#492 The High-Stakes Playbook: Jim Bauman’s Tips for Nailing Your Big Moment
What’s scarier: facing an Olympic final or your everyday to-do list? Turns out, the mindset to overcome that fear is the same.
If mental training can help Olympians win gold, what could it do for you?
Let’s face it: most people crack under pressure.
Not because they’re not talented or driven, it’s because they don’t know how to manage what’s happening in their own heads.
But what if you could turn that doubt and fear into fuel, just like the world’s best performers?
Whether it’s Olympians chasing gold, Navy SEALs preparing for battle, or entrepreneurs closing billion-dollar deals, there’s one thing they all master: their mindset.
In this episode, I chat with Dr. Jim Bauman, a pioneer in sports psychology who’s been coaching elite athletes, military heroes, and high-powered professionals for decades now. Dr. Bauman shares strategies that apply whether you’re swimming for Olympic gold, pitching to a big client, or just trying to keep your head above water in life.
We talk about how to stop fear in its tracks, the power of mental “timeouts,” and the art of staying present when everything’s on the line. He even breaks down how to use visual cues to shift your mindset in seconds, because sometimes the simplest tricks make the biggest difference.
Everything you’ll hear in this episode isn’t just theory— it’s the kind of advice that can change your life starting today, so hit that play button now!
If you don’t have time to listen to the entire episode or if you hear something that you like but don’t have time to write it down, be sure to grab your free copy of the Action Plan from this episode— as well as get access to action plans from EVERY episode— at JimHarshawJr.com/Action.
Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Jim Bauman
[00:00] Jim Bauman: For any vision, there’s going to be some, let’s say, typical steps that you’re going to go through. In order to get to that place, here are some things that you’re going to have to do. And so having people around you, particularly who have done it, can be very, very helpful. You know, for people who haven’t done it, it’s more difficult to convince people.
[00:23] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Welcome to another episode of Success for the Athletic Minded Man. Real talk on harnessing your athletic drive for clarity, consistency, and focus in business and life. This is your host, Jim Harshaw, Jr. And today I bring you Dr. Jim Bauman. Imagine competing on the world’s biggest stage, knowing that one wrong move could cost you a lifetime of preparation.
[00:45] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Now imagine you have a sports psychologist by your side, helping you. Not just survive those moments, but thrive. Well, that’s who we have today. It’s Dr. Jim Bauman. He’s worked with Olympians, including some of the biggest, biggest household name, Olympic gold medalist, who you definitely know, but we can’t disclose their names, uh, due to confidentiality reasons.
[01:06] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Uh, he’s also worked with the special Navy warfare school. IE the Navy SEALs. Um, and he’s worked with elite performers across more than 60 different sports. And in this episode, we’re going to explore the evolution of sports psychology and performance psychology and the mental side of the game and how that is more critical now than ever, both in sports and in business.
[01:26] Jim Harshaw Jr.: We talk about how the things that. Probably hold you back like fear and pressure. They actually can be your biggest assets and like how to make those assets for you. And as opposed to holding you back and he just really brings these amazing breakthroughs that I’ve not really heard sports psychologists talk about before in quite this way.
[01:44] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Here’s the paradox, the same guy who’s helped all these amazing world class performers perform in these extreme conditions. He says that the actual thing that you most need to do is. Take a break and we talk about this. So stay with us to the end of the episode where we get into that. And he also talks about practical techniques for harnessing fear and finding focus and chaos, and just achieving your biggest goals.
[02:10] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So, plus he actually shares a really, really powerful story about this one Olympian whose success. Is both heartbreaking and inspiring. So incredible stories, incredible person. He’s actually a fellow Wahoo, like myself. He actually worked at the university of Virginia. And so I knew him across paths with him years ago.
[02:29] Jim Harshaw Jr.: He didn’t really know him all that well. We got reconnected with him more recently and learned about all the things he’s doing with the Navy SEALs and with some of these Olympians that he’s worked with. And, and I was super, I’m super blessed to have him back on the show here. I have him on the show and to be reconnected with them.
[02:43] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So, all right, here we go. My interview with Dr. Jim Bauman. So what drew you into this line of work to begin with, Jim?
[02:51] Jim Bauman: It was accidental. Prior to getting into this kind of work, I was involved in mental health for a while. I knew as a person in the field of psychology working at a master’s level. I was pretty much at a terminal level, and so I was going to go back to school.
[03:05] Jim Bauman: So I actually applied to law school, you know, and, uh, psychology programs, and the psychology programs came back first. And so, uh, I went down to Washington State University and entered into that program. And I was really interested in doing, uh, post traumatic stress disorder work for Vietnam vets, because that’s who I was bumping into an awful lot, kind of in the criminal justice system.
[03:26] Jim Bauman: So that was going to be my research, was doing PTSD work for people. The treatment regiments and protocol for people like that really weren’t very well investigated back then. But during the course of that, one of our visiting professors was actually in the athletic department and she was a sports psychologist in the athletic department.
[03:45] Jim Bauman: At that time, this is back in 1989, there really weren’t many sports psychology people at all, you know, in the world of athletics. In fact, in the Pac 10 at that time, the only other person there was Bill Parham down at UCLA. Nobody else had anybody working in their departments. So as we talk more, the more I got fascinated with what she was doing, and having some sport background of my own, I got very interested in it to a point where I just switched my research over into athletic performance.
[04:12] Jim Bauman: And so that’s kind of how it began, was that sort of serendipitous sort of conversation I had with one of my professors.
[04:18] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So you were at the beginning, really, of what we call sports psychology today. Like, what are the developments you’ve seen? Like, you’ve seen a lot of change probably over the, you know, since the 80s, 90s to today.
[04:27] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Like, what changes have you seen in the industry?
[04:29] Jim Bauman: Well, I think it’s been driven primarily by more attention with mental health and mental wellness. So as a licensed psychologist, what I was really doing, you know, as a sports psychologist was dealing With, um, just personality issues, mental health issues, mental wellness issues, substance abuse, alcohol abuse, just life circumstance issues that face 21 year old people away from home for the very first time.
[04:55] Jim Bauman: And, of course, with that comes added stress, and if there’s added stress, if there’s any sort of psychological issues, that tends to sort of foster those a little bit and kind of amplify those. So, over the years, there’s been way more attention, Jim, given to mental health. You know, we see lots of people from NFL teams, NBA teams, Major League Baseball teams, and on and on, talking about mental health and suicidality and all those kinds of things.
[05:21] Jim Bauman: So, along with that attention and more social media taking a hold of that sort of topic, that began to just Spread more quickly. So more attention primarily on mental health and mental wellness, not so much performance, although that’s very directly connected to performance. It was really about mental health and mental wellness.
[05:42] Jim Harshaw Jr.: What are the commonalities? What are the common themes that you see in performance for the typical list, right? Professional man, mid career, you know, a guy who’s maybe in his thirties, forties, fifties, he’s got a family, big job pulled in a million different directions. What are the common themes related to performance for that guy compared to, let’s say, an Olympic athlete?
[06:01] Jim Bauman: Sure. I mean, as we take a look at Olympic athletes and even professional athletes, they’re staying in sport longer. Because of strength and conditioning programs, because of nutrition, because of all the medical help that they get, you know, to recover from training and to recover from injuries and that sort of thing.
[06:17] Jim Bauman: So we’re seeing a more middle aged population of people staying involved with sport, which includes Olympic Games as well. So it’s not unusual to see people in their 30s, you know, they’re still professionally involved in athletics. We see that in the military, of course, for an example, because most of the people in the military who stay in the military.
[06:34] Jim Bauman: Are there for a minimum of like 20 years, if they’re career people, and so that’s putting people into their late 30s early 40s before they retire. So the age piece of the people that might be watching this is very similar to the people who are seeing in elite athletics or elite military performance. So there’s some age commonality, you know, there as well.
[06:53] Jim Bauman: The other thing that I would see as being common, Jim, is that for professional athletes, for Olympic athletes, for military war fighters and that sort of thing, they always have to get better. Today is not good enough. You know, the demands are just continue to increase. So if we’re talking about business people, what they were able to produce this past year, well, they might have to meet that by 10 percent next year.
[07:14] Jim Bauman: They have to beat that production by 10%, you know, with inflation cost of doing business and growing the business and that sort of thing. So Same thing for athletes, you know, let’s say if we’ve got somebody who swims a particular distance in, let’s say, 23 seconds flat. Well, that’s not going to be good enough next year because somebody else is going to be swimming faster than that.
[07:32] Jim Bauman: So the expectation always is sort of aspirational, but in reality, we’ve got to get better every year in order to keep our job. And that’s in sport, that’s in military fighting forces, that’s in business because the competition is getting better. And so we have to keep up with that. So that’s the other common piece.
[07:51] Jim Bauman: It’s constantly you’re at work to find ways to get better. The other thing that’s happening is because we’re dealing with older people in sport and military service and in business, we’re finding people who have, uh, spouses or partners or something like that. And in some cases, even family. So now the question becomes, how do I continue to be this?
[08:12] Jim Bauman: amazing, productive person in my work life, and yet still have valuable quality time for my spouse or partner, uh, and kids. As we move into this, it begins to be sort of a different mindset. At the beginning of a career, work is first. Career is first. You know, you just don’t say no to anything, you know, and that’s at the expense.
[08:36] Jim Bauman: And so in those cases, having these very special partners, these spouses who are understanding, you know, with that is really helpful because if they’re not, that will have a direct effect on how you do your job at work. Okay. And so again, with that same sort of an idea, Jim is being able to begin to compartmentalize things, work and family and other things as well.
[08:58] Jim Bauman: And as you. Or leaving home to go to work, you have to begin to disengage from that role as a father, let’s say, or a husband, and now you are beginning to engage in the role that you’re going to. At the end of that day, you have to reverse that process. You have to disengage from that work piece so you can fully engage with that other role when you get home.
[09:17] Jim Bauman: That transitional piece. It’s something we have to work at very hard.
[09:22] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You talk about, you know, whether in sports or in business, you know, in swimming, for example, you hit a certain time and now you want to get better. And then in business, you might hit a certain revenue number. You know, it’s up 10 percent and you want to get better and you’re not coaching swimmers to have better technique.
[09:37] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You’re coaching swimmers to have, you know, in, in their mindset, in the psychology, and it’s the same thing on the business side, you’re not saying, okay, here’s how to do your business better. You’re saying, here’s how you can perform. Like what kind of coaching would you do with somebody when you’re not teaching the technique?
[09:52] Jim Harshaw Jr.: You’re not teaching the actual thing, the swimming or the business. You’re just teaching them the mindset side of it. How do you approach that with somebody?
[09:59] Jim Bauman: Part of the mindset of that is helping people be open to coaching. So no, I’m not doing the biomechanics or the physiology. That’s the coach’s job, you know, to do that.
[10:08] Jim Bauman: That’s for sure. Not teaching a swimmer how to do starts or kick turns. That’s not my job at all. However, my job. As far as the athletes and coaches are concerned is to help them be ready to help them be ready to be engaged in that. Just like we talked about earlier, where they’re disengaged from being the person was fully dressed, you know, maybe walk around on campus or or at home or whatever to disengage from that.
[10:30] Jim Bauman: So they can be fully present and engaged as a swimmer. Mentally that that that’s their job right now is to be a swimmer and whatever the training is for that day to be fully and present and involved in that. So, as we take a look at people who are involved in tasks that are lengthy, you know, staying present and involved.
[10:49] Jim Bauman: is it’s a job to keep reminding yourself to stay attention, stay, stay focused. So that’s part of the mindset that we, we teach, you know, and that is be present. Think about your experience as a wrestler, you know, how easy it is for your mind to go someplace else. You know, you get tired, you don’t agree with what the training program is or whatever.
[11:06] Jim Bauman: And if you’re doing that, you’re missing out on whatever lessons you might be learning there. So it’s about staying present during that whole time. Any techniques for that?
[11:14] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I mean, whether it’s breathing or meditation or journaling, how do you get somebody to do that? Is there a routine?
[11:19] Jim Bauman: Well, I mean, some of that’s, that’s there, you know, the, the disengagement, you know, of, of being in one role to being in the next role for talking about business people being present for work, you know, today, part of what I help people do is to be organized, you know, for them to kind of understand what’s going to happen today, you know, so they can kind of plan that, that part out.
[11:36] Jim Bauman: If we’re going to be there. a swimmer, let’s say for two hours. What’s that two hours going to look like? You know, so they can begin to kind of organize what they’re going to be doing, even, even help them organize maybe breaks. So if they’ve got a break in between sets or something like that, let your mind go someplace else.
[11:51] Jim Bauman: But when it comes time to be in work again, boom, you’re back at it again. So taking breaks, breathing exercise can be very helpful. But a lot of that is just helping people being more organized in terms of what is their job today, what do they need to do today, what comes first, what comes second, and let’s stay focused on the front end of whatever those tasks are today, as opposed to trying to grab the whole day and try to deal with that.
[12:14] Jim Bauman: If we take a look at the Navy SEAL population, Jim, for an example, that’s a 59 week, very arduous training program, you know, and probably the most difficult part of that is that hell week, you know, thing that those guys go through, where they start that basically. on Saturday night, and they finish the following Friday.
[12:33] Jim Bauman: And during that entire time frame, they may get three hours of sleep on about Tuesday or Wednesday. And so the very first night there, because it starts at night, you know, on Saturday night with lots of noise and lots of water, you know, and being miserable from the very beginning. Lots of pushups, lots of setups, lots of running to the beaches, getting sandy, getting wet and coming back.
[12:52] Jim Bauman: If we’ve got somebody that begins to think, there’s no way I can do this for seven days. There’s no way I can do this for seven days. I’m already gassed with push ups and sit ups. You know, I’m already tired. You know, because they’re thinking about too far, they’re biting off too big of a chunk. The people who make it are absolutely able to stay right there in that moment in time and take one set of push ups at a time, run to the beach one time, and they continue to be right there at that moment, taking small little pieces.
[13:18] Jim Bauman: And again, same thing for athletes could be a big day, but we got to take that in very, very small pieces and stay focused and just simply being in the present.
[13:27] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah. I think for the listener, you know, when you’re going through the grind of your day, you’re going from this transition, you know, from work to home or home to work, just knowing that you can make it through this moment.
[13:37] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I think that’s relevant. To like that, I can make it through this busy day where I’ve got meetings stacked up back to back all day, you know, and then I have to hustle home and get to my kids events and you know, I know we’re going to get to bed late and I have plans to work out tomorrow morning or whatever it might be.
[13:50] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Just not looking too far out, but rather staying in the moment, being present and handling like what’s on your plate right now and getting to the next thing, whenever the next thing comes.
[13:58] Jim Bauman: That’s right. If you’ve got a brief break in between, you know, it could be maybe 10 or 15 minutes, you know, be able to take that time and just simply try to be quiet.
[14:07] Jim Bauman: Take that time to give yourself just some rest time and a refueling time. And sometimes five minutes is all you need to go to the next task. Yeah. And it’s
[14:15] Jim Harshaw Jr.: so easy to fill that space with scrolling on your phone or returning a couple of emails or checking ESPN. com or whatever it is. And so, okay, for the person who has a 5 minute break, a 10 minute break, what would you suggest that they actually do?
[14:27] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Like, what are some ideas for what they could do?
[14:29] Jim Bauman: I think you’ve hit on a couple of them already. Put your phone down. Uh, get away from your computer. If you’ve got another chair in the office, just go sit in it, maybe put some music on or get a coffee or get a water or something like that. So you can kind of refuel, but use that time to rest.
[14:44] Jim Bauman: And refuel as opposed to doing something. In fact, you are doing something by doing nothing just for a few minutes right there, where you give your brain an opportunity to just rest and then replug back in again, you got to put these things down. And that’s one of the biggest struggles that I’ve got with athletes, you know, let’s say before or after competition, in some cases.
[15:03] Jim Bauman: we would simply kind of outlaw those for a period of time. With swimmers, for an example, when they’re done with it, with an event, they’ve got to spend some time in a warm down pool and literally just swim for a while. And part of that was physiologically remove some lactate, you know, in your system. But part of it was also, so you could just simply be in the pool by yourself and just think and emote and not have to be around it.
[15:25] Jim Bauman: Anybody to answer any questions or anything like that. Just be alone. Just be alone.
[15:31] Jim Harshaw Jr.: When you got to work with some of these elite swimmers and household names, some of the biggest names in Olympic history, a lot of them, you know, we watched them on TV over the years. What were the things that separated the good ones?
[15:42] Jim Harshaw Jr.: From the great ones,
[15:44] Jim Bauman: it seemed to start pretty early, you know, life for most of the people and some of that, that mentality and that mindset of being an elite person, some of that genetics. And we have not even tapped into what all that means just yet. But we, we actually know that there’s a genetic component to it.
[16:01] Jim Bauman: We also know that there are maybe life circumstances that people are experienced or exposed to. As they’re growing up and they’re very young and they begin to decide, I mean, literally decide to be something very early age and to be something great. Sometimes it’s to prove other people wrong. Sometimes it’s to survive.
[16:23] Jim Bauman: You know, it could be any reason that gives you. The motivation, you know, to kind of like, you know, I’m going to be better than this. I’m going to be better than this. And they really begin to develop a work ethic, you know, that goes with that as well. If you don’t have that, then you’re not going to make it.
[16:37] Jim Bauman: You’ve got to be able to work hard. You’ve got to be able to sacrifice things. And in some ways be sort of selfish and selfless, you know, about it, and then be able to do that over a long period of time. Other parts that make it really helpful for athletes is to have mentor like coaches. I break people of influence into three categories.
[16:59] Jim Bauman: Either they’re, they’re mentors. We kind of all know what mentors are, you know, they are people who know what they’re doing. People have really solid value systems. People who respect you and you respect them. People who will teach you right from wrong. People who actually have these incredible value systems that, that they teach you just by watching them because what they want you to do, they do.
[17:23] Jim Bauman: It’s consistent. You know, we’ve got a lot of people who are in influential positions, but what they do and what they say are two different things. You know, so we’re looking for people, mentors who do and say the same things. They’re consistent with that. Those are the mentors. Another class of people are tormentors.
[17:40] Jim Bauman: You know, they are the opposite of that. And if we list all the mentors we have in our life, Jim, they can be parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, coaches, bosses, teachers, pastoral people. That whole list, you know, of those roles and relationships, the people that we have, mentors. The list is kind of the same for tormentors because we have parents that are tormentors.
[18:03] Jim Bauman: We have coaches who are tormentors. We have bosses who are tormentors and relationship people, but they’re in an influential position, you know, as well. Then that third category, or what I call the neutrals, you know, there are people who are in an influential position. Let’s say a coach, you know, for an example, or a boss, but they’re neither a tormentor or a mentor.
[18:22] Jim Bauman: And for the life of me, those are the people I can’t even remember their names after 20 years. They had no effect, you know, on me whatsoever, even though they were in a position of being a mentor. And so what also continues to help people through this journey of being an elite person is having mentor like people in their life that help them along this journey and help them through those times.
[18:47] Jim Bauman: In that journey that are times for struggle, you know, because, uh, things come up, you know, things come up that will drive people kind of away from what we’re doing. One of my mentors was John Wood, you know, down at UCLA, and he was a pyramid guy, as you know, and I see down at the very bottom of this pyramid, these are all of the people who want to be great.
[19:11] Jim Bauman: They want, their dream is, I want to be great. You know, they’re at the very bottom of the pyramid. We’ve got more people down there who want to be special and great than anybody else. And then on the left hand side of this pyramid, I’ve got this performance line, which goes from very low to very high up here.
[19:26] Jim Bauman: And it’s also a timeline. So performance and time kind of go together with this pyramid. And as we move up the pyramid in terms of time and required performance, now we get into this huge workspace. That takes up most of that pyramid as we’re moving forward. Work, work, work, work, work as we’re moving up.
[19:43] Jim Bauman: And some of the people who were just dreamers down here, well, they’ve left the pyramid. And as the pyramid gets narrower and narrower, we start to lose more and more people because of what the work is required to stay there. And every time somebody gets toward the edge of that pyramid, it could be because of an injury, or maybe they don’t like their coach, or they feel like they’re done, or it could be a lot of things.
[20:01] Jim Bauman: Then they either stay in the pyramid, they turn around and come back into it and continue to work and move toward the top. Or they jump off the pyramid and go try something different. We’re still, you know, on the left hand side, we still got the time and the performance line kind of going up. So the time is still clicking and the workload gets bigger.
[20:16] Jim Bauman: We get to the very top, you know, of that. And so we go from the people at the bottom who are willing to dream it. The big piece in the middle where it’s time. We got people who are willing to work for it. And at the very top, when they get to the very top of that, when they’re an elite person, they’ve done all of this work, and they’re the people that bring it.
[20:35] Jim Bauman: Performance is high, they’ve been in it for a long time, they’re invested, and they are the go to people. Because they have woven back and forth across this work part of the pyramid to get to the very top of that. And now that they’re there, They’re kind of going, bring it. I’m here.
[20:50] Jim Harshaw Jr.: The people who stick to it over a long period of time, they get, you know, to that edge and whether they stay or whether they don’t, like, does it require the person to have the dream first?
[21:00] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Like I make this distinction in my coaching between hard work and inspired action. Hard work is just say digging a dish. If you told me to dig a dish, I probably wouldn’t work very hard. But if you told me that that digging had a purpose, it was going to build a field, build a house, you know, foundation for a house for my family.
[21:16] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It would be different. Right. It would be, I’d work harder. It would be inspired action. Like for me, when I was wrestling, you know, I went through just absurd training over the years and weight cutting and that sort of thing. And yes, it was hard work. And a lot of people would say that, you know, you work really hard to do that, but it was, it was inspired action.
[21:30] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Like there was a reason there was a purpose behind it. And I think a lot of people don’t have the consistency and the discipline and the focus and the work ethic that they wish they had. Like, say, a world class performer might have because they don’t have that goal, they don’t have that dream. I have interviewed, just recently, John Naber.
[21:46] Jim Harshaw Jr.: He was an Olympic gold medalist from the 1970s, swimmer. You might even know him. I interviewed a guy named Bo Eason recently. He was a safety in the NFL. Just been successful in a lot of things that he’s done. And both of these guys, and a lot of my guests really over the years, they’ve had these dreams, these visions as a child that they were going to be somebody great and do something great.
[22:04] Jim Harshaw Jr.: That was a big part of their success. It was a You know, part of their pyramid. Is it accurate to say that you have to start with that dream first?
[22:12] Jim Bauman: I mean, that’s been my experience. Are there exceptions to that? Probably are. I haven’t come across many of those people. And I think you hit a really interesting point, Jim, and that is the dream actually changes into a vision.
[22:25] Jim Bauman: You know, there’s a difference between a dream and a vision, you know, and again, if we think about little kids, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up? You know, you dream about those. But as we become more mature and begin to kind of go after things, the dream becomes more of a vision and the vision begins to be more specific.
[22:39] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Meaning you’re seeing it, it sort of goes from this kind of idea to this thing that I can actually visualize and see.
[22:47] Jim Bauman: That’s right. So let’s say for the SEAL population, for an example, it was interesting to ask some of the questions of a, of a new person coming in, like, why are you here? You know, why are you here?
[22:58] Jim Bauman: And we were looking for one of two answers. One answer would be, I came here to see if I could be a Navy SEAL. Other people would simply say, I came here to be a SEAL. Those are the people that would make it. Because they had that vision, they could see the Trident on their chest. They could see the Trident on their chest.
[23:14] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So at some level, they were already there. They were already that person.
[23:17] Jim Bauman: That’s right. That’s right. You don’t create those people during that 59 weeks. They’re there, you know, they’re already there. It’s not something you teach there.
[23:25] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It reminds me of the book. I think it was the Talent Code where they talk about the musicians and some kids talk about how they play piano and other kids say, I’m a pianist and there’s a difference.
[23:36] Jim Harshaw Jr.: There’s somebody who plays the piano. Like I play piano or I’m a pianist. And these are two totally different people, you know, one’s doing an action and the other has taken on that identity.
[23:46] Jim Bauman: That’s
[23:46] Jim Harshaw Jr.: right.
[23:47] Jim Bauman: And again, it’s that vision and being able to imagine that is sort of the glue that holds you together during the hardest of times.
[23:56] Jim Bauman: Is there a process for that?
[23:58] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Like, I don’t want to paint the picture that like, you have to have this vision as a child in order to be or do something great. I mean, you could be at whatever point in your career and have this vision and go and be that thing. Like, how do you help people really crystallize that?
[24:11] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Or do you, can you? Like, can you help take it from a dream to reality?
[24:15] Jim Bauman: Yeah, I think that for any vision, there’s going to be some, let’s say, typical steps that you’re going to go through in order to get to that place. Here are some things that you’re going to have to do. And so having people around you, particularly who have done it can be very, very helpful.
[24:31] Jim Bauman: You know, for people who haven’t done it, it’s more difficult to convince people. You know, but if you’ve done it and it could be many things, you know, so I don’t know, let’s say I’m working with an athlete and I begin talking about, okay, here are the steps that you need to go through. And many of these have been taught to me by other athletes, or they’ve been taught to me by coaches, you know, but if you want to get to this point, this is what you have to do.
[24:52] Jim Bauman: So I have personally never done that, you know, I’m not that swimmer, but if I take a look at my. Academic sort of journey. I’ve had to do that. I had to go through basically a four year undergraduate degree. I had to go through a two year undergraduate degree. I had to go through a five and a half year PhD program.
[25:10] Jim Bauman: I had to do a dissertation. I had to do my oral exams. I had to take and sit for my licensing, you know, to get that done. I have to do CEUs, you know, all of the time, because my vision is still to be a PhD. A competent, licensed psychologist who can help people.
[25:28] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Okay. So now we’re, we’ve got this Olympian who, or maybe this person who has this, this big vision and you know, they’re an aspiring Navy seal.
[25:35] Jim Harshaw Jr.: They’re an aspiring or Olympic gold medalist. They’ve had this vision at some point in their life and the dream became a vision and they put, put in the work and they’re approaching the top of their pyramid, you know, where you mentioned earlier. And they have this sort of bring it on mentality and the stakes are high.
[25:49] Jim Harshaw Jr.: They’re, you know, they’re at that moment where they’re about to enter the pool. They’re about to go into hell week. They’re, they’re facing that, you know, for the listener, it might be walking in the door to that job interview and the stakes are high. Oh yeah. They’re feeling like I’ve worked on this for years.
[26:00] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I’ve worked towards this for years. Personally, I had this moment in my life where it was my senior year in college and I’d stepped onto the mat to the blood round where if you win, you’re an all American. If you lose, you go home with nothing. And 17 years of competing comes down to this moment. And this could be the very last wrestling match of my life.
[26:16] Jim Harshaw Jr.: After thousands of matches, how do you prepare people for that high stakes moment when it’s not just the pressure of winning another game and other match or an event or a job interview? It’s the game like the match the job the interview.
[26:30] Jim Bauman: Yeah. Well, let me ask you this question Let’s go back to that time for you.
[26:35] Jim Bauman: And What was going on in your head on that particular day?
[26:39] Jim Harshaw Jr.: So I had the blessing and I’m glad you asked this Jim I had the blessing of working with a sports psychologist. Dr. Tom Perrin at UVA And he helped me get out of my own head and stop thinking about fear of failure and just start being present in the moment enjoying and being grateful for this opportunity.
[26:54] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And I had developed routines and this is actually a question I wanted to get around to asking you and talking with you about this as well. But I had a counterintuitive routine that worked for Jim. It worked for me. And that was, well, it was actually two things. So number one, I would get out of the arena and get away from all the stress and the intensity and the anxiety.
[27:12] Jim Harshaw Jr.: I would just go into the locker room or in the hallway and just be kind of away from things until right before match time, because I knew I could just flip the switch and turn it on and then number two. To take the kind of the next level of extreme, I would, I told my assistant coach that he had to tell me a joke right before I stepped on the mat before my biggest matches.
[27:29] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It was like, you know, my senior year was the ACC championships, the NCAA championships before that blood round match and just other big matches that year. And I said, listen, you have to make me smile. You got to cut the tension because I’m like, I’m too tense. So this is, this is what worked for me. I got myself.
[27:43] Jim Harshaw Jr.: How did that intensity and, and sort of obeyed kind of what I see as the, the, the first law of sports psychology is like, everything is important, but nothing is special.
[27:51] Jim Bauman: Part of it is when we perform our best, we’re actually having fun. We were actually having fun when you’re in that moment and experiencing it.
[27:59] Jim Bauman: It’s like nothing else, you know, nothing else. It’s like when I was in the military, for an example, I was an airborne units and jumping out on an airplane was the best thing in the whole world, you know, because it was fun. It was just fun. Cause you were. immersed, you know, kind of in that moment. So kind of getting back to where we’re at, the joke thing is really funny because it’s sort of like, let’s just have some fun here.
[28:18] Jim Bauman: You know, we’re not going to, we’re not going to change the world significantly with your performance one way or the other here today. And it feels like life and death to you, but it’s really not. It’s not. Some of the things that I will do with people that I think is very helpful, Jim, we talked earlier about my work with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder.
[28:35] Jim Bauman: And with that, there are a number of what are called triggers that remind people and they’re, they’re sort of sensory triggers, things that they see or smell or taste or hear, or think about that really kind of brings them back to these very traumatic sort of, Tough situations that they were in and they relive those again as if they’re just happening all over again.
[28:52] Jim Bauman: So triggers are very important. So because triggers are very important to get people to a very negative place in their life, I use what are called cues, you know, to help people get to a more positive place in their life. So, for an example, the baseball show with Kevin Costner, for the love of the game, for an example, he’s standing on the mound in New York City, and he’s a Detroit pitcher, you know, and he’s got relationship issues going on, and he’s at the end of his career, and he’s standing on the mound of Yankee Stadium, and you know, you can hear people yelling and screaming at him like the New York fans do, you know, to people who come to New York, and I mean, just all kinds of noise going on that he was picking up.
[29:26] Jim Bauman: And then what he said to himself was, clear the mechanism. And then suddenly, All of the noise began to go away, and his visual picture was just the batter, the umpire, and the catcher. Now, that’s an auditory cue. It’s great for the movies, but auditory cues usually don’t work in real life. And so what I use are visual cues.
[29:46] Jim Bauman: So as we take a look at, let’s say, getting ready to go for an event, what I want people, and we talk about this even before they go for an event, I talk about the word perspective and really Question people about what is perspective, you know, anyway, when it’s sort of like your view, you know, of life and you in life and what’s happening right now.
[30:04] Jim Bauman: It’s your perspective. It’s your view of life and what’s happening. And that can be either healthy or unhealthy. And if people have a healthy perspective, usually what they’re paying attention to is. What do they have? What are they bringing to this competition today? They’re bringing in, I’ve trained, trained my tail off, you know, for days and weeks.
[30:23] Jim Bauman: I am really fit. I am healthy today. I don’t have any little dings I have to kind of deal with or anything like that. I love the pool that I’m swimming in. I love the lane that I’m swimming in. I love the atmosphere and it’s about what I have and I’m celebrating what I have in terms of what I’m bringing here.
[30:38] Jim Bauman: That’s a healthy perspective. An unhealthy perspective is somebody who shows up and kind of goes, Oh geez, I could have traded harder. You know, I should have trained harder. I wasn’t as focused as I should have been. If I don’t win today, then my career is going to be a failure. Or I’m going to be a failure.
[30:54] Jim Bauman: I don’t really like the lane I’m in. I don’t really like this pool. I didn’t have a good warmup. You know, it’s all the things they don’t have and all the things that could potentially lose because they don’t have that. I could lose this event today. I could lose my status. I could lose, I could not be, you know, an all American.
[31:11] Jim Bauman: They think about the things that they could lose. And so they’re more outcome oriented at that point in time. And so as I work with people’s perspective, and I’m a cognitive psychologist, so I really pay attention to things like distorted thinking and try to help people, you know, kind of clarify that and help them sort of establish a way of thinking and being this more constructive and more productive rather than destructive.
[31:32] Jim Harshaw Jr.: For the listener, they’re sitting there and a lot of times. People don’t even know they’re carrying this default negative mindset. It’s I’m not enough. I failed at that last thing. You know, you remember that last thing you failed at and that can just be a default that I think runs through a lot of people’s lives.
[31:48] Jim Bauman: That’s right. I’m going to do a presentation. Let’s say, you know, if you’re in business, I’m going to do a presentation to this new prospect out there or something like that, you know, and there’s going to be three people there. And I know there’s one person’s going to show up that I’ve never really liked before, or there’s always given me issues before, as opposed to.
[32:03] Jim Bauman: But I got two people there who I can resonate with, and those are the people I really pay attention to. But to remind them to be in that mindset, I use these cues, and literally, Jim, there are cues that I have them put someplace on them that’s visible. And so a lot of times it might be on the back of their hand.
[32:21] Jim Bauman: And it might be, it just might be the letter P for perspective, to remind them about that. And I’ve used this with swimmers, for an example. And with swimmers, it’s almost always on the back of their hand or the top of their feet, because that’s where they are at the starting blocks when they’re getting ready to go.
[32:37] Jim Bauman: And if they’re going to disintegrate, that’s where it’s going to be, those seconds before and when they are getting ready to, but if they just see that. If they just see that, it stops the negative thinking. It doesn’t get anything positive going. It just stops the negative thinking, and then they’re into their event then.
[32:52] Jim Bauman: I had one lady at the Olympic Games in Beijing. This particular swimmer had all kinds of things going on, really, in her life. And as we’re doing the, the warmups and the Olympic games were like three days away, you know, I mean, they were three days away and this person’s going to be competing again. So we’re swimming back and forth, swimming back and forth.
[33:10] Jim Bauman: All the swimmers are down at one end of the pool and this swimmer’s at the other end all by herself. So I walked down there and I said, so what’s going on? And tears, just all kinds of tears. And so I kind of went to the coaches and said, Hey, we need to leave. So we got out of the pool. I took her out to the side.
[33:24] Jim Bauman: We began to talk about the things that was on her mind, you know, right now. And what had happened was. She’d been in the Olympic games previously, you know, four years ago and hadn’t done very well. And so it was going through her mind is here. We are all over again. I’m going to repeat that all over again after having worked for four years to make the team qualify and be here again.
[33:43] Jim Bauman: What if it’s like it was four years ago?
[33:45] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah. I mean, you’re coming to this moment of crescendo, this moment of truth and like, you know, what if the same thing happens?
[33:51] Jim Bauman: Oh yeah. And then, uh, what’s interesting with many of our athletes, and this is really tragic, that sometimes people go to Olympic games, their parents have never seen them compete.
[34:00] Jim Bauman: Never seen them compete. And so what had happened in the previous Olympic games, you know, this person’s parent had never seen her swim before. It wasn’t at the Olympic Games, but if she made this Olympic Games, then the parent was going to actually come to the Olympic Games. Well, the Olympic Games were in August and the parent passed away earlier in the year.
[34:20] Jim Bauman: So now she’s brokenhearted, you know, and thinking about that, you know, parent was going to be here, not going to be here. The person was also a very religious person and thought that maybe she was even being sort of let, let down by God. You know, but why is this all happening to me? And so we literally for the next three days, we talked about perspective.
[34:39] Jim Bauman: We talked about things that you have, you know, things that you had a parent, but that parent, maybe that parent’s here in spirit. You think maybe that parent’s here in spirit, you know, and just maybe you’re a lot different person for years, no matter what you were before, you know, and she was always one of these people too, Jim, that had the biggest smile in the whole world, you know, and she’d walk into a room and it would light the place up.
[35:03] Jim Bauman: And she didn’t have that. So we began talking about things that we could sort of like build in that would be cues for her to get her out of that way of thinking and into being ready to go. And so she began developing cues and cues can be, they can be a number, a letter, a word, a symbol, anything like that, you know, that is not going to be like, you know, a paragraph on your arm or your foot or something like that, but just something that will grab your attention.
[35:29] Jim Bauman: Kind of the opposite of a trigger, like a smell or something you hear, you know, something quick, something quick. And so she came up with these three cues, one for each of those areas that was causing problems. And one was going to be, uh, rather than a broken heart. She drew a full heart, and rather than her being sort of abandoned by her spiritual world, she had a proverb, I think it was like 125 or something like that, that said, the Lord never gives you more than what you can actually carry and bear.
[36:01] Jim Bauman: And then we put a smiley face, you know, and she had a All of those three things, sort of the magic marker on her foot when she went in. And again, that was all meant for her to kind of like pay attention briefly, not to all we talked about went, oh, I have to put these cues, boom, the cues stopped all that negative stuff.
[36:21] Jim Bauman: And she had a very successful Olympic games. I use cues a lot. I use cues on baseball bats, on baseball gloves, on people’s hands, on their feet, on their shoes. wherever, you know, wherever they can visually see that, you know, so the visual cues work really well, you know, for Kevin Costner, the auditory cue that was, that was cute.
[36:39] Jim Bauman: That was cool for, for TV, but they don’t work. You got too much going on in your head. You need a visual kind of like shock to the system to kind of go. Cues work great.
[36:48] Jim Harshaw Jr.: They work great. Yeah. For the listener. I want you to think about what this means to you. Like, what is a cue that you could create that you could use?
[36:56] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Like, just like Jim was talking about here, that would work for you. I mean, what, how can you actually make this work for you? What’s that cue that would work for you now, Jim? I’ve heard of this thing called fear of success, like is that a thing? Have you ever seen athletes or special forces who have faced something like a fear of success?
[37:12] Jim Bauman: I see fear in many forms, you know, and, and some people will say was, is it fear of failure or fear of success? I said, I don’t know, but I’ll just simply deal with fear. Why don’t we just deal with fear regardless of what the next word might be? And fear is a really interesting and necessary. Emotion, you know, it helps us survive, you know, and if we get into sort of that fight or flight kind of way of thinking, there’s actually some steps in between that people don’t talk about very much.
[37:39] Jim Bauman: That fear is necessary to motivate us either to fight or it motivates us to run. Both are survival instincts, you know, basically. So fear is actually a good thing. I mean, it’s actually a good thing. It’s not fun for some people, but it’s a good thing because it creates action. You know, when we’ve got fear.
[37:58] Jim Bauman: Now, if we take a look at fear for an example, we see this a lot. If we take the first step of fear and the first behavioral thing that we do, the first thing is we, well, let’s just use an example here. It’s very primitive. And so I’m going to use the example of, let’s say deer out in the woods. Let’s say that you and I are a couple of deer out in the woods, just munching away.
[38:18] Jim Bauman: And all of a sudden through our senses, One of us picks up potential danger. We hear it, we see it, we smell it. What do we do? What’s the very first thing that an animal will do? They will not move. So for the animal kingdom, freezing is like camouflage. You know, if they’re not moving, then it’s kind of camouflage.
[38:37] Jim Bauman: And it also gives them a few seconds to determine, is there really danger out there? Can I smell something, see something, hear something that confirms that there’s danger out there? And if I don’t get anything, they go back to eating and they go back to eating. But if, you know, there is some danger out there, you know, then they have a different behavioral thing.
[38:58] Jim Bauman: There’s some things that, that animals will go through before they actually run. Not deer, but let’s take a look at something closer to us, which are primates, you know, monkeys. And so let’s say for an example, we’ve got a bunch of monkeys in an area and all of a sudden the alpha monkey kind of comes into the area.
[39:12] Jim Bauman: All the male monkeys freeze. They just freeze. Is this the male monkey? Yes, it is. And I hope they don’t see me because I’m going to freeze. The next thing that they might do in order to survive is what they will do is they may try to fake it. In other words, I don’t really want to get into a fight here, but if I can make myself look more dangerous than the perceived fear thing.
[39:33] Jim Bauman: then maybe we won’t get into a battle. So for an example, they’ll make themselves look bigger. Fish, for an example, change their color to brighter colors. Cats and dogs will bow their backs and the fur will stand up on the back. You know, they want to look bigger and more threatening. We see that in sport all the time.
[39:50] Jim Bauman: Look at all the people with all the smack talking that goes on trying to make themselves look bigger so they can kind of deal with that. If that doesn’t work, then what they might do is they will sort of like submit. They’ll just cower down, and hoping that cowering down will not be threatening to the threat, so the threat will leave them alone.
[40:05] Jim Bauman: We have that in sport, too. People just sort of, like, give up. They just kind of start to go through the motions, for an example. They submit to that. Then the last thing they do, when things are really kind of going, okay, this is not working. Freezing didn’t work for me, faking it didn’t work for me, submitting didn’t work for me, it’s still there, now people will fight.
[40:23] Jim Bauman: But it’s not a controlled fight. You know, it’s a desperate kind of fight, you know, for an example. And so what happens is we experience things in life. We begin to put things into things that are threatening or non threatening. And so for things that are non threatening, we get to the fight, but the fight comes at the very beginning.
[40:39] Jim Bauman: We’re ready to fight right now. But if it’s fearful, then we have to go through those steps, you know, all the way down to finally a desperate kind of fight. And so as we’re younger, we put Sometimes we put threatening things into non threatening boxes and non threatening things, you know, into threatening boxes, but as we get older, hopefully we get smarter about, okay, what’s really threatening and what’s not threatening to me.
[40:59] Jim Bauman: Because our brain is able to kind of process that in a more rational way. If we’re going into a swim meet or a presentation, is it fear or is it what I love to call anticipatory excitement? I said, you gotta have that. You know, whether you’re going in to do a presentation, if you don’t have a little bit of anticipatory excitement, it’s not going to be the best presentation for you.
[41:21] Jim Harshaw Jr.: It’s a different perspective to go back to something we were talking about earlier.
[41:24] Jim Bauman: That’s right. That’s right. You got to be a little nervous. There’s got to be a little fear. There’s got to be a little of anticipatory excitement there that will draw out the best in you. Otherwise you’re going to be flat.
[41:34] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Jim, you’ve given us so much to think about here. What is an action item or two that the listener can do in the next, let’s say 24 to 48 hours to start? Taking action on what you talked about here today.
[41:45] Jim Bauman: Great. And there’s a lot more. I mean, there’s, there’s so many, many things we can talk and, you know, this Jim, because you’ve been around this, this world for so long that there’s, there’s so many tools in the toolbox, you know, that people can use, and some people are better at some tools than others, you know, it’s like a carpenter’s toolbox.
[42:01] Jim Bauman: Hammers and screwdrivers and all kinds of saws and all kinds of things in there. And some of those work better for them than others. They use hammers for a lot of things, you know, besides pounding nails. So I had this interesting conversation with somebody just here not too long ago. I asked them this question because it They were asking me a very similar question, which you’re asking me.
[42:19] Jim Bauman: I said, so let’s take a look at the NBA for an example. Um, why do coaches use timeouts? And so let’s just talk about that for a few minutes. Jim, why in the NBA do coaches use timeouts? Or how do they use timeouts, you know, in, in, in stoppage of play?
[42:35] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah. A lot of times it’s to stop momentum. What else? Game plan, strategize for the next play or a big play coming up?
[42:41] Jim Bauman: Yep. Sometimes it’s to get our motivation, get our, get jumpstart us a little bit. Cause we might be a little bit flat, you know, or maybe our guys are looking a little bit gassed and a little winded, you know, out there. And so we, we use stoppage of play for a variety of reasons and all of it is meant to move us closer to whatever objective is on that particular day.
[43:02] Jim Bauman: And maybe if, if it’s an NBA game, it’s to win the game. Well, in order to win the game. They got the momentum right now. I need to stop the momentum there by calling a timeout. Or like you said, we’ve got the ball with five seconds to go and we, we got a score on this. We’re gonna take a timeout, do a game plan so we can, we know what we’re doing out there to maybe set a play.
[43:17] Jim Bauman: Another one might be we’re a little flat. So let’s just talk about what’s going on out here, fellas, you know, what’s happening out there. So we can kind of get our gel kind of going here again, you know, for that. And so it’s, it’s just ways to sort of like break the action so that we can. continue on this journey in terms of what we had anticipated we’re going to be doing today in terms of achievement.
[43:35] Jim Bauman: And so I guess what people can do in the next 24 to 48 hours is be able to take a look at, okay, what timeouts can I put into my day to get me closer to or back on track to where I’m going on this particular day. So it’s those timeouts that are so necessary during the day and being able to use those.
[43:55] Jim Bauman: So just like a coach, a coach gets maybe five timeouts. They got to be careful when they take them. Or some people just take them at the end of a game because somebody else is getting ready to kick. I’m going to burn timeouts to try to put some, you know, put some noise into this guy’s head, you know, so timeouts are a wonderful thing to have.
[44:08] Jim Bauman: You know, and so that’s what I would say, Jim, maybe that’s something people can think about is when and how they might be able to more effectively call a timeout.
[44:18] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah. And for the listener, you’re smiling right now for the longtime listener anyway, because Jim, we have a concept that I talk about quite a bit called the productive pause.
[44:25] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And it’s this idea of taking this time. I, I’ve never really heard it phrased in the way that you just phrased it right now. Um, so I think it’s a really good new way for me to look at it and for others to look at it, but it’s. It’s this timeout, it’s a productive pause and it’s defined as this, it’s a short period of focused reflection around specific questions that leads to clarity of action and peace of mind.
[44:45] Jim Harshaw Jr.: And that’s what, that’s what we all need, right? And for the listener, like this is, this is great advice from someone who’s worked with some of the highest performing humans in the world in their field. And so Jim, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. Thank you for coming on the show.
[44:59] Jim Bauman: Oh, it’s been wonderful to talk to somebody, you know, who’s a who as well.
[45:02] Jim Harshaw Jr.: Yeah. Wahoo. That’s right. Good to see you, Jim.
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