playing overseas and and just doing dreadfully and his, you know, fiance disappeared and all kinds of things happened and and it was really difficult. Um and then he moved to another country and difficult management and everything else and they were hoping to get into the Euro Star Cup but he was getting very little court time, very little anything. And this is the part of autonomy and the model that really is important. This is Bandura's 1957 and 77 and whatever else concept of self-efficacy that what I do makes a difference. What happens often with the elite athletes is everything gets out of control whether it's social media or the coaches or bad spells or slumps or everything else. So I revert them back to what they can do that will make a difference. So we started with his cooking and his eating and his routine and the exercise and the language he was using. So all the things he could control, that's what we worked on. And as a sense of I can control my food, I can control my weight, I can control my left leg, you know. Yeah. Um that year his team went off and won the Euro Star Cup and he played the entire game and was given MVP. Wow. Of the game. Not because he got any better as a player, but when he went on that day, he he made this speech on air and he said, um, I was up against the best scent in the world, so I played him off the court. Yeah. And that was because he had a sense of efficacy back, a sense of effect that what I do makes a difference. I can be in control of small things. So again,

so if you believe other people and you believe I with athletes, I replace two words, belief and faith, and I trash them." What you can trust is your own experience and it's in the past and it has evidence and it is concrete. faith and belief in the future can be blown apart at the first problem that you have. So if you're working on trust in your past and you are trusting in what you do makes a difference cuz you have the sanitized evidence of every good game you've played and this is where visualization comes in then you're going to manage adversity. And now we're talking again about psychological flexibility depends on trust not faith and belief cuz the future's unknown. You can go into a game and be one down or lousy wave or whatever. And that's where you did so well is that you trusted yourself, your skills, your board. You stopped thinking. So that getting into the zone is when you trust that you've trained your whole life for this. Just let your body do the work. Let your limbic cordics do the work and stop thinking. Yeah, that's actually so fascinating that you talk about that cuz every time I've asked Elbert, how did you do it? How did you do it? She always says trust. like you never use faith or believed. And like I look at um uh Alcatraz, is his name Alcatraz? The tennis player Carlos. Carlos Alcarez. Alcarez. I call him Alcatraz cuz he's just like cuz he just escapes out of tricky situations and wins all the time. And he writes belief on the um that's a stock standard term. It's the bumper sticker. But it is it is just not going to be okay because belief in what? It's an act of faith that can be shattered at your worst moments. Can be shattered as you get older. It can be, you know, you don't want to be vulnerable. You want to have a sanitized visualized positive trophy room. Positive psychology itself nearly died when when, you know, Martin selling went off to uh to the American military and tried to train the corporals and the drill sergeants, you know, to be positive. Um that positivity is very difficult when you're sore, when you're in pain. Yeah, when you sacrifice, but if you trust this machine that you have spent your entire life building and you let it do its work and don't get too clever, when you get into the zone because you're matching your ability to what the demands are being made of you, you shouldn't even remember what you were doing. It should have been so automatic. When we ask you how you did it, you go, I have no idea. I don't remember a damn thing. I was so lost in the moment. Yeah. Like you're in flow. I I can remember every event that I won in flow. Really? Yeah. And and I wish I could bottle it up because it's such a beautiful effortless feeling to be wholeheartedly trusting in my ability and trusting in my performance and not thinking just being in my heart and out of my head. It's a really beautiful thing to do. I often say um Roy that you know we're always asked like why does people why is it that some people win and some people lose if they've got you know they match up with ability and talent and opportunity and they have everything around it why is it that one person win wins and one loses and it's and it's really hard to dissect that because I as you and I both know we all know there's a lot that goes into winning and losing but what how I often answer that question is and we've heard it all before you don't create what you want you create what you believe and if you want to know what you believe. I say listen to your yeah butts because your yeah butts come up when you put that psychological stake in the sand when you say I am going to be or I will or I can. The yeah butts of the subconscious beliefs that sit within your value system of saying yeah but you're not that good or yeah but remember when you

to predict the future. So, I'm going yes, but and I'm trying to minimize danger instead of maximizing reward. And the best way I can say to maximize reward with the if thens and the earbuds, you can't prepare yourself for anything. But you do have to be radically positive or in um you know in in acceptance and commitment terms. We really talk about the idea of radical acceptance. Things are going to go wrong on you. They are not indicative of anything. On the day I can be beaten to death by my opponent, on a good day, I'm going to beat him to death. On a good day, the top team can beat the bottom team. The bottom team on a good day can cause an upset. So the idea of this radical acceptance or is really important that I will take losing as a gift as much as I will take winning because it's not entirely under my control. But I need to know that the world is going to hand me failure. Now how you deal with that is that six hexiflex instead of being psychologically rigid that if I'm behind and losing look at Martina Navati Loma look at people like John McEnroe they had to get angry and lose before they were good they really got behind and then they came screaming back and that was not only trust that was managing their emotions working themselves up into a competitive mindset but what they were doing was accepting that defeat was there and refusing to to go with it. So they were able to reach into themselves because of this radical acceptance. I can be losing that doesn't mean I'm losing. Yeah. It doesn't mean I'm a loser. No, it doesn't say anything about me. I'm still who I am. So that identity deciding what your authentic I mentioned authenticity. Now the word values comes to the word valid. What is your valid authentic self? And you can be losing and retain your valid authentic self. And that's what makes them win is deep down inside what they call on is this losing is not valid. This is not authentic. And if I'm losing and it's not a I need to have a look at what's valid for me, what my values dictate at this moment. So if you're going through moment by moment saying what is important for me in the here and now, what is the value? Don't look at the big picture. In the big picture, you're losing. What has that got to do with anything? So you narrow down to those milliseconds to each single point. You set micro goals

for me. Or you can do what I did and distract myself from that thought. So I was paddling around in England about to win the richest prize purse in surfing history, which was $20,000 in cash, by the way, for a female, a million dollars for a male. Yeah. and I uh started thinking about the prize purse and and the outcome and what you could do with it. And then I went into that's only going to sabotage my performance cuz it's going to put pressure on me. So I started Yeah, that is and I'm not an extrinsically motivated person. And so I started reciting Austin Powers or in actual fact fat bastard where he he kept saying you can keep your money. I want your baby. I want my baby baby bat ribs. Chillies baby bat ribs. So I was literally paddling around saying that out loud which helped me stay out of and that's a word there's a word for that. It's one of those six pillars. Oh it's called diffusion. Diffusion diffused from your thoughts instead of being fused to the extrinsic demotivating factor. You simply diffused. You did the Mary had a little lamb. Isn't that amazing sauce? It's like what does it take to be a six-time world champion? You've got to know Austin Powers. You do have to be able to diffuse from the toxic thinking. And yes, that's one of the great pillars is thought diffusion. Not overthinking or thought diffusion means moving away from the sticky bad thoughts. And it can be ridiculing them. It can be singing them. I'm going to lose the money. That's pretty sharp, you know, or little B peep lost her sheep and that's the end of her career because listen, just move into a different business maybe, you know. So, you can have these. So, it can be self-deprecating, too. Oh, it could be fun. Oh, you want to be self-deprecating. You want, you know, so the idea of diffusion is important because what we have to teach athletes, your thoughts and your feelings are not reality. They are perceptual and they can Can we just pause for one second? Yes. For the listener who's tuning in right now, just imagine yourself as when when we say athlete or high performer, please just relate that to you and focus on that similarity because that's how I get the best out of this. Yeah, cuz you're not a high performing athlete, but you're a high performing human. No. And Yeah. Well, yes. Yes. And these tools and what is so powerful to me right now is often I was quite scared of neuroscience or psychologist, psychiatrist cuz I thought that you would just talk about the science of things like label them and label them. But every tool you're mainly talking about is the ability to control your mindset. Focus on the things that you can control. Like they're all things that I can do. Like I can't recite Austin Powers. I can teach you. But the diffusion like I think about times where I've had to get up on stage or you know enter a situation that is like I could get the itty bitty

are the six. What are they? Hexa what? The hexoflex. Hexoflex. Acceptance and commitment therapy which is based on the neuroscience of how we make sense of our world growing up. Okay. Which is using language because we're humans and we can do that. So um very early on a kid knows that for instance a motorbike is not half a car you know doesn't hey who cut a car in half? the kids, you know, we can make that sense, but we also learn to be afraid and we we learn that these cars can crash and motorbikes look more dangerous and so we can create fear and everything else. So the whole point of of basing a science of applied psychology which is not diagnostic, it doesn't call anybody depressed, anxious or whatever is it has these six things of cognitive and uh psychological flexibility. Obviously it borrows from CBT in mindset being a case of mindfulness. of being in the moment. Yeah. CBT being cognitive behavioral therapy. Correct. So CBT is second generation therapies. We're now in acceptance commitment third generation which is now we do not engage with our thoughts. We diffuse from them. So in other words, thoughts and feelings are not reality. We diffuse from them. We stay in the moment because what happened in the past is immutable. Yes, there may be lessons in it and the hippocampus that is the memory center sticks to the emotional center only remembers all what we did when things were bad. Forgets what we do when things are good. And so radical acceptance because we cannot change the past. Correct. And we accept bad things is the same way we would a gift from our auntie. Oh, thank you. I really wanted a pale green t-shirt with, you know, these horrible slogans on it. And I can really use that desk set that you gave me. people really use Dex straight out the back door. Not even the Smiths want them. What are we going to do with it? So the the radical acceptance is part of it. So the acceptance means the opposite is the commitment to your values. So once you've accepted terrible things happen to you and you're losing or you're damaged, your way trading out of that is to commit yourself to your values. Yeah. I watched this in real life with Alex Noble who was a um C5C6 spinal injury um survivor athlete um and I was in hospital with him and I one of the first lessons that he taught me and that I got out of him cuz he was 16 at the time and I said what how have you moved through this and he's like I've just accepted it and he talks about it now um as radical acceptance. So radical acceptance is the opposite of the just world hypothesis. M the just world hypothesis says that good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people and it's just not true. So when you have someone who hates themselves or is harsh on themselves, um they've made sense of the world by saying all these terrible things have happened and the only way I can accept them is to say that I'm a bad person or I'm a weak person or I lost this game because I'm not good enough. Which is rubbish. You can lose against the best person against the worst person. So the acceptance and commitment story is that if I'm going to accept terrible things, I'm going to trade out on a value system. Given this has happened to me, given this is what I've lost, what is critical and important to me now? Uh athletes coming to the end of their career, given I can no longer compete at that level, what is important to me now to do with this? Am I going to stay valid and authentic as a sports person for the rest of my life and keep on doing what I love, but now for intrinsic purposes? Part of that is another part of the hexiflex is avoidance. So where we at? We've got we're at what number are we at now? So I'm just sort of mixing them up because people can just Google hexiflex and they'll get it. Okay. But uh I'm just mixing up because they all come together and and they have their opposites in psychological rigidity. So the first rule is don't um take your thoughts and feelings as reality and diffuse from them. Mhm. which involves not overthinking and thought diffusion and socratic questioning and there's a whole lot of skills. Second of all, accept that the world is not always going to be on your side in your favor and that you're going to lose and you're going to have to sacrifice. Well, that's fine to trade out of that despair is what are your values now? Trade out on what is important to you given this disaster, this pain, this suffering. And if your values are there and they're authentic to you, then you can cope with just about anything. Mhm. Right. Then there's the mindfulness of staying in the moment. Your past is immutable. There are lessons to be learned, but they are not predictive. Just because you lost a million times, Thomas Edison, well, the idiot should have given up 10,000 times. Do me a favor. If at first you can't succeed, you should give up. No, not really. Try three times and then you really um but no so the whole idea of of um the the past is is not much use as Martin Seligman and the positive psychologist came up with it has lessons in it but we can't undo a damn thing so therefore become curious about where you are now so the opposite of avoiding anything to do with your failures and avoiding anything is to be curious about what would happen if you try again or you try differently. So then we have avoidance and we have curiosity on the other side. And curiosity has been very poorly studied by psychologists. But think of what it means. It's an openness and willingness and a commitment to the experience of success or failure. How am I going to feel if I lose? And they're little things there. You know, how will I feel if I lose? How will I feel if I win? And how will I feel if I absolutely do incredibly well beyond my wildest dreams? And then I go, well, why not you? Yeah. Yeah. So visualizing a more positive outcome going back to your failures and adding to them but coming out willing rescripting your failures is the curiosity of how would it have felt if I won. Okay. So this kind of encompasses it for you. There's another thing called self in context which I've expanded on before in terms of functional contextualism or what I also call contextual polymorphism. What does this all mean? I am different people in different circumstances. M I am only this person. And let's take someone who was abused by their parents, got into an abusive relationship, and is now 30 years old. And they tell you, I am a horrible person because that's the only way I can make sense of it. And maybe you just had bad luck and were born in the wrong place in the wrong time. And that context defined who you were in that context. Change the context. You're going to change who you are. which is a bit like changing the story, right? Well, then we get to narratives which are really important. So the narrative you use is going to define exactly where you land up. So telling your own story. Let's say you are someone who's accused of something that you never did and now you're in front of a crime commission or someone. You have to own the narrative. Don't let other people, the press or anyone tell your story. You tell your story no matter what it looks like. And then you own your story. Allowing other people to tell your story is really sad and it's really horrible. And you have no control, no power, no self-efficacy, no mindset, no nothing. You have given over your story to someone else. So that's where your self-evaluation comes in in your selfreflection. If you're a doctor, a soldier or anyone who's done something wrong, the first thing we ask is self-reflect. Tell your story. Don't let anybody else tell your story, right? Not your accusers or the press or anyone else. If you lose your story or your itty bitty shitty committee. Yeah, that's who or your 300 million year old liic that's telling you that you do suck. Dr. Roy, it has been so I feel like we're in neuroscience school and we have so much to learn from you. I think we're going to do a part two because we asked you what it takes to know yourself, grow yourself. Um but and

but I'm not ready to share it just yet everyone because I want to understand it myself. Um, so for the person listening and for us, what's a takeaway? Like we we love to give everyone a toolkit that they can apply to their life. What's one tool that people can do for their own lives that summarizes when you put all of this into play? What's one thing that you can do to control your your own outcome so that you can live your best life? So it's the executive functions both how you execute and how you manage and it's in one it's in one phrase. You need always to when you're faced with the choice to do the difficult thing that's the right thing to do and that's the definition of success in peak performance always do the difficult thing that's the correct thing to do when you have a choice. Don't go for the prepotent environment thing that tells you what to do in owning your narrative. Always do the difficult thing. That's the right thing to do when you have a choice. I love that. We call that choose your heart. Lane, thank you for bringing Dr. Roy in. Roy, thank you for joining us. Thank you for It was so exciting to know as coming today. I was all like so excited. Yeah. And I feel that excitement because I just feel what comes from you is that you want human beings to feel better and do better. And that has unlocked the science behind it. and we sort of put the emotion and the heart behind it. So, I look forward to seeing what else we can do together. So, from us to you, thank you. Um, if you enjoyed today's episode and you've got a high performance person or someone who is wanting to win a world title, please share this podcast with them. And we will see you next week for more tips on how to know yourself and grow yourself. So, Roy, if anyone wants to connect with you and dive deeper into neuroscience, how do they do that? Uh, through my website, royugarman.com.au. It's a very rockstar name. Roy Sugar Man. All right, we'll see you next week. Thank you, Dream Team. Toodles. Toodles. Have you been listening to this episode and thought, "Mike drop. Maybe I'm ready to get coached or have some therapy, but you don't want to go all the way down and get a therapist." Welcome to the Awake Collective, where we do monthly coaching to help people feel accountable, supported, and they keep on doing the work that you hear in this podcast. It is life transformative, right LB? It's a community of support and like-minded people who are willing to keep investing in themselves because what we do is we help people help themselves. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today, then the Awake Collective is for you. So, come and join us at awakeacademy.com.au and join us for monthly coaching, a community that supports you, and tools that you can use in your life to thrive. Let's go. See you there. Before we close, we just want to gently remind you that Awake Academy is not a licensed mental health service and this podcast is not a substitute for personalized mental health advice, assessment, diagnosis, or treatment. What we share here is general in nature and is designed to offer reflection, insight, and practical tools for everyday life. Therapy can be life-changing, and we deeply encourage you to speak to your GP about your mental health and wellbeing options. If this conversation brought something up for you, please do not sit with it alone. Reach out to someone you trust. Speak to your GP. And if you need immediate support in Australia, Lifeline is available 24 hours a day on 13, 11,4. You are not alone.