Episode 325: Performance Lessons From Olympians and Elite Coaching
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Welcome to the Purple Patch Podcast! With the Paris Olympics all wrapped up, we have a perfect opportunity to reflect on the outstanding athletic performances and their relevance to you.
In this week's episode, IRONMAN Master Coach Matt Dixon, fresh from his trip to the Paris Olympics, shares his insights on the common trends among the athletes in various events.
Matt compiles a series of performance lessons for all athletes based on observations of competing Olympians in the women's team gymnastics final, triathlon events, swimming finals, and track and field. You don't have to be an elite athlete to benefit from these lessons, which can be applied in sports and everyday life.
He shares patterns that have emerged during his years of experience coaching world-class athletes and guiding them on their journeys. These patterns are essential for developing the right mindset to overcome challenges and prepare for any event.
Matt distills practical and actionable strategies from elite athletes that anyone can and should apply to their performance journey to unlock high performance.
Episode Timestamps
00:00 - 05:31 - Welcome and Episode Introduction
05:38 - 43:24 - The Meat & Potatoes - Episode 325: Performance Lessons From Olympians and Elite Coaching
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Full Transcript
Matt Dixon 00:03
I'm Matt Dixon and welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. The mission of Purple Patch is to empower and educate every human being to reach their athletic potential. Through the lens of athletic potential, you reach your human potential. The purpose of this podcast is to help time-starved people everywhere integrate sports into their lives.
Matt Dixon 00:32
And welcome to the Purple Patch podcast. As ever, your host, Matt Dixon, and I just returned from a trip of a lifetime. Yes, I was in Paris for the Olympics. It was my very first Olympic Games experience as a spectator. Now I dedicate years of my life. I'm aiming to make the Olympic Games as an athlete, and I missed it twice: Barcelona in 1992. Atlanta in 1996, so I never got to go as an athlete, and until this year, I'd never spectated. I'd just watched it on television. Obviously, in my formative years, it was massively impactful. Now, as a coach, I helped some Olympic athletes on their journey, although most of my elite coaching was focused on long-course triathlon, aka the Iron Man, which is not an Olympic event. And so the reason that I went to the Olympic Games in Paris just a couple of weeks ago was that it was all-around fun, I was a spectator with my family, and it was terrific. But of course, while I was there, I couldn't help watching it, also through the lens of a coach, and over all of the events that we saw, including the final of the women's team gymnastics, the triathlon events, multiple nights of swimming finals, track, and field, I saw consistent trends starting to emerge amongst the participating athletes. Much of the behavior, the body language, and the actions of competing Olympians reminded me of my work with world-class athletes, and I realized that over the week of spectating, many lessons were just too good not to share, and so here we are with this show. It's titled Performance Lessons from Olympians and Elite Coaching. It's a show that's anchored in two main areas. The first is my observations just over the last week or two, from the racing and the athletes that I got to see at the Paris Olympics, but also, in parallel, my thoughts as a coach of world-class athletes and their journey, because I couldn't help but see some of the patterns, and so I thought I would share them with you. My goal in building this show is to frame some actionable strategies that you can apply to your performance journey, whether that's in sport, of course, or in business or broader life. As we go through, I'm going to try and tell you a few stories. Maybe draw some parallels to make the lessons as actionable and simple as you can. It's all going to be in the meat and potatoes, but just before we get going, I've got two quick notes for you. The first is an invitation. On August 23rd, I'm going to be hosting 9 a.m. Pacific, although the time zone doesn't matter too much on this because you can always get the recording just by registering for the event. But I'm hosting a free educational webinar. It's all part of our performance webinar series that we're doing this year, and this one is for the triathletes in our listenership because it's focused on the key lessons that I've learned over the last 20 years of coaching on how to execute and nail an Ironman or a half Ironman, if that's your cup of tea, in eight to 12 hours a week of training. And so, in other words, I'm answering some of the questions: how do you train for the demands of the event while also amplifying how you perform in broader life? How do you ensure that you avoid converting a fun and challenging hobby or quest into a second job? And how do you avoid many of the pitfalls that so many athletes fall into when they embark on their Iron Man journey? It turns out that at Purple Patch, we're pretty good at cracking the code. We've qualified over 1500 athletes for World Championship events. We had countless first-timers and an unparalleled reputation for coaching successful, time-staffed athletes. And of course, I want to help. It's part of our purpose at Purple Patch. Of course, it's free. You do not need to be a Purple Patch athlete to participate. We would love to welcome people from far away. It's August 23rd. Feel free to attend live, and if you do attend live, you can ask me your questions in a thorough Q&A session that we plan to have after the presentation. But you can also register and get the recording, so you can get the information without having to attend live. We understand that people live busy lives. After all, we work with time-starved athletes. I think you'll appreciate it. The link is in the show notes; register, join, and share with those that you think are interested. And of course, across your social channels, it's appreciated. And secondly, just to note, I'm not going to interrupt your listening. Day with any ads or promotions about purple patch services. With this said, it suffices to say that if you would like to further your conversation if you have questions, or if you want to set up a complimentary consultation for any of your performance needs, feel free to reach out. It's very simple. At info@purplepatchfitness.com, we're always happy to help with a complimentary call. And with that, we're going to dive into the lessons of Olympians and my journey in elite coaching. It is, ladies and gentlemen, Barry, the drum roll. Here we go the meat and potatoes.
Matt Dixon 05:38
So what can we learn from Olympians? Well, it turns out quite a lot, and you don't need to be an elite athlete to benefit from these lessons. And so I'm going to frame today's show in a repeatable and accessible pattern. I've got three main principles that I've filtered through. There are many lessons, and I've decided just to build this show around three of them, I built them in a structure where I have my observations as a spectator at the Olympics. I'm going to go through there, a parallel lesson from my elite coaching that I did with world-class Ironman athletes, and then an applying principle for you to take away and maybe apply to your performance journey, so you can anticipate each of those. So we've got three main themes or observations that we're going to build it around, and we might even do a follow-up to this because there's a lot more. There are many more. I don't get to tell you my Tim Reed story of why I could say to him when he went on to win his World Championship, go and have fun. There was a lot of substance to that. We're not going to talk about that today, but we are going to talk about some key observations that I saw at the Olympics. So without further ado, let's crack on and let's do part one.
Matt Dixon 06:52
Part one of this is a simple and important driver, and that's that I consistently observed the importance of ritual—in other words, making something very unfamiliar as familiar as possible. So here's the observation that I saw, and this extended across all of the sports, and that's the simple fact that the Olympic Games are really like no other, and in the finals, individual athletes are called out one at a time, whether it's swimming, whether it's track and field, up they come. Now, in the swimming pool, which is where I spent three nights of swimming finals, around 15,000 spectators are cheering, cameras from every direction, pointing straight in that swimmer's face, and they come out of the archway, and you feel like you have the world staring at you. And the reason you feel like that is because you have the world staring at you. It is like no other sporting occasion for these athletes, and it's also amplified, I believe, by the internal realization of the athletes that this event doesn't happen every year. There's no second pass. It's occurring every four years, which, throughout a career for an athlete, is a heck of a long time. And so even for returning Olympians, even returning Olympic gold medalists, this is not a particularly familiar situation, and this is why routine and ritual are so important. As I observed many of the athletes coming out or walking onto the pool deck, I started to see their actions from the time of their calling out and walking through that archway to when the gun went off, and typically, as you saw, many of them go through their routines multiple nights in a row because they might have qualified for multiple finals. I saw something that was striking. Athletes tended to remove their sweat suits and their clothes in a similar order each night; they repeated the same activation exercise, from arm swings to slaps on the chest to jumps to whatever it might be. But it was the same every time. Some of them perhaps kneeled, grabbed and palmed some water, put it in their mouths, and spat the water. Maybe they even did a shout or a cheer, but very clearly this was a rehearsed routine, and I saw a similar pattern to when I sat and watched the swimming warm-ups, seeing a few swimmers on multiple nights who were executing the same warm-up. They got out at the same time. They were on routine. This might sound simple, but this is important, and it's no accident because what it becomes is a management tool for the athlete to convert a highly unfamiliar occasion into something more familiar. It removes the guesswork and enables a sense of control. In fact, beyond that, what it's doing is freeing up the conscious part of our brain to focus on race execution, because the pre-race routine, from warm-up probably to what they've eaten before they come to the swimming arena to when they're walking up, falls into something auto-magical, into the subconscious. It's very normal. Now, I'm sure that this pattern that I observed in swimming, but also in track and other sports, is doubtless displayed through many of the sports, whether it's skateboarding, track, pistol shooting, judo, or archery. The reason is very simple: it creates an operating framework that enables focus on the aspects that are needed to yield positive results. This was familiar to me as a coach, as we leveraged exactly this principle at a greater scale across all of the professional athletes that I coached. So let me give you an example of that from a coaching lesson, and this is out of the actual execution of a race and a pre-race routine or a warm-up. It's even bigger than this. For many athletes that I coach, we would even build our training programs to drive familiarity so that the race week going up into the race actual day is familiar to them. So we build the programs after 10 to 14 days of training. Most of those days were very demanding: week one, week two, and then we had the third week, which was labeled a transition week. And that transition week is not easy, but it's a week that would follow a familiar and similar pattern to what they can anticipate on race week. So it might be, for example, on Tuesday, a flash of intensity, maybe in the swim or maybe on the bike, but something that's pretty high-end. On Wednesday, it tends to be more endurance-focused. Then we had a very easy Thursday with a little bit of priming and activation work, similar to on Friday, a set of sessions that typically would help you feel better the next day, similar to what they would do the day before a race, and then a tougher, more race-specific session on either Saturday or Sunday, which are, of course, the normal days for racing for triathletes. And this is a structure that we still leverage across all of the programs at Purple Patch. And those weeks, it's not that you're just repeating a race week, going into a tough session every Saturday or Sunday, every third week of the program. It's that the rhythm and the pattern are familiar. And then, of course, when it does become race week, we take that rhythm and pattern and replicate it; we just have slightly fewer loads so that we can freshen up for the week. And so this pattern and week of training include a broad session focus, no matter what the event is, and it removes all of the guesswork and improves familiarity, both physiologically and, of course, mentally. Now, the week of preparation that we leverage going into a race is the same. It doesn't matter whether it's getting ready for a B race. It doesn't matter whether you're getting ready for a world championship. Why change it? Just make it familiar. Tell the body, tell the mind; you're getting ready to have a peak performance. And so this routine and ritual were always really, really important to help the pros be able to not have to think about that and what they're doing because it's already familiar, and they can just focus on race rehearsal and mindset as they go into it. And so this is similar. Now, of course, athletes would have their routines, their rituals, what they would do the night before for dinner, what time they would like to get up, what they would have for breakfast, what they would do for their pre-race routine, and warm-up, what they would think about right before the race started, etc. That's all steeped in preparation and routine, and it's important. So what's your lesson from this observation? Well, the first is that it's very, very simple that you can apply this principle well outside of sport. If you have something looming that's high pressure or challenging and you've got to execute it, then I would recommend that you try and build a familiar structure around it. Let me give you a specific case study or example of this. I'm going to draw no personal story of this because this is something that happened to me very recently, but I think it might be easy for you to correlate and understand a little bit. So recently, I went and did a large keynote presentation in front of 25 CEOs as well as 50 associated board members and senior management of major organizations. In other words, I was on. I was on stage. I had to deliver a 30- to 40-minute presentation with a Q&A following. And so what I did on this occasion was build structure and, here's the word, routine, and familiarity around the occasion. And so I did what I like to do if I want to perform, whether it's in meetings, whether it's in sports, whatever it might be, I do what I like to do. I followed my routine. So I woke up early. That's what I like to do normally. I had a nice cup of coffee. I hydrated with my one liter of fluid, with my 250 tabs of precision hydration in there. I read the newspaper and then had another coffee, then I went for a little run. And when I went on that run, I didn't rehearse my speech or anything like that. I listened to a podcast; I tend to listen to a podcast and audiobook when I go for my little run in the morning, and then I return. I hydrated again. I had my breakfast, then I showered and went to the auditorium where I was speaking. I ordered my customary third cup of coffee. Yep, I do like my morning coffee. And then I sat quietly, and I reminded myself of the three key things that I wanted to get across in that presentation. And then I was on. Now, I had butterflies, I was excited with the anticipation, and yet what I did with that routine, so I put myself in the same operational framework that I do. It's very familiar to me. It established some control. The routine is mine. It works for me. You don't need to emulate it; you need to build something good for you. There isn't a right routine apart from the one that works for you. And every athlete is very different from one another. When we looked at the Olympic Games, to bring this back to the title of the show, there were vastly different types of routines here. There was Olympic swimmer Florent Manaudou, an amazing guy and the absolute Adonis of an athlete. He drew energy from the crowd. He was very vocal, but he had a routine—every race he followed the same pattern. You could observe Olympic great Caeleb Dressel, where he would go through, would put his clothes in the bin, and then would stand back, and he would do an explosive jump every single time. That jump went to an impossible height, by the way. Or you had American swimmer Phoebe Bacon, who slapped her skin to activate on her chest, her back, her legs, and her arms in a repeatable and very familiar fashion. Now, some of the routines draw from the external, some from the internal, but the key is ritual. And so I ask you this: What are your routines that help you with a performance framework? Because they are going to give you control and enable you to focus on the things that are going to help you perform. Observation number one.
Matt Dixon 18:12
All right, we move on. Part Two. Here's the second observation throughout the Olympic Games, and we're going to talk less about swimming in this one; we're going to draw from an observation in the triathlon. The best athletes are highly adaptable and responsive, not reactive, to adversity. So let's talk about the triathlon events here. You may have followed this in the media, but the triathlon events were a stunning success globally, with absolutely incredible racing, a majestic setting across rivers, bridges, the Eiffel Tower, and much more. In other words, it was one of the great game successes. But it didn't always look like that was going to be the case. There was inclement weather, and there were rapid currents in the River Seine. There was polluted river water. The events were in major doubt, so much so that the practice swims were canceled, leading up to the actual competitions themselves. And there was a single day of postponement of the men's triathlon events, which doesn't sound like much work. We can't do it on a Thursday, so do it on a Friday, but it has a huge impact on the athlete’s physical preparation as well as their psychology. There was also uncertainty on whether the full format could even be race, swim, cycling, or running, where there would be a high potential of the triathlon becoming just a bike, run, or duathlon, in other words, canceling the swim. And so, is this stressful? Sure, but most of the athletes can adapt to the situation and respond to adversity. Let's think about what they've gone through. They planned their week. They've executed their race week, and all of the preparation—physically, mentally, etc.—and then suddenly, poof, everything changes. Doesn't that destroy everything? Isn't that your ritual, your routine that we just talked about as being important just in ashes? Well, no, not necessarily. And the reason for that is that they planned for such events and situations. In other words, Plan A was the normal race week and preparation, but the best athletes also did a little bit of Plan B scenario planning. So how do I know this? Well, I happen to be good friends with one of the leading British sports psychologists who was embedded and working with the triathletes at the Olympic Games. And so I thought, You know what? I should ask her. Very smart woman, and I said, Okay, what happened here? The event was postponed. There was all of this adversity. What did you say as their leading sports psychologist? What did you say to the athletes? The answer was pretty simple, and that was the fact that we had a plan A, but there was also a plan B, and that plan B is what the athletes would do practically for their preparation in the event of a shift of format or postponement, so thinking ahead of the structure, and this plan B was just as familiar to them as Plan A. Both plans included structure around training, pre-race prep, time with families, media, purposeful restful activities, pre-race briefings, and more. In other words, they had a whole road map of what to do in this scenario. She also told me that they also referenced, for the athletes, their emotional management tools. In other words, you need to go and get this tool out of the toolkit that you've worked on so that individual athletes can recognize when they are starting to get anxious or worried, and they are ready and equipped to connect with either their coach or their sports psychologist if they were indeed struggling. So they had a support network around them. So the key principle in this observation of how they managed through this was that proper prior planning shifted the changes from being a threat to simply a situation that required a shift in mindset and some management and response. And this was familiar to me as an elite coach. And I thought, Okay, there are several scenarios here, but what can I impart to you today on this show to help paint the picture here? And I got drawn back to preparing athletes for the Hawaii Ironman World Championship. Most of you guys know that this is an incredibly challenging event: swim, bike, and run. Swim 2.4 miles, ride 112 miles, run a marathon, and run 26.2 miles off of the bike in high heat. There are only two guarantees for the grueling Iron Man Hawaii World Championships, Number one, it's going to be freaking hard, and number two, it's going to be freaking hot. Those are the two guarantees that you have. But over the race week, it is riddled with uncertainty. Are you going to have rain? Are you going to have wind? How windy is it going to be? When is that wind going to emerge? Over a very long day, it has one of the biggest impacts on how the race will roll out, and the wind factor has a massive impact on the strong cyclists in the pro field. One other element of consideration is cloud cover. Because when they get off the bike, if there is no cloud cover, we know we're in for a very, very hot run because the sun is coming down and bouncing off of the tarmac, bringing temperatures up, and of course, a high propensity for the sun to blister the skin, etc. Or will it be cloud cover, where you're going to get more humidity, but you're also going to have a little bit more of a cooling effect? So there are all of these uncertainties that you have to do all sorts of contingency planning for to help the athletes be successful. Well, one of the athletes that I coached was an incredibly strong cyclist, and he was one of the better Iron Man athletes in the world. His name was Chris Lieto. When I started to coach Chris in 2009, he was the best biker in the sport, and his ideal scenario for the Hawaii Iron Man World Championship was for it to be windy as heck. We wanted howling winds, the nastier the better, and then we would dream of having cloud cover for his run because that was his relative weakness, and we didn't want him to bake in the sun. But of course, hope is not a strategy, and so instead, we developed a responsive plan for different types of race execution, depending on the wind conditions, the cloud cover, and the changing conditions as the race went on. In other words, if it started still and calm, but the wind started to build on the bike as it went on, so when we went into the 2009 race, his race was executed based on the third of these changing conditions as we went. The day began with little wind, and we knew that if there was going to be little wind, it was really important that Chris didn't just sit out in front of the big lead Chase pack and sit down in front on the bike, not leveraging any of the legal benefits of drafting, 10 meters apart or so, although in those years it was a little bit closer. It was a little bit more like seven meters at best. But we knew that it wouldn't be a good strategy to ride just out front, so Chris sat in the group for the first half of the bike ride, and he sat there being patient, so patient that I was getting nervous, and even more nervous, as the commentators suggested that perhaps Mr. Lieto was having a tough day out there, but, it was planned, and luckily for us and Chris, the wind started to whip up in the last 90 minutes of riding. We had about 35 miles to go. Chris had a very minor lead. He'd gone to the front at the turnaround in Hawi, and he came down. With about 35 miles to go, he had about a 45-second lead, but the wind came up, and it whipped up. And the strategy was, if we have wind, we go. And so Chris attacked. He attacked by keeping his power very, very strong, and throughout those last 35 miles, he built up a 10-plus-minute lead. So that was a huge component, but it was a tactical application of scenario planning. He went on to get second in that year's Hawaii Iron Man World Championship. In other words, scenario planning and responding to situations are massively important for any athlete.
Matt Dixon 26:59
How does this apply to you in life? Well, let's think about time-starved athletes on a week-to-week basis. The biggest mistake that I see amateur athletes make is that they follow a static training program that's either been built for them or maybe built by some fancy, fancy AI machine that isn't that useful yet, but anyway, or a coach, and they have this plan, and they force this plan into life, ignoring the realities of what's going on with their day-to-day, and without responding to it. Now, life is not a spreadsheet. It's dirty, it's dynamic, and it's unpredictable. Things happen. And so the key asset in this is not to treat your training plan as just checking a box and saying, Well, this was what was written to me five days ago, a week ago, two weeks ago. And so my success is getting every workout in. That's fool's gold. Your success is adapting the program relative to how your body's doing and what's happening in the rest of your life and having the courage to shift things around a little bit, potentially even reducing the duration of some of your workouts and even removing some of the intensity, so that you can build up the magic word of training, which is consistency, and that's your winning formula over time. And so having scenario planning is what I planned, but now, as life happens, this is where I'm going to adapt the program if I'm fatigued, if I'm challenged logistically, or if I'm running out of time. These are the workouts that I'm going to reduce, these are the workouts that I'm going to retain, and I'm going to ensure that I can nail those at the time that I'm best suited. And that's why we structure Purple Patch and our training weeks just like that: key sessions, supporting sessions, and soul-filling workouts that are easily reduced, or, of course, knocked out altogether if necessary. And so that's a contingency plan that we have. We also love athletes to plan, build out a Sunday special, have autonomy, and have clarity so that they can make better decisions on a day-to-day basis. That becomes important for you, but this is well beyond sport as well, because adapting your training program is one thing, but ultimately, the key is that you can take this same principle and apply it to your plans—with your family, your business plans, anything in life. If you begin with a rigid mindset and a preset definition of what success looks like, and you believe that is the only path, then, I promise you, trouble lies ahead. So instead, planning is key, and then smart execution and responsiveness—that's the unlocking of where you become effective. And so I encourage you to apply these principles to not just your sport but also work and life, because it's going to make things much more enjoyable and, ultimately, much more successful. And with that, we get to transition to my final observation of the Olympics.
Matt Dixon 30:20
Yes. Observation number three, part three here, guys, and that is all around stress, building a positive relationship with stress. If you can't do that, you're going to wilt. Observation here, spectators at the Olympic Games. Let me tell you, making the Olympic Games is tough. I should know; I didn't make it twice. Yeah, that's a lot of years to dedicate. You're putting in years of dedication. There are no promises, there's huge risk, and you make it, and now you've got to perform on the biggest stage. And a big part of the external and internal pressure that the athletes feel is the jeopardy that is a part of that, because, as I mentioned earlier in the show, the Olympics only come around every four years. There are no second chances, and that is a part of the magic of this thing. The beauty of the Olympics is the fact that they include unparalleled jeopardy. If the Olympics happened every year, it wouldn't have the same component. This is the Olympic Games every four years. And so, therefore, it's no wonder that this experience can be crippling for many athletes. Now, let's even go a step further. Let's think about the favorites in the events. The weight of external expectations can be huge. A certain French simmer—what was his name? Leon? That's right. Léon Marchand is a prime example of this. The pressure that he was under, seeing it live, was quite something, and it could be crippling for him, or, as we observed, it could become the wind beneath his wings. And so there's a saying that a lot of elite athletes in a lot of sports love to embrace, and it's a fantastic saying, and that's that the pressure is a privilege. In other words, they feel lucky that they get to do something that delivers this type of opportunity, this pressure, and this stress. I love that—the pressure is a privilege. You can leverage that in itself; this is a wonderful opportunity. Yes, I'm nervous and worried, but goodness me, this is a privilege that I get to go and do this, and in any experience in life, it is a privilege. But as I keenly watched the athletes, and I looked at them and watched them come out onto the triathlon pontoon, the swimming blocks, and the track and field finals onto that track, it was stunning for me that you could almost see their body language. You could visually feel their pre-race conversion into actual race day performance or not. And this wasn't about looking at an athlete and saying, Wow, they're brash, they've got a big ego, they've got big vocals, and everything like that. It emerged in a different form. But one thing's for sure: those who stepped up in the face of that enormous internal and external pressure were the ones who had successfully, over time, developed a positive relationship with stress. Now I'm sure that every single athlete there was massively nervous and had lots of butterflies in the stomach, but that's different from fear because anxiety and priming are normal. It's a prerequisite to getting the best performance out of your body. And so this isn't just about being confident and having no worries or anxiety. Of course, that's part of the equation here, but across the running, the triathlon, the gymnastics, and the swimming, it was so easy to observe and see those that were going to meet their external demands and embrace them to leverage better performance and those that were not, because it was equally pretty simple to see those that were stuck in the headlights and unable to convert all of their work into a great performance. Now I should note here that there's no shame for athletes who stuttered; this is the biggest stage. Every athlete at these games is amazing. Amazing. They're so good, and pressure can get to everyone, but for those who shined, you could almost see them leveraging the stress. And those who got massive personal breakthroughs didn't just meet the demands; they had built a positive relationship with stress.
Matt Dixon 35:16
Let's go back to my coaching when we talked about the Purple Patch pros. I never talked about winning. I never discussed Tim Reed trying to win the world championship with Rachel Joyce trying to win the world championship. I never talked about these components. Instead, we focused on the process—on the athlete, trying to become the best that they could be, and focusing all of their minds on the aspects that were under their control—the actions that they could train. And we try to take back the negativity of failure. And so, in other words, we always talk to them about—there is no failure. If you're on a quest to become your best, and as you go through day to day and when you show up on the race, you give it everything that you have, and you execute every element that is under your control to the best of your ability. So you just need to go and dance in the fire and see what happens. And it was a very simple concept, but we never chased outcomes. We talked about the process the whole time, and we gave them—we used to call it sometimes—the freedom to fail for the athletes. Look, go out there, give it your best, and if you get beaten by someone, that's okay, but just focus on execution, on the things that you can control. Now, years later, I stumbled into some great coaching words that were from a coach that, at the time, I wasn't overly familiar with because I grew up in the UK and I wasn't a massive fan of basketball, particularly collegiate basketball when I was living and growing up as a swimmer in the UK. But most of you guys will know this coach. It's the famed UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden, and he was discussing failure, I want to just read out what he said and discuss failure from his point of view. "I didn't believe that success or failure was based on the final score." Remember, we're talking about basketball players playing as a team and trying to win basketball games. It wasn't based on the final score. "I can sum it up like this: if you truly do your best, and only you will know that then you are successful. The actual score is immaterial, whether it is favorable or unfavorable. However, if you fail to do your best, you have failed, even though the score might have been to your liking. In other words, I want you to be able to feel, and I want my players sincerely to feel, that doing the best that they're capable of is victory in itself, and anything less than that is defeat." That's a winning mindset there, folks; that's incredible. It goes on, and he says, "To keep his players fearless, Coach Wooden. Never mentioned winning". That sounds familiar to me. He summed up his logic this way. "I don't think that you could find any player to tell you that I mentioned winning. I wanted to win to be the byproduct of preparation, and failure to prepare is preparing to fail. I always wanted them to have that satisfaction within themselves, that peace of mind within themselves, that they made the effort to execute near their particular level of competency, not trying to be better than someone else, but instead trying to be the best that you could be." Goodness me, that is very powerful. I think that's a powerful word.
Matt Dixon 35:46
And so when you think about anything that you're doing, whether you're trying to be a great parent, a great business leader, or a great athlete, you're trying to accomplish everything. Buy into that. Because when you build a positive relationship with yourself, the stress, and the demands, but you make them internal, you're equipped to navigate through external, and internal pressure. You build a positive relationship with stress because you're putting your mind and focus on things that you can control. And so I invite you to go and apply it to yourself, evolve your mindset a little bit, and realize that anything worthwhile in life that you're looking to achieve is going to come with a prerequisite of high demand and some form of a mix of internal and external pressure. And the reason for that is because you care about that thing; you own it, and so you're going to have emotions; you're going to have physical feelings because you care, and that's a good thing. And we're pummeled with messages from the media, health experts, and others that stress is really bad. It's harmful. But. It's a necessary prerequisite for growth. It doesn't mean that it is comfortable, that it feels good, and it certainly doesn't mean that on big occasions, you're going to avoid all of those butterflies and that feeling of anxiety, but what you can do over time is develop a positive relationship with the internal and external forces and pressure. And guess what? Your ability to handle high pressure is not something genetic. It isn't innate. It can be learned, improved, and developed. We can coach it. It begins with your mindset, and then it's practiced and developed over time. And when you think about that, we often talk about a champion athlete taking years to develop. Well, there's a physical component to that, but there's also the fact that they need to develop a high-performance mindset. And that doesn't happen with a set of experiences. It occurs with a set of experiences repeated over time so that they create the ability to navigate through it. And so it begins with your mindset. Remember, you care and you want something; therefore, stress is part of it. And so embrace it and remember that saying pressure is a privilege, folks. Three observations from the Olympics, three lessons. I hope you enjoyed it and found it helpful. Next week, we're going to talk about processes and goals. It should be an interesting one as you start to get excited about the Olympics and start to chart your performance journey looking forward. That's going to be a cracker, but I'll see you in four years. Oh no, I'm going to see you in a week. We don't have to wait that long. Take care. I hope that was helpful.
Matt Dixon 41:52
Guys, Thanks so much for joining, and thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed the new format. You can never miss an episode by simply subscribing. Head to the Purple Patch channel on YouTube, and you will find it there. And you could subscribe. Of course, I'd like to ask you if you will subscribe. Also, share it with your friends, and it's really helpful if you leave a nice, positive review in the comments. Now, if you have any questions, let me know. Feel free to add a comment, and I will try my best to respond and support you on your performance journey. And, as we commence this video podcast experience, if you have any feedback at all, as mentioned earlier in the show, we would love your help in helping us to improve. Simply email us at info@purplepatchfitness.com or leave it in the comments of the show on the purple patch page, and we will get you dialed in. We'd love constructive feedback. We are in a growth mindset, as we like to call it, so feel free to share with your friends. But as I said, let's build this together. Let's make it something special. It's really fun. We're trying hard to make it a special experience, and we want to welcome you into the Purple Patch community. With that, I hope you have a great week. Stay healthy, have fun, keep smiling, and do whatever you do. Take care.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
athletes, race, routine, coach, Olympic games, plan, familiar, week, Olympics, triathlon, events, sport, purple, other words, feel, observation, work, performance, world championship, life