Positive psychology is an opportunity-based psychology versus looking at situations and going, what is the problem here and how do we fix it? Positive psychology asks the question, what is the situation here and where is the opportunity for us? Hi guys and welcome back to Mindset Coach Club, the podcast. My name is Lindsey Wilson.
I am so excited to share with you today. We actually have a return best. His name is Chris DeSantis. He is from the Swim Brief podcast. He studied, he was the first sports coach to go through the applied positive psychology program at U Penn.
He's been studied under Martin Seligman, Andrea Duckworth, Gov Gritt. And so he really knows his stuff when it comes to positive psychology, but actually today we're talking about negative visualization. And what I'm going to share with you is actually from our certified coaches. We have alumni calls with our certified coaches and Chris was kind enough to come on and teach that group, including myself, about how he uses negative visualization. And I actually just got off and I wanted to record this intro because what he talks about is so important.
I think from a coaching standpoint, from a mental performance coaching standpoint, like I was scribbling notes the entire time. So I'm really excited for you to listen to it because his approach to negative visualization is so unique. And I think it's really a tool that even if you don't do visualization yourself, if you're not a mental performance coach, the idea that we're exploring and helping our brain or helping the people that we lead, helping their brain explore what happens with failure and the power of that, understanding how the brain works when we don't do that and how we can really prepare our brain in a way that it's going to feel safe.
It's going to feel safe to go for it in life or in sports. The way that he uses the tool of negative visualization is something that I'm so excited to use and explore. And of course, I talk about my own experience too and places that I probably could have used it or could have used it with clients or people that I was coaching or leading. So anyway, I wanted to introduce Chris DeSantis. We've had him on the podcast before, but today we go even deeper and it's going to be mostly him talking. I'm kind of like nodding in the background a couple times. You'll hear me ask a couple of questions, but it's mostly him presenting because he is the expert in negative visualization. So I know you're going to love it. And here we go. Welcome to our MCA alumni call.
Chris DeSantis. All right. Let's talk about what is positive psychology. This is a really poorly conceptualized thing in the world. The way in which it's poorly conceptualized has changed over time. I would say now that I've had sort of 15 years in the field, in the beginning there was like a perception that it was, you know, it was like some Tony Robbins or the book, like The Secret, you know, just like manifest your best life, the power of positive thinking, all that association, that stuff got wrapped up into positive psychology. I would say today, people have an idea of concepts that do come from the field of positive psychology.
Some of them have gotten quite popular. Growth mindset is an example of one of those things that has come out of the field of positive psychology. Grit, Angela Duckworth actually was my, hey, thesis advisor. She was not very pleased with my thesis while I was doing it.
So don't take that as a brag. I chose to do research when I hadn't even taken bath since my junior year in high school, sorry, my senior year in high school. So we had a lot of edits to do to learn statistics on the fly, doing a research study.
But anyway, I digress. Grit is another concept. So there's been some popular concepts that have gotten out there. And the problem with some of these sub concepts is they don't do a good job telling you like, what is positive psychology all about at the 30,000 foot level? And I want to tell you that because I think it's really important for what we're going to discuss today. And so like, I'm going to, again, we're at 30,000 feet.
The world is giant. Okay, I'm going to do some vast generalizations here. You know, get a very, very brief history of the tradition of research psychology, right? But the field of psychology, okay, basically, since the time of Freud, one of the organizing principles of that field had been we should figure out what's wrong with people and how do we fix it? What is wrong with people?
How do we fix it? Okay, the big book of modern psychology, okay, of practicing psychologists is the diagnostic statistical manual, I can't even say that word, five, you know, it's the big book of what's wrong with people. That's what I call it, because I'm not a real psychologist. So I poke fun at that a little bit, but you got a big book of what's wrong with people, what's wrong with people, and it's a problem based psychology. And I don't think that there's anything wrong with that, by the way, I'm somebody who really believes in the field of traditional psychology, don't take anything I'm about to say as like a bash on traditional psychology, I just think every approach has its has its strengths.
But it, it, it starts from asking the question, what's wrong here, and how do we fix it? And that's the easiest way to explain to you on a general level, why positive psychology exists. Because the idea at the outset was, what if instead of a big book of what's wrong with people, we created sort of a mirror image that was all about what is right with people, what are their strengths, what are their virtues, what capacities do they have, right? And to me, therefore, positive psychology is an opportunity basic psychology. Versus looking at situations and going, what is the problem here? And how do we fix it? Okay, positive psychology asks the question is like, what is the situation here?
And where is the opportunity for us? Right? And I think when I look at what I do as somebody that coaches around sports, I think that that is most of what I do.
Right? I think that that approach is most of what I do. Yes, do I, do I do corrections? Do I fix things? Absolutely. But at the end of the day, I'm trying to help people be at their best. I'm trying to help a lot of people. I mean, right now I'm coaching somebody who will compete now, this is the last call I had before this, compete in 10 days to get a spot on the US Olympic team in swimming and cross your fingers that he does it.
Right? But somebody like that, does he really have a lot of problems? Or is he somebody who's trying to just eke out sort of more and more potential out of what he's got? So I look at it more as the latter. And that's why I think positive psychology is really valuable in that regard. Okay, if we look at visualization as a mental prep technique, we're going to get to negative visualization at the end.
But again, I want to give you context. Visualization was a big technique when I was coming up as a kid in sports. Like I think that probably the first I'm 41 next month, the first time that I did it, I might have been 11 or 12 years old. So it's been very, very popular, particularly within sporting circles for at least 30 years, as far as I can tell.
And why do people do it? I'll try to sum that up. One of the reasons is we have a really cool capacity as human beings, right? We can actually practice things before you ever do them in real life. So you can imagine, you know, everybody knows practice makes perfect. But when you're trying to do something you've never done before, how can you, you know, help yourself to do well on it maybe the first time that you're experiencing it? Well, you your mind has an ability to rehearse things.
It has this imaginative quality to it, right? And it can practice, can put you in situations that you haven't been in yet. And you can think about them and you can actually kind of groove, you know, neural pathways towards showing up differently in situations that haven't happened yet, right?
Important part of it is, and I said, you know, it's not about the secret stuff. So I'm aware of the context of this word manifesting, but, you know, creating a positive vision does have some impact on whether or not you're able to do the thing that you have envisioned. It's a way of preparing for a high pressure, high emotionality situation, a high stakes situation, as I put it here, and preparing for the outcome that you want, right?
And I think that's sort of where it gets to at the base level. People generally think visualizing the outcome that they want, okay, makes that thing more likely to happen. I mean, number one way to guarantee, almost guarantee that you won't get some outcome is if you never imagine yourself doing it, right? And so it's really a necessary first step and it's something that you can train and develop. One of the aspects of taking psychological research into practice is a lot of research and theory is very mechanistic.
And that's by the nature of what it is. I want to give a little bit more psychological history. What I see a lot of out in the sports world is there's a lot of unwitting disciples of B.F. Skinner. Some of you probably recognize that name, okay, or you may have heard of a Skinner box, right? The concept of a Skinner box, B.F. Skinner was really like, you know, the king of behaviorism, right? And he would build these Skinner boxes.
These were rat mazes, right? And so if we introduce the following condition to the rats in the maze and then we observe how they behave after that, that's sort of the basis for whatever we're going to theorize, right? And I hear this all the time in people saying like, well, I don't want to reward that behavior, right? What they're saying is, I believe in behaviorism, you know, if we introduce the following condition, X, me being nice to somebody in the presence of Y behavior, then Y behavior will happen more.
People psychologically are quite a bit more complex than that. But when we get down to studying at something, right, if we're going to get down to doing quantitative research, which is what researchers generally do, right? They do quantitative research where they try to test out variables, right?
They're going to look to isolate a single variable, manipulate that, and then see how it influences another variable. And if you get any more complex than that, the research gets very hard to do, harder to fund, and harder to make any deductions or conclusions from, right? And I think understanding that the way this mechanistic thinking penetrates into visualization is key because when it comes to the opposite, right? If we go back to visualization, why do people do it? Well, they think that it's going to make the outcome that they're visualizing more likely, okay? So if we accept that visually in the outcome that you want, visualizing the outcome that you want to happen, makes it more likely to happen, then we must also accept that visualizing the outcome you don't want to happen makes it more likely to happen. So what do people conclude in general? Visualizing negative outcomes is something that should be avoided, eradicated, cleansed, right?
Don't do it. That's what people internalize. That visualizing negative outcomes is bad, essentially. It doesn't get more complex than that, the way that a lot of people think about it. And I think, again, this lends itself somewhat to the problem-based approach, right? If you're looking at this situation, well, yeah, thinking about something bad is a problem, how do I fix it?
I don't think that it's something to be fixed. And that comes back to my approach coming from positive psychology. And I'll start with this.
One of the reasons why I don't think it's something to be fixed is because it's impossible, okay? Stress is a big topic. People, you know, I would report on many days that I'm stressed. I think many of you probably are feeling stressed on a frequent basis.
In my mind, stress is often created by trying to do impossible things, by trying to control uncontrollable things. I mean, we made a reference to childcare in this. It's so interesting. I mean, one of the observations I have about myself is it's not stressful doing anything with my children as long as I'm not trying to do something else at the same time. If I try to hang with, because they're like attention monsters, I mean, I have a 10-year-old and a six-year-old. They want my attention all the time.
Completely underestimated how much parenting would be daddy look at this, right? And if I'm trying to do something else at the same time, especially me, since I have some particularly rabid ADHD, getting interrupted every 10 seconds is extremely stressful. But if I'm just hanging with them, it's a great experiment, a great experience, they should say. So, what do I mean by all that is I think a lot of people looking at negative visualization, that is visualizing an outcome you don't want to happen, they draw that conclusion, they say, I just want to not do that. And then they set that out as a goal, but that's impossible. And the easiest way to show you that it's impossible, they do this with athletes I'm working with all the time, as I say, like, just I want you to imagine for a second that I have magical powers.
I can guarantee that you're going to do well at the end of the year. But like all Disney magicians, there's one way to break the spell. And that's if between now and when you race, you think about a white bear. Now, everybody instantly thinks about a white bear and the magic is broken, right? So, it's not a realistic goal to not think about something, right? And in fact, the act of trying, if I tell you to try to not think about a white bear, now you've thought more about a white bear than you previously were going to do, if I never mentioned it to you today, it's just not in the mind's capacity to not think about something, right?
It can think about things, but it can't not think about things. And I would add another piece of this, a place where people get tripped up, and this will become a little bit relevant later, so that's why I put it in at this juncture is you can't change how you feel in the moment, right? So, whatever it is you're feeling based off of what just happened, you can white knuckle all you want, like I don't want to feel this way, but that's the way you're going to feel. And you can create a lot of stress for yourself by saying, by denying sort of your own emotional state. But in my experience, not really possible to change how you feel in the moment.
Okay. So, given this situation, positive psychology, the psychology of opportunities, okay, like positive psychology comes to the rescue. I try to look at this situation, right?
You are somebody that is preparing for a high stakes event. Where is the opportunity? If we can't change this, well, we might as well figure out a way to make it work for you, right? And part of that is key to understanding where the opportunities are. Again, your subconscious is anticipating a high stakes event. It's, it wants you to be prepared, right? That's why it's pinging you with the worst case scenario or a bad case scenario well in advance. I walk athletes through this, that their subconscious wants them to be prepared. It's like, it's like, you know, it's like you're standing on train tracks and like you've got like a little buddy that's like, Hey, there's a train coming.
And people that try to deny or eradicate just go like, no, no, no, no, don't worry about it. Right? What's that buddy going to do? You get louder, start going, Hey, there's a train coming, you got to get out of the way.
I don't want to hear about the train. And pretty soon they're screaming in your right. So, the act of trying to actually deny this state amplifies it. If your goal is to not think about a situation, but that's impossible, the act of denying it is actually going to amplify it. So we want to look for an opportunity that if your mind is going to do this anyway, if there's nothing you can do to change that, how can you make it work? One key to understanding is crucially, this early warning system in my experience is not about the thing you're anticipating.
So again, I work with summers almost exclusively. So they'll always be thinking about a certain competition or a race. But when we drill down, the thing that they are, the reason why they're visualizing this bad outcome is not to prepare for the actual race. It's to prepare for afterwards if it doesn't go well. What is the aftermath? Particularly, what is the emotional aftermath?
Because they understand on some level that there's going to be an emotional aftermath. And if it's a negative emotional aftermath, it's going to be very hard to deal with. It's going to be very uncomfortable.
It's going to be very unpleasant. And so your subconscious wants you to prepare for that. And at the core level, our minds, in my opinion, they weren't designed to distinguish the level of threat. So what I mean by that is when you tell them high stakes, they start to, your mind starts to view it as life or death.
Right? We got to, and it goes into full overdrive. And I think that's where a lot of people's systems get overwhelmed because that life or death system wasn't meant to be chronically engaged two or three weeks before something. It was meant to be like bears chasing me right now and like pump cortisol into your system so that everything could fire at once and run away as fast as possible.
And when it's engaged chronically, it can cause a lot of problems for us. So I walk people through a proactive approach. And I admit the first time that I tried to do this, I was terrified because the idea actually came out of, I was coaching my team in Mark. I had one particular athlete who I had a really, really hard time with in the beginning.
And she was really, really struggling and she'd be very, very upset at meets. And one time with the team as a group, I did a visualization, right, with them. And I asked them to do this positive visualization, right? I want you to like, imagine how well you want to do in this race and what it's going to be. And I said, I'm going to do this.
And I'm going to do this. And she came after it and she's like, can we never do that again? She said to me afterwards.
And I said, why? She's like, because all I could think about was the worst case scenario. And like it's scared the hell out of me and I don't want to do it. And I thought, okay, well, where's the opportunity in that?
Right? Don't treat it as a problem. Where's the opportunity in that?
If that's what's happening to somebody that I'm coaching, maybe there's an opportunity based on what I'm getting back to help them. So I started and I asked her, sit down and actually imagine what is the worst that can happen? How will you feel, right? Actually think this all the way through. We'll think it even further through, but then get through to the piece of like, how bad's it going to be?
How bad's it going to feel? And oftentimes, I will ask athletes then and basically a series of questions that are like, and then or then what? You know, what happens after that?
Right? And I'm following that line as many steps as needed to get to like, what is the overall existential question? And I promise you, I'm going to give you an example of this from my recent coaching at the end of this so you can see how it works even over.
We're going from big to small here, right? But the purpose is, I want to train athletes to be able to relay the message back to their subconscious that we've thought it all the way through. So you don't need to keep warning us. We know the train's coming and we're going to get out of the way.
Everything's okay. Like we're ready. Right? That's one purpose. I think it also can serve again, since you can't change how you feel in situations, you can validate yourself emotionally, right? It makes sense that I'm worried about this. When you figure out what the existential fear is at the end of it, most athletes go like, oh, well, I get why I'm pretty nervous for this meet. And you might laugh a little bit at the example that I'm about to give you in a second.
But I promise you, this is a real example. And very crucially, a final piece of this is as you're asking them these questions, as you're asking them, and then what next, etc., every single one of those answers is going to be opportunity for you coaching wise. Like I get pure gold stuff that myself as a coach, I could spend months working on athletes with, because they give very revealing answers. And remember, I did say, you can't not think about something. You can't change how you feel. But all your thoughts can be influenced, right? So anything that you detect that they are thinking, well, that's an opportunity for you as a coach to get in there and train them up to have a sort of different default thinking pattern in that situation. So let's do an example. This one is like, I may be one or two weeks old.
So I picked the freshest fruit for you guys in this one so you could hear about it. So I was working with a teen athlete, this is Swimmer, preparing for a competition. She's distressed. She's got some negative visions of herself failing miserably.
That's how she put it. And so I asked, what's the worst that can happen? And here's the part where the older I get, I have to really keep control of myself.
Because I think very often when I asked, what's the worst that can happen, the perspective of being an older person makes some of these answers go, is that it? That's it? At the outset. But so because in this case, I think if I had to drill down just specifics, it was somebody like her best time and something was 57 seconds and I go, what do you imagine the worst that can happen?
She goes, I might go 59. And so what? But it's really important.
It's big in her life. So I'll do significantly worse than my best. Okay. And then what's going to happen?
Well, I'll be disappointed. And I think that the hard work I put in this season is always of time. In the first answer, there's a giant opportunity there. I mean, I have gone weeks working with athletes just around this theme of so many of them construct for themselves, right, that the only reason I'm like I'm not actually doing what I want to do because, but like I'm doing it so that I can get this outcome at the other end. And like as a coach, you got to work on that because that is undermining their ability to be their best to just at the baseline have a good experience doing the sport. If your fundamental reason for doing things is that you need an outcome to come at the other end or everything was a waste of time, you're not going to last very long doing a sport because bad times will come, right?
And part of getting to a good time in the future is learning from that experience. That's just sort of an example, but it went on, right? Okay, so what next, right? Well, it may lead to me not doing well in subsequent races.
And then what? I won't get recruited to a good college, okay? And then I won't be successful after college. And then the existential piece, I won't be happy as a 25 year old adult.
That's where we stopped in this negative visualization. I walked her all the way down the line to, you know, she's the pressure that she is putting on her next swimming race is that on some level, this may be do or die for whether she's a happy adult in the world. And no wonder, no wonder, it feels like a lot, right? And no wonder, her subconscious is trying to be like, you know, what if this bad stuff happens? It's a big deal, right?
That's a big piece of it. Do you have a question, Lindsey? Yeah, I wanted to say just from a mental performance, actual coaching, sort of X's and O's, when you're asking her these questions, are you just talking or you're having her visualize and you're asking her questions or are you having her journal? Like, how are you getting these answers out of her?
So we'll do it real naturally. I'll just talk to her in the moment. And I'll be writing this stuff down.
That's how I tend to do it, because I want whoever I'm talking to to just kind of flow and often they'll have a hard time remembering this stuff afterwards. So I'll just be like, I mean, the same athlete, I did something with her the next week. And it was really just even just like, Hey, what are you thinking about the meet this weekend? And I just wrote down every distinct thought that she had.
It was 10 different things. So again, you're going to find different athletes with different levels of willingness to share. But this one, I think, if you're just like walking them through it one step at a time with those sort of simple questions, I've never experienced somebody who just stopped me cold and that and you get all sorts of distinct things. Like, again, I would look at this one, it may not lead to me doing well in subsequent races. That's also something you can coach somebody on. Like, you can spend probably, I've spent an entire hour with somebody just going like, Why do you think that? Why do you think that not doing well in one race leads to not doing well in a subsequent race? And actually pull apart, you know, what is the whole thought infrastructure that they are constructing to get to this place, right? Because it's easy to get to the end of this and say, well, of course, like this, this race doesn't mean you're not going to be happy when you're 25 years old. That's, that's ridiculous.
But from a coaching perspective, the opportunity to get into all the constituent pieces of that and coach somebody on that can lead to something different coming up at the end of this conversation. So that was everything. Oh my god. Amazing.
Questions. And we have plenty of time. We have at least 20 minutes. This is great.
Bianca just put one. What if, you know, a lot of people, a lot of coaches on here will get that I don't know when you say and then what? How do you handle that? I'm relentless. I mean, I have a background in one of the things I didn't tell you guys is I have a background in sports media as well.
So it's, you know, it's interesting. I'm headed to Olympic trials in the next week to see the guy that I'm coaching and see if he makes the team. My first Olympic trials that I went to was in 2008, for swimming, and I was accredited media at that. And one of the jobs that I had essentially, right, we were, it was Internet 2.0. And we had like camcorders and swimmers would, they'd do a race and they'd come down the stairs and they'd walk past this whole row of people and we'd be at the end of the row. They were the last people before they would walk in, you know, to go talk to their coach or, or cool down or whatever they were going to do after the race. And we had to basically, you know, like, shout questions at them and see if we could get them to stop and answer stuff.
And like, I can remember, I got the opportunity to interview Michael Phelps and I was like, I had spent all this time thinking about this big, nerdy question that I was going to ask him. And I asked him and he went, I don't know, I do what Bob says. And I was like, I was not expecting there to be no answer to my master question. I was just stunned.
And then he just walked away. So what I learned pretty quickly was, you know, you can ask the same question in two or three or four or five different forms. Give them another chance to answer it.
People that sort of default to like an, I don't know, response, I would say in most situations, you know, it's, it is probably because they're a bit uncomfortable or they don't want to think about it. But if you want to work on it with them, you want them to think about it. And you got to have the confidence in that situation to keep pressing for an answer. Now, if I go four or five rounds and somebody still, I don't know, then I just have to regroup and go somewhere else. I mean, you know, you can't keep badgering the witness.
But I think there's a lot of value. Five is kind of a magic number for me in a lot of things and persisting on asking for something. In most situations where I really want to know something or I want to get in contact with somebody, I ask five times. Isn't that the Toyota theory of like ask why five times or something?
It was like some leadership thing at Toyota and they like massively improve their like, you know, conveyor belts system. Okay. It makes sense to me.
Yeah, get the, well, we just invented something. Okay. Guys, quit your questions in the chat box. I'm going to start talking and then Chris can get to your questions.
Okay. So I just pulled up the, maybe you could go back to that, the proactive approach slide if you don't mind. Cause I think that really gives us like a really good framework for how to actually do this. And I mean, every single one of these, first of all, this is amazing for us.
Like this is so cool. And I think like as a mental performance coach, I haven't done a lot of negative visualization. The way that I've typically used it in the past is pre game. This is what we are teaching the performance visualization specialist.
So all these coaches would know this as well. The way that we've taught negative visualization, which is why I wanted you one, because this approach is so different and so cool. The way that we've used it is using negative visualization almost as a motivating factor to get ready to play. Like if you're kind of low vibe and you're not, you don't have enough adrenaline and you're like, this game is going to be easy. This race is going to be easy. Nobody performs at their best when they're like that. Right.
Like this is podunk university. It's going to be a blowout. You know, so I would use negative visualization as an athlete in particular when I was playing in Lithuania and we like beat every team by 50 points.
I would have to like try to trick myself into like, oh, it's I'm going to have to get myself ready. So we would use the negative visualization that way. But I'm looking at your approach and I'm like, this is so genius because I remember both, I mean, my work as a pro as a performance visualization and like as a mental performance coach, I think it's relevant there.
But even myself as an athlete, like I resonate with so many of the things that you say, because I remember like all of a sudden in my career, I struggled with free throws. And speaking of the frickin white polar bear, I could not stop thinking about it. Right. And I didn't really know how to untangle. And like, I know exactly not like the train, like my subconscious was just like, excuse me, excuse me, we need to fix this. Like you have to fix it. And it would just get louder and louder and louder. And then it just got into the cycle. And at no point, I mean, I knew about visualization, but I didn't know about this.
I just knew about like visualizing myself, shooting well. But guess what would happen? Sometimes I would miss in my brain. And then I would get mad at myself for missing in my brain.
Because I was like, who actually misses in their brain? It's a free throw. Yeah. So I would add exactly, I would add in the emotion of shame on top of it, which of course was like clearly really helpful. And this is like, at, you know, 20 years old, I knew a lot about mental performance training.
I'd done a lot of it, but I wasn't next level yet. Right. And so, and even this, I didn't even know this until today. So it's like, I didn't have the emotional maturity to also say, okay, so why blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I would have gotten to an existential, it was probably that I worried I wasn't going to be playing professionally, which was my lifelong dream. And then, but I didn't have the emotional maturity to say like, well, it makes sense that you're worried about that. You know, and so I just love this on so many levels again, like personally, and also like, I can see how many athletes would really benefit from like the safe place to take their subconscious all the way through it. Because I think you're right.
I think a lot of people feel the thing and are like, why shouldn't be thinking about that? And then it's like, like, shut up. Don't tell me about the oncoming train.
And then like you said, it just gets louder. Well, so I just learned something from what you said, which is it's so interesting. I mean, I get the question all the time, like, Chris, you know, a lot of what you're talking about really has nothing in particular to do with swimming, like wouldn't this apply to other sports? But it's so interesting, the situation that you present, right, that I think presents itself in a lot of team sports, which is, ah, we're going into this game, we're going to blow these guys out. Like that doesn't really exist in the sport of swimming. As far as the people that I'm coaching, because even people that are extremely good, they're, they're constantly measuring against themselves.
So there's no letdown situations, right? They're like, I had never even considered that you would, I think that's a very good situation to apply it to. I've just never worked with anybody who needed help getting adrenaline.
Like, I'm trying to do the opposite all the time. Racing sports, you're always nervous. I ran track and I was always nervous. And it's just, yeah, there's just something very, yeah, you get, you get up to race, that's for sure. Okay, so yeah, and if you guys are listening to this on the podcast, we'll put the, this proactive approach, the slide that we're looking at right now, we'll put that text in the show notes.
Chris, you said all the pieces, but just so people know that they can kind of get those steps like written out, because I think that's like the purpose. And I think, you know, even deeper than that, like what I'm hearing from you, so much is the like ability to basically calm our nervous system with like the honest approach of negative visualization, like thinking through all the obstacles, like being really honest about what could happen. So you have a plan. And I love, I just, I'm kind of laughing the whole time, because you're like, I'm, you have a master's in positive psychology.
And this is what it means. And I love like the thought of like the opportunity. I think that's like just a great question for all of us. And then it's like, but we're going to do negative visualization, you know, like, I love that what you do really is not the like, you know, like toxic positivity, everything has to be positive all the time. Like it's really like an honest approach, you know, and like, we're doing negative visualization because it's real.
Your brain is going to go there anyway. And like you said, it's going to be tapping you on the shoulder, like, Hey, hey, hey, I haven't thought about this. And I totally experienced that. Unfortunately, I do because of the poor conceptualization, I do run into people all the time and who see me the way I show up and they go like, aren't you just supposed to be telling us we're doing a great job all the time? And they're like, yeah, that's why you need to learn what positive psychology is. Because, you know, that's just like fluffing people up. It's not right.
It's not it's not what actually works. I want to address a couple of these questions or comments that just make sure to read them out loud. Yeah. So somebody asks, once you've uncovered the quote real reason why they're nervous, do you follow up with a positive visualization? Personally, I don't do a lot of positive visualization. One of the reasons why is just my own comfort level with doing various things over a zoom. Maybe I'm too nervous about dead, dead air on a zoom call.
It could be an irrational fear on on my end. I do encourage people to and walk them through doing it on their own. And I I talk about this as a strategy for again, if you can instantly address your subconscious, right, and just be like, we thought it all the way through, you don't need to bring it up, right, then you do create the space for more time thinking about the thing that that you want to think about, right?
So if you can just deal with that intrusion, right, as it comes up, and in a in a self empathetic way, I would say, that should allow you and I think that the sort of the next comment gets to that. I talk about a practice environment. This one says, we talk about how athletes need to have a practice environment with quote high stakes.
So athletes can practice how to settle down or rest when they make a mistake. I think that's that's like precisely what this is all about, right? Like, actually, you're actually practicing the emotionality of a situation, rather than what most people do, which is just like, Well, I guess I'll figure it out when I'm really upset. Like, you know, one of the questions that I ask people all the time that gets them bristling, like, Hey, aren't you supposed to be the positivity guy is, you know, ask people like, Hey, what's your plan? You know, in this situation, and they'll sort of go like, plan, I was I was supposed to have a plan in that situation. And I'll go, Okay, well, how's that working for you?
You know, I had an athlete got really upset with me once when I asked him, how's that working for you? But it's true. I mean, practice this stuff. Put yourself in the situation, both, both the good and the bad, so that you don't have to make snap decisions when you're completely cognitively compromised by being really emotional.
Like, that's not going to work. Yeah, it's very, it is very similar. Sorry, to what we teach with our we call it the mistake ritual, the reset ritual, you know, something to do when you make a mistake, like preparing for that ahead of time. This is just more of on the visualization side. But in particular, I love that focus on like, it's actually not the failure itself, it's your feelings about the failure. Because I think that is like, particularly relevant for so much of what we teach, which is our thoughts are not facts, right? Like, you're, there's the failure, and then there's the feeling about the failure. And, and, and also what you're getting to what you kind of joked about for those of us that are older and actually have, you know, quote unquote, real problems is like, the failure of, you know, not getting your perfect time is not actually life or death that we don't need to minimize it. But like you said, you're taking them through that, like, you're still going to have a warm meal tonight, you're still going to have, you know, your, your, it's real that your nervous system is activated. That is a real feeling. But it is, like you said, our, our nervous system really gets activated in, it's not actually good at distinguishing real fear from.
Right. And, and, and are you going to practice like, again, life will teach you that if you wait long enough. But like in a lot of instances, if you're coaching an athlete, like, maybe they're going to be done in that sport by the time they learn that lesson. So give them some reps on building perspective, like you can train that up now. Yeah. And, and particularly by doing this, and give their mind some reps, walking it all the way through and realizing like, what is it I'm thinking about?
And what do I want to do? Given that, that's what I'm thinking about. I think also like, I think it was Joe Beth, I was asking about the following up with positive visualization. And I'm just wondering, you know, for, for those of you that are, that have gone through the performance visualization specialists, and perhaps we can talk about this offline, like an insider program or, you know, I don't know where, but what we teach is so much metaphor based. So I'm wondering if there's a way like after someone's gone through this, if there is the metaphor that helps their subconscious really feel safe with the potential of failure and the feelings that come after it. So food for thought for those of you that have, you know, learned this stuff with our performance visualization specialists, because I think that there is an opportunity after the sort of negative visualization and taking them all the way through it to really go a little bit deeper with the metaphor work.
And sort of just totally agree. I don't have a handy metaphor, but, but well, I was just thinking like, I don't either. And that's where, that's where we might have some fun trying to figure that out. But like, you know, so much of like the basic one of the basic metaphors we use is like, the obstacles on a path are a pile of rocks, right?
And you move them one by one out of the way. Something like that that really helps them like, yeah, just go through that from a metaphor standpoint. I think there's some fun things we could figure out with that. So that's cool.
It gave us some stuff to think about. Yeah. Um, oh yeah, sailor was asking about the Michael Phelps thing. Well, you already mentioned. Yeah, but I remember we, you and I, I think talked about this too, like with his negative visualization, but I don't think it was a visualization, right? I think his, his coach made him like, like his goggles, like he actually took him away or something when he was practicing. So he was ready for that obstacle. I don't remember the exact story, but you know, I don't know about that particular example. And maybe that makes me, um, uh, it's the inner dain in me.
Um, I am half Danish and Danish people famously love to chop down whoever's on top. Um, so I've paid less attention to Michael Phelps than some other elite athletes that in the sports swimming, probably which many of you have never, um, heard of. But I, I think there's been some really interesting developments in terms of Michael Phelps's coach who I think had a really dysfunctional relationship to the sport when he was coaching Michael.
Um, and, uh, you know, if you haven't been following swimming closely, you won't see what's going on with him, but it's very obvious that he has done a lot of work on himself personally. Um, he seems much happier now than, than when he was coaching at that time. And he's just coming off, uh, winning an NCAA championship in the sport of swimming. He'll be coaching at the Olympics this summer.
Um, he has probably the best male swimmer in the world that he's coaching once again. Um, so that's the stuff I get interested in in terms of Bob. I know, and Michael, I know that doesn't really answer your question, but, uh, I won't, I won't ask. Well, you have me in three questions that I don't know the answer to.
Yeah, I don't follow swimming, but now I'm interested because like the, you know, the game within the game is always the most interesting part, right? Um, Bianca is asking, this is a great question. Um, after you finish the negative visualization with your client, like what do you do to finish out that session? Well, here's where I probably reveal like I'm not that, um, I'm not that methodical. So I will throw this in wherever I don't have like a, I don't have a step that's always before this, and I don't have a step that's always after this.
Um, so that's really going to be a judgment call, um, based on the, the, the, the whole experience I have working with an athlete, how do I, what do I do in that situation? Um, afterwards, um, because it's, it's always fitting into a bigger system. I don't know, it's not a very satisfying answer, but I, I, I don't tend to like follow, you know, a script than, than this. Um, and I, I think that if you do it well, there's not like there's not something you have to do afterwards.
I've finished, uh, I've finished a call like with this, right? So, um, and I haven't had a problem, you know, like, oh, it was a disaster the next week after I did this. So yeah, it's interesting. Like the, so much of what I've been teaching and all of us have been teaching is like positive, positive, positive, positive, and we don't want to leave them on a negative note. And like, you can see that's coming up in all of our questions because all of us are nervous about doing it. Like you said, you were in the beginning. Oh yeah. And I'm still nervous when I do it, everybody, just so you know, it feels like a high wire act every single time, but it has such a great payoff on the other end.
It's never blown up in my face. Um, so I don't know why I feel that, but it is, it just, it just, it feels a little bit scary because you're going to, it's going to be uncomfortable, basically, you know, you're nervous about it for the same reason the athletes are. I was going to say, it's almost like we need to do visuals. We need to do negative visualization for ourselves about doing negative visualization. Exactly.
Yeah. We're imagining that somebody will be in tears and totally decimated on the other end of the phone call. We go, oh, I was supposed to help this person and now I've left them like a total wreck. So yeah, I hear you.
All right. I know you have to go to childcare. So I just wanted to sort of like, I got to drive to some practice actually.
I have to drive my daughter to swim practice. Even better. Okay. Do you have just one more minute so I can summarize? Yes. One more minute.
Okay. Guys, then you guys can also, what do you think about like your big takeaways? Um, I really love this idea that like, uh, failure or the fear of failure or the emotions around failure are not a problem.
And you've said this on the last podcast, like, in fact, we actually want athletes that care that much. So like, that's a really positive. And for you as a positive psychologist, it's like, what is the opportunity with that? I think as coaches, if we can bring that into our sessions, I mean, we always say we're not here to fix, there's nothing wrong with them. That's like kind of part of how we coach, but like this also leveled like, what's the opportunity here?
I love that question for ourselves and for our clients. Um, and then also that plan on failing because if the brain has no plan, if you for failing, it always imagines even worse than it could be. And it's a recipe for thinking about it more like the white polar bear. Um, and actually we want those situations where we fail because that's actually where growth happens. And so we really need to anticipate those obstacles and have a plan. And I know another thing you said in the last podcast is like, if we don't, and I really love this, like if we don't think through what happens with failure, um, we really, our brain is just constantly thinking about, like you said, the little guy, like when you're on the train tracks, we really need to finish the story. Our if it doesn't have it, that in and of itself is the stressful thing. That in and of itself is a source of anxiety. And so finishing the story is actually way better than unfinished. There's less anxiety. That like is a huge takeaway for me.
Yeah. And before I go, I just wanted, I didn't get to my last slide. That's my email address. That's my personal email address. If you guys want to reach out to me after this, um, be happy to hear from anybody. I'm not going to read my email address out loud.
Yeah. Go to christycoach.com. Uh, fill out a contact form, Christy underscore coach on Instagram's other way. Uh, and I got a podcast where I talk about coaching topics all the time. I do stuff like this.
Uh, you can listen to that for free. It's called the swim brief. I promise it doesn't get, it's not, if you don't love the sport of swimming, it's accessible.
Um, I have plenty of listeners that, that aren't swimming people. Um, but yeah, I'm off to, uh, drop off at some practice. So thank you all for having me and, uh, and good luck out there. Chris, thank you so much. We so appreciate you guys. Go follow them on Instagram and then the podcast and all the things I'll stay on for a couple of minutes. If anybody has any questions and Chris, thank you so much. I so appreciate you. Talk to you soon. Bye. All the books, all the podcasts, all the things.
