DR. TIMOTHY SILVESTRI – PERFORMANCE PSYCHOLOGIST & DIRECTOR OF COUNSELING SERVICES AT MUHLENBERG COLLEGE – EPISODE 888

Website – https://www.linkedin.com/in/timothy-silvestri-2a7662b/

Email – timsilvestri@muhlenberg.edu

Instagram – @TimSilvestri

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Dr. Tim Silvestri is a performance psychologist, the Director of Counseling Services at Muhlenberg College and the Founder of Impact Being.  Tim helps athletes perform at their best by improving their understanding of psychodynamic theory, neurophysiology, and performance psychology.

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Be prepared with a notebook and pen as you listen to this episode with Dr. Tim Silvestri, Director of Counseling Services at Muhlenberg College and the Founder of Impact Being. 

What We Discuss with Dr. Timothy Silvestri

• “We don’t work with narcissists. You have to be able to state the impact you want to have by excelling in your sport.”
• “Athletes who can’t name their impact really tend not to excel.”
• The courage an athlete needs to recognize and ask for help when it comes to mental performance
• Three Buckets – You, Execution, Performance
• Assessing athletes in each of the three buckets
• “Trust is a major variable when you’re talking about teammates or trusting yourself. How reliable are you showing up for yourself?”
• “You focus on one priority at a time, and that can really jack up execution and performance.”
• “You cannot focus and think at the same time. You cannot focus and worry at the same time.”
• “You don’t decrease worry, you focus, and when you focus, worry decreases.”
• “Focusing comes down to are you seeing details or not?”
• Ways to help athletes overcome the yips
• “We process the world through stories, not facts.”
• The neurophysiology behind why good teams lose to bad teams and why bad teams beat good teams
• “The individual or the team who sees the details for the most amount of the competition has a significantly higher chance of winning.”
• “Give people explanations, not just descriptions.”
• “The number one thing that athletes come to me that they’re stressed about is a poor relationship with a coach.”
• Truth based language vs. shame based language
• “I manage the ecosystem. I don’t manage people and that’s how you really get results.”
• “In our competitive life, it is about problem solving and the person who problem solves the best reaches the promised land.”
• Dealing with a coach that uses shame based language
• “Do you know where to be? Right? The ball is going to find its way to the path of least resistance, but are you going to be there or not?”
• “Each elite coach can define the most important element that’s going to drive the most amount of success. And then you go from there to the next priority, next priority, next priority.”
• Trust in yourself is based on witnessing yourself doing something
• Manage ecosystems not people
• “Really study your craft and understand what is the primary element.”
• “Success equals knowledge plus systems”
• “Fill your dang notebook. And that means every success slash failure that you’ve ever experienced is simply a filled slash empty page in your notebook.”
• “Most of my athletes are overworked. They’re under recovered.”
• Improving an athlete’s knowledge of training and recovery
• “What’s measured is managed.”
• “I think athletes underestimate the amount of knowledge acquisition that goes into performing at an elite level.”
• “That big gap between professional and amateur, there’s a huge gap. That gap is almost 100 percent accounted for by knowledge.”
• “It’s which team runs their system flawlessly will win, not which team has a better system.”
• “I train elite athletes who have won a championship, I train them to now focus on legacy.”
• “If you want to rise to the top, know the legacy you’re building, know the impact you’re having on your school or your town or your teammates or whatever and link that impact to your performance.”
• “You come to a program that’s already established. Are you going to let those guys down? And are you going to let the future guys down, right? This is bigger than you. That’s legacy, that’s ecosystem, that’s impact, and that is the cleanest, most long lasting fuel on the planet for an athlete.”

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THANKS, DR. TIMOTHY SILVESTRI

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TRANSCRIPT FOR DR. TIMOTHY SILVESTRI – PERFORMANCE PSYCHOLOGIST & DIRECTOR OF COUNSELING SERVICES AT MUHLENBERG COLLEGE – EPISODE 888

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here without my co-host Jason Sunkle tonight, but I am pleased to be joined by Dr. Tim Silvestri, Performance Psychologist, Director of Counseling Services at Muhlenberg College and the CEO of Inner Being. Tim, welcome to the Hoop Heads Pod.

[00:00:17] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah, thanks. Well, I’m happy to be here.

[00:00:22] Mike Klinzing: Thrilled to have you on and looking forward to diving into the performance psychology that you deal with every day and trying to help athletes and people be at their very best. Let’s start by going back in time to when you were a kid. Tell me a little bit about your athletic background and kind of how you came towards as you worked through into adulthood how you got to your profession.

[00:00:48] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah, for sure. So there’s two angles here. One is a performance psychologist that I am sports psychology plus I work a lot with other folks like dancers and business folks and stuff. So I broaden it to performance psychology. I’ll talk a little bit about that. I’ll talk a little bit about my athletic background, but actually my athletic background is when I was young, I’m a short guy.

I’m five, five. And so when I was young, all of my really close friends were like the greatest athletes on the planet. Like one of my good friends was the all time leading scorer of our basketball team. Another good friend was the number two wrestler in the state. He only lost two matches, three to two to the number one wrestler in the state.

My best friend was a number two pitcher on our baseball team. And I basically got cut from all those teams. So when I went to college, I walked on as a runner did pretty well. And then at age 46, and this will come in play sometime in our conversation tonight, which is why I’m mentioning it, a little teaser here.

At 46, I said, you know what, screw it, I’m going to try to turn myself into an elite athlete. And there is a new sport, which is called OCR racing, obstacle course racing. You basically go up and down high mountains gnarly, no terrain, no trail kind of things, carry heavy objects to all kinds of crazy obstacles.

And I thought that was the coolest thing I had ever seen. And I said, I’m going to dedicate myself to four years to try to turn myself into a top class of a 50 plus age group athlete and four years minus three days. I won my first national level race, technically international because there was Canadians there.

And I was basically kind of towards the top end, maybe top five, top 10 in the world in my sport and a 50 plus age group. So that’s my history. And again, that’ll come into play later, but as a performance psychologist I’ve always been interested in performance from a number of different angles and my specialty is applied neurophysiology and the more I learned about performance, the more I realized there’s not a lot of conversation about applied neurophysiology and these types of things.

And so it became clear that that was kind of a calling of mine that I could contribute. And my company is called Impact Being, and we don’t work with narcissists. You have to be able to state the impact you want to have by excelling in your sport. So if you want to go to the Olympics and work with us, we’ll work with you, but you have to be able to state if you win a gold medal, how are you going to turn that into impact in this world?

And the reason that is one that’s pretty cool and important but also. Athletes who can’t name their impact really tend not to excel. And so we kind of cook success into the books in some ways by mandating that right up front. And our athletes do excel, I think, at higher levels than many of our competitors, athletes.

So, there’s more to be said about that. One other thing I would mention is the impact, I call them an impact avatar the impact avatar for my company is a former athlete. Unfortunately she met a tragic end and her story resonated with me greatly. She was from New Jersey. She ran track at Penn.

I was a track runner and I did my residency at Penn and unfortunately her life ended in tragedy. But there is a really good book written about her called What Made Maddie Run. Some of your audience might be familiar with that. And throughout the interviewing of the book the author interviewed everyone around Maddie Holloran and she had access to all of the components of Maddie’s life. And Maddie kept saying, I just don’t understand what’s happening to me. And I wanting to leap into the pages of the book. Because I knew what was happening to her. We could go a little short into it with hypofrontality, which is what was happening to her. And I was like, if I, and I’ve met with many Maddies and who were depressed or anxious or whatever, and I explain it to them and when you get an explanation, your chances of healing and survival and thriving are much greater, and so our mission is really to not just describe what’s happening to someone, but to explain the neurophysiology behind it. And that goes from elite performance to other things like stress and well being and resilience and depression and anxiety. We explain it. We explain it through neurophysiology and I assume that’s what we’re going to do today on your on your podcast is to offer your audience a lot of explanations so they can really understand what’s happening. And I think that’s where healing comes from.

[00:06:01] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. All right. So let me ask you this off of what you just talked about there for a second. When you have an initial conversation with an athlete, whether that’s them coming to you or maybe in your role at Muhlenberg where you’re working and you’re observing or a coach is coming to you with, Hey, this.

How good are the athletes at articulating what is happening to them when they first start to meet with you? Because I always picture an athlete as having, as somebody who has sort of an ego and maybe isn’t willing to admit there’s clearly that old fashioned attitude. Outlook of, I got to tough through it.

If I’m mentally tough, I can’t be going through some of these quote, softer skills, theoretically. So just how did you get to, what’s an athlete’s initial ability to sort of vocalize what it is that they’re going through?

[00:06:54] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I have two answers to that. The first thing is I think athletes and coaches need to understand there’s two sides of sports psychology.

Sometimes coaches refer athletes to me because, or athletes come to me on their own. I work a lot with elite athletes outside of college. And so an athlete might come to me and they’re troubled by something, right? That’s technically more therapy, right? And you don’t need a sports psychology degree to do therapy.

So there’s the therapeutic side to it. And then there’s the performance side. And, and I often don’t do therapy with athletes. We do the performance side. And so an athlete first has to try to, or a coach may need to understand, am I referring for kind of therapy and assistance? Referring for performance based work.

And those are two different angles and they often overlap and coincide. But they are two different things. Having said that I speak a lot to teams and this past year, something interesting happened in that I was speaking to a team and this happened to be a football team. And one individual on that team, I happened to work with.

And he stood up, he’s a senior, and he stood up and said, listen guys, I’ve worked with Tim. He turned his words not mine but he said, quote, like, he turned my life around and he transformed the way I approach my sport. I approach myself and whether I’m putting pressure on myself or being compassionate.

And so I suggest everyone in here, right? And, and I don’t think coincidentally, I think coincidentally, Rather, that because of that, I had a lot of athletes from that team immediately reach out to me in the next four weeks, which is rare for a team. I tell teams, listen, I got off the phone with a world champion three hours ago and I can guarantee you that none of you are going to reach out to me.

And I don’t know why, but you know, it’s like up as an example. And Dozens of athletes reached out to me. So for you out there, it’s like show courage, be the guy who stands up, be the woman who stands up and people will follow, but it takes some courage to be the first or second person to stand up.  And so that can usually kind of break things through.

[00:09:35] Mike Klinzing: In your initial meeting with an athlete, let’s focus on that performance side of it. And you talked about sort of in your own life and with the book you referenced with Why Maddie Runs. Talking about that there has to be a connection to a greater purpose.

So what does that conversation look like when you’re talking with an athlete initially trying to get to sort of the why behind what they’re doing in their sport?

[00:09:59] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah, so the initial session, the first thing, and sometimes I do group sessions, sometimes I do team sessions, sometimes it’s individual, regardless of the medium there’s three things that I want to cover up front and, and our conversation today is going to mirror my work, really. So by listening to this podcast, you would get a good sense, I think, of what a sports psychologist does and what I specifically do. So the first thing I try to assert is there’s three buckets that athletes need to look at and coaches need to look at it too.

Remember, I’m talking to coaches right now, just as much as I am their athletes. And so there’s three buckets that that are important. There’s you and I call it being like, are you a full being? Are you healthy? Are you resilient? What’s in your being there’s the execution bucket. You say you’re going to work out Saturday.

Do you do that? Do you follow through? Do you do your stretching or whatever it is that’s being assigned to you? Do you do your summer workouts, right? Can you execute? Your game plan. And third is the performance piece that’s in game performance and in game performance comes down to things like nutrition pregame routines, and then capacity to focus during the game.

And so within each of those buckets, there’s some really important factors. So the first thing I do is introduce, there’s three buckets we’re going to look at. And then what I try to do with an athlete, if they come to me for individual work, is we try to look at which of those buckets are you strongest in, and which are you weakest in.

I had a one athlete, he won a world championship, he was really good at himself, right? He was very likable, people adored him, popular guy. Good teammate, that kind of stuff. He could execute, like nobody’s business, right? If he said he was going to do it, he was going to do it.

He lagged in the performance piece, and so he was finishing 7th when he should have been winning, I think. And so for him, I had to work on the performance piece. Other people some athletes, they’re kind of narcissists, they’re kind of jerky, and their teammates don’t like them, and they tear their teammates apart.

And they need to work on that because if you can’t facilitate a strong sense of trust and likability, then you’re not going to perform well. Eventually that’s going to bog you down. Imagine someone who’s kind of a jerk and you go through breakup after breakup, after breakup, every one of those breakups is going to affect your performance.

Every one of those tension points with friend groups are going to affect your performance. And so sometimes I got to fix their being. I got to fix themselves because that keeps interfering with their performance. And other times they dream, they’re dreamers, but they can’t execute. And to learn how to execute is really important for any of us, because it takes a long execution pattern over many, many months, in my case, four years of being terrible at something until it really clicked and I started getting really good. So you need to be able to execute for long periods of time. So that first session is really about defining where are they strong?

Which bucket are they strong in? Which one are they weak in? And then how do we move forward from there?

[00:13:24] Mike Klinzing: Which bucket of those three is the most interesting to you?

[00:13:25] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Oh, I love them all. I mean I’m going to say that, but and I’m not trying to cop out, but they all have such a rich element of neurophysiology in them.

And they’re amazing. Each of those buckets are amazing. Let me give you a quick example of each. Coaches sometimes refer. students to me because they think they’re a mess, they’re a basket case, when really they’re not executing. And that execution they’re not doing what they want to do.

They’re not doing what they say they’re going to do, and that starts to invade other areas of their life, stuff like that. So but one key for each, right? So, for the you bucket, the personal bucket, the being bucket, are you trustworthy are you reliable, things like that go into trust and ask any Navy SEAL, you’d rather have someone high in trust and moderate in performance over someone who’s moderate in trust but high in performance, right? So trust is a major variable when you’re talking about teammates or trusting yourself. How reliable are you showing up for yourself? So trust is a big factor there.

With execution, it comes down to, one major part of execution is prioritization. What’s your priority? And if you show up and you say, okay, I’m going to train Saturday, I’m going to train Sunday. If you go into the weight room, what’s your priority? If you go out for a run, what’s your priority? If you show up to study for a study session, what’s your priority?

And so by naming the priority, your execution skyrockets. And too often, our, especially our young athletes, they don’t name a priority. And then they wonder why they’re not executing. You focus on one priority at a time, and that can really jack up execution and performance.

One element of performance I would highlight is focus. So a lot of athletes get in their head and they think a lot and they worry and they stress and right, they’re distractible and all this stuff. They get in their head. I hear that a lot. Well, you’re either focusing or thinking slash problem solving. You cannot focus and think at the same time. You cannot focus and worry at the same time.

So what I tell athletes is you, you, You don’t decrease worry, you focus, and when you focus, worry decreases. Right? You don’t stop thinking, when you focus, thinking stops. So, athletes are too busy trying to stop thinking, when they should be trying to focus, and then thinking stops. And so how do you focus?

It’s so simple. It’s mind blowing, and I think too many sports psychologists make this way too complex. Focusing comes down to are you seeing details or not? If you’re a tennis player, are you seeing fuzz on the ball? Finite details. Are you a basketball player? Right? If you’re defending someone, you’re looking midway between their waist and the ball, right?

If you’re guarding someone one on one, you’re watching their waist because where their waist goes is where they’re turning, right? Things like that. You’re receiving a pass. You’re literally seeing the stripes on the ball spin. You’re focusing on the front of the rim, whatever. minutia of detail that is that if you’re seeing details, then you’re in an optimal state of performance.

And I could give you the neurophysiology that we might not have time, but it comes down to focus, not stopping thinking. And so that’s an example of all three buckets.

[00:17:18] Mike Klinzing: So we get in on that focus thing, and this is a conversation that I always find to be interesting because when I was a college basketball player, Tim, and this is from 1988 to 1992, and I was in the middle of my sophomore season, I think I was shooting probably like 91, 92% from the free throw line.

And at some point during that season. All of a sudden, my ability to shoot free throws just completely disappeared and I’d get up to the free throw line and kind of what you’re describing, like I’d start thinking about what am I doing? Why am I not doing it? And I literally you have the old, whatever, Steve Sax, Chuck Knobloch, Rick Ankiel, can’t throw the ball and it felt like I just could not get the ball to the free throw line. I just couldn’t, I couldn’t get a free throw to go in. And I suffered through that for like the last, probably, I don’t know, probably the last third of my season as a sophomore. And then as a junior, so I had to change my routine and everything that I did, but no coach at any point ever talked to me about it.

Never mentioned it, never, nobody ever tried to help me, nothing. It was just like I was kind of on this island by myself, never talked about it with a teammate, anything. And then when I was a junior, I sort of recovered. And I think I got back up and I shot like 76 or 77 percent for the year. And then by the time I was a senior, I was back to 83%, but I never got back to like prior to that incident, like every time I went to the free throw line, there was never a doubt in my mind that I was going to make it. And that feeling after I went through that, I was able to overcome it. And again, as I look back, it was totally strange. And I honestly, it sounds dumb, but I give myself a lot of credit for getting out of it because I know there are a lot of people that suffer through that and never get out of it.

And I was able to at least get back to 90 percent of maybe what I was previously, but I just think if I’m an athlete and I come to you with that situation, and I think about focus versus thinking, what advice would you have given me back whatever, 35 years ago when I was a college basketball player?

[00:19:33] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah. So it’s a common thing, right? And in baseball, we call that the yips. Basketball, they call it a different thing, right? But it’s, I get a lot of that. I had a softball player come to me recently, same thing, hitting. She was an outstanding hitter and suddenly she couldn’t hit the ball. So what I would do is I would show you the neurophysiology of it, I would explain it.

And that is boy, let me, let me take a minute here to do this. So blood is heavy and if you had enough blood in your body for all systems to be on at the same time, you wouldn’t be very mobile. And we would have been offed by Jaguars 200,000 years ago. So we have alternate systems and those alternate systems share blood and so you can’t have these systems on at the same time.

So if you’re flexing, right? You’re pumping blood into your skeletal muscular system, then blood is dominant in your extremities. If you eat, then you turn down your digestive system and blood accumulates from your skeletal muscular system into your digestive system, right? And so the brain is the same thing.

In that blood is either accumulated in your frontal lobe, which is your thinking worrying center, that means that system is active and on, or blood is dominant in your midbrain, which is your dog brain, your mammalian brain, and now your performance brain is on. And so you’re just like your skeletal muscular system and your digestive system are antagonistic systems.

They can’t be on at the same time. Your dog brain or your mammalian brain and your human brain are antagonistic. They can’t be on at the same time. So what I would show you is that a choke or a limited performance outcome is basically You are frontal lobe dominant. Blood flow is dominant in your frontal lobe.

That is your dominant system. And your dog brain, your mammalian brain, your performance brain is off. And so all we have to do in that situation is switch. When you walk up to the free throw line, what you’re actually trying to do is become mammalian brain or dog brain dominant, which means you simply focus on any detail.

You look down at the stripe, and you see a speck of dirt on the floor, a speck of dust. You see details in your environment. Will literally immediately turn on that performance brain and you would see your free throws start to skyrocket again. Because again, you can’t be dog brain dominant and worrying frontal lobe brain dominant at the same time.

They’re antagonistic systems. So once I explain that to you and now you feel empowered by having a rational human explanation then, and by the way, I would also make sure you didn’t develop any mechanical flaws. But if the shooting coach said his mechanics are flawless, then it’s my job, right? And I explain that and I explain how to focus, which is just simply seeing details and watch your performance come right back.

I’ve had athletes say it snaps right back within a few days. Because they’re seeing details and there’s no arguing the neurophysiology of that. One last piece of this is, notice what happened. You started saying what many athletes do, what’s wrong with me. You had no human explanation. You had no neurophysiological explanation.

And when you have no base scientific neurophysiological explanation, there’s no one else to blame but you. Right. It’s very personal and that’s a bad place to be. And so one of the things that I do in my company is we explain the neurophysiology and by doing that, we defocus, we decenter the focus from the individual to their humanity.

And when an individual is now human. They’re much more likely to fix it, humanize it, have compassion, and be able to get through it. When it stays vague, and it’s just like, I’m a mess, and I’m a basket case, where’s the solution? What, are you going to not be a basket case? Right? Like, There’s no firm solution in there.

And so we get our solutions through the answer, which is neurophysiology. And that’s how I would have treated you. And I can pretty much guarantee you wouldn’t have spent much time at all. You would have been back to 90 something percentile very quickly. And then later, if you want to, we could talk about the question I get a lot, which is, why do bad teams beat good teams?

Why do sometimes good teams lose to bad teams? And believe it or not, the answer lies within the same neurophysiology I just talked about. But we could cover that later if we have time.

[00:24:21] Mike Klinzing: Let’s hit that right now. Cause I think again, if I’m a coach, which a lot of our audience is, then I’m interested in, I could be on one side or the other of that equation, right?

Sometimes I’m coaching a team that’s not as good as the team that we’re playing. And hopefully a lot of times I’m coaching a team that’s better than the team I’m playing against, but clearly all coaches have been in that situation. So talk a little bit about that.

[00:24:42] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah. So Nick Sirianni, the Eagles Philadelphia Eagles head coach, he has a perfect paradigm.

You start every game, your record is zero and zero, right? So this game is the only thing on your record. And you have a zero to zero record before every game. So that’s a centering technique. And you don’t treat bad teams as bad. You don’t assume a win, anything like that.

So here’s what happens is that when a good team is playing a bad team, you, you were human, right? So the neurophysiology of our humanity is stories outweigh facts. And so the fact is that team is 0 0 heading into that game, right? You have to play the game. That’s why we play it and we don’t just go by records, right?

But we process the world through stories, not facts. And so we can head into a game telling ourselves the story that we’re a great team and this team’s the worst team in the league and we should win this. That’s the story. A bad team goes, Oh my gosh, we’re playing the best team on the planet. You know, we’re in trouble here, right?

That’s a story. The fact is any team on any given day can win, right? But we’re already doomed by the story we’re telling ourselves. Okay. So now a team goes in and they’re fully confident. They’re the better team. They’re playing the worst team in the league and they know they should win. And what happens is suddenly it’s close.

Now, their brain has to problem solve because something that shouldn’t happen is happening and so a problem emerges. So now, they are frontal lobe dominant because they’re trying to solve a problem of what’s happening, why is this happening, we’re better than this, we should be winning. We should be winning, we should be winning, right?

And now, they’re thinking, not focusing. And that’s how a bad, a better team loses to a bad team. They become frontal lobe dominant. How does a bad team beat a good team? They stay dog brain dominant. And by being dog brain dominant, they start hitting shots. They start making plays and suddenly they’re turning the tables where they’re seeing details, they are dog brain dominant and the better team is worrying and now this bad team can beat the good team.

Basically in sports, the individual or the team who sees the details for the most amount of the competition has a significantly higher chance of winning, like tenfold, right? Now, that’s a little bit not true in endurance sports, where training matters. But it’s certainly true, more true of ball sports where I’ve seen Puerto Rico beat the U.S. Dream Team, right? That’s a famous story, too often told probably, but that had a lot to do with positioning and better coaching and it wasn’t just focus. But, the more the Dream Team was losing to Puerto Rico in that game in like 1980 or whenever it was 1992 or something the more they got ahead, the more the problem started falling apart.  That’s how it goes.

[00:28:01] Mike Klinzing: All right. So then the question becomes, if I’m a coach and we can break it down at the player level as well, but how do I get my team? I guess what I’m hearing you say is I sort of think of that as how do I get in the flow state where I’m not thinking about the bigger picture of, oh, we’re losing. We can’t be losing this game or this is something that’s going to, whatever. It’s going to affect me for this and standings and championship and this and that. And I start worrying about those big picture things that are focused in on what am I doing in the moment and seeing those details.

So the question is, how do I help myself? How do I help my team get to that point? How do I help them to see those details? What are things that I can talk with them about as a coach that enable my team to get past that, that state of, of worry and that state of thinking and get to the point where I’m noticing details?

[00:28:59] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah, great question. And so one thing is if you don’t explain to people what a choke is versus what success is. You know, that’s where I come in, right? Not me, but people like me, right? If you can find someone who’s able to explain this stuff, then at least now your team has an explanation, right?

So that’s where I come in and sports psychology comes in is let’s give people explanations, not just descriptions. Focus. That’s a description. Explanation is at some point they need to explain what focus actually is. How do you operationalize it? The second thing besides bringing in a sports psychologist to explain it is leadership.

So, the number one, I have two other answers to this. The number one complaint or the number one thing that athletes come to me that they’re stressed about is a poor relationship with a coach. By far, that’s the number one thing I talk to athletes about. And basically, good coaching comes down to, are you using truth based language?

And bad coaching comes down to, are you using shame based language? So coaches that shame athletes, get your head out of your ass, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, that’s shame based language. And that is going to be extremely ineffective, and that team is not going to turn that corner. Truth based language works much better, is the way forward, which is, guys, this is not how we play.

Remember what we practice. You can do this. You saw yourselves, you witnessed yourself do this throughout the week. It’s in you. You have to trust that it can come out of you. It’s in you. We mapped it in. We practiced this. You 100 percent can do the play we’re asking you to do, right? That is truth based language.

It’s not just rah rah positive. It’s truth based. Shame based has no role in coaching whatsoever. The second answer that coaches flop a lot is as a leader. So this goes for athletes and coaches. You future leaders out there, you current leaders, never manage people. People don’t like being stripped of their freedom.

And when you manage people, you’re basically stripping them of their freedom. Good coaches manage ecosystems. Because now you’re managing the ecosystem we reside in, we live in, you’re managing the parameters of our behaviors and stuff, you’re not managing people per se. And so when I said Nick Sirianni says every, every week, we’re zero and zero, that’s our record this week.

He’s managing an ecosystem, not an athlete. And that is how you move an entire team forward and get them to perform at high levels. The teams I lead, right. I, I’m a director of a unit. And they enjoy working for me, but they know I manage the ecosystem. I don’t manage people and that’s how you really get results.

So those would be a couple of my answers. I don’t know if any of those resonate with you or not, but that would be my quick answer. Well,

[00:32:06] Mike Klinzing: Well they do. Absolutely. Take that answer from the team perspective and the coach’s perspective, and then flip it around and let’s look at it from the athlete’s perspective.

So when an athlete comes to you with a difficulty in their relationship with their coach, and so you kind of gave the answer from a coach’s perspective. What would be the answer from an athlete’s perspective? Beause obviously the athlete can’t change the way the coach coaches or talks. Now you can have a conversation with your coach about the way you’d like to be coached, but we all know that coaches tend to coach to their personality and their way of doing things.

And they may change, they may not. So what advice do you have for athletes who are in that situation? What can they do to try to improve their relationship with their coach when they know that they can’t necessarily. Get the coach to change the way they operate in a given moment.

[00:33:01] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah, good question. So, and it’s a tough answer, right?

Because I’d love to magically wave a wand and make the coach use truth based language, not shame based language, and we can’t do that, right? So, here’s the thing, and your audience is going to immediately get confused and say, wait a minute, you said the opposite 20 minutes ago, but hear me out. So, I tell my athletes that success is basically, comes down, success comes down to problem solving.

And what I mean by that is not that in the performance you’re thinking in problem solving, the problem solving comes in in these other moments. And so now an endurance athlete like me, if I’m in a five hour competition, things are going to go wrong in that five hours, right? And I have to problem solve.

It’s what I don’t want to do is to get down and say, Oh, I failed an obstacle or a problem arose. I have a cramp or I have this or I have that. You problem solve. If you do a hundred mile race, it’s gross, but a lot of times your toenails fall off. Skin and, and things aren’t good at handling these long, crazy distances.

So, in these things, in our competitive life, it is about problem solving and the person who problem solves the best reaches the promised land. And so no matter what the problem is with my athletes, I say, okay, that’s the problem, now problem solve because brilliant athletes problem solve, that’s what we do.

And so we say, okay, I have a coach that’s using shame based language. How am I going to still focus in a game, focus on details, despite shame based language being thrown at the team? And Bobby Knight just recently passed RIP, but that dude was the king of shame based language and it was abusive and I don’t agree with his style of coaching whatsoever.

I don’t mind going on a record at all with that because. He was the king of shame based language, and it’s completely unnecessary and just wrong because athletes don’t perform up to that standard. He did win a national championship, I get it, blah, blah, blah. He won it in spite of that, but overall his career was not a stellar career in those lines.

So an athlete, I would say, okay, you have a coach using shame based language, now let’s problem solve. And really, that’s what we have to do. And that could be leaving a team in really extreme cases, but it’s often using focal strategies to do the job that you’re there to do for your teammates, right?

Because it’s the team that is winning or losing. The coach is there to guide it. Things like that are what the way I would approach it.

[00:35:45] Mike Klinzing: So one of the things that I’ve always heard in those situations and you talk about Bob Knight and there are some players that react or deal with that type of coaching better.

Thankfully, I think we’ve, in many cases, there’s certainly a lot less coaches that subscribe to that particular theory of coaching than there used to be. But I know one of the pieces of advice that I always heard growing up was if you have a coach that uses abusive language or is, Not talking to you in such a way or is insulting or is doing things that what you have to sometimes do is to tone out or tune out the tone of what someone is saying.

Tune out the extraneous language there and try to focus in on well, what is it that they’re actually trying to coach me to do? And so maybe they’re not delivering it in a way that’s positive, but Is there a way for me to cut through all the, the shame talking and get to what is the message and is there actually a message in there that I can utilize to help me to be a better player?

And so how would you approach that advice?

[00:36:57] Dr. Tim Silvestri: There often isn’t. You know, there often isn’t. Shame based language really is without truth. I do agree, and I do that work with athletes who have problematic families. It’s like know that someone’s. reacting and their reaction is not a healthy way to communicate.

But I do this in couples work a lot, right? It’s like your partner is reacting to something you did and, and the way they’re delivering that message might not be okay. But they’re still reacting to something you did. And so there may be, something there worth looking at, even though the way they’re delivering it isn’t good.

But a lot, but honestly, a lot of the times, that’s not the case. Where they’re reacting because they’re kind of a toxic person and you actually, there is nothing to glean from it and so just like coaches are fallible people, right? They’re humans. There’s a lot of fallible, there’s a lot of kind of unhealthy, toxic people out there.

And so you may have a coach that is less than healthy, and then I wouldn’t want to try to decipher a proper meaning from it. I would want to dive in and do the work needed to be done and win games for your team and do stuff like that. But for the most part coaches are not toxic. Probably only 10 percent of them are.

There are some of your athletes on this podcast who may have, they maybe have one of those one out of 10, but 90 percent of them, their message delivery stinks, but they are still delivering an important message somewhere in there. Now an athlete has the right to say, coach, you’re telling me something important.

I’m not hearing the message though. And I need you to help me hear the message, right. And do that in an 18 year old way of doing it, not a 54 year old psychologist way of saying it, but there are ways that an athlete can ask for clarification.

[00:39:05] Mike Klinzing: And I do think that’s one of the aspects of coaching that I feel like we’ve discussed it on the podcast before.

And I think coaches are much more aware of it now. And I always think of the, sort of the John Wooden school of being able to coach and make your message precise and also make it actionable. When you talk to someone, there’s a lot of, how much are we getting out of it? If we’re just yelling, good job, or we’re giving things that are non specific.

Like you want to give kids something that they can actually utilize. And I think about that in terms of coaches and timeouts, where a lot of times you’ll. I have a coach who runs a timeout and they’re saying a million things, but maybe those things aren’t actionable. Or maybe there’s 20 things that are actionable and those athletes leave that timeout and they walk back out onto the court and they’re like I mean, I can’t remember or process all those things.

Whereas if as a coach. You could focus in on, hey, here’s the number one most important thing. It’s kind of like what you talked about earlier, right? In terms of it’s a detail like, I need one, here’s one thing we can do. It’s a priority, right?

[00:40:17] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Here’s one thing that you can do all performance, really.

You’ve gotta prioritize the one thing for sure. And then if you do that, yeah, so truth based language, never shame, prioritize for you. Coach should prioritize and, coaches are, they’re driven, passionate people. And so I think a lot of coaches don’t understand the difference of truth based versus shame based language.

I hear, I still hear far too much shame based language in the coaching world. Honestly, I think it’s still fairly common. Unbeknownst to the coach, because the coach is a really caring person and they’re dedicated to mentoring young people. So their heart’s in the right place, but their words are often misplaced.

And I find that coaches are very trainable towards truth based language versus shame based language. Just by hearing those two words, they start to self select towards truth based and away from shame based just by introducing them to the dichotomy of it. I think it’s within their wheelhouse and I think they want to mold the minds of young people.

That’s why they coach. And, but they just don’t have this paradigm to judge themselves on. You know and Bobby Knight, non Bobby, Bob Knight is not a good paradigm to judge ourselves because most coaches aren’t Bobby Knight, right? But shame base versus truth base I find that coaches can really mentor themselves through that process and they can use much better statements.

But the other thing is again, the priority is besides prioritization is manage the ecosystem. Let me give you a Jacques Lemaire famous coach, New Jersey Devils, won a Stanley Cup I talked to one of his athletes, a guy named Bruce Driver, who happens to live in New Jersey where I grew up.

And having several conversations with Bruce Driver I said, how did Jacques do it? And he said No matter what was happening, because I asked Bruce, you guys were always in position. How did Jacques Lemaire do it that these players were never out of position? And he said, no lie, if any player was ever out of position, anywhere on the ice during scrimmages, during practice, he would stop the entire thing, move the guy into the right position, and then restart it.

That’s managing ecosystem. There was no yelling, there was no shaming, there was no nothing. It was just, this is our priority is positioning, right? And I tell ball athletes all the time, the ball knows where to go or the puck or whatever. Do you know where to be? Right? The ball is going to find its way to the path of least resistance, but are you going to be there or not?  And so that’s managing ecosystem.

[00:43:10] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, it’s that ability to give a clear instruction and have a priority. I know that’s one of the things that we talk with a lot of coaches on the podcast about, and we’ve had this conversation a bunch of times, and I always find it to be fascinating just how different coaches approach the idea of, and I give the example of myself, the first time I ever coached.

So my first experience coaching, I was hired as a JV basketball coach, and I had I obviously had my playing career, but I’d never coached at all really during my playing career, then like a little rec team where I wasn’t practicing or doing anything or thinking at all that I was actually coaching. I was just doing whatever for fun.

But when I actually became a coach, I remember I went into my first practice. And we practiced for about five minutes and we’re doing a drill that was some kind of five on five drill. And I remember just five minutes into that drill going, Oh my God, there’s like 500 things that they’re doing wrong. How am I ever going to fix all this stuff?

And I remember just being completely overwhelmed and I’m not sure that. And that first season that I ever really figured out that, Hey, you can’t fix all 500 things. You can only prioritize one or two or maybe three things at a time or in a given week or in a given practice, whatever it might be. And you got to kind of zero in on those.

And that’s something that I talk to coaches at all levels about on the podcast is how do you balance out when you see something that is a priority? And then obviously you fix that. But if there’s something else that’s going on that you haven’t prioritized, how do you balance letting that Sort of letting that go to keep the flow of practice going because obviously there’s things that you could fix or mistakes or whatever that you could do all the time.

So it’s interesting for me to, to talk to coaches about how they balance the flow of their practice versus how many things they can prioritize in a given, in a given practice, if that makes any sense.

[00:45:13] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah, I love it. And one of the things about experts, so you can know a true expert when an expert can tell you this.

I call it the 3 5 prism in my work, and it’s can you tell me the three to five most essential elements of success at whatever it is we’re talking about? You know, Einstein broke the universe down into three elements, right? E equals mc squared. And that meant that dude understood the universe quite a lot, right?

He could simplify it. He could summarize it in such a quick way. Ball sports, for example, most ball sports are about spacing, right? And position. Defense is a hundred, right? I’m not a defensive master. I’m not a ball sport master. So correct me if I’m wrong, but defense is about positioning.

And so if there’s not positioning, then what are you even focusing on the other stuff, right? And that’s my story with Jacques Lemaire is the forward, everyone knew where to be on defense. Forwards knew, the goalie knew, the defensemen knew Michael Jordan was big on defense, right? And he would, he always insisted on positioning and getting that positioning right for defense.

So you prioritize based on your expertise of the thing you’re doing. If you’re a hitter, part of it is balance. Barry Bonds used to train rookies. He would push them. He would say, get in your stance. And he would push them. And if they fell backwards, he’d say, you’re not going to hit very well.

Whereas when you push Barry Bonds, he didn’t budge. He was like a jujitsu master. Like his feet were like cemented into the ground. And so each elite coach can define the most important element that’s going to drive the most amount of success. And then you go from there to the next priority, next priority, next priority.

So for coaches like lean into that and try to define what that is. Right. And so here’s where that’s really important. Can we go into an elite, elite level here? When I work with elite athletes, when we talked about some of the beginning stuff, right, execution and, and focus on that, but to win a world championship, to win an Olympic medal, to win an NBA title, what I focus athletes on at elite levels is the word trust.

And that trust is, I tell athletes, don’t believe in yourself. You could just as easily not. Believing in yourself is like a straw hut. Okay, I’ll take a straw hut over the rain, but I want a more sturdy house if there’s a hurricane, right? Trust is a sturdier house that can face down a hurricane. Believing in yourself is more flimsy.

So, trust is based on witnessing and when I train elite athletes heading to a major competition, we try to define what are the three to five most important variables we’re talking about and what trust variables have you built into your training that since you did that, you definitively know you can win a world championship, right?

And so for a basketball team, it might be spacing or for a free throw shooter it’s, can you shoot a free throw, perfect form, perfect focus, while teammates are throwing nerf balls at you, screaming at you, pounding the floor in front of you, right? Doing all these things, and if you can throw perfect free throws in that scenario, Then now you trust yourself.

That trust is unshakable. If you can do that, then you can face off against the Duke Cameron crazies. If you’re the visiting North Carolina team. It’s same, that’s the same technique Juilliard uses when they’re training opera singers. They have them sing their opera until the point where they can sing it, despite people around them, singing off key, singing other songs, throwing Nerf balls at them.

And despite all that, they sing this opera perfectly. If it’s good enough for Juilliard, it’s good enough for North Carolina basketball. It’s good enough for whatever, right? And those are true. That’s based on trust, witnessing, not believing in yourself. And so a team that can do spacing should trust themselves that they can win a national championship.

That’s first and foremost. Coaches forget it, forget what’s next if you don’t have spacing and then you go to the next thing. I don’t know what that would be. I’m not a basketball coach, but I would put a high probability that coaches would prioritize spacing above all else, something like that, right?

Defense and positioning above all else.

[00:50:06] Mike Klinzing: It makes sense. I mean, I think. Yeah. Again, it’s kind of interesting that the number of coaches that we’ve talked to that do talk about like, Hey, here’s the, the three most important things that we have to work on, whether that’s offensively, defensively, whatever it may be.

And we have to, these are the things that are most important that we’ve boiled it down to this particular team. Needs to do these three things in order for us to win. So those are the three things that we put the most focus on. And maybe if we get to the point where we’ve, I would never say mastered, but we’ve gotten to the point where we trust that we’re good at those things, then maybe we can add another thing that we can start to look at.

But when we try to do 15 things, that’s where we end up getting in trouble. And we don’t end up doing any of them at an elite level. And to your point, what you’re talking about is if I can get those three priorities nailed down where I trust that in the biggest moments, we know we’re going to be able to execute this offense because we our spacing is correct, or we’re going to be able to be in the right spots defensively, then that allows us to perform at an elite level, no matter what situation we’re faced with, whether we’re talking about we’re in the NCAA championship game, or we’re talking about a scrimmage in October after we’ve Just gotten started.

We know what our priorities are and what we’re looking for. And that helps us to focus as coaches. And it also helps the players to understand what it is that they need to be focused on. Whereas if there’s a million things coming at you as a player, it’s kind of that old adage, right? That if, if everything’s important, then nothing’s important.

[00:51:45] Dr. Tim Silvestri: So, yeah, exactly. And I think that’s the key is coaches who manage ecosystems, coaches who build trust based on witnessing, right? And coaches who can tell you what the priority is and sequential process of that. They’re going to do well. And, and Tony Dungy was big on that of forging trust.

And he lost a world championship because his team didn’t trust themselves based on witnessing. And he famously then, fixed that, built trust into his workouts, and then won the Super Bowl with his next team based on they did it till they trusted 100 percent they could do it. And then during the high stress times, they still knew they could do it, definitively knew they could do it.

And so it’s example after example of that. And you heard that with me in that I can take this complex world of sports psychology. And right. I, it’s like, if you can’t see details, if you don’t even know that, and you haven’t practiced that, and you’re not seeing details, don’t talk to me about any other part of sports psychology, because that’s the defining quality.

Then we could get into some other things like witnessing and trust and other elements, right? I also broke it down to the three buckets being execution and performance. So any topic you throw at me, if I know that topic, I’m going to break it down to the three to five core elements, and I’m going to enable my athletes to see the world through that lens.

And then they shine brightly. They do great things and coaches out there, you have the capacity to do that. But instead of just molding kids and being great coaches really study your craft and understand what is the primary element. What is the secondary tertiary and don’t get too bogged down in number 50 through a hundred.

But that takes a coaching, a coach really, really knowing their stuff that they can solidly boil it down to two or three or five things, five things. Max, I rarely see anything that goes beyond five.

[00:53:54] Mike Klinzing: When you think about an athlete’s perspective, when you think about that trust element. I think I go back to when you talked about the execution bucket and the athletes seeing themselves execute and putting the time in on the practice floor and individual workouts, whatever it may be to see themselves having success over and over again.

How does that tie into them trusting their performance so that I know I put the time in that’s necessary to be able to perform well when, when the lights come on, so to speak.

[00:54:27] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah, so athletes, please remember this. Write this down. Success equals knowledge plus systems. Systems are implementation, but they’re better than just implementation.

Knowledge equals success equals knowledge plus systems. And so, Athletes are under they don’t have enough knowledge. Another line is and I’ll explain this in a second, but is fill your dang notebook. I start all my sessions with my athletes, fill your dang notebook. And that means every success slash failure that you’ve ever experienced is simply a filled slash empty page in your notebook, right?

And so you want to then take that knowledge, that filled page in your notebook, and you want to apply it through a system. So. Point being athletes are understudied. Athletes are underinformed. Athletes are not given explanations for things. And so athletes do dumb things like work really hard, which isn’t dumb.

But you know what I mean? Most of my athletes are overworked. They’re under recovered. They they’ve shredded their nervous system. They’re fried and they’re performing badly because they work too hard. And so they’re not seeing the connection between recovery and good performance.

They’re actually overworking. I remember an Olympic wrestler and he said after winning a gold medal during his interview, he said I’ve since I’ve joined the Olympic training camp, I’ve never worked less and smarter in my life. And he came out of the top D1 wrestling program in the country.

And he was basically calling out all of college athletics as saying, you overwork your athletes stupidly, you don’t know what you’re doing and to compete at this level, you have to prioritize recovery equal to work. And so a good athlete in the weight room never goes to failure. You don’t because that takes too much recovery time if you go to failure, right?

And so these are things that rookie or amateur athletes get wrong a lot. They work too hard. So again, we want to get our knowledge, I also say to athletes, think like your body, not a basketball player or fill in X, whatever sport there’s, they too often thinking like a basketball player with all this hype and this mythology in their head your body can only do what it’s recovered enough to do.

And so you’re constantly managing recovery and those types of things. And that’s where we want to bring up our knowledge base of our athletes.  

[00:57:11] Mike Klinzing: Some of that new technology that’s out there in terms of understanding the load that’s placed on athletes and understanding where they are in their recovery.

I know, I think it’s seeping down into some of the high division one level of college basketball and certainly it’s been in the NBA for a while, but just in terms of. Again, the, the training staff having an idea of where a player is physically and then being able to communicate that to a coaching staff.

And I think back to my experience as a college athlete, and I know that there was not much thought given to what was our team’s recovery. This is what we were doing on a given day. And it was, it was this and it was that. And I don’t know that there was a ton of concern back then. For, Hey, are these guys recovered?

Are they going to be at their peak physically for this game? It was more just a case of this is what we’re doing in practice. You got to get through it. So just how has the new technology in your experience over the course of your career, how has it helped to coach us to understand better what the recovery process should look like for an athlete?

[00:58:16] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah, I mean, the technology is helpful in many ways because it really gives us some kind of data. There’s a saying in consultation what’s measured is managed. And so not managing, not measuring your macro intake every day means it’s not going to be managed very well.

And not measuring your sleep is, it means you’re not going to manage your sleep very well. So measurement can lead to, but again, Mythology, one fella out there calls it data over dogma. And we often buy into dogma, not data. And so we want to be careful of, it’s not just measurement and some of these technological advances are really important and I think very helpful and they’re fairly affordable, but, we still want to get out dogma, like work hard versus data to help our athletes improve. But back to the knowledge piece, that’s where knowledge again comes in. It doesn’t matter what you’re measuring if you don’t have the knowledge base to really understand what should be measured. And knowledge is, I’d rather athletes work harder on knowledge building than just doing the sheer workout and elite athletes do.

When you talk to an elite athlete, they sound like they have a Ph. D. in nutrition, a Ph. D. in endurance, conditioning, strength. Explosive power, footwork, like they’re so smart on so many of these things and, and they have a team around them that is equally smart, right? Of, of different trainers and such. Kevin Long, one of the best hitting coaches in the major league, when the Phillies get a new batter, Kevin Long, before he even meets the batter, will view 2,000 to 5,000 swings, dating all the way back to that batter in high school. He collects so much data and he is in such a huge knowledge build that of course he’s the best hitting coach on the planet. I think athletes underestimate the amount of knowledge acquisition that goes into performing at an elite level.

And that’s why I say fill your dang notebook. There’s no substitute for that. And then institute some kind of system that’s going to help you apply that knowledge. Jacques Lemaire focusing on spacing and stopping the practice anytime anyone, that was a system, right? And that won a Stanley Cup championship for a young team against the Red Wings, who were the odds on favorite to stomp them.

They were the president trophy winner that year, meaning they had the most wins in the league against an upstart rookie team with a bunch of hacks and they swept the Red Wings that year, right? That’s the kind of stuff that knowledge really knowledge wins.

[01:01:21] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. I think what’s interesting is as you were talking and just explaining how, again, that when you talk to elite athletes, that they just have such a handle on every aspect of their performance.

Right. And they understand their body movement. They understand the things that are maybe not even sport related that go into their success. And I was fortunate enough this is probably a year or two ago now that I interviewed Mark Hendrickson. And Mark is a guy who is one of, I think, only 13 people that has played both professional basketball in the NBA and played in the major leagues.

And one of the things that he talked about, which I thought was super interesting is that in his experience, the difference between a professional athlete and an amateur athlete is the professional athlete can. Get done with the game and maybe they didn’t perform as well as they wanted to, or even within the game, they can make adjustments because they have such an understanding of what their performance looks like when it’s at its best, that if it varies from its best, that professional athletes can quickly So, if my technique’s a little bit off, maybe I’m a major league baseball pitcher and my landing spot when I come out of my throw is off by an inch and I can make that, I can instantly recognize that and make that adjustment or the basketball player can talk about their footwork on their shot.

And he said that you talk to college athletes or you talk to high school athletes and something doesn’t go well and they have no idea why. There’s no connection. They can’t understand, Oh, I was missing my shots or I was wildly out of the strike zone or whatever it is. And he just said that professional athletes are just able to make those adjustments so much, so much faster.

Because to your point. That they have the knowledge of what that, what a great performance looks like. And then they’re able to make the adjustments that are necessary to get them back to that level. And that’s what sets them apart. And I thought that was really, I thought that was really interesting.

[01:03:27] Dr. Tim Silvestri: A hundred percent.  And you know, famous story. Yeah. And a famous story is Roy Holiday, who was, is a hall of famer and he was in and out of AAA to major league back to AAA. Right. And he was a mediocre, nothing pitcher. He had the size and all required to become a major league pitcher, but he was not doing well. And he went back in and he studied the craft and he applied the most important variables, staying over the ball, right, and all this stuff.

And he studied. His Hall of Fame was born out of knowledge acquisition and study, and to the point, and then he put it into a system, he applied it, right? To the point where he got to the point where when he left the mound, there was only three marks on the mound. There was the push off point, his right foot land, his left foot land, and those three marks never deviated.

So there were only three disturbed spots on the mound of dirt. And that’s how precise he became, but it came from knowledge acquisition. He had no right becoming a Hall of Famer. He wasn’t that good. How did he do it? It was knowledge acquisition. So athletes, I’m sorry, you like playing ball sports, ball sports are fun.

The reason why most of you will not go on to play elite, one, either you don’t have the size and you’re in a height specific sport like basketball I’m 5’5 I’m too short to be a basketball player, I’m too tall to be a horse jockey, right? So, wrong sport for me, right? My sport is a perfect sport for me, because height isn’t that much of a detriment.

Point being what, that big gap between professional and amateur, there’s a huge gap. That gap is almost 100 percent accounted for by knowledge. And knowledge is a lot more boring than playing pickup basketball or slam dunking the ball or those type of things. But it’s that knowledge base that really launches both coaches and athletes into the stratosphere.

Guaranteed. I see no evidence to at all contradict what I just said. Not talent, not talent is robustly a myth except for height, if height matters in your sport, right? Swimming, height matters, right, because there’s physics and, and water has a lot of drag. Major League Pitching, because physics and the torque of an arm, of a long arm.

If it’s not a height specific sport, knowledge, and I wouldn’t say height is talent.

[01:06:12] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I agree. There’s some physical traits that give you the capacity to potentially reach whatever it is, the pinnacle of your sport, whether that’s the NFL, Major League Baseball, NHL, NBA, whatever. There are some physical things. Some. Right. Some.

[01:06:33] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Correct. It depends. A 6’4 guy and a 5’4 guy have both run a 2:03 marathon, but you’ll never have a 5’4 guy be an NFL lineman, right?

It’s mass, and you need mass to be able to block people from running over you. So it depends on the sport and it depends on the thing, right? But once you’re, if you have the mass or the height or whatever needed for that sport specific, then it’s knowledge. That was my Roy Holiday example.

[01:07:07] Mike Klinzing: Ok, so let me ask you this. Now, that’s a good example. Let me ask you this, because I always find this question to be sort of a fascinating question and I’m curious to get your take on it. So, when you get to the highest level of any sport, and I’m going to keep it basketball specific here when you talk about the NBA.

And you get to that level and you have guys all across the league who are tremendous, tremendous athletes. They’re all skilled, they all can run, they all can jump, obviously to varying degrees. But if you’ve gotten to that level, there’s, there’s a certain degree of athleticism and skill that you obviously have.

And, and then you get to, The all star level where you’re talking about the best 25 or 30 players in the league. And then there’s another level where you get to the guys who are the first, second, third best player in the league. These are the guys that are the superstars that in the big moments, they always seem to come through.

They you think of your LeBron’s, your Steph Curry’s, in the history, you think of Michael Jordan as a guy who just every big moment. There he is coming through and what sets those guys apart in your mind from it? Is it a, is it a mental toughness? How do you think about the buckets that you talked about in terms of where that goes?

Is it just the fact that they’ve studied it and the knowledge? Just how do you break out the fact that even at the highest, highest levels with the best 350 players in the world, there still can be a guy who is X amount better than everybody else. How does that happen?

[01:08:48] Dr. Tim Silvestri: So it happens in a couple of different ways.Bill Russell at the time was a freak of nature. Will Chamberlain Kareem Abdul Jabbar, right? LeBron James is a freak of nature. Michael Jordan was not. And so Michael Jordan or Shaquille O’Neal, right? I mean, he just, the diesel, he just bulldozed people.

He was just a freak. He was seven foot two and like whatever, 300 pounds. I don’t know, whatever he was. I have no idea what he was, but so. Even among elite, there can be freaks among the elite, right? However Jordan, not a freak of nature then you’re talking about knowledge and systems, right?

So Jordan was obsessed with Spacing. Jordan was obsessed with defense and Jordan didn’t become Jordan until he became obsessed with defense. Jordan also led people and he didn’t manage people. He managed ecosystems. Dennis Rodman would go away for the weekend to Vegas. As long as Dennis Rodman showed up and was ready to practice defense, Jordan didn’t say a word to him.

If Dennis Rodman showed up and wasn’t ready to practice defense and was sluggish and whatever, then Jordan would say something. You can’t do that, right? But he would let Rodman be Rodman. And so there’s a different answer to that depending on the athlete. There are freaks of nature even among freaks of nature.

Other people though do it correctly and do it by the priority. Jordan established the priority as defense and spacing, and that is what won six NBA titles. Now as ball sports, remember no one system is necessarily better than the other. If there was, then everyone would be running the same system.

What is important is, are you running your system perfectly? So athletes often get hung up on, I don’t like the system we’re running. To buttercup. It’s which team runs their system flawlessly will win, not which team has a better system. And athletes get that wrong a lot. So the triangle offense wasn’t any better than any other system.

It’s that the Bulls bought said we’re going to run our system perfectly and that will win. Right. So there’s different answers to that question, but what keeps an athlete going for the longest amount of time is a different question and a different answer, which is Jordan won six NBA titles. How did he do it?

Kobe won multiple championships and Kobe and Jordan are great examples of great leaders and having their head straight. And. There you get into legacy in that once you cross a finish, you ever notice in a marathon no one collapses 10 feet before the finish line, but everyone collapses 10 feet after the finish line, right?

That’s because when you accomplish something, your brain shuts down. You go into what’s called conservation mode, you’re now conserving energy shut down. And athletes who won a championship, it’s hard to reboot it. So what I train elite athletes who have won a championship, I train them to now focus on legacy.

And Jordan and Kobe. These folks focused on legacy, and that’s what drove them to multiple championships. Same with Bill Russell, same with Kareem Abdul Jabbar, same with Magic Johnson. They were all legacy focused, and that made them elite among elite versus the Kyries of the world or whoever, who are kind of brilliant, flash in the pans once and done.

Cause they’re, they’re not focused on legacy. They fulfilled their personal mission of narcissism. I don’t know Kyrie exactly. I don’t want to call him a narcissist. I’ve never met him, but you know what I mean? Flash in the pan. They fulfilled their personal legacy. I’m brilliant. And they’re not looking at long term legacy.

And that’s a very hard thing for an athlete to transition to legacy. So it depends on the athlete is your answer, my answer to you, but I gave you, I think, a number of different examples.

[01:12:54] Mike Klinzing: No, it’s a very good. That’s a very good answer. And I think when you start talking about the best of the best, and I think it goes back to the top of our conversation that there has to be more, right?

There has to be more behind it than just performing in this particular game in this particular moment. And  I’m doing it just for me and for my own self satisfaction. It’s what am I what am I doing? And you often hear, and again, you heard it with Jordan, you hear it with LeBron today that I want to be, I want to be the best of all time and I want to have a legacy.

And that everything that I do from a meaningless regular season game to an NBA championship, all that stuff weighs into, weighs into the legacy. What kind of a leader am I, do I come through in big moments? What, what do I do here? What do I do there in these situations? And, and you can’t, to your point, you can’t do that.

If you’re not focused on that, if you’re not focused on that bigger picture.

[01:13:46] Dr. Tim Silvestri: Yeah. And there is a football team, Southeastern Illinois, I think it was, or Northeastern Illinois. I don’t know what a team in Illinois, they won the Division Three National Championship several years ago. And to a person, they all said what drove you, how’d you win blah, blah, blah.

And they all said, We had to build a legacy for our school so that future people who come through our program, other previous teams took it so far and then it was our turn to pick that up and take it a step further and we won a national championship and we hope that that lays a foundation for future teams to win other national championships.

They saw legacy as College division three athletes and you see over and over again impact driving people more than narcissism. And so my company, I don’t hire people if they’re about the money, right? We are there to stop tragedies from happening and offer explanations to people so they can live joyfully.

They can have bigger impact. And that’s why we don’t work with narcissists. You have to name your impact. Well, I said earlier that that enables people to do better. And now you’re hearing it come up at the end of our conversation, which is if you want to win multiple national championships, or if you want to rise to the top, know the legacy you’re building, know the impact you’re having on your school or your town or your teammates or whatever and link that impact to your performance you know, and that’s what drove the Jordans of the world, the Kobe’s of the world, the Bill Russell’s of the world. That’s what drives super successful people, is truly impact. Very rarely does narcissism alone drive someone. Very rarely. It has happened, but when they do, they tend to fall from grace.

Isaiah Thomas was kept off the Dream Team because he was so unlikable that everyone refused to play if he was picked on the team and he was the absolute best point guard in the world at that time. So even if narcissism gets you there, it’ll make you fall from grace quickly.

[01:16:11] Mike Klinzing: So as you’re talking, I think about a t shirt that I saw that I played at Kent State and at some point when I was back on campus, this was not what I played and it was not within probably the five or ten years after I played, but a team, they had, the team had created a t shirt.

I don’t know who came up with the saying or if it was used anywhere else, but. on the t shirt said, feel free to drink the water, but don’t forget who dug the well. And then it just had a list of previous teams. And that was good. Like, that’s all, that’s something that I remember when I saw that t shirt, I’m like, man, that.

Like that means a lot. And so I think of it all the time as, as a coach, whether I’m a high school coach or I’m a college coach. And you start thinking about, as you said, talking about your legacy and playing for more than just yourself and your current team that in the best programs and the coaches that I’ve talked to that the guys are connected and they’re not just connected to the guys that they played with.

They’re connected to guys that played five years before them or 10 years before them. And they all feel a part of that program. And I really think that saying you know, really, really impacted me when I saw it. It’s like, yeah, if you could get to the point where that’s the kind of program that you have, then you’ve really got something, right?

[01:17:29] Dr. Tim Silvestri: You do. That’s ecosystem, right? That’s ecosystem. It’s you name the people and you say, these guys work their ass off so you could come to a program that’s already established. Are you going to let those guys down? And are you going to let the future guys down, right? This is bigger than you. That’s legacy, that’s ecosystem, that’s impact, and that, that is the cleanest, most long lasting fuel on the planet for an athlete.

Because let’s face it, I get up at 4am, I get my first workout in, then I do an hour of work, of intellectual work, then I shower, I get to work, I work a full day, I do my second workout of the day, I clean up after the day, right? Who wants to do that every day for four years? Why am I doing it?

Because if I win a world championship, I’ll have a farther reach and potentially my company can save more lives. Who’s going to win up a mountain? Me trying to save a life or some other narcissist trying to prove they’re great. Right. I’m going to beat that guy every time because it’s bigger than me. And so that’s ecosystem stuff and coaches who do that.

You’re right, coach. Keep doing it. Build legacy. That’s huge. That’s ecosystem. Stop shaming your athletes. No place for that. And let them learn the key factors that will make them successful and drive that home. And then we all got it. And imagine the world we’d live in with that kind of focus. It’s just a beautiful thing.

[01:19:02] Mike Klinzing: I think it really would be, I mean, it really would be. And I think that if we can get more coaches and athletes to think about that and plan for a greater purpose than just themselves and what’s in the moment, then I think we really have something. And athletics. Tim, this is awesome. Love the conversation. I want to give you a chance before we wrap up to share how people can reach out to you, get in contact with you, ask you questions, work with you.

Just give me whatever social media, email, website, phone number, whatever you feel comfortable with. And then after you do that, I will jump back in and wrap things up.

[01:19:33] Dr. Tim Silvestri: My Instagram @Tim Silvestri. My email is my name, timothysilvestri@gmail.com. And my phone number is 610-751-2024.

[01:19:46] Mike Klinzing: Awesome Tim, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule tonight to jump on with us?

Really appreciate it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.

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