[Music] we've got toughness fundamentally wrong and it's so largely a result of just some bad ideas that are left over from high school gym class high school middle school football authoritarian parenting and teachers and these wrong false ideas of how the military creates toughness and that's that's what it is we have this idea that you have to grind through things that you should show no pain that any sign of weakness just means you're weak you're not tough that there's no crying in baseball that you can never have any doubts if you're a tough person and
all that stuff quite frankly it's the world's best performers will tell you that even in the midst of a great race or a great performance they want to quit that doubt circle their mind that they have to constantly navigate this swirl of feelings doubts like urges to quit to find a hole to step in to get off the stage to do anything to get them out of that moment that is normal because we're human beings and these feelings these actions these thoughts are all designed to protect us so instead of ignoring reality instead of setting
up a unattainable standard we need to deal with what our body gives us which is the best performers figure out how to navigate that discomfort those thoughts those doubts those urges to quit not through just bulldozing through things but taking meaningful action developing the skill set and expertise to be able to zoom out have perspective to create space between the stimulus and the urge to quit or act all of those are trainable aspects and in fact the military actually spends a lot of time training those aspects not through crazy exercises on their own or throwing
people into the deep end and hoping they swim they literally teach people the coping skills to navigate discomfort so we need to let go of the old school football coach who yells at us screams at us and teaches us only to perform when we're scared or afraid and move towards a model that teaches us how to navigate discomfort effectively whether that's on the athletic field or in the workplace the old model fails it might look pretty good on the outside but it fails repeatedly research in fact shows that authoritarian parents lead to kids who are
worst behaved authoritarian kind of coaches hard ass coaches lead to players who perform worse and have more technical fouls it just doesn't work time to embrace science psychology and the world's best performers ditch the old model it doesn't work [Music]
